Wartime home front

In the last major British army manoeuvres before the First World War, two ‘armies’ led by Sir James Grierson and Douglas Haig engaged at locations across Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire. Each had cavalry and infantry, aeroplanes and an airship, and vital lessons were learned, but the reality of trench warfare would make very different demands of the army.

An official government film to encourage efforts to maximise the benefit of farmland for national self-sufficiency. The voice of Norfolk farmer Charles Wharton is dubbed over and he is renamed Mr Hodge, perhaps out of concern that he might not be understood; this was sometimes the response to regional accents before television began to make local voices acceptable in national broadcasting.

The damage to buildings following a zeppelin raid on Ipswich, and the remains of a bomb.

Queen Alexandra unveiled the Norwich memorial to Edith Cavell, a nurse from Norfolk shot by the Germans in 1915 for helping British and Allied soldiers in to escape from Belgium. The Norwich newspaper in 1918 called for the film of this occasion to be preserved in an archive.

“For the sake of local and historical interest the film being shown at the Prince of Wales Palace, recording the visit of Queen Alexandra to Norwich ought to be preserved for as long a time as such things are captable of preserving. Presumably there is some authority charged with the duty of keeping historical films in hermetical safety. If not there ought to be.”

Eastern Daily Press, October 1918 (cited in Stephen Peart, The Picture House in East Anglia, Lavenham Press 1980)

At the end of the war, the German submarines surrendered to Admiral Tyrwhitt off Harwich, Essex in November 1918.

A very unusual film made to be shown at the Palace Cinema, Braintree. It is a series of photographs of the Braintree men who served in the War, reflecting styles of portraiture before and during the War. The men are identified by name, regiment and rank. This is the first of two reels.

In this appeal to Norwich residents to volunteer for air raid precautions and civil defence duties, with scenes of the city on the brink of war, Alderman Riley of the City Council ends by pointing at members of the cinema audience in the style of Lord Kitchener’s 1914 army recruitment poster.

Evacuees from London arrive in Clacton, then Clacton children are evacuated to the countryside, including Peter Smerdon whose father Herbert, a newspaper photographer, filmed these silent scenes of a wartime family Christmas and the boarding up of the town.

Newsreel morale boosting and the ‘novelty’ of a confident young woman succeeding where 17 men had failed to find homes for evacuees and others who had lost their homes.

One of two official films at EAFA in which serving soldiers in India and Burma appear before the camera to send messages to their families at home, who would be invited to a screening at a local cinema. Very few of these ‘Calling Blighty’ films survive.