Humphrey Jennings (1945)

Humphrey Jennings’ rightly celebrated thirty-eight-minute documentary has some stellar contributors.  The voiceover narration was written by E M Forster and delivered by Michael Redgrave.  Those on screen include John Gielgud, playing Hamlet at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket and Myra Hess, playing the piano at the National Gallery – illustrations of the show going on in 1940s wartime London.  The film’s recurring presences, though, are four unknowns:  Peter, an RAF pilot; Goronwy, a Welsh coal miner; Bill, an engine driver; Allan, a farmer (who features noticeably less than the other three).  And at the heart of it all, the title character, Timothy James Jenkins, a baby born on 3 September 1944.  A Diary for Timothy describes the first six months of Tim’s life and, through the Forster-Redgrave narration, muses on his future in the post-war world.

Produced by the Crown Film Unit, Jennings’ documentary was distributed by the Ministry of Information shortly after the end of World War II.  Yet the film’s timeframe, and exactly when it was put together, mean that A Diary for Timothy blends cautious celebration and hope with anxious patriotic propaganda, and gains genuine tension as a result.  The narration stays up to date with events.  On the day of the baby’s birth, exactly five years on from the start of Britain’s war with Germany, it’s hoped that hostilities will be over by Christmas 1944.  These hopes are soon dashed, first by the Battle of Arnhem, then by last-ditch German resistance to the advance of American troops (culminating in the Battle of the Bulge).  The picture changes with the intensifying Soviet offensive on the Eastern Front in early 1945.  Tim turns six months old less than two months before VE Day.

He’s born in a nursing home, and into relatively comfortable circumstances:  his mother brings her baby back to the Jenkins family home in a Henley-on-Thames rectory.  Jennings’ images and Forster’s lucid, balanced script combine, though, to stress that no one is safe until the war has ended, and that peace, by offering choices, will bring new risks.  As the newborn stretches and yawns in his cot, the pilot, the miner, the engine driver and the farmer are shown making their essential contributions to the British war effort.  Peter’s plane was shot down in June 1944, and he sustained serious leg injuries.  Jennings gives repeated coverage to Peter’s rehabilitation; at nearly the end of the narrative, he’s on the point of resuming RAF service.  Goronwy’s pit accident makes clear there are dangers to life and limb to those working outside the military arena.

The film’s themes are solemn, the surface details more emotionally various.  A sequence in which the miner vainly resists being taken to hospital with a broken arm, would be quite light-hearted even without the antediluvian comedy of a doctor handing Goronwy a pacifying cigarette.  There are times when it’s obvious that the unsung heroes playing themselves are speaking scripted lines – and delivering them woodenly.  Yet because they’re doing so in their real circumstances, the woodenness itself somehow reinforces the film’s authenticity.

On the professional stage, Gielgud is interesting to watch and hear in the ‘Alas, poor Yorick’ scene (with George Woodbridge as the gravedigger).  Music plays an important part, too.  After the Myra Hess recital, the narrator remarks on the beauty of the music played, and that it’s German music (Beethoven) – a troubled reflection in marked contrast to Jennings’ use of the Allies’ national anthems or other themes (the Battle Hymn of the Republic, the Internationale, Chopin’s ‘Polonaise’).  There’s a strong, sentimental montage of toasts to ‘absent friends’ at Christmas 1944.

I’m guessing that the filmmaker who briefly appears on screen is Humphrey Jennings himself (though I’ve not found anything to substantiate the guess).  Jennings didn’t, alas, live to see much of the world beyond World War II.  In 1950, he was killed in a fall from cliffs in Greece, where he was scouting locations for a film on post-war health care in Europe.  He packed a lot into his forty-three years.  Born in Suffolk in 1907, and privately educated before reading English at Cambridge, he joined the GPO Film Unit under John Grierson in the mid-1930s, when Jennings also co-organised the International Surrealist Exhibition in London and co-founded Mass Observation.  In 1942, he and Stewart McAllister made the formally innovative and influential Listen to Britain.  Jennings’ only feature-length documentary was the seventy-minute Fires Were Started (1943), also under the auspices of the Crown Film Unit, about the work of the Auxiliary Fire Service.  His film output was enough, even so, for Lindsay Anderson to describe Jennings, in 1954, as ‘the only real poet that British cinema has yet produced’.

It seems that Timothy James Jenkins lived out the twentieth century but only just.  According to Wikipedia, Kevin MacDonald made a documentary, Humphrey Jennings: The Man Who Listened to Britain, broadcast on Channel 4 on Christmas Eve 2000:  ‘it was revealed that’ the adult Tim ‘moved to Brighton in the 1960s and became a mod before settling down to become a teacher; he died in November 2000’[1].

2 May 2026

[1] Wikipedia editors have inserted ‘citation needed’ for this information.