Reconstruction

Last year, and occasionally thereafter, I have pleaded for TV programmes about post-war reconstruction to balance all the war footage out there. There has been no let-up, even over Christmas, in dramas about both World Wars and documentaries about fighting men and machines from those conflicts. 

Lo and behold, Talking Pictures TV came up with the goods yesterday. However, it was not about the rebuilding of Germany physically and politically, but closer to home. The Way We Live Now (1946) was about the proposed rebuilding of Plymouth after the Blitz, written and directed by a clearly committed Jill Craigie. Three years later she was to do the same on Blue Scar, a film partly shot on location in and around Port Talbot. Locals today do not have a high opinion of this, so it was with some trepidation that I settled down to watch the Plymouth film.

It turned out to be a gently British-style agitprop affair, no worse than many movies produced in that optimistic period following the Labour landslide in 1945. Craigie was not the only writer or director fully committed to the brave new world of the welfare state and modern town planning. One wonders whether she would have developed to widen her film-making horizons as her contemporaries did if she had not met (and included in her film) a passionate Labour candidate in Plymouth by the name of Michael Foot and later married him. She was clearly technically well-equipped enough to pursue a film career standing alongside pioneers Wendy Toye and Betty Box.

A summary of the reconstruction (the Abercrombie-Watson plan) and an account of how much of it was realised is here.