DVD Region 0 PAL. The films comprising The Pattern of the Britain were made at a unique moment in British history. Filmed between 1944-47, they serve the function of reclaiming the land, the country and its regional differences for its inhabitants after years of siege during the Second World War. Any temptations to romanticise the land though is tempered by an emphasis on the amount of sheer hard work necessary to keep the countryside looking the way it does, and a realisation that the land was changing fast and old ways were dying. In Fenlands, directed by Ken Annakin, sedge-cutters are shown at work before we are told they are the only two men left ‘at this old trade’, while in Cornish Valley, the headworks of tin mines that characterise parts of the Cornish landscape are pictured as we are told in the commentary that most of them have now shut down.
The emphasis is on change and adaptability. Fenlands looks at the work needed to channel their yearly floods and retain the maximum acreage for crop growing, and also celebrates the laying of concrete roads throughout the area to counter the constant battle against mud. The Grassy Shires surveys the grasslands of Leicestershire and its surrounding counties and looks at how its famed pasture had to give way to arable production as part of the war effort and how this will now be integrated into an overall farming scheme. Cornish Valley looks at how the continuity of family traditions helps remote farms make the best of the often inhospitable terrain, while Downlands looks at farming life on the chalk downlands of southern England.
As well as the obvious interest to be found in the methods of transport and the agricultural machinery of the time, the films are notable for showing the amount of people then involved in food production. Striking too is the general fitness and physical shape of the people shown. It’s a sobering thought that both the countryside and its inhabitants have changed so greatly in half a century.
Mention must also be made of the excellent quality of these prints of rural life in the 1940s. Transferred from beautiful condition 35mm prints in the National Film Archive, they are clean and bright enough to show distinctly each ear of barley in a field before the combine harvester comes along.
The two Scottish members of The Pattern of Britain series – Crofters and North East Corner, both filmed in 1946, can be found on The Glen Is Ours collection. The first of the films looks at the everyday life and activities in a crofting community in Sutherland. While the daily mail car from Lairg now provides a welcome service and delivery of goods, the inhabitants of the place still wonder when they are going to get the electricity that people are always talking about and also lament the fact that the place is depopulated with not half the number of children at the local school. Meanwhile, the crofters continue with their work of sheep clipping, peat cutting and hay making, making ends meet by taking money where they can, from gillying, road making or taking visitors out fishing. The film ends by calling for a vigorous policy of land improvement so they can continue their livelihood.
With its commentary written by John R Allen and Laurie Lee, North East Corner shows a retiring Fraserburgh skipper giving way to his son on the boat and encouraging others to do the same and so let the new generation have their way. With memories of the hard times of the 1930s still vivid, he considers how fishing and farming in the area have changed, with fields and farms taking over from ‘the withered mosses and hungry moors’ and looks to the future with one eye on the necessary mechanisation that farming has already undergone. As with the rest of the series, past, present and future in the regions of Britain are linked in a way which it seems will never be quite as important again.
FORMAT: PAL DVD All Regions - aspect ratio 1.33:1 - b/w
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 65 mins.
