This groundbreaking book investigates the murky relationship between the Metropolitan Police Press Bureau and the British film industry, shedding new light on police-media relations. Beginning with the culture of suppression during the interwar period, when retired police inspectors were threatened with loss of pension should they become involved with the film industry, the relationship shifted when a forgotten pioneer of public relations, Percy Fearnley, was appointed to the role of Metropolitan Police Public Information Officer in 1945. Fearnley was the first-ever journalist to take up this role and, through him, the Metropolitan Police embarked on a series of collaborations with the highest echelons of postwar British cinema, including J. Arthur Rank, Ealing Studios and Gainsborough Studios.
Using newly-declassified internal Metropolitan Police and Home Office correspondence, Alexander Charles Rock tells the story of the Metropolitan Police’s project to manipulate the British film industry into producing propaganda under the guise of mainstream entertainment cinema. In doing so he offers a radical re-reading of the context of production of a number of canonical British films such as The Blue Lamp (1950), I Believe In You (1952) and Street Corner (1953).
By:
Alex Rock (Derby QUAD UK)
Imprint: Zed Books Ltd
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 216mm,
Width: 138mm,
ISBN: 9781350295087
ISBN 10: 1350295086
Pages: 278
Publication Date: 13 July 2023
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Primary
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
"Introduction 1. ""Now it's entertainment, now it's propaganda"": The Processes of Cultural Production 2. Transparency or Control: The Metropolitan Police Press Bureau 1919-1938 3. ‘A Reassuring Necessity’: Mediating Images of Law and Order in the Light of the Second World War 4. The Police As Producer: Percy Fearnley, The Metropolitan Police Press Bureau, and the Making of The Blue Lamp 5. “We should not co-operate”: The Home Office’s Collaborative Production of I Believe in You 6. Real Life as the Metropolitan Police Insisted Upon Us Seeing It: Division of Labour and the Collaborative Production of Street Corner, 1950-1953 7. 'The machine at work': Forensic Filmmaking and The Long Arm, 1951-1956 8. Conclusion: Further Areas of Research Bibliography Annotated Filmography"
Alexander Charles Rock is Director of Commercial and Operations at Derby Museums, UK. He has published on the history of independent cinema, policing London’s cinemas during World War I and local film censorship. His writing has featured in Post Script and Early Popular Visual Culture.
Reviews for The Metropolitan Police and the British Film Industry, 1919-1956: Public Relations, Collaboration and Control
Rock has produced a critical reading of the public relations activity of the Metropolitan Police and their film industry collaborations in the twentieth century, foreshadowing issues around press-police relations identified in the Leveson inquiry. His forensic archival work identifies the impact of the first journalist and non-policeman, Percy Fearnley, appointed as the Met’s Public Information Officer in 1945 and the contradictory tensions between committing to transparency and controlling the message. The book makes a strong contribution in developing a nuanced historical narrative that highlights the role of public relations in producing both propaganda and entertainment. -- Kate Fitch, School of Media Film & Journalism, Monash University, Australia
