It is an irony of Powell and Pressburger’s work that films which are timeless in their appeal belong so much to the circumstances of a specific time. A Canterbury Tale offers a taste of mysticism and eternity, but it is rooted in the newsreels and headlines of 1942.
After the Fall of France in June 1940, the church bells of Britain fell silent. By order of the Minister of Home Security they were to be used only to warn of an invasion. The first time they rang again was more than two years later, on Sunday 15 November 1942, to give thanksgiving for victory at the Battle of Alamein.
Opening and closing with the sound of the cathedral’s bells, A Canterbury Tale (1944) was shot in the summer of 1943 when Britain’s bells could ring freely again, but some of the inspiration for its finale in the cathedral, when a special service is held for a battalion of soldiers about to go overseas, can be found in an actual special service that took place on 23 April 1942, St George’s Day, when – with the bells still silent – a new Archbishop of Canterbury was enthroned.
Dr William Temple was the first Archbishop of Canterbury to be the son of an Archbishop of Canterbury. As a boy, he had watched his father being enthroned forty-five years previously: the 95th successor to St Augustine of Canterbury and primate of all England, Frederick Temple sat down on a chair of English Purbeck Marble that King Ethelbert of Kent had given Augustine in 597. If such qualities of continuity and tradition seem to have had a special appeal for Emeric Pressburger, his grandson, the film director Kevin Macdonald, suggested a possible reason why when he observed in his biography of his grandfather – who left his native Hungary in the late 1920s – that they recalled “the very continuity from which he was splintered in his own country long ago”.
Like father, like son. In the film, the main character, Thomas Colpeper, explains to the soldiers who attend his local history lectures that he was born in Kent as his father had been before him. “Don’t you want to know how your father lived, and his father?” he asks them. The point of his lectures is to explain how to get close to one’s ancestors, and to appreciate the traditions that the war threatens.
On the very day of Dr Temple’s enthronement in 1942 there was a brutal reminder of this threat when the Luftwaffe, in retaliation for an RAF raid on the medieval city of Lübeck, began a series of raids over three consecutive nights on the cathedral city of Exeter. The cathedral was badly damaged and many other buildings in the city centre were destroyed.
Over the next few weeks, in a series of attacks – nicknamed the “Baedeker raids” after the famous German travel guides – the Luftwaffe bombed several other cathedral cities: Bath, York, Norwich and then Canterbury: on 1 June German planes dropped high explosive bombs and incendiaries, which killed or seriously injured 83 people and – although the cathedral itself escaped with only minor damage – reduced much of the town centre to rubble. There’s a memorable sequence in the film when the land-girl Alison Smith – one of the Archers’ three modern pilgrims – walks along a street that has been reduced to ruins since she last visited the town. “It is an awful mess,” says a woman air-raid warden who shows her the way, “but you get a very good view of the cathedral now.”
A Canterbury Tale can be thought of as Powell and Pressburger’s “Baedeker” movie, but it wasn’t only German bombing that threatened “olde England”. Almost as challenging were the huge upheavals in society that came with the nation’s commitment to a total war. They included the arrival in England, through 1942, of an ever-increasing number of American soldiers, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
At the end of 1942 Britain offered an unprecedented gesture of gratitude to the troops of its new ally. On Thursday 26 November, the Westminster Abbey authorities, for the first time in 900 years, gave up possession of the cathedral so that the US armed forces could celebrate Thanksgiving Day. “This is not an abandonment of our age-old position,” said the Dean. “It is a deviation under exceptional circumstances.”
Over 3,000 American soldiers, sailors and airmen attended the service that took place. A Stars and Stripes flew from one of the cathedral towers, while another was carried up the nave and laid on the altar. US Army Corporal Heinz Arnold, who in peacetime had been the organist at the Trinity Reform Church in New York, provided the organ accompaniment through the service.
It was a miraculous occasion in which two once bitterly opposed nations joined together in the common cause of defeating fascism. The American ambassador read out President Roosevelt’s Thanksgiving Proclamation, and the hymns included “America the Beautiful”. To hear such a song sung in a cathedral at the very heart of the British monarchy that America’s Founding Fathers had expelled was as extraordinary as the Thanksgiving party that the King and Queen threw after the service.
As Pressburger watched the newsreel of the occasion, he must surely have been taking copious notes. It completed a series of actual events in 1942 Britain that delivered, almost ready-made, the background for the next Archers film. When the Westminster Thanksgiving Day was reprised in the special service that provides the finale to A Canterbury Tale, Dennis Price as Sergeant Peter Gibbs was Corporal Arnold’s fictional counterpart. A cinema organist before the war, Gibbs accepts an invitation to play the organ in the cathedral, which – in a blessing for a modern pilgrim – gives him an opportunity to fulfil the true potential of his talent.
There was very little that Pressburger had to invent for A Canterbury Tale. The very best of the film came through simply being responsive to what had been going on in Britain around him. It involved a process of imaginative sympathy that was very similar to the one with which Thomas Colpeper responds to the ancient pilgrims of the past: “When I turn the bend in the road, where they too saw the towers of Canterbury, I feel I have only to turn my head to see them on the road behind me.”
The less successful aspect of the film was the disturbing fanaticism that could cause Colpeper to put glue in girls’ hair to deter them from going out with soldiers. No matter how high-minded a motive that Pressburger could concoct for Colpeper, it was never going to be enough to redeem the perversity of such behaviour. The actor Eric Portman brings out Colpeper’s charming, erudite side, but it’s difficult to forget that finally he has been guilty of physical and mental assault. While the other modern pilgrims in the film come to Canterbury to receive blessings, Colpeper goes there to pay penance, although it is questionable how sorry he really feels. He remains a cultural zealot who has sacrificed the possibility of an ordinary life to his extremism. In his character are the seeds of the obsessive impresario Boris Lermontov who will in The Red Shoes describe ballet as his “religion”.
It was a handicap, too, that the film lacked the basic appeal of an on-screen romance or a more tangible dramatic conflict that could hold the audience’s attention. Its preoccupation with abstract ideas of continuity and tradition turned out to have little appeal for the large mainstream audience that it needed to be successful.
But such ideas were enough for one family that lived in Canterbury during the Baedeker raids of 1942. In July 2008, a photograph in the London Times of the bomb damage to the city elicited the following letter from a reader who wrote of his childhood experience of becoming a refugee:
Sir, At the time of the bombing raid in 1942 on Canterbury, we were living in Broad Street, just round the corner from Northgate Street … The only damage to our house was a piece of shrapnel through the front window but my mother lost several friends and many houses in the immediate neighbourhood were destroyed.
My father was a prisoner of war in Germany and my mother, bringing up my brother and me on her own, decided to move to Wellington in Shropshire, where we lived with my father’s sister and her family. That was in June 1942 and it was the first time she had left Canterbury. She lasted there, far from her beloved city, until July 1944. In that month, she went to the cinema to see A Canterbury Tale, a film set in the bomb-ravaged streets she knew so well. She cried throughout the film and kept being shushed by the audience when she exclaimed on recognising neighbours playing in crowd scenes.
That was enough. Within a week, we were on a train back to Canterbury where she spent the rest of her life. Bombs or not — there is no place like home.
Alan Green
Canterbury
Comments