Humphrey Jennings in Poets' Corner

I suppose one reason why there are so few photographs of Humphrey Jennings is that his main employer was a government film unit that had only a shoestring publicity budget. But it is good that this photograph of him in Poet’s Corner exists, because it’s such an appropriate setting. It was taken in 1941 during the production of Jennings’ film, Words for Battle, in which its narrator, Laurence Olivier, borrows the words of several of the poets who are remembered there.

In an excellent essay on Humphrey Jennings, called “Only Connect”, Lindsay Anderson singled out Jennings’ films as having a “poetic style”. He then went on: “In fact it might reasonably be contended that Humphrey Jennings is the only real poet the British cinema has yet produced.” I don’t think these words are actually true – they weren’t even true when they were written more than seventy years ago in 1953 – but it might reasonably be contended that Humphrey Jennings is the finest poet that the British cinema ever produced.

He offers such a striking example of a poet articulating a national cause (but as much a human cause) that the Dean of Westminster Abbey really need only see his wartime films to understand why he deserves a place among the other poets already celebrated in the Corner. He would not be the first wartime poet to have a memorial there. In 1985 an inscribed marble slab was laid in honour of the First World War Poets, who, in the words of the then Dean, “through their sensitivity of spirit and disciplined use of language, bore witness to the truth”.

Through the language of moving pictures, Jennings did the same a quarter of a century later.

Not that he was the sort of person to be bothered by such vanities. The people who knew him remembered it was always the work – the poetry, the cause – that counted before anything else. To understand the intensity of that poetry, of such rare relevance and immediacy, it helps to understand the urgent time that he distilled.

Joe Mendoza was Jennings’ young assistant on what is arguably the finest film-poem ever made: Listen to Britain (1942). In a letter that he wrote to me after he had read a chapter on Jennings in my book The Finest Years, Joe shared his memories of working with a notoriously exacting man, but also gave an idea of how it felt to belong to that wartime generation:

“I spent from twelve to twenty knowing there would be a war and frustrated by all the idiots who couldn’t see it coming. When it did, I never expected to survive it – the chances were too great – but apart from having my house blown up over my ears I did. All the same, I had five good mates in 1939 and only one left in 1946. All that sort of stuff affects your history...

“Humphrey had no illusions about himself; what he could do; what he could achieve. He had no pretensions and loathed other people who had... He was arrogant about what he wanted because it was a thousand per cent important to him, but in normal situations he really had great humility. He knew where he fitted in and he knew where other people fitted in.

“His reactions to frustration were extreme. If a camera operator gave him a set-up he didn’t like and insisted it was the best thing, he could turn on [him] with venom ... It meant that people hadn’t listened to him properly or hadn’t the courage to ask for more explanation but thought, ‘It’ll do.’ That was what brought out the temper and the intolerance. He took himself and what he was doing terribly seriously, and expected everyone who was supposed to be working with him to do the same... He always spoke to everybody so they could understand him; he never talked ‘down’, he certainly never bothered to talk ‘up’. He was odd but warm, so people without hang-ups took to him immediately, judging him as he was, just as he was to them... Even with the self-important, if they got on their high horse, he never got on his... he never wrote anybody off.”

Jennings died in 1950 at the age of only 43 after falling from a cliff while making a film on the Greek island of Poros. He was found with a copy of Trelawney’s Last Days of Shelley and Byron in his pocket, two poets who also died far from England. Both are honoured in Poets’ Corner, but it was more than a hundred years before either of them was allowed in (Shelley in 1954, and Byron in 1969).

I hope Jennings won’t have to wait so long.