The Crown Film Unit, 1940–43

Abstract

My main contribution to British war films was not as a maker. From my appointment in midsummer, 1940, to the then Ministry of Information’s Film Production Unit I organised film-making by others: myself only occasionally commenting on content and execution. However, we must go back a little further, to the opening of the war in Europe in 1939.

Ian Dalrymple graduated from Cambridge and joined the film industry in 1927. He worked until the war as a film-editor, screen writer and director, as head of the Crown Film Unit, 1940–43, and on feature productions and helped the Army Film Unit, 1943–45. He was responsible for the inception of many of the wartime propaganda classics, such as Fires Were Started, Western Approaches, Coastal Command, Wavell’s 30,000 and London Can Take It amongst others. He has been an independent producer since the war and his post-war work includes The Royal Heritage, A Hill in Korea, The Boy and the Pelican, and the series The Changing Face of Europe, amongst many others. He was Chairman of the British Film Academy 1957–58.