The Second World War has thrown up an array of wild and unlikely stories. There’s the supposed experiment in 1943 to make a ship disappear, for example. Or that President Roosevelt knew that the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbour but kept it a secret.
But there’s one rumour that has somehow persisted without ever becoming well known. It claims that, as a morale-boosting measure, the UK government not only permitted the showing of so called ‘blue movies’ to those serving in the Royal Navy in lonely outposts but was actually involved in supplying the risqué film reels.
It’s a notion that surfaces in oral histories of Royal Navy veterans and is still circulated on military forums.
Attitudes towards nudity and sex on our screens have certainly become more liberal since the war but the thought of pornography being specially made for ‘Our Boys’ in the navy – the rumours don’t extend to films being made to cater for those serving in the Women’s Royal Naval Service – runs contrary to the view we have of WWII Britain.
Ask someone on the street today to define the nation during that period and they’ll probably talk about bravery, determination, stiff upper lips and ‘being the good guys’. It’s a picture that doesn’t have room in it for servicemen having their resolve fortified by a diet of government-approved smutty films.
That said, there’s no denying that there were plenty of such films being made in the 1930s and 40s, and many of them appear to have found their way to British servicemen. But is there any firm evidence to suggest the UK government had gone into the underground film business too?
What do the official records say?
Well, when it comes to official records, the cupboard is bare. Nothing that has survived in the archives of the armed services or the Ministry of Information points to there having been any programme to make or supply pornographic material.
However, BAFTA-nominated director Richard Hawkins has discovered that the British Film Institute archives include propaganda from the time that seeks to boost morale through the use of nudity and sexual suggestion.
‘While far removed from modern definitions of pornography,’ the filmmaker observes, ‘such material demonstrates that wartime authorities were willing to test moral boundaries in the service of maintaining fighting spirit. In extreme circumstances, the boundaries of the acceptable can shift.’
He also points out that the Nazis were not averse to using such tactics, citing Leni Riefenstahl’s infamous documentary about the 1936 Olympic Games which featured gratuitously naked athletes and dancers. And yet another of the rumours to come out of the Second World War asserts that the Nazis considered forcing residents of the occupied Channel Islands to act in explicit films shot in situ.
However, Hawkins concedes that ‘after much investigative sleuthing I could find no corroborating evidence whatsoever, and can thereby now consign it into that vast, dusty vault that is the Depository of Apocryphal Tales’.
But that didn’t stop him from making Think of England, a film that imagines what might have taken place had the rumour been true. Set on an Orcadian island in 1943, it probes the topics of censorship, state control and how societies’ sense of what is moral may become elastic in times of war – issues that are only too relevant today.
