Blue Plaque for Documentary Film Maker Humphrey Jennings

One of the most renowned figures in documentary film making, Humphrey Jennings (1907-1950), was commemorated with an English Heritage Blue Plaque on Tuesday 9 May at 11am at 8 Regent’s Park Terrace, London, NW1, where he lived from 1944 until his death in 1950.  The Blue Plaque was unveiled by Dr Marie-Lou Legg, Humphrey Jennings’s daughter. 

Jennings has been described as “the greatest film director the British documentary movement produced,” and as “the only real poet the British cinema has yet produced.”  The range of his achievements is remarkable – he was influential as a film director, painter and writer.  His wartime films are regularly screened at the Imperial War Museum and the National Film Theatre and, in 2000, he was the subject of a Channel 4 documentary by Kevin Macdonald, who has described him as a “lynch pin in the arts of Britain in the 1930s and ‘40s.”

After studying English at Pembroke College, Cambridge, Jennings’s first jobs included work as a textile designer in Paris and as a set designer for the Cambridge Festival Theatre.  In 1934, he joined the General Post Office Film Unit (later renamed the Crown Film Unit) where he learned his craft as a director making short documentaries. 

In June 1936, with Roland Penrose, Herbert Read and others, Jennings organised London’s International Surrealist Exhibition.  Among his works was an unflattering collage depicting Lord Kitchener which proved to be one of the most notorious exhibits in the show.  The following year, Jennings joined Tom Harrisson and Charles Madge in founding Mass-Observation, a project which collected the diaries of hundreds of volunteers to study the everyday lives of ordinary people in Britain.

In 1939, Jennings returned to film-making in earnest. He produced a series of propaganda documentaries on life in wartime Britain for the Crown Film Unit which were, without doubt, his finest work.  "London Can Take It" (1940) is said to have been one of the films which helped bring America into the war, while "Listen to Britain" (1942), "Fires Were Started" (1943) and "A Diary for Timothy" (1945) are now agreed to be masterpieces – works of great eloquence, complexity and emotional force.  Jennings was awarded the OBE in 1946 for his part in sustaining morale at home and promoting the British cause abroad.

Jennings’s post-war career was less successful and none of the feature films he prepared for Wessex Films, his main employer in this period, ever went into production. Yet he continued to work tirelessly on a number of projects, notably "Pandaemonium", an account, using contemporary descriptions, of how our vision and language has been changed by the coming of the machine.  He died in 1950 on the Greek island of Poros after falling from a cliff while location hunting, and was buried in Athens.