What's New: March 2024
March 14, 2024
Welcome to the 108th update of the Oxford DNB, which adds fifteen new articles, containing sixteen new lives, accompanied by three portrait likenesses, with a special focus on women in filmmaking. From March 2024, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford DNB) offers biographies of 64,942 women and men who have shaped the British past, contained in 62,525 articles. 12,030 biographies include a portrait image of the subject—researched in partnership with the National Portrait Gallery, London.
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Introduction by Melanie Bell: Women and Filmmaking
This month’s Oxford Dictionary of National Biography update includes a collection of fifteen entries devoted to women and filmmaking. We have documentary directors, screenwriters, costume designers, foley sound artists, composers, and animators. Collectively these fifteen figures display the breadth of women’s creative achievements and evidence the diverse ways women historically contributed to the skilled work cultures of twentieth-century filmmaking. The women featured here worked in different forms including documentary, amateur filmmaking, experimental and commercial features, but what draws them together is how their professional choices reflect the opportunities and challenges for women in twentieth-century film production.
Five women—Jean Haines, Marion Grierson, Ruby Grierson, Budge Cooper, and Rosie Newman—are linked by their work in documentary or factual filmmaking; an area of production which flourished in the mid-twentieth-century. Whilst women were largely shut out of senior creative roles in commercial features, documentary production, with its commitment to social issues and collective approach to filmmaking, was more accommodating of women’s creative talents. Hollie Price’s entries on Marion and Ruby Grierson show how the sisters were instrumental in ensuring that working-class women’s lives and domestic labour were represented on screen, whilst Budge Cooper extended this focus to the topic of juvenile delinquency and its social causes in her landmark film Children of the City (1944). Jean Haines set up a small production company with her husband Ronald in 1937 to produce documentary entertainment shorts, an initiative which enabled her to direct and act as well as run the company’s distribution arm. Rosie Newman, a talented amateur documentary filmmaker, used her private wealth and family connections to produce socially-aware films which recorded key moments in Britain’s social and political history. For those women whose creative inclinations were towards directing, it was the production spaces outside commercial feature films which gave them the greatest scope for creative agency. This was also the case for the filmmaker and poet Margaret Tait. Whilst her output was significantly more experimental than the documentary women, they share common ground in their commitment to independent ways of working. Tait founded her own production company Ancona Films in 1953, and funded her early filmmaking by working as a locum doctor. Sarah Neely’s entry demonstrates how Tait valued the autonomy that independence brought, taking time to collect material, write scripts, handcraft credits, and direct animations for her films. There is a connection here with the animator Alison de Vere. A painter by training, marriage interrupted de Vere’s artistic ambitions and she found work in 1951 at Halas and Batchelor, an animation company which specialized in advertising films. As Annabelle Honess Roe explains, de Vere worked for the next twenty years on animated commercials, whilst simultaneously making her own animated shorts. This culminated in The Black Dog (1987), a ‘symbolic exploration of sexual politics and … female identity’ which is widely-acknowledged for influencing the development of animation as an artistic form.
If commercial features largely refused women entry to director roles, it was happy to draw on their literary expertise. As the collection shows, several women enjoyed prominent careers as screenwriters for feature films. Some had relatively short but high-profile careers, with Neil Sinyard’s entry illustrating how Marjorie Gaffney’s skillful screenplays helped Jessie Matthews to popular success in the 1930s. Lesley Storm was more prolific, her significant literary output stretching across plays, novels, short stories, and film scripts. Storm, who was adept at both literary adaptation and co-writing screenplays, made significant creative contributions to a number of notable British films of the 1940s and 1950s including The Heart of the Matter (1953). This adaptability was also a feature of Doreen Montgomery’s writing career. After enjoying popular success with her screenwriting for Gainsborough Productions during the Second World War, Montgomery became an accomplished writer for television in the 1960s. Diana Morgan was similarly adept. As Melanie Williams’ entry on her shows, Morgan’s writing career encompassed revue sketches and straight drama, screenwriting, radio, and television. Her long career reflects both changing tastes in popular media and her own success at adapting her writing to different forms, a sensitivity to the demands of the medium which also characterized Lydia Hayward’s professional life.
Whilst screenwriting for commercial features offered women some outlet for their creative talents it nevertheless remained dominated by men. Conversely costume design and foley sound became feminized spheres in the second half of the twentieth century, as the entries on Jocelyn Rickards and Beryl Mortimer show. Llewella Chapman attests that Rickards was considered ‘the most interesting newcomer’ to the coterie of women who came to dominate costume design in the British film industry of the 1960s. Rickards’ instinctive understanding of ‘artistic innovation’ and the power of clothes to visually signpost character was to earn her an Academy Award nomination for her work on Morgan – A Suitable Case for Treatment (1966). Whilst costume design has long been recognized as a cornerstone of narrative cinema, foley sound has received less critical recognition. As Melanie Bell’s entry on Beryl Mortimer highlights, foley artists did not routinely receive screen credits for their work until the 1980s, yet during a remarkable forty-year career Mortimer provided foley sound for dozens of British films and was remembered by her peers as ‘the mother of Foley’.
Whilst the achievements of women in filmmaking are numerous, the challenges of recovering their careers are considerable due to the social and cultural practices of the times. Where married couples worked together, it was common practice not to credit women’s production work, as Emma Sandon and Phyll Smith show in their entry for Jean and Ronald Haines. Screenwriting often went uncredited, as with Diana Morgan’s input on The Foreman Went to France (1942), or credit was shared in a way that minimized women’s involvement, as with Lesley Storm on The Heart of the Matter. Women’s achievements were systematically downplayed, with Rosie Newman written off as ‘a self-promoting socialite’ (Motrescu-Mayes), whilst those who tried to breach male domains such as film music faced overt discrimination. Despite its subject being a talented composer and Royal Academy graduate, Leah Broad’s entry on the composer Doreen Carwithen is sobering. Carwithen wrote scores for over thirty films but was routinely paid less than her male colleagues and struggled to find an agent to represent her, which led to her receiving fewer commissions. It is for these reasons that contextualizing women’s ‘achievement-within-discrimination’ is an accepted methodology for women’s film history (Bell, 2021).
These entries show the many and diverse ways in which women engaged with the sphere of filmmaking. Whether as foley artists, screenwriters, documentary directors, animators, or designers, women’s creative labour contributed significantly to the skilled work cultures of twentieth-century filmmaking. Their representation in the Oxford DNB marks a significant step in securing their place in the history of Britain’s screen heritage.
Melanie Bell is Professor of Film History at the University of Leeds. She is the author of Movie Workers, the Women Who Made British Cinema (University of Illinois Press, 2021).
March 2024: summary of new articles
The amateur film-maker, charity fund-raiser, and socialite Rosie Newman (1896–1988) was born in London to a family of considerable financial means. She used her society connections to make films both in Britain and during her travels across the British empire and elsewhere, perfecting her film practice across all stages of the production process. Newman turned the pastime of amateur film-making into a historical project that recorded pivotal social and political moments, whether in the later stages of the British empire or the home front in the Second World War.
Ruby Grierson (1903–1940), a documentary film-maker and schoolteacher, was born at Cambusbarron, Stirling, to a large family for whom education and social service were prized. Among her seven siblings were John and Marion Grierson—her elder brother and younger sister, respectively—whose passion for documentary film-making complemented her own. Ruby was often praised as a socially conscious film-maker who connected sympathetically with the subjects of her films. She paid special attention to women’s lives and domestic labour, and today she is considered an important precursor to feminist film-making of the 1970s.
The younger sister of Ruby and John—and a film director in her own right—Marion Grierson (1907–1998), also born at Cambusbarron, played an influential role in promoting documentary film culture by combining her film practice with her training as a journalist. During her lifetime, her films were overshadowed somewhat by those of her siblings, but recently Marion has been recognized for the unique ways that her films give voice to their subjects, their innovative use of different visual and sound techniques, and their powerful, poetic, and witty records of everyday life in Britain.
A film-maker born to English parents in Montreal, Canada, Jean Haines (1910–c.1972) settled in London and established a film production company in 1937 with her third husband, Ronald Haines (1901-1969). Although the firm, British Foundation Pictures, owed its success in no small part to her contributions behind the camera and in business, it was common practice at the time not to credit women’s production work, particularly when married couples produced films together. The twenty credits for Jean Haines as director, producer, scriptwriter, and as a cast member understate her actual involvement in making the company’s films.
In 1944, the documentary film-maker Budge Cooper (1913–1983) participated in a symposium on ‘Women and Film’ organized by the Royal Photographic Society, where she outlined her commitment to work with ‘[r]eal people … living in their real surroundings’. Born in London to a film technician and a schoolteacher, Cooper became interested in the social and political potential of film, which she explored through the scripting, editing, and directing of documentary films; her central place at the Documentary Technicians Alliance (DATA), a co-operative film unit guided by a commitment to left-wing politics; and as a staunch advocate for documentary film and its social value.
Although largely overlooked during her lifetime, the film-maker and poet Margaret Tait (1918–1999), born in Orkney, is today considered one of Scotland’s greatest talents. Tait worked mostly independently, devising her own scripts, shooting with her 16 mm Bolex, recording sound, editing, and hand-crafting credits and directing animations for her films. On average she produced one film a year. She was also a prolific writer of poetry, novels, short stories, and essays that seek to convey an authenticity of being in a particular time and place—of ‘time felt’, or ‘felt time’. Her legacy is supported in part through the establishment of the Margaret Tait award by Glasgow Film and LUX Scotland.
The screenwriter Lydia Hayward (1879–1945) was born in Sheffield, Yorkshire, and pursued a stage-acting career as a member of touring companies that traveled across England and to South Africa. In 1920 she was recruited to co-write the script of Three Men in A Boat, which trade press critics at the time praised as ‘a new standard in comedy’. This early success opened many doors. With her gift for incisive intertitles, she was well placed to continue screenwriting in many genres and across the silent-sound divide during the upheaval that accompanied the changeover to sound.
Marjorie Gaffney (1897–1963), a screenwriter and assistant film director, was born in Liverpool, Lancashire, and later moved to London to work in the film industry as a continuity supervisor. In 1925, she married the cinematographer Frederick Archibald Young, with whom she would collaborate over the next several years. Gaffney’s screenwriting career began in 1933, and she contributed to ten films in the next six years, three of which starred Jessie Matthews, who became one of the most popular British film stars of the decade. Although there is no screenplay that attributes single authorship to her, today she is considered one of the most prolific and respected British screenwriters of the 1930s.
The screenwriter Mabel Margaret Cowie [pseud. Lesley Storm] (1898–1975) was born in Aberdeen, Scotland, and gained an MA degree from Aberdeen University, after which she became an assistant schoolteacher. When she moved to London with her husband and two sons, she became a full-time writer, adopting the name Lesley Storm. In all, Lesley Storm wrote seventeen plays, ten volumes of novels and short stories, and eight film scripts, including successful adaptations of A. J. Cronin’s The Spanish Gardener (1956) and The Heart of the Matter (1953) by Graham Greene.
The dramatist, screenwriter, and actor (Mary) Diana Morgan (1908–1996) was born in Cardiff to a pair of schoolteachers and developed a love of theatre and performance at an early age. Soon after the outbreak of the Second World War, Morgan was hired as a screenwriter by Ealing Studios. Propaganda was an important driver of her early work at Ealing, where she demonstrated skill in writing morale-boosting cinema that foregrounded the heroism of ordinary people. After the war, Morgan resumed a wide range of writing work encompassing revues, stage plays, lyrics for musicals, novels, and films.
The screenwriter Doreen Montgomery (1913–1992), born in Glasgow, submitted a number of scripts to Associated British Pictures after graduating from the University of Edinburgh with an arts degree. Her work came to the attention of the head of production, Walter Mycroft, who was sufficiently impressed to put her under contract. Montgomery reached the peak of her screenwriting success in the 1940s through her collaboration on three films for Gainsborough Productions, which were wildly popular with general audiences and foregrounded issues such as patriarchal oppression, social division, and sexual desire. She continued writing for film and television until 1969.
The Foley sound artist Beryl Mortimer (1920–2001), born in Cheshire, took up acting early in her career and worked in British film studios as an understudy. When she transitioned to Foley work, she found new and welcome applications for her training as an actor. Foley artists stage and record the performance of sound effects and sync them to the film, and an understanding of character and timing is essential. Mortimer was revered for her creativity and improvisational instincts, and conservative estimates suggest that she provided Foley sound for at least fifty feature films including Lawrence of Arabia (1962), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and many films in the James Bond franchise.
Born in Haddenham, Buckinghamshire, the composer Doreen Carwithen (1922–2003) began formal study at the Royal Academy as a performer, but it quickly became clear that she had an aptitude for writing music, too. Carwithen composed mostly within a Romantic idiom, but she often made liberal use of dissonance and strongly defined rhythms. Such traits attracted film producers, and she would ultimately score more than thirty films. Alongside her professional success in film, Carwithen continued to write music for the concert hall; towards the end of her life, she oversaw the première recordings of her Violin Sonata, String Quartets, Piano Concerto, and orchestral works.
Jocelyn Rickards (1924–2005), costume designer, was born in Melbourne, Australia, emigrating to London in 1949 to begin her career as a designer for the Old Vic Theatre Company. Before long, she was designing costumes for films as well as the stage, preferring to work with directors and producers with whom she had a rapport such as Tony Richardson, director of The Entertainer (1960), and Harry Saltzman, producer with Albert R. Broccoli of the James Bond film From Russia with Love (1963). She was recognized for her work with an Academy award nomination for Morgan—a Suitable Case for Treatment (1966) and received a BAFTA award for Mademoiselle (1966).
The animator Alison Frances de Vere (1927–2001) was born in Peshawar, and in 1930 returned to England, where she displayed an early affinity for art. Her career in animation started in 1951 at the British animation studio Halas and Batchelor, where she earned responsibilities working on background layout design and as an animator. She translated her skills to a freelance career in 1960, which gave her precious time and freedom to experiment. Her film The Black Dog (1987) is often cited as important for the development of animation as an artistic form, and it remains a seminal work of women’s independent animation.
The Oxford DNB is updated regularly throughout the year, giving you access to the most up-to-date and accurate information available. Nearly all public libraries in England, Scotland, and Wales—and all in Northern Ireland—subscribe to the Oxford DNB. This means you can access tens of thousands of biographies, free, via your local library—anywhere, anytime. Full access to all biographies is also available by individual subscription.
Discover a full list of entries added this year.
