British Pathe

Here's to the Memory - Part 6

Dance hall with a live band. A quickstep. Evening Standard headlines: "Nazis invade Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg: French Towns Bombed" and "Germans Advance on Wide Front, 335,000 Saved from Dunkirk in 1000 Ships". Footage of men leaving Dunkirk. On board ship....

Here's to the Memory - Part 6

Dance hall with a live band. A quickstep. Evening Standard headlines: "Nazis invade Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg: French Towns Bombed" and "Germans Advance on Wide Front, 335,000 Saved from Dunkirk in 1000 Ships". Footage of men leaving Dunkirk. On board ship. Walking down gangplank, injured and dishevelled men.

01:46:34 - Soldiers on shore watch for the enemy. C/U of soldier looking through binoculars. Evening Standard headline: "Channel Battles All Day: 12 More Down". Air raid siren, young boy scouts run across a field. Airmen run to their aircraft. C/U of pilot in cockpit of plane. Chocks pulled away and the planes - Spitfires? - take off. They are American planes. Air battle. Voice over of Winston Churchill's speech: "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few" etc. Montage of World War Two munitions work. Travelling shot in a factory, many shots of women at work, men in aircraft construction industry. Notice about the Orchestra of the Central Band of H.M. Royal Air Force with Myra Hess at the piano (lunchtime concert). We see her play, also shots of the audience, including Queen Elizabeth (later Queen Mother) and many in uniform.

01:49:00 - Views of London at dusk. People bedding down for the night in an Underground station. Camera pans along sleeping people. Antiaircraft gunners on duty. Clouds in a night sky. Searchlights. Guns going off contrasted with people sleeping in the underground. Fires during the Blitz. Firemen try to put out the blaze. Big Ben and Houses of Parliament. Bomb damage. An overturned bus. Men use picks to break up the rubble.

01:51:19 - Women are rescued from wrecked buildings. Piccadilly Circus. Sailors, Soldiers, air force men, policemen etc. including two black soldiers walk through London. Britain's allies. Aircraft, tanks, battleships, aircraft, military training, guns, aircraft taking off. Air to air shots of large number of aircraft in the sky.

01:53:14 - Very large military parade - top shots. King and Queen watch the parade. Nurses on parade. Buckingham Palace. Returning servicemen and women at railway station. They return to civilian life. Space flight. View of earth from space rocket. Atomic explosion. Mushroom cloud.

01:55:08 - Clement Attlee and Winston Churchill. Houses of Parliament. Marriage of Princess Elizabeth (later Queen Elizabeth II) and Prince Philip. Queen Elizabeth at an evening function. Princess Margaret. Trooping of the Colour. Princess Elizabeth on horseback. Big Ben at night.

01:56:16 - Film ends with the dinner party guests drinking a toast as their host makes the following speech: "...if men ask us what it is we had, our answer is, as always, 'our people' for that is all we need".

Made by the Pathe Documentary Unit. The Producers make special acknowledgement to: London Film Productions, Warner Bros., Metro Goldwyn Mayer, Francis, Day & Hunter, British Broadcasting Corporation, Central Office of Information, The Proprietors of "Punch", The National Press, Lord Mountevans, Pathe Picture Library, the work of Dame Myra Hess, the late Humphrey Jennings and the cameramen who through the years have filmed the events.

Note: Interesting retrospective of the previous 50 years, especially the change in the role of women. Documentation file exists which includes shotlist and transcript of commentary.
Mute fine grain is in 6 reels. Combined print is in 3 double reels. 2 x fine grain prints of reel 2 exist. Versions on K24 are scratched.
One print is marked up as "Best Combined Print" so this is one to be used.