NHS Untold Stories

5th July 1948 was one big day in British history: the day our National Health Service came into being. The NHS quickly became — and has remained — a major presence in the lives of everyone in Britain, from cradle to grave.  

But did you know that that long-ago summer’s day was also a red-letter day for British filmmakers? That film was in at the ground floor of the creation of the NHS? That the moving image quickly became — and has remained — a significant player in this great and complex public service?

This exciting collaboration between the BFI and the AHRC offers today’s filmmakers a chance to provide creative responses, in our 21st century, to a double legacy inherited from the 20th — our national screen heritage, and the heritage of our NHS itself.

There are so many stories to be told about the NHS on screen. From cinema and TV depicting it, as drama or as comedy, to TV reporting on it, as news or as documentary. The central storyline of the BFI’s NHS on Film collection, however, is that of film on the health frontline. Film made for the NHS and playing a role in the NHS and in public health. Films that have changed lives – and even saved them.

Consider the earliest film in the collection… Preceding that July 5th revolution, pre-announcing it to the public a little earlier in the summer, the curiously titled Doctor’s Dilemma (1948) is a brisk public information film that was screened in cinemas across England and Wales – landing somewhere amid the newsreel, the cartoons and the adverts accompanying the feature film. The closest distribution method then existing to today’s viral video dissemination — and a pretty effective one.  

Then consider three more films shown in cinemas across 1948-9…

The drama-documentary, Here’s Health (1948), starring non-professionals including a real doctor in the lead role, proffering a (strangely melancholic) vision of health services before the NHS and of improved services to come.

Or, far more upbeat: the cartoon, Your Very Good Health (1948), from a series made by Halas & Batchelor, Britain’s leading animators at the time, made to explain the welfare state to the public.

Or finally: His Fighting Chance (1949), about a then all-too-common condition: polio. This documentary is co-narrated by movie star Michael Redgrave with Eleanor Roosevelt, widow of US President Franklin Roosevelt.

So right here, in NHS Year One, we’ve got all the main building blocks of moving image messaging in place. Documentary — complete with celebrity voiceovers. Animation. Drama. And the simple short announcement combining narration, text and graphics. Today, in the ever-pulsing world of online video, we’re all still consuming these very same forms of filmmaking.

As the NHS evolved each block was further built upon… Let’s for instance consider two fascinating, contrasting uses of drama:

First: an ultra-ambitious nursing recruitment film, Life in Her Hands (1951). This hour-long feature was distributed to cinemas as a B-movie, starring Kathleen Byron (most famous today for her role as an unhinged nun in Black Narcissus, the classic feature film by renowned filmmakers Powell & Pressburger).
Then: from 1960, an internal NHS film, used to train psychiatric nurses in how to deal with difficult incidents with patients. In comparison with the skilled but starchy 1951 B-Movie, this training film, Understanding Aggression (1960), empathetically and imaginatively uses stylised techniques. It’s interesting, too, to note its efforts to represent the diversity of postwar NHS intake including Irish, African and Afro-Carribbean nurses.

Many of the films in our collection were made for the government’s Central Office of Information (COI), a hub for the short films industry turning out public information, industrial and charity films: a sector offering slightly more opportunities to women filmmakers than the commercial cinema industry. Among them, Margaret Thomson, director of Understanding Aggression, a stalwart of information and training films from the 1930s to the 1970s.  Later, we can track the influence on such films of TV documentary and current affairs, using mobile 16mm cameras. For, example Modern Day Nightingales (1978). This is an edition of a series broadcast in several African countries, here presented by Jumoke Debayo, a Nigeria-born actress who played many roles in British TV drama. One of the COI’s jobs, unbeknownst to the public, was making magazine-style programmes about the UK, broadcast on TV stations overseas.

This film reflects changing conceptions of nursing, speaking to the other great value of archive health films: records not just of changing screen practices but also of changing issues in health itself. Film increasingly came to be used in public health campaigns, often serving a health education or preventative medicine agenda – from Smoking and You (1963) and The Smoking Machine (1964), two of the world’s first ever anti-smoking films in the 1960s, to the plethora of public information fillers reaching the airwaves from the 1970s to the 1990s and covering all sorts of health issues – the single most famous, of thousands of examples, being the controversial anti-AIDs advertising (1987). The public health information film experienced its most spectacular rebirth, online, in 2020, as Covid-19 raged across Britain and the world.

Yet film has also continued to operate behind the scenes, sometimes testifying to the challenges our health professionals face. For example, our collection includes Nursing in the NHS: Spanish Nurses Recruitment (2002) that is uninteresting cinematically, but fascinating historically: using informational video to recruit nurses from elsewhere in the European Union. Labour shortages remains an NHS issue, post-Brexit…  

In both film and public health, so much has changed since 1948 – yet so much has stayed the same. How will you respond to these films, reflecting so many twists and turns across so many decades, with your own digital filmmaking? I can’t wait to find out. 

Patrick Russell heads the BFI National Archive’s non-fiction curatorial team, responsible for building, managing and interpreting the UK’s national collection of documentary and non-fiction filmmaking.

• Central Office of Information (1946-2012)
• Article: The NHS on film: files from the campaign that launched the National Health Service
• National Archives: The NHS on film