Cinema-going in Britain in the 1930s: Report of a questionnaire survey

Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television

Volumn 19, Issue 4, 1999, Pages 531-543

  Kuhn, Annette ^a,b  

^a LANCASTER UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

^b LANCASTER UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61149419542     PISSN: 01439685     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/014396899100163     Document Type: Review

References (13)

1. An account of the Bolton cinema-going study appears in Jeffrey Richards and Dorothy Sheridan (eds), Mass-Observation at the Movies (London, 1987), Part I
2. The questionnaires are held in the Mass-Observation Archive at the University of Sussex: M-O A, Worktown Box 35; the observer accounts in M-O A, Worktown Box 36, Folder B. A separate national study, in which Mass-Observers completed day diaries and time charts of their activities, gives a sense of how cinema-going slotted into people's daily routines in the late 1930s: see M-O A, Day Diaries (1937-38)
3. Graham Thomas and Christine Zmroczek Shannon, 'Reconstructing old times: problems and possibilities of a quantitative use of Mass-Observation's diaries', Mass-Observation Archive Working Paper, December 1981
4. Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain (CCINTB), ESRC project R000 23 5385. For further details of and extracts from interviews, see Annette Kuhn, Memories of cinemagoing in the 1930s, Journal of Popular British Cinema, 2 (1999), pp. 100-120
5. Although calculated on a different basis and covering a wider age range, Guy Routh's data on occupational classes in 1931 suggest that in comparison with their generation as a whole, white collar workers may be somewhat over-represented, and professional and partly skilled workers under-represented, among our respondents. See Guy Routh, Occupation and Pay in Britain, 1906-60 (Cambridge, 1965), Table 1
6. This figure tallies almost exactly with the findings of the only controlled statistical research into cinema audience figures carried out during the 1930s: see Simon Rowson, The Social and Political Aspects of Films (London, 1939)
7. See also Nicholas Hiley, 'Let's go to the pictures': the British cinema audience in the 1920s and 1930s, Journal of Popular British Cinema, 2 (1999), pp. 39-53
8. Annette Kuhn, Researching popular film fan culture in 1930s Britain, in J. Gripsrud and K. Skretting (eds), History of Moving Images: Reports from a Norwegian Project (Oslo, 1994)
9. Annette Kuhn, Cinema culture and femininity in the 1930s, in C. Gledhill and G. Swanson (eds), Nationalising Femininity: Culture, Sexuality and British Cinema in the Second World War (Manchester, 1996)
10. See also John Sedgwick, The comparative popularity of stars in 1930s Britain, Journal of Popular British Cinema, 2 (1999), pp. 121-7
11. A. Kuhn, Researching popular film fan culture in 1930s Britain
12. W.N Coglan, The Readership of Newspapers and Periodicals in Great Britain, 1936 (London, [1936])
13. Nicholas Hiley, 'British cinema fan magazines in 1936' (Unpublished manuscript, 1991). In the mid 1930s, these magazines had a combined weekly circulation of more than 300 000 copies, suggesting a readership in excess of a million