Children’s Film Foundation

Between 1951 and 1982 this unique institution made films exclusively for those attending the hundreds of Saturday morning children’s matinees hosted in Britain’s cinemas each week.

Now a long-forgotten tradition, the first matinee was held in 1927. They became community events with singing and lectures on topics like road safety besides the film screenings. All kinds of back catalogue films were shown; Disney cartoons, Westerns, gangster movies and American cliffhanger serials like Tarzan and Flash Gordon.

The influential head of the J. Arthur Rank Organisation (owner of Odeon and Gaumont cinema chains) wanted British-made product within matinee programmes and had Rank’s Gaumont-British Instructional division make Tom’s Ride (1944). Rank wanted these films to provide useful moral lessons; Tom’s Ride (pictured below) warned against theft.

The unit continued making such films for Rank cinemas as the Children’s Film Department and, from 1947, as CEF – Children’s Entertainment Films.

The 1950 Wheare report, a study of Saturday morning cinemagoing, commended how the matinees were run but deplored many unsuitable, violent and frightening films shown and called for more films of the kind made by CEF.

Unfortunately, within months, the CEF had closed. Rank alone had been unable to carry the CEF’s financial burden, so the British film industry’s producers, exhibitors and technical unions agreed to a unique collaboration.

In 1951, the Children’s Film Foundation (CFF) was created to provide films for not just Rank cinemas but all of Britain’s picture houses. Mary Field, CFD head since 1944, was made the CFF’s first Chief Executive. Its first feature was The Stolen Plans (1953) – a contemporary adventure story produced by Gaumont-British.

Over the next four years, the CFF released fifteen features, seven comedy shorts, five educational shorts and two adventure serials, alongside its ongoing production of magazine-style newsreel compilations. It also bought in several features from Eastern Europe, which it dubbed into English.

The core of the comedy shorts was a series of knockabout misadventures featuring Peter Butterworth, who later became a stalwart of the Carry On films. Produced by Grendon Films, they employed slapstick visual gags with each episode placing Butterworth in a different occupation – from working in a café in A Good Pull Up (1953) to assistant in a grocer’s shop in That’s an Order (1956).

The first serials, Raiders of the River (1955) and Five Clues to Fortune (1956) – also known as The Treasure of Woburn Abbey – used eight fifteen-minute instalments to tell an ongoing narrative, pitting groups of children against bank robbers or sending them in pursuit of clues to a hidden treasure.

The popularity of these early efforts led to the real heyday of the CFF’s cliffhanger serials in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Another CFF staple, the sporting contest, was established with Heights of Danger (1953) and Skid Kids (1953), which featured motorcar racing and speedway, respectively. Here, the emphasis was on playing fair at all times.

The Secret Cave (1953) was adapted from a Thomas Hardy story and would become unique in the CFF canon in being remade in 1985 as Exploits at West Poley.

Peril for the Guy (1956) (pictured at right) introduced another CFF perennial – the eccentric inventor or boffin, while comic adventures with a sympathetic alien appeared in Supersonic Saucer (1956), another plotline that the Foundation was to repeat, particularly in the 1970s.

Perhaps the most ambitious film of this early period is Johnny on the Run (1953), the affecting story of a Polish refugee and orphan who faces prejudice but eventually finds a new home in Scotland. The topic is handled with considerable flair by the young Lewis Gilbert.

The Foundation began establishing a repertory company of filmmakers who formed the bedrock of its early output. Gaumont-British, Merton Park, Rayant Pictures and Associated British-Pathé were its most frequent production partners at this time.

Production was funded by a voluntary levy on all cinema ticket prices, called the British Film Production Fund (also known as the Eady levy, which was made compulsory in 1957). The CFF received around 5 per cent of this levy, granted £60,000 in its first year, £100,000 the next and £125,000 annually until 1957. Goodwill discounts were received in kind from studios, and processing labs and some forms of union restriction were waived.

The films were made for set fees by independent producers, who then signed over their rights to the CFF on completion.

As a non-profit-making concern, the CFF sold prints to exhibitors for a minimal handling fee and demanded that entrance fees stayed fixed at sixpence (they remained at sixpence until decimalisation in 1971).

Just sixteen prints of each film were distributed to the chain groups on a rota system. There were 33 CFF features, nine serials, 23 shorts and 16 magazines available by the end of the 1950s, but even so, compared with American serials, CFF films were not that widely seen.

Still, by 1955, 1,400 of 1,915 matinee cinemas (with a million attendees nationwide) showed some CFF product. This was the high point of matinees – by the end of 1957, there were 1655 with many cinemas closing as general cinemagoing declined.

The 1960s were a new era in many ways. Mary Field left to become director of children’s television at ATV in 1959, with Rank’s Chairman, John Davis, taking over the post. Henry Geddes, an experienced producer of films for the CFF, became head in 1964 (remaining so until its closure in the 1980s).

Geddes’ arrival coincided with an extensive market research survey of matinee audiences, and its findings helped rejuvenate output. While there had been occasional colour films since 1961, an all-colour policy began in 1967.

“We have frequently been accused of making middle-class pictures for middle-class children. Sometimes, I wish those who complain would see some of our films with their intended audiences.” So said Henry Geddes, the long-serving Executive Officer of the Children’s Film Foundation in 1976.

Those who watched CFF films in the 1950s and early ’60s might have levelled this accusation, but those watching in later decades – in cinemas or on television – would more likely recall the exciting adventures of everyday kids. In its four decades, the CFF did its best to move with the times.

Following J. Arthur Rank’s moral fables, the CFF’s first Executive Officer, Mary Field, preferred more subtle moral education to dogmatic instruction and relied on “intimacy with good example”. She moved from ‘goody-goody’ characters to “ordinary children and adults behaving well, but not too well”. The films allowed a little room for bad behaviour and moral ambiguity that could be shown to be wrong.

The characteristic elements of a CFF feature had a gang of resourceful kids or a brother and sister team, normally ranging in age from four to fourteen, who accidentally uncover the plans of a criminal gang. Unable to go to the police (for some reason provided by the script), they had to catch the villains themselves.

Alternatively, they found themselves in a competition, sporting or otherwise, with a rival gang whose underhand methods were resisted by our heroes, who eventually won by fair means. Settings were mainly urban or suburban, usually in London, with occasional forays into a rural idyll (more often than not the Home Counties) or to more exotic foreign climes.

Boys typically took the lead, and girls were assigned a supporting role, as were smaller children. Bravery, resourcefulness, loyalty and honesty were prized, whereas villains were often also cheats and bullies.

The CFF Britain was largely a white country, and its children were polite, smartly dressed and showed due deference to adults, particularly teachers and policemen. Accents were middle-class, even when the settings weren’t (Mary Field was keen on overdubbing dialogue and preferred formally trained acting school graduates).

Some provincial audiences disliked the ‘posh’ accents of the child leads in 1950s CFF films. Field believed in promoting Received Pronunciation (‘RP’) and did not think provincial audiences would understand regional accents. Television – ITV in particular – would soon change that.

There were chases and mild fights, but the villains were generally comic and/or incompetent so there was little real threat. It was, for the most part, a cosy and reassuring world where virtue won and was duly rewarded. The template for the ‘underdog’ film was perhaps Soapbox Derby (1958).

Starring a young Michael Crawford, it showed a gang of enthusiastic kids competing in a cart race despite the attentions of a rival gang of mean-spirited saboteurs. The story of cheats who never prosper was replayed in dozens of CFF classics from Go Kart Go (1963) to Headline Hunters (1968).

A growing back catalogue meant CFF output began to dominate matinee programming. Funding was also high – by the end of the 1960s, the CFF had spent a total of £3m on productions.

1969 was the 25th anniversary of children’s cinema and a welcome opportunity for publicity. Otherwise, the trade press ignored the CFF, whose non-commercial status also meant that, for example, no posters were issued for their films.

Matinee attendances declined further, and by 1969 350,000 children were attending weekly, the number of matinees falling to 750.

Films were resolved by actions not words: usually a big, noisy event such as a race. CFF villains were dispatched via slapstick – the swindling garage owner of The Adventures of HAL 5 (1958) is dunked in a muddy pond – and comedic treatments became more pronounced after the 1964 survey showed it was the most popular genre, liked by 27% of boys and 37% of girls.

Importantly, it was thought to “call forth a response which produces no anxiety” while fulfilling another CFF aim of “avoiding shock, brutal violence, or stimulation of morbid excitement or attitudes.”

The 1960s brought a broader range of child heroes, but Junket 89 (1970, pictured at right) was the first to use kids from the Anna Scher drama school in Islington; Pauline Quirke and Linda Robson were among the snotty-nosed, scruffy urchins.

Such actors were probably an accurate reflection of the raucous, enthusiastic tykes sitting in the stalls.

Director Harley Cokliss recalled a screening of one of his films: “I have never known such a rowdy audience . . . I thought ‘What a dire disaster’, but everyone told me it was a marvellous reception.”

CFF screenings came to resemble celluloid pantomime, and directors tailored films accordingly, filling them with action that children could respond to. When watching CFF films in isolation today, it’s important to consider that a vital part of the intended viewing experience has been removed.

Boisterous, good-natured gang antics are what CFF is remembered for, whether dressed up as science fiction or period drama.

The 1970s brought a touch of emotional subtext to some output, however. Hide and Seek (1972) centred around a bank raid, but focused on a boy who had run away from an approved school to seek his father – the villain masterminding the raid. Tense disaster picture One Hour To Zero (1976) used action to frame the story of a borderline delinquent boy ignored by his busy father. The anti-pollution theme of The Battle of Billy’s Pond (1976) demonstrated a social awareness.

The 1980s move to television ended any need to ‘play to the gallery’ and more time was spent on dialogue and character development in films like Friend or Foe (1982), about a Nazi pilot who crashed in WWII England.

Restructured as the Children’s Film and Television Foundation (CFTF) in 1982, its films were sold to some regional ITV stations, like Thames, and a major deal was struck with the BBC, which showed 26 features and one serial between 1984 and 1989.

One of the CFTF’s final films, Terry on the Fence (1985, pictured above) delved deep into the pitfalls of delinquent theft and peer pressure – its updated demonstration of “intimacy with good example” nonetheless showing not so much had changed in thirty-odd years.

The Eady levy was abolished in 1985, spelling the end for the CFTF, and in 1987 it was wound up as a filmmaking concern. The CFTF continues as an advisory body, helping develop TV and film production for children, and played an important part in successes like Danny the Champion of the World (1989).