In Focus

In looking through the archive collections of The Museum of Rural Life (MERL), it is clear that filmstrips played a key role in transmitting information about the countryside, food and farming throughout the 20th century. The Educational Agricultural Film…

Between 1951 and 1956, the Home Office made a series of film strips focusing on aspects of Civil Defence. These ranged from case studies addressing the effects of the atomic bomb or the 1953 Ionian earthquake to emergency feeding guides and instruction ma…

The 1950s was a decade defined by fears of nuclear warfare and the aftershocks of the Second World War, a tension brought into sharp focus when looking at the National Library of Scotland’s collection of Civil Defence film strips. Produced between 1951 an…

The Second World War saw a dramatic increase in communal dining, largely in response to food and fuel shortages. Cooking in bulk was cheaper and more efficient than cooking for individual households, while the 1944 Education Act meant that local authoriti…

While researching in the national archives in Ghana (PRAAD) in 2017, I came across a letter, catalogue and leaflets addressed to the country’s Director of Education from the Daily Mail School-Aid Department. The letter, written in August 1952, promoted th…

Given the huge number of filmstrips produced and circulating in the middle of the twentieth century, it may be surprising how few survive within British libraries and archives.

This instructional video from 1962 gives us an insight into projecting filmstrips.