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 the Daily Mail’s role as a producer of more than 200 filmstrips and advertised a new strip for teachers around the world, entitled “Coronation: Its Ceremony and Regalia.”
I was intrigued that one of Britain’s best-selling, and most outspoken, newspapers had an educational department (founded in 1945) and, what’s more, that it was so active in producing filmstrips. Indeed by 1950, the Daily Mail School-Aid Department claimed to be the second largest producer of educational filmstrips in the UK.
The Daily Mail filmstrips represented one part of a much wider educational programme, produced and used alongside wall charts, photographs, books, and 16mm films, while the department also led the way in publishing on visual education (including its annual Visual Aid Year Book). It even sponsored exhibitions showcasing, and selling, filmstrips to educators around the country, including in major department stores, like Selfridges, and at the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition.
The Daily Mail would curate and collate disciplinary experts, whether on nature, geography or sport, and would bring together different factions of its media empire (for example, utilising images from its newspaper collections). The filmstrips helped position the Daily Mail as an educational authority, advertising its “brand” to a next generation of readers, reaching audiences collectively and extending its often-conservative worldview into schools.
Some of these filmstrips directly promoted the Daily Mail, others offered a largely traditional, conservative vision. Its three-part series, “How I teach sex,” (spoiler: largely through diagrams of plant reproduction) outlines “the gift from God,” the sanctity of marriage and the need to nurture children who are “really good citizens in the world,” privileging morality and social values. “Careers for Boys” spoke to those who will soon be “earning your living and helping your country, also, to become richer,” with the citizen defined by his economic value to the nation. Many others centred on traditional markers of Britishness, such as “The Story of an English Village,” or, as with the opening example, scenes of royal pageantry sold overseas.
The Daily Mail was not the only newspaper to branch out into visual education after the War. In America, the New York Times, which had set up its school service in 1932, began releasing monthly filmstrips across the school year from 1948, bringing a recent front page news story directly to the classroom. An advertisement celebrating 50 years of the school service in 1982 acknowledged that the school service “of course, has a vested long-term interest in encouraging students to read the paper on a regular basis.”
The Sunday Times would follow a similar tack in 1966 when it launched its Current Affairs Filmstrip Service to 460 schools with a filmstrip entitled “The Race Problem in Great Britain” (by 1969, it was reaching nearly 3000 schools across the globe). The filmstrip was “produced from the Sunday Times’ own resources of writers and pictures,” alongside a manual providing discussion points and guidance for teachers, all compiled and written by “the nation’s top journalists.”
In this way, we can see how the filmstrip functioned as one part of much wider media empires, adapted and utilised by newspapers to reach, as the letter to the Director of Education in Ghana shows, audiences far beyond the grasp of the daily newspaper.
Tom Rice