In October 1939, William Sellers, the head of the newly formed Colonial Film Unit (CFU), began work on the company’s first film, Mr English at Home (Smyth, 1986, 5). Work at Soho Square was held up when the GPO Unit, which had lent technicians to the CFU, moved to Pinewood, but Sellers recruited personnel including George Pearson as head of production and Fred Gamage – recently departed from the GPO Film Unit and credited here as Faulder Gamage – as a cameraman. Production was completed in 1940 (Pearson, 1957, 202).

Rosaleen Smyth noted that Mr English at Home ‘aroused a good deal of controversy’. Denounced by members of the Film Division at the MOI and by the Educational Advisory Committee at the Colonial Office, the film nevertheless proved enormously popular on the mobile cinema circuit in Africa (Smyth, 1988, 289). A report from East Africa explained that ‘officials who had viewed the film expected it to be a dreadful flop, but not at all! It can only be described as a striking success’ (Sellers, Royal Society of Arts Journal, 16 October 1953, 831).

Rosaleen Smyth argued that the film ‘is both an instructional film and a piece of propaganda’, belonging to the ‘projection of England genre’, which she described as a ‘quintessentially British style of propaganda… based on the assumption of the superiority of the British way of life’. This propaganda represented ‘the celebration of one’s virtues rather than the denunciation of the enemy’s vices’. Smyth also noted the influences of the GPO Film Unit – which initially worked alongside the CFU in Soho – in the film’s focus on the English working man (Smyth, 1988, 288).

Reports from screenings in Africa noted the popularity of Mr English at Home. For example, the results of a questionnaire sent out to mobile cinema operators throughout Africa in 1943 revealed that Mr English was one of the most popular films in Kenya, Nigeria and the Gold Coast, where ‘amongst literate audiences, Mr English at Home has caused more interest and comment than any other’ (CO 875/10/11). Reports also noted the influence of the film on local audiences. A British man, writing in Colonial Cinema magazine in 1945, explained that ‘I have just seen a film of the everyday life of an English working-class family projected, with running commentary in a Gold Coast vernacular, for African teachers in Accra’. The purpose of the film, he suggested, was to bring ‘an English family to West Africa’ (Colonial Cinema, June 1945, 47). The writer noted the remarks of the African teachers at the end of the film – ‘Do many English women have to work as hard as that?’, ‘Do they not have servants?’ – while a Colonial Films Officer further remarked that to many Africans it came as a revelation that not all English households had a ‘complement of servants’. An African viewer, quoted in Colonial Cinema, praised Mr English’s ‘high sense of responsibilities’ and described his wife as ‘a true specimen of a conscientious and dutiful helpmate’ (Smyth, 1986, 6). William Sellers emphasised the role of Mr English at Home in challenging popular perceptions of English life. ‘I have been 22 years in West Africa’ he wrote, ‘and know only too well how our way of life in this country is judged by the very artificial lives we officials and others live in the colonies’ (The Film in Colonial Development, 1948, 46). 

In assessing the appeal of the film to African audiences, a report from East Africa noted that ‘the characters are few and the scenes remain on the screen sufficiently long for Africans to appreciate their meaning’. The report described the film as ‘a lesson in the presentation of a subject to illiterate Africans through the medium of the cinema’ (Sellers, Royal Society of Arts Journal, 16 October 1953, 831). The influence of William Sellers, the head of the Colonial Film Unit, is most apparent here. In his role as a medical officer for the Nigerian Government, Sellers had made a series of health films for African audiences, and championed a specialised type of filmmaking. In a 1941 article entitled ‘Films for Primitive Peoples’ Sellers outlined the case for a different film language for African audiences. He stated that it was ‘essential… to make individual scenes much longer than is usually considered necessary, in order to enable illiterate Africans to analyse the scenes in detail’. ’Reverse shots and other violent changes in camera angle are very confusing to the minds of illiterate people’, while Sellers also emphasised the difficulties of using close-ups and panning shots – ‘show him a vertical pan and he will tell you he saw the buildings sink into the ground’ (Sellers, Documentary News Letter, September 1941, 173). James Burns argued that ‘by 1945, the Sellers style had established a kind of orthodoxy among colonial filmmakers throughout the Empire’ (Burns, 2002, 52).