In the autumn of 1935 Benjamin Britten and W.H. Auden began work on a documentary provisionally entitled ‘Negroes’. Auden described the soundtrack as ‘a most elaborate affair, beginning with quotations from Aristotle about slavery and including a setting of a poem by Blake’ (cited in Carpenter, 1981, 185-186). Britten noted in his diary that much of their work had ‘to be altered for [GPO head, John] Grierson as being too “flippant” and subjective’ and by November, after a couple of months of work, the project was abandoned (Britten, 1991). Aspects of this work finally appeared in 1938 as God's Chillun.

The GPO Film Unit was founded in 1933, effectively as a successor to the Empire Marketing Board. Headed by John Grierson until 1936, the GPO Film Unit was subsequently transferred to the Ministry of Information, where it became the Crown Film Unit early in 1940. Auden and Britten began collaborating for the GPO during the summer of 1935 – most famously on Night Mail (1936) – and their work on God’s Chillun dates from autumn 1935, when they were aged 28 and 21 respectively. Basil Wright explained that ‘soon after Night Mail’ the pair worked together on ‘another highly experimental film on the Negro, based, I think, partly on some material I had shot in the West Indies some three years previously’ (The Musical Times, November 1963, 780). This material dated from 1933, when Wright had travelled to the West Indies and produced Windmill in Barbados (1933) and Cargo from Jamaica (1933). Further footage originated from Walter Creighton and James Rogers’s trip to West Africa in 1932 (see for example, Castes and Fisherfolk), while a report in the Post Office Magazine in 1939 recalls ‘slaves’ wandering around the film unit, suggesting that additional studio filming took place in 1938 (Stedman, January 1939, 16).

Although Wright recalls a session in 1935 in which parts of the score for God’s Chillun were played in his flat, he stated that ‘thereafter the project was abandoned’ (Mitchell, 1981, 129). Auden would reuse some of the writing for ‘Negroes’ inThe Ascent of F6 a year later (for example, the concluding lines of God’s Chillun, ‘the choice is free to all; and light falls equally on black and white’), but was not involved in the film’s completion in 1938. When the film was finally completed, reviews noted its composite nature. ‘God’s Chillun is an experimental film’, Sight and Sound stated in 1938, ‘similar to the early Coal Face in that the sound was completed first, and the visuals later cut and combined with the sound track. It is a poem with music, the poetry by W.H. Auden, the music by Benjamin Britten’ (Sight and Sound, Winter, 1938-9, 171). Rachael Low was far from complimentary about the ‘freakish little film’ finally produced, and suggested that ‘the three editors, not known members of the Film Unit, seem to have created editing chaos’ (Low, 1979, 148). The three editors included Gordon Hales, who would subsequently direct the first Colonial Film Unit production, Mr English at Home (1940) and Max Anderson, who would work for the Crown Film Unit, producing Daybreak in Udi in 1949.

God’s Chillin is introduced by George Copeland Grant – better known as Jackie Grant – a Cambridge graduate who captained the West Indian cricket side in 12 Tests from 1930 to 1935. Between 1932 and 1935 Grant worked in Trinidad as a schoolmaster at Queen’s Royal College, before becoming Principle of the Grenada Boy’s Secondary School in 1935. This represented a move, in Grant’s words, from a position as a ‘member of the colonial service’ to a ‘senior government officer’. A deeply religious man, Grant subsequently spent many years carrying out missionary work in Africa.

In his autobiography, Grant spoke positively of the Colonial office – ‘their high sense of duty and integrity often separated the governing and governed’ – but was critical of their speed in implementing policy. ‘Its declared policy after World War I’, he wrote, ‘was that the interest of the indigenous people of the colonies should be paramount and the political goal should be self-rule. This, I believe, was the genuine desire of the British government; that, in practice, the fulfilment of this desire often left much to be desired, I cannot deny’ (Grant, 1980, 43).