Newman was showing her films to paying audiences by the late 1930s. Her reputation as an amateur filmmaker of note was burnished during the Second World War when she succeeded in obtaining unique permissions (including official sanction from the Ministry of Information) to film military activities on the Home Front and to record events in wartime Britain. Her film of the war, including extraordinary footage of the London Blitz, was edited into her most famous production, Britain at War (IWM, MGH 3773), which she exhibited publicly in various versions from 1942 onwards (Fish, 1997, 33).

Born into a wealthy and well-connected family, Newman had taken up filmmaking as an ‘amusing hobby’ in 1928, when a trip to Morocco prompted her to purchase a 16mm camera. The result was her first film, ‘an amateur travelogue which was typical of wealthy travellers of the period’ (ibid., 27; this film is held by the IWM as MGH 3768). Glimpses of India, also in the travelogue mode, was the fruit of an extensive trip to India in 1935, where she and her mother were received as guests of the Viceroy, Lord Willingdon. It was apparently Willingdon who encouraged Newman to show her work publicly, and Glimpses was the first of her films to be exhibited to a paying audience. Screened at various public locations including the Royal Geographical Society and Grosvenor House (where it was shown ‘under the auspices of the East India Association’; Newman, 1941[?], 5), the money raised from ticket sales was donated to charity. According to a note in Newman’s accompanying book (also titled Glimpses of India), showings of the film raised over £6000 for various charities, and in the first two years of the war a further £2000 was donated to the Red Cross (ibid., endpiece).

Newman’s time in India was spent in the highest echelon of Raj society. Her itinerary took her from Bombay to Peshawar via Madras, Calcutta, Dehli, Darjeeling, Varanasi, Udaipur and Jaipur. Newman and her mother had palaces, official residences and royal barges placed at their disposal. Mixing with Maharajas and Governors, attending sumptuous banquets, spectacular official events and even going on a tiger shoot with the King of Greece, the account presented in the book reveals an Imperial world of aristocratic luxury that was intimately linked with the extraordinary opulence of Indian princely privilege.

References to events or circumstances that indicate a different set of concerns and problems afoot in India occasionally appear in her text, but they are mentioned in passing, and left largely uncommented on; nevertheless, they puncture the happy Imperial equilibrium painted by the account. Peshawar is ‘surrounded by barbed wire entanglements’ and she travels with and armed escort (ibid., 26); a visit to the university in Calcutta is the occasion for ‘a sorrowful reflection that some of the students use the knowledge they acquire to spread unrest and discontent,’ and the pair are ‘impressed by the enormous responsibilities of the Governor of Bengal, and the need of his firm hand to keep terrorism in check’ (ibid., 13). Newman visited the Legislature in New Dehli, where the important Government of India Act (1935) was being prepared. There ‘a most interesting man, who had worked many years in the Indian Civil Service’ explained to her ‘how in his opinion, India under the new regime, would be a much happier country if not as efficient’ (ibid.,18). All of these asides imbue the largely idyllic and untroubled Imperial life of the main travel narrative with a sense of increasing unreality, transforming it into a picture of a world on which time is being called.

Perhaps most tellingly, at a banquet for 100 people held in Calcutta, she records a conversation with a fellow diner who impressed upon her ‘how even visitors leave their marks in India, sowing the seeds of either hate or respect, and how important it is for the individual to be human and tolerant. He added “We should all remember we are India’s guests”’(ibid., 13). The sense conveyed is not only that human consideration and tolerance on the part of ‘India’s guests’ had not always been in plentiful supply but also that guests, however enjoyable their sojourn may have been, must finally take leave of their host.