by Stephen Vagg
The history of British film is littered with notable female pioneers in the worlds of writing, producing and directing – Ruby Grierson, Betty Box, Muriel Box, Mai Zetterling, Doreen Montgomery, Jill Craige, etc. In terms of mogul-dom, however, women are relatively thin on the ground, being traditionally excluded from the highest corridors of power unless they were doing the typing – a woman didn’t officially run a British film studio until Verity Lambert at EMI Films in the 1980s. However, years before her came Lady Annie Yule, who actually owned a film studio – and what’s more, quite a successful one – British National Pictures, which ran from 1934 to 1948, and made around seventy pictures, some of them classics.
Yule was born (in 1874) Annie Henrietta Yule, the only daughter of Andrew Yule, who made a fortune in India running a series of businesses, including jute, cotton, coal and tea. Annie married her cousin David, who worked for the family business, making it even more successful – so much so, that when David Yule died in 1928, he was considered one of the wealthiest men in India. This left Annie as a very cashed-up widow, inheriting nine million pounds (making her a billionaire by today’s standards) – and, we’ll hand it to her, she decided to blow the family fortune in style, on such things as her luxury yacht, horse breeding, and the film industry.
In the 1930s, Lady Yule met producer John Corfield in Bermuda, and he succeeded in what so many producers dream of doing – persuading this millionaire to invest her cash in movies. Corfield introduced her to another nepo baby, J. Arthur Rank (whose father made a fortune in flour), and in 1934 the trio formed British National Pictures; they also later bought the newly-constructed Pinewood Studios. Their motives for doing so were varied – both Yule and Rank were Methodists interested in promoting the British way of life via movies; they were also clearly attracted to the glamour of the new medium, and the financial success of Korda’s The Private Life of Henry VIII might have given a false impression as to its potential profitability.
The first movie from British National was a low budget drama, Turn of the Tide (1935); it received nice reviews but was not widely seen. Rank was dissatisfied with the movie’s distribution but differed with Yule on how best to deal with that; Rank ultimately left British National, buying out Yule’s interest in Pinewood, and forming what became the Rank Organisation. His story is well known – we did a whole bunch of articles on it.
Lady Yule’s story is far less familiar.
The “divorce” with Rank did not lessen Lady Yule’s enthusiasm for movies: she kept her interest in British National, which started turning out low budget programmers under the stewardship of Corfield – cheap musicals (The Street Singer, Lassie from Lancashire), crime films (Mr. Reeder in Room 13, Night Journey, Dead Men Tell No Tales, Spies of the Air), and comedies (Meet Mr. Penny). Incidentally, Street Singer was produced by a woman, Dora Nirva, although we’re not going to be pretend that British National was a hotbed of glass ceiling breaking.
In June 1939, British National signed a deal with Anglo American Film Company, headed by Louis Jackson, for Anglo to distribute the movies. This saw British National become a leading studio – never as big as, say, Gaumont British, Gainsborough, Associated British, Rank, Two Cities, British and Dominions Film Corporation, British Lion or London Films (it never had its own cinema chain, for instance) – but still entirely respectable.
Throughout its existence, the main supervising executives at British National were John Corfield and Lou Jackson, but Yule was the majority owner of the company, served on the board, visited film sets and watched rushes. She also had interests in three other companies: National Studios (which owned the Elstree studio complex), Herford Films and Strand Films.
British National’s mantra was basically to make films cheaply. “If the British film industry is to succeed, it must be run on a businesslike basis like every other industry,” declared Lady Yule. “I have never thought it was impossible to make a beautiful picture unless you spent an extravagant amount of money. We are cutting out waste and keeping within certain limits of expenditure.”
However, Yule did want quality. “I have always wanted to see British films which were worthy of this Empire. I have travelled all over the world, and wherever I went I saw excellent American films and realised the great influence they wielded. I often felt ashamed of the British films that were showing, and irritated, too, because I knew that if we could make good pictures, the sort that would put the real glory of England on the screen, they would be snapped up everywhere.”
What really got British National going was the advent of World War Two. This prompted most studios to stop operations, but British National kept up production and others soon followed suit. The war also acted as a boon for the British film industry – there was an increasing appetite for locally made films, particularly comedies, war films, and melodrama, and British National found a strong market for its product.
British National’s main genre was comedy: star vehicles for comics (What Would You Do Chums?, Laugh It Off, Crooks Tour), the Old Mother Riley series (comedies about a man in drag, which audiences loved), cheap play adaptations (The Second Mr. Bush). However, the studio was ambitious – it produced the war thriller Contraband from Powell and Pressburger, which was a hit and led to One of Our Aircraft is Missing from the same team. It also financed the first version of Patrick Hamilton’s classic stage play Gaslight (a version famously suppressed by MGM when it did its own version of the play in 1944) and an adaptation of the novel Love on the Dole, which made a star of Deborah Kerr. Pimpernel Smith was a brilliant war movie from Leslie Howard.
British National generally kept its budgets low but did provide a varied slate. There were historical dramas (This England, Penny of Pennsylvania), “ordinary people in war” dramas (The Common Touch, Those Kids from Town, Salute John Citizen, The Shipbuilders, Strawberry Roan, Welcome, Mr. Washington, Twilight Hour, The Agitator), spy films (The Seventh Survivor, Sabotage at Sea, Lady from Lisbon), comedies (Asking for Trouble, We’ll Smile Again, Theatre Royal, Medal for the General, The Trojan Brothers), JP Priestley adaptations (Let the People Sing, When We Are Married), crime stories (The Dummy Talks, Candles at Nine, Meet Sexton Blake!, Don Chicago, Latin Quarter, Murder in Reverse, The Echo Murders), musicals (Heaven is Round the Corner, Give Me the Stars), and melodramas (The World Owes Me a Living).
Their key directors included names like John Baxter, Montgomery Tully, Lance Comfort, and Vernon Sewell. These were capable people, but it must be admitted that with a few exceptions, the really top rank directors did not work at British National (one of the main reasons why the studio is so little remembered today).
In 1945, Lady Yule announced that she wanted British National to move into international markets. British National did make some bigger budgeted movies such as: Bedelia with Margaret Lockwood, then the most popular star in Britain; the expensive musicals Waltz Time and The Laughing Lady; and the costume film Mrs. Fitzherbert. However, these movies disappointed at the box office. The war seemed to rob British National of much of its drive and on the whole, its peacetime era films made little impact, whether musicals (Meet the Navy, Spring Song, Lisbon Story ), crime stories (Appointment with Crime, Dual Alibi, Counterblast, Uneasy Terms), dramas (Woman to Woman, Green Fingers, The Three Weird Sisters, No Room at the Inn), or comedies (The Ghosts of Berkeley Square).
In 1947, Anglo American, the company that distributed British National’s films, was bought by Associated British, a competing studio and cinema chain. British National kept making movies, but the studio’s poor run at the box office was costing it money, a situation exacerbated by increased expenses that came about at the end of the war. The late ‘40s was a crazy time in British filmmaking, with most studios going broke – Alex Korda did go broke, J Arthur Rank only narrowly escaped disaster via cost cutting and government assistance. Lady Yule was clashing with Lou Jackson and getting sick of all the hassle: she shut down the Elstree studio in April 1948, after having made what turned out to be British National’s last movie, No Room at the Inn – according to director Vernon Sewell, Yule just gave everyone two weeks’ notice and that was it. Yule tried to see if Maurice Ostrer, former head of production at Gainsborough, would take over, but Ostrer decided to get out of filmmaking altogether and eventually, so did Yule.
In 1949, Yule wrote a letter to the newspaper saying that the film industry was in trouble because of laziness, inefficiency and too many drones – the sort of lecture people like to give when they’ve inherited their fortune. Lady Yule died in 1950, leaving around 520,000 pounds to her only child, Gladys… so she burned through a fair bit of that nine million pound fortune (to be fair, millionaires, were properly taxed by the British government during and after the war). Gladys, who had joined the board of British National in 1943, sold the Elstree Studios to Associated British in 1955 and died of a heart attack in 1957, aged just 53, prompting Kinematograph Weekly to write “The industry has good cause to be grateful to Lady Yule and her daughter, for there is little doubt that their joint efforts at the National Studios between 1935 and 1948, helped to save British production from near extinction”
Most subsequent histories of British filmmaking, however, routinely dismiss Lady Yule as an eccentric and point out that she inherited her money from her husband (not entirely correct because she inherited a lot from her dad). Alan Wood, Rank’s biographer dismissed her with the following analysis: “To Lady Yule, films were no more than an interesting hobby—rather on a par with the International Horse Show, which she helped to subsidise. Her life after her husband died was a perpetual battle against boredom, and films were her latest diversion, though there was an ill-defined patriotic flavour to her motives as well: the idea, to use the modern jargon, of projecting the British way of life. She was openly disinterested in whether British National made a profit or a loss: and when business was discussed at Board meetings, she would yawn, light a cigarette, and turn the other way.”
This was mean. Look, we can’t defend Lady Yule too much – she did get into movies via virtue of inheritance, like J Arthur Rank (and the Ellison kids, John Hay Whitney, Shari Redstone, Austin Hearst, etc) and she shouldn’t have kept making declarations about how lazy everyone was. But she was involved in British National for fourteen years and it made scores of movies, most quite watchable, some of them classics (Contraband, One of Our Aircraft is Missing, Pimpernel Smith, Love on the Dole). Her involvement in the film industry might have been an indulgence, but she ran a studio as a proper business. She lost money on the enterprise, but many people do, and she hung in there. She didn’t waste her inheritance on destabilising democracy and spreading misinformation, she spent it on things like luxury yachts to travel around the world and making movies; to be honest, if we were billionaires that’s how we’d spend our money, so she deserves respect.
