"Cable Ship" is one of a series of short documentaries produced by the GPO Film Unit during the 1930s to publicise the work of Britain's General Post Office, which at this period controlled telecommunications as well as the postal service. Probably the best-known of these was "Night Mail", which described the journey of a mail train from London to Scotland with the assistance of music by Benjamin Britten and poetry by W H Auden. "Cable Ship", however, made three years earlier, is much more prosaic than poetic.
Its purpose was to convey the importance of the GPO's cable ships in keeping communications with the continent open. The film opens with shots of the international telephone exchange and then cuts to a cable ship tasked with finding and repairing a fault in a submarine telephone cable. The scenes set on board the ship were actually filmed at sea on a real cable ship, unlike some later Film Unit productions in which shipboard scenes were reconstructed on land. Besides the commentary we also get to hear from two of the cable repair men, although because of the difficulty of recording sound on location in the early 1930s their dialogue was recorded later. For the same reason the scenes at sea often sound oddly silent when no-one is actually talking.
The main interest of films like this one at the time was to instruct the viewer in the workings of what was then state-of-the-art technology; most people in the thirties probably did not know much about the workings of the international telephone system, and this was a chance to enlighten them. The main interest for the viewer today is largely historical in that it enables us to learn something about how the world worked eighty years ago. It did, however, leave me wondering one thing. The repair operation we see here took place in the relatively shallow waters of the English Channel. How did they repair cables in the much deeper waters of, say, the Atlantic Ocean?
Its purpose was to convey the importance of the GPO's cable ships in keeping communications with the continent open. The film opens with shots of the international telephone exchange and then cuts to a cable ship tasked with finding and repairing a fault in a submarine telephone cable. The scenes set on board the ship were actually filmed at sea on a real cable ship, unlike some later Film Unit productions in which shipboard scenes were reconstructed on land. Besides the commentary we also get to hear from two of the cable repair men, although because of the difficulty of recording sound on location in the early 1930s their dialogue was recorded later. For the same reason the scenes at sea often sound oddly silent when no-one is actually talking.
The main interest of films like this one at the time was to instruct the viewer in the workings of what was then state-of-the-art technology; most people in the thirties probably did not know much about the workings of the international telephone system, and this was a chance to enlighten them. The main interest for the viewer today is largely historical in that it enables us to learn something about how the world worked eighty years ago. It did, however, leave me wondering one thing. The repair operation we see here took place in the relatively shallow waters of the English Channel. How did they repair cables in the much deeper waters of, say, the Atlantic Ocean?
