Skip to main content
BFI logo

Home

Film

Television

People

History

Education

Tours

Help

  search

Search

Screenonline banner
Britain First (1929)
 

Synopsis

Warning: screenonline full synopses contain 'spoilers' which give away key plot points. Don't read on if you don't want to know the ending!

Mr. Forster, a salesman, pulls up in his car and enters the hardware store. Inside, the proprietor announces that owing to a consignment of cheap foreign goods (crates are marked 'Hamburg') he will not need to place an order. The salesman examines the goods (tin bowls) and pronounces them 'sweated goods'. He offers the proprietor a lift in his car. While driving along, he shows the propietor the effects of him not placing an order. They stop by a closed factory.

Later, at the Red Dragon public house, they meet other businessmen and women, who comment on the situation. One man shows a letter from the United States cancelling an order from his firm since the imposition of an import duty. Another comments on the success of the artificial silk manufacturing firm. Mrs Wells explains that after a recent trip to Paris, on her return to Britain, she had to pay excise duty to customs on the silk goods she had bought, hence the success of the artificial silk manufacturer. Another man reads from the newspaper that Messrs. Hamburger is setting up a new tyre factory in the area. Mrs Wells remarks that by buying British goods there is more money around. Another man comments on the quality of the new factories and the leisure provisions they provide. All drink a toast to 'Buy British'.

Intertitle: "The preceding story illustrates the arguments in favour of buying British goods so that our own people may reap the benefit. It is part of a Buy British Goods campaign instituted by the National Union of Manufacturers - an organization of British manufacturers employing British labour, and seeking security for them and their workmen." Stanley Baldwin addresses a crowd: "I wish the National Union of Manufacturers success in their campaign for buying British Goods. It is important that we should support our own people first."