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Mousehole, Cornwall. The boat of rascal sailors Bill Blewitt and Joe Jago
slips from its moorings on a blustery day and is blown against the rocks. The
two fisherman salvage what they can but their uninsured boat is ruined. Their
only hope is the unused vessel of a local retiring fisherman, but he refuses to
sell his boat, the Pleasant, for less than £100. A dejected Joe gets a job as a
sailor; Blewitt turns his back on the sea and gets a job at the local
quarry.
Blewitt remains outwardly unconcerned, but the physical nature of the quarry
work takes its toll and one evening he takes some money from the teapot where
his wife, Hetty, keeps her savings. However, the returning Hetty blocks his way
to the pub and Blewitt is forced to hide out of her sight in an alley. The
unsuspecting Blewitt is plucked from the alley by a postal savings man and,
despite his efforts to escape, has to deposit his wife's savings into a post
office account. On the way home he spies the Pleasant and vows to save up to buy
it. His wife tells him he'll face competition from Joe, who has also set his
heart on buying the boat.
Two years pass, and though Blewitt's savings have been hit by reduced working
hours in the winter and the need to buy new tools, he has managed to save £25.
But he also now faces a new rival. A wealthy tourist couple are attracted by the
Pleasant, and though they really want a yacht rather than a fishing vessel, they
offer the old fisherman a £50 down-payment. Blewitt rushes round to the
fisherman and offers £25 plus a percentage of the future catch, but is rejected
as a charity case.
Fortunately, Joe returns the next day from his spell at sea and by pooling
their money, Blewitt and Jago finally secure the Pleasant. They take to the sea
and land a triumphant catch, which they bring spectacularly to
market. Acclaimed by Paul Rotha as the first 'story' documentary, Harry Watt's The Saving of Bill Blewitt can be seen to inform everything from Ealing comedies
such as Whisky Galore! (d. Alexander Mackendrick, 1947) to the films of Mike
Leigh.
Ostensibly produced to promote the 75th anniversary of the Post Office
Savings Bank, Watt's film dispenses almost completely with narration and instead
improvises a story out of the people of Mousehole and the Cornish landscape they
inhabit. From the village laundry blowing in the wind to the artist struggling
behind an easel, Saving exhibits an unforced affection with place and people
that was to become Watt's hallmark.
The film's conviction owes much to the very real Bill Blewitt, a local
postman discovered by Watt. Pat Jackson remembered "a mesmeric gift of the gab,
a glorious Cornish accent, twinkling blue eyes, a grin as broad as 'Popeye' and
the charismatic charm of the Celt." Blewitt subsequently went on to appear in
such propaganda films as Charles Frend's The Foreman Went to France (1942) and
Johnny Frenchman (1945) and Watt's own Nine Men (1943).
There are several interesting historical aspects to Watt's charming film. The
impact of the slump, in particular, hangs over the picture like a malign weather
front. The inter-village scrimping and squabbling, the references to the broken
rhythms of employment at the quarry and the evident, though unarticulated,
vulnerability of the film's protagonists reflected the actual hardships of the
village, whose pilchard industry had been further hampered by Britain's refusal
to trade with Italy after Mussolini's invasion of Abyssinia.
Against this backdrop of economic hardship, the film's promotion of Post
Office saving occupies a rather ambiguous place. Systems of finance were a more
directly political issue during the interwar period than we might appreciate -
The Green Shirt Movement for Social Credit, for example, drew tens of thousands
of marching enthusiasts - but in Blewitt the administrators of the post office
savings account are unreal and over-earnest comic figures. Their near-farcical
intrusions into the otherwise realistic story have an almost dream-like quality.
Similarly, the brief narration that overlays the story implies both the
difficulty of saving and the even greater challenge of achieving economic
mastery. A moral but political point is made which is at odds with the film's
otherwise gently comic flow.
Scott Anthony
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1. Postal savings (2:07)
