Our Club Magazine

Dates

1945 - 1950

Category

Cinemagazine - Children's

History

Our Club Magazine was made by Wallace Film Productions for the Children’s Educational Film Department (CEF), a division of Gaumont British Instructional Films and the Rank Corporation. The unusual situation of an outside company producing material for a Rank department is explained by the date of the beginning of the series. With studio time limited because of the Second World War, CEF productions were squeezed in by any company able to spare the time. When the war was over, Wallace continued to produce the series. Issues of this black and white cinemagazine were about eleven minutes long, regularly containing four stories that featured children from the Odeon and Gaumont cinema clubs. The first issue included scenes of children taught ‘safety first’ on the roads. Rank alone had 400 clubs in the United Kingdom with an estimated audience of 400,000 per week. Our Club Magazine was meant to be entertaining as well as educational and they seem to have been very popular with child audiences, partly because they featured children their own age. Fifty-eight issues had been produced by the time the series ended in 1950 with the demise of the CEF.

Provenance

The records of this series were compiled from information held at the British Film Institute, reviews in The Cinema, and the various publications of the Children’s Film Foundation.

Films in this series can be obtained from:

Film Archive

Name

British Film Institute (BFI)

Email

For BFI National Archive enquiries: nonfictioncurators@bfi.org.uk For commercial/footage reuse enquiries: footage.films@bfi.org.uk

Web

http://collections-search.bfi.org.uk/web

Phone

020 7255 1444

Fax

020 7580 7503

Address

21 Stephen Street
London W1T 1LN

Notes

The BFI National Archive also preserves the original nitrate film copies of British Movietone News, British Paramount News, Empire News Bulletin, Gaumont British News, Gaumont Graphic, Gaumont Sound News and Universal News (the World War II years are covered by the Imperial War Museum).

Series held

View all series held by British Film Institute (BFI)