Westward Ho! (1940)

Wartime short promoting the evacuation if urban children to rural areas.

Date of release
1940-05-05
TMDB
2.0 / 10 (1)
Runtime
9m
Genres
War, Documentary
Director
Thorold Dickinson

Casting

Interesting facts

Westward Ho! is a 1940 British short public information film directed by Thorold Dickinson about the evacuation of children during the Second World War. At the time, evacuation was a controversial policy, and the film was produced with the aim of building support for it.

Production

The production of Westward Ho! marked the beginning of a new Ministry of Information programme of five-minute propaganda films. According to Sir Kenneth Clark, Controller of Home Publicity for the Ministry of Information, the aim was "to help people to remember government messages by putting them in dramatic form". These films were distributed free to cinemas once a week between 1940 and 1942, when the programme stopped.

The project was initially placed under the leadership of Dallas Bower, who invited feature film director Thorold Dickinson to help create the inaugural production. The idea for the first film's subject came from a letter written to a newspaper from a mother who objected to evacuation.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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