Australian Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows home-movie footage mainly taken by former prime minister Sir Robert Menzies during the Second World War. It documents the 1941 wartime tour made by Menzies to Libya, Sudan, Egypt, Jerusalem, Britain, the USA and Canada. The clip features dramatic colour footage of London during the Blitz, showing bombed and burnt-out buildings, as well as informal footage of British aristocrats and politicians, including British Prime Minister Winston Churchill at home. Intertitles written by Menzies are included. The footage was originally silent, but a piece of music featuring strings and voice was added during production which accompanies the length of this clip.

Educational value points

• Prime minister Robert Gordon Menzies was Australia’s longest serving prime minister and the founder of the Liberal Party. Menzies (1894–1978), who was prime minister when the Second World War began, led the country from 1939 to 1941 and again from 1949 until his retirement in 1966. He represented the United Australia Party (UAP) until 1944, and from 1949 he was leader of the Liberal Party, which had superseded the UAP in 1945. In 1949 Menzies led the Liberal Party to victory and formed a coalition with the Country Party, which was renamed the National Country Party in 1975 and the National Party in 1982. During his second period in office, Menzies presided over Australia’s longest period of economic prosperity.

• Menzies went to England in 1941 primarily to secure Britain’s aid in the defence of the Pacific region against Japan, and to seek help in establishing munitions and aircraft production in Australia. Because Germany was threatening invasion of Britain, Churchill was unwilling to devote Britain’s scarce resources to Australia’s defence. Churchill later refused a request by John Curtin, who was prime minister from 1941 to 1945, for the return of Australian troops to defend their homeland. In a Christmas message to the Australian people, Curtin controversially said, 'Without any inhibitions of any kind, I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom ('The Task Ahead’, The Melbourne Herald, 27 December 1941).

• Menzies’s wartime tour was the first occasion on which an Australian prime minister travelled overseas by air. Menzies left Australia for England in a then government-owned Qantas Empire Airways flying boat, which is shown in this clip. He travelled to Britain via Singapore and the Middle East, where he visited Australian troops who had participated in victories against the Italians in North Africa. His stops included Cairo, Tobruk, Benghazi, Lagos, Lisbon and Khartoum. On his return journey Menzies stopped in the USA, where he delivered several speeches about the War, and in Canada, where he visited Royal Australian Air Force pilots who were training there.

• Menzies was in London during the Blitz, the sustained and intensive bombing of Britain by Nazi Germany during the Second World War. The Blitz took place from September 1940 to May 1941, although German aerial bombardment of British targets continued until March 1945. The Blitz caused about 43,000 deaths and destroyed 1 million houses. In 1941, Menzies wrote in his diary of buildings down and blazing and 'craters and fallen masonry in the streets, and the fear of an unexploded bomb lurking around every corner. Wherever we walked, we crunched over acres of broken glass’ (www.oph.gov.au).

• The Blitz reduced parts of London to rubble. About 1.4 million Londoners, or one in every six, were made homeless by the Blitz. Menzies’s footage suggests that tonnes of building rubble were dumped in Hyde Park. The clip shows barrage balloons, hundreds of which floated above London. The barrage balloons were attached to the ground by cables capable of bringing down any aircraft that collided with them and were designed to discourage low-level bombing.

• During his stay in London, Menzies mixed with British leaders and aristocrats, many of whom are shown in this clip. Anthony Eden, Lord Beaverbrook, Ernest Bevin, Oliver Lyttelton and CB Attlee were members of Churchill’s all-party wartime government, while David Lloyd George was a former British prime minister, and Lady Astor was the first British woman elected to parliament. Field Marshall Sir John Dill served as a wartime commander. Menzies’s close personal relationship with various British ministers and in particular with Anthony Eden, who was the British prime minister from 1955 to 1957, led to his becoming embroiled as a negotiator for the British in the Suez Crisis of 1956.

• While he was in Britain, Menzies toured British factories and military bases. He and his wife Pattie experienced firsthand the devastation caused by German air raids during the Blitz, and were deeply moved by what they saw and, in particular, what they regarded as the fortitude of the British people. They visited several provincial British cities and war factories to help boost morale. Menzies also visited Australian troops stationed in Britain.

• Menzies made home movies that provide a valuable historical record of his period in office. The films provide an insight into one political leader’s view of world events and rare footage of some world leaders, often in informal settings. Menzies was an avid filmmaker and his daughter Heather Henderson recalls that he approached Kodak to edit the film shown here and to insert the intertitles he devised himself. A self-deprecating humour is evident in the intertitle that introduces Churchill, which reads, 'Just to prove that I met him’.