British National Films

In 1934 the British National Films Company was formed in England by J. Arthur Rank, Lady Annie Henrietta Yule of Bricket Wood and producer John Corfield.

Joseph Arthur Rank was a devout member of the British Methodist Church and the son of a millionaire flour miller. On the first day of the week, he was a Sunday school teacher, and he discovered that if he screened religious films instead of lecturing his class, he got a positive response.

His idea spread to other classes held by other churches and in 1933, this motivated Rank to form a Religious Film Society to distribute the films that he wanted to show to other Sunday schools.

Following distribution, Rank then decided to go into the business of producing religious films. Mastership was his first religious film production. It was a twenty-minute film made at Merton Park Studios at a cost of £2,700. Mastership was never shown commercially because it was merely intended as a form of evangelism and shown within other churches. Rank was pleased with the results, and other films went into production in Elstree at the better equipped Rock Studios, which were later renamed British National.

In the 1930s, the Methodist Times newspaper in England began attacking the low moral standards exhibited by British films and by American films shown in Britain. In response, the London Evening News answered the Methodist Times by suggesting that if the Methodist Church was so concerned about the effect that the film industry was having upon family life in Britain, that it should start producing its own family-friendly films. It was this exchange that motivated Rank to expand his movie interests into the commercial market.

A young producer named John Corefield introduced Rank to Lady Annie Henrietta Yule of Bricket Wood, who was both extremely wealthy and extremely bored with life. In order to fill her life with activity, she engaged in big game hunting and breeding Arabian horses with a degree of success and lasting fame. Upon meeting J. Arthur Rank, she decided to add the making of films to her list. However, when it came to the business side of film production, Lady Yule did not share the same ideas as Rank with regards to the making and distributing films to improve society; she did not believe in giving discounts to religiously motivated film productions. She thought that films were an interesting hobby and similar to her financial interests in Arabian horse breeding.

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