After my father died, I dis­covered a film he had dir­ec­ted in 1938 for the his­tor­ic­ally fam­ous GPO (Gen­eral Post Office) film unit. It was called The Islanders, and in it, to my amazement, was a short sec­tion about Guern­sey and the once-renowned Guern­sey tomato. The film shows how toma­toes were grown in ster­il­ised soil and glass­houses, heated by coal and how toma­toes were graded and stand­ard­ised, to be shipped to main­land whole­sale mar­kets. You can see the boxes with names of traders in Manchester and Birm­ing­ham. There is an incred­ibly snooty trader, act­ing as inter­me­di­ary between the grow­ers and the Eng­lish mar­ket, tak­ing and mak­ing orders daily and hourly by phone. The toma­toes are then shipped to the main­land and taken by train, in return for an inflow of Kellogg’s Corn­flakes, Lyons Cakes, tim­ber to make the boxes for the toma­toes, and coal.


The Islanders (1939) dir Maurice Har­vey. Per­mis­sion of Royal Mail Film Archive.

In Explor­ing the Tomato: trans­form­a­tions of nature, eco­nomy and soci­ety (Mark Har­vey, Steve Quil­ley and Huw Beynon, 2002), there is a chapter called ‘Broken Glass’, describ­ing the extraordin­ary eco­nomic and social organ­isa­tion of small grow­ers (includ­ing part-time post­men), the Guern­sey Tomato Mar­ket­ing Board, and glass­houses made from the skeleton-frames of up-turned boats. It told of the sys­tem of Eng­lish whole­sale mar­kets, and how the Guern­sey ‘Potentate’ tomato (a power­ful hybrid) had to endure a clunky two-week jour­ney from grower to con­sumer, and of the stand­ard­isa­tion and ‘pro­cess of qual­i­fic­a­tion’ of toma­toes for mass con­sumer mar­kets. This trans­it­ory world was shattered by the twin forces of com­pet­i­tion from Dutch, North Sea Gas-warmed toma­toes and the growth of super­mar­ket chains in the UK. The book was writ­ten nearly five years before I dis­covered the film – but could there have been some sub­lim­inal con­nec­tion? A trans­mis­sion of a kind of interest in the world?

The film trans­ports us into a world as seen 65 years ago. One of many in a revolu­tion­ary genre of doc­u­ment­ary films — Night Mail being the most fam­ous —  The Islanders shows how the world was made rather than con­sumed. Social real­ist vis­ion uncov­ers the work of world-making. So we see mostly men, mostly smoking, engaged in manual labour of pro­du­cing, lift­ing and trans­port­ing toma­toes; the work of pick­ing and grad­ing; the work of mak­ing sales, of inter­me­di­at­ing, and reg­u­lat­ing. We are told only that res­taur­ants demand reg­u­lar, middle-sized, good-coloured toma­toes. The con­sumer as such is an absent fig­ure. Fur­ther, this and many of the films from the GPO stable, unsur­pris­ingly present a com­mu­nic­a­tions revolu­tion, eco­nom­ies now made pos­sible by radio and tele­phone, worlds con­nec­ted, ships at sea res­cued, let­ters delivered, tele­grams sent, under­sea cables laid. As today, the sense of a world being trans­formed by then revolu­tion­ary tech­no­lo­gies of com­mu­nic­a­tion, wired social and eco­nomic organ­isa­tion, is tan­gibly and visu­ally excit­ing. The work of com­mu­nic­a­tion, of cre­at­ing the infra­struc­tures, occa­sion­ally at risk to work­ing lives, is explored through stark and res­ol­utely mod­ern­ist imagery. The island dis­solves into the planet, the planet into the uni­verse, the film ends.

Orbit­ing the tomato: A door to a hidden-to-me dimen­sion of my father. A refract­ing prism of past and present worlds. A soci­ety of proud pro­duc­tion, now dis­ap­peared from visual rep­res­ent­a­tion (a genre doc­u­ment­ary now dead) and bur­ied by new forms of supermarket-dominated, consumer-oriented social and eco­nomic organ­isa­tion. Work los­ing its core soci­olo­gical repu­ta­tion, and attempts to recover and re-visualise the tomato in the round, through its mul­tiple pres­ences. Such a simple fruit.

Ref­er­ences

  1. Har­vey, M., Quil­ley, S. and Beynon, H. (2002) Explor­ing the Tomato: Trans­form­a­tions of Nature, Eco­nomy and Soci­ety Edward Elgar.