In the Orbit of the Tomato

Mark Harvey — Wed, 26 May 2010 11:37:55 +0000

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

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

No Way To Make A Living » Mark Harvey

In the Orbit of the Tomato

References