SARAH: Hello, I’m Sarah Castagnetti, a visual collections record specialist at The National Archives. We’re going to look at a document from the Central Office of Information or the COI.
The documents in this collection all relate to the production of public information films, leaflets and posters from 1946 to 2012 when the COI closed. So what was the COI? Well, it was a government organisation that other departments could turn to if they wanted help in promoting new policies or laws, for example around public health or road safety.
The COI could advise on the best way to get a message across and they had connections with film and graphic design companies who they could ask to do the work. The COI collection includes a lot of visual material. This includes leaflets and posters and story boards for films, where someone sketches out different aspects of the story, a bit like a comic strip. You can also find letters and notes between the staff at the COI and the people in the other government departments discussing what sort of information campaign they should run, who it would be aimed at, what it would cost, and how long it would take. Sometimes there are detailed reports looking at the best way to reach an audience. In the files to do with films there are often early ideas for a film called treatments, scripts for the actors, and shooting scripts, which show what camera shots will be used. You won’t find the actual films, though; that’s because these are stored at the British Film Institute Archive, but a lot of them can be seen online on the BFI Player platform.
Before we look at our example from this collection, notice that our document has a unique reference: INF 6/1584, so we can use our catalogue to find it. Now let’s take a close look at our document and work out what it’s about. This is a COI film production file about a film called Insaaf. ‘Insaaf’ is an Urdu word which means justice or fair play. The COI was asked to make the film by the Race Relations Board which was responsible for dealing with complaints of racial discrimination.
And what about the appearance of the document? The file is contained in a sort of wallet, which has the document reference written on it. INF is at the start of the references of all the documents from the COI and the ones that start INF 6 are all film production files. So the fact that this reference starts with INF 6 tells me what kind of file I’m looking at. The document was closed until 2003, which means it wasn’t available for people to look at until then, and the note ‘selected by NFA’ means the film was selected to be kept in the National Film Archive. If we take the wallet off, we can see a folder which also has the title ‘Insaaf’ in the corner.
The file covers the years 1970 and 1971 when the film was made and it was produced by those working on the production of the film Insaaf. The file has story outlines or treatments for the film and a script in English, even though the actual film was mostly in Urdu. There’s publicity material like posters and leaflets and some newspaper cuttings. There’s also correspondence between the COI and the Race Relations Board about the film as the storyline developed. Production files like this were kept so that all the documentation around the development of a film could be brought together. Anyone who needed to know what was happening during the production or what else needed to be done could consult the file.
If you watch the film Insaaf on the BFI Player, you’ll see that it’s a 45 minute story featuring a South Asian family with a 16-year-old boy who suffers discrimination when he applies for a job.
MAN 1: He uh, he seems to be the sort of bloke we want.
MAN 2: Oh yes, he’s fine.
MAN 1: If we can get him past the old man.
SARAH: He puts a complaint in to the Race Relations Board.
JOB CENTRE WORKER: What’s the matter, have you lost a job? CHHOTU: No sir, I haven’t lost one, it’s just that…just that I was turned down for one.
JOB CENTRE WORKER: Any idea why?
CHHOTU: Well…because of my colour.
JOB CENTRE WORKER: Is that what you think?
CHHOTU: Yes sir. But what do I do?
JOB CENTRE WORKER: Well, you can complain.
CHHOTU: How sir?
JOB CENTRE WORKER: You fill in the form to start with. Come
to think of it, most things these days begin by filling in a form.
SARAH: And ultimately, the employer admits discriminating against him and he’s given compensation and offered the job.
RACE RELATIONS BOARD ASSISTANT: Mr Appleby has written to us offering you two weeks pay in lieu of what you would have earned if he’d taken you on in the first place.
CHHOTU: Two weeks pay?
RACE RELATIONS BOARD ASSISTANT: Yes, and the offer of a job after all. He’ll sign an assurance of course that he won’t do it again.
SARAH: Watching the film and then reading the correspondence in the production file, you can learn something about how the government was trying to address race discrimination at this time and find out about the work of the Race Relations Board. The National Archives has documents from the COI because it was a government organisation. The film production files like this one are just one part of the COI collection. Don’t forget we have only looked at one document about race relations in this period of history and remember our government records are not really going to show the realities of discrimination from the point of view of British South Asians at the time. These are considerations we must bear in mind when we’re trying to evaluate its significance. So this is just one of the documents to be found in our COI collection which can be used to find out more about race relations in the UK around this time.