julian_craster

From The Times London
January 13, 2006

Margaret Thomson
June 10, 1910 - December 30, 2005
Film-maker whose wartime documentaries for the Government foreshadowed the cinéma vérité style

ONE OF Britain’s first female film-makers, Margaret Thomson began by making educational films in the 1930s. During the Second World War she contributed several shorts to the “Dig for Victory” campaign, including an instructional film about compost heaps. Her postwar documentaries about children for the Ministry of Education were regarded as precursors of the cinéma vérité style of documentary that aimed to convey real life as naturally as possible.
Having developed a reputation for her work with children, she directed the feature film Child’s Play (1954), in which the offspring of two atomic research scientists join the village children’s secret society. She also coached juvenile actors on several features, most notably the drama The Kidnappers (1953), for which the young leads, Jon Whiteley and Vincent Winter, each received a miniature Oscar.

Thomson was the daughter of the eminent New Zealand geologist James Allan Thomson, and she was born during a trip to Australia. After taking a degree in zoology, she moved to London in 1934 and made a series of educational shorts about British ecosystems for Gaumont-British Instructional Films.

At the time female directors were virtually unknown and faced the same sort of prejudices that women encountered in many other spheres of professional life. Thomson subsequently worked as a film editor, but found steady employment in the industry elusive. She taught English in Spain, where she was caught up in the Civil War and escaped through Portugal, and then retrained as an electrician, before the war gave her the chance to revive her film career at the Realist Film Unit, which had been set up by Basil Wright in 1937.

During the war the unit specialised in medical and agricultural shorts and home-front propaganda for the Government. Subsequently it continued to make films on a wide range of subjects for various sponsors. Thomson’s films include Making a Compost Heap (1942), Clamping Potatoes (1942), Clean Milk (1943), Children Learning by Experience (1946) and Children Growing up with Other People (1947).

Of Thomson’s work the film historian Sarah Easen wrote: “She filmed children playing on London’s bombsites and in parks, trying to avoid intruding on the children’s environment and to obtain a truer picture of their behaviour by allowing shots to run longer than normal. She believed this to be an early example of the cinema vérité style.”

In the late 1940s Thomson returned to New Zealand and worked as a newsreel director. In the early 1950s she was back in the UK, working for the Crown Film Unit. Child’s Play was the only feature film she directed and she also helped to write it. It was made for the state-supported Group 3 and received good reviews, but Group 3’s films were never especially popular with the public, and she disliked the experience.

She worked as a children’s acting coach at Pinewood Studios and in the late 1950s formed a production company with her husband, Bob Ash, making sponsored shorts, often on medical subjects. She retired in 1977.

Her husband predeceased her and she is survived by a stepson.

Margaret Thomson, film-maker, was born on June 10, 1910. She died on December 30, 2005, aged 95.

theuofc

Many thanks for posting this. For someone who began by teaching zoology to children, Margaret Thomson carved out a varied and gutsy career for herself as a woman. She did well in her coaching work with young actor Jon Whiteley. The talented little boy also appeared in Dirk Bogarde's Hunted (1951) and The Spanish Gardener (1956) and went on to become an academic at a well-known UK university.