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British News No 1

Video British News No 1

TLF ID M011955

This is a British News newsreel showing scenes of war and war-related activities from June 1940, in the days after the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk in World War II (1939-45). It contains five segments: King sees Sunday Arms Speed-up; River Plate Heroes in South Africa; Comforts for Our Men in Germany; Paris Succours Stricken Refugees; and B.E.F. Evacuation Amazes World (the longest segment). The newsreel is in black-and-white, runs for 16 mins 30 secs and is accompanied by some background information.

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Educational details

Educational value
  • This newsreel is of great value for the World War II depth study in the year 10 history curriculum. It is especially relevant for the content description about the course of the war. The evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk from 27 May to 4 June 1940 is shown in detail in the final segment; and the destruction of the German pocket battleship the 'Admiral Graf Spee' in December 1939 after the first naval battle of the war is referenced in the second.
  • The newsreel is also of value for the content description in the depth study that refers to the impact of World War II, including the use of wartime government controls. Newsreels were controlled by the censorship rules of the Ministry of Information and their content was designed to boost British morale and, in this case, convince the neutral Americans visiting the New York World's Fair where the newsreel was shown that the British were not defeated and that Nazi aggression must be beaten.
  • The resource may make some contribution to students attaining the year 10 history achievement standard. It provides a multimedia source from World War II that may help students explain the context for people's actions in the past. It could also be used by teachers to provide students with an opportunity to sequence events and developments within a chronological framework and identify relationships between events in different places in May and June 1940.
Year level

10

Topics Refugees Propaganda Military campaigns Conscription Labour market Domestic war effort Prisoners of war World War II British history
Learning area
  • History

Other details

Contributors
  • Contributor
  • Name: Education Services Australia
  • Organization: Education Services Australia
  • Description: Data manager
  • Address: VIC, AUSTRALIA
  • URL: http://www.esa.edu.au/
  • Copyright Holder
  • Name: British Council
  • Organization: British Council
  • Address: UNITED KINGDOM
  • URL: http://film.britishcouncil.org/
  • Publisher
  • Name: British Council
  • Organization: British Council
  • Description: Publisher
  • Address: UNITED KINGDOM
  • URL: http://film.britishcouncil.org/
  • Resource metadata contributed by
  • Name: Education Services Australia Ltd
  • Organisation: Education Services Australia Ltd
  • Address: AUSTRALIA
  • URL: www.esa.edu.au
Access profile
  • Unknown
Learning Resource Type
  • Video
Rights
  • © British Council, except where indicated otherwise. This material is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC 3.0) licence http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/.