Sidney Bernstein: A biography

by Caroline Moorehead

344 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Caroline Moorehead is the New York Times bestselling author of Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France; A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in Occupied France; and Human Cargo: A Journey Among Refugees, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. An acclaimed biographer, Moorehead has also written for the New York Review of Books, the Guardian, the Times, and the Independent. She lives in London and Italy.

Reviews

[Richard Bartholomew · Rating 4 out of 5]

For many people in Britain of a certain age, the word "Granada" evokes not the sunshine and medieval romance of city in Spain, but rather the slate tiles and chimney pots of a modest Edwardian terrace under a damp and gloomy sky in the north of England. This is because for a long time a shot of some Salford rooftops formed the backdrop for the end credits to Coronation Street, a nationally popular soap opera of everyday life, which would sign off by fading into the logo and name of the programme maker: Granada, a regional franchise holder for independent (i.e. commercial) television.

Granada Television had offices and studios in Manchester, but the larger Granada Group was based in London. It was headed by Sidney Bernstein, an Ilford-born second-generation Jewish migrant with a background in theatre and cinema. Bernstein first used "Granada" as an appropriately exotic name for a lush a new cinema that opened in Dover in Kent in 1930; as described by Moorehead:

The entire town came to gape at a décor of such splendour that an admiring critic was reduced to describing it as a compromise between Russia and Spain. There was an enormous entrance hall, overlooked by a balcony with carved stone balustrades; there were Moorish arches and a feeling of 'infinity beyond'.

Bernstein had commissioned a Russian theatre director, Theodore Komisarjevsky, as the designer, and it was the first of what would become a chain; similarly exuberant "Granada" cinemas next appeared at Walthamstow and Woolwich, although at the latter location a colour scheme "based on early church manuscripts with lines of gold, grey and red" had to be revised at the last minute for aesthetic reasons. The greatest triumph was at Tooting, where "the Grand Canal in Venice, the Ca D'Oro, the Palazzo Cavalli, and the Palazzo Foscari, all had had their say; so had thirteenth- and fourteenth-century French Gothic".

Bernstein, born in 1899, famously joked about having been born with a silver screen in his mouth: by the time he left school aged 15 his father Alexander was already running theatres and cinemas, and renting out cinema equipment. In the 1920s, Sidney helped set up the Film Society with Iris Barry and Ivor Montagu, and following war work as an advisor to the Ministry of Information – which included organising the filming of horrors uncovered at the liberated Nazi camps – he moved for a short time into Hollywood film production, partnering with Alfred Hitchcock on Under Capricorn and Rope.

The family business, however, had evolved into cinema almost by chance: Alexander was originally primarily a property developer, and his first foray into entertainment came about after he bought a plot of land in Edmonton. He planned to build some shops, and judged that a theatre would be a draw; the Edmonton Empire opened in 1908, and although Alexander "knew nothing about music halls", he wisely let the building out to experienced music hall professionals. Marie Lloyd performed at the Edmonton Empire just before she died, even though Sidney Bernstein had released her from her obligation when he heard that she was ill. By this time, music hall programmes had started to incorporate a "bioscope" segment into their entertainments, and Alexander had moved into building cinemas. Like Lloyd, Alexander died in 1922, at which point Sidney took complete control of the theatres and cinemas while his brother Cecil took charge of the property empire. As well as running cinemas, Bernstein was approached to organise private viewings for Lloyd George in Scotland and the Royal family at Sandringham.

Although not an intellectual, Bernstein was interested the potential of cinema as a serious art form: Iris Barry, who at the Spectator was "one of the first serious critics of the cinema", became a close friend (and later, his ex-wife's mother-in-law), and it was through her that he was involved with the creation of the Film Society, which brought over European films for showings in London. He befriended Sergei Eisenstein, although there was some conflict in 1929 when he arranged for the Society to show Battleship Potemkin as a double bill with John Grierson's Drifters. Grierson felt the pairing was slight intended to question his originality, and Eisenstein was not pleased either (alas for them both, the two films are now bundled together on the British Film Institute's 2012 Blu-ray edition, which explicitly memorialises the "momentous" 1929 showing).

Bernstein's war work included advising on pro-British messaging in films in the USA, and a 10-week visit to North Africa, where he was involved in the organisation of cinemas and the distribution of British films. He was particularly keen to visit the front line, having been refused enlistment in the First World War due to breathing difficulties caused by a sports injury that had disfigured his nose. In April 1945, he was in Germany:

At the end of April 1945 the allies entered Buchenwald. Next day, towards the end of the afternoon, they reached Belsen. The following morning, on 22 April, Sidney came to the concentration camp. He stayed all day. That night he visited the nearest journalists' camp and persuaded an old friend, Alan Moorehead, of the Express, to go in and write about what he had seen. Then he drank an entire bottle of whisky; it had, friends remembered later, no effect on him at all.

(Alan Moorehead, it just so happens, was the biographer's father). Bernstein persuaded the Allies to create a documentary about the camps, and for Alfred Hitchcock to offer his services – the biographer follows Bernstein's lead in calling Hitchcock the "director", although his involvement was from a distance in London, working through the footage and advising. For various reasons, the film was shelved before completion, but it was broadcast in 1984, under the title German Concentration Camps Factual Survey; this was the year after the biography was published, and one wonders whether the book helped build momentum for its release.

Bernstein was opposed to the idea of commercial television – Moorehead's account of the various objections to commercial television draws attention to a less-remembered moral panic of the 1950s – but once it was clear that was going to happen anyway he decided to make a bid for a franchise. ITV Granada is still going strong, the last of the original ITV companies still in business. Bernstein did not have much affinity with Coronation Street, although he appreciated its popular appeal (and cheapness); he was more interested in documentary exposés and pushing the boundaries of the Television Act:

Sidney… didn't really believe in impartiality. By letter and by meeting they fought, backwards and forwards, advancing one step, retreating the next. They fought about drunken driving, they fought about the monarchy, suicide and hire purchase. They fought, passionately, about 'What the Papers Say'. Jeremy Isaacs remembers Sir Robert Fraser coming to Granada and telling the assembled 'Searchlight' team that every single episode of the series had been a direct infringement of the Television Act in that it had expressed a single point of view. And when 'Searchlight' came to an end and 'World in Action' was born they fought about a naval prison in which a young man hanged himself (the programme was cancelled)…

Granada also brought theatre into people's homes, most notably with a production of Look Back in Anger. It was Bernstein who persuaded Kenneth Clark that the National Theatre ought to include television cameras.

In the 1960s, Bernstein also moved into publishing, first buying MacGibbon & Kee, then a half share in Jonathan Cape (company history reviewed here), and then Rupert Hart-Davis. At this time, Hart-Davies the company was owned by Harcourt Brace, but Rupert Hart-Davis the man (biography reviewed here) retained his position and had the right of veto. Their meeting went well, although Bernstein made a faux pas by reminiscing about Komisarjevsky – he had forgotten that Hart-Davis's wife Peggy Ashcroft had left Hart-Davis for the Russian. Bernstein entered paperback publishing by purchasing Panther from Joseph Pacey, who "chose to sell to him rather than an American company who had offered more money". The various interests were eventually branded as Granada, with Paladin Books created in 1970 for "highbrow non-fiction".

Although not billed as the "authorized biography" the book is obviously just that: it was published by Jonathan Cape, and his biographer was a family friend. Moorhead writes that much of her work was based on "many hours of conversation that I had with Lord Bernstein over eighteen months", as well as access to "his papers and archives". Something unauthorized might have been a very dicey prospect during his lifetime, given his infamously litigious reputation, although there's no sense that anything has been covered up. However, a biographer has to be wary of sounding hagiographic, and so we read about conflict and arguments with his father and of times when he would "explode into irrational anger" and "stalk through the offices complaining that the telephone directories were in the wrong order, or that too much stationery was being hoarded", as a contrast to his generally courteous and fastidious impression.

On politics, Bernstein "started out in the 1920s as a champion of the underdog, believing that socialism could improve the lot of man", and he remained a Labour supporter for his entire life. During the 1930s, he worked with Otto Katz and Ellen Wilkinson in supporting Spanish Republicans and refugees from Franco; later in life, he became a patron of Israeli causes, including advising on a non-profit television station and funding research into patterns of immigration to Israel ("Emmanuel Marx of Tel Aviv's Faculty of Social Sciences… said that it was due to the Bernstein Research Fund that social anthropology was established as an academic discipline in Israel").

Some aspects of Bernstein's personal life are handled discreetly: he first married aged 36, but there are no references to younger romantic entanglements. Some "human interest" background detail is trivial but revealing, such as an account of how after renting out the country property of Long Barn from Harold Nicholson and Vita Sackville-West he clashed with the latter over the care of some rare plants in the garden, winning the argument by paying for an official of the Royal Horticultural Society to inspect them and adjudicate.

[Kate]

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