Margaret Thomson

A science-fiction film about children who manage to split the atom and thereby create a new form of popcorn.

Is your hedge thin and straggly? Don't worry, help is at hand.

A dramatised documentary featuring Adrienne Corri, made to recruit women for training as nurses in ‘mental hospitals.’ It takes a deeply humane and stylistically vivid approach. Some of the treatments shown would be considered unsuitable today.

Instructs on the importance of ante-natal care and proper diet in helping children to grow healthy teeth.

Dramatised documentary, intended for schoolchildren, showing the work of a youth employment officer.

This is a half-reel film telling its audience how to use inedible parts of plants from their garden to make compost. It seems pretty basic stuff, but there were a lot of city boys working in what were called Victory Gardens in the United States. Letting them know how easy it was to make compost for a better truck garden meant a lot of fresh food on the home front.

This Ministry of Information film does ‘what it says on the tin’. It is a straightforward, ‘no frills’ demonstration of how to store roots vegetables outside by a traditional method known as ‘clamping’, which had been used for centuries.

Part of BFI collection "Your Children and You."

This eye-opening drama-doc, set in a psychiatric hospital, was used to train student nurses and tells us much about evolving attitudes to mental illness. A progressive training tool in its time, it still feels sincere but also sensible and silly in about equal measure. The clinical need to clarify vies with the cinematic need to dramatise, reaching a feverishly literal extreme in scenes of a paranoid schizophrenic being pursued by a giant eye…

Part of BFI collection "Your Children and You." A simple film stating the need for more foster parents. Gives glimpses of the tragedy which comes to some children, how they are helped by the Boarding-Out Officer and placed in a "short-stay" Home until foster parents can be found.