The Camden Town Group in Context

Factory Girls on Strike in Camden Town 1911 (British Pathé) shows a group of women marching along a road carrying a banner for the National Federation of Women Workers. Formed in 1906 by Mary Macarthur, this was arguably the organisation that did more than any other to unionise women during the strike wave of the 1910s.1 This film was part of an issue of the Pathé’s Animated Gazette, the first weekly newsreel to be produced in Britain in 1910.

Early films were exhibited in the music halls of London and, from the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, in purpose-built cinemas. The artists of the Camden Town Group often portrayed music halls and cinemas. Malcolm Drummond’s In the Cinema 1913 (fig.1), for example, represents an audience watching a film in the darkness of a cinema, while in the background of Charles Ginner’s Leicester Square 1912 (fig.2) is The Empire, the variety theatre which in 1896 saw the first commercial screening of films in Britain.

A number of Ginner’s paintings – for example, The Dressmaking Factory 1914 (fig.3) and The Blouse Factory 1917 (fig.4) – evidenced the growing presence of working women in manufacturing industries, a social change also recorded in films of the period along with scenes of women on the streets marching for their rights.