This is the night mail crossing the Border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner, the girl next door.
These opening lines from W.H. Auden’s poem Night Mail (1935) were written to accompany a documentary film of the same name released in 1936 by the General Post Office (GPO) Film Unit. The 24-minute film was made to promote the work of the Post Office services and documented the nightly journey of the London, Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS) postal train from London’s Euston Station to Scotland. Today, the film is recognised as a classic of the British documentary film movement with its blending of modernist documentary techniques and an innovative integration of sound, synchronizing W.H. Auden’s verse and Benjamin Britten’s score with the sounds and rhythms of the train.
But what has this got to do with Sherborne School, I hear you ask?
The answer is that the film’s joint director, producer, editor and script writer was Basil Wright (1907-1987), who attended Sherborne School (Harper House) from 1921 to 1926.
Night Mail was released in February 1936, ten years after Basil Wright left Sherborne School, but a life-long friendship formed at Harper House played an important role in the film’s creation and artistic development. That friendship was between Basil Wright (Harper House 1921-26) and Cecil Day-Lewis (Harper House 1917-23).
During his early days at Sherborne Basil Wright, a self-confessed book worm, struggled to fit in but salvation arrived in the form of the Head of Harper House, Cecil Day-Lewis (1904-1972). Basil later recalled how their friendship began in the dining room at Harper House:
‘In the dining room we had a system, by which all the boys moved one place up every day and a prefect sat at the head of each table, so that once every ten days or so you sat twice next to a prefect, once on his left and once on his right. The first time I sat next to Cecil, who I regarded as God, or at least a man of about 60, he engaged me in conversation. Somehow we got on to books and he impelled me to start talking about the books I liked. He then, as it were, descended to earth and became extremely personal, charming and exciting. He told me about other books I should read and suddenly I realised that there was some humanity left in the world, that there was something worth living for. I could not be grateful enough for what he did then.’ (Sean Day-Lewis, C. Day-Lewis. An English Literary Life, 1980)
Cecil Day-Lewis left Sherborne in 1923 and entered Wadham College, Oxford, but he remained in touch with Basil and would later introduce him to his friend and fellow poet W.H. Auden (1907-1973).
Following in Cecil’s footsteps, Basil became editor of the school magazine The Shirburnian, a School Prefect and Head of Harper House. In 1925 he won the English Verse Prize with his long poem ‘The building of Sherborne Abbey. A dream’, inspired by the restoration of the Lady Chapel of Sherborne Abbey where on 4 June 1925 a stone coffin was discovered which was thought to contain the bones of Æthelbert King of Wessex.
Alongside poetry, Basil’s editorials in The Shirburnian (1925-26) reveal his talent for creative writing. In the November 1926 editorial he consults an aged philosopher for advice on what to write, only for the philosopher to point to the stars and ask him whether any of them care in the slightest degree whether he writes his editorial or not? And, in the March 1926 editorial, written shortly after an alleged Palaeolithic engraved bone ‘discovered’ in 1911 by two Sherborne schoolboys was declared a fake, he dreams of interviewing a caveman and, hoping for a scoop for The Shirburnian, asks him whether the bone is genuine or not, only for the caveman to tell him that his daughter found the bone in the stockpot and the markings on it were absolutely natural, but they liked the look of it and placed it on their mantelpiece as an ornament.
In 1926 Basil was awarded a Mawson scholarship at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge where he read classics and economics. He continued writing poetry and in 1929 co-edited and contributed three poems to Cambridge Poetry 1929, published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press in their Living Poets series (series 1, no.8, 1929). The Hogarth Press later published in the same series three collections of poems by Cecil Day-Lewis – Transitional Poem (series 1, no.9, 1929), From Feathers to Iron (series 1, no.22, 1932) and The Magic Mountain (series 2, no.1, 1933).
When Basil left Cambridge in 1929 he decided he would become either a poet, a dramatist, or a film maker. His love affair with the film medium had begun in 1913 when aged six his grandmother had taken him to the cinema for the first time. At Cambridge Basil became interested in European cinema and began making experimental films with his own camera. A chance meeting in 1929 with the pioneering documentary film maker John Grierson (1898-1972) at the premiere of his documentary film Drifters, led to Basil being invited to join the Empire Marketing Board (EMB) Film Unit which John Grierson had formed the previous year. Here Basil began directing his own films and benefitted from working with John Grierson and Robert J. Flaherty, famous for his classic documentary films Nanook of the North (1922) and Man of Aran (1934).
In 1933, Basil followed John Grierson to the General Post Office (GPO) Film Unit where in 1934 he directed The Song of Ceylon. The film proved an important turning point in not only Basil’s career but also in the British documentary movement, winning the gold medal and prix du gouvernement at Brussels. With the The Song of Ceylon Basil demonstrated that film could be an art form.
In the autumn of 1935, while visiting Cecil Day-Lewis at Cheltenham, Basil met W.H. Auden (1907-1973). Shortly afterwards W.H. Auden joined Basil as writer and assistant director at the GPO Film Unit where Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) was also engaged as composer. Together with Harry Watt and Alberto Cavalcanti, Basil, Auden and Britten created what is today considered a classic of the British documentary film movement – Night Mail.
After Night Mail, Basil collaborated with Cecil Day-Lewis on a number of documentary projects. In 1939, they worked together on a script for The Colliers, but with the outbreak of the Second World War the film was shelved. In 1941, Basil produced The Green Girdle, a film sponsored by the British Council about the newly-created green belt around London, for which Cecil wrote the poetic commentary, and in 1953 Cecil stepped in at the last minute (replacing Dylan Thomas who had disappeared) to provide the voice of Leonardo da Vinci for Basil’s BAFTA award nominated television documentary The Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci. Cecil also set his Nicholas Blake detective story The Case of the Abominable Snowman (1941) at Easterham Manor which he modelled on Basil’s parental home.
On 26 February 1950, Basil returned to Sherborne for the first time in many years when he was invited to give a talk to The Duffers, a literary society founded at the School in 1898 by Cecil Day-Lewis’ father-in-law, the Rev. Henry Robinson King (1855-1935). During his visit Cecil asked Basil to say hello to his son Nicholas (Harper House 1947-52) who was then a pupil at the School, with Basil suggesting he could take Nicholas out for doughnuts or long buns.
The paper Basil read to The Duffers at Harper House on 26 February 1950 was entitled ‘Film: Fiction and Fact’. In the paper Basil laid out his belief that cinema should be ranked among the arts. He admitted that many of its productions fell short of the artistic, but mentioned The Grapes of Wrath and other films which had affected him as profoundly as, for example, the music of Bach and Beethoven. After a brief discussion of the methods of making a film, he stated that the art of the film lay chiefly in the manipulation of light, which should be handled so as to afford the greatest opportunities for the extraordinary visual power of the cinema, which was essentially an art to be appreciated by means of the eye. He mentioned his practice of closing his eyes when he suspected a film of being a bad one, to discover if he was able to understand what was going on without them; if he could, the film was at best second rate, for it was not realizing its potentialities. Art in the making of a film was also to be found in editing. The editor had not only to ensure a suitable beginning, a satisfying continuity and a harmonious conclusion, but had to use an artist’s vision to perceive how effects could be obtained and ideas driven home by means of skilful juxtaposition, of alterations in the time sequence and a remunerative alliance with the sound track. The cinema was an independent art, and any attempt to borrow from other arts was always a mistake and often a disaster; films from the theatre were stunted in growth and warped in development owing to the purely superficial similarity of the two genres. He said that he believed film had many fresh fields to conquer: the film-novel was a commonplace, but the film-poem remained to be written. The progress of the cinema as an art form was hard. All art had ultimately to depend upon patronage, whether it was that of private means, special committees or public assistance. Often artists required little more than their livelihood, but the film maker needed a quantity of highly expensive equipment and highly specialised technicians before he could exercise his art. The present system was unsatisfactory; owners did not encourage originality and were too ready to indulge what they conceived to be the public taste. The solution might be found in ownership by a public corporation which would have both the resources to champion originality and the freedom to rebuff state control, which was one of the greatest potential dangers to the cinema although it had achieved some successes in Russia. He went on to discuss the future prospects for film, with his main proposal being for the free circulation of films which were currently hindered by tariff walls and the misgivings of the owners. He believed that the reign of Hollywood was coming to an end and that it had outlived its usefulness. Film could be a great educator and some educational authorities were beginning to believe in its usefulness. Much, he said, would depend on the preliminary training of those who wished to enter this half industry, half art as a career and that the creation of Chairs of Cinema at the universities would help meet these needs.
As for Basil’s own career, he co-founded the Realist Film Unit and went on to work for the Film Centre, the Crown Film Unit, the Ministry of Information and UNESCO. He taught in the United States at the University of Southern California, Temple University in Philadelphia and Houston University, and in London at the National Film and Television School. He was Governor of the British Film Institute, President of the International Association of Documentary Filmmakers and a Fellow of the British Film Academy. He was film critic for The Spectator and a regular contributor to Sight and Sound. His books include The Use of the Film (1948) and The Long View. An International History of Cinema (1974), and A.C. Marshall’s The Innocent Eye. The Life of Robert J. Flaherty (1963) was based on research he had carried out with Paul Rotha. He was awarded the Council of Europe Gold Medal and the Gold Cross of Royal Order of King George I of Greece and in 1986 the Royal Anthropological Institute established in his honour the Basil Wright Film Award.
Basil saw Cecil Day-Lewis for the last time on 25 September 1970 when they both attended a memorial service for their friend and fellow Old Shirburnian, V.C. Clinton-Baddeley (1900-1970) (Harper House 1913-18). Basil wrote afterwards that ‘it is sad that at this stage in our lives we only met at the funerals of friends… he [Cecil] didn’t look at all well at Clinton’s funeral. And that was the last time I ever saw him.’ Cecil’s death on 22 May 1972 brought to an end their friendship which stretched back over 50 years to their first meeting in the dining room at Harper House.
In 1974, when looking back over his long career, Basil wrote in The Long View:
‘As to the question of where the motion picture has got to so far, I would, in looking back over my own sixty years of film-going, be inclined to choose one single sequence to justify its existence and development as an art. Many sequences parade in memory, and the world of filmic recollection is rich and full. I shall choose the ending of Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu Monogatari [a Japanese fantasy film directed by Kenji Mizoguchi, released in 1953], where the threads of all the joys and sorrows of human life, of nature, and of the supernatural are magically woven together in a montage which floats gently and compassionately into a continuity, an infinity, and finally into an ineffable peace.’
and as for the future of film and the cinema:
‘The world of the moving picture is based on the collision of images and their control; and as in the universe the collisions can be microcosmic, as in the atom, or macrocosmic, as in the nebulae, so in the visual media are to be found similar contrasts. There will be room for artists working on every scale. I am not a prophet, and don’t wish to probe further; for what we are waiting for is some new genius who will know how to use and organise the new technical perspectives with a certitude of aesthetic discipline through which, no doubt, new forms of montage may be evolved on the bases on which so far all of us, whether on screen or tube, have learned and must continue to learn to work.’
Basil Wright died on 14 October 1987 at Little Adam Farm, Freith, Buckinghamshire.
Watch Night Mail (BFI player)
See also:
Basil Wright (BFI Screen Online)
Oral history interview recorded in 1982 with Basil Wright (IWM)
Obituary for Basil Charles Wright (1907-1987)
Rachel Hassall
School Archivist
2 February 2026