START 00:00:00 'Mobile Column takes Drivers from the Ranks' . A report on an exercise by the London Taxi Battalion of the Home Guard, showing taxi cabs collecting passengers at a mainline railway terminus (Paddington Station ?), leaving one unhappy passenger behind at the taxi rank unable to get a lift, and a column of taxis in Marylebone Road (?) outside the taxi battalion's depot where taxi drivers in the uniform of the Home Guard collect rolls of scrim netting and stow them away on their roof racks before heading out west past Hammersmith Broadway and along the deserted A4 Great Western Road (?). In a clearing in woodland (Burnham Beeches ?), Home Guardsmen unroll the scrim netting from the roofrack and spread it out to conceal the vehicle. They add fern leaves to the camouflage netting. Shots showing members of the London Taxi Battalion cleaning their Sten Mk II sub machine guns, hammering a sign for the Gas Post into the ground, deploying in the wood and cooks preparing food at the field cookhouse for No. 2040 Company, Home Guard. Men line up to receive hot food and have their food out in the open. At the end of the exercise, the taxi battalion heads back to London. A taxi arrives back at the mainline railway terminus to pick up the traveller seen unhappily waiting for a cab at the beginning of this story.

00:02:27 'Diamond Cut Diamond. Brilliant Work by Girls'. A report on the manufacture of diamond dies used to make extremely fine electrical wiring using graphics and live actuality. Scenes showing young women at work with microscopes at a work bench and small uncut diamonds being poured out of an envelope onto dark felt cloth before one small stone is selected for cutting into shape as a diamond wire die on a grinding machine that closely resembles a stylus arm on an old record turntable. A sequence showing how a hole is drilled through the cut diamond die with a miniature diamond cutter and a steel drilling bit tipped with crushed diamonds. The technique of manufacturing extremely thin and delicate conductive wiring with a diamond wire die is shown together with some of the end products, for example the filaments inside a radio valve and an aircraft's instrument panel. The report ends with shots of a Flight Sergeant radio operator tapping a message on a Morse key inside an aircraft and a pilot sitting at the controls inside a cockpit of an Avro Lancaster (?) bomber.

00:05:49 'Props'. A report about tree felling by the Women's Timber Corps in a forest somewhere in Scotland (?). Views of men and women at work burning spare branches and cutting up timber and tall spruce pines growing nearby. Male lumberjacks are seen felling trees and chipping away at the base of one tree trunk with an axe. Two 'lumberjills' use a double-handled saw to slice through a tree trunk and then bring it crashing to the ground. More women are seen chopping off branches from a felled tree trunk and using handsaws to cut tree trunks into shorter lengths of timber which are then cut up into pit props by a powered circular saw. The pit props are thrown into the back of a Fordson lorry which delivers them to a local railway goods depot. The final shots in this report show open railway goods waggons loaded with pit props and miners deep inside a coal mine making their way along a a mine shaft past some pit props.

00:08:01 'Song of the Islands'. A report featuring a calypso band of West Indian musicians serving in the armed services. Scenes inside a radio studio in BBC Broadcasting House (?) where servicemen and servicewomen from the West Indies (mainly RAF and Army personnel) are seen chatting in groups; they include white men and women from the region but the majority is Afro-Caribbean in origin. A West Indian RAF aircrewman speaks into a BBC microphone. Royal Navy Petty Officer Alf Jennings leads a calypso band consisting of a drummer, double bassist, guitarist and trumpeters in singing, 'We came from way out west/We came to do our best/To fight for right/And against the might of Nazi tyranny!'

END 00:10:06

A wartime newsreel highlighting the part played by ordinary working men and women in Britain's war effort featuring London taxi drivers in the Home Guard, women manufacturing diamond wire dies for the production of electrical wiring and felling timber for pit props and a performance by a West Indian calypso band.

Notes

Remarks: an unexpected and an intriguing mix of stories and subjects.