Disabled Operators: Training Disabled Ex-servicemen as Projectionists during the Great War.

This article offers an account of the various schemes for the training of disabled ex-servicemen as projectionists during the First World War. It places those schemes within the context of wider activities of the film industry in support of the war through the rubric of 'practical patriotism' arguing that, like those other schemes, the training was designed to enhance the public image of the industry as much as it was designed to help disabled veterans themselves. Using evidence from local and national newspapers as well as trade papers and records on film itself, the article describes the design of the schemes and their spread throughout the country. Cinema was also adopted as a central tool in the Ministry of Pension's strategy for publicising a variety of veterans' rehabilitation schemes and the disabled operators' schemes offer a particularly self-reflexive example of how this policy developed. The question of what kinds of disabled veterans benefited from the scheme is addressed, and the popular understanding they were directed primarily at veterans with facial disfigurements is refuted. The growing dissatisfaction with the schemes expressed by veteran's organisations through 1917-18 is noted. The sudden abandonment of the scheme at the end of the war in the face of political questions surrounding the re-employment of returning veterans in their pre-war roles is discussed. Parallels with the fate of female projectionists (projectionettes), and the implications for the post-war unionisation of projectionists are also considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]