Geoffrey H. Malins

Geoffrey H. Malins was born in Hastings in 1886 and worked in the early British film industry before the First World War. He became one of the official cameramen sent to the Western Front, using cumbersome motion-picture equipment under battlefield conditions at a time when moving images of modern industrial warfare were still novel to most civilian audiences.

Malins filmed preparations for and the opening of the Battle of the Somme in 1916. His footage, combined with that of John McDowell, became The Battle of the Somme, a documentary seen by enormous audiences in Britain and an important record of how the war was presented to the home front. He later wrote about his wartime experiences and died in South Africa in 1940.

In Iain Gale’s Zero Hour, Malins appears with his cinematograph as the armies prepare for the assault of 1 July 1916. His presence gives the novel a viewpoint concerned not only with fighting but with the act of recording war and with the images through which the Somme would be remembered by people far from the battlefield.