Many years ago, a great American, speaking of Britain, said that in the storm of battle and conflict, she had a secret rigour and a pulse like a cannon.

The evening hymn of the lark, the roar of the Spitfires, the dancers in the great ballroom at Blackpool, the clank of machinery and shunting trains.

[4] Writing in the Documentary News Letter, Anstey complained: By the time Humphrey Jennings has done with it, it has become the rarest bit of fiddling since the days of Nero.

[4] Helen de Mouilpied (later the wife of Denis Forman), the deputy head of non-theatrical distribution for the Ministry of Information, recalled: All sorts of audiences felt it to be a distillation and also a magnification of their own experiences on the home front.

I do not exaggerate when I say that members of audiences under the emotional strains of war ... frequently wept as a result of Jennings' direct appeal to the rich cultural heritage of Britain....[8]The success of Listen To Britain in influencing British public opinion vindicates Jennings and shows "boundary lines in the debate over social utility and aesthetic pleasure are not as distinct as they may seem.

[10] Having learnt through Mass Observation that the British people were uncomfortable with detecting propaganda,[12] Jennings used a poetic style to mask it.

Leaving in the serendipitous stumbling child[4] and Jennings' obsessive technique, pointed out by Mike Leigh,[4] of getting the actors to scratch their noses, adds to this sense.

This allowed the audience to make up their own mind from the images and the music alone,[13] and this apparent freedom, along with the many, diverse voices, helps conceal the true nature of the message[14] as Geoffrey Nowell Smith explains.

[15] Likewise gender; women are shown firmly within the family unit despite a sub-textual admission of future liberation aspirations.

[14] In Mein Kampf, Hitler talks of the success of British propaganda in World War I[18] believing people's ignorance meant simple repetition and an appeal to feelings over reason would suffice.

A. J. P. Taylor believes Britain's war socialism represented genuine unity, allowing Jennings to admit these tensions given the public's distaste for overt propaganda.

[4] In 2012, London-based band Public Service Broadcasting released Waltz for George [22] which uses images taken from several Ministry of Information war films, though mostly from Listen to Britain, to accompany the radio report on the soldiers returning from Dunkirk.