Sidney Bernstein, Baron Bernstein

Sidney Lewis Bernstein, Baron Bernstein (30 January 1899 – 5 February 1993) was a British businessman and media executive who was the founding chairman of the London-based Granada Group and the founder of the Manchester-based Granada Television in 1954. Granada was one of the original four ITA franchisees. He believed the North's media industry had potential to be cultivated.

Although born in Essex, Bernstein became an adopted northerner, building Granada Television, which created a proud heritage of television broadcasting in Manchester; a legacy which continues. He is described by the British Film Institute (BFI) as the "dominant influence on the growth and development of commercial television in Britain".

Bernstein was awarded a life peerage by Queen Elizabeth II in the 1969 Birthday Honours List for his services to television, and in 1984 he was made a Fellow of the British Film Institute in recognition of his outstanding contribution to British television culture.

Biography

Born to a Jewish family, Bernstein left school at 15 and he gradually inherited the property portfolio his father had built.

Granada Theatres

Bernstein, with his brother Cecil, created a successful circuit of sixty cinemas and theatres. Some of the cinemas were on property he inherited from his father. The Bernstein holdings eventually encompassed interests in publishing, real estate, motorway services, retail shops and bowling alleys, as well as the hugely profitable television-rental business.

Bernstein was a co-founder of the London Film Society in 1925, where he met and befriended the young Alfred Hitchcock, who became a lifelong friend and, briefly, a producing partner. He was the first to bring '' October: Ten Days That Shook the World'' and other works from the Russian filmmaker Eisenstein, as well as the films of Pudovkin, to London, and sponsored Eisenstein's trip to Hollywood in the early 1930s. He also ventured into theatre, building an elegant new venue which housed the premiere of ''Private Lives'' by Noël Coward, the hit which cemented that playwright's reputation. Though his involvement with the live stage was short-lived, he was passionate about the construction of palaces throughout Britain. As early as 1931, he was advising the planning committee for the long unrealised project for a National Theatre to include film projection and television production facilities into its plans for a theatre.

Bernstein was an early and ardent anti-fascist, beginning in 1933, when he helped many German actors, such as Peter Lorre, directors, cameramen and other German Jewish and anti-Nazi filmmakers to escape Germany and find work in Britain after they were expelled from the state-run UFA studios when Adolf Hitler came to power and sacked all Jewish state employees. Bernstein travelled to America frequently during the 1930s, where he met with Hollywood studio executives and organised meetings to persuade them to support the anti-fascist cause, and, after war broke out between Britain and Germany, to join the British in their fight against the Nazis. By this point, Bernstein joined the newly formed Ministry of Information, and continued his role of producing and bringing anti-Nazi and pro-British films before the American people during the critical years 1939–1941, when the United States remained neutral while Britain struggled alone against the Blitz and potential Nazi invasion. By 1943, Bernstein was also a member of SHAEF and worked on films which would help the new Allies, Britain and America, to understand each other. He read and advised on early drafts of ''Mrs. Miniver'' (1942), the film starring Greer Garson as the heroic mother of a wartorn British family, which MGM made after a meeting of MGM executives with Bernstein in Hollywood.

As the invasion of France loomed, Bernstein brought his friend Alfred Hitchcock back from Hollywood to Britain to work on two short documentary films for the post-invasion French audience. As the war wound to its close, Bernstein heard the first reports of extermination camps, visited Belsen himself, and was determined to create a film that would be seen by both the German and English-speaking audiences so that they would know the extent of the atrocities of the camps. To this end, he again consulted with Hitchcock to supervise the work of US and British Army cameramen documenting the horrors of the newly liberated camps, under the working title ''German Concentration Camps Factual Survey''. The original plan to complete a feature-length documentary film of the camps was abruptly cancelled in July 1945, as the British Foreign Office claimed the material was too incendiary in light of the need for post-war co-operation from the defeated Germans. Hitchcock had already begun screening and editing the 800,000 feet of film from Allied cameramen and confiscated German documentation in the summer of 1945 when the project was shelved under number F-3080 in the Imperial War Museum archives, not to be seen until it was unearthed by film scholars in 1984 and shown on the BBC
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