John Monk Monck

John Monck (1908–1999), name at birth John Goldman(n), was an English film editor and producer, in later life a farmer. A communist, he worked mainly on documentaries and newsreels, but is best remembered as the editor of Man of Aran.

Life He was the elder son of Sydney Goldman and his wife Agnes Peel, born at Rottingdean, and was educated at Harrow School. Paul Rotha suggests Goldman had university education, but there is no evidence he took a degree.

Films In the late 1920s, Goldman became a film editor at Gainsborough Pictures, after being introduced to Michael Balcon in 1928. On his own account, it came about through Simon Rowson, a contact of his father's as a political researcher, and connected with the Gainsborough management. Interested by Soviet cinema, he went to the Soviet Union. Falling ill, he returned to the United Kingdom, where he found he was suffering from diphtheria. He went back to work at Gainsborough, and was credited as editor on Michael and Mary (1931), alongside Ian Dalrymple. At the same period, he also edited Sunshine Susie. He was keen to go to Ireland to learn camera work from Flaherty, but initially the rushes were sent to London. In the end Balcon sent him to Ireland, where he began to edit the very extensive accumulated takes developed in a "field laboratory" into a film, beginning with the final storm scene. A provisional edit took nine months. Then further changes were made in London. Flaherty, "unable to write a script", "did not understand, or even want to understand, the fundamental technique of film editing", and on the other hand Goldman was a professional editor. Rotha writes that "It was perhaps largely because of Goldman's tact, as well as his respect for Flaherty, that the film was finished without a shattering battle." Balcon remained hands-off. Ted Black and publicity man Hugh Findlay were liaison with the studio, and Balcon made concessions to Flaherty.

Rotha's biography of Flaherty quotes Monck's view that a type of regression is to be seen in Flaherty's films, towards "romanticized childhood". Goldman turned down an offer to work on Flaherty's Elephant Boy.

During World War II Monck was a film producer for the Crown Film Unit, based at Pinewood Studios. He worked on a number of films made for the Ministry of Information, including Wavell's 30000 and Malta GC. A project of Monck's under the title Calling All Peoples, aimed at occupied Europe, involved Jiří Weiss and Laurie Lee. It hit difficulties with the script, and had to be abandoned. Monck helped Pat Jackson with approval at the early stages of the treatment of Western Approaches, which Ian Dalrymple went on to produce.

After the war Monck made documentaries with Sergei Nolbandov.

Farming Monck also farmed. After a short period working for Alexander Korda in the later 1930s, he left the film industry in 1939, and settled on a farm in Sussex with his wife. He was recruited away to the Crown Film Unit in 1940, returning to farming in 1947 in Hampshire, then Wiltshire.

Monck's address in a 1961 directory was Dugdales Farm, Compton Bassett. In 1936 it was bought by William Spurrett Fielding-Johnson, and on his death in 1953 it passed to his wife Noel, who sold it in 1956. Monck bought the farm in 1957, from Anthony Staveley, added another farm to it, and sold it in 1966 to Robin Clark. From the end of the 1960s he was interested in forage crop drying, setting up a company to market his Hayflaker system, based at Aldern Bridge House, Newbury, Berkshire.

Family In 1934 John Goldman married Margaret Thesiger, daughter of the late Frederic Thesiger, 1st Viscount Chelmsford; The couple had a son, Robert Frederick Thesiger Monck, christened in 1939, and another son, Charles (born 1945).

John Goldman Monk Goldman changed his name legally to John Monk Monck, on 22 February 1939. The name Monck was stated to be the original family name. In the 1870s Bernard Goldmann, Sydney Goldman's father, lived for a period in Breslau with his family, and a tutor to the children, Dr. Monck, was stated to be an uncle.

Margaret Monck (1911–1991) was from a conventional upper-class background. Working for a spell at the Lefevre Gallery in the later 1920s, she became a photographer. She had some tuition from Edith Tudor-Hart, and admired the work of Frances H. Flaherty. In the 1930s she did candid photography in the poorer inner suburbs of London. She used a Leica and recorded Camden Town, Clerkenwell and the East End. Some of her photographs are in the collections of the Museum of London and the National Media Museum. Extracts of letters written by her father to her mother, and watercolours by her mother, passed to John Monck on her death.

With his younger brother Victor, known as Penryn or Pen, John Monck inherited in 1958 on his father's death a collection of pictures. Included was the large work The Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon, which the brothers sold in 1963.