How new technology is providing a window on a bygone world
Words: Yvette Huddleston
Photographs: Walter Swan

It’s a treasure trove of fascinating images of Yorkshire representing around 15,000 film and video items from the 1880s to the present day. The collection includes newsreels, documentaries, promotional films, home movies and animation, some of it extremely rare. And now this fantastic archive of the way we used to live will be available for all to see. It is being placed online by the Yorkshire Film Archive, based at York St John University in Clarence Road. In November last year, the archive launched on the internet, initially placing 21 hours of film online to coincide with its 21st birthday. The interactive facility will develop into an ever-growing resource.

Graham Relton, the archive’s Project Manager for the past two years, explains some of the background. ‘We have around 15,000 film and video items in the collections ranging from the 1880s right up to the present day. We even have the BBC’s ‘Look North’ archive from the 1970s and 80s.”

Material comes from various sources – private donations, libraries and museums. Recently they were given some film by Ripon Town Hall. It included footage of a Highland Sports Day which, it transpired, featured soldiers of Scottish regiments who were passing through Ripon in 1916.
‘The whole town had come out and supported the day, and the local cinema owner filmed it all,’ Graham said. ‘He made sure he got everyone on film so that he could then charge them to come and watch themselves at his cinema. That film had been put on a radiator to dry out – so we were lucky it hadn’t burst into flames!’
A film such as this has significant resonances and is not simply a quirky remnant of days gone by. ‘It’s an important one in our archive because it’s very unusual to get footage of military men at leisure,’ Graham said. ‘It’s also quite a poignant piece of film because we now know that these men would have been going to the Somme not long afterwards – and very few of them would have come back.’

The fact that a film first shown more than 90 years ago exclusively to cinema audiences in Ripon is now available online for anyone with access to the internet highlights the value of the YFA’s continuing project ‘to find, preserve and show moving image made in or about the Yorkshire region.
‘We go out into the community with our film shows which are very popular – there is a nine month waiting list at the moment,’ Graham said. ‘We put footage together that is relevant to that particular community, showing them films that are local.’

However, for the great majority who want to access the archives, using their home computers is going to be much the most convenient means.
‘We have made the online archive as user-friendly as possible and there are all sorts of different options to search,’ Graham said. ‘You can do a themed search, for example, wartime, family, childhood, by Yorkshire region, or by decade.’ Since it is interactive, visitors can leave their own information on films on the website. So if, for instance, they recognise a place, person or event in the footage, they can share that with other visitors to the site as well as assisting the YFA with their work. ‘People will be able to help us with their local knowledge. It’s a dynamic resource that is constantly building and developing. Moving images bring the past to life.’

The Yorkshire Film Archive moved to its present premises in 2004 having previously been housed in Ripon St John College since the archive was set up in 1988. The oldest footage  placed online is a Riley Brothers film, made in 1897, of Queen Victoria visiting Sheffield. Another 19th century film is ‘The Kiss In the Tunnel’ by the Bamforth film company of Holmfirth depicting a brief encounter on a train. More recent films include a documentary from 1999 entitled ‘Taming the Tiger’ which charts Castleford Tigers rugby club’s bid to get to Wembley in the Silk Cut Challenge Cup.

Films arrive at the archive from a range of sources and in a variety of receptacles –biscuit tins, shoe boxes and, occasionally, suitcases. ‘We got one of our most important collections – the Ramsden Collection – in 2006,’ archive assistant Rachel Smith said. ‘It was a suitcase full of post war films – there are 50 in all – made by a fairly affluent couple from Leeds, Cyril and Betty Ramsden. The films were given to us by their nephew.’
The Ramsdens were passionate amateur filmmakers – Cyril was a dentist and Betty a teacher – and they would spend all their free time and annual leave making movies. The quality of their filmmaking is impressive and they produced a variety of movies between 1945 and the mid-60s including family and holiday films as well as documentaries and light comedies. The collection was featured in the 2006 BBC programme ‘Nation on Film’.

Another important collection are the films made by Charles Chislett: a bank manager, he was a semi-professional filmmaker from Rotherham who made many movies between the years of 1930 and 1967. The YFA has nearly 100 of them and they range from documentary to fiction to family portraits. One of the most charming is a short film entitled ‘Rachel Discovers the Sea’ made in 1939 showing his young daughter Rachel enjoying a holiday at the seaside with the rest of the family.

‘We watch every film that comes in from start to finish,’ Moving Image Archivist Megan McCooley said. ‘We assess it for any restoration or preservation issues and then we catalogue it.’
The films are then transferred onto digital tape and stored in climate-controlled vaults. ‘Looking at some of the films and knowing how much work went in to making them does make you respect the filmmakers,’ she said. ‘Today it is very easy for anyone to make a film but in the past you had to be really dedicated; it took a lot of time and effort.’
One of Megan’s favourite films is footage of a hairdressing competition at the Alexandra Hall in Halifax in 1963, made by members of the Halifax Cine Club, founded in 1929 and still going strong. ‘I really like the Sixties look and feel of the film – it’s very much of its time. There is a common misconception about amateur films that they are all of people sitting around at a birthday party but within those collections there is some really interesting material – they are important social documents.’

Some of the films, however, were made purely for entertainment such as a wonderfully quirky Monty Python-esque animation entitled ‘T’Batley Faust’. An accomplished piece made by Leeds university student Tony Hall in the 1970s it retells the Faust story with a Yorkshire mill owner as the central figure – who sells his soul to the devil in order to be young again and marry the girl of his dreams. Inevitably, things don’t work out quite the way he wants them to.

One thing that all the films in the archive have in common is that they were made to be seen and this is central to the YFA’s ethos. ‘We are really keen to share these films with people,’  Graham said. ‘We don’t want them to gather dust somewhere.’

To discover the Yorkshire Film Archive for yourself, click here to visit www.yorkshirefilmarchive.com