Up to 28 hours of recently discovered high quality film dating from 1900 to 1913, capturing Northern working-class life at the height of Britain’s industrial power, has now been restored by the BFI:
In 1994, workmen stripping out an empty shop at 40 Northgate, Blackburn, Lancashire, went down to the cellar and discovered three large metal drums, like big rusting milk churns, which turned out to contain more than 800 rolls of nitrate film. A cinephile and film historian, Peter Worden, knew of the site as the old studios of two Blackburn men, Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon, who had made and processed films there until 1913.
Worden had kept a watchful eye on the shop in case anything was discovered inside it. He arranged for the metal drums to be delivered to him – the alternative destination was the skip – and transferred their contents to 17 plastic food containers, the size of family ice-cream tubs, and stored them in a chest freezer. To preserve and restore the films proved beyond Worden’s means. The BFI took them over as the Mitchell and Kenyon collection in 2000 and then began their painstaking restoration at its laboratories in Berkhamsted. […]
The images, then, have a freshness and clarity, but that (to the film historian or otherwise) is only part of their appeal. What they show is a world now lost to us: the busy world of northern Britain in its manufacturing, mining heyday; the world that, among other things, created and sustained this newspaper as the Manchester Guardian. Not until the 1930s and the British documentary movement did film-makers pay it so much attention again, this time as a subject for moral concern because it had then begun its slow collapse.
In Mitchell and Kenyon’s films you can see it as an independent civilisation, glorying in its new recreations and enjoyments such as electric trams, professional sport, street parades and pageants, and seaside holidays. There are films of 32 northern soccer matches, and of 18 rugby games played by professional teams in the newly-founded Northern Union (later the Rugby League) which broke from the amateur Rugby Football Union in 1895. You can see the new electric trams in Halifax, Lytham and Accrington, Catholic and temperance processions in the streets of Manchester, a flotilla of destoyers moving up the Manchester Ship Canal, the crowded piers at Blackpool and Morecambe. You see horses pulling people and goods – stables in British towns then contained 1.7 million of them. You see many factory chimneys, smoking.
Here are some stills from the films, and here‘s a short film of workers outside Pendlebury Colliery. “The Lost World of Mitchell and Kenyon” will be on BBC2 at 9pm next Friday.
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