From shelf to screen: the journey of a can of film found in the archives in 2014

by Lisa Soverall, Heritage Officer

London’s Screen Archives has been an indispensable resource for Southwark Local History Library and Archive. It is a fantastic network of organisations including museums, galleries, charities, community groups and public sector bodies who hold heritage film and whose aim is to ‘preserve and share London’s history on film’. They started digitising our film and video holdings in 2011 and now host them on their website and YouTube channel. Over the years they have offered us training and advice on how to catalogue and license our holdings and have welcomed us as a steering group partner. This has enabled us to keep on top of developments in this ever changing sector. We are very grateful to them, so it was naturally to LSA that I turned when a can of film was discovered in our archive store by my colleague, Lisa Moss, in 2014.

Some lessons from the Brandon Estate Cine Club collection

Previous to this discovery, the last time I had had the opportunity to look at film held in the archive was in 2009. I bought an 8mm viewer on eBay and tentatively began looking through what was to become the Brandon Estate Cine Club film collection. With no accession paperwork, tracing the provenance of that collection of around 22 films was the first step in a journey that turned out to be one with a few twists and turns.

I knew that there were two film makers as they credited themselves in intertitles made of what looked like magnetic alphabet.

^{Screenshot from the film Canvey Capers made in 1969}

I established via a telephone call with his sister, Dorothy that Richard (‘Dickie’) Morgan was alive but I was unable to get any more information about Brian Waterman. Suffice to say that despite my best efforts, which included holding the first ever screening of the films in one of the estate’s community centres, (which I thought might elicit some memories about the film makers), contacting local tenants’ associations (a member of whom knew Brian but did not know if he was alive), contacting local newspapers, writing letters and making other general enquiries, I had assumed Brian’s demise. So, obviously I was shocked when a few weeks after the film show, I received an email from Brian himself informing me that he was ‘very much alive’! I am well aware of the moral to that story.

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^{Southwark News, 1 November 2012 and 10 January 2013}

So, when my colleague found another can of film in the archive I knew there were two things I needed to do immediately; get the film viewed and assessed and research the provenance thoroughly and that’s exactly what I did.

How I assessed the condition of the film

The can of film was in a flat archival box. There was little information on the outside other than the words ‘film can’ and no accession documentation to be found so we had no idea who deposited the film or under what agreement.

On opening the can, I got a slight whiff of something chemical and I wondered whether the film had vinegar syndrome, (safety film, introduced by Kodak in 1923 is made of cellulose acetate plastic and can degrade if not kept in the right conditions giving off a vinegary smell).

I couldn’t see any warping or buckling of the film however, which is a clear sign of film degradation.

I also wasn’t sure if there was any mould deeper into the reel. Perhaps the smell was just the release of chemicals built up over the years. This is where the possession of AD strips would have been useful. They can detect the severity of acetate deterioration and can therefore also be used on 35mm stills film.

The gauge of the film was 16mm, so I wondered who made it, as this was a format commonly used by municipal organisations, professional businesses and broadcasters between the 1930s and 1970s, though it was still popular with amateur film makers despite the introduction of the smaller Standard 8mm. The Bermondsey Borough Council films for example, were mostly shot on 16mm.

The problem with this film was that there was no leader (a piece of film at the head and tail that helps to thread or ‘lead’ the film into the projector). The head end could sometimes contain written information about the film such as title or filmmaker.

As I carefully unravelled a few inches of film away from its roll I wondered if we had stumbled across a local amateur film. Without a 16mm viewer I couldn’t be certain of the source or content and if the film was not relevant to Southwark, we would have to consider transferring it to another relevant archive. For now, I needed to keep the film as cold (but dry) as possible to prevent further degradation.

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^{Left: AD strips by Aperegoy (Creative Commons 4.0)
Right: 16mm film by DRs Kulturarvsprojekt (Creative Commons 2.0)}

Some expert help from the Cinema Museum

As luck would have it the Cinema Museum were having one of their fantastic open days in October 2014 where anyone could bring along their film and have it viewed and assessed by a professional film archivist for free! It was important to view the film before sending it to a professional organisation like LSA or British Film Institute first, since the volume of material they receive (or did at that time) would mean I would be waiting a long time before I received any information about it and I may not have been allowed to view it while they worked on it. So, Home Movie Day was next on my list of things to do.

Volunteer film archivist, Sally, made the following observations

• The film was approximately 600ft in length (that’s approximately 25 minutes duration).
• It contained mixed film stock from Ilford dated 1965 and Kodak dated 1966. (The date a film was manufactured can be worked out from the symbols on the edge of the film – here’s a handy guide that you can download).
• Part of the film was shot at 24 frames per second and part at 18 frames per second. (It was cheaper to shoot at 18fps as fewer frames per second means you could save on film stock.)
• The film was spliced in several places. (An edit of two separate films, so they can be shown continuously.)
• It was perforated on both sides of the film. (Otherwise known as ‘double perf’ and therefore the film was silent with no separate sound track.)
• There is evidence of ‘slight mould’ on the edge of the film in places although it is inactive with ‘slight shrinkage in places.’ (This was perhaps the most important point, and meant that regardless of its overall good condition, film conservation was going to be an important step in this film’s journey.)

Sally’s recommendations were to get the film professionally assessed and digitised.

Once the assessment was completed, I was invited to look at the film via a film projector in another part of the main hall. As the viewing started I immediately realised that I was looking at footage from Clubland.

Clubland: Walworth’s pioneering youth club

Clubland was founded by Reverend Jimmy Butterworth in 1922 and was based in the Walworth Methodist Church on the corner of Camberwell Road and Grosvenor Terrace for over 50 years. It was a Christian youth club which pioneered a new approach to youth work and became one of the most successful in the UK, with royalty and celebrities among its fan base.

The film began in quite grainy black and white, showing the exterior of the Clubland building and went on to show young people from Clubland cleaning a property, presumably for the purposes of club activities. Rev. Butterworth is clearly seen managing the youth with his trademark pipe in mouth. As the film went on, I was aware of more and more people in the hall joining the viewing and would occasionally hear the utterings from film enthusiasts about details of the filming.

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^{Some stills from Clubland}

The film went from black and white to colour, indicating a different film and showing footage of the club’s outings including one to Wissant in France and sports day in Burgess Park, Camberwell. All of it was in remarkable condition and the local history details were fantastic! Shops no longer on Camberwell Road were revealed, the old factories that lined the perimeter of Burgess Park, and of course the Rev. Butterworth who featured regularly.

I was keen to know who the film maker was but there was no doubting the significance of the film to the borough. But did the film exist in another format elsewhere?

Researching provenance

Since the subject matter of the films meant there was significance to the borough of Southwark, I decided that the next steps would be to research the film’s origins.

A few days after the Cinema Museum’s Open Day, I called Mary, daughter of the late Rev. Butterworth. I had spoken to Mary on numerous occasions, the family have close ties to the archive as it holds the majority of Clubland’s records. I told her about the film. Did she know anything about it? Mary said it was filmed by her mother, who she said did most of the filming of the club’s activities and was probably part of a larger donation of items by the family over 20 years previously. Mary and her brother, John were happy to transfer the rights in the film to Southwark Local History Library and Archive, particularly as it had stored it for so long. Documentation would later be drawn up between the archive and the Butterworth family but for now, we had the permission to pursue the film’s preservation and digitisation with London’s Screen Archives.

Digitising the film

Timing is everything and as luck would have it (again) in the late Autumn of 2014 London’s Screen Archives were checking archives with moving image across London to see whether they had any film material they would like to put forward for their Unlocking Film Heritage programme in association with the British Film Institute. I recommended the Clubland film and it would be a couple of months of back and forth emails before I would receive confirmation that it would be accepted into the UFH programme. Hurrah!

It was not until the following year in March 2015 that I finally handed the film over to the LSA in person at their then offices in the Tea Building in Shoreditch. I met with film archivist, Louise Pankhurst, who began the official assessment process. Of course the film had no name and so one was assigned to it – ‘Clubland Activities of the 1950s and 60s‘ since that’s what the film showed (or so I thought).  

That was the last time I saw that can of film which is now safely stored courtesy of the LSA.

It would be another 9 months from the handing over the film before I would get a DVD copy of Clubland Activities of the 1950s and 60s. Such was the success of Unlocking Film Heritage that thousands of films were being assessed, preserved and made available to the public. However, it was worth waiting for and our archive is grateful for the opportunity to have our films digitised for free and made available for the public to enjoy. The film is available on both the London’s Screen Archives website and the BFI Player for free forever. The BFI assigned their own title: Rev. Jimmy Butterworth and the activities of Clubland (1966).

If you have old film, significant to the borough of Southwark, and would like help to get it digitised or would like to deposit a film of any format with the archive, do get in contact with us by email at local.history.library@southwark.gov.uk.

With thanks to David Whorlow, Volunteer and Archives Co-ordinator and Jack Reichhold, Information and Media Officer at London’s Screen Archives.

Check out the recently published book The Temple of Youth: Jimmy Butterworth and Clubland by John Butterworth and Jenny Waine (J B Club Press, 2019).

Discovering Southwark’s LGBTQ+ History

This weekend Southwark Local History Library & Archive are taking part in the ‘Talking Back’ LGBTQ+ History and Archives conference at London Metropolitan Archives. In preparation for this and in celebration of 50 years since the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967 we have been delving into our collections to discover what we hold to tell the histories of LGBTQ+ communities in Southwark.

We hold records for one of the earliest community, council and police-consultative groups in the country to begin tackling homophobia openly, the Southwark Anti-Homophobic Forum that launched in 1995 – still running today as the Southwark LGBT Forum. We also have an archive of the fascinating ‘Southwark Sappho’ lesbian newsletter, produced in 1993 by the Southwark Women’s Centre in Peckham and catering to the needs of a diverse local lesbian audience.

Other collections we discovered include photographs from World War One of soldiers in drag entertaining the troops in ‘concert parties’ abroad, including the incredible Kenneth Lowndes as Cinderella. We also have a watercolour painting from 1935 that shows an extremely rare-depiction of street drag performance, showing a drag troupe performing their high-kicks routine accompanied by barrel-organ on the back streets of Peckham.

We hold many council flyers promoting services to Gay & Lesbian people in Southwark including the launch of the ‘First ever day for Lesbians and Gays in Southwark’ which took place in 1988. We also hold photographs of Southwark’s float in Pride parades in London, as well as copies of an incredible photographic exhibition on the history of Pride in London 1972-2005 produced by Pam Isherwood for the Southwark LGBT Network.

New additions to the collection include Oral History interviews with key local figures including: Stephen Bourne, a prominent gay author and founder of the Anti-Homophobic Forum; Sue Sanders, another member of the forum and founder-member of ‘Schools OUT’ and LGBT History Month; and gay ephemera collector James Gardiner who brought the 1930s love story to the world of upper class Architect Monty Glover and his life partner Bermondsey boy Ralph Hall in his book ‘A Class Apart’.

To enable users to more easily discover these and more we have created a new LGBTQ+ Communities Collections Guide and will be launching a new online gallery showing some key items in the collection. Here is a selection:

Kenneth Lowndes

These photographs from 21st London Regiment soldier Harry Milner’s scrapbook show Kenneth Lowndes in drag. He was part of the 60th Divisional Concert Party ‘The Roosters’, one of many such theatre troupes who formed during World War One to entertain their fellow troops when stationed abroad. The Roosters formed in 1917 in Salonika and went on to become one of the longest-lasting and popular concert parties, made famous to home crowds across the nation via performances broadcast on BBC radio, and performing to audiences up to the late 1950s.

The Follies Concert Party

This photograph shows the 47th Divisional Concert Party ‘The Follies’, one of many such theatre troupes who formed during World War One to entertain their fellow troops when stationed abroad. They performed a variety of comedic and variety pieces, and one popular song performed by two ‘ladies’ vying for the love of one gentleman was ‘Wonderful Girl, Wonderful Time’ from the 1916 musical Houp-La. The Follies often wore dinstinctive green and black pierrot costumes although this photograph depicts them in character roles.

Turkish room at Bermondsey Public Baths

The public baths on Grange Road in Bermondsey opened in 1927 and were a very grand affair designed in ornate fashion to enable the poor of the borough to wash. While the baths performed their public function very well, the Turkish baths and Russian steam room in the basement also took on another role as a notorious and tolerated homosexual rendezvous. Before the days of open homosexuality public baths such as these were well-known cruising and homosocial spaces, especially as many were open late at night with little supervision. Bermondsey became quite famous in queer circles with even carry-on star Kenneth Williams commenting that having been there for ‘traditional interest’ in 1958 he found it ‘quite fabulous’.  [For further information on the London public baths in this context see Matt Houlbrook’s excellent book Queer London]

The Street Entertainers Move On

This watercolour was painted by 18-year-old Winnie Collins for a school competition in 1935. It is a rare depiction of a troupe of Drag entertainers who performed on the streets of Peckham. Female impersonation in theatre was common at this time, especially in the ‘soldiers in skirts’ that existed in theatrical units of the armed forces in World War One. During the 1920s and 30s some of these continued entertaining on stages across the UK and street entertainment drag was common in the working class areas of South and East London.

Southwark LGBT Forum

The Southwark LGBT Forum is a partnership organisation originally formed in 1995 as the Southwark Anti-Homophobic Forum, a panel including representatives from Southwark Council and local councillors working in collaboration with Southwark Police to address problems of homophobia in the borough. Our collections for the Forum include materials from 1995-2011 covering their community outreach work and also project materials for LGBT History Month and Pride.

Southwark Sappho

These pages are from the Lesbian Newsletter ‘Southwark Sappho’ produced by the Southwark Women’s Centre on Peckham High Street from 1993-1994. The newsletter and related group aimed to provide ‘non-separatist support’ for all lesbians, running drop-in sessions and events considering issues such as racism in the lesbian and gay community as well as promoting local services and events taking place across London.

 

Researching the First World War: Searching for someone outside the UK

By Patricia Dark, Archivist at the Southwark Local History Library and Archive

This is the fifth post in a series exploring ways to find out more about the part your family, school, workplace, or neighbourhood played in the First World War.

The First World War was the first truly global war, and you may be looking for someone who lived in the wider British Empire, one of the Allied countries, or in one of the Central Powers who fought on the opposite side of the war. Many of the important points discussed in the second part of this series – major types of heritage organisations, digitisation of primary sources, and the challenges of using historic records – are true for records relating to the experiences of people in the Empire, Allied nation, or the Central Powers. You will also usually need to know the same basic and specific information, like full name and date of birth, service number, date(s) and place(s) of service, as you would to find British military personnel or civilians.

However, there are some challenges unique to using foreign records. In order to use undigitised foreign records, you will need to travel abroad or hire a local researcher to consult them for you – this includes many Commonwealth countries, who took responsibility for service records on achieving independence. Language may also be a challenge, both in terms of accessing documents and finding a local researcher. Finally, not all countries hold military service records in a central archive. This means that you will need to know where the person you’re interested in enlisted – and may need to travel to the appropriate regional archive to do research.

British Empire Forces

When the First World War started in 1914, Britain administered a world-spanning empire (whose symbolic successor is the Commonwealth).  Australia, Canada, Newfoundland, New Zealand, and South Africa were self-governing units known as Dominions: each Dominion had its own legislature and made local laws, but the UK controlled their international relations. India had a more complicated system that was, in practice, similar to Dominion status; for this reason, all six of these states entered the war in August 1914. Colonies in Africa, Asia, and the West Indies had more limited self-government, and their casualties were accounted with that of UK forces.

Since the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) has a Commonwealth-wide remit, you should be able to find troops from all over the empire in its database of war dead; however, it’s important to note that men from the colonies are included under “United Kingdom forces”, Newfoundlanders under “Canadian”, and all troops from the Indian subcontinent under “Indian”. The Imperial War Museum (IWM) also has a Commonwealth-wide remit, and you can find details of those who served with imperial forces on the Lives of the First World War website.

Australia, Canada, New Zealand, India, and South Africa also have their own war museums (not all founded in the immediate aftermath, however); similarly the website Soldiers of the First World War provides access to digitised service records for Canadian and Newfoundlander troops; Discovering Anzacs, the AIF Project, and New Zealand Anzacs in the Great War do the same for Australian and New Zealander service records. Indian Army records for the time are generally at the British Library, and are not available online. You can also find some Indian Army unit diaries at the National Archives’ Operation War Diary website. South African records are available through the South African National Defence Force Documentation Centre; records of the King’s African Rifles, a unit based in Kenya, are available at the National Archives.

Allied Forces

Records of “doughboys” – American military personnel of the First World War, who joined the war in 1917– are held by the American equivalent of TNA, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). They were badly affected by a catastrophic fire at the National Personnel Records Center in St Louis, MO, in 1973: many of the surviving records are available on Ancestry or Family Search. The American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC) is the equivalent of the CWGC, and its website allows you to search for burials in American military cemeteries. It’s important to note that, in contrast to British policy, American policy gave bereaved families the choice of whether or not to inter war dead in battlefield cemeteries. This means many American war dead are buried in their hometowns, and so don’t necessarily appear on the ABMC database. You may also find useful information on the website of the American National World War I Museum.

In France, the Ministère de la Defense (the Ministry of Defense) is in charge of service records, while the Ministère des Pensions (the Ministry of Pensions) is the official war graves agency. For poilus – French military personnel of the First World War – the Memoire des Hommes website provides access to digitised military and war graves records. Some of its background material and database fields are in English, but most of its results are in French and may require knowledge of that language to use.

Italy also fought on the side of the Allies in World War I. Service records there are held at regional centres, and most are not digitised; you can find more information on how to access them at Family Search. Russian records are particularly challenging to use: records are scattered, fragmentary, and generally not online. To make use of them, you will need to have good knowledge of Russian and read Cyrillic. One place to start is the World War I project of the Russian genealogical society Союз Возрождения Родословных Традиций (Union Revival Bloodlines Traditions, SVRT).

Central Powers forces

If you are searching for an ancestor who was in the military forces of the Central Powers, the situation is more complicated. At the end of the war, the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires broke into pieces; like British colonies, the military records of different newly-independent areas became the successor states’ responsibility. Many of these nations also hold military records on a regional, not national, basis; many of these records were lost in the bombings of the Second World War, and relatively few of them are online.

Ottoman service records are likely to be held by the archives of the Türkiye Cumhuriyeti Millî Savunma Bakanlığı (Republic of Turkey Ministry of National Defense). These records are likely to be very difficult to use unless you are familiar with Ottoman Turkish and its Arabic-based script.

Service records of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (which included modern Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Croatia, Slovenia, and parts of Poland, Romania, Italy, Ukraine, Moldova, Serbia, and Montenegro) are held regionally; the vast majority of them are handwritten in German. The Österreichisches Staatsarchiv (Austrian State Archives) leaflet on military genealogy (in English) contains an overview of resources available at the Kriegsarchiv Wien (Vienna War Archives), as well as contact details for regional archives. The Österreichisches Schwarzes Kreuz (Austrian Black Cross) is the equivalent of the CWGC: you can make a research request for information on an Austrian war grave. The Hungarian equivalent of the Kriegsarchiv Wien is the Hadtörténelmi Levéltár (Hungarian Military History Archives) in Budapest: its website is entirely in Hungarian.

Many German service records for the First World War did not survive the 1945 destruction of the Prussian military archive, in Potsdam, near Berlin; however, records for some semi-autonomous German forces (Bavaria, Saxony, and Baden-Württemberg) are held at regional archives. Ancestry provides online access to Bavarian service records, and the Generallandesarchiv Karlsruhe (General state archive, Karlsruhe) provides digital copies of service records for Baden-Württemberg. You may also find useful information on the First World War centenary website of the Bundesarchiv (German federal archive), including their introduction to military genealogy leaflet (German language only). The website of the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge (German War Graves Commission), the German equivalent of the CWGC, allows you to search for a soldier buried in a German war cemetery.

This is the final post in a series exploring ways to research the First World War.

Researching the First World War: Introducing Archives

By Patricia Dark, Archivist at the Southwark Local History Library and Archive

This is the second post in a series exploring ways to find out more about the part your family, school, workplace, or neighbourhood played in the First World War.

If you are interested in discovering more about an individual’s service, or what happened in your community, during the First World War, you will most likely need to study surviving records or artefacts from the period. These are usually held in heritage institutions like archives and museums – there are lots of different types, but we describe some of the most useful below (we’ll look at non-UK sources later in this series).

Central government archives hold records of national-level central government bodies. They will hold foreign service and diplomatic records that explain why and how the country went to war, military records that describe how the country fought the war, and civilian and military service records for millions of people in and out of uniform. The UK’s central government archive is the National Archives (TNA) at Kew: its website on World War I and research guidance on First World War personnel have useful background information.

War memorial museums collect, preserve, and display objects, documents, photographs, and film that record the experiences and commemorate the service and sacrifice of service personnel and civilians. The UK’s main war memorial museum is the Imperial War Museum (IWM), founded in 1917 to record, collect, and display material that recorded the experience of the peoples of the British Empire in the Great War.

Local record offices and museums hold records and artefacts relating to a specific geographic area. Their holdings may include local governmental and organisational records, audiovisual material, personal papers, and other reference material like newspapers, medals and personal letters. Many local record offices also hold records of individual military units associated with that area. Examples in the UK are the London Metropolitan Archives, the Cuming Museum or the Southwark Local History Library & Archives.

Other organisations, including businesses (like TfL or John Lewis), charities (like the British Red Cross or St John Ambulance), schools (like Dulwich College), or universities (like London South Bank  University) may have their own archives or museums that safeguard the organisation’s heritage. Alternatively, another archive or museum (often local government or university) may look after their records and artefacts. Specific military units, usually at the regimental level, often house artefacts and records of that unit in their own museums. The National Archives’ Discovery service can help you work out if an organisation’s records survive, if they may help your research, and which repository holds them.

In fact, many records are now available in digital form on the internet: you can see a copy of the original document – which were almost always hand-written – as well as a typed-out version of the information, known as a transcript. While some organisations put digitised records on their own websites, it’s much more common for them to be on pay-to-view genealogical aggregator sites like Ancestry or Find My Past.  Another excellent starting point is the Imperial War Museum’s Lives of the First World War website.

There are two important things to note before you begin your research:

First, many records simply did not survive the hundred years between the First World War and today. Some UK central government records – especially military service records – were destroyed when the Public Record Office in Holborn was blitzed in 1940. Other records, like those of the Women’s Land Army or the military service tribunals (which we will discuss in the next few posts), were deliberately destroyed after the war.

Second, you may need to spend money or time to view these records. Some organisations make digital records available on a free-to-view basis; libraries in Southwark (and many other library services around the country) also provide free-to-view access to Ancestry on-site. However, if you want to use Find My Past, or to view Ancestry at home, you will need to pay. Other records are not on-line, so you will have to visit the archive that holds them to use them. Some archives will answer enquiries, but do not provide searchroom facilities for on-site research access. If you are interested in non-UK records (more about them later in the series), you may have translation or transcription costs, as well as travel costs.

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