Restored film reels that capture a grey Ireland on the cusp of the 20th century make fascinating viewing, writes Barry Roche
Home to 4,000 holes for John Lennon's A Day in the Life, Blackburn, Lancashire is a typical north of England industrial town, and hardly the sort of place one would expect to find a brief but fascinating opening into the days and lives of Ireland more than a century ago. Yet it was in a Blackburn cellar that arguably the most significant archive of film of Ireland in the early years of the 20th century was found, and now, thanks to the restorative efforts of the British Film Institute (BFI), the films are available on DVD for home viewing.
The films were part of a treasure trove of more than 800 rolls of nitrate film found in 1994 in three large, rusting metal drums by workmen clearing the cellar of a shop at Northgate, Blackburn which once belonged to one of the partners of the film company, Mitchell & Kenyon.
Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon had founded the firm of Mitchell & Kenyon in 1897 and, under the trade name Norden, were one of the largest film producers in the UK in the 1900s with slogans such as "Local Films for Local People and "We take them and make them". The rich archive of film was saved from scrapyard destruction when the workmen who found them showed them to the owner of a local firm that did cine-to-video transfers, Nigel Garth Gregory.
Gregory contacted local historian and cinephile Peter Worden, who, together with another local historian, Robin Whalley, researched the films. Restoring them was beyond Worden's means so he transferred them to the BFI in July 2000.
Staff at the BFI spent four years working on the preservation of the dangerously inflammable 35mm nitrate negatives which were then used to produce remarkably clean and scratch-free positives to offer a social record of early 20th century life in industrial Britain and Ireland.
A selection of the films provided the basis for a BBC TV series, The Lost World of Mitchell & Kenyon in 2004, and since then the BFI has released more of the footage in a series of DVDs with the 26 surviving Irish films now released as Mitchell & Kenyon in Ireland.
The films had been commissioned by travelling cinematograph exhibitors such as the North American Animated Photo Company and the Thomas Edison Animated Picture Company, who had toured Ireland in 1901 and 1902 in association with Mitchell & Kenyon. While they may lack the geographical spread and societal range of the broadly contemporaneous Lawrence Collection (1890 to 1910) of still photographs, the films of Mitchell & Kenyon in Ireland have perhaps greater emotional force and poignancy.
Partly, this lies in the power of the moving image for, grainy and grey as some of the films may be, they still depict living people at work, play or prayer, displaying all the unsure emotion of being confronted by a new technology - smiling, bashful and, in some cases, just chuffed.
But beyond the power of the moving image, the films also have a personal and historical resonance as the viewer may very well be looking at their ancestors.
According to Dr Vanessa Toulmin of the National Fairground Archive at the University of Sheffield, who researched and catalogued the films, Mitchell & Kenyon used to film by day and then hire a local hall and charge admission to the subjects to see themselves on screen.
The Irish films, which are narrated by Irish actor Fiona Shaw with an original soundtrack by Neil Brand and Gunter Buchwald, open with a horse-drawn tram journey through the centre of Belfast along Donegall Place, Castle Place junction and Royal Avenue.
The modernity of Belfast and the prosperity of its stylishly dressed inhabitants contrasts with the next film - a scene from the cattle market at Rossville Street in Derry, which highlights the still agrarian nature of Irish society and the more impoverished condition of those featured.
The scenes from the Dublin films also provide a contrast, with some historic and panoramic footage of College Green, highlighting buildings such as the Bank of Ireland and the Front Arch of Trinity College.
The two other Dublin films, Congregation Leaving the Jesuit Church of St Francis Xavier and Congregation Leaving St Mary's Pro-Cathedral are variations of the local films made in England by Mitchell & Kenyon of workers leaving factory gates, which were inspired by the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière's actualité film, La Sortie de l'Usine Lumière à Lyon (1895).
Their more middle-class variant, the church exit, was based upon the same principle - that people would pay to see themselves on screen. Church gates, like factory gates, provided an opportunity to film large numbers of people in close-up.
As Shaw remarks in her narration of the Dublin films, they portray the capital as it was in the days of James Joyce; a poster at the church of St Francis Xavier actually advertises a sermon by a Fr Convee, who inspired the priest of the same name in Ulysses.
Mitchell & Kenyon also drew on the Lumière brothers for their film on Wexford where the footage of train passengers disembarking at the railway station follows the French pioneers' L'arrivée d'un Train en Gare de la Ciotat. But it's perhaps the footage of the market at the Bullring in Wexford that is the most fascinating, especially when one considers that the elderly fishwife who smiles for the camera may well have been old enough to have seen and survived the Great Famine.
While the films give a flavour of the black and grey worlds of Edwardian Belfast, Dublin, Derry and Wexford, it is undoubtedly the footage of Edwardian Cork that best throws light on what life was like for the people of Ireland in the early years of the last century.
Close to 20 films from Cork have survived, capturing everything from panoramic tram shots of the city centre and trips to Blarney to footage from Cobh, (then Queenstown), from where an estimated 2.5 million of the country's 6 million emigrants departed.
The films also depict the good burghers of Cork exiting from Mass at St Patrick's and St Mary's churches as well as workers exiting the Lee Boot factory, dockers unloading cargo ships at Albert Quay and a staged rescue by members of Cork Fire Brigade.
Most fascinating of all is the insight that the Cork films give into the city's political loyalties with Mitchell & Kenyon, whether by fault or design, capturing a city apparently comfortable with its place within the British empire as the new century opens.
For, ironically, it is not in Belfast but in Cork that one glimpses a Union Jack, hanging from a building in Patrick Street which, perhaps even more ironically, would 20 years later be destroyed by British forces as they sought to stem the tide of nationalist insurgency.
Just how loyal a city of the empire Cork was can also be seen in the warm reception given to members of the Munster Fusiliers with their pinned-up bush hats as they return home from the Boer War to their base at what was then Victoria Barracks, now Collins Barracks, in the city. And yet more imperial pomp is evident at the opening of the Great Exhibition of 1902, when the Royal Irish Constabulary provide a guard of honour for the visit of the Commander of Chief of British Forces in Ireland, the Duke of Connaught and Prince Henry of Prussia.
As in much of the footage from Dublin and Belfast, Mitchell & Kenyon avoid the poverty of the laneways and tenements of Cork and focus instead on the middle class, and the footage from Cork clearly captures the excitement ignited by the Great Exhibition. Grainy images of Cork's well-to-do trying out the water chute at Fitzgerald's Park and boating at Sunday's Well show a yesterworld that now seems quaintly leisurely and yet, no doubt for the inhabitants of the screen, was undoubtedly adventurously modern.
As Dr Toulmin concludes: "They gaze out to us a century later, revealing the secrets of Edwardian Ireland captured in a celluloid tapestry of smiles, gestures, motion and poetic grace as they walk across the screen, beckoning us into their brave new world - the dawn of the 20th century."
