SH Archive Single video: 1902 Downtown Halifax, England

[KD Archive]

This is allegedly a real video. What’s your opinion on that? See anything weird?

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[Archive]

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Username: VinniePazman
Date: 2019-08-03 07:44:26
Reaction Score: 2

I do not know if my observations are correct, but there are mostly children and older people, I noticed just few middle-age people.

 

[Rhayader]

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Username: Rhayader
Date: 2019-08-03 08:09:58
Reaction Score: 3

Weird in what way? To me all the people walking around and vehicles moving look super imposed onto a green screen style background...and the audio is obviously added too. In terms of the scene on first look, looks relatively 'normal'. Halifax was a bustling industrial town at the time and the scenes seem typical of that.

Just read the waki page for the film makers, Mitchell and Kenyon and it caught my attention that they were known for producing a fictional narrative for the Boer war! As far back to the start of this tech, it's been used for deception and manipulation.

 

[KD Archive]

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Username: KorbenDallas
Date: 2019-08-03 08:16:42
Reaction Score: 1

people walking around and vehicles moving look super imposed onto a green screen style background

That. In turn, if that’s the case, than when was it made, and why?

The quality of this 1902 video is better than most of the 1901, and 1904 Expo photographs.

 

[Mike Nolan]

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Username: WarningGuy
Date: 2019-08-03 10:41:09
Reaction Score: 1

Also we have tram tracks in cobbled roadways that look like they have been there for a very time.

 

[Archive]

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Username: Red Bird
Date: 2019-08-03 14:14:02
Reaction Score: 3

My first thought was they all look related- same noses, dark hair, etc. Jewish section?
With the ending scene I thought, advertising orphans (though most the kids seemed fairly well dressed until that last scene).
I’m reading here to distract from the fact we just had our 4th earthquake in the last 6 hours. Dang. I guess this isn’t national news for some reason- barely local, though people are beginning to talk.

 

[AthroposRex]

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Username: AnthroposRex
Date: 2019-08-03 14:36:38
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My first thought was they all look related- same noses, dark hair, etc. Jewish section?
With the ending scene I thought, advertising orphans (though most the kids seemed fairly well dressed until that last scene).
I’m reading here to distract from the fact we just had our 4th earthquake in the last 6 hours. Dang. I guess this isn’t national news for some reason- barely local, though people are beginning to talk.

California? There have been something like 8k quakes in a 30 day period.

 

[Archive]

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Username: Red Bird
Date: 2019-08-03 15:00:02
Reaction Score: 1

California? There have been something like 8k quakes in a 30 day period.

Not to derail but, Montana. 209 EQ last 365 days. We’ve had them but this is ridiculous. Actually we just had another.

 

[AthroposRex]

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Username: AnthroposRex
Date: 2019-08-03 15:06:36
Reaction Score: 2

Not to derail but, Montana. 209 EQ last 365 days. We’ve had them but this is ridiculous. Actually we just had another.

Wow! Didn't hear that. Stay safe!

 

[KD Archive]

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Username: KorbenDallas
Date: 2019-08-03 20:26:24
Reaction Score: 3

It looks like the objects close to the camera have a huge TV screen behind their back.

 

[Archive]

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Username: Banta
Date: 2019-08-03 21:32:54
Reaction Score: 2

So, I was trying to read what the cart with the white horse that was at the end said.

It's saying "A Trip Around the World", "By the Bio-Motograph", then I'm not sure what's at the bottom, though I suspect it's the date, as it looks like this horse and cart show up earlier in the footage too.

So that helped me find this::

The snappily-named 'Tweedale-Edison Phono-Bio-Motograph Company' found huge success in Halifax for its programme of films entitled 'A Trip Round the World'. But the most popular part of the show proved to be these local scenes. It's likely that they were shot at different times throughout the two-week run at Victoria Hall and added to the bill to encourage paying audiences to come back for more.

Watch Street Scenes in Halifax (1902) - BFI Player

So, it's an ad for the show IN the show (proto-product placement) and advertising what they're doing to the crowds, I suppose, and when they can check it out!

If nothing else, it confirms this is a PRODUCTION.

 

[Rhayader]

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Username: Rhayader
Date: 2019-08-03 22:38:22
Reaction Score: 1

The more I watch it, I don't think there's a great deal to read into it. It seems to me a poorly done digital touch up of at least archival footage, or animated photo stills brought to some semblance of life- but alot of the movements seem artificial and copied in places. Facial expressions don't move much either. Can't really see any purpose other than an attempt to make the scenes 'HD'.

As a side note, the people dressed up in it doesn't really give the same impression of the gruff northern industrial town it was...I mean this is Yorkshire! Strange they call it downtown too, not really a term we ever use in the UK.

 

[KD Archive]

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Username: KorbenDallas
Date: 2019-08-03 23:36:05
Reaction Score: 1

I don't think there's a great deal to read into it.

We have different opinions on this. These videos and related photographs are being presented as authentic. They serve to form our understanding of the past.

If we have nothing but actors “recreating” things, than what do we really know about that time?

 

[Timeshifter]

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Username: Timeshifter
Date: 2019-08-04 00:48:55
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It appears, as though the original movie, with few people, carts, horses etc is there, and is a different film stock, exposure, tone/ quality and depth of field to the later, composited people and things which are of a much higher contrast & exposure, and it would appear aperture (depth of field) than the original background footage. I have seen composites like this before, where actors are composited in to archive footage in exhibitions/ museums etc where they wish to add to the narrative, but normally that would be just a few characters, not whole street scenes. This "composote" could have easily been produced anywhere in the last 90 or so years, the tech and know how has been officially available.

Questions are, what is the purpose of this and why is it being presented as origonal footage?

 

[KD Archive]

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Username: KorbenDallas
Date: 2019-08-04 01:20:12
Reaction Score: 3

The issue with us not knowing what's real and what's not is way broader than anyone thinks. Please read the Train #25 portion in this thread. Multiple sources present the photographs from the event as real, but are they?

We also have a discussion on the 1906 pre-earthquake video of San Francisco somewhere on the forum. I can't find it, but similar issues were being presented. Additionally the Civil War Photography , and General Lee threads are in the same boat. May be we should start looking into video more attentively.

I agree on the main question - why were they producing reenactments, and why are they being portrayed as authentic? Also which videos are real?

 

[Archive]

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Username: Banta
Date: 2019-08-04 04:58:26
Reaction Score: 3

The issue with us not knowing what's real and what's not is way broader than anyone thinks.

Great sentence.

Korben is right over the mark in this thread again... what the hell that means, though, I have no idea.

So, let's examine the players here. The filmmakers, first, Mitchell and Kenyon:

• Mitchell and Kenyon

The Mitchell & Kenyon film company was a pioneer of early commercial motion pictures based in Blackburn in Lancashire, England at the start of the 20th century. They were originally best known for minor contributions to early fictional narrative film and Boer War dramatisation films, but the discovery in 1994 of a hoard of film negatives led to restoration of the Mitchell & Kenyon Collection, the largest surviving collection of early non-fiction actuality films in the world.

Ugh, I can't even get through the first paragraph of Wikipedia... plowing forward:

Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon founded the firm of Mitchell & Kenyon in 1897. Under the trade name of Norden, the company was one of the largest film producers in the United Kingdom in the 1900s, with the slogans of "Local Films For Local People" and "We take them and make them", they operated initially from their respective business premises at 40 Northgate and 21 King Street, Blackburn.

The first reported showing of a Mitchell & Kenyon film was a film of Blackburn Market, shown at 40 Northgate, in Blackburn, on 27 November 1897. The company produced films either on their own initiative or as commissioned by local businesses. In April 1899 the travelling showman George Green commissioned them to film workers leaving factories, to be shown at the Easter fair, thus beginning the showing of their films by a network of showmen....
...

The outbreak of the Boer War in South Africa in October 1899 brought new business opportunities to the company – it turned its attention to the production of war films. Troops were shown marching off to join the war or coming back from the front, past flag waving spectators. Crowds were shown greeting war heroes, in particular Private Charles Ward of Leeds, the last man to receive the Victoria Cross from Queen Victoria herself, being interviewed by Ralph Pringle.

Fictionalised scenes from the South African war and the Boxer Rebellion were filmed in the countryside around Blackburn. These are described as fakes, but the audiences may well have accepted them as dramatic re-enactments. Screenings were enlivened by smoke bombs and guns being fired.

Mitchell & Kenyon's most innovative film was The Arrest of Goudie in 1901, which is arguably the world's first filmed crime reconstruction – the film incorporates the actual crime locations and depicts the arrest of Thomas Goudie, a Bank of Liverpool employee who embezzled£170,000 while involved in a gambling ring.

Having fun yet?

Discovery and restoration of the Collection

In 1994 during demolition work in what had been Mercers toy shop in Northgate, Blackburn, two workmen were clearing out the basement when they found three metal drums like milk churns, and looked inside to see hundreds of small spools of film. On their way to the Lethbridges Scrap Metal Processors was Magic Moments Video which did cine to video transfers, and the workmen dragged in a churn and asked the proprietor, Nigel Garth Gregory, if the films were of any value.

Knowing of local businessman and historian Peter Worden's interest in cinematography, Gregory phoned Worden and offered to arrange for the drums to be delivered to him. Following delivery Worden examined the rolls and realised that the film stock was highly volatile and stored the rolls in a chest freezer in his garage until their transfer to the British Film Institute in July 2000. A large cache of Mitchell & Kenyon negative and positive films and a Norden cinematographic camera was offered by Christie's South Kensington on 23 November 1997. A second group of five 35mm negatives was sold by the same auction house on 20 February 1997.[2] The film titles sold in the initial lot are listed in the reference.

They probably should have checked for some Apollo tapes while they were there.

So, who is Tweedale-Edison Phono-Bio-Motograph Company? It appears to be the production company/distributor for some of the films that these two made (such as the one in this thread). Tweedale appears to refer to the Tweedale Ironworks in some capacity (some of articles with the videos refer to a Mr. Tweedale commissioning the films), as the filmmakers have footage of this.

BFI Screenonline: Mitchell and Kenyon: Workers at Barlow and Tweedale (1905)

Watch Workers at Barlow and Tweedale Ironworks, Castleton Nr Rochdale (1905) - BFI Player

Barlow and Tweedale's own personalised electric shunting locomotive trundles past the camera before hundreds of its employees emerge.

I'm not even gonna deal with that now.

Tweedales and Smalley manufactured textile machinery, mainly for export. The Globe Works in Castleton was opened in July 1892, and rapidly became one of the world's leading machinery manufacturers – at one point fully half of India's textile equipment was said to have been manufactured there.

There's some money here. Not a lot else on Tweedale Ironworks... except that it appears here:

Shropshire Mineral Railways

Not really sure what 1799 is referring to... establishment of the tramway to the ironworks, probably, but was it there already? Probably doesn't matter (for this particular inquiry). There just doesn't seem to be a lot on this company available on the internet.

Same for the Tweedale-Edison Phono-Bio-Motograph Company. Searches will just lead you back to more of these Mitchell and Kenyon films. And this one reference in a book called "The Showman", dated February 12, 1902:



The Showman

Same time the video in the thread was being filmed. And Professor Norton?

Professor George Norton: who do you think you are?

He said he was a magician, a sign-writer, an army officer, a multi-linguist, a tattooist, an inventor and even a killer. He said he was born to live in a castle, but he ended his days in 1953 in a council house in Crook.

“There’s a lot of mystery behind him and it is difficult to find out what is true,” says his grandson Geoff Carter, “but he was certainly a man of many parts.”
Memories 239 called him “a magical man of mystery”. But a fortnight later, we know much more, courtesy of his many descendants who tell a story which has been handed down with amazing consistency.

But how much of that story is another of his illusions is difficult to say.
The illusion begins with Millom Castle, a romantic 13th Century ruin on the west Cumbrian coast near Barrow-in-Furness, which was owned for hundreds of years by the Huddleston family.
Professor Norton was a Huddleston, but he said his upper class family disowned his father after a lowly marriage in the 1870s. Then, when his father died of TB, the professor and his mother were left alone – until she remarried Mr Norton, who was apparently the Lord Lieutenant of Liverpool.

But the Lord Lieutenant was violent towards the boy, so George ran away to the circus.
Not any old circus, mind, but Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Circus. He taught himself magic, and became so good that he toured with Buffalo Bill around Europe and then the US. He was over there when the First World War broke out, so he joined the American Expeditionary Force in Siberia, stationed in Archangel. He became fluent in Russian, to go with the French, German and Arabic that he was already able to converse in.

...

Her research so far suggests that the professor was indeed a Huddleston – but without any upper crust connections. His father, John, was a humble iron dresser from Blackburn, and rather than being kicked out of a castle for a lowly marriage, he appeared in court in 1880 for deserting his wife and five children, the youngest of whom was two-year-old George.
This family break-up may explain why in the 1891 census Margaret found George Huddleston living as an “inmate of The Bolton and County of Lancaster Certified Industrial School”.
Industrial schools were set up by 19th Century social reformers to keep vulnerable children away from a life of crime. Boarders were often orphans, and may already have committed an offence.

After the 1891 entry, though, George Huddleston seems not to have bothered the official record-takers for 40 years until he got married in 1929. Now calling himself George Norton, he re-appeared living in Freville Street, Shildon, when he tied the knot at Bishop Auckland Register Office to Martha Phyllis Oakes, who came from Rotherham, and was 20 years his junior.
Where had he been for 40 years?...

Apparently working for the Tweedale-Edison Phono-Bio-Motograph Company...

So, to recap, we have a couple of filmmakers (without very detailed backstories themselves, outside of being filmmakers) whose big claim to fame was war reenactments that the audiences weren't sure were real, who were bankrolled by a vague iron working company (who also bankrolled a professional magician/conn man/intelligence operative), and then who died and their footage was lost for 70 plus years.

Nothing to read into here at all.

(I know that was in comment to the actual video quality, I'm just an ass.)

 

[KD Archive]

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Username: KorbenDallas
Date: 2019-08-04 05:10:06
Reaction Score: 3

I have never heard of this Motography, but here is a pertaining 1911 book. Volume 5, yep.

• Motography, Volume 5, Issue 6

 

[Archive]

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Username: Banta
Date: 2019-08-04 05:17:57
Reaction Score: 1

I have never heard of this Motography, but here is a pertaining 1911 book. Volume 5, yep.

• Motography, Volume 5, Issue 6

Back when the US had a Department of War... it's a good thing we've changed all the words now, or else Twitter would be on fire.

 

[EUAFU]

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Username: EUAFU
Date: 2020-03-03 14:52:29
Reaction Score: 1

At 0:18 seconds of the video it seems that there is an overlap of images the two boys appear to be in front of a screen with real old images. A tram soon approaches and remains "foggy" while the boys look very clear and with colors that clash with the background. I found it very strange.

Why would they insert images of "actors" in old footage? I really do not know.

Sorry if anyone has already pointed this out, but I only read the posts after responding to the topic. I get excited.

 

[fabiorem]

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Username: fabiorem
Date: 2020-03-03 17:06:45
Reaction Score: 1

Too many children in the street.
9 in 10 people are dressed in black.

In the middle ages and the "renaissance" period, people dressed in different colors, like today.
But in the 19th century, and the beggining of the 20th... everybody in black, like in a funeral.