The Mitchell & Kenyon film company was a pioneer of early commercial movies based in Blackburn in Lancashire, England at the start of the 20th century. Blackburn ( is a large town in Lancashire, England. It lies to the north of the West Pennine Moors on the southern edge of the Ribble Valley Lancashire is a non-metropolitan county of historic origin in the North West of England, bounded to the west by the Irish Sea England is a Country which is part of the United Kingdom. Its inhabitants account for more than 83% of the total UK population whilst its mainland The twentieth century of the Common Era began on 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 collection of early non-fiction films in the world giving a new and fresh view of Edwardian England and an important resource for historians. Class and society Socially the Edwardian era was a period during which the British Class system was very rigid
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Background
Following on from the first motion picture, made in 1891 by Thomas Edison's employee William Kennedy Dickson in the USA, the first showing to a paying audience was by Auguste and Louis Lumière of France, in Paris in 1895 and in London the following year, featuring La sortie des usines Lumière showing workers leaving their factory gates in Lyon. William Kennedy Laurie Dickson (3 August 1860 &ndash 28 September 1935 was an Anglo - Scottish Inventor who devised an early motion picture The United States of America —commonly referred to as the This article is about the country For a topic outline on this subject see List of basic France topics. Paris (ˈpærɨs in English; in French) is the Capital of France and the country's largest city London ( ˈlʌndən is the capital and largest urban area in the United Kingdom. ||-||} Lyon, also known as Lyons in English is a city in east-central France. Others in France and Britain soon made films, some in "the factory-gate film" genre, and when Mitchell & Kenyon came together they found themselves ideally placed in the heart of the industrial North of England. People were excited at the opportunity of seeing themselves on film, and there were commercial opportunities for short films featuring as many local people as possible.
"We take them and make them. "
Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon founded the firm of Mitchell & Kenyon in 1897. Sagar Jones Mitchell ( October 28, 1866 &ndash October 2, 1952) was a pioneer of Cinematography in Blackburn, Lancashire James Kenyon ( May 26, 1850 &ndash February 6, 1925) was a businessman and pioneer of Cinematography in Blackburn, 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 United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom, the UK or Britain,is a Sovereign state located Blackburn ( is a large town in Lancashire, England. It lies to the north of the West Pennine Moors on the southern edge of the Ribble Valley
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. Events 1095 - Pope Urban II declares the First Crusade at the Council of Clermont Year 1897 ( MDCCCXCVII) was a Common year starting on Friday (link will display the full calendar of the Gregorian Calendar (or a Common 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.
Three Norden fiction films released in September 1899, The Tramp's Surprise, The Tramps and the Artist, and Kidnapping by Indians brought them to national attention. The success of their early films encouraged Mitchell to give up his shop and in September 1901 Mitchell & Kenyon moved into premises in Clayton Street, Blackburn, to concentrate on film production. Blackburn ( is a large town in Lancashire, England. It lies to the north of the West Pennine Moors on the southern edge of the Ribble Valley Fiction production was not as extensive as their production of topicals, but by 1903 the company had an outdoor studio at its premises at 22 Clayton Street, Blackburn, which was used in addition to outside locations. The Cinema Museum in London currently preserves 65 Norden fiction films.
The showmen became self-publicising travelling cinematograph operators. Films taken during the day were shown on the same evening in fairground tents or local meeting halls and music halls with slogans like "see yourselves as others see you". Dramas took a while to catch on and the non-fiction actuality films were more popular. A typical 2 hour programme would show drama, comedy, live actors and then the main attraction, local "topicals", with a brass band and the showman's commentary during the silent films, plus occasional sound effects from guns and members of the audience paid to scream and faint to add to the excitement.
Topicals
As well as workers streaming out of factory gates, Mitchell & Kenyon filmed street scenes, parades, marches, walking out on Sunday and the fairgrounds. Charmingly, as the crowds pass by there are usually a few who come up and stare or wave at the camera, in a way that nowadays annoys news presenters. The street scenes are busy with pedestrians wandering across in front of the slow horse drawn carts and trams, some horse drawn as well as the new electric trams, and Mitchell & Kenyon added variety by filming from moving trams. A tram, tramcar, trolley, trolley car, or streetcar is a railborne vehicle, of lighter weight and construction than a Train Bicycles abound, and they also showed the novel rarity, a motor car. Warships and steamboats are shown, and at Liverpool docks emigrants are shown boarding ships such as the Cunarder RMS Saxonia bound for Boston, the films having been developed on the same day for relatives to see that night. A steamboat or steamship, sometimes called a steamer, is a ship in which the primary method of propulsion is steam power, typically driving a Propeller Liverpool ( is a City and Metropolitan borough of Merseyside, England along the eastern side of the Mersey Estuary Cunard Line is a British shipping company operator of the Ocean liners RMS ''Queen Elizabeth 2'' ( QE2) RMS ''Queen Mary 2'' ( History As one of several ships that were among the last built for transatlantic passenger traffic in the early 1950s the Saxonia was launched in 1954 and revived
Workers now had one week's holiday each year, albeit unpaid, and films were made in the thriving holiday resorts including Blackpool and Morecambe Bay. Blackpool (/ˈblækˌpul is a seaside town in Lancashire, England. Morecambe Bay is a large bay in northwest England, nearly due east of the Isle of Man and just to the south of the Lake District National Park Leisure activities shown include boating on rivers, promenading in pleasure gardens and rolling Easter eggs.
The parades and processions include carnivals with participants blacking up and doing 'golliwog' dance routines, and men dressed as both Dutch men and women doing a clog dance. Others show religious processions, [carnival processions) charity parades and marches, and Temperance parades featuring their children's section, The Band of Hope. See also Prohibition, Teetotalism The Temperance Movement attempted to reduce the amount of Alcohol consumed within a community or society in Military marches and parades were featured, as well as marches by the Boys' Brigade and the Church Lads' Brigade
News and re-enactments
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. For the 80s New Wave band from Canada see Boys Brigade (band. The Republic of South Africa (also known by other official names) is a country located at the southern tip of the continent of Africa 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. See below the section "Separate Commonwealth awards" Note that since
Fictionalised scenes from the South African war and the Boxer Rebellion were filmed in the countryside around Blackburn. The Boxer Rebellion, or Boxer Movement, was an uprising by members of the Chinese Society of Right and Harmonious Fists against foreign influence 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. The Bank of Liverpool was a financial institution founded in 1831 in Liverpool, England. Embezzlement is the act of dishonestly appropriating or secreting assets usually financial in nature by one or more individuals to whom such assets have been entrusted The film was shown at the Prince of Wales Theatre in Liverpool only three days after Goudie's arrest. Liverpool Empire Theatre is located on Lime Street in Liverpool, England. Liverpool ( is a City and Metropolitan borough of Merseyside, England along the eastern side of the Mersey Estuary Goudie was subsequently jailed for ten years. A full detailed history of this film by Vanessa Toulmin can be found 'An Early Film Crime Rediscovered: Mitchell & Kenyon’s Arrest of Goudie (1901), in Film History Vol 16, no 1 (2004): 37-53.
Sports
The recent introduction of Saturday afternoons off work had made sporting events into popular mass entertainment. Mitchell & Kenyon filmed these events, taking care to get as many spectators in as possible as well as showing some of the action. They took the first known film of the newly-renamed Manchester United, at the match they played on 6 December 1902 against Burnley — the film was to have been shown that evening at the Burnley Mechanics' Institute, but the showing was cancelled as Burnley lost 2-0, and the film was never shown until its recent rediscovery. Events 1060 - Béla I of Hungary is crowned king of Hungary 1240 - Mongol invasion of Rus: Kiev Year 1902 ( MCMII) was a Common year starting on Wednesday (link will display calendar of the Gregorian calendar (or a Common year starting Burnley is a large Market town in the borough of Burnley in Lancashire, England, with a population of around 73500 A match between Sheffield United and Bury in September 1902 featured William "Fatty" Foulke, one of the most famous players of his day who also played for Bradford City and Chelsea. William Henry "Fatty" Foulke (also spelt Foulk or Foulkes ( 12 April 1874 &ndash 1 May 1916) was a professional Cricketer They also filmed possibly the first football injury to be captured on film, when an Irish striker struck the goalpost in the Wales versus Ireland international match at Wrexham in 1906. The Wales national football team represents Wales in international men's football. This article deals with the Irish Football Association team up to 1950 when it last picked players from outside Northern Ireland Wrexham (Wrecsam is a town and principal area in Wales. It is the largest town in North Wales and lies to the east of the region For further details see Vanessa Toulmin, ‘Edwardian Sport on Film, International Journal of Sport in History (Volume 26, No. 2 (2006).
Rugby and cricket matches were also featured, and when A D Thomas, who styled himself "the picture king, the master mind of the world", heard of a cricketing scandal where the respected Lancashire bowler Arthur Mold was repeatedly given no ball by the umpire, he promptly commissioned a filmed re-enactment of Mold's bowling to prove that his technique was valid — the first action replay, which was a popular success. Lancashire is a non-metropolitan county of historic origin in the North West of England, bounded to the west by the Irish Sea
Other films featured rowing events, horse trotting, athletics, cycle races and motor tricycle races.
Comedy
As early as 1900 some fiction films included slapstick comedy with blundering policemen, in anticipation of the Keystone Kops and Charlie Chaplin more than a decade later. The Keystone Cops was a series of Silent film comedies featuring a totally incompetent group of Policemen produced by Mack Sennett for his Diving Lucy of 1903 showed a lady's legs sticking up out of a pond in Blackburn's Queen's Park, and rescuers setting up a plank which a tubby policeman goes out on only to find it a hoax, at which the others let go and he falls in the water. It was an international success, in France and the US where it was billed as "the hit British comedy of the year".
To enliven some street scenes the showmen arranged for mock fights or hosing down a spectator, and slapstick was added to park scenes with male actors dressed as women falling off a donkey or in the water from a boat, revealing their petticoats under the long skirts of the time.
Decline
In May 1907 Sagar Mitchell resumed possession of his original business, S. & J. Mitchell, at 40 Northgate, Blackburn. Blackburn ( is a large town in Lancashire, England. It lies to the north of the West Pennine Moors on the southern edge of the Ribble Valley The volume of film production seems to have tailed off from this date, and from 1909 was increasingly restricted to local events. By the mid 1900s the taste of audiences for seeing themselves was fading, and more structured films were coming into vogue and the company concentrated on their fictional outputs. The last surviving film dates from 1913. Mitchell was joined in his business by his son John in 1921. His partnership with Kenyon was formally dissolved around 1922 and Kenyon died in 1925. Mitchell carefully stored the film negatives away in the basement of his shop. He lived to the age of 85, and died on 2 October 1952. Events 1187 - Siege of Jerusalem: Saladin captures Jerusalem after 88 years of Crusader rule Year 1952 ( MCMLII) was a Leap year starting on Tuesday (link will display full calendar of the Gregorian calendar. John continued to run the business until he retired in 1960.
Discovery and restoration of the Collection
In 1994 during demolition work in what had been Mercers 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.
Gregory knew of local businessman and historian Peter Worden's interest in cinematography, he phoned up and offered to arrange for the drums to be delivered to him. The films were then looked after by Peter Worden until their transfer to the British Film Institute in July 2000
Peter, along with another local historian, Robin Whalley, researched the films and provided an invaluable introduction into the firm and their films in an article published as Forgotten Firm in Film History, Volume 10, Number 1, 1998, (ISBN 1-86462-031-5).
The Peter Worden Collection of Mitchell & Kenyon Films has now been preserved by staff at British Film Institute's National Film and Television Archive, carefully storing the dangerously inflammable 35mm nitrate negatives. The British Film Institute ( BFI) is a charitable organisation established by Royal Charter to encourage the development of the arts of film television The National Film and Television Archive is the former name of the BFI National Archive. Painstaking film preservation techniques were used to produce remarkably clean and scratch free positives, adjusting the speed to smooth out the variations in these hand-cranked films. The film preservation, or film restoration, movement is an ongoing project among film historians archivists Museums and Non-profit organizations to rescue The results are fresh and natural, offering an unparalleled social record of early 20th Century British life.
The University of Sheffield's National Fairground Archive and the British Film Institute were awarded a three year research grant by the Arts and Humanities Research Board to research, catalogue identify and contextualise the 800 plus films. The University of Sheffield is a research University, located in Sheffield in South Yorkshire, England. This has culminated in a collection of essays The Lost World of Mitchell and Kenyon: Edwardian Britain on Film, edited by Vanessa Toulmin, Simon Popple and Patrick Russell and published by the bfi in October 2004 (ISBN 1-84457-046-0, paperback, ISBN 1-84457-047-9, hardback) and over 15 articles. The major catalogue and interpretation of the Collection has just been published by the British Film Institute titled Electric Edwardians: The Story of the Mitchell & Kenyon Collection (London: BFI, 2006, by Vanessa Toulmin, it contains over 431 stills from the collection, an impressive array of handbills and posters from the National Fairground Archive and 100,000 words of text and filmographic references. Also available is a companion DVD entitled the Electric Edwardians featuring two hours of highlights from the Collection with extras on the archiving of the films, an essay by film historian Tom Gunning and an interview with the lead researcher on the Collection, Dr Vanessa Toulmin. Forthcoming film releases include Mitchell & Kenyon in Ireland and Edwardian Sport on Film (both to be released in late spring 2007)
A prime-time three-part series The Lost World of Mitchell & Kenyon was shown on the BBC in January 2005 with enthusiastic commentary by historian Dan Cruickshank and interviews with descendants of people shown in the films, and is available on DVD from the BBC or the bfi. The Lost World of Mitchell & Kenyon is a BBC documentary series produced in conjunction with the British Film Institute. Dan Cruickshank (born 26 August, 1949) is an architectural historian and Television presenter currently working for the BBC
The BFI and the NFA have toured the Collection extensively presenting over 100 shows in venues throughout the North of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales and proving once again that local films for local people are as popular today as they were a century ago. Dr Vanessa Toulmin of the National Fairground Archive has also presented specialist feature shows on the history of Rugby League with Professor Tony Collins, seaside entertainment with Professor John Walton and football history with Professor Dave Russell.
External links
- Mitchell & Kenyon at the National Fairground Archive, Sheffield University
- Mitchell & Kenyon at the British Film Institute
- Guardian Unlimited | Features | The Lost World
- bfi Video: The Lost World of Mitchell & Kenyon (DVD)
- The Latest Industry News (restoring the films)
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