Metadata
WORK ID: NEFA 10418 (Master Record)
Title | Year | Date |
A RIVER SPEAKS | 1956 | 1956-01-01 |
Details
Original Format: 16mm Colour: Black & White Sound: Sound Duration: 17 mins 57 secs Credits: Individuals: H.G. Casparius, Flora Robson, Anne Balfour-Fraser, Monica Casparius, Walter Lassally, Max Brenner, Timothy Burrill. Organisations: Inca Films, Jack Armstrong & His Band. Genre: Travelogue Subject: Urban Life Ships Rural Life Industry Coal |
Summary A travelogue, narrated by the South Shields born actress Flora Robson, looking at the history, culture and industry of the Tyne Valley. It contrasts the Roman heritage and rural economy of the western settlements, including Hexham and Corbridge, with scenes of life and work in the Newcastle & Gateshead conurbation. The industrial settlements between Newcastle and the coast are discussed, with a particular emphasis on the shipbuilding industry. |
Description
A travelogue, narrated by the South Shields born actress Flora Robson, looking at the history, culture and industry of the Tyne Valley. It contrasts the Roman heritage and rural economy of the western settlements, including Hexham and Corbridge, with scenes of life and work in the Newcastle & Gateshead conurbation. The industrial settlements between Newcastle and the coast are discussed, with a particular emphasis on the shipbuilding industry.
Title: Inca Films
Title: A River Speaks...
A travelogue, narrated by the South Shields born actress Flora Robson, looking at the history, culture and industry of the Tyne Valley. It contrasts the Roman heritage and rural economy of the western settlements, including Hexham and Corbridge, with scenes of life and work in the Newcastle & Gateshead conurbation. The industrial settlements between Newcastle and the coast are discussed, with a particular emphasis on the shipbuilding industry.
Title: Inca Films
Title: A River Speaks
Credit: Produced & Directed by H.G. Casparius
Title: Narrated by Flora Robson
The film opens with a view of a hilly moor, the sun coming through the clouds.
A steam train travels through the Tyne Valley landscape. Trees and woodland can be seen alongside the riverbank where the North Tyne meets the South Tyne. Behind a line of trees along the banks of the River Tyne is Hexham Abbey and the town.
The scene changes to show the exterior of Hexham Abbey; pedestrians and traffic move along Beaumont Street and Market Place in front of the abbey. Pedestrians walk past a series of small shops along a narrow street. A number of cars are parked in the road. An old man walks his small dog past the cross in Market Place. Two women walk through an underpass into the sunlight of the street.
The River Tyne passes under Hexham Bridge with the leaves of a Willow tree drooping in the water.
A car travels along a country lane. The camera pans across a field with a farm house and the River Tyne in the near distance.
General view of the remains of the Roman town of Corbridge or Corstopitum. An illustration depicts Corbridge as a Roman town. Close-up of a Roman stone figure of a lion eating a sheep. The camera pans across the ruins of the Roman town. A man in the near distance is digging on the site. Several buildings on the edge of Corbridge can be seen as the River Tyne passes under Corbridge Bridge
General view of a field of wheat. A young boy wades through small rocky pools on the rivers edge. Three people sit on the hill overlooking the River Tyne as it flows downstream.
There are views of the electric pylons and cooling towers at Stella South power station near Blaydon, Gateshead.
The camera tilts down from the winding gear of a coal mine to two miners leading two pit ponies across a yard to the mines. next, a group of miners walk beside a conveyor belt. They stop and talk to another miner who is sitting by the conveyor. Shot of a seam of coal. Three miners push coal wagons along rail tracks. A miner uses a pickaxe to cut into a seam of coal. Another miner uses a large electric drill to get at the coal and a third digs out the coal from the seam with a shovel. The coal then moves along a conveyor belt out of the mine.
Back on the surface two miners lead the two pit ponies away from the mine.
The scene changes to a market where two men examine the plumage of a pigeon. There are a number of cages filled with pigeons in the background. A group of people are looking at the caged pigeons. A man in glasses takes a pigeon out of a cage to examine it. Two teenage boys, one of whom is examining a pigeon, talk with another man, probably a pigeon seller. A number of young boys look at the pigeons. A young boy holds a pigeon in his hands. Another strokes the wings of a pigeon. A small boy peers closely through the bars of a pigeon cage.
A field of flowers stretches in front of Castle Garth. The camera tilts upwards to show The Castle. A man in a trench coat with a case walks out of the shadows and up a series of stone steps onto Castle Garth. The Castle is directly in front of him.
A still of an historic engraving of Newcastle and the Tyne is intercut with views of the spires of St Nicolas and All Saint churches, cars and buses crossing the Tyne Bridge into Newcastle. A bus passes on Neville Street, which is busy with both traffic and pedestrians. The George Stephenson memorial, St Mary’s Church and Newcastle Central Railway Station appear in the background.
Traffic and pedestrians travel past Grey’s Monument and along Blackett Street as seen from Grey Street.
More traffic passes through the intersection of Grey Street and Market Street, with the Newcastle Theatre Royal to the right. A traffic warden directs traffic from the crossroads as a number of electric buses pass the Binns department store.
Another bus passes through the busy intersection of Northumberland Street and St Mary’s Place past the Church of St Thomas the Martyr.
General view down steep steps towards the Newcastle Quayside and the River Tyne. Two small boys in school blazers walk down the steps from Castle Garth. In the background, a coal train passes over a bridge.
There is a high angle view across the Newcastle rooftops, with All Saints Church and the McEwans Ale factory visible in the background.
Large crowds enjoy time at the Sunday market on Newcastle Quayside, near to the Swing Bridge. A man walks along the Quayside holding a tray of novelty masks. Another man in a feather hat is trying to sell canned goods from a stall next to a large crane. Stall holders are selling crockery and beaded necklaces to interested groups of women. A woman stall holder wraps a bunch of flowers. Another stall holder puts a record into a sleeve for a well dressed woman who is looking in her purse for the money. A group of people drink Sarsaparilla from a stall. The camera follows the crowds walking up and down the Quayside.
The film changes to show the exterior of Bettie Surtees house with the High Level Bridge in the background.
Back at Quayside market, a man sells nylon stockings to a crowd of women beside the Tyne Bridge. More women are seen looking at the stockings hanging from pegs. A woman smokes a cigarette while looking at the goods on another stall. A group of young girls look at a toy carousel on another stall. A young boy holds a toy clown. A group of children are playing a game where they toss a small ball onto a table. A small boy eats an ice-lolly. A large group of children gathers around a man who is holding a tray full of jumping beans. Two girls eat ice creams. Looking down from the Tyne Bridge crowds walk along Quayside amongst the stalls. A boat is moored on the Tyne.
High angle views of the High Level Bridge, the Swing Bridge and the Tyne Bridge follow.
The next sequence contains traveling shots from steam boat on the Tyne. Shot of the Tyne Bridge from below. A tramp steamer sails past. Two seagulls perch on a floating buoy. view of the factory of Clarke Chapman & Co. Ltd.
Shot of a field full of large steel marine turbines sited at the works. Two men are working on one of the turbines.
There are further traveling shots from the river of newly built houses on the top of a cliff, followed by the Spiller's Tyne Mill building on the bank. A tug boat sails alongside, with background view of shipyard cranes and docked ship.
Continuing to travel downstream, there are views of the Tyne shipyards including Vickers Armstrong and Swan Hunters, with many ships under construction at building berths or moored on the Tyne. A radar dish is sited on top of one large building.
The scene changes to show exterior views of Bede’s Monastery ruins at St Paul's Church, Jarrow.
There is a view looking down onto the river around Jarrow with the town in the background. A tramp steamer sails downstream past a number of shipyards and cranes.
A group of identical smaller steam ships are moored together.
Men work on a ship as it sits in dry dock at Smiths Docks, North Shields. A man rows across the Tyne in a small boat.
Shot of a royal emblem above the Customs House at North Shields. A large ship is moored at a quayside. In the distance the Tyne Ferry is heading back upstream.
The film fades to a view of Marsden Bay where people are walking on the beach, seagulls nest on Marsden Rock, and young boys walk beside the Marden Rock stack. Four young boys run past.
Next, there are shots of the crowded outdoor sea bathing pool and the beach at Tynemouth. A large wave crashes against the side of the bathing pool, splashing a group of children in bathing costumes. Children and adults swim in the pool while others sit on seats around the sides. The camera pans up to show children playing around a large fountain. In the background the tide crashes onto Tynemouth Beach. A young girl in a bathing costume walks around the fountain. Another girl is swimming in the pool with a rubber ring around her waist. Two young girls run beside the pool. A young boy dives into the pool from a slide. Another young girl holds and looks through a safety ring.
Looking down from the cliffs, people are walking on the beach below. A number of small fishing boats are moored on the beach, the ruins of Tynemouth Priory on the headland. Views of Tynemouth Priory and coast guard station. A number of small boys stand around the statue of Admiral Lord Collingwood and nearby cannon.
At the mouth of the Tyne, a number of vessels are at anchor or moored on nearby quaysides. A tramp steamer heads out to sea as another steamer comes into the river. A small ship sails out to sea past the northern pier of Tynemouth harbour. A large crane sits on the pier in the background.
The film ends with a panning shot from Tynemouth out into the harbour, with the piers and the mouth of the Tyne leading out to the open sea.
Title: The End
Title: The Producers wish to acknowledge the help and assistance given by the North East Industrial and Development Association and Messrs. Clarke, Chapman and Co. Ltd of Gateshead.
Credit: Assistant Producer - Anne Balfour-Fraser.
Credit: Location Manager - Monica Casparius.
Credit: Camera - Walter Lassally.
Credit: Editor - Max Brenner.
Credit: Production Advisor - Timothy Burrill.
Credit: Music by Jack Armstrong & His Band.
Title: An Inca Production.
Context
“Shrewd, reserved, independent, hardworking, warm hearted and very hospitable … “ You might not recognise the delightfully well-spoken narrator as she sums up the Geordie character in a film shot in the 1950s around the two industrial centres of the busy ‘coaly Tyne’. The voice belongs to the much-loved stage and screen actress from South Shields, Dame Flora Robson, who was one of eight children born to a former ship's engineer and his wife. However, she appears to have left her own...
“Shrewd, reserved, independent, hardworking, warm hearted and very hospitable … “ You might not recognise the delightfully well-spoken narrator as she sums up the Geordie character in a film shot in the 1950s around the two industrial centres of the busy ‘coaly Tyne’. The voice belongs to the much-loved stage and screen actress from South Shields, Dame Flora Robson, who was one of eight children born to a former ship's engineer and his wife. However, she appears to have left her own Geordie accent behind when she went to train at London’s RADA in her late teens.
Following some success as an opera singer in the theatre chorus at La Scala, Milan, Anne Balfour-Fraser ((10 August 1923 – 26 July 2016)) decided film production was a better long term prospect, particularly as she had become a single parent. With no experience, she set up the production company Inca (Independent Cine Art) in 1954, drawing on her passion for music to create a series of shorts called Music in Miniature. One of her first short fiction films, Simon (1956), directed by Peter Zadeks, featured the future James Bond, Sean Connery. Like many filmmakers and producers, Balfour-Fraser turned to the lucrative post-war world of corporate, state and voluntary sector documentary sponsorship to fund her independent shorts, producing over 100 documentaries between the mid-50s and mid-80s as Inca, Balfour Films (formed in 1970) and Samaritan Films, a name which signalled her humanitarian approach along with a belief in the medium as a potential vehicle for social change. Her films for the Central Office of Information included their speciality, medical films, and also films promoting family planning, and covering the deeply misunderstood subjects of psychiatric illness and learning disability. With funds raised through the Jewish Welfare Board, Samaritan Films also produced director John Krish’s compassionate and claustrophobic observational documentary I Think They Call Him John (1964) about the solitary domestic life of an elderly widowed man in a 60s tower block, hailed as a masterpiece. Balfour-Fraser’s most widely seen production was probably the terrifying public information film Never Go With Strangers (1971), shown on TV and in schools, directed by Indian-born filmmaker Sarah Erulkar. Amongst their popular collaborations, A Woman’s Work (1961) was said to have reached 1 million viewers via the Women’s Institute. She was born into a family of strong-willed women, who included a moderate suffragist grandmother, and her great aunt, Lady Constance Lytton, who was a more militant presence, a member of the Women’s Social and Political Union who believed in direct action, and suffered the brutal practice of force feeding whilst in prison and on hunger strike. Her mother, Lady Ruth Balfour was one of the first women to study at Cambridge and worked as a doctor during the First World War. She also led the Scottish Women’s Voluntary Service during World War Two. Her daughter Anne covered many women’s issues of the day in her filmmaking career, including a television documentary on the French writer, Simone de Beauvoir, a feminist and activist (campaigning, for instance, for the legalisation of abortion). The American TV company insisted the film crew should be entirely female, a condition which proved difficult when Balfour-Fraser tried to find camera operators. When asked whether women had achieved emancipation, she said of the film industry: ‘Women can achieve everything, but it’s appallingly hard work and shouldn’t be as difficult as it is.’ Today in the early 21st century, little appears to have changed. Balfour-Fraser’s love of music shines through the Tyne travelogue A River Speaks, with its distinctive sound track by Jack Armstrong (and his Northumbrian Barnstormers). Armstrong was a well-known and influential folk musician, player (and instrument maker) of Northumbrian Small Pipes, a fiddle player and, from 1949 to 1971, the official ‘Piper to the Duke of Northumberland’, playing at the annual Shrovetide Football at Alnwick. He worked as a coal miner at Dinnington colliery with his father until just after World War One when he became a chauffeur and escaped the pits. Armstrong, both solo and with the band, was hugely popular in the 1950s and 60s, especially with folk dance enthusiasts, entertaining throughout the Borders and Northern England, from city hall to country barn. The band recorded at Abbey Road Studios, and appeared regularly on the BBC’s long running TV series ‘Barn Dance’. Contemporary admirers include Kathryn Tickell who has covered Armstrong’s ‘Rothbury Hills’. The cinematographer on A River Speaks was Walter Lassally, a child refugee to England from Germany in 1939 who later won an Oscar for the 1964 film classic Zorba the Greek. In the 50s he worked on a number of documentaries for directors Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz (a Czech refugee) and Tony Richardson whose experimental film-making came to be known as ‘Free Cinema’, and kick started the revolutionary British new wave of film-making in which Lassally worked. These included so-called kitchen sink dramas such as A Taste of Honey (1961) and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962). Much later in 2013, he made an onscreen appearance in Before Midnight, the third of Richard Linklater’s “Before” trilogy, which was set in Greece – Lassally featured as Patrick, the elderly British writer in whose house Céline (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke) are spending a summer holiday. Pigeon fancying can start young, as this lyrical travelogue reminds us in a scene on the Newcastle Quayside, where, according to Flora, you could indulge your passion for pigeons at ‘the same price for pot or perch’. Traditionally, pigeon racing has been associated with the industrial working class male, particularly miners, the familiar loft or cree a quiet refuge from the week’s monotonous graft. But the history of rearing homing pigeons has spanned popularity with the leisured classes in the 1760s through to wider participation in the nineteenth century, all classes attracted by the competitive thrills and status attached to racing and the aesthetic and intellectual appeal of breeding prize birds, with its great demands on time and money. Its respectability as a sport was enhanced towards the end of the Victorian era when in 1886 King Leopold of Belgium gave pigeon stock to the royal family. A committed pigeon fancier, the Queen still keeps a prestigious Royal loft on her Sandringham estate, which once bred some of the brave birds operating as coded message carriers during World War Two. But despite the sport’s middle-class and even royal supporters, the pigeon was still considered ‘the poor man’s racehorse’. Friendly short-distance challenge matches (rarely above 10 miles) remained rooted within villages or local communities before the 1890s, with prizes and a flutter on the outcome upping the stakes. Choppington was the location of the first homing club, the Great North of England Columbian Society, formed in 1877 to promote racing contests between members. Long-distance pigeon racing was more socially diverse and developed into a modern organised sport, requiring an infrastructure. The first English open national race took place from La Rochelle in 1894, and the formation of the National Homing Union at a meeting in the White Swan in Leeds followed two years later. The Up-North Combine was founded in 1905 as an amalgamation of pigeon racing clubs and federations from Staithes in North Yorkshire up to Berwick at the Scottish Borders. By 1905 the North-Eastern Railway Company had begun to run pigeon specials due to the volume of birds travelling to races from the mining districts of Northumberland, and from 1907 the Up-North Combine had responsibility to negotiate rail transportation for that year’s 23,982 birds to Rennes in France, the release point for one of the season’s big races. Along with the Queen and the thousands of pigeon fanatics that converge on Blackpool for the start of the season with the Royal Pigeon Racing Association Show (former London Mayor Ken Livingstone obviously not amongst the crowd), famous pigeon fanciers through history have included Charles Darwin, Walt Disney, Pablo Picasso (whose daughter was named Paloma – Spanish for pigeon) and the famous cartoon character, Andy Capp. One of the oldest parts of Newcastle in the 1950s, the vibrant Quayside market was still alive with barkers, tipsters, the Jokerman with his fake-blood capsules, stink bombs and gyroscope tops, and stalls selling live animals including pigeons, along a River Tyne chock-a-block with coal trade ships. References: Leisure and Recreation in a Victorian Mining Community: The Social Economy of Leisure in North-East England, 1820–1914, Alan Metcalfe (Routledge, 2006) http://www.screenonline.org.uk/people/id/451935/index.html http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/1397291/index.html https://www.scotsman.com/news/obituaries/obituary-anne-balfour-fraser-film-producer-and-singer-1-4201855 https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/aug/21/anne-balfour-fraser-obituary http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/making_history/pigeon.pdf https://www.europeana.eu/portal/en/explore/people/28042-jack-armstrong-piper.html |