The belief at the time that sea air was good for your health motivated a lot of people to travel to the seaside or coastlines for their holidays. And the Mortons were extremely lucky that they had some of the most beautiful unspoilt coastlines on their doorstep. Here we have a home movie of a seaside holiday to the Bamburgh area of Northumberland where they are staying in a camper van, which alongside other cars all seem precariously close to the cliff edge. No health and safety rules then...

The belief at the time that sea air was good for your health motivated a lot of people to travel to the seaside or coastlines for their holidays. And the Mortons were extremely lucky that they had some of the most beautiful unspoilt coastlines on their doorstep. Here we have a home movie of a seaside holiday to the Bamburgh area of Northumberland where they are staying in a camper van, which alongside other cars all seem precariously close to the cliff edge. No health and safety rules then obviously.

The film opens with a woman taking a photograph of Bamburgh Castle from a road a mile or so from the castle. Bamburgh is one of the largest inhabited castles in the country. There is archaeological evidence that there were people here as early as 10,000 BC and there are Bronze Age burials and pottery sherds dating to the Iron Age.  It has an incredible history of Viking invaders, visiting Christian saints, sieges and ghosts.  Edward IV almost destroyed it in the Wars of the Roses but eventually Lord Armstrong's restoration saved it from ruin. To this day it is the ancestral home to the Armstrong family, but was opened to the public in the early 1900s.

Home movies are a valuable source of social history where we can follow the everyday, those special family gatherings, the casual often unremarkable events, which nevertheless give us unique snap shots of a life. From these visual documents we can recall the clothes we wore, the cars we drove, the shops and local amenities, the food we ate, and the pastimes and landscapes we enjoyed. This is but a glimpse of the Morton family and friends’ lives, yet it reveals so much. They obviously enjoyed fashion wearing relaxed cotton summer dresses with prints, casual sweaters that emphasised waists pairing them with slacks, capri trousers or full skirts and embracing the freedom of wearing shorts around the caravan and on the beach. Styles that wouldn’t go amiss today.

Their camper van was a Commer van, a British manufacturer of commercial vehicles from 1905 until 1979, including light vans, medium to heavy commercial trucks, military vehicles and buses. The company also designed and built some of its own diesel engines for its heavy commercial vehicles.  In England the origins of the caravan go back to the early 1800s and were more functional as they were used for shelter by farm workers, travelling circus and fairground showmen. Jump to the 1920’s manufacturers supplied their caravans with complete with a set of china, cooking utensils and cutlery, but as war loomed in the 1930’s production virtually stopped. However, the cheaper caravans proved to be ideal for emergency accommodation. By the 1960s caravanning really started to take off in the UK. Manufacturing techniques improved mass production and as a result created a price of around £600. The bright yellow Formica kitchen with gas cooker really represented everything energetic about the 60s. Good enough to cook a meat and two veg supper on accompanied by a good cup of tea. The preparation of food, apart from the task of peeling the potatoes was obviously helped by a number of cans of food, including Libbys and Batchelor tins of peas, carrots, pineapple and grapefruit juice. Caravaning gradually became a source of cheap holidays especially when families started hiring on the growing number of caravan sites around the country.

Dorothy Morton was born in 1926, at 2 Bell Street, Cockton Hill, Bishop Auckland, one of seven children. Her father, Jack Hunt, the son of a lead miner had gained a scholarship to get into Bishop Auckland Grammar School and was a talented violinist. He became a reservist with the Royal Army Medical Corps, and once the threat of war was on the horizon and began training. He was called up six weeks before war was declared and was part of the troops trapped at Dunkirk, eventually escaping back to England on a fishing boat.

Dorothy married Stephen Morton, a teacher and they had one son who features in another film from the Morton collection JONATHAN KNOCKOUT; NEW CARAVAN; SCHOOL SPORTS ETC. (1975-1976)

Dorothy and Stephen obviously had a love of the outdoors and making family movies. She died on 30 July 2018 at 91 years of age and her husband Stephen just over 20 years earlier.

The home movies the Mortons made used 16 mm film, which refers to the width of the film and was generally used for non-theatrical film-making, or for low-budget pictures, with richer amateurs and early cine clubs also embracing the format. It was an expensive hobby at the time with the camera alone costing more than a month’s average wage. It existed as a popular amateur format for several decades, alongside 8 mm film and, in the 1960s, Super 8 film

References:

 http://www.bamburghcastle.com/history