Metadata
WORK ID: NEFA 22060 (Master Record)
| Title | Year | Date |
| VAUX ENCOURAGE SPORT 1961 | 1961 | 1961-01-01 |
|
Details
Original Format: 16mm Colour: Black & White / Colour Sound: Sound Duration: 38 mins 42 sec Credits: Organisation: Turners Film Productions, Vaux Breweries Individuals:Douglas Nicholson, Bob Danvers Walker Genre: Promotional Subject: COUNTRYSIDE / LANDSCAPES ENTERTAINMENT / LEISURE SPORT |
| Summary A promotional film produced by Turners Film Productions for Vaux and Associated Breweries Limited looking back on a year of sporting success across Scotland and Northern England sponsored by Vaux. The film is introduced and ended by the Chairman of the company, Mr Douglas Nicholson and the film features athletics from Gateshead, show jumping from E ... |
|
Description
A promotional film produced by Turners Film Productions for Vaux and Associated Breweries Limited looking back on a year of sporting success across Scotland and Northern England sponsored by Vaux. The film is introduced and ended by the Chairman of the company, Mr Douglas Nicholson and the film features athletics from Gateshead, show jumping from Edinburgh, archery from County Durham, junior motor racing from Charterhall in Berwickshire, cycling from Wolsingham, golf from Stanley as well as...
A promotional film produced by Turners Film Productions for Vaux and Associated Breweries Limited looking back on a year of sporting success across Scotland and Northern England sponsored by Vaux. The film is introduced and ended by the Chairman of the company, Mr Douglas Nicholson and the film features athletics from Gateshead, show jumping from Edinburgh, archery from County Durham, junior motor racing from Charterhall in Berwickshire, cycling from Wolsingham, golf from Stanley as well as horse racing from Redcar and Ayr. The film also features the presentation of mini-minor motor cars to winners of Vaux ‘Spot the Ball’ competition and the 1961 Lille to the North East pigeon race.
The opening titles are shown over a montage of sporting events featuring racing cars speeding around a track, runners competing in a race, pigeons being released and horse racing.
Title: Vaux Encourage Sport
Title: A record of sporting events promoted by Vaux Breweries during 1961
Credit: Photography Turners Film Productions. Commentator Bob Danvers Walker
Title: Introduced by Mr Douglas Nicholson Chairman Vaux and Associated Breweries
Standing beside a large fire Mr Nicholson introduces the film 'to help bring the best of sport in the North East of England'.
Title: Vaux International Athletic Meeting Gateshead
An array of athletics events takes place in Gateshead at the ‘International Athletic Meeting’ including the junior steeplechase, javelin. Crowd shots are interspersed with the athletic events. Spillers Mill appears in the background across the river in some athletics running events.
The next sequence is of the shot put competition with Yorkshire born Arthur Rowe, the British and European Olympic record holder. He signs autographs for a group of young boys surrounding him.
The pole vault competition features winner Rex Porter and Mike Nagent, the junior record holder.
Sprinting track events are next, then long distance running with Anne Oliver from Gosforth Harriers.
Winners are presented with contemporary 1960s items of furniture as prizes. Close-up of the back of a man's tracksuit top with sewn slogan "Running In Please Pass."
Derek Ibbotson, the UK mile run record holder, competes in the mens long distance event. Prizes (Vaux cups this time) are awarded by the Chairman of Vaux, Mr Nicholson, and his two sons. The three mile race event is won by Mike Bullivant (Derby and County AC), shown crossing the finishing line.
The 100 metre sprint is won by a Gosforth Harrier, Emmet.(?)
Title: Vaux Competition for 12 Mini-Minors
An advertising hoarding appears on the wall of a warehouse that reads: "Double Maxim gives You Double Strength." The winners of a Vaux sponsored ‘Spot the ball’ competition are featured next; each receiving a brand new Mini-Minor. The cars are filmed leaving a warehouse next to the ‘Brandling Arms’ (possibly in Gosforth) and one being presented to Mrs T. Thompson a blue Mini-Minor and a cheque for £50. Outside at the ‘Lambton Worm’ pub between Birtley and Chester Le Street Mr J Pilkington from Jesmond is also presented with a red Mini-Minor and is seen sitting in the drivers seat. A group of the men retreat inside the Lambton Worm.
Title: Usher Gold Tankard Event at Edinburgh Horse Show
Next is the show jumping event in Edinburgh at Stenhouse Stadium. A banner reads: ‘Edinburgh Horse Show: In Aid of King George’s Fund for the Sailors and Military Charities.’ Famous competitors include Ted Williams, Jack Barry and Betty Henry. Footage includes a fall from a horse after one jump.
Title: Northern Counties Archery Championship Houghall
The Northern Counties Championship Archery takes place at Houghall in County Durham. A three day competition in which both men and women take part, including the ladies record holder: Miss Jane Hayward. Miss Shirley Lions wins and prizes are presented by Mrs Davidson.
Close-ups follow of men and women counting arrows in the targets at the start of competitions. A man pulls out an arrow. A woman competitor pulls out her arrow. Prizes are arranged on a table. A brief shot of a woman in baseball cap looking through binoculars. There are various general views and close-ups of the archers. A judge blows his whistle. Competitors relax with a beer outside, by the outdoor Vaux stall bar.
Title: Vaux Gold Tankard Pigeon Race. Lille to the North East
The Vaux Gold Tankard Pigeon Racing begins with owners registering their birds with officials of the Up North Combine pigeon club who ring the birds before placing them in a wicker basket for the journey to Lillie in northern France. At Newcastle Central Station porters load the baskets into a special wagon and the steam train leave the station. At Gatwick Airport a Dan-Air London airplane takes off in day and lands at Lille at night.
The baskets are eventually opened and the pigeons are released to fly back to Great Britain. Outside a loft at Skinningrove on the North Yorkshire coast owners wait for their birds to arrive home. A pigeon comes into land at the loft and its collection by its owner. An official from Up North Combine come to the loft to check and confirm the winner Mr Alan Hicks
A view of a Vaux Gold Tankard award
Title: Formula Junior Race, Charterhall for Usher Tankard
The Formula Junior Race for the Usher Tankard and £100 prize winning money. Single-seat racing cars are briefly inspected before the race. Among the racers are Trevor Taylor, the reigning junior champion, Peter Proctor and Tony Maggs. The winner is presented with the tankard from which he drinks the celebratory champagne.
Title: Vaux Tankard Cycling Championship Wolsingham
A large suspended banner reads: ‘START of the Vaux Silver Pint Tankard Race’. Miss Weardale starts the race. The 110 mile race takes place with a backdrop of rural hills. Among the riders are some notable contestants: Peter Chisom, Billy Holmes (the current champion) and Bill Bradley (Wigan). The voice over remarks on the ‘sharp and dangerous bends.’ Various shots focus on the crowds beside the road, including one shot of many onlookers in multicoloured jumpers. A view of the finish line and of the presentation of prizes in the street by Vaux Chairman, Mr Nicholson.
Title: Usher Gold Tankard Horse Racing Ayr
[B&W] The Usher Edinburgh Gold Tankard horse racing takes place at Ayr and is filmed for BBC Grandstand with on-the-spot commentary. Jockeys include Lionel Brown, Bill Williamson and Ron Hutchinson. High angle shots capture one horse bucking and the race master wielding his whip at the start of the course pre-race. Lionel Brown wins the race on Three Wishes.
[Colour] Title: Northumberland & Durham Open Golf Championship. Vaux Tankard for Best Under 21 Golfer.
On the course at South Moor, Stanley, various shots of the players as they tee off and at different holes during the competition. Robert Walker is the winner from Hebburn. Golf balls being struck on the sound track.
Title: Vaux Tankard Handicap at Redcar Racecourse
Vaux Tankard Handicap race, the north’s most valuable handicap with a prize of £10,460, includes footage of experts studying the horses in the paddock that includes Winston Churchill’s horse ‘Vienna’. High angle shots of a packed stadium and thronging crowds of smartly dressed spectators. Tic tac men make coded hand signals. Race highlights are followed by the presentation of awards. Lester Piggott rides the winning horse, Off Key. Douglas Nicholson presents the tankard to the winning owner.
The final part of the film begins with a montage of views taken from the film cutting to Mr Nicholson back beside the fireplace. The film ends on him comparing the many spectators seen at the Vaux Tankard Handicap at Redcar to those of individual owners waiting on their own for the return of the pigeon competing in Lille to the North East.
Context
This film was commissioned by the race sponsors, Vaux & Associated Breweries, a family run business founded in Sunderland in 1837 who were big supporters of sports events across the North East, some of which are pictured here.
The production company was Turners, which started life as a chemist shop, selling cameras from 1931 onwards down Pink Lane, Newcastle. The business grew into one of the North East’s leading photographic and cine retail firms, with 4 stores in Newcastle as well as...
This film was commissioned by the race sponsors, Vaux & Associated Breweries, a family run business founded in Sunderland in 1837 who were big supporters of sports events across the North East, some of which are pictured here.
The production company was Turners, which started life as a chemist shop, selling cameras from 1931 onwards down Pink Lane, Newcastle. The business grew into one of the North East’s leading photographic and cine retail firms, with 4 stores in Newcastle as well as branches in Whitley Bay, South Shields and Darlington. A new colour film processing laboratory was opened in the 1970s on Tyne Tunnel Trading Estate at North Shields to meet the increasing demand of holiday snaps, and by 1976 Turners was developing more than five million pictures a year. Following World War Two, Turners excelled at industrial and corporate films, working for all the major regional industries over the years, making over 2,000 films during its long existence (1930s-1990s). One of the earliest films in the north east region, a beautiful industrial film and workers’ portrait, records The Building and Launch of the Mocamedes. The International Athletics meeting at Gateshead took place on 1 July 1961 and was the new arena’s first major competition. Gateshead Council began work on the Youth Stadium in early 1955, transforming the derelict site of two large chemical works beside the River Tyne, demolished in 1932 leaving a 2-million-tonne heap of spoil. Clearing and regenerating old industrial sites like this was one local government response to the inner city decay of the 1970s. On 27 August 1955 it was opened by a former world-record marathon runner of the 1950s, Jim Peters. This original venue was little more than a cinder running track and an asphalt cycling track, with floodlights and seating added later. In the early 1970s Gateshead Council Leader William Collins decided to invest in a new synthetic track, inspired by the promise of a local athlete destined for Olympic glory, Brendan Foster, who was forced to travel to Scotland to train. On 3 August 1974, the Gateshead Games were staged to reopen the stadium, with Foster promising to make it a landmark athletics meeting. The track star wagered he could set a new world record in the men’s 3,000 metres at the 1974 Gateshead Games and help win international publicity for the city and its improved stadium track. That day, the sell-out crowd of 13,500 were there to cheer on their local hero, ‘Big Bren’, future medallist at the Montreal Olympics. Thinking small has its advantages. In 1959 the Mini was launched for an affordable £496, and more than five million cars have since been sold, making it the best-selling British car in history. The car was the brainchild of an engineering genius who had not even seen a car until he was 12 years old. A British citizen born in Turkey in 1906 who later dubbed himself ‘The Ironmonger’, Alec Issigonis designed his compact, fuel-efficient version of the ‘people’s car’ for the British Motor Company in response to the Suez Oil Crisis (1956). An iconic car of the 1960s, the Mini (Cooper) achieved star status as souped-up red, white and blue getaway cars in the British heist movie The Italian Job (1969) starring Michael Caine, with stunts choreographed to a soundtrack by Quincy Jones. The press loved the Mini, publicised as “Wizardry on Wheels” at the launch, but it took celebrity owners such as Paul McCartney, Twiggy and Hollywood movie star Steve McQueen to send car sales through the roof and cement its cult status in the swinging Sixties. No surprise that Frank Nicholson, the Chairman of Vaux and Associated Breweries Ltd. hit upon an idea for boosting beer sales by offering brand new Minis with customised Vaux "V" brand bumper grilles, as prizes for a “Spot the Ball” competition in 1961. Entry tickets were free with every shilling’s worth of beer bought in a Vaux pub. The winning customers from the Brandling Arms in Gosforth, Newcastle, and the Lambton Worm near Chester-le-Street, seem happy with their prizes, especially at a time when only four out of ten households in Great Britain had a car, and women car drivers were difficult to find. By 1976 only 29% of women held a licence. Nicholson’s sales gimmick was, however, most unpopular with the RAC and the Association of Pledged Motorists (for reformed drink-drivers). Also featured in this Vaux sports run-down of 1961 is Britain’s largest (some say the world’s greatest) pigeon race from Lille in France, organised by the Up North Combine. Traditionally, pigeon racing has been associated with the industrial working class male, particularly miners, the familiar loft or cree a quiet refuge from theworking 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. The first homing club, the Great North of England Columbian Society, was formed in Choppington, Northumberland, in 1877. 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 (former London Mayor Ken Livingstone obviously not amongst the crowds), 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. We also join race goers who fancy a flutter at the Vaux Tankard Handicap on Redcar Racecourse in 1961, where Winston Churchill’s horse Vienna competed but Lester Piggott rode the winning horse, Off Key. Redcar’s popularity as a seaside resort in the 1920s and 1930s was boosted by the Whitsuntide race meeting, which attracted visitors from across the Teesside region, pulling in crowds of up to 30,000. The racecourse once boasted the second richest handicap in Europe. Redcar’s punters are entertained before the race by the mysterious sign language of the tic tac men, who signal odds and price changes with white-gloved hands, from the bookmakers at the rail to the bookies in the centre of the betting ring. Tic tac is sadly fast becoming a lost art, replaced in the gaming industry by computers and mobile phones. References: https://www.gazettelive.co.uk/news/nostalgia/morris-mini-minor-launch-vaux-brewery-5793029 https://www.pressreader.com/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/car-manufacturers/mini/10456893/Mini-a-brief-history.html http://www.theitalianjob.com/cars_coopers.htm https://www.nationalflyingclub.co.uk/index.php/about-us/royal-connections/152-our-royal-connections http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/making_history/pigeon.pdf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_North_Combine |
