This film is one of a collection of home movies made by James Dudfield Rose ((1907 -1992), often with the help of his fiancee, and later wife, Elsie Adeline Rose.  He was born in Jarrow to J Dudfield Rose (known as Jim) and Mary Ann nèe Skelland, and was educated at Jarrow Grammar School and King's College Medical School, Newcastle. As a child he was very good with his hands, building the most complicated Meccano models, a transporter bridge, the Eiffel tower and a working loom.  The...

This film is one of a collection of home movies made by James Dudfield Rose ((1907 -1992), often with the help of his fiancee, and later wife, Elsie Adeline Rose.  He was born in Jarrow to J Dudfield Rose (known as Jim) and Mary Ann nèe Skelland, and was educated at Jarrow Grammar School and King's College Medical School, Newcastle. As a child he was very good with his hands, building the most complicated Meccano models, a transporter bridge, the Eiffel tower and a working loom. 

The family had been keen photographers for several generations and Dudfield took up the new technique of 16 mm home cine photography with enthusiasm, recording family life in Jarrow, his trips abroad and more locally. His fiancèe, Elsie Adeline Richardson, created the intertitles.

They travelled to Hamburg and Erlangen during Germany's turbulent inter-war years for Dudfield to learn how to use a gastroscope and bring one of these advanced medical instruments back with him.

As a member of the Territorial Army he was immediately called up at the outbreak of war, precipitating his marriage in the first week of September 1939. He worked as a surgeon with the field hospitals of the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) during the retreat to Dunkirk, where he got off the beach at 2.30 am on 28th May on the minesweeper HMS Hebe, having been told he “could either pack up and leave the wounded or stay and be captured.”  His subsequent experience took him to the Middle East, which he photographed extensively, the siege of Tobruk, Lüneberg Heath and most memorably and shockingly Bergen Belsen concentration camp, whose horrors he also recorded on film.

 After the war, he continued his surgical career at the Royal Victoria Infirmary and the General Hospital, Newcastle, specializing in biliary disease and gastroscopy, for which techniques colour cine films were made by the Medical School Illustration Department. The collection also contains records of his work filmed by the hospital technical team. He continued with cine film until the 1960s but still photography was a passion all his life, remaining a firm fan of Leica cameras. In the basement of his house in Jesmond, Newcastle he had his own dark room. 

He had a distinguished surgical career, being mentioned in Hamilton Bailey, the surgical bible of the time, gave a lecture tour across the US and was President of the North of England Surgical Society.

On retirement he developed his craft skill including embroidery but especially weaving, having a loom hauled up into the tower of his Northumberland country home, Dunstan Hall, Craster. There he wove blankets, cloth and Northumbrian plaid, which was worn by the Duke's Piper, Jack Armstrong.

Elsie Adeline Rose was born in Low Fell, Gateshead to Charles Bowman Christy Richardson and Sarah (née Moult). She was educated at the Church High School, Newcastle and Cheltenham Ladies' College. After school she qualified as a librarian and worked with the travelling library service based in Morpeth, in Durham City, Wakefield and King's College, Newcastle. She was good at drawing small cartoons and designs rather than fine art; she enjoyed calligraphy, wrote short stories that were published and won prizes, as well as personal poems. She contributed home made titles and intertitles to Dudfield Rose's cine films, as illustrated in the staged home movie Our Home.

She was fond of dogs and had several corgis before her children arrived, which occasionally featured in the home movies. While Dudfield was away during the war, following bombing raids on Newcastle she lived in Edmundbyers, County Durham. The location features in the amateur footage Annual Gala; High Force; Venture Mail Coach and Punch Bowl Inn

References: 

Biographical information provided by depositor James Rose, the filmmaker's son.