Metadata
WORK ID: YFA 2118 (Master Record)
Title | Year | Date |
HULL STREET SCENES | c.1957 | 1954-01-01 |
Details
Original Format: Standard 8 Colour: Colour Sound: Silent Duration: 27 mins 56 secs Credits: John Turner Subject: Urban Life Fashions Family Life |
Summary Part of the John Turner collection, this is a film showing street scenes in Hull and of Pearson Park in Hull. It shows children playing, teenagers in groups in the streets and the park, as well as a cricket match and an event in York. |
Description
Part of the John Turner collection, this is a film showing street scenes in Hull and of Pearson Park in Hull. It shows children playing, teenagers in groups in the streets and the park, as well as a cricket match and an event in York.
The film begins with a parade of trucks as part of student rag week. One truck has students dressed in an animal costume, with female students as mermaids, another is for the Catholic Society. This is followed by a traditional band. The students are all dressed...
Part of the John Turner collection, this is a film showing street scenes in Hull and of Pearson Park in Hull. It shows children playing, teenagers in groups in the streets and the park, as well as a cricket match and an event in York.
The film begins with a parade of trucks as part of student rag week. One truck has students dressed in an animal costume, with female students as mermaids, another is for the Catholic Society. This is followed by a traditional band. The students are all dressed in fancy costumes, one on a bicycle with a parasol, making their way along a shopping street past the shops of Spence's and Carline's.
The film then has a break and returns with a building, possibly bomb damaged, being demolished. The film switches to a group of elderly men sitting on a bench, one of them has a barrow. Some children are out on a street, two of them pushing a pram. Small children play in a front yard and on the steps leading up to the house. Other people are sitting on steps and the walls of the front gardens. Down another street there are also children out playing, with many prams and washing lines hanging between the houses. Then people are out on a busy street with shops, bicycles and the Salvation Army selling their newspaper. Four teenage girls sit outside a house. One teenager holds a baby, and four teenage boys are stood by a wall eating lollies. More small children wander down narrow terraced streets, and the film switches between various street scenes. In one some boys sit against a wall and are playing cards. A man in a white coat pushes a barrel down a street selling something. The group of boys who are playing cards increases. Several prams have been left out in a narrow street with terraced houses on one side and a large church on the other. Down by a river a black boy is fishing. A group of small girls are playing in a street, and two girls with abacuses sit on the kerb. Three teenage boys are stood talking outside a shop.
The film then switches to snow covered streets, with boys playing on the compacted snow. The film shows TV aerials on the roofs of the houses, and a sign for the New Adelaide Recreational Club. A street gas lamp is seen through a backstreet archway. A sign shows 'Forfeited Pledges' and a pawn shop sign hangs up outside a shop with watches hanging up in the window.
There is than another break before returning to show a boy kneeling over a pond in Pearson Park with a fishing net. A girl eats a lolly next to an ice cream seller. There is a plaque to commemorate Zachariah Charles Pearson. Two other boys look into a tin with, presumably, small fish from the pond. A man pushes a girl on a swing. There are other boys down by the pond, some with model boats. Two elderly men sit on a park bench. Children are on the swings, and the Park Warden talks to a mother. Some cyclists go past on Pearson Park Road, with an ice cream vendor in the background, around which gather a group of young men. There is another group of young men with cycles, possibly students.
The film then switches to people walking out onto a promenade on a small boating lake, possibly the Ferns Lake in East Park, and some people are gathered by a gate. A cyclists rides across a flooded area, and there is a soaking wet dog. Some young people are stood talking in a street. Boats are on the lake and a large building can be seen on a hill in the background. Back at Pearson Park a woman is being pushed in a wheelchair, and boys and men are together playing football. A family are having a picnic in the park, and men are sat on a bench. Again we see the playground and the boys by the pond. There is a painted shed with 'Civic Catering' written on it. A young man is sat on a bench surrounded by boys who laugh at what he is saying.
Some men are playing bowls in the park, and boys are playing cricket. In the playground girls are playing in a sand pit. The film roams about the park observing all the people: young adults sitting on benches, children in the playground and playing football.
There is another break and the film returns to a field where people are sitting in chairs and watching an athletics event at Bootham School, followed by synchronised diving. The Lord Mayor arrives at an event being held in York. A car park is filled with cars. This is at the back of the paint works of the filmmaker’s father, followed by a shot of his home garden.
There is a break before returning to a cricket match, with people sat on benches, including a nurse. The film ends with some trees in full bloom. A young woman sits on a bench in the Museum Gardens in York waiting for someone. A young man arrives and they walk off together through the gardens.
After a break we see a sign for Honister Pass, in the Lake District, with someone else filming a car slowly making its way up the steep incline. At the end another sign states 'you have been warned'. A man and a woman, possibly the filmmaker's parents, wash some cups out in a mountain stream, and they feed some birds. There is another sign for 'Ferry Stop', and their car boards a ferry being pulled by a cable.
On the other side a large group of children are stood watching, and they are led off back to their school. This is Standish Grammar school, (a boy’s junior school) where the filmmaker’s mother was the head teacher.
The film then switches to a Mayoral Procession in York, which is joined by an ecclesiastical procession from St Michael le Belfrey, with scaffolding on the Minster. A large crowd has gathered in York centre, with the Minster in the background.
There is a break and the film continues back at the grandparent’s house at Eastholme, Driffield, with members of the family getting into their car, and others walking around the garden. There is also footage of the other grandparent’s home in at Cranswick, Driffield. Back in York Mansion House is shown, before returning again to the Lake Distract and a view over the hills and then the sea overlooked by a ruined castle on a hill. The filmmaker’s parents walk out onto a pier on a blustery day, looking at the sea and a seal bobbing on the waves.
Back in Hull some teenage boys have some cigarettes; there are backstreets with washing lines and an unattended pram. Some boys play football in a derelict area, surrounded by bombed out houses. There is a panoramic view over a smoky Hull cityscape, and more images of Hull, including children playing, but which have other images superimposed on them.
Context
Hull Street Scenes (2118) is one of four films donated by John Turner, an amateur cinematographer in the 1950s. He was a physics student at Hull University for three years, beginning his studies in 1957. Aside from this however, his main interest was documenting snippets of the daily lives of ordinary people. His ‘street scene’ films have a particular focus on the youth of Hull and each one (around half an hour’s worth of footage) was captured with the intent to reflect the “different world”...
Hull Street Scenes (2118) is one of four films donated by John Turner, an amateur cinematographer in the 1950s. He was a physics student at Hull University for three years, beginning his studies in 1957. Aside from this however, his main interest was documenting snippets of the daily lives of ordinary people. His ‘street scene’ films have a particular focus on the youth of Hull and each one (around half an hour’s worth of footage) was captured with the intent to reflect the “different world” (The Way We Were, references) that had developed in the post-World War Two transitional period.
In the ITV series The Way We Were Turner is interviewed about his films and discusses his desire to record this “different world” in the way in which he saw it, thus the eighteen year old student’s view of 1950s Hull has a large focus on people his own age. Many of the clips in Turner’s films show the young people of Hull making the films an important documentary of young people in a time of social change and a useful tool for the study of social change and British emerging culture. In the post-war economic boom there was a period of renewal, as demonstrated in the film by the pulling down of derelict buildings, presumably the result of bombing raids, and across Britain community developments were undertaken, including the construction of many council estates and shopping centres. Despite this, as Turner recollects, there were still areas of abject poverty in Hull perhaps resulting in the strong sense of community conveyed in the films and the concentration on social gatherings and events. Turner’s emphasis on youth and young people in his films brings to light another aspect of 1950s culture; the emerging generation of teenage rebels and Teddy Boys. Teddy Boys were the most visible British subculture in the 1950s in terms of media representation. They were often painted with negative connotations of juvenile delinquency, an assumed result of exposure to American rock-n-roll and jazz music, though the Teddy Boy movement predated the introduction of rock-n-roll to Britain by several years. They were also known as New Edwardians because of their fashion influence, an attempt to revive the Edwardian styles of the first few decades of the twentieth century, and “an upper class reaction to the austerity imposed by the socialist government in the years following the World War II” (The Edwardian Teddy Boy, references), another factor in the new image of rebellious teenagers that appeared in the fifties. However, this image doesn’t appear in Turner’s films. In fact he recalls in The Way We Were that general public were friendly and happy for him to film them, and that he used his camera as a way of meeting new people. Also interviewed in The Way We Were, Ron Wilkinson, an ex-Teddy Boy, comments that it was a time when the sense of community was strong and that Hull was a hub of social activity. While Hull Street Scenes (2118) has a particular focus on children and young people, another running theme is sports and leisure and the film is interspersed with what appears to be home video and holiday footage; scenes filmed in back gardens, in York city centre and also at Honister Pass in the Lake District. These two themes add to the naturalistic, slice-of-life feel of the film that aims to capture ‘life as it is’. Similar to a ‘fly on the wall’ documentary, the film consists of footage in which the camera and its operator have little or no impact on the subject of the recording. This, and the fact that the footage is unedited, produces a documentation that is ideal for studying social and cultural history without filters. References: Nick Bentley, ‘New Elizabethans’: The Representation of Youth Subcultures in 1950s British Fiction, Literature & History, Vol. 19, 2010. Andrew Knight, The Way We Were, Tyne Tees Television, 2007. The Edwardian Teddy Boy Fifties Britain |