This fascinating film is one of a number of films made by Hull student, John Turner. John arrived in Hull in 1957 to study Physics at the University, leaving three years later. From his lodgings on Wellbeck Street, the home of Mrs Holmes, John would venture out onto the streets of Hull and film whatever he came across. John made the films using just 4 minutes 10 second reels, which required turning over when half way through – hence we sometimes get a glimpse of John’s shoes! These short...

This fascinating film is one of a number of films made by Hull student, John Turner. John arrived in Hull in 1957 to study Physics at the University, leaving three years later. From his lodgings on Wellbeck Street, the home of Mrs Holmes, John would venture out onto the streets of Hull and film whatever he came across. John made the films using just 4 minutes 10 second reels, which required turning over when half way through – hence we sometimes get a glimpse of John’s shoes! These short reels simply got spliced together without any editing; so that the film will skip around from street scenes, to shopping scenes, to dock scenes – something that adds to the film’s ‘fly-on-the-wall’ character. Together they make up over 100 minutes of film.

 

John kept the films until quite recently when he donated them to the North West Film Archive, in Manchester, near where John lives, who passed them on to the YFA. They had remained all that time unwatched.  But John’s father-in-law had also been an amateur filmmaker in the 1930s, and he hadn’t kept his films, thus making John aware of just how important it was not to discard these films. The film makes an interesting contrast to the film made of the visit of the Queenand Prince Philip to Hull, which also took place a bit earlier in 1957 – see Royal Visit to Hull.

 

Although John had been using a camera before he arrived in Hull, he made the films mainly as a way of getting to meet new people. The fact that John came from quite a different, and better off, background than those he met gave the filming an added interest. John had no hidden agenda, just a fascination with what he saw.  Interviewed for the ITV programme The Way We Were, John recalls some of the appalling conditions caused by poverty.  But his most abiding memory is of just how friendly people were, never objecting to his filming. Indeed, he was able to wander around the docks without anyone bothering him.

 

John notes that he may well have been influenced by the cinéma vérite that he saw at University. This was the name given to those films, both fictional and documentary, that had become especially important in France. Cinéma vérite, literally film truth or ‘truthful film’, drew upon the realism that developed in strands of French arts, especially in the novel, in the later part of the 19th century. Beginning in the 1950s, some French film directors started using non-actors, small hand- held cameras, and real life locations. Nevertheless, despite the similarities, cinéma vérite was would often manipulate what was being filmed, to get at a deeper truth, and sound was also important to this. Moreover, by and large cinéma vérite post-dates these scenes from Hull, taking off as it did in the early 1960s, so perhaps not too much should be made of the influence here. In fact this film might better be placed under the heading of ‘Naturalism’, where any human mediation between the camera and what is being filmed is kept to an absolute minimum.

 

Rather, the camera was for John more a prop that enabled him to communicate to people. Looking back on this enterprise it might be considered a brave undertaking for an 18 year old, and somewhat shy, middle class student to do. Indeed, the gangs of Teddy boy youth would certainly be intimidating, not without reason. But John would ask them directions for somewhere, and then use this as a way in to ask if they minded being filmed. Perhaps it is of some significance the fact that there is very little ‘playing up’ for the camera from any of those being filmed: something that may well be very different today.

 

Something that has certainly changed is the practice of people going around to their neighbours to watch TV. John recalls their next door neighbour, a teacher and her young daughter, popping around to watch Dixon of Dock Green. Another 1950s Hull resident, from Hessle Road, Ron Wilkinson, also interviewed on the Way We Were, notes that despite the poverty, and maybe in part because of it, there was a strong sense of community at that time, and he doesn’t remember anyone having to lock their doors. It can of course be pointed out that although much of the sense of being part of a local community has been lost, much has been gained over the proceeding decades in living and housing conditions. Yet despite this progress, it might be asked why there hasn’t been so much more given the continual housing problems and poverty that remain in Hull.

 

Ron Wilkinson also recalls that Hull City Centre in the late 1950s and early1960s was a good place to be. By and large there wasn’t any excessive drinking, and in the evening the music halls, the Continental and the Tivoli, were popular, as were the pubs, most of which would have a local rock’n’roll band playing. The film also shows the popularity of Hepworths department store, which features in other films –see The East Riding (1959) and the Context for this for more on Hepworths. Perhaps even more interesting is seeing Sydney Scarborough record store (now gone). Record stores like this were once common, but now rather rare. Those of a certain age might recognise some the records on display –during the last three months of 1957 Elvis had eight hit 45s in the charts.

 

But perhaps the most poignant images in the film are those of the children playing in the streets and the derelict areas severely damaged by German bombing. Hull had been particularly hard hit by bombing raids, and was in the process of radically re-building – see the Context of King Visit to Hull (1941), for more on the bombing the re-building.  It was a time when it was usual for children to play on the streets – John Turner doesn’t remember there being any cars on the street where he lived. There must be some irony in the way that the homes that had been devastated by bombing, and the lives lost as a result, had become the play areas of the following generation – a phenomena that is still too frequent an occurrence in other parts of the world.

 

It is perhaps easy to get sentimental about this ‘bygone age’, but it was an age when the culture was changing rapidly.  At the time John was walking the streets of Hull with his cine camera, another member of the University of Hull, lecturer Richard Hoggart, was publishing his influential book The Uses of Literacy. In this seminal work, sub titled Aspects of Working Class Life, Richard Hoggart chronicles what he saw as the breaking down of a popular culture and its replacement with a mass culture promulgated by a mass media. Whether or not John would have been aware of this book, his film makes for a fascinating compliment to Hoggart’s thesis – one that has become more relevant in the intervening years. 

 

John certainly was aware of the fact that the time he was filming was an important transitional period, one when many of the bomb damaged terraced housing was being replaced by new council estates and high rise flats. This historical background was in the back of John’s mind, though in his interview he plays down the significance the films may have. But his film will surely be an important document for social historians, and a vivid portrayal of a lost world for both older and younger generations.

 

References

 

Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working Class Life, Chatto and Windus, 1957.

Peter Wintock, Cinéma Vérite: defining the moment, DVD, Beckman Visual, 2006.

How does realism differ from naturalism?