Made in 1900, Boys Sliding is one of several early films held by the YFA made by the Bamforth Company of Holmfirth. Others from this period include Women’s Rights and Kiss in the Tunnel, from 1899, and Leap Frog and Playing in Snow, also from 1900.  James Bamforth was one of a small group of early British filmmakers – along with Cecil Hepworth, George Albert Smith, and Robert Paul – and the first to take the music hall tradition into film.   Bamforth started in business in 1870 as a studio...

Made in 1900, Boys Sliding is one of several early films held by the YFA made by the Bamforth Company of Holmfirth. Others from this period include Women’s Rights and Kiss in the Tunnel, from 1899, and Leap Frog and Playing in Snow, also from 1900.  James Bamforth was one of a small group of early British filmmakers – along with Cecil Hepworth, George Albert Smith, and Robert Paul – and the first to take the music hall tradition into film.
 
Bamforth started in business in 1870 as a studio photographer and began the production of magic lantern slides around 1883. At first a small-scale enterprise, Bamforth's production of photographic lantern slides was so successful that by 1898 a factory extension to the studio in Station Road, Holmfirth, was built, enabling production on a larger scale. At first, the company specialised in 'life model' slide sequences in which simple narratives, usually conveying moral, temperance and religious themes, were photographed in front of a backcloth, painted by James Bamforth himself.  During the showings background music would be played to accommodate the piece shown and a narrator to explain the images to the audience.  For more information on Bamforth see the Context for Leap Frog. 

The turn of the century was an interesting time in the history of children’s activities. It is often said that childhood is a Victorian invention: so too was the governing belief that new ideas, and books, were needed on how to ensure that children are brought up correctly. This was common to both Britain and the U.S.: Baden Powell and his Boy Scouts Movement – established around this time in 1907 – was partly influenced by the Ernest Thompson Seton’s Woodcraft Indians in the U.S., which preceded it.
 
Although sliding on snow might be considered a natural thing for children to do, and not really ‘a game’, this didn’t stop it from becoming one.  Of course, children themselves often turn activities into games; but also those who saw themselves as the moral guardians of children, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, would turn children’s natural playing into ‘games’.  Thus U.S. soldier, journalist and author Alfred Rochefort Calhoun gives the ‘game’ of running around and sliding on snow the name ‘keep the pot a-boiling’, in his book Healthful Sports for Boys written in 1910.  Outdoor games were seen as being particularly good: both Ernest Seton and Alfred Rochefort Calhoun looked to Native American Indians and the outdoor life for inspiration in fostering the right character in boys – see Rochefort’s 1872 book, Wonderful Adventures: a series of narratives of personal experiences among the native tribes of America. See also the Context for the film New Horizons, which features the Boy Scouts.
 
Alfred Rochefort provides a good example of this concern with character formation in children.  In Healthful Sports for Boys, Rochefort states that: ‘Outdoor sports in winter are necessarily restricted to the thing that can be done in the snow or on the ice. But what glorious, health-giving, strength-making things they are! It is from the land of the stern winter that the world's greatest men have come.’ He goes on to describe "keep the pot a-boiling," when, ‘strings of youngsters took the slide. What if some did topple over? No bones were broken, and the incident always caused a lot of good-natured laughter.’

References

Alfred Rochefort, Healthful Sports for Boys: The American Boy’s Ultimate Guide to Building Confidence, Strength and Good Moral Character Through Sports, Games, Camping, Boating, Swimming, Cycling, Skating, Sledding, Sleight of Hand Magic and More!,  Better Days Books, 2007 (1910).

Further Information

Alfred Rochefort Calhoun, Lost in the can~on. The story of Sam Willett’s adventures on the great Colorado of the West, A. L. Burt, New York, 1888.
Alfred Rochefort Calhoun, Wonderful Adventures: a series of narratives of personal experiences among the native tribes of America, Cassell, Petter, & Galpin, London, 1872.