Metadata
WORK ID: NEFA 22197 (Master Record)
| Title | Year | Date |
| THE FARNES | 1930s | 1930-01-01 |
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Details
Original Format: 16mm Colour: Black & White Sound: Silent Duration: 9 mins 22 secs Credits: James Dudfield Rose Genre: Amateur Subject: Seaside |
| Summary Amateur film of a cruise to the Farne Islands from Seahouses featuring Elsie Adelaine Richardson (future wife of the filmmaker), shot by James Dudfield Rose with intertitles by Elsie. Includes some footage of Souter Lighthouse and lobster fishermen at Seahouses. |
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Description
Amateur film of a cruise to the Farne Islands from Seahouses featuring Elsie Adelaine Richardson (future wife of the filmmaker), shot by James Dudfield Rose with intertitles by Elsie. Includes some footage of Souter Lighthouse and lobster fishermen at Seahouses.
Title: The Farnes
Title: The Farnes are a group of islands off the Northumbrian coast.
Title: Three miles out from Seahouses harbour.
The film opens with general views of Seahouses harbour. Boatmen and other local men are relaxing...
Amateur film of a cruise to the Farne Islands from Seahouses featuring Elsie Adelaine Richardson (future wife of the filmmaker), shot by James Dudfield Rose with intertitles by Elsie. Includes some footage of Souter Lighthouse and lobster fishermen at Seahouses.
Title: The Farnes
Title: The Farnes are a group of islands off the Northumbrian coast.
Title: Three miles out from Seahouses harbour.
The film opens with general views of Seahouses harbour. Boatmen and other local men are relaxing at the harbour. Some men in a coble row into the harbour and one of them hops into a fishing boat moored there. A fisherman is sewing up the claws of a lobster. Fishermen are on their boats in the harbour.
Title: “Stop me if you have heard it …”
Fishermen chat together on a boat, one smoking a pipe. Elsie Richardson races down the steps in Seahouses harbour to board the boat offering cruises to the Farne Islands. She waits for her parents, her mother, Sally Richardson, carrying her fur coat. The mother is helped into the coble 'Glad Tidings' by the boatman, possibly Jack Shiel or his brother. Other people get into the boat.
Travelling shots follow from the boat as it leaves the harbour of the lobster fisherman on their boat, and of people watching them leave from the harbour quayside.
Title: Seals play round a rock near the Longstone lighthouse.
More travelling shots from the boat trip of island rocks and of Longstone lighthouse.
Title: Landing on the Farne.
The boat arrives at Inner Farne. The group walk up the hill from the boat landing as the two boatmen tie up the boat.
Title: St Cuthbert’s chapel
Elsie walks into St Cuthbert’s chapel built in 1370. She then climbs the pele tower and takes in the view, including Farne lighthouse.
Title: Sand Terns
Elsie is menaced by a sand tern. Jack Shiel picks up a chick from the beach. Close-up of Elsie holding the baby sand tern, struggling to get out of her hand. General view of the nests of sand terns on the sandy beach.
Title: An Eider duck
Close-up of an Eider duck on a nest in the ferns.
Title: The Pinnacles
Shot of birds on the ‘Pinnacles’ on Inner Farne cliff faces.
Title: The Puffins
Various shots of puffins on the rocks follow.
Title: Black backed gull’s egg
Close-up of a single bird’s egg in a nest, followed by shots of the pinnacles crammed with birds.
Title: The Guillemots’ housing problem
A closer look at the top of one of the pinnacles, overcrowded with guillemots.
Title: Kittiwake gulls and chicks
Kittiwakes and their chicks snuggle on a cliff face.
Title: Unearthing a young puffin
Jack Shiels (or his brother) pulls out a puffin chick from a puffin burrow. Close-ups as Elsie holds the scared furry chick. General views of the birds flying at the island and of Cuthbert’s chapel and the medieval pele tower.
Title: A marauder’s warning
A dead seagull is strung on a pole near an island beach.
The visitors on the trip make their way back down to two boats, helped on by boatmen. Portrait shot of Jack Shiel at the rudder of the boat, heading back to Seahouses.
Title: David
Two men pull away from the island in a smaller boat, one rowing. Travelling shots follow of leaving Inner Farne, and arriving back at Seahouses harbour. Other boats are heading out to the Farnes. People still stand on the quayside watching boats coming and going. The trippers leave the boat and climb the steps to the quayside.
[Note: Sally Richardson was a former nursing sister at the Royal Victoria Infirmary, Newcastle upon Tyne.]
Context
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 28 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. |
