The next film is a glimpse at the art of making narrative home movies on 16mm cine film. It was produced a few years before the outbreak of World War Two by an enthusiastic amateur filmmaker and surgeon, James Dudfield Rose (1907 -1992) and his fiancée, Elsie Adeline Richardson, a qualified librarian. Here’s a typical Sunday at the house of his parents, Jim and Mary Anne, in Croft Terrace, Jarrow, which his father had christened ‘Ruskin House’ after the eminent Victorian art critic,...

The next film is a glimpse at the art of making narrative home movies on 16mm cine film. It was produced a few years before the outbreak of World War Two by an enthusiastic amateur filmmaker and surgeon, James Dudfield Rose (1907 -1992) and his fiancée, Elsie Adeline Richardson, a qualified librarian. Here’s a typical Sunday at the house of his parents, Jim and Mary Anne, in Croft Terrace, Jarrow, which his father had christened ‘Ruskin House’ after the eminent Victorian art critic, philosopher and writer.

Filmmaking was an expensive hobby at the time and only affordable by the middle-classes. And this film was made in 1936, a date forever associated with the legendary Jarrow March. Around 70 percent of the local workforce were unemployed by early 1933.  

 The film is a lovely insight into the filmmaker’s family but also a self-aware little movie about making a movie, from holding the camera to editing the film and designing the beautiful watercolour intertitles, which was Elsie's forte.  

 Jim Rose Senior was a retired pharmacist, a socialist, Labour councillor, an Alderman and Justice of the Peace. He was hard of hearing, hence the headphones as he listens to his favourite gardening programme on the wireless. He was also a vegetarian, which was unusual at the time. You might notice he is served a different meal to the rest of the family who are tucking into the customary Sunday roast. In a lovely touch, there’s a photo of his hero, Ruskin, in the copy of the Radio Times he’s leafing through.

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 this 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.