This film is the first of a collection of films held by the YFA of the filmmaker John Murray. The collection dates for the late 1960s through the 1970s, whilst John ran the Film Unit at Leeds University Audio-Visual Service. John has continued to make films through to the present.  Another one of John’s films, made several years after this one, can also be seen on YFA Online, Huddersfield International Club Opening Night (1968). This also shows John’s concern to document important local...

This film is the first of a collection of films held by the YFA of the filmmaker John Murray. The collection dates for the late 1960s through the 1970s, whilst John ran the Film Unit at Leeds University Audio-Visual Service. John has continued to make films through to the present.  Another one of John’s films, made several years after this one, can also be seen on YFA Online, Huddersfield International Club Opening Night (1968). This also shows John’s concern to document important local events that have a great public interest.   In fact John was involved in the first ever all Electronic News Gathering (ENG) broadcast on British TV, from Leeds, in the mid 1970s. John was, and remains, very versatile, getting involved in the technical side of cinematography, producing and directing films and making many films as a cameraman for the Yorkshire Film Company. With the closure of the Film Unit at Leeds University, or Leeds University Television Service, John later went on to form Honley Film Services in Leeds.

 

Berry Brow falls within the Newsome Ward of Kirklees, on the outskirts of Huddersfield. The film is made at a pivotal point in its history, capturing the change from being a quiet village to becoming a modern suburb of Huddersfield. The post war period was one of huge redevelopment across Britain, with the building of large council estates and high rise blocks of flats – see the Context for Billy Liar (1962) for more on this background. This is usually associated with cities, however, so it is interesting to find the same process underway in a village, a couple of miles away from an urban environment. In fact it might be thought of as a process of urbanisation. 

 

The Salem Methodist Church closed in 1960, with the congregation joining the Birch Road Methodist Church. The Chapel, which was situated on School Lane, running into Chapel Street, was demolished in 1966. Salem Terrace was just three households not shown on local maps, but was probably at the rear of the Chapel.  An article in the Huddersfield Daily Examiner of 16th July 1963 reports on a public meeting held with the residents of Berry Brow and the Town Council Housing Committee and other officials; one of these was Dr W Turner, the Medical Officer of Health, who was quoted as saying, '...his department had inspected some 200 houses in the area, 100 of which had been found unfit for habitation. Ninety of these had been owned by the corporation.'

 

The film has a journalistic quality, without explicitly presenting the material in any particular way. Rather the unidentified people interviewed are allowed to speak for themselves and reveal the contrast between an older inhabitant of the village and the agendas of local government in the 1960s. In this John Murray’s film may well have been influenced by TV documentaries of the time. By and large this would have an investigative thrust, as in the case of the BBCs Special Enquiry series which ran from 1952 to 1957, Panorama which started in 1953, the BBC West series Citizen ‘63 (when John Boorman was Head of the Bristol Documentary unit) and Man Alive which first broadcast on 4th November 1965. But it was commercial TV that in some ways led the field in the 1960s, especially with the more hard hitting World In Action produced by Granada television between 1963 and 1998, with the first of its Seven Up films coming out in 1964. There were also many one-off productions, such as Robert Vas’s 1962 The Vanishing Street, with which Berry Brow has certain similarities.

 

Berry Brow offers a great example of contrasting the comments of the councillors with the reality as seen in the images, adding to the irony with the background singing of Blake’s Jerusalem (sounding like a recording from the last night of a BBC Prom).  One councillor, or developer, is heard in the film stating that they must look towards the 21st century, to create “a village of the future”. Well, it might be thought that in some ways they did just this, although perhaps not in the way that was meant.

 

Before too long a problem arose in the 1980s when the new buildings were found to have high levels of asbestos in them. The process of clearing this itself led to great difficulties for the tenants, often elderly, living there. In the end the cost of refurbishment was in the order of £6,000,000. But as happened so often, as the flats were let to poor single parents and younger single people, often desperate asylum seekers from other countries, they became centres of hard drug use with the accompanying problems that this brings with it. This meant there was a need for increased security and CCTV cameras, hardly making the places attractive to live in.

 

The film shows some of the derelict places that had recently closed at the time it was made. Among these are the derelict Railway Station at Berry Brow which had recently closed as a result of the Beeching's cuts – for more on Beeching see the Contexts for Eight O’ Clock Special. The station was re-opened in 1989 as a single track line. Another is the Almondbury Chapel Street Methodist New Connexion on Salem Terrace, which closed in 1960.   This Church had only opened in 1899.

 

(with special thanks to Julie Mahoney of Huddersfield Library Local Studies)

 

References

 

Keith Beattie, Documentary Screens: Nonfiction Film and Television, Palgrave, London, 2004

Patrick Russell, 100 British Documentaries, BFI, 2007.

Berry Brow Wikipedia