This film was made by Huddersfield filmmaker Ernest Taylor.  The YFA has ten films made by Ernest spanning ten years from 1945 to 1955, the year before his death in 1956. He may have started making films earlier in 1939, although the war made obtaining film very difficult.  These are mainly family and holiday films, but he also made training films.  As evidenced with this film Ernest was willing to experiment in his filmmaking.  Ernest was a member of the Huddersfield Cine Club, of which he...

This film was made by Huddersfield filmmaker Ernest Taylor.  The YFA has ten films made by Ernest spanning ten years from 1945 to 1955, the year before his death in 1956. He may have started making films earlier in 1939, although the war made obtaining film very difficult.  These are mainly family and holiday films, but he also made training films.  As evidenced with this film Ernest was willing to experiment in his filmmaking.  Ernest was a member of the Huddersfield Cine Club, of which he was twice Chairman. This film features his daughter, Shirley (later to become Shirley Jones), who can be clearly spotted with her red hair.  For more on Ernest Taylor see the Context for Careless Security (1952).

The school that Shirley attended was Hunmanby Hall School Girls Boarding School.  At that time Hunmanby was part of East Yorkshire, until the local government re-organisation of 1974 when the village was incorporated into North Yorks.   It was also claimed to have been the largest village in Great Britain, until it was classified as a town in the 1960s.  The original Hunmanby hall dates from the 11th century, but this was replaced by the existing Hunmanby Hall, a Queen Anne era building built from stones taken from Filey Brigg.  At the beginning of the century it was owned by Lord Nunburnholme of Warter, the son of the head of the Wilson Shipping Line.  After the death of Lord Nunburnholme the Hall was bought by the Methodist Education Committee in 1921 and re-opened in April 1928 as a boarding school for girls, taking up to 300 girls.  The Methodist school went on to become one of the leading girls boarding schools in the country. 

Someone, whose father, H.C.Mowthorpe (Sen.), was the main contractor for the original conversion of the Hunmanby Hall into the boarding school, has anonymously made a website on the school, Hunmanby Hall Girls Boarding School (possibly the person with the initials RB who writes for the Discover Filey website).  This states that, “Although effectively ‘divorced’ from the village proper, the school’s presence had a very beneficial effect, providing employment and trade locally besides preserving the old Hall and its beautiful grounds.”  On the website there is a detailed historical account of the school by a former pupil and later teacher, Mrs Genista Dawson.  Genista Dawson notes that the school had an emphasis on outdoor games and activities as well as academic achievement.  It was clearly a fairly progressive school with Remedial and Speech Therapy available.  A Timetable that accompanies the piece shows that in 1928 the typical day crammed in 11 lessons. 

This film clearly shows the high standard of physical exercise that the school had.  Despite the clear, albeit rather slow, advances of women in Victorian society, sport was still considered a male preserve, and women’s participation was frowned upon.   Women had to combat the usual stereotypes of ‘femininity’.  Yet once a connection was made between sport and national productivity the attitudes of many began to change.  Those sports that women did participate in, such as hunting and archery, were regarded as non-competitive, or were segregated from the men’s, as in golf.  And, of course, these were confined to the upper class. 

An early influential figure was Madame Bergman-Osterberg who introduced the idea of combining team sports along with Swedish gymnastics – something that can perhaps be seen in this film.   A breakthrough came in 1885 when the London School Board introduced therapeutic gymnastics and within two years had trained seven hundred teachers to teach gymnastics.  These then found their way into private schools such as Cheltenham Ladies’ Colleges, where games of hockey and lacrosse for girls thrived.  Huggins notes that more women were playing tennis and golf in the 1890s. 

These were games that were considered suitable for women or girls, but cricket was still regarded as essentially a man’s game.  So women playing cricket had an uphill battle.  Reports of women cricket games go back to 1745, just two years after the formation of the first cricket club, the Hambledon Club – it was in fact between the Bramley and the Hambledon maids.   It was in Yorkshire however that the first women's cricket club was formed in 1887, the White Heather Club at Nun Appleton.   Soon after, in 1890, a team known as the Original English Lady Cricketers toured England, playing in exhibition matches to large crowds.  Apparently, according to the Wikipedia entry, the team was highly successful until its manager absconded with the profits.  It was not until 1926 that the Women's Cricket Association was founded.  But by the time that this film was made, it is clear that the girls shown playing in this film had been playing 2013 serious cricket, judging by the nice shots on the on and off side, and one nifty glance down the leg side.  Women's cricket is now an established and expanding sport, with the World Cup now in its tenth year.

This film of the school’s open day was made a year after the first St Trinian's book by Robert Searle came out in 1948, Hurrah for St Trinian's – closely followed by the films, displaying the great comic acting of Alastair Sim, George Cole and Joyce Grenfell.  Searle’s anarchic cartoon characters were inspired by two independent girls' schools in Cambridge - Perse School for Girls and St Mary's School – the latter being a similar kind of boarding school.  One wonders whether the girls at Hunmanby resemble those of Searle’s wild imagination, or are rather like the more restrained ones to be found in the novels of Angela Brazil’s – one featuring St. Cyprian's College, ‘the nicest school in town’.

References

Derek Birley, A Social History of English Cricket, Aurum Press, 1999.

John Major, More than a Game: The Story of Cricket’s Early Years, Harper Perennial, 2008.

Kathleen McCrone, Playing the Game: Sport and the Physical Emancipation of English Women, 1870-1914, 

The University Press of Kentucky, 1988.

Mrs Genista Dawson, ‘Our School’

Hunmanby Hall Old Girls Association

Discover Filey