The Early Years Scotland's Home Movies

For over 100 years, the people of Scotland have been filming...

..themselves.

Here we go. And there's me.

There's my father.

Across generations, home movies have recorded the ordinary

as well as the great moments of life.

From our first steps...

..to our furthest travels.

Here's a shot here, coming up.

The one on the left's Jessie.

HE LAUGHS

Very funny.

We reminisce.

Today we take for granted the ability

to record our lives on tiny digital cameras and mobile phones.

But in this series, we look back to the golden age of home movies

shot on cine film by our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents.

Unearthed from attics and cupboards across the country,

home movies from the 1920s to the 1980s

tell an alternative, more intimate history of Scotland.

I haven't seen this film for years.

In this episode, we look back to some of the

very first examples of Scottish home movies.

This is Glasgow's Great Western Road on a typical Sunday morning in 1914.

Whilst cinema itself was still in its infancy,

the idea of making movies for yourself wasn't far behind.

But early cine cameras were hand cranked, mechanical

and cumbersome.

They were also expensive.

Too expensive for all but the most wealthy.

The Isle of Arran belonged to my mother.

She had this place and Easton Park in Suffolk.

But I only knew this one.

This is Lady Jean Fforde and her father, the Duke of Montrose.

Her mother, Lady Mary, was a keen photographer

and a pioneer home movie maker.

She began recording family life around their home,

Brodick Castle, in the mid 1920s.

That's me with long hair.

This is our little boat called the Crewbin and we got pulled along.

It was really too slow to try and do that.

It would capsize very easily.

Oh, I'm sure to go down there.

We bathed from 30th May to 30th September every day.

Supposed to be good for us.

These personal films are a rare glimpse into the lives

of the privileged few.

Father and the Queen, I think. Aunt Nellie...

Ah, the Queen Mother. There you are.

And the King. You know, Albert.

And the King and Queen came up for a football match in Glasgow

and stayed with us while they were there.

It is amazing to think that we all wore hats

every time we went out in the garden. Isn't it amazing?

Highland dancing and Brodick Games.

Pillow fight, pillow fight.

Last one who stays upright is the winner.

Ah.

And this is just a pony rally, pony club rally.

There's father pushing me in the barrow.

SHE LAUGHS

Oops!

Not surprising I didn't like horse riding.

No, I was not a rider.

Lady Jean was the youngest of four siblings by eight years.

With her brothers and sisters away at boarding school,

she spent much of her childhood alone or with her ageing nanny.

I couldn't go to school cos I'd had tuberculosis.

That illness... That really put me back.

One had to be in bed every evening at about nine o'clock.

I'd had a governess, I did lessons outside if it was sunny.

I really very seldom had anyone to play with.

So, it was lonely.

One learned to occupy oneself, because Mother's great saying,

if you said you were bored,

was that, "Boredom is a sign of lack of intelligence."

So, it didn't really take you very long to get something to do.

# I dream of Jeanie with the light brown hair

# Borne like a vapour on the summer air. #

I was born 94 years ago, 1920.

I'm glad to have seen the great British Empire.

The greatest since the days of the Romans.

And we won't ever see the like again.

# On the soft summer air. #

The British Empire of Lady Jean's childhood was at its peak,

ruling over one fifth of the world's population

and almost a quarter of its landmass.

It was a great time to be part of the aristocracy.

Eager to leave behind the horrors of World War I,

Britain was embracing modernity in art and design,

experimenting with technology

and dancing to the new and exciting jazz music.

But the vast majority of the country

still didn't even have electric light.

They certainly couldn't indulge in the expensive hobby

of making home movies.

Unless, that was, they ran a camera shop.

Here we go.

July 1926 and there's me.

My father had a photographic shop at that time.

It was the family business and he used cameras

that there may have been a problem with them

and he would take the cameras home,

shoot some film on them, just to check whether they worked or not.

And so that was where the early family film came from.

That covered the early black-and-white stuff,

which was taken in Mid Stocket Road in Aberdeen

and I was just a nipper.

Alan's father's home movies give a rare insight

into the life of an Aberdonian family in the '20s.

The fashions of the time were...

something else.

Beehive hats for ladies and long dresses.

White stockings.

I've got what looks like a little dress on which.

Hmm, let's say no more about that!

Oh.

Now there's my father. My goodness.

And a silhouette of my mother.

And a little pirouette in the road.

Hey-hey!

I wish I could remember more about...

My memory is through the film.

But I certainly don't remember any of that.

Ah, Bonzo the dog. Goodness gracious.

He was a lovely dog.

Hey-ho, where'd that come from?

Yeah.

Things you remember.

This is what a lot of the original film was shot with.

This is a camera called the Cine-Kodak Special.

It's quite heavy.

It was bought new and used by my dad's company.

I can't tell you how many thousand feet of film was shot

in its lifetime and still runs like a clock.

CAMERA WHIRS

But this is a good old friend and I wouldn't part with it.

It's lovely.

These early home movies are precious.

Not only is it a treasury of memories for Alan, but also as

an unofficial history of Aberdeen in the 1920s and '30s.

Here's a shot now, for instance, looking down Camperdown Road.

There is no Royal Infirmary, there's nothing.

It's just open countryside at that time.

It just shows how the town has grown.

When I was growing up, shopping was done once a week.

You went to the grocer, you went to the fruiter

and you went to the butcher and you placed your orders

and they delivered to you by a boy on a bike.

The milkman came every morning.

We used to have lemonade, Bon Accord lemonade.

Used to come round the houses and deliver lemonade.

There were gas lamps.

There was radio entertainment.

There was radio, or wireless as it was in those days.

We had Children's Hour with Uncle Mac.

Now we're at my grandfather's farm at New Deer.

There was no electricity, so battery radios were used

and it was slowly becoming better technically and then,

of course eventually, as far as the countryside was concerned,

the hydro-board began bringing in electricity to farms and things.

Electricity, fertiliser and most significantly the tractor

would eventually transform the way people lived and worked

in the countryside.

In 1916, before these changes had taken hold,

Thomas and Annie Henderson bought a large estate

near Doune in Perthshire.

They'd made a fortune from the tea trade in India

and wanted to move into farming.

These images were recorded by their son-in-law,

David Charles Bowser, on his new 16 millimetre cine camera.

Without realising it, David was preserving on film

a way of life that is now completely lost.

David's grandson, Niall Bowser, still runs the estate today.

That was the estate hall down there

and that's been sold and been done up as a house.

That's where they'd have the, the Christmas

home movie parties in there.

Right, we're going off-road now folks, so hold on to your corsets.

When my great-grandparents bought the house in 1916,

they did a massive refurbishment.

No expense spared.

But then money wasn't an object, so why spare expense?

It was a vast estate surrounding a large country mansion.

This was Argaty House.

Looking back at the picture of the house

does remind me that it was a massive house.

When the lavish renovations were finally complete,

Niall's grandparents were welcomed home in style.

# Bless this house

# O Lord we pray

# Make it safe by night and day. #

Oh, there's a lovely shot of the estate workers towing

grandparents in, when eventually Argaty House was ready for them.

Two little boys peering out.

This will be Mr Barty, the factor,

welcoming the family to the newly-refurbished house,

and there's grandfather.

This is just the domestic staff greeting the family in.

There's a huge number of people to make this family work.

It works out something like three members of staff per family member,

which is a ridiculous proportion.

But I think it's good for people to be able to see that that's just

the way things were in these big households, these big posh families.

This is my grandmother, a fearsome woman with her gun under her arm.

One in the policeman's uniform is my Uncle Hubert

and on the right is my father.

It was a very rarefied existence here.

They probably didn't have to do an awful lot for themselves as children

because there were nannies and nursery maids and housemaids

and cooks and bottle washers and gardeners and grooms and chauffeurs.

Any idea they're going to have to work hard

wasn't really on the agenda at that age, I suspect,

but that's the way it was.

And, to be fair, I saw a bit of that when I was growing up as well.

We went off for our summer holidays to North Berwick.

We went every year. We didn't go with parents. We went with Nanny.

We just thought everyone did that.

So, yeah, things have changed a fair bit.

The 1920s was a decade of great change.

Alongside huge developments in transport,

industry and communication,

the inter-war period saw seismic changes in social attitudes.

In 1928, after a long and sometimes violent campaign of suffrage,

all women over the age of 21 were finally given the vote.

This is St Andrews in the late 1920s

and these are the films of Frances Hedges Montgomery,

a remarkable woman who played her own part

in the fight for women's rights.

There's my father.

Julia and Alistair are Frances's grandchildren.

Though we're using modern technology to project this particular film,

we're really mimicking how we actually saw the films as children.

My father would actually pin a sheet up against the window.

Yes, and it always took ages to get everything set up.

And we would put film like this onto it.

But, I mean, in those days, we didn't have a television and it was

really quite a treat for Dad to get out all the apparatus

and show us these old cine films.

It was a sort of special family occasion.

Like a lot of home movies from this period,

the Montgomery films detail the life of a gentrified family.

They're unusual, because Frances was a single mother

with her own idea of how she wanted to live her life.

My grandmother was quite a flamboyant,

possibly impulsive person.

Is that her mother there?

Yes, that's her mother.

Who for some reason was known as Gag.

I think sort of, as a child, Dad was, in a way,

more brought up by Miss Smith, father's old nanny.

I think she had provided the maternal side of mothering.

Yes, I think he regarded my grandmother as more a father figure.

Yeah, probably true, actually,

what with all the shooting and riding to hounds and things.

-Well, she rode with the Fife Hunt.

-Yeah.

A formidable lady and quite a big lady and very strong personality.

We treated her with tremendous respect and deference

and certainly didn't disagree with her or do anything naughty.

Oh, there we are.

There's 'Vote Right Mrs Montgomery. Women's Rights.'

And then there was another one.

'Fan is my fancy. Vote for fan.'

In 1930, with a strong suffragette vote,

Frances was elected the first female councillor of St Andrews.

It would have been really, really unusual to have women

standing for the local council.

I'm sure she must have met with quite a bit of disapproval

in various quarters.

It would certainly be unusual,

certainly have raised eyebrows in Fife.

It certainly would have done.

And I don't suppose my grandmother cared one bit.

These films are an important record of the changing attitude to

women's rights and the role Frances played in the fight for equality.

I don't remember Dad ever talking about it.

If it weren't for these films,

I don't think we'd really know about it.

She was quite ahead of her time, really.

Throughout the '20s and '30s,

attempts were made to bring colour to motion pictures.

This is a rare example of a complicated process

called Dufaycolor which failed to catch on.

Then, in the mid-1930s,

Kodachrome was launched to instant and commercial success.

Whilst the majority of feature films

were still being released in black and white,

it was now possible for ordinary people

to capture their world in colour.

With the arrival of colour and cheaper more user-friendly cameras,

the home movie market grew

and the tradition was passed down through generations.

In Perthshire, Niall Bowser's father took on the responsibility,

for filming family life in the mid-1950s.

That is me.

Aren't I gorgeous? Look at the hat.

This is my Tri-ang tricycle,

and I was always deeply jealous of my big sister Emma,

because she had one, a proper big tricycle.

I don't think I've seen this footage.

This, of course, is father's efforts.

We had a lovely, lovely, free, footloose childhood,

you know, very, very privileged.

I can only describe it as blissfully happy.

My parents decided to sell Argaty House in 1982.

There was no point in having a house that size for two ageing people.

In recent times, Niall's films have become even more poignant.

That is a sad sight, those beautiful wrought iron gates

all covered with demolition site signs and danger keep out,

ruined buildings and all the rest of it.

It's like looking at a ghastly ghost. Ghoulish.

It's a face with no eyes.

That's what it feels like to me

and always has done since the day it burnt out.

It's a sort of...lifeless corpse.

It burnt down the day of William and Kate's wedding.

It was an electrical fault and we could hear the noise of the fire

from up at the farm where we live.

It was terrifying.

Fortunately, nobody was in the house at the time,

but that's what happened.

Just gutted.

And I was gutted too, because all these things that I'd seen and known

and loved as a child, you know,

the flames were tearing out through the windows.

I think that both grandfather and father made these films,

because they wanted to record things

and it was also the new trendy thing to do for my grandfather.

I suspect he wouldn't have realised

that he was recording future history, but thank goodness he did.

What a result.

Like Niall, Lady Jean was the last of her family

to live in the ancestral home.

The National Trust now owns Brodick Castle.

Have a look at this one...

..which we haven't seen yet.

We'll put it on the machine next door here and then you can see it.

When her mother died,

Lady Jean carried on the tradition of making home movies.

She began to record her own family life, and one of her

favourite subjects was a little red deer calf called Cha-Cha.

We took this one home

and I had it in the house here

and she lived in the house.

Watching television.

Looks like cricket, does it?

Oh!

There's Charles, my son, my one and only.

I haven't seen this film for years.

Lady Jean's films and those of her mother

are a precious record of a different age.

I've tried to preserve them.

I'm afraid I did destroy a lot.

I never thought they'd be sort of particular interest.

And I did put away...

There were so many of them, great boxes full,

and I did destroy some of them...

which is a pity.

# Some of these days You'll miss me, honey

# Some of these days You'll be so lonely. #

These home movies paint a picture of life in the 1920s and '30s.

They capture intimate details,

filling in gaps missed by the commercial films of the time.

Most of all, they connect us to the behaviours, fashions

and personalities of our ancestors.

I think next generations are going to be very sad that they've

put everything on their computer or one of these telephones, and

they don't develop them, they don't have an album, they don't keep them.

There's going to be nothing left.

You know the sort of flat telephones that you have nowadays,

you've probably got one, and you just take snap, snap, snap,

but do you bother to off-load them? No.

So therefore you just, you know,

your grandchildren are going to say, "I wonder what he was like."

Next time on Scotland's Home Movies...

This is one I would like you to see.

HE CHUCKLES

..after the trauma of World War II,

home movie making really takes off...

-Oh, there's me!

-There you are.

..capturing the austerity of the 1940s

and the prosperity of the 1950s.