A World Away The Thirties in Colour

The 1930s was the decade when colour film first started to erode

the long domination of the monochrome image.

A series of technological breakthroughs in film processing

made it possible for amateur as well as professional film-makers

to record the rich, vibrant colours of the natural world.

Several processes such as Dufaycolor, Kodacolor and Technicolor reached the market,

a development that presented enthusiasts

with a new world of creative possibilities.

At last, colour film was used to capture everything

from major historical events to the intimate details of everyday life.

Colour film was expensive,

so it largely remained the preserve of the wealthy.

They used it to record special moments in their lives,

including encounters with distinguished personalities,

and journeys to exotic lands.

One of the first to appreciate the exciting potential of colour film

was the wealthy British adventuress, Rosie Newman.

On her travels, Rosie trained her lens on spectacular parades...

..And some of the great treasures of antiquity.

And closer to home,

her cameras glimpsed fun and games in the north...

..And fleeting moments in the life of a young princess

who did not yet know she would become a queen.

Born on the 25th July 1896,

Rosie Newman was the daughter

of the Bavarian banker Sir Sigismund Neumann,

who'd made a fortune from the diamond mines of South Africa.

One of five children,

Rosie spent her early years between the family's rented stately home at Raynham Hall in Norfolk

and the bustle of their home in the heart of London.

It was number 146 Piccadilly.

It was next door to the home, or one of the homes

of the Duke and Duchess of York,

who later became King George VI and Queen Elizabeth,

who we knew as the Queen Mother.

The Newman family's prodigious wealth ensured they were admitted

to the highest circles of Britain's political and aristocratic elite.

Rosie's contacts in the Diplomatic Service would prove particularly valuable,

as she was determined to travel the world.

In 1928, before a trip to North Africa,

she decided to take up what she called the "amusing hobby"

of amateur cinematography.

She started filming at home, practising with her camera

and then filmed while on holiday.

From this material she made a short film called Morocco 1928,

which she then showed to friends and family.

When planning her next, more adventurous holiday in India in 1935,

she again took with her her camera.

This time she took a stock of Kodacolor film,

the first amateur colour film available.

On the 22nd December 1934,

Rosie and her mother Anna boarded the P&O steamship Rajputana,

which was heading for the Orient.

Joining the Newmans in First Class

was one of the richest and most extravagant of India's princes,

The Maharaja of Patiala, Bhupinder Singh.

He's one of the larger than life characters on the Indian scene at that time.

Very keen on shopping. He'd come to Europe and he'd buy up entire shops.

Very keen on pearls, as you can see, that wonderful pearl earring,

a giant pearl earring in his ear.

And also very keen on sex.

He had a large harem, which he was constantly adding to.

After two and a half weeks at sea,

the Rajputana finally docked in front of one of the most recognisable symbols of the British Raj,

the Gateway of India in Bombay.

She checked into one of the grandest hotels in Asia, The Taj Mahal,

where India's high society stayed and played.

Rosie belonged to a kind of international plutocracy

of whom the most eminent figure was the Aga Khan.

He was the titular head of millions of Muslims.

And he was immensely rich.

He was an international playboy.

And the fact that almost the first thing that Rosie did

when she got to India was to play golf with the Aga Khan

indicates the extraordinary kind of status that she occupied.

"In response to a charming invitation from the Aga Khan,

"we lunched at the Bombay Racecourse.

"There, one certainly sees racing

"under the most ideal and picturesque conditions,

"enhanced by the lovely saris worn by the Indian ladies."

Circulating exclusively on the Bombay social scene,

Rosie's trip had so far been untroubled by political unrest.

Yet at the time, Mahatma Gandhi's civil disobedience movement

was posing a real threat to British colonial rule.

The Raj was in a fragile state by 1935,

because the nationalists were on the rampage

and Gandhi's moral dominance was quite overwhelming.

Many people felt that the sands of time were running out

for the British Raj in India.

'This newsreel sure is a riot!'

Britain's heavy-handed response to demands for national self-determination

had brought turmoil to the streets of some of India's biggest cities.

At Chowpatty Beach in Bombay,

Rosie's camera glimpsed some of the unrest that was engulfing India.

Although Rosie herself didn't fully appreciate

what was happening in front of her lens.

Chowpatty Beach becomes hugely important

in Indian political history

and it became a sort of Speakers' Corner.

And all the political orators came here

and Rosie pans across the beach

and she misses this political meeting that's going on.

Although she failed to grasp the significance of political developments in India,

Rosie was entranced by the spectacle of Bombay's street life.

In January 1935, Rosie and her mother took the first of many train journeys

that would carry them all over the sub-continent.

En route, Rosie would often disembark from her carriage

to shoot the lives of those living and working on the platforms of India's vast rail network.

What is lovely is that she spent time here to photograph people

going abut their business, washing and waiting for the train,

and you can see all Indian society on the move.

The railways were a huge Imperial enterprise.

By the time we left India,

we had built about 40,000 miles worth of railway.

The British built railways much as the Romans built roads.

They were really designed to move troops about

to preserve the security of the Raj, but what actually happened

was that Indians started to travel in huge numbers.

By the time Rosie got there in the 1930s,

all India was to be seen on the railway stations.

Rosie's films capture some of the divisions within Indian society

that would ultimately lead to the partition of the country

into India and Pakistan in 1947.

You have Hindu water for Hindus, Muslim water for Muslims,

and the Europeans would have their own refreshment rooms.

Everybody going their own ways, and within that a further system relating to the women.

On the railway station you actually have areas

where the women and their families can go,

secluded, away from public gaze.

Two days after leaving Bombay, Rosie arrived in Madras,

where she was the guest of the city's Governor, Lord Erskine.

His palatial residence came with its own dedicated troop of guardsmen.

Rosie was at home when filming familiar scenes of the British at play,

but when she ventured onto the streets it was another matter.

The intertitles she edited into her films suggest that once again,

she didn't really understand what she was seeing.

What she's photographing here is the brothel area, called 'the cages',

and the women here, behind the cages, behind the bars,

are in fact the local prostitutes.

After a 2,000 mile journey up the coast,

Rosie arrived at the former capital of the Raj, Calcutta,

where she was the guest of the Governor, Sir John Anderson.

In the years to come,

he would introduce the famous Anderson air raid shelter,

over two million of which were built in Britain during the Blitz.

In Calcutta, Rosie continued to enjoy the refined luxury of British India.

Inland, lay the hill station of Darjeeling,

a perennially popular resort for the wives of Raj officials

seeking respite from the heat and humidity of Calcutta.

Most people who made the journey would go by the tiny Himalayan Railway.

But Rosie had the Governor's car at her disposal.

Even so, her journey into the mountains was perilous.

Rosie's very struck by Darjeeling

because it's so different from the rest of India.

You can see why straightaway, because the peoples there are totally different.

These are hill peoples and they're from Tibet, from Nepal, from Burma,

they're from Bhutan and Sikkim.

And the marketplace is full of these exotic figures,

most of them, of the women in fact, are Nepalese.

You can identify them by their wonderful necklaces.

One of the great sights of Darjeeling was to go up to a particular point

and look at Kanchenjunga due north and then pan over to the left,

and you just see Everest in the distance.

Now Rosie for some reason gets it wrong, and she pans to the right,

towards Assam and Bhutan, so who was guiding her, I do not know.

Returning to the heat of the plains,

the travellers' next stop was the holy city of Benares, now called Varanasi,

where Rosie filmed life on the stepped riverbank terraces, known as ghats.

Varanasi is probably the most important Hindu city.

It has a continuous history of over 2,500 years

and it's supposed to have fallen to earth from heaven

and it's supposed to be the earth-bound living place

of the god Shiva.

For all sorts of reasons like this,

Varanasi is deeply, deeply sacred in Hindu ritual belief systems.

To bathe in the Ganges is very auspicious.

Most particularly, to die in Varanasi

is supposedly to free yourself,

to gain 'moksha', to gain transcendence, to finally die.

And therefore death and cremation rituals don't have the stigma

that they have in the rest of India.

So you actually see the cremation ghats,

you know, next to the bathing ghats.

After her immersion in the unique culture of Varanasi,

Rosie headed to the capital of British India, Delhi.

In 1911, at the great Coronation Durbar,

George V moved the capital of India from Calcutta to Delhi.

The British have spared no expense to lay out a magnificent capital

for what they regard as a magnificent Empire,

the jewel in the crown.

And they have made every effort to replicate and exceed Mogul excess.

They want to show the Indian population

that the British Raj is here to stay.

Designed in the Classical style

by the architects Sir Edwin Lutyens and Sir Herbert Baker,

New Delhi also had Hindu, Buddhist and Mogul features,

including water gardens and lotus petal fountains.

It's hard to believe that independence was only 12 years away,

and yet here the British have built this vast folly,

this extraordinary statement that they're here to stay,

which exceeds all previous capitals in India.

It's magnificent and it's bizarre.

At the centre of the new city was the Viceroy's House,

which when Rosie arrived was occupied by Lord Willingdon.

Together with his wife Marie, he lived a gilded existence.

They had little sympathy for the aspirations

of those striving for democracy.

Their rule was described as a combination

of "masked balls and terror".

Although renowned for her charity work,

Lady Willingdon revelled in the opulence and influence

of those in command during the Raj.

She would have enjoyed it enormously I think, to be a viceroy's wife.

Because she liked power. She was a lady who definitely liked power.

Lady Willingdon, charming though she was,

had a bit of a reputation in India, particularly among the princes.

She was something of a kleptomaniac.

She did like to pick up souvenirs as she travelled.

And so the princes tended to hide away some of their best treasures

when the Willingdons came to stay.

She expected to be given anything she admired.

And it did become, as she grew older,

it did become slightly embarrassing. People had to watch her.

The Newmans joined the Viceroy

for one of the highlights of the social calendar.

Rosie obviously arrives in Delhi just in time for Delhi Horse Show,

which was the climax of the Delhi season, the winter season,

when British India comes together

and enjoys itself with gymkhanas and polo weeks and regattas.

And the Delhi Horse Show is the top society feature.

"In the brilliant eastern sun, the state arrival of Their Excellencies

"was a scene of splendour and magnificence beyond description."

After leaving the pomp of the Viceroy's world,

Rosie headed west to the Princely States of Rajputana,

where the extravagance almost matched the Willingdons' circus of excess.

Here Rosie was entertained by some of India's richest men.

The Princely States were semi-independent.

They occupied about a third of India

and they were governed by their old feudal rulers, the Indian princes.

These rulers have no real power.

That power was taken away from them by the British,

and indeed they have a British agent on their shoulder

who's telling them how to rule

and the moment they step out of line,

the British agent can get rid of them.

At Udaipur, Rosie shot landscapes in what's known as the City of Lakes.

Udaipur has been built over a process of hundreds of years,

each ruler adding a little bit to the palace.

And so you get this magnificent city made entirely of marble.

"At beautiful Udaipur, rightly called the Venice of India,

"the Maharaja's lovely barge was put at our disposal.

"Rowed up the glorious chain of lakes,

"we were entranced by the beauty of the water palaces,

"designed in such perfect architecture."

There's a lot of debate about why the princes were so ostentatious.

One view is that when the British take over,

when they quite clearly become, in a sense, the puppets of the British,

what is left to them really, except to manifest their authority

and status through extreme ostentation?

The other argument is that the British themselves

were very susceptible to displays of extreme ostentation

and these princes competed intensely with one another

for status in the eyes of the British.

One of the princes closest to the British was the Maharaja of Jaipur,

who invited Rosie to stay at his palace.

Jaipur had the huge advantage of having a very modern looking ruler

in Sawai Man Singh who was always better known as Jai.

He was the famous polo playing Maharaja of the 1930s.

He's very good looking, he's dashing, he's outward looking,

and the British take to him in a big way.

At the palace in Jaipur, Rosie joined other notable guests,

including the Maharaja and Maharani of Indore,

to watch an extraordinarily lavish procession.

What she's captured here is a little glimpse into medieval India.

These are the royal infantry, the royal cavalry of the House of Jaipur

as they would have been four, five hundred years ago.

This is really going back to the days of Saladin the Great.

This is extraordinary.

The British have emasculated the princes,

they've taken away their power to fight.

They have no modern army, all they've got is this parade,

a purely symbolic presence and yet how touching it is to see it here.

Rosie's visit coincided with that of the exiled King George II of Greece.

She took her camera to Bhopal

where a spectacular tiger hunt had been organised in his honour.

By now, Rosie was running short of colour film,

so she shot much of the hunt in black and white.

The Nawab of Bhopal, who's arranged this,

and the King of Greece,

go up to a platform where they sat in complete safety

while the bearers down below beat the undergrowth

to encourage the tiger to appear.

So all the King of Greece had to do was lean over and shoot the tiger.

"Suddenly, the jungle seemed to stir.

"The eerie stillness was broken,

"and for a second we were held spellbound

"as we saw a tiger creep out.

"I quickly filmed him, before he was shot by the King of Greece.

"It was a thrilling moment."

What we're seeing here is something much more than a tiger being shot.

We're actually seeing an instrument of policy,

a sort of weapon of state.

What was absolutely crucial was that your European VIP got to shoot a big tiger,

because that would make the European VIP happy

and therefore more likely to grant

whatever particular favour that you wanted.

Then out would come the Royal tape measure which was slightly...

gave slightly exaggerated figures.

And this was so that they could measure the tiger that the European VIP had shot

and tell them that they'd shot an 11-foot tiger

whereas in fact they'd actually only shot a ten-foot one.

Looking to experience the thrill of wild colonial India,

Rosie travelled to Peshawar.

Today it is one of Pakistan's most dynamic cities,

but when Rosie visited in 1935, it was a bustling trading post

situated on India's north-west frontier with Afghanistan.

It was a notoriously dangerous area,

so the travellers were accompanied by armed guards.

Afghanistan was extremely difficult to control.

It occupied the area between the British Empire and the Russian Empire.

And so it was almost bound to be a kind of permanent war zone.

There's this great sense of Wild West about that part of the world.

"Seeing Peshawar surrounded by barbed wire entanglements

"made one realise that living on the frontier is full of adventure.

"As someone remarked, 'Life is held very cheap up here.'"

There's a tiny strip of land which was unadministered territories

and these are inhabited by the Bhutan tribes,

the Afridis, the Shinwaries, the Waziries, the Masuds et cetera,

who are all constantly marauding against the British.

"We were greatly impressed by the fine, manly type of Muslims

"living on the frontier, and much amused by their red moustaches,

"which we were told they dyed in order to disguise old age."

The British had never successfully brought them under control

despite several attempts, several campaigns in the late 19th and early 20th century.

These people were pretty effective fighters.

They were tough people who had retained some autonomy

and to whom the British had to deal on something like an even level,

and they didn't like that.

Journeying up to the Afghan border,

Rosie braved the dangers of the strategically sensitive Khyber Pass.

As you can see, this was a very war-like area.

On every side you can see there are forts,

there are armed men, there are guns.

The whole area is really up in arms.

She goes down into tribal territory,

into this area where the British law no longer extends.

And she gets to visit this famous rifle factory

where the Afridis are busy turning out guns

to fight against the British.

But as difficult to control as the North West Frontier was,

the armed and war-like tribes did provide a buffer zone

against any possible invasion by the Russians.

The area was the Achilles heel of the Raj

and remains a place of intense volatility even today.

Rosie travelled in a bubble, seeing India through her camera lens

and never really experiencing it directly for herself.

Her films celebrate the pomp and splendour of the Raj.

When she reflected on her Indian odyssey,

she evoked a wistful and uncritical picture of British Imperial rule.

"India is a country of treasure, romance and glory,

"but also of greater contrasts in climate, caste and religion than any other land.

"Travelling from end to end of the peninsula as we have done,

"we realised the gigantic achievement of Great Britain.

"The name of the King-Emperor George will live for ever in his Indian Empire."

What Rosie has done, almost inadvertently,

is she's created a record of an India just about to change for ever.

This is part of India's past.

In 12 years, it'll all be gone.

At the end of March 1935, Rosie returned to England.

She edited her films together

and arranged special screenings for her high-society friends.

In the beginning, I think, she took her films

to show her friends and family where she'd travelled

and to share her journeys with them.

Then, I think she was encouraged by friends,

particularly Lord Willingdon, to show her films to a wider audience.

Rosie's screenings were attended by some of the most prominent figures of the day,

including Queen Mary and Clementine Churchill.

Rosie was elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society

in February 1936 in recognition of her growing reputation

as an amateur filmmaker.

Later that year, Rosie toured Scotland.

Scotland for the upper classes is about play.

They come to enjoy the beautiful scenery,

they come to hunt and shoot and perhaps go to the races

and you see that all over Rosie's film.

"A long day's run from London,

"passing though the ancient border town of Berwick upon Tweed,

"and one reaches Edinburgh."

The main focus of Rosie's trip seems to have been the new town, Princes Street,

and the area there where she has the altercation

with the traffic policeman who's waving the traffic around.

"Suddenly, I was stopped by a rather dour policeman,

"who asked me, 'What do you think you're doing, crashing though the traffic?'

"I apologised, whereupon he became less dour

"and told me not to do it again."

Throughout her tour, Rosie indulged in her passion for sport.

Horse racing had long been a family obsession

and while on the west coast, Rosie dropped in on the races at Ayr.

After motoring north towards Glasgow,

Rosie boarded the ferry from Greenock across to Dunoon,

to watch one of Scotland's most famous sporting events.

The modern Highland Games are very much a product of Sir Walter Scott

creating, if you like, the romantic image of the Highlands,

inspiring a great tourist industry among the wealthier classes.

And it was to show the strength of the highland male

in various athletic pursuits.

The other thing about the Highland Games

is it's very rooted in Scottish martial traditions.

After the games, the crowds aboard the steamer taking the return journey

were packed so tight that the ship listed under their weight.

Over on Scotland's east coast, Rosie visited one of her favourite haunts

at North Berwick, near Edinburgh.

At the outdoor swimming pool, divers showed off in front of her camera.

Rosie adored being on a coastal stretch

boasting some of the finest golf courses in the world.

"The famous North Berwick Links are the Mecca of golf.

"On entering Ben Sayers' shop, one's whole existence seems transformed.

"Worries are quickly forgotten, all that matters is golf!"

"A glorious day and to be on one's game is utopia."

Intending to drop in on some friends,

she headed north, filming the rugged Highland landscape along the way.

"Our progress by car was slow.

"The Highland road is so narrow that signposts have been placed at certain distances,

"marking passing places where the road has been broadened out."

Roads are a really potent symbol of the future,

when you're gonna get this surface

that will allow tyred vehicles to come, and they will come en masse.

When you're talking about the Highlands wanting good roads,

that's a great symbol of modernity and the future.

"We motored right across to the west coast,

"and were much amused seeing the only train of the day

"puffing along on its way."

"We named it the Daily Mail

"as indeed it did bring the daily papers."

Rosie's serene progress through Scotland

ended at Loch Maree in the north-west Highlands.

As in India, she'd filmed the scenic, sporting and frivolous,

but avoided recording the social and economic realities of the times.

It's a fascinating insight into the minds of the upper classes,

because this is the '30s,

this is when Britain and Western Europe have undergone absolutely immense depression.

And in Scotland there's a huge amount of poverty.

And yet here she is showing all the nice, pretty things,

the exotic, it's almost like her finger's in the dyke of change.

In the summer of 1936, Rosie left Scotland

and returned to her home at Piccadilly in London,

where she had a brief encounter

with the children of her royal neighbours.

The Newman family lived next door to the Duke and Duchess of York on Piccadilly

and it does appear that the Newmans visited them in their home.

And we have some marvellous footage

of Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret in their garden.

This film, which has never been broadcast before,

is the earliest known colour footage of the Queen.

It was shot just before the destiny of the young Princess Elizabeth changed for ever.

In January 1936, her uncle Edward VIII had succeeded to the throne.

But before the year was out,

the new King's relationship with the American divorcee Wallis Simpson

would create a constitutional crisis.

On 10th December 1936,

a week after the revelations of their liaison became public,

Edward abdicated.

In a BBC broadcast, he told the nation

that he couldn't discharge his duties without the woman he loved.

Edward had been a dashing and glamorous figure.

But he was succeeded by his younger brother George,

who lacked Edward's popular appeal.

Even so, George's coronation in May 1937 was a spectacular affair.

The coronation of George VI was a particularly brilliant pageant,

and it was designed to be so for two particular reasons.

The first was to wipe out memories of the abdication,

the brief and tragic reign of Edward VIII.

And the second reason was to pull the nation together

at a time when war seemed to be closer

than it had ever seemed before.

The cavalry escorting George would be no match

for the hardware being amassed on the Continent.

Hitler's Germany was putting on a more convincing and menacing show

of modern military might.

The contrast is between what I see as the pantomime of pomp in London

and the brutal theatre of power in Nuremberg.

And what I think is revealed

is that Britain was rather an old fashioned state.

In some respects, an obsolete state.

In May 1937, Rosie had been invited to film the new King's Review of the Fleet at Portsmouth.

It was designed to reassure a nervous British public

that militarily, Britain still had a navy to be reckoned with.

From Victoria's reign onwards,

the fleet was the symbol of Britain's greatness

and to see it all together in one place

was very comforting, very reassuring.

These are the equivalent of the wooden walls that defended Britain,

and Rosie shows us in the background aircraft carriers and submarines,

waiting to be reviewed by their King.

It was only through the strength of these great, grey leviathans,

these mighty warships, that the British Empire,

which was spread across a quarter of the world,

could be secured for the future.

But overhead, the appearance of Britain's air force

did little to inspire confidence.

The RAF flypast was designed to improve morale

and to show that we could stand up to the Luftwaffe,

the German air force which was just coming into being at this time.

Unfortunately, what it proved

was that our own aircraft were hopelessly obsolescent.

They were no match for the new Messerschmitts and Junkers

that were being manufactured in Germany at this time.

Ignoring the threat of war,

on 4th March 1938, Rosie embarked on another foreign adventure.

Caught up in the vogue for all things Egyptian,

created by recent archaeological discoveries,

she headed for North Africa.

For the first leg of her journey,

she boarded an Imperial Airways plane at Croydon Airport,

and flew to Le Bourget in Paris.

Air travel was a new experience for one passenger,

who was the worse for wear

after drinking champagne to calm her nerves.

"Up we soared into space, far above the clouds,

"a carpet of white ermine contrasting with the deep blue sea below,

"where the toy-like ships seemed to dance on the waves."

From Paris, Rosie took the express train to Genoa

where she boarded the steamship Esperia.

After the ship docked at the Bay of Naples, Rosie went ashore,

and in a park, happened upon a group of nannies.

When she returned to the harbour,

Rosie saw evidence of the growing military menace in the Mediterranean.

She saw an Italian warship which was, I think,

an indication of Mussolini's attempt to gain naval control of the Mediterranean

and perhaps even to cut the jugular vein of the Empire,

namely the Suez Canal.

On 9th March 1938,

Rosie's ship reached Egypt's biggest seaport, Alexandria,

where she was helped ashore by teams of porters.

There's one person in particular who comes up in his uniform with a sword as well. And he's so proud.

He looks so fine, and I thought "What a wonderful way to be greeted to Egypt!"

Rosie set out to follow the course of the Nile,

travelling south to take in Egypt's many temples and antiquities.

She headed to Cairo

where she stayed with friends from the British Embassy.

Soon, with her camera, she was exploring the largest city in Africa.

Rosie goes to the more traditional part of the city, the old city,

and she takes some great footage along Muski,

along the main shopping street,

which is still the main shopping street in old Cairo, in the souk.

Another thing that she shows in this part of the city

is a lot of men who are dressed...

Well, some of them are dressed half-way Western,

they're wearing sports jackets.

They're also wearing the Tarboosh, the fez,

which is a hangover from the Ottoman Turkish period.

And below that some of them are wearing a gallabeya,

a long gown which is from the Arab period.

So in a way, you see these men walking down the street,

they're a walking historical document

in the way that they're dressed.

"Sometimes an old man would sit outside a small shop,

"contentedly smoking his hookah,

"a little opium often being added to the bowl."

"You also see the picturesque water carrier,

tinkling his bell and shouting 'Two milliemes,'

"the equivalent of a farthing, for a glass of drinking water."

"Carts carrying as many as 20 women dressed all in black,

"herded in close together.

"That is how they transport their wives and women."

The majority of the women you see are veiled.

This tends to be actually an urban practice.

De-veiling had begun to occur in Egypt by the time Rosie visited,

but I think it is also fair to say that the feminist movement

was very much an elite movement.

After filming in the souk, Rosie stopped for drinks

at the European expats' favourite watering hole.

If you were wealthy, if you were glamorous,

you would want to be seen at Shepheard's

where you would have a drink and watch the world go by outside.

Like the Shepheard's Hotel, the Gezira Sporting Club,

built by the British after their occupation of Egypt in 1882,

epitomised the British desire to create a home away from home.

Imperial clubs were a way of separating the British,

the ruling class, from the people they governed in the colonies.

But few were as luxurious and magnificent as the Gezira Club.

But at Cairo's racecourse, the atmosphere was more relaxed,

and there was more of a mixing of cultures.

Just a few miles away at Giza, stood a monument

that testified to an age when Egypt was itself a powerful empire.

"We saw the Great Pyramid, of unnumbered stones,

"standing majestically, defying time,

"disdainful of human criticism,

"beside the colossal Sphinx, hewn out of solid rock.

"It's the expression of man's greatness."

It is fairly deserted while she's there

and it certainly is a contrast to today,

where it is a much busier scene.

The Pyramids are virtually on the edge of Cairo now,

they're virtually being swallowed up by the ever-expanding city.

On 16th March, Rosie took the train from Cairo to Luxor,

where she was spellbound by the temples,

some of which were almost 4,000 years old.

"We drove out to Karnak

"and were amazed at the beautiful proportions of these colossal ruins,

"the unique avenue of rams and the elegant columns

"carved with papyrus and lotus plants.

"The history of bygone days seemed still to linger there."

Once again, Rosie had the luxury

of exploring one of the world's great archaeological sites

almost entirely by herself.

Four days later, she took a boat down the Nile towards Aswan.

Aswan was always the frontier of Egypt.

At the time of the Pharaohs, it was a trading post.

It's as far south as you can sail up the Nile.

At that point you hit the cataracts, which are a series of rapids.

Egypt goes on further,

but beyond there is effectively another country.

"We took a rowing boat and were followed by small black boys,

"each in a tiny canoe made of tin trays.

"They raced one another for baksheesh.

"We named them the Water Babies."

The entourage passed Elephantine Island,

home to a population whose lives had been transformed

by the construction of the first Aswan Dam,

which was completed in 1902.

You see this Egyptian agriculture, winnowing and water raising

and she says "Look, this is what has been happening

"for a thousand years, but look, here is this great dam.

"Here is Western engineering and technology.

"Here is the new world coming to Egypt."

It's one of the world's great engineering projects,

in the way that the Empire State Building was when it was built.

And going across in that little box car as she does

on the very small railway that was built across the top,

would have been a great thrill.

It would have been something you would have wanted to go and see.

The dam had many economic advantages,

but it left scores of Nubian villages 50 feet under water.

One of Egypt's most important ancient monuments was also submerged.

One thing they couldn't move above the water level

was the Temple of Philae.

And Rosie shows it as two bits of masonry

sticking out above the water.

But if you've ever seen a picture of Philae,

you'll know that below the water

there is one of the great temples of the world.

It's an extraordinary building.

In the desert near Aswan, Rosie visited the villages

of the mainly Muslim and nomadic Bisharin people.

The Bisharin are very clearly a Nubian tribe.

That part of Egypt is in fact known as Nuba.

It has its own culture, it has its own identity,

which is quite strong even today.

But in her memoir, Rosie dismissed Bisharin culture in terms

that today would be considered derogatory and racist.

"Early, we set off to see a camp of the Bisharin,

"a wild poverty-stricken tribe.

"Living in mud huts in the Arabian Desert,

"they wore their hair 'golliwog fashion',

"or in numerous plaits.

"They skilfully performed a sword dance,

"accompanied by strange noises."

On the return journey, Rosie stayed at the home

of the British Army officer Colonel Wilfred Jennings-Bramly

in Egypt's Western Desert.

She filmed nearby at the Burg al-Arab,

an experimental community that had been created by Bramly in 1915.

The Burg al-Arab village was this kind of social engineering,

an attempt to create a model village

and to settle the tribes

and to turn them to useful productive tasks

and integrate them more fully into the Egyptian nation.

Social experiments such as the Burg al-Arab

were by no means the only influence

that Britain exerted on Egyptian life.

At Alexandria, Rosie filmed Nile barges carrying bales of cotton.

Because of British financial backing,

it had become the country's biggest crop.

A lot of Egyptian farmers were encouraged to grow cotton rather than food.

And when the price of cotton collapsed on the world market,

there was significant difficulty in the fields in Egypt.

If Rosie was troubled by the poverty she encountered during her journey,

she made few references to it, either in her memoirs or her films.

She's trying to see Egypt,

but she's still walking very well trodden paths

and I don't think she truly breaks free

or has a particularly independent view of Egypt.

I think, in a sense, she views Egypt through rose-tinted spectacles

and she rarely questions what she's seeing.

Rosie captures the last hoorah of the British in Egypt.

The Second World War, just one year away, changes everything.

There's no hint of it in this film.

If she'd gone and asked the people in the Gezira Club,

"Would you believe that in two, three years' time,

"you will no longer be masters in this way?",

they would have said no, they wouldn't have believed it.

On 26th March 1938, amid chaotic scenes at Alexandria's harbour,

Rosie boarded a ship bound for home.

"Then, as the ship steamed slowly out,

"I felt Egypt had cast her spell in one brief month

"and that I had seized the exceptional opportunities given me

"of bringing home to others,

"a living memory of a trip, which I had enjoyed so much.

"We waved farewell to this ancient land of beauty, romance

"and untold treasure, belonging to the Pharaohs."

In the same month that Rosie returned to Britain,

the Anschluss, through which the Nazis had effectively annexed Austria,

had edged Britain closer to war with Hitler's Germany.

Rosie would have been aware that many people feared war would happen.

On the other hand, life was pretty good for those with money.

And many people felt that that was what appeasement was about,

that we shouldn't rock the boat, that we shouldn't provoke Hitler.

Cushioned by her family's wealth, in the years before the conflict,

Rosie toured Britain in her Rolls Royce,

filming scenes of a world apparently untroubled by thoughts of war.

I think Rosie was filming the Britain she wanted to see,

the Britain she thought her audience would want to see,

and giving it a kind of validation if you like.

And reassuring herself, reassuring her audience

that this was really what Britain was all about.

The kind of merry England you see evoked by haystacks

and horses in the field and so on.

This was the Britain that she wanted to exist

and that she believed really did exist,

so it was partly self-delusion on her part.

Rosie captured genteel, reassuring images

representing the continuity of British institutions and traditions.

On one occasion, she exploited her royal connections

to film George VI's sister, Princess Mary,

attending a Girl Guides' Rally at Sandringham.

The Girl Guides and Boy Scouts were organisations that were set up

during the Edwardian era when there was a feeling

that we must strengthen society, that we must rally round the flag,

and rally round the crown

which was the great unifying force in society.

Rosie's pictures represent a prosperous, carefree and contented country,

but her films don't reflect the storm clouds of war

that were gathering over Europe.

After war was declared on 3rd September 1939,

Rosie joined the Women's Voluntary Service,

which informed people of the threat of air raids.

But it was her filmmaking skills

that would become important to the war effort.

It was suggested that she could take her films out to France

as entertainment of the troops.

So under the auspices of the YWCA and the Red Cross,

she travelled down to the south of France to show her films.

While in Cannes, Rosie filmed French troops on leave.

She also encountered some of the Tirailleurs Senegalais,

the African sharpshooters recruited by the French

from their colonies in sub-Saharan Africa.

There were 63,000 Tirailleurs Senegalais

on the French mainland at this time.

Just a few weeks after Rosie filmed them,

thousands of these soldiers were massacred by the German army

as they swept through France.

During a visit to Paris,

Rosie showed her films to the troops of the British Expeditionary Force.

By mid-May, Hitler's army was massing on the French border.

Rosie left France on the last civilian airplane

before the German invasion that led to the occupation of France.

"Unescorted, we started off,

"only to return to Le Bourget as German planes had been sighted.

"I had a stiff whisky and soda!

"Later we took off again, this time flying low over the Channel."

With a German invasion of Britain now seeming inevitable,

Rosie decided to use her camera to record Britain at war.

By the time of war,

she was taking her filmmaking very seriously indeed

and everybody wanted to play their part to defeat fascism,

to protect the country.

It was something that everyone joined in together.

I think she used all her social connections

and all the tools available to her in her social circle

to fulfil what she wanted to do.

After sitting next to an Admiral at a dinner,

Rosie was granted permission to join HMS Berkeley

and to film the ship out on patrol.

To get permission to get anywhere near any of the hardware,

you need to seriously pull some strings to get in there.

She must have been able to persuade them

that it was for a very good cause that she was doing this.

She went out to sea on HMS Berkeley out of Portsmouth.

Now that's unique to get an amateur filmmaker, and a female,

on a serving ship during wartime.

She arrived on board wearing very smart clothes

and of course, a skirt,

as a woman of her age and of her social class would.

Obviously, that was not suitable for climbing around on board ship

and the captain lent her a pair of trousers.

For most Londoners, the war meant long queues for food,

damaged houses, and an ever-present fear of German bombs.

At Hyde Park, Rosie filmed piles of furniture

salvaged from homes destroyed during the Blitz.

She also captured normal life carrying on amidst the chaos.

Rosie was one of the few amateur filmmakers

who was given the permit required to record scenes of this kind.

Courageously, Rosie also took her camera out onto the streets at night

to produce a series of remarkable images of London in flames.

She was aware of what she was seeing, was interesting, was curious, and wanted to record it.

It was terrifying, but it was grand spectacle.

"I had some close shaves during the Blitz.

"You don't notice it when you're absorbed in your work.

"My camera was to me like a gun was to a soldier."

She has referred to her camera as her gun

and she's also referred to running out of film stock

as running out of ammunition,

because that was always a worry for her.

Because colour film stock during the war was very difficult to get.

Throughout the Blitz, Rosie remained in London,

taking her camera onto the streets to record the aftermath of the raids.

Eventually, the war came even closer to home.

"One night, a bomb fell on the house next door,

"which had been occupied by royalty and it also damaged ours.

"I was sleeping in the basement and was rather shaken."

Her house in Piccadilly was seriously damaged by the bombing,

so Rosie moved around the corner into the sandbagged Dorchester Hotel.

The Dorchester was built in 1931

and it was the first concrete and steel building in London.

It was considered to be bombproof,

which is why all the socialites came here.

I mean, it was party time at the Dorchester.

Everybody who had money was coming here, they'd dance the night away,

oblivious to the fact there was a war going on in many cases.

Except dear old Rosie was up on the roof photographing the planes coming over.

Rosie grew so fond of the hotel

that she stayed there for more than 30 years.

She became affectionately known as "The Duchess of Dorchester".

When I started at the Dorchester in 1958,

Rosie was established, well established,

one of the regular guests here.

Everybody gave them top service, I mean, that was the manager's orders.

Whatever Rosie wanted, Rosie got.

Even in later life, Rosie's passion for filmmaking never waned,

and she continued to show her work at special screenings

for her society friends.

For Rosie Newman,

I think her filmmaking became part of her social life

and part of her standing in society.

She was known as a filmmaker.

Though she was not short of suitors, Rosie never married.

She continued to enjoy London's busy social scene

and never lost her love for life.

We always loved having Rosie to stay because she was great fun,

because she was always laughing and she was hamming it up.

You'd say something to her like,

"Rosie, you're obviously a very good filmmaker",

and she'd say, "But I was. But I was. I was very good."

On the 16th February 1988,

the intrepid film-maker Rosie Newman died aged 91.

But she left behind a unique treasury of images

that bear witness to a remarkable life,

lived in extraordinary times.

Absolutely certain she didn't set out to be a well-known filmmaker,

but she sort of grew into it

and it provided her with almost her own career,

something she could do that others couldn't.

And she enjoyed it and it served a very good purpose.

In the 1930s, Rosie Newman was one of the few women

in a position to travel the world and record her experiences on camera.

She took her filming very seriously,

and used her privileged position and high-powered connections

to gain access to people and places that were off-limits

to most amateur film-makers.

Though she was spirited and intrepid,

she was often oblivious to the more unpleasant realities of a decade

overshadowed by economic depression and privation on a global scale.

But her rich and vibrant films do show us in vivid colour

the elite at play in the twilight of Empire...

..Sites of great antiquity before the age of mass tourism...

..And individuals whose lives would be transformed by events

in the years before the ultimate cataclysm of a world war.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

E-mail [email protected]