Windrose Rural Media Trust has released its latest production on DVD, featuring archive film from the Mendip region of Somerset, down to the coast at Clevedon.
High Above and Down Below – Mendip’s Film Pioneers features the Curzon Cinema in Clevedon, village life in Compton Martin, Winscombe, the snows of 1963 and 1978, Cheddar, Wells and Axbridge.
The DVD is part of A Century of Sights and Sounds, a project funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund and local sources to preserve Windrose’s massive film, video and audio archive and bring much more of it to the public.
This has included digitisation, research by students and volunteers, live shows, online access and the use of old films and music with people affected by Alzheimer’s.
The new Somerset DVD begins with a trip to the Curzon Cinema in Clevedon. Local historian Jane Lilly introduces a 1915 film of the town and its people made at the behest of Victor Cox, the first proprietor of the Curzon. Bernie Brown plays the cinema organ, just as it used to be.
In Compton Martin, Dave Salmon, who has lived in the village all his life, is filmed at his grandfather’s pub and takes the viewer back to a lost world through a 1940s film of daily life in his community. Folk songs sung by Amanda Boyd complete the atmosphere.
Winscombe’s Filmmaker Gerald Bird
Robert Bird’s father made films around Winscombe in the 1930s and 40s. His record of the wartime fire brigade contrasts strikingly with the experience of Sean Heighton of the modern Fire and Rescue Service.
The snows of 1963 and 1978 were captured on film, as was the Cheddar flood of 1968. Farmers Clive Dennis and Andrew Sealey remember how their Mendip farms survived, and John Rowlands of the Environment Agency draws the contrast between conditions then and the computerised warning systems of today.
Siobhan Godwin, who runs Wells Walking Tours, introduces 1930s films of Wells and reflects on a city that is both changeless and changed.
Axbridge had its own professional film maker. The late Nick Barrington, hotelier, caver and cameraman, is remembered by his friends, Jan and Francis Rabbitts. through his films of caving under Mendip and Axbridge’s Silver Jubilee celebrations in 1977.
High Above and Down Below can be obtained from Windrose Rural Media Trust, price £10 (including p & p), at Corner Cottage, Brickyard Lane, Bourton, Gillingham, Dorset, SP8 5PJ. For more information contact Trevor Bailey on 01747 840750 or email tbailey352@btinternet.com
Details of Windrose’s other DVDs and CDs can be found under here. All proceeds from the sale of DVDs and CDs are used to help Windrose’s work.
