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British Pathe: Video memories of Peterborough
The British Pathe website has recently been relaunched and a wealth of wierd and wonderful pieces of footage from our area from yesteryear are only a click or two away:
HENS wearing spectacles? Wrestling vicars? Fire eating in a Peterborough pub?
Many Peterborough people will have fond memories of, a mainstay of broadcasting in the early-mid 20th century
The cut glass English accents accompanying black and white images, often moving at unnaturally rapid speed, with Austin Powers-style music... it was a different era.
Multimedia:
In pictures: British Pathe archives
Search Peterborough videos at www.britishpathe.com
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The service covered everything from events that stopped the world to dog shows and new motorways.
And its website is a treasure trove of more than 90,000 clips from across the world – plenty of them from close to home.
The site, www.BritishPathe.com, was recently relaunched with a new enhanced search facility. Type the name of an area, town or village into the searchbox and you will likely find some hitherto-unappreciated gem, a grainy piece of historic film, or a face from yesteryear.
Enter ‘Peterborough’ and you will enjoy a list of treasures including these:
A video from London Road was filmed in the 1970s, and shows the Posh taking on an unidentified team in red and white.
The camerawork shows how far football coverage has evolved to the 3D HD of today – players’ heads are sometimes missing from the picture, and action is often shot through the net.
Another video shows what Posh players from 1960 – the team “carving a name for itself in football history” – got up to away from football. Can anyone imagine Lee Tomlin as a joiner, or Paul Taylor and Emile Sinclair running an oil delivery business?
For those who like their football of an even older vintage there is also coverage from 1928, when the Posh took on Birmingham in a seven goal thriller.
Those of a squeamish disposition will want to avoid Jack Taylor and his family performing various stunts including dancing on broken glass and fire eating in a pub while drinkers cheer and cover their eyes in equal measure.
The colour footage was shot in 1965 in the Triangle.
Beautiful choral singing from 1934, and images of the interior and exterior of the city’s most famous building, can be glimpsed in a clip titled ‘Peterborough’s noble cathedral’.
Peterborough was well-known for its brickworks and one video from 1935 shows men at work in the pits where the clay is scooped up by digging machines.
Young men unloaded the finished bricks from machines in the factory, and the soft bricks were taken to the ovens on trolleys.
Shoppers who believe the Bretton Centre is old fashioned should take a look at the centre in the 1970s – they may even recognise themselves in Sainsbury’s.
Hens wearing spectacles sounds like the figment of a vivid imagination, but in fact one farmer from Crowland in 1951 believed that it stopped them “frowning over their beaks” and pecking rivals.
A 1929 video shows Prince George laying the foundation stone of the new Town Hall.
A procession of royal cars drive through a narrow street in the city and crowds line either side of the road, while floral decorations hanging between the buildings give the occasion a carnival atmosphere.
Further afield, viewers can see footage of Minister of Transport Ernest Marples at the opening of the Stamford bypass in 1960, heralding “the uncorking of another Great North Road bottleneck,” and famous motorboat racer JW Shillan practising on the River Ouse near Huntingdon back in 1930.
The award for the most unusual video, above goes to 59-year-old wrestling vicar Reginald Thompson who trots to a ring consisting of a blanket in the middle of a Fenland Field, on the back of Flossie the horse.
The vicar administers some heavenly holds in a display of ‘muscular Christianity’ in 1963.
In pictures: British Pathe archives
Search Peterborough videos at www.britishpathe.com
The British Pathe channel on YouTube
Do you have any memories? Have you found any other photos or video online of Peterborough?
Contact our news team by email john.baker@peterboroughtoday.co.uk, telephone 01733 588719, on Twitter - @jpbaker or use our Have Your Say form
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Thursday 24 May 2012
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