A living, breathing history of Liverpool

May 6 2008 by Laura Davis, Liverpool Daily Post

Even without sound, the flickering images of yesteryear bring life to our knowledge of a city at the peak of its fortunes. Laura Davis reports

THEY swarm out of the shop door, spreading like spilt liquid in all directions across the pavement and into the road without a thought to the Green Cross Code.

In Edwardian Liverpool, there were no shiny little red men standing to attention who would warn of danger, and neither were there zebra stripes marking the safest path.

Children were not taught to look right, then left, then right again, even before they were shown how to write their own name.

The pedestrian was the master of the street and drivers of the few vehicles on the roads knew their place. People wandered freely and crossed wherever took their fancy.

You can’t tell all this from a photograph, especially not from the carefully posed line-ups that our ancestors favoured, gazing sternly into the lens. And even the candid shots have a certain formality, the figures frozen in time, unable to wriggle their arms or legs for all eternity.

How exciting, then, it must have been to have stumbled across two large barrels of film, shot in the early 1900s, of people bustling busily, waving frantically and appearing so completely and fascinatingly alive.

"We didn’t think there was anything so early," says Dr Julia Hallam, of the University of Liverpool’s School of Politics and Communication Studies. She, along with Prof Robert Kronenburg, head of the School of Architecture, is spending two years collating footage of Liverpool’s landscape from the earliest days of film to the 1980s. The project will conclude with an online database of Liverpool- based actuality films.

There was much footage of Liverpool shot by pioneers of the moving image, but sadly most of it has been lost. Fortunately for researchers, film lovers and historians, two barrels of film created by Blackburn-based entrepreneurs Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon were uncovered in 1994.

Among them were some 20 films of Liverpool, featuring city parades, football matches and even the world’s first crime reconstruction. Almost lost forever when Mitchell & Kenyon’s original shop was demolished, if it wasn’t for chance this valuable resource would have been accidentally destroyed without anybody even knowing its fate.

Excerpts will be shown at a special screening at St George’s Hall on Tuesday, May 13, in an experience made as authentic as possible for its audience, with an organist accompanying the film.

"These would never have been shown in their entirety. Even when they were made they would have been shown separately," explains Dr Hallam, who has organised the event.

"They would originally have been shown by showmen who organised screenings at all sorts of places like the Grand Tivoli Vaudeville Theatre of Liverpool." The Victorians had been fascinated by the idea of motion, and were very inventive in using movement in entertainment.

One creation was the phantom ride, involving the audience sitting in a railway carriage while an image was reeled at speed in front of them, visiting Switzerland and back and home in time for tea.

Another was the magic lantern show, during which the showmen would create the appearance of motion through sound effects such as rustling leaves and by moving pieces of scenery.

Even so, it must have been an amazing experience to view authentic moving pictures for the first time.

"When they first started taking moving pictures, they would keep the camera still and often have a recognisable building in the background;, in Liverpool, it might be St George’s Hall," explains Dr Hallam.

"Mitchell & Kenyon came along and they made things more interesting by getting people to watch themselves. The showmen realised quite quickly that people would go to paid performances to see themselves.

"They would go around getting people to wave at the cameras in very much a contrived performance, and on some of the films you can see the showmen walking around handing out leaflets for the shows.