Filming at the Front in 1899

Snapped off the screen at last week’s Magic Lantern Society Spring meeting at Swedenborg House, thanks to Lester Smith’s wonderful miscellany of ‘Unusual Slides’. The image is familiar from Robert Paul’s catalogues, but seeing it as an original lantern slide was a first – doubtless supplied to head up programme of films about the South African war early in 1900. Paul had quickly arranged to send two cameras to South Africa when war broke out in October 1899, one of which he gave to Colonel Walter Beevor, a medical officer with the Scots Guards, who may well have taken this photograph, if he’s not the man pictured.

It was Beevor who took the best action films for Paul, including the striking one of the Scots Guards marching in to ‘liberate’ Bloemfontein in the following year. currently available to view on the BFIplayer https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-entry-of-the-scots-guards-into-bloemfontein-1900-online.

Films as impressive as this were hard to capture in the Transvaal, and Paul soon resorted to supplementing what Beevor could send with ‘reconstructions’ filmed on Muswell Hill Golf Course, like this Attack on a Piquet, viewable courtesy of the Media Archive for Central England, https://www.macearchive.org/films/attack-picquet. Soon other pioneer producers were joining the fray )so to speak), with a variety of fanciful scenes from this war. Compared with Mitchell & Kenyons’ and Edison’s, filmed in New Jersey, Paul’s reconstructions seem a model of sobriety. But as he remarked later, who knew how they were presented by exhibitors around the world in what Simon Popple aptly termed ‘the first media war’.

There don’t seem to be any separate catalogues of the slides that Paul and other producers produced: presumably you just ordered them with your films. But within a year, Paul would pioneer titling on film, with intertitles, as can be seen from what survives of his elaborate 1901 Scrooge, or Marley’s Ghost. However, lantern slides would continue to be used for at least the next decade, to link programmes of short film, as an important part of the exhibitor’s craft.

Posterity short-changed?

The British Museum c.1894

Sometime in July 1896, Robert Paul made the British Museum an offer he thought they couldn’t refuse. To have a collection of ‘animatographs’ of recent events, such as Princess Maud’s wedding, the Derby won by the Prince of Wales’ horse, and London street scenes. Future generations would be able to look at ‘an exact representation of present-day scenes’. Each film would be in a sealed red glass vessel’, to prevent fading, further enclosed in a cast-iron or brass tube. Thus the BM would be the first museum in the world to hold a collection of these wonderful new records. What could go wrong?

What did go wrong was the Museum’s inability to decide where this new material should be housed. Paul went public about the lack of any response in an extended interview for the Daily Chronicle in December, which Stephen Bottomore has kindly provided me with from his pioneering research back in 1981. Thanks to Stephen’s Film History article in 1995 (‘The Collection of Rubbish’), we know that Sidney Colvin, the Keeper of Prints and Drawings, eventually admitted that ‘no-one could say in which particular pigeon-hole they belonged’. Paul apparently donated one subject regardless, the Persimmon Derby, but no trace of this has ever been found at the museum, although the film survives in the BFI National Archive.

Thus Britain missed out on a far-sighted scheme. And by the time that film collections began to take shape, much of the early decades’ output had been lost. But what’s interesting to read in the interview, is detail about filming techniques (15 frames per second), and Paul’s confidence that rapid improvements would continue. Within five months, in April 1897, he would be offering shares in his company, predicting many new branches of the business and substantial profits on the basis of his first year of trading. But this too met with little enthusiasm, and when the flotation failed, Paul’s Animatograph Works continued as a private company, alongside Paul’s electrical instrument business.

Paul clearly regretted the Museum’s lack of interest. He thought it was ‘more of a place for permanent records’ than the South Kensington Museum, forerunner of today’s Science Museum, which was his second choice. If his offer had been accepted, imagine what a record we might have had of ‘living London’ in the 1890s!

Frames from Paul’s London films of the 1890s – all currently lost, apart from Blackfriars Bridge (bottom r), which still shows the remarkable quality he boasted of to the Museum.

The Modern Mystery Merchant Sells Up?

After two epic round the world tours as a magician in the late 19^th century, the American-born Carl Hertz styled himself ‘the Modern Mystery Merchant’ in his autobiography. And just to read the 1896-1898 itinerary – from Southern Africa, through Australia, New Zealand, then to Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), India, China, Japan, the Fiji Islands and Hawaii – is enough to inspire awe.

But even more impressive was Hertz bringing ‘animated photography’ to all of these countries, having managed to take one of Robert Paul’s early projectors on his travels, along with a batch of films, which he somehow supplemented along the way. His show would feature what he billed as the ‘Cinematographe’ – no doubt reckoning this was the name most widely known. And amid all the other illusions he offered, it seems to have attracted most attention. The report of its first night in Melbourne in 1896 recounted in local papers is still wonderfully vivid (see my full account at http://filmalert101.blogspot.com/2017/09/the-animatograph-hits-australia-ian.html as well as in Robert Paul and the Origins of British Cinema).

And what about the early model Paul Theatrograph he used, and the films he’d shown? Given that Hertz had to learn how to project while on the first leg of his journey, it’s hard to imagine that the projector and prints, a mixture of early Paul and Edison subjects, were in usable condition by the end of his gruelling three-year tour. But perhaps they were?

Early film historian Deac Rossell, author of an impressive recent Chronology of the Birth of Cinema 1833-1896, recently spotted a brief London advertisement, which he suspects may be Hertz selling off his kit after returning to England, and kindly shared with me. Underpinning the early film business was a flourishing trade in ‘used’ prints, which made their way through its many layers until they were unprojectable.

Hertz seems to have had no continuing interest in film after his 1890s tour, devoting himself to debunking mediumship and spiritualism like many other magicians of the era. He would no doubt have approved of Paul’s Is Spiritualism a Fraud?, subtitled The Medium Exposed (1906 ). And selling off his now outdate machine and combustible film collection would have made good business sense for this shrewd ‘modern mystery merchant’. When he died in 1924, the New York Times reported his estate of $200,000 as a ‘record performer’s fortune’.

The Unipivot Thread

Photographed here alongside two of Robert Paul’s electrical instruments is a window-catch from the house he built shortly after leaving the film business, but close to what was still his instrument making factory off Sydney Road, North London. The catch was very kindly given to me as a memento by the current owners of number 49, Maggie and John Dodd, who first welcomed me inside many years ago to see the house that Robert built.

Catching sight of the windows, I immediately connected this distinctive design with Robert’s most prized invention – the unipivot galvanometer, which he patented in 1903 and won gold medals at worlds’ fairs in St Louis in 1904 and Brussels in 1911. The same principle would be applied to a wide range of instruments manufactured by the Paul Instrument Company, before and after its merger with the Cambridge Instrument Company in 1919. And here it was reproduced in the house he helped design.

What’s so special about it? According to the University of Queensland Physics Museum, ‘the coil is circular and cleverly pivoted on a single spike (the unipivot) at its centre of gravity, with the result that the device is not disturbed by accelerations and could be used to make measurements in moving vehicles. The design was further refined by an automatic lock that protected the delicate mechanism from damage when not in use.’ And from one of Queensland’s useful online photos (above), we can see how this works inside the brass casing.

The unipivot principle certainly made a great deal of money for Paul – probably more than the fifteen years of his film business. ‘Unipivot’ became his telegraphic address; and he must have left instructions with Ellen for putting an image of it on his gravestone in Putney Vale Cemetery. Did she add the cryptic phrase ‘true till death’ on her own initiative? Or did they discuss how Paul had proposed to her with it in 1897, as recounted by a family friend?

We might speculate that ‘unipivot’ had some metaphorical significance for Robert and Ellen, connoting steadiness throughout their marriage, despite the loss of their three children in early infancy. But Paul was not a man given to half measures, as registering the unipivot patent coincided with the peak of innovation in his film production. He’s easier to understand as an engineer, trained to solve problems and seek improvement in any process, whether realising the potential of film, which he had proclaimed in 1898, or producing more versatile and sensitive instruments for the new electrical world.

The elegance and economy of the unipivot principle – still admired by instrument historians – must have seemed a better symbol than anything from his career in film, with the technology of cinema constantly changing across his lifetime. He had left cinema while the going was good, before the upsets of patent wars and price-cutting which put most of his British contemporaries out of business. And he seems to have retained an affection for it, helping to found the Cinema Veterans organisation in 1924 after the death of William Friese-Greene, and patiently answering queries by film historians throughout the 20s and 30s. But in the end, he chose to be remembered as an engineer.