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.
Paul's Animatograph Works 