Summer Holiday in the late 1950s
The vintage home movie featured in this post shows a Summer Holiday taken in the late 1950s on one of the Scilly Isles.
The film is a standard 8, Kodachrome single reel which was taken by a Photographer I’ve featured on Vintage Home Movies before, Doreen Cables.
It should have been published a while back, but I missed posting it and only rediscovered the digitised version of the film as I was doing some organising of the disk on my Mac. I assumed in fact that I’d already published it, and spent quite a bit of time searching through the site for it before I realised that it wasn’t posted.
Some stills from the Summer Holiday Film
The images below give a taster of the scenes in the film. The rocks shown towards the start of the film, place the location as the Scilly Isles which the photographer visited several times and recorded in her films.
Summer Holiday in the 1950s film
The part of the film which made it stand out in my mind was the scene towards the end of the film when the family are being picked up by aeroplane for, I assume, the journey home. The plane registration is G-AHKU, and as part of the research I did to try to find some information about this film I discovered this site which gives a bit of information. The aircraft was registered in 1959 (the date the photo on the page was taken) at Land’s End / St Just and that seems to tie in with the location the film was taken.
The film was one of the earliest that the photographer took, according to my library of her home movies, and there are several scenes which show she is still working out how to use the camera and make successful home movies. Several of the scenes have panning which is rather too fast and there are some quite short and jerky scenes. Her later films were much more polished, which shows that she learnt from her mistakes and improved as time went on.
Lovely film. The opening scene shows the south side of St Mary’s, with views of Peninnis Head and Pulpit rock (the one that looks balanced on another). At 0:55 we see the arch on the steep lane leading up to the Garrison, followed by views back to Hugh town from The Star Castle, showing both beaches, Town Beach and Porthcressa. At 1:30 we see St Mary’s harbour, and what may be Scillonian II unloading? We then see a day trip across the water to nearby St Agnes (based on the lighthouse) and the sand bar between St Agnes and the Gugh, which gets covered over at high tide.
The family then head home from the airport on St Mary’s (in my previous post about the other Scilly film, I was unsure whether there was an air service at this point, but there obviously was).