Isle of Wight Holiday in 1957

The home movie embedded below was taken in 1957 on standard 8mm film and shows scenes filmed during a family holiday on the Isle of Wight in 1957.

The box the film was packed in had no markings to describe where the film was shot, although it did have the date 1957 marked on it. In order to find the location of the film I needed to do a bit of detective work.

Isle of Wight Film

At about 1:30 there is an image of a car transporter crossing a river and in the background is a building with the name 'J Samuel White & Co Ltd' written on it. After a bit of googling I discovered this was a boat builder in Cowes on the Isle of Wight and that led me to the location. Later in the film the HMS Victory in Portsmouth is shown and very briefly, at the end of the film, there is a short sequence showing Charles Dickens birthplace which is also in Portsmouth so the film was completed there.

At the start of the film, a family is shown playing crazy golf at a holiday location, and this is followed by some shots of large ocean liners filmed not far from the coast. Following the shots of the car transporter (which may be the Cowes floating bridge?), there are shots taken on the beach and around a town on the coast. The final sequence, as I said above, was taken in Portsmouth.

Unfortunately the quality of the transfer to digital is not very good it is my intention to create a better telecine machine and once I have that working I will re scan this film.

The film was originally taken by the same photographer as the short film in Skye and Ullapool which I published earlier.