Playing golf in the garden in the 1960s

This vintage home movie shows a family playing golf in their large family garden sometime in the 1960s.

About the Golf Film

The film is part of a set of family films I purchased from eBay in the UK about two years ago. They are all on 4 inch reels and came in a small film storage unit with individual compartments and labels attached to each door explaining what the film is about.

This particular film had written on the door, ‘Jimmy, Jean & Gang at xxxxxx’; Unfortunately, I can’t make out the last work which is written vertically on the label.

The film stock is Agfa standard 8 and I would estimate the time period as the late 1950s or early 1960s.

As to the location, other than saying I’m fairly certain it is in the UK, I can’t pin it down to any particular town of village. There is a church shown in later stages of the film and if anyone recognises I’d love to hear from them in the comments below.

After the conversion to digital, I found there was a strong red colour cast which I removed during the post conversion editing stage but there is still a bit of a red tone in the darker parts of the image.

Some Still images form the film

Here are a collection of still images from the film to act as a sort of visual table of contents.

The golf in the garden film

The film is shown below for your entertainment and enjoyment.

I suppose the first thing which occurred to me as I watched this film for the first time is how lucky the family were to have a garden big enough to play golf in. I’m obviously not assuming they had a proper course set up, but just to have enough room to put the ball about is quite something. These days any garden that big would probably have been sold and had a house built on it!

The other thing which occurred to me is that the grass shown is not really suitable for putting; it’s not a very flat surface so actually sending a ball in a straight line would be quite an achievemnt.

The other thing which struck me is that the photographer obviously enjoyed making films, and took the time to add some stop frame animation into the film in the form of the balls which took themselves off to the hole. I wonder how long that sequence took to film? One thing is for sure – they didn’t have any software to make it easier.