From the collection of
Established in 1992, the South West Film & Television Archive collection spans from 1893 to the present day containing more than 250,000 items. Formed from a variety of depositors, including broadcast news and programmes material from the Westward and TSW archive. In 2018 the archive collection transferred to The Box in Plymouth.
Holidays are close to home for the Parsons' family.
This film is delightfully 1930s with cloche hats and shift dresses for the ladies, wide legged pleated pegs with turn ups for men, full bathing costumes for boys, girls and adults (but no lycra). Filmed at Whitesand Bay Beach which at high tide is split into Sennen Cove Beach to the south and Gwenver or Gwynver Beach to the north. The rocks in the distance are Brisons Rocks but on a clear day it is possible to see the Isles of Scilly.
The Parsons family lived in Redhill in Surrey and owned a house at Sennen Cove. They left an impressive collection of amateur film on 16mm dating from the 1920s including film from Hillsbrow Preparatory School, a London to Eastbourne Old Crocks motorsport rally race and horseriding events. The amateur filmmaking tradition carried on down the generations to the 1970s and more family oriented home movies. They also filmed cruises to New York, Italy and Egypt in the 1930s.
Home movies give us unique permission to step inside the lives of people who we've never met and never will.
Home movies are always acutely personal - in subject and perspective - and most were never intended for audiences beyond family and close friends. But even so, these private films share generously with the uninitiated stranger. Watching home movies transports us into other lives and other times, where the actions of people we never knew, in places we've never visited, resonate with our own memories. The home movies of the stars, the rich and the famous, the royals - see past the familiar faces and they're much like anyone's: intimate film portraits of loved people and places, colourful moving picture albums of experience and emotion. These simple point-and-shoot home movies seem to connect with the past in a profoundly authentic way - their images unfiltered by filmmaking technique and artifice.
