Incoming Tide
- Worthing
- 1898
A pack of beagles are assembled for a hunt by their trainers and a huntsman
This film of the hounds assembling before a hunt is a simple affair taken from a single camera position. Alas, we know nothing about which hunt it shows or where it was taken. William Henry Youdale was a talented amateur filmmaker from Cockermouth who left us several films from the late 1890s. The meeting of the Hunt was a rural spectacle popular in early cinema.
Some of the most fascinating of early films are those which are content to watch the world go by. Numerous filmmakers parked their cameras on street corners, in parks, on seaside promenades or outside workplaces or churches to capture fleeting moments of everyday life.
In their own day, these films held a mirror up to Victorian society. Today, these images of our ancestors – relaxed, smiling and laughing, gazing at us through the camera lens - are a gift of moving history. The offer us extraordinary insights into a lost world, more vivid than any still photograph or written account.