Tetherball, Or Do-do

1898
Silent
1m

At sea for weeks on end, Victorian sailors had to find ways to amuse themselves and get a little exercise in too

Four sailors on board the Carisbrooke Castle indulge their competitive spirit with a game of tetherball. A Victorian version of our modern swingball, it is by far the most practical ball game to play on the deck of a ship - no worries about balls getting lost at sea. The camera is set up at just the right angle for us to follow the game - we can see all four players and who wins each point, plus the crowd watching them on deck.

This film was directed by British film pioneer Robert W. Paul, who made several comedies, trick films and actualities. He was a successful instrument-maker by trade and became the co-inventor of the country's first moving-picture camera in 1896. He built Britain's first film studio in London's Muswell Hill in 1898 and continued to make films there until around 1910, when he turned his focus back to instruments and military technology.

Robert Paul: Giant of Early Film

The most prolific filmmaker of the pioneer period of British film

The multi-talented Robert Paul (1869-1943) was the first British filmmaker to project film for a paying audience, in 1896. A contemporary of the Lumiere brothers, Paul had been producing film, in partnership with Birt Acres, for his own brand of Kinetoscope viewer since April 1895. Shortly after, he began producing for his Theatrograph and Animatographe machines, enjoying a long run at the Alhambra in Leicester Square. As an engineer, Paul made a number of significant innovations - such as an intermittent mechanism for efficiently projecting film. But he also made key innovations in film language, such as the first two-shot fiction film, Come Along Do! (1898). To cap it all, he was a shrewd businessman, with an instinctive grasp of audience tastes.