Tom Merry, Lightning Cartoonist, Sketching Kaiser Wilhelm II

1895
Silent
1m

Quick on the draw: Victorian cartoonist Tom Merry does a rapid sketch of Kaiser Wilhelm II.

One of many actuality shorts filmed by Birt Acres in 1895, in its surviving fragmentary form this film provides a brief glimpse of Tom Merry (real name William Mecham), a popular caricaturist of the period whose work was featured extensively in the political magazine St Stephen's Review.

Merry's 'lightning sketch' act was a popular music hall draw - and he may have been the first British celebrity to be filmed. His path to the screen would soon be followed by other cartoonists. Kaiser Wilhelm II would be a frequent target of the cartoonists' pens after 1914, when he was typically drawn much less kindly than he is here.

Tom Merry sketching Kaiser Wilhelm II.

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.