Flying a Kite
- Streatham
- 1903
Charming amateur film of the 1930-31 Marylebone Cricket Club team relaxing while on tour in South Africa.
This well-made amateur film introduces the members of the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) touring party - but there's not a bat or ball to be seen in this behind-the-scenes glimpse of the players' leisure time. Providing a rare insight into the tourists' activities away from the cricket, there are delightful scenes of the team swimming, enjoying the seaside sun and taking part in the amusements on board ship.
The tour comprised five tests against South Africa between November 1930 and March 1931. Unfortunately, Ian Peebles' name is misspelt as Ian Pebbles in the captions.
Home movies are intimate catalogues of everyday life: birthdays and holidays, childhoods and neighbourhoods. Each reel is a private scrapbook - memories of cherished people, places and times committed to film. Rarely shared outside the family, home movies are the most intensely personal kind of filmmaking. They are by us, of us, for us. Victorian inventors put filmmaking gear in the hands of wealthy amateurs, but decade by decade, home moviemaking technology has become ever cheaper, simpler and more ubiquitous. Our home movies look much as they always have: in and out of focus, thumbs over the lens, wobbly framing, over-enthusiastic pans. But these flaws can't diminish their warm authenticity. Collectively, the nation's home movies make up a patchwork archive of British social life, of whims and ways, loves loved and lives lived.