This England - Cornwall: Helston Furry Dance and Villages

Helston
1934
Silent
6m

The town of Helston comes out dancing in this charming amateur film of a unique springtime custom.

The 8th of May is 'Furry Day' in Helston, Cornwall, a springtime festival of floral decoration and dancing, captured beautifully in this charming amateur film. White dresses abound as townsfolk young and old dance their way in and out of shops and around the town. Filmmaker John Wilson shot several other 'This England' films in the 1930s - an ambitious project to document life and landscape.

The tune accompanying the Flora (or Faddy) Dance, performed by the town's silver and brass band, is a key component of the festival. While this film is silent, the intertitles refer to the lyrics of a popular song version, 'The Floral Dance', composed by London concert singer Katie Moss in 1911. Moss' version helped to promote the event outside of Cornwall, though it differs from the traditional tune.

Home Movies & Amateur Film

Celluloid scrapbooks: the most intimate and personal of films invite us into Britain's birthday parties, back gardens and beach holidays.

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.