Employees Leaving Brown's Atlas Works, Sheffield (1901)

Employees Leaving Brown's Atlas Works, Sheffield (1901)


Workers are marshalled past the gate of one of Yorkshire's biggest steel firms.

Staging is common in Mitchell and Kenyon's 'factory gate' films. These workers at John Brown & Co.'s huge Sheffield ironworks are very obviously being chivvied past the camera by a smartly-dressed, bowler-hatted man - possibly Isaac Thomas, brother of regular M&K commissioner AD Thomas. In the concluding shot, an assortment of workers and children wave cheerfully to the camera.

Sheffield-born industrialist Sir John Brown (1816-96) was a major figure in the south Yorkshire iron trade. He founded his company in 1844, and opened the Atlas Works in Brightside in 1856: before the decade was out, the site had grown to 30 acres. Brown made his fortune making rails for the rapidly expanding rail network before turning to armour plate for the Royal Navy. He was knighted for services to British industry in 1867. Mitchell and Kenyon filmed the factory the year before Brown's merged with neighbouring Thomas Firth & Sons and began specialising in stainless steel manufacture. The company still exists as part of Sheffield Forgemasters, but the majority of the Atlas Works site was demolished in the 1980s.


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From the collection

Mitchell & Kenyon's Edwardian Britain

A miraculous journey around Britain at the dawn of the 20th Century, courtesy of filmmakers Mitchell and Kenyon.

Welcome to a lost world. These amazing films, lost for at least 80 years, offer something close to time travel. Miraculously discovered in a Blackburn basement in 1994, the films give us stunning images of ordinary life in late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain. 

The films' rediscovery rewrote the story of early film. Blackburn-based duo Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon, we now know, belonged to a thriving local, non-fiction filmmaking scene. Touring northern and central England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, they made films for fairground operators and other showmen to screen to paying audiences, offering punters the chance to 'see yourself as others see you'. Factory workers, churchgoers and schoolchildren, sportsmen and spectators - these relaxed Edwardians laugh, grin and point at the camera. Film brings them all back to life, as no painting or photograph ever could. 

Digitisation of this collection was funded by The National Lottery.


8 videos in this collection

Workers are marshalled past the gate of one of Yorkshire's biggest steel firms.
1

Employees Leaving Brown's Atlas Works, Sheffield (1901)

How the magnificent Mitchell & Kenyon collection was resurrected, thanks to the dedication and skill of the BFI National Archive.
2

Road to Restoration

First-ever footage of Manchester United in a tense Edwardian football fixture.
3

Burnley v Manchester United (1902)

Crystal-clear views of town, sands, sea, tourists and locals at the Lancashire resort.
4

Panoramic View of the Morecambe Sea Front (1901)

Dumfries schoolchildren take their turn in the spotlight.
5

Loreburn School, Dumfries (c.1901)

A breathtaking winter journey in the Pennines, from country to town and back again via electric tram.
6

Tram Ride into Halifax (1902)

Summertime laughs and larks at a West Yorkshire pleasure gardens.
7

Trip to Sunny Vale Gardens at Hipperholme (1901)

Outside a fairground cinematograph in Edwardian Lancashire.
8

Sedgwick's Bioscope Showfront at Pendlebury Wakes (1901)

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