Surprising a Picket

From the collection of

MACE is the strategic lead organisation for screen heritage for the East and West Midlands regions. An independent charity based at University of Lincoln, MACE preserves and makes accessible a collection of more than 100,000 historic moving images representative of the diverse cultures and histories of communities throughout the heart of England from the Lincolnshire coast to the Welsh border.

Surprising a Picket

Media Archive for Central England
Muswell Hill
1899
Silent

Faced with the immense logistical issues of taking the new film technology to far away South Africa, the British pioneers sought ingenious ways round the problem. Here we have a Boer War reconstruction shot by R.W. Paul, one of seven he produced during 1899. Many years later he told the British Kinematograph Society that he had filmed on the golf links next to his Muswell Hill studio supervised by Sir Robert Ashe, a former officer with Cecil Rhodes's forces in the Transvaal.

War. Boers attack a camp and steal from the bodies of soldiers.

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