British Pathe News

This is well worth a mention.

A few years ago I found a brand new web site which was sponsored by lottery funding and which gave public access to the massive database that is the British Pathe Film News Company.

For those who are still of tender young years, or maybe a damn foreigner, in the days before a TV set inhabited at least one room in every house in the country, the only way to see the News in moving images was at your local cinema and before each and every showing of each and every film in each and every cinema in the country, a 15 or so minute clip of British Pathe news films was shown, covering any event wherever it happened in the world, and the best thing about the company was that they filmed on real film, not video tape, and so kept a huge archive of material.

Some years ago this incredibly valuable 100 or so year archive of material, with the aid of a lottery fund, was copied into a digital format and made available on the web, you have to register your name and address but downloading the clips is now much simpler than it was originally (it used to be a bit hit and miss) and there is some fascinating stuff on there.

One of the better uses of the National Lottery Fund money.

Link to home page British Pathe News