Our Home Movies … by Ms Paige Turner

‘Screenocean’s Anna Ison interviews me regarding our Home Movie Footage’.
We have some fascinating home movies and travelogues from the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s held within our Jan Moran Neil/Linda Ralph collection. It’s a nostalgic collection documenting post Second World War working class family life and captures golden moments from that period. Highlights include celebrations of the Queen’s 25th Jubilee in 1977 featuring the Queen and Prince Philip arriving and greeting people as well as some fantastic scenes of Jubilee’ street parties with Union Jacks, homemade crowns and long tables filled with party food.
The collection mainly depicts London but also documents UK caravan holidays and trips to Paris and Venice, including various scenes of Orange Men parading in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
We spoke to Jan Moran Neil about the collection to discover what the films mean to her and find out the real gems of footage she cherishes most.
What’s your favourite footage captured?
I think the footage of me dancing and curtseying around our Ford Escort van. I went into the professional theatre so I learnt to curtain call early on. It’s lovely to be able to look back and see how our family relationships played out at the time. My sister, Linda was eight years older than me and at times acted like a second mother to me, which you can really pick up on when you look back and observe the body language. My sister worked in our grocery shop after school so she had to grow up quickly.
How was the footage filmed?
My dad and sister filmed all the footage on cine camera. It’s especially nice that my sister was able to capture my dad on film too. There’s a sense of continued contact when we watch the films as we lost him early on in our lives. The rolls of film were all stored in our loft, with a projector to play it back on and watch the footage as it was projected on our living room wall.
How would you describe the collection to someone who hasn’t seen it?
It’s a historical document. The footage captures a family after the war, full of hope and ambition for a better standard of living. My father worked hard – , but in those days we played pretty hard as well! For example, there’s footage of me running around in open spaces with the poodle, as there wasn’t the living space that many enjoy these days.
Was your father always fascinated with film?
I think more so than my mother, but it was always a joint effort between my father and sister to record and capture family moments on film. Film making became a part of my dad’s rare leisure activity, rather than something he did for work.
What does the collection mean to you?
Having family members captured on film; seeing ourselves in our former glorious youth. There aren’t too many photos of us as children. It’s so lovely that we can share this footage with our family, my daughter and our granddaughters, and future generations to come, knowing that Screenocean is preserving and using it. We didn’t have the plethora of digital footage available now, which is taken so much for granted, so this inherited three hours of film is a historical document to be cherished.
To find out how to license this footage: mailto:info@screenocean.com
www.screenocean.com