Films bring bygone Scotland to life again - video report

Published on Tuesday 18 March 2008 22:04

THE bride received the top- hatted wedding guests on the lawn of her family’s Irish castle, and the Scottish groom brought along his own pipe band, which followed the departing couple in a boat.

The oldest wedding video in Scotland, and probably the world, was shown for the first time in a century yesterday, part of a huge restored archive of vintage films.

To view footage from the archive, click here

In 1905, the 4th Marquess of Bute, a fan of new technology, commissioned an unknown camera crew to film his lavish marriage at Bellingham Castle. The four-minute film, dating 20 years before the first home cine cameras, spent the next century decaying in an attic.

At the Scottish Screen Archive, www.ssa.nls.uk, the public can now access minute-long clips of 1,000 films. Thousands more are searchable on the website, and full footage is available on DVD, where copyright allows.

“This is a real milestone for us,” said the archive curator, Janet McBain. Two years of work to transfer 13,000 containers of fragile celluloid film to digital format was completed this month.

The films paint a fascinating, candid, often comical picture of Scottish life. They range from professional documentaries such as No Easy Way Out, which follows the Olympic champion Allan Wells in training, to films made of neighbourhood galas by local cinema owners.

In Meet the Stars, a goalie for Third Lanark FC appears – pulling a packet of cigarettes out of his shorts.

There are scenes of Hawick in 1909, and smutty schoolboys in Tam Trauchel’s Troubles, a fund-raising film for a holiday camp for poor Glasgow children in 1934. There are soldiers marching in Rothesay in 1918, women’s rights campaigners from 1928, and curlers at Castle Douglas in 1952.

Gordon Brown, interviewed as a student rector of Edinburgh University in the early 1970s, is also featured.

The wedding film was found in an attic by an archivist at Mount Stuart, on the Isle of Bute, the Bute family seat, in 2003. The 35mm film was on nitrate stock. “It had dried out to a state we had never encountered before,” said Ms McBain. “It would shatter like glass if you tried to unravel it.”

Digital restoration was used to piece together the film.

“This is a personal wedding film, a record for the participants of their happy event,” said Ms McBain. “It is, we think, one of the earliest, if not the earliest known family wedding film in this country.”

John Bute, the 7th marquess, was due to watch the film of his great-grandparents for the first time last night in a screening at the Glasgow Film Theatre.

The film shows guests gathered at a garden party at Bellingham Castle in Co Louth.

“The family already had a tradition of being technologically advanced,” said Andrew McLean, the Mount Stuart archivist. “Mount Stuart was the first house in Scotland to have electricity and a telephone, and the first house in the world to have an indoor heated swimming pool, in the 1880s.

“I don’t think any other films are known before this. I guess in terms of technology, it could have been the first in the world.”

To view footage from the archive, click here