Back in the days when money was money and you got a full 240 pennies to the pound, no trip to the cinema was complete without the 10-minute news reel. Shortly after the ice-cream lady had come round in the intermission between the double feature - you got two films for the price of one then - the cockerel logo would appear on screen and you would settle back to the Pathé News round-up of the week's events from around the world.
Well, round-up and news may be putting it a little strongly. By the 1960s Pathé had become rather idiosyncratic, having decided it couldn't compete with the hard reportage of daily television news. What you tended to get was a quaint snapshot of British life. You'd start with a clip of a few loyal subjects being deferential to Her Maj on one of her royal tours, and end with a visit of the Windmill girls to Paris or a dolly-bird in a pink mini-skirt hanging out next to a pink Mini. It was all very comforting and reassuring, and often, it has to be said, a great deal more entertaining than the main film.
If TV news put the first nails in the Pathé coffin, it was colour TV that buried it six feet under. Throughout the 60s Pathé had managed to keep an audience by filming in colour, but once TV got in on the act, the game was up. The last Pathé News was screened on February 26, 1970. "It contained an item called 'Prelude to a Royal journey to New Zealand'," laughs Julian Aston, managing director of British Pathé. "The cameramen knew their jobs were coming to an end and they just wanted to get as much foreign travel in while they still could."
Bizarrely the very medium that knocked Pathé off the screen has sustained it for the past 30 years, as Pathé has made a very lucrative business of selling broadcast-quality clips back to telly. Up till now, though, its film stock has not been available to the general public as this was thought to be too difficult and cumbersome to manage. From today all that has changed, as British Pathé has digitised its archive and put it online. For the next three years low res images will be free, higher res will cost £75 for seven clips. "We believe we have a unique resource of moving images," Aston continues, "and we hope that everyone from schools, libraries, universities to individuals make use of it."
Paris in the last decade of the 19th century was the centre of the pioneering work in motion pictures. It was here that Gaumont and Lumière were based, and it was here that Charles and Emile Pathé set up shop in 1896. Aston sees parallels between the birth of moving pictures and the start of the internet. "They found a way of distributing information that had hitherto been impossible," says Aston. "They realised that all they had to do was equip theatres with film projectors and they had a captive audience and a ready market."
Les frères Pathé started producing short news reels and by the early 20th century they had offices in both London and New York. One of Pathé's oldest items is Queen Victoria's funeral in 1901. For the next 70 years the company documented nearly every major world event, including the death of the suffragette Emily Davison at the Derby, the Hindenburg disaster, both world wars and the liberation of the Nazi death camps. "At the beginning of the first world war the Germans had no motion cameramen." Aston says. "They were lent some by the French so that their history of the war could be recorded."
Inevitably much of the footage and the voiceovers appear dated and stilted now. "It was a different era and British Pathé developed an unmistakable style that was proudly patriotic," Aston explains. "There wasn't any censorship as such - people just didn't film anything that wasn't going to be shown. We have hours and hours of footage of the Queen from a baby to an adult and we've looked for a clip of her making a mistake but we can't find one. Of course she must have made mistakes, but the cameramen were too polite to record them.
"The only exception is the wedding of the Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson. The world's press was invited to a photocall in Paris, and we have some footage of the couple standing together, but it was never screened. It was considered too disloyal to the new king, George VI. But that's just the way things were; it wasn't until Princess Margaret and Group-Captain Peter Townsend split up in the 1950s that the press broke rank and door-stepped St James's palace."
Pathé also made thousands of hours of magazine footage. These include the first ever dedicated women's programme, Eve's Film Review, which ran from 1921 to 1933. Its first edition featured "a popular actress has a stork painted on her shapely shoulders", "a hotel waiter shows how to create dainty shapes with serviettes" and "a charming picture of the minuet dance in an old-world garden". "Oh yes," smiles Jenny Hammerton, Pathé's archivist and author of For Ladies Only, a history of Eve's Film Review. "Watching it taught me how to be a flapper." At least I think that's what she said.
The trend toward magazine-style features became more marked in the 1960s when news coverage gave way to lifestyle values, and there are endless clips of the swinging sixties - though if you watch closely you quickly realise that by and large, the swinging was all being done by a few famous faces within several square miles of central London.
Digitising the archive was made possible by a cash injection of £1m from Pathé's parent company and matched funding from the National Opportunities Fund. Aston naturally hopes everyone will sign up for the high-res option, but perhaps he isn't aware how little money schools have. In any case, the low-res images look good to me. So log on while you can. Your three-year window starts now.
www.britishpathe.com
