Morning In The Streets

[poliphilo]

BBC 4 showed Morning in the Streets last night as part of a evening of programmes about Liverpool. It's a wee gem- a lyrical impression of the post-war city- somewhat in the style of Humphrey Jennings-  put together by the BBC Northern Film Unit.  It records a society that has completely- but completely- vanished. Respectable tramps are dossing in blitzed out buildings, respectable families are sleeping seven to a room, all the men wear flat caps, all the women wear headsscarves- and girls in the playground are doing a complicated ring dance and chanting,

Take her by the lily white hand,
Lead her to the water, 
Give her gifts and make her cry-
She's the old man's daughter!

And then someone on screen tells us about something that happened in 1957. Sheesh, was I really contemporary with all of this?  But of course I was.  I checked with the Radio Times this morning. The film was made in 1959- when I was eight- approximately the same age as the ring-dancing girls.

Comments

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Splendid!

[nostoi.livejournal.com]

Well, that was really interesting. I was expecting everyone to have typically Liverpudlian accents, but most of them didn't. Quite a lot of the shots reminded me of Accrington/Haslingden when I was a little girl, and I wasn't born until '69. So even in the very early seventies the scenes from this film would still have been recognisable. Not so much the debris in the streets, but where I grew up there were derelict houses and wasteland where the kids would play. We were right next to the railway line.

Did you talk in a previous post about mill chimneys? That's something I remember very clearly, just the sheer volume of them, and then when I went back there a few years ago they were all but gone. Shame in a way, but you can't have dozens of useless chimneys dotted about just to satisfy a random person's sentimentality can you?

I remember watching a silent film a bit back about the mills and there was a scene where hoards of women were leaving the factory after the shift was over. The narrator said the sound of the clogs on the cobbles would have been deafening. I can't remember the name of the two men who shot it, but it was film that had been found in a shop or a basement or something...just reels and reels of ordinary human life recorded on film. Very early 19th C.

I'm so glad that this documentary survived the years, and can be shown still as an important historical record. Thanks for talking about it. :)

[nostoi.livejournal.com]

Actually "grow up" is completely the wrong phrase...we left before I was 3!

[nostoi.livejournal.com]

Here we are - the chaps who did those films:

http://www.cbc.ca/arts/film/cameraneverlies.html

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, I watched some of those shows. I see what the writer means about Dan Cruikshank. I like him, but he wasn't needed. The material speaks for itself.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I first showed up in the North of England in 1976- when things were beginning to change. I've watched the process with fascination- the mills coming down, the terraces being broken up.

Of course the revelopment of Manchester received a massive fillip from the 1996 IRA bomb. God bless you, you Fenian bastards!

[nostoi.livejournal.com]

You're naughty! LOL

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Naughty perhaps, but it's how a lot of Mancunians feel. The IRA bomb didn't kill anyone, it ripped up the ugly city centre and provided the impetus for the regeneration that's been powering away ever since. What's not to love? In the thirty odd years that I've lived here I've seen Manchester go from a grimy, depressed, post-industrial shell to one of the liveliest, most cosmpolitan cities in Europe.