Newly Discovered Films Reveal Lost World

Street traffic moving at different speeds, and often at cross-purposes, required controlling.

"Enter the policeman," said Hattersley, "And I sense that the police officer, the bobby, becomes more ubiquitous -- maybe even more obtrusive and annoying -- than at any previous period of English history."

Ever the streetwise team, Mitchell and Kenyon picked up on the new visibility of police. Mitchell and Kenyon also pioneered the future for cop films -- the drama with law enforcement heroes -- by dramatizing a notorious case, the arrest of Thomas Goudie, an employee of the Bank of Liverpool who was accused of embezzling enormous amounts to pay of his gambling debts.

"That's right, 'The Arrest of Goudie,' " said Worden. "Mitchell and Kenyon read about this in the papers, got in their car, went over to Liverpool to Bury Street where this man had lived. They did this enactment of his landlady reporting that he was in her house. We then have footage of two detectives frog-marching him from the bed-and-breakfast that he lived in to Bootle Police Station."

The Birth of Leisure

If everybody loves a parade, nobody ever loved parades more than the Edwardians.

"Edwardian Britain began with the biggest parade in British history," said Hattersley, "which was Queen Victoria's funeral. It's probably the biggest assembly of troops ever anywhere in the world outside Communist China."

"Demonstrating that you were part of a club, a society, a religious group, was incredibly important," said Kalas.

The Edwardian Age was also a time of great political turmoil, according to Toulmin. "It was an age where the growth of the trade unions came into power. The age of feminism and the suffragettes and you see these in the street scenes."

But turmoil was not the filmmakers' subject; and neither was poverty. Mitchell and Kenyon ignored the 30 percent of the population that was poor. They couldn't buy tickets.

"What Mitchell and Kenyon shows you is the lost age," said Toulmin. "It shows you this whole generation that was taken from us, through the shadow of the Great War."

Many of those traveling on trains from England's east coast to its west coast port of Liverpool were fleeing the shadow of Europe's wars. Liverpool was their last stop before the grueling ocean voyage to their futures in America. More than half a million immigrants went from England to America in the Edwardian decade, twice as many as the decade before.

But for the up-and-comers in Mitchell and Kenyon country, trains and trams were for a different form of escape the excursion to the seashore.

The Edwardian Age was the birth of leisure time for the middle class: "People actually had weekends, they had time available, and they were starting to get a little bit more money in their pockets so they could use to spend to go to places like Blackpool or Morecambe for holidays," said Russell.

As Mitchell and Kenyon's films show, the beach resort was where anyone could dream of moving up. And Edwardians dressed the part.

"When the ordinary working people wanted to be smart they could dress up and look just as smart as the bosses, so you get a picture in Blackpool of a pier with people walking on it and you cannot tell who are the bosses socially, who are the middle-ranking people socially, and who are the working people socially because they're all dressed almost identically," said Worden.

"The seaside holiday in Britain was aping their betters," Hattersley said. "The dressing up is being different from what we do in our... six-day working week. They're proving that they are part of the new society."

Another sign of working-class people with money to spend was their enthusiasm for soccer, or football, as they called it.