Stoke on Film 1900 - 1930

£12.99

This collection of archive films and interviews from Staffordshire Film Archive represents films shown at local picture houses then cinemas from 1900 to the end of the heyday of silent cinema.

Many show lots of local people who were encouraged to come and see themselves on the silver screen. These new prints were made from films discovered and preserved by Ray Johnson at the Archive and are the earliest moving images of this area.

There is film of a colliers train arriving and the colliers crowding onto the platform in 1900, railway workers in Stoke in 1901, silk workers in Leek in 1901, Stoke football matches in 1903 and 1904, Stoke Locomotives Works in 1910 and dustmen in Tunstall in the same year.

King George V and Queen Mary are filmed in Burslem in 1913, Belgian refugees and a mayor-making in Newcastle in 1914 and the melodrama A Pottery Girl’s Romancefilmed in Burslem in 1918. King George again in 1925 on his visit to declare Stoke a city, and many scenes from a film made to celebrate that and shown in 1926.

After fairground scenes at the Potteries Wakes in 1927, we end with the Wedgwood Bicentenary Pageant of 1930 with a cast of thousands.