Mitchell and Kenyon
The Mitchell & Kenyon film company was a pioneer of early commercial motion pictures based in Blackburn in Lancashire, England, at the start of the 20th century.
[1] Following on from the first motion picture, made in October 1888 by Louis Le Prince in the United Kingdom, the first showing to a paying audience was by Auguste and Louis Lumière of France, in Paris in 1895 and in London the following year, featuring La sortie des usines Lumière showing workers leaving their factory gates in Lyon.
A typical two-hour programme would show drama, comedy, live actors and then the main attraction, local "topicals", with a brass band and the showman's commentary during the silent films, plus occasional sound effects from guns and members of the audience paid to scream and faint to add to the excitement.
As well as workers streaming out of factory gates, Mitchell & Kenyon filmed street scenes, parades, marches, walking out on Sunday and the fairgrounds.
Leisure activities shown include boating on rivers, promenading in pleasure gardens and rolling Easter eggs.
Troops were shown marching off to join the war or coming back from the front, past flag waving spectators.
The recent introduction of Saturday afternoons off work had made sporting events into popular mass entertainment.
A match between Sheffield United and Bury in September 1902 featured William "Fatty" Foulke, one of the most famous players of his day who also played for Bradford City and Chelsea.
Rugby league and cricket matches were also featured, and when A.D. Thomas, who styled himself "the picture king, the mastermind of the world", heard of a cricketing scandal where the respected Lancashire bowler Arthur Mold was repeatedly no-balled by the umpire, Jim Phillips, he promptly commissioned a filmed re-enactment of Mold's bowling to prove that his technique was valid – the first action replay, which was a popular success.
As early as 1900 some fiction films included slapstick comedy with blundering policemen, in anticipation of the Keystone Cops and Charlie Chaplin more than a decade later.
Diving Lucy of 1903 showed a lady's legs sticking up out of a pond in Blackburn's Queen's Park, and rescuers setting up a plank which a tubby policeman goes out on only to find it a hoax, at which the others let go and he falls in the water.
By the mid-1900s the taste of audiences for seeing themselves was fading, and more structured films were coming into vogue and the company concentrated on their fictional output.
In 1994, during demolition work in what had been Mercers toy shop in Northgate, Blackburn, two workmen were clearing out the basement when they found three metal drums like milk churns, and looked inside to see hundreds of small spools of film.
A large cache of Mitchell & Kenyon negative and positive films and a Norden cinematographic camera was offered by Christie's South Kensington on 23 November 1997.
The results are fresh and natural, offering an unparalleled social record of early 20th century British life.
In 2014, The Life and Times of Mitchell and Kenyon was produced at The Dukes, Lancaster and the Oldham Coliseum, starring Gareth Cassidy, Liam Gerrard and Christopher Wright, with video elements by imitating the dog.
