The Cine Technician (1943 - 1945)

90 THE CINE-TECHNICIAN July— August, 1943 Edited by Frank Sainsbury CLOSE-UPS No. 22 — SYD BREMSON THIS film business of ours is certainly a funny old business, and our union, composed as it must be of film workers, is certainly a funny old union. What with the big shot financiers and producers spending all their time in and about the Savoy and Claridge's, and most of the rank and file doing all they can in their own little way to imitate the bigtimers, it's small wonder that the film business has very little real contact with the life, people and problems of the rest of the country. I remember a film worker, who liked to consider himself left-wing, telling me about five years ago, before the cost of living had doubled, that nobody could bring up a family of wife and two children decently on as little as £15 a week. This, mark you Hamilton, at a time when a survey had shown that the income of over 70% of the families in Britain (not workers, note, but families, which may include several wage-earners) was less than £4 a week. And today, with the cost of living more than doubled and the workers with even the smallest pay-packets paying income-tax, the workers' average wage (men's only, of course, women's being much less) is still only £5 13s., according to a survey which did not include two million or so railway workers and miners who get about £4 a week, nor nearly a million agricultural workers who get £3 a week. All this is by no means intended as an encouragement to our bosses to try to cut our wages; an industry which, under its present organisation, can afford^ to have its gaudy figureheads disporting themselves at Claridge's and the Savoy, can certainly afford to let the people who do the real work visit the Corner House and the Cumberland. But it does show the real danger for our industry of losing touch with the rest of Britain and soaring away into a dream-world of its own. And that is why our great over-inflated gasbag of an industry should be grateful for the only anchor that keeps it firmly down to old mother earth — the labs — and why our union should be thankful for its thousand or so lab-worker members. Just as the lab bosses, when their day's work is done, shun the bright lights of the west-end, return to their solid suburban villas, and, like every normal boss throughout the country, bring out the bank books and spend a happy hall-hour wondering how to double their profits without being caught, so the lab. workers, when they come to A.C.T. meetings and talk of their long hours, bad conditions and low wages, bring in the freshening breeze of normal working-class life in this country. Time and again, at Executive, General Council or Annual General Meetings, you'll find a lab worker getting. to his feet and bringing the discussion right back to earth. And often enough the lab worker will be Syd Bremson. Syd must have had as wide an experience of the different labs as anybody, but you could hardly call his background quite typical of the average lab-worker. His grandparents were all Russians who in the days of the pogroms sought refuge in Ireland and settled down in Cork. The Russian refugees made a little self-contained community there of about 50 families, most of whom were traders, and Sid was born and spent his first few years in his father's grocery store. His father had married from among the little community, and Syd was the baby of fourteen children, a mixed bunch of boj'S and girls. They all survived but one of a pair of twins, but Syd has never seen three of his elder brothers who emigrated to America before he was born. In fact he has a nephew older than himself. When he was only a few years old his parents died and his sisters moved to Dublin, took a house and proceeded to bring up the rest of the family there. In Dublin the close family relationship continued, with one of the sisters keeping house and the others going out to work. One of his sisters had married a him renter with an office in Dublin, and when in about 1926 Syd left school, he went to work there. As he was one of the family, Syd was very well treated by his brother-in-law, with easy working hours and a starting wage of £2 a week. He did mainly office