We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
glad to put out work of this description. It was just taking in other people's washing, of course, but what of that? We hadn't the faintest idea at first that we might ever come to make pictures on our own account.
We needed several things and our tiny capital had to be very carefully laid out. There was a funny little central electricity station near Clapham Common, all run by strange little vertical gas engines direct-coupled to dynamos, and there were also some for sale. We bought one and rigged it up, with its fifty-volt dynamo, in the scullery of our little house, where it made a terrible noise when it was running. We bought a second-hand battery of twenty -seven accumulator cells from a man at Burgess Hill. We wired the whole house for electric light, moved the developing machine from Warwick Court and re-erected it in the drawing-room, rigged up the two bedrooms as film drying-rooms and the front sitting-room as an office. That left the kitchen and bathroom for general domestic use. It is not true that we ever contemplated taking in a paying guest. Indeed, I don't remember how we arranged our private lives. I know we prepared and ate our meals in the kitchen and I suppose we must have slept somewhere.
Somewhere about the middle of the summer of 1899, a young lady from Weybridge came in daily to do our secretarial and office work. She was a Miss Worley, and she stayed with us and was very helpful for many years. But the work didn't flow in as we hoped it would, and after a while, for lack of other occupation, we began to take a few little fifty-foot films and then we started a List with 'Film No. 1, Express Trains in a Railway Cutting.'* That was the very first of the Hepworth Films, but, like many another important baby, its birth was scarcely noted !
Then a young girl named Mabel Clark joined the 'staff' as what would now be called 'cutting expert' and we decided to carry on with the making of these tiny films until Fortune turned her face our way and sent us a few orders. But Fortune knew better. She only smiled a little and turned her face away, so we were left with the baby.
Thereafter there followed at short intervals a small number of fifty-foot films of a very simple and elementary character, such as Ladies' Tortoise Race, Donkey Race, Procession of Prize Cattle, Drive Past of Four-in Hands. All simple little things obtainable locally at no cost save that of the film-stock, and of very little interest to anybody. The fact that we took them and sold them, is proof that
42