An early crime film rediscovered: Mitchell and Kenyon's Arrest of Goudie (1901)

Film History: An International Journal

Volumn 16, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 37-53

  Toulmin, Vanessa ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 61949290537     PISSN: 08922160     EISSN: 15533905     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2979/FIL.2004.16.1.37     Document Type: Article

References (73)

1. 'The Romance of a Cinematograph Film', Ideas (31 January 1907): 14-15.
2. Liverpool Daily Post (5 December 1901): 1.
3. The Peter Worden Mitchell and Kenyon collection film are listed using the numbering system implemented by Peter Worden when he discovered the films. Subsequent citing of the films will use the prefix PW followed by the number and then the title if ascribed or known. Therefore, PW 757 and 758 will be described as the Arrest of Goudie in the forthcoming Mitchell and Kenyon Filmography to be published by the BFI in 2005.
4. For a full description of how Peter Worden discovered and listed the collection see Vanessa Toulmin, Patrick Russell and Tim Neal, 'The Mitchell and Kenyon Collection: Rewriting Film History', in The Moving Image, Vol. 3 No. 2 (Fall 2003): 1-18.
5. For details of the Biograph Company's Non-Fiction Production see Stephen Bottomore, 'Every Phase of Present-Day Life: Biograph's Non-Fiction Production', in Griffithiana 69/70, The Wonders of the Biograph (1999-2000): 147-211;
6. for Mitchell and Kenyon's fiction output see Peter Worden and Robin Whalley, 'Forgotten Films: A Short Chronological Account of Mitchell and Kenyon, Cinematographers', in Film History 10, No. 2 (1998): 35-51;
7. for George Méliès see Paul Hammond, Marvellous Méliès (London: Gordon Fraser, 1974)
8. and also Stephen Bottomore, "Zischen und Murren'. Die Dreyfus-Affäre und das frühe Kino', KINtop 2 (1993): 69-82, who comments that George Méliès in L'Affaire Dreyfus placed great emphasis on realism, using exact replicas of the costumes and employing an ironworker who bore a close resemblance to Dreyfus.
9. For a full account of the background to Thomas Goudie and the events surrounding the case see Charlie Simpson, 'Tragic story of a Lerwick man' in The Shetland Times (28 December 2001): 20-21
10. and John Gannon, 'The bank clerk from Shetland who stole a fortune, Shetland Life (November 1987):39-43
11. and Frederick Edwin Smith, Rt. Honourable the Earl of Birkenhead, Famous Trials of History (London: Hutchinson & Co. , 19): 229-236. Frederick Smith was the defence lawyer for Goudie in the subsequent trial in London; he became solicitor-general in 1915 and then attorney general. The Goudie case was one of his earliest as a solicitor.
12. The Police Gazette (29 November 1901): 6, for details of Goudie's aliases.
13. For details of the other conspirators in the bank fraud see The Times (26 November 1901): 14.
14. See The Liverpool Daily Post from 25 November 1901 to 1 December 1901 for details of the story on a daily basis.
15. John Gannon's account of the Goudie bank fraud in Shetland Life (November 1987): 43 cites a number of people shouting "keep your heart up Goudie" as he was taken from Liverpool station.
16. The Illustrated Police News (14 December 1901): 8.
17. Goudie benefited little from the bank fraud: he was only found with £278 on him at the time of his arrest whereas Kelly restored £17,000, Stiles £6574, and Burge £30,000. In addition £46,000 was found in banking accounts in the names of Marks and Mances. Sydney Morning Herald (24 February 1902).
18. The Leeds Saturday Journal (25 October 1902): 2. The serialisation continued until 1903, and was a sensational account of the Goudie case with graphic illustrations of the major incidents.
19. For details of Mitchell and Kenyon's relationship with travelling film exhibitors see Vanessa Toulmin, 'Local Films for Local People: Travelling Showmen and the Commissioning of Local Films in Great Britain, 1900-1902', Film History, Vol. 13 No. 2 (2001): 118-138.
20. Further details of the life and career of A. D. Thomas can be found in Vanessa Toulmin, 'The Importance of the Programme in Early Film Presentation', KINtop 11: Kinematographen-Programme, ed, Frank Kessler, Sabine Lenk and Martin Loiperdinger (2002): 19-33.
21. Mitchell and Kenyon did show a film of the funeral of Queen Victoria and advertised this prolifically in both The Showman and The Era. See The Blackburn Times (5 February, 1901): 5 for a detailed account of Mitchell and Kenyon's filming of the funeral of Queen Victoria. However, it is unclear whether this is their title or one of the many other ones taken by rival cinematograph companies at the time.
22. For a full range of titles shown during the period see the Liverpool Daily Post from 5 April to 20 May 1901.
23. Liverpool Daily Post (6 May 1901). Although the local press do not mention the presence of Mitchell and Kenyon, reports in The Showman for the same period usually state that Mitchell and Kenyon were the operators working for Ralph Pringle.
24. The Showman (24 May 1901): 328.
25. and for details of the Northampton show for A. D. Thomas see Northampton Mercury (27 August 1901).
26. Pringle's exaggerated newspaper adverts state that '1,000 Animated Pictures of Peace and War, Tragedy and Comedy are shown daily'. See Liverpool Echo (3 October 1901): 1, for an example of this kind of advertisement.
27. Both films are in the Peter Worden Mitchell and Kenyon Collection: Prince of Siam aboard the New Ferry PW 411, filmed 27 November 1901
28. and Magnificent Pictures of the Cunard Mail Steamer Lucania leaving for America (PW 229, 231-232, 237) 30 November 1901.
29. Midway through the film stock, an inscription was found on the emulsion - 'Gou - boo', followed by '128' (with a 9 written over the top of the 8) then '129' was inscribed on the negative. At the tail end of the nitrate negative, '126 1/2' and 'Goudie' were also inscribed on the emulsion. The NFTVA staff note the very proficient splicing on this film. The condition of the two films was shrunken, with inconsistent frame line position, and the film stock was brittle and buckled, with red staining (a sign of nitrate decomposition).
30. For an in depth study of the Victorian craze for crime reporting see Thomas Boyle, Black Swine in the Sewers of Hampstead (London: Viking, 1989)
31. and for information pertaining to the Illustrated Police News see Leonard De Vries, 'Orrible Murders: An Anthology of Victorian Crime and Passion Compiled from The Illustrated Police News (London: Macdonald, 1974).
32. For information pertaining to Madame Tussaud see Pauline Chapman, Madame Tussaud in England: Career Woman Extraordinary (London: Quiller Press, 1992)
33. and Pauline Chapman, Madame Tussaud's Chamber of Horrors: Two Hundred Years of Crime (London: Constable, 1984).
34. Bill Smith (with the help of Mrs Smith and Mr Saunders), Joe Smith and his Waxworks (London: Neville Beeman Limited, 1896), 111.
35. I am indebted to Stephen Bottomore for information pertaining to this case. Films of the event were released by three different companies: The Moat Farm Mystery (Gaumont), The Moat Farm Tragedy (Harrison) and the Moat Farm Murder (Robert Paul) and all can be found in Denis Gifford, The British Film Catalogue: Volume 2: Non-Fiction Film, 1888-1994 (London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 2001).
36. For further details of the Moat Farm Murder see Essex Police Museum, History Notebook, Issue No. 37 at http://www. essex. police. uk/pages/offbeat/o-his37. htm
37. For details of the Moat Farm films see The Era (23 May 1903): 33
38. For details of the Hanging of Mary Rogers (Biograph 1905) see Stephen Bottomore, 'Every Phase of Present-Day Life: Biograph's Non-Fiction Production', in Griffithian 69/70, The Wonders of the Biograph (1999-2000): 147-211.
39. For further details of the life and career of Charles Peace see Gordon Honeycombe, The Complete Murders of the Black Museum, 1835-1935 (London: Random House, 1995): 1-17.
40. Michael Diamond, Victorian Sensation: or the Spectacular, the Shocking and the Scandalous in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London: Anthem Press, 2003), 90.
41. Catalogues from Madame Tussaud's waxworks in the National Fairground Archive from 1890 until 1953 reveal that two waxworks figures of Peace were on display, one as his alter ego 'Mr Thompson' and the other as the notorious Banner Cross assassin; in addition they also have a figure of Mr Robinson the policeman who apprehended Peace, and Marwood his executioner. See NFA PAM SALA/1405, NFA PAM Q SALA/1586, NFA PAM MADA/1438 and NFA PAM MADA/1069 for MadameTussaud's catalogues.
42. See also NFA PAM LOUI/1454 and NFA PAM MEET/1461 for details of LouisTussaud's Exhibition in Blackpool, which also featured Peace in the 1950s.
43. For information on archival material relating to Charles Peace see Sheffield Local Studies Collection B. P. 313s and B. P. 313s; and National Fairground Archive, Holloway Family Collection for the silk posters advertising the Life of Charles Peace in the early 1900s. I am also indebted to Ann Featherstone for notes pertaining to the Hodgson manuscript of the play of Charles Peace as performed by the family in their travelling theatre. In true melodramatic tradition they transformed the life of this villainous character to a Robin Hood figure whose dying words are enacted as being 'I stole from the Rich and spent freely with the poor. Many a poor mother will bless the name of Charles Peace'.
44. For reference to the use of the engine driver see Dave Berry, CinemaandWales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1994): 50, where he cites the Sheffield Photo Co. catalogue for 1906 as the source for this claim.
45. See Pauline Chapman, Madame Tussaud's Chamber of Horrors, loc. cit: 82.
46. The landlord was John McCarthy. See Paul Begg, Jack the Ripper: The Definitive History (London: Pearson, 2003): 250.
47. Michael R Booth, Victorian Spectacular Theatre, 1850-1910 (London: Routledge, 1981): 14.
48. For more detail of the use of the cinematograph in America as a visual newspaper see Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1991): 240-249.
49. Charles Musser, Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 163.
50. Cited in Stephen Bottomore, 'Every Phase of Present Day Life', loc. cit: 161.
51. Jonathan Auerbach, 'McKinley at Home: How Early American Cinema Made News', in American Quarterly 51:4 (1999): 797-832.
52. The most famous example is the article on Robert Paul: 'The Prince's Derby, Shown by Lighting Photography', The Strand Magazine Vol. XII (July-December 1896).
53. Jonathan Auerbach, 'McKinley at Home: How Early American Cinema Made News', p. 822.
54. Musser, Before the Nickelodeon, op cit: 188-189.
55. Mitchell and Kenyon produced over twenty fake titles relating to the Boxer and Boer conflicts, including The Despatch Bearer (1900), The Sneaky Boer (1901), Hands off the Flag (1901) Attack on a China Mission (1900) and Chasing De Wet (1901). Many of these titles survive and were the sole basis for their reputation as film makers until the discovery of the Peter Worden Collection and the 70 fiction titles now at the Cinema Museum in London.
56. Peter Bailey, Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998): 171.
57. See Worden and Whalley, 'Forgotten Films' for more information relating to this film; and Ideas (31 January 1907): 14-15, for a description of the working practices of Mitchell and Kenyon's out door studio in Blackburn.
58. The Sydney Morning Herald ran daily news bulletins on the event. For example see Sydney Morning Herald (4 December 1901): 'LONDON, Dec. 2. Thomas Goudie, the absconding bookkeeper of the Bank of Liverpool, was arrested at a Workmen's Lodging House at Booth, where he has lived since the robbery. It is believed that the landlady was suspicious and informed the police, who thereupon affected the arrest. '
59. For details of the Mitchell and Kenyon Company see Peter Worden and Robin Whalley, 'Forgotten Films: A Short Chronological Account of Mitchell and Kenyon, Cinematographers'. Some of the fake titles from 1900 include Attack on a Mission Station, The Despatch Bearer, The Clever Correspondent, and Assassination of a British Sentry.
60. For full details of these and other Boer War fakes produced by Mitchell and Kenyon in the 1900s, see Dennis Gifford, The British Film Catalogue 1895-1970 (London: David and Charles, 1973)
61. and John Barnes's five volumes on The Beginnings of Cinema in England, 1894-1901, reissued by the University of Exeter Press (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1996-98).
62. Pringle appears to have worked for Thomas on many occasions during the 1900 season. For two examples of the shows see The Huddersfield Examiner (3 November 1900)
63. and Newcastle upon Tyne Evening Chronicle (3 December 1900): 1.
64. Newcastle Upon Tyne Evening Chronicle (4 March 1901): 1.
65. Arthur Bird, Cinema Parade: Fifty years of Film Shows (Birmingham: Cornish Brothers Limited, 1947), 46.
66. for Nottingham see Nottingham Evening Post (13 March 1901)
67. and for Accrington see Accrington Observer and Times (16 March 1901).
68. Sunderland Echo (14 November 1901).
69. Bruce Peter, 100 Years of Glasgow's Amazing Cinemas, (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1996).
70. For details of Pringle's other cinemas in Edinburgh and Huddersfield see Brendon Thomas, The Last Picture Shows: Edinburgh. Ninety years of cinema entertainment in Scotland's capital city (Moorfoot Publishing: Edinburgh, 1984)
71. and Stanley Chadwick, The Mighty Screen: The Rise of the Cinema in Huddersfield (Huddersfield: The Venture Press, 1953).
72. Geoff Mellor, Picture Pioneers: The Story of the Northern Cinema, 1896-1971 (Newcastle: Frank Graham, 1971), 18-19.
73. Charles Anderson, A City and its Cinemas (Bristol: Redcliffe, 1983).