The history of the Mercury Movie Makers group is quite fascinating. They were members of another local cine club who wanted to branch cine off and make 16mm, and not just 8mm or super 8 film. They formed themselves into a club in 1959 as an offshoot of an adult education class run by Geoff Bolton; naming themselves after the Roman messenger of the Gods. At first meeting in a room above a pub in Guiseley, The Old Drop Inn, they rented Sexton Lodge from the Church of St Paul in Esholt through one of their members, Ken Dixon, who was a Church committee member. The cine group turned this into a cine showroom in return for upkeeping it and paying the Church a small rent towards the repair of their roof. When the TV soap Emmerdale started filming here they used these premises, bringing in a good income. Here they would put on film shows for the many other cine clubs from across Yorkshire, and for the public, especially the elderly. They also made a film of the making of Emmerdale, also on YFA Online, From Esholt to Beckindale.  In 2008 they moved to Rawdon Conservative Club when the Church upped the annual rent from £150 to £3,000. The group made films as a collective, although individual members would also made their own personal films. Most of these are now collected together at the YFA.

 

This film was made shortly after the group was formed and shows just how adventurous they were, making a fiction film as well as the many documentary type films that they were collectively responsible for. Alan Sidi was as well known for his ingenuity in the film making process as he was in making films. Sidi developed a synchronising device that allowed audio to be synchronised with 8mm film as they run at different speeds. There was certainly some ingenuity in the making of 8 O'clock Special; not least in getting permission for British Rail to allow a film camera into the engine cab. This however, is an old practise, going back to the ‘phantom rides’ of the early days of filmmaking. But perhaps the most famous example is that of the film London to Brighton in Four Minutes, produced in 1952 by the BBC Film Unit, showing a journey from Victoria Station in London to Brighton from the front of a Brighton Belle train, and shot at 2fps, making it a bit faster than this film. 

 

Alan Sidi has said that his film was made without reference to this famous predecessor, which was made as a speeded up film, whereas the humour of 8 O'clock Special comes from taking the perspective of the unwitting passenger. Alan sat in the front cab clicking the camera on and off with a switch at regular intervals to produce the speeded up effect. It being a long time ago, Alan couldn’t remember whether he had just the one camera or whether someone else filmed the train from an embankment as it passed.  Alan notes that few people notice that the train gets reduced from four carriages to two.

 

8 O'clock Special was made just before the publication of the Beeching Report, ‘The Re-Shaping of British Railways’, in  From 17,830 route miles in 1961, there are now some 10,000. Some lines earmarked for closure did survive after hard-fought campaigns, such as the lines from Manchester to Buxton and Leeds to Ilkley.March 1963.  Under the direction of Dr Richard Beeching, formerly of ICI and the newly appointed chairman of the British Railways Board, a group of industrialists called the Stedeford Committee produced a report on the state of the railway.  This proposed the closure of 2,363 stations and halts, of which 235 had already been closed when the Report was published, and closing around 5,000 miles, almost a third of the network.

 

The Beeching Report caused major controversy, and even now still causes fierce argument, with those for as well as against. Supposedly set up to stem the losses the British railway was making, some have argued that the Report was a cover for the road lobby: the Tory transport minister at the time, Ernest Marples, was a director of Marples Ridgway, a major road building company and also a member of the British Roads Federation.  There is also the argument that, after the railway union’s strike in 1955 forced a climbdown over pay, there was a desire by the government to weaken the power of the unions. Whatever the truth of this, the film was made without thought to this impending report, although the line shown in the film was probably one of those that closed after Beeching, giving the film added significance.

 

David Henshaw, The Great Railway Conspiracy, Leading Edge, 1991.

Information on Mercury Movie Makers