This film was made by local filmmaker Ernest Taylor. The YFA has ten films made by Ernest spanning ten years from 1945 to 1955, the year before his death in 1956. He may have started making films earlier in 1939, although the war made obtaining film very difficult.  These are mainly family and holiday films, but he also made training films. As evidenced with this film Ernest was willing to experiment in his filmmaking. Ernest was a member of the Huddersfield Cine Club, of which he was twice Chairman. He was also a member of Huddersfield Rotary Club, and this, as well as his work in business – with his own tailoring establishment – the Special Constables and the Air Training Corps, brought him contacts he could use in his filmmaking.  

 

Ernest was also active in the local operatic societies – the Huddersfield Light Opera Society and the Huddersfield Amateur Opera Society, both performing and organising. In 1954 this resulted in a film he made of one of the Societies and their productions, Amateur Cavalcade, which can also be seen on YFA Online. [That same year, and the following year, Ernest took Mediterranean cruises, filming the latter, My Summer Cruise, held with YFA.] In this film three well known entertainers at the time can be seen: the actresses Mary Clare and June Whitfield, and the singer Gracie Fields. The family of June Whitfield – who later went on to become a very successful TV comedienne – had a shop in Huddersfield, as did Taylor, so he may well have known her.

 

Ernest had already made a similar fictional film in 1951, Service Partners, which won first prize in the Novice Competition of the Scottish Film Academy. Ernest’s son, Stephen, believes that the story for Careless Security is inspired by –but not necessarily based upon – the true story of a local petty thief in the late 1940s, named Moore. Apparently the petty thief shot and killed a police inspector. Furthermore, Stephen thinks that Ernest gave it this title in reference to the ‘careless security’ of the local companies. Although fictional films made by amateur filmmakers aren’t uncommon, there are not that many still around. What is of note in this film is, for the best part, the naturalness of the acting. And although the direction is sometimes a bit ‘stagey’, it is also quite ambitious. 

 

As to what films coming out at the cinema at that time might have influenced Ernest Taylor, we can only speculate. Certainly there were plenty of films coming out in the 1940s and early 1950s where the criminal comes undone, such as Night and the City, from 1950. But Careless Security is less like the film noirs emerging from the US than something like the British film of 1950 The Blue Lamp, with Jack Warner playing George Dixon, the police constable who gets shot by the petty crook played by Dirk Bogarde. In contrast, the hero in Careless Security is the woman police officer using her alertness and observational skills.  What connects them is the fact that they each have intelligent police officers solving crimes: the writer of The Blue Lamp, Ted Willis, claims that it is the first film not to portray the British policeman as “a bumbling simpleton”. 

 

The film revolves around three central characters – the thief and the woman police officer being two, with the new police recruit being the third. Recruiting into the police force from the army is of course not unusual, and this would have been reinforced because at that time there was still National Service – Britain was still fighting in Korea until 1953 – which continued until the end of 1960. Pannal Ash College, featured in the film, is still used by the police although no longer as a training centre. 

 

Perhaps the other notable ‘character’ in the film is the large police box used in the film. Police telephone boxes go back as far as 1891, and of course became famous when one of them, on 23^rd November 1963, become Dr Who’s TARDIS (time and relative dimensions in space). They became widespread from the 1930s – Walthamstow was one of the first places to get them in January 1936 – until the 1970s when they were phased out. The kiosks could come in different sizes, although the one seen in the film is much bigger than the standard. Interestingly, at the time of writing (June 2009), Huddersfield is going to reintroduce a police box at Almondbury.

 

(With special thanks to Stephen Taylor)

 

 

The YFA has some notes that Ernest Taylor’s son Stephen has produced on the films. There are also some photos of Ernest, with his film projector and in theatre costume.

Anthony Aldgate and Jeffrey Richards, Best of British: Cinema and Society form 1930 to the Present, I. B. Tauris, London, 1999.