RACHEL DISCOVERS THE SEA (1939)

This is one of many films made by Charles Chislett of his family, starting back in the early 1930s.  Chislett was a semi-professional filmmaker from Rotherham who, over a period spanning the years 1930 to 1967, made a considerable number of exceptionally well made films.  The Charles Chislett Film Collection held at the YFA consists of nearly 100 films, about half directly relating to Yorkshire, the rest mainly holiday films from around the world.  Chislett made many types of films: documentary, fiction, and family portraits.  It is right to see Chislett as a semi-professional filmmaker because, although he never made films for money (indeed he often subsidised them), he made many films to commission –either industrial or with the Church Pastoral Aid Society (CPAS), for example Men of Steel (1948) – and he brought to his films a lot of thought, great passion and considerable expertise that he built up over the years. 

Chislett worked his way up from a clerk to become the bank manager with William Deacon's Bank in Rotherham, but during the war he worked in the Intelligence Corps where he made a training film for dispatch motor cyclists, Dear Sergeant or the Story of Rough Riding Motorcycling Course (1944).  Later in the war he travelled across Europe as photographer with Radio Padre, photographing, among other things, the hideous consequences of Belsen’s Concentration Camp.  These photographs, along with a considerable collection of Chislett’s photographs, are also held with the YFA.

Not content with making films Chislett also put on shows of his films across Yorkshire, providing talks to go with each film to large audiences.   But this was only one of very many activities Chislett was involved in, which included the hobbies of golf, bird watching, acting, writing and producing plays.  Even more impressive are the number of organisations that Chislett either worked for or supported, among them: the Rotary Club, Continuity, Probus, the 41 Club, distaff and Remnants, the NSPCC and Handicapped Club in Toddington, the Society for the Preservation of Rural England and the National Trust.  In addition he was Superintendent of Masbro Chapel’s 1,000 strong Sunday School, as well as being a treasurer, Deacon and Lay Preacher.  He also instigated and ran the Rotherham Celebrity Lectures and took an active interest in the Rotherham Arts Council.

With all of these activities it is a wonder that Chislett managed to find the time to be a father.  But the film testifies to his devotion as a father, seen in the film dancing with his daughters, playing with model boats and rigging up a ‘train track’ for his daughter’s, Rachel’s, pram.  Rachel appears in an even earlier film in 1937, simply titled ‘Family’, and in many other films right through to her wedding in 1961 and beyond.  The film is a lovely portrait of a family having fun on the beach, and is given added poignancy by its timing.  In March 1939 Germany occupied Czechoslovakia and Britain declared that they would go to war with Germany if they invaded Poland.  Everyone expected war, and when Hitler duly invaded Poland on September 1st Britain declared war on the 3rd.  Who would think that an imminent world war was looming watching this film?

Yet families continued to go on holidays to the seaside during the war, and the YFA has many films showing this.  The traditional seaside holiday features, of buckets and spades and donkey rides, that go back to the nineteenth century, and evidenced in the film, helped to enable a temporary escape from the hardships of war.  Of course, for a great many families, broken up, poor or without transport, this was not possible.  The Chislett family were fortunate in this respect, and a few years later Chislett made another film of the family on holiday, Dale Days (1943), again with Rachel prominent.  This time set in the Yorkshire Dales, this also shows how expert Chislett was in capturing that cliché, the innocence of childhood.  Interviewed for the Way We Were TV programme, Rachel (now Williams) recalled how her father never staged any of the action on the film, but that he was very particular in getting the right angles, background and lighting.

This film was part of a trilogy of films that Chislett titled Rachel Discovers England, all made in 1939, and in which Chislett deliberately sets out to record his daughter as she is growing up.  In a speech to a showing of the film in 1939, Chislett begins by stating that if the films are viewed as himself being ‘a fond parent’, then ‘ . . the evening stands no chance at all of being a success’.  Clearly Chislett was very self-conscious of his role and motives in making the film.  He goes on to describe his intentions as being to portray, ‘ . . a world where everything is new and exciting and full of thrilling possibility, yet so delicate that it may be destroyed by the careless word of an unsympathetic dictator .’  His sensitivity to the fragility of childhood, and appreciation of its significance, shine through the films, and can be felt in the conclusion to his speech: ‘Let us tonight leave behind for a while the declaiming of rampant Dictators, instabilities of exchanges and economic distribution and pass into a realm where such things are unknown, but where a nursery chair may be anything from an Atlantic liner to a somnolent donkey.’

Further Information:

The YFA has an extensive collection of material from the Charles Chislett archive.  This includes correspondence, film scripts and notes, photographs, promotional material and slides.  This is accompanied by an itinerary of documents within the collection produced by Fiona Latham.