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Claude Endicott was an amateur film maker based near Plymouth who made many films using both 9.5mm and 16mm, colour and black and white, featuring his family, as well as shooting film of local scenes and events of importance to the region. His films constitute the largest amateur collection in The South West Film & Television Archive and span from the 1920s to the 1970s although the majority of films are from the late 1920s and 1930s. He was part of a prominent local family of butchers but was an enthusiastic and skilled film maker as well as having an endless fascination with new innovations and spectacles. He filmed Atlantic liners arriving in Plymouth (a normal stop on the way to other ports), the Nautilus submarine as it left for the North Pole in 1931, and he filmed famous people who visited the port by ship, including Walt Disney and 1930s Hollywood actor Richard Dix. Endicott showed his films locally in later years but they were originally filmed for his own pleasure and for his family. Films include several family weddings in the 1930s, family picnics and tennis matches, boating holidays, openings of local landmark buildings, a diving team in Plymouth, the launching of ships, Lynmouth before the flood and events in the Coronation year of 1937. This clip shows the rare event when ice skating was possible at these ponds, during the great freeze of 1933. Other strong amateur collections in the archive include, the films of the Parriss family. Father and son worked for the gas board and had a shared interest in film making, they made distinctive amateur fiction from the 1930s to the 1970s, including one on 'Fashions of '38', and aero-engineer Frank Owner, who also shot home movies from the 1930s onwards, covering both his career as an aero engineer and his home life and hobbies. |
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