Chalfont St Giles (1946)
Item title reads - Chalfont St. Giles.
Buckinghamshire.
M/S of a signpost pointing to Chalfont St. Giles, the site of the first squatters' town. The camera pans across the huts in the army camp taken over by squatters. Various shots of the interior of one of the huts, seen through a window. C/U of a housewife making tea, another peels potatoes. The first woman hangs up her clothes and tides the room. Pathe's John Parsons interviews the woman in her house with the children around her feet. She says they moved in because where they were before was very overcrowded. A group sit around and discuss the fact that the men in the families are all ex-servicemen. A lady tells of the bad conditions she used to live in. The squatters get together for a 'town council' meeting everyone says they will stand by the Chairman if the army tries to evict them.
FILM ID:1408.14
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A DAY IN THE LIFE OF NON-LEAGUE WINGATE & FINCHLEY by Tamia Padotan
Last week the club was visited by UCFB student, Tamia Padotan who recorded what a typical matchday is like at Wingate & Finchley Football Club when Corinthian Casuals arrived at the Maurice Rebak Stadium. Featuring: Club Director, Paul Lerman; Ball boy, David Keane; Kit Man, Peter Barker; Press Officer, Nikhil Saglani; Club Secretary, Mark Felstein; Groundsmen, Andy Ward; Press Officer, Khalid Karimullah. Enjoy!
John Betjeman: St Saviour's Aberdeen Park
A serious Sir John? Impossible! - No, not impossible, but highly probable. The thicker come the jokes, the more likely the serious intent. Not that he ever tells a joke; but we conceive his purpose as being primarily to entertain; to dissolve us in laughter by the absurdity of it all. This is what he does, with not the slightest trace of malice - or only the very smallest. And yet we all know, and always have known, even while we smile indulgently - for we cannot help but smile, knowing him to be inevitably kind even when most kindled to righteous wrath - that he is in earnest. Not deadly earnest; just earnest, with that puzzled look on his face that tells us he finds it difficult to conceive how things ever came to such a pass. But they have, he perceives, and he must make the best of a bad job.
He is never the clown. But the sadness breaks through. The tears are held back. But tears there are. Something claws at him and will not let him be. A divine discontent with all this levity and his own jollity and uncle-like chumminess. Not only tears, but fears; the blind fear of the child confronted by the dark. And he reminds us that we are all of us frightened, all of us lost, all in need of redemption. Who will lead us from the Valley of Darkness? What kind hand is given to us to uphold and comfort us? Why, none other than that comfortable and comforting Church into which he was reluctantly born and raised. He, the hedonist, he, the unbeliever, he, who can so often mock through the nods and winks of understanding, he, the big lost child he always knew himself to be, he who loved the established forms and rituals even while he smiled at their pretentiousness...
And in this poem, requested by a viewer who was perhaps stung into remembrance by his laughter and his gentle mockery, we see him naked at last, on his knees before the Lord of Hosts, the Mighty, whose other face (for in this puzzling existence everything has at least two aspects) is that of the gentle Redeemer whose love holds us up through the worst calamity, whose forebearance can forgive even the unforgiveable.
The music is from the second movement of Elgar's Piano Quintet in A minor.
St Saviour's, Aberdeen Park, Highbury, London, N.
With oh such peculiar branching and over-reaching of wire
trolley-bus standards pick their threads from the London sky
diminishing up the perspective, Highbury-bound retire
threads and buses and standards with plane trees volleying by
and, more peculiar still, that ever-increasing spire
bulges over the housetops, polychromatic and high.
Stop the trolley-bus, stop! And here, where the roads unite
of weariest, worn-out London - no cigarettes, no beer,
no repairs undertaken, nothing in stock, alight;
for over the waste of willow-herb, look at her, sailing clear,
a great Victorian church, tall, unbroken and bright
in a sun that's setting in Willesden and saturating us here.
These were the streets my parents knew when they loved and won -
the brougham that crunched the gravel, the laurel-girt paths that wind,
geranium-beds for the lawn, Venetian blinds for the sun,
a separate tradesman's entrance, straw in the mews behind,
just in the four-mile radius where hackney carriages run,
solid Italianate houses for the solid commercial mind.
These were the streets they knew; and I, by descent, belong
to these tall neglected houses divided into flats.
Only the church remains, where carriages used to throng
and my mother stepped out in flounces and my father stepped out in spats
to shadowy stained-glass matins or gas-lit evensong
and back in a country quiet with doffing of chimney hats.
Great red church of my parents, cruciform crossing they knew -
over these same encaustics they and their parents trod
bound through a red-brick transept for a once familiar pew
where the organ set them singing and the sermon let them nod
and up this coloured brickwork the same long shadows grew
as these in the stencilled chancel where I kneel in the presence of God.
Wonder beyond Time's wonders, that Bread so white and small
veiled in golden curtains, too mighty for men to see,
is the Power which sends the shadows up this polychrome wall,
is God who created the present, the chain-smoking millions and me;
beyond the throb of the engines is the throbbing heart of all -
Christ, at this Highbury altar, I offer myself To Thee.