At Wessex Film and Sound Archive you can see and hear history, from late Victorian times to the present day, through moving images and sound recordings. The Archive contains over 36,000 film and sound recordings relating to Hampshire, the Isle of Wight, Berkshire, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire, including film and tapes of local TV and radio.
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Basque Refugees at Stoneham and a Holiday to Lands End
There's something reminiscent in this home movie from the 1930s – with refugees escaping from a distant civil war to find safety in England
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Overview
Reverend Henry Horton’s gem of a home-movie features Basque refugee children, from the Spanish Civil War, living in a camp at Stoneham, Hampshire. We then accompany the Reverend on holiday to Cornwall where we see Land's End, the tiny port of Mousehole and Lanyon Quoit, one of many Neolithic structures in the region. Back in Hampshire we see a man starting his motorbike and an outdoor children's tea party before ending with views of Remembrance Sunday at Minstead.
In May 1937 just over 3,800 children from Northern Spain arrived in Southampton, in what was at that time the largest single influx of refugees into the UK. They were housed at Stoneham camp before being dispersed to host families around the country. Volunteers set up the camp and fed and looked after the welfare of the children during their stay at Stoneham, since, apart from issuing the young refugees with three-month visas, largely in response to the public outcry over the bombing of Guernica the month before, there was little official help from the UK government. Reverend Harry Horton, who made several films featuring village life in and around Minstead, was presumably part of that volunteer effort.
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