The Yorkshire Film Archive collects, preserves, and shows film made in, or about Yorkshire. Our collections are non-fiction, dating from the 1890s to the present day, and providing a rich and visually compelling record of all aspects of lives, cultures, landscape, industries, major events and everyday activities, many of which are available to watch, free of charge, on our website.
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Game Fair
The place to go to kit out as a country gent, buy a shotgun and learn the necessary sporting skills that go with being one of the leisured class.
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Overview
Wandering amateur filmmaker Eric Hall of Bradford gives us a great overview of the kind of stalls and events to be seen in the early 1970s. This one at at Lord Barnard's home of Raby Castle, County Durham. These were participatory events, and here we see several punters having a go at clay shooting, as well as marvelling at the expert fisherman as they demonstrate their casting skills.
Eric Hall began making films in 1929, becoming one time Chairman of the North East Region of the Institute of Amateur Cinematographers and President of Bradford Cine Circle. With its 200 acres of deer park Raby Castle is an appropriate venue for a game fair. In the 1950s shooting game rapidly expanded, with a sharp increase in game licenses, as wider sections of the population took up shooting. To enable this breeding pheasants rapidly increased (by 2004 35 million pheasant poults were released to be shot). Game fairs are a late twentieth century invention of the Country Landowners' Association, established in 1907 (since 2000 the Country Land and Business Association), the first one being in 1958.
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