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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Our Work and Workers: Kings Hall Mission
The moral reform of potentially wayward youth is given methodical treatment in Hull in the 1920s, as a local Methodist Mission promotes the virtues of sport over alcohol.
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Overview
The great late Victorian mission to keep working class youth off the drink, and play sports instead, is seen here to be alive and well in 1920s Hull. The Methodist-run Kings Hall Mission organises a Boy's Life Brigade, a temperance parade, a male choir, a cycle run and football matches, with local Methodist wealthy benefactor and Liberal M.P., Thomas Ferens, kicking off.
The maker of this film is unknown, but presumably he or she would have been a member of the Methodist Kings Hall Mission. Methodism had historically been very strong in Hull; indeed its founder, John Wesley, had preached there on no fewer than sixteen occasions. A Methodist chapel or mission hall was established in Hull for each of the 120 years from its beginnings in the 1790s. Although Methodism had several schisms in its brief history, in 1907 three of the major branches re-united, with the Primitive Methodists joining them in 1932. However, in 1923 the Kings Hall Mission may well have been in competition with the even more zealous Primitives who had their own Zion Chapel further down the road.
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