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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Romsey Gazette
Social and civic events in Romsey are recorded in this film from the early 1930s - with fascinating views of the town centre as well as a car crash and a devastating house-fire.
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Overview
This fascinating amateur film from the early 1930s records various events in Romsey's social and civic calendar. These include pageants, the official opening of the hospital, a well-to-do wedding and an Armistice Day procession. Some events, like a meeting of the local hunt and a military display, take place in the town centre, which, apart from traffic, looks little changed from the scenes shown in this film. The film ends with two disasters - a car crash and a house fire.
The film-maker, Dr G H Johnson was a private medical practitioner in Romsey whose hobby of cinematography enabled him to film the activities of his friends and family before World War Two, including subjects which particularly took his interest, such as horses, fox hunting and the building of the Western Docks extension in the port of Southampton. He passed on his interest in film-making to his son Peter, who died in 2002 after a lifetime's involvement in the social life and institutions of the town.
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