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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Sheffield Student Rag Week 1967
1967 may have been the summer of love, but here we have a marvellously filmed (late) summer of frivolity and pranks as Sheffield students raise money for charity in a week long fest.
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Overview
The age old tradition of students playing at being students is here given full rein, and brilliantly caught on film by the students of Sheffield University themselves. Highlights include a fabulous Rag Week parade, men in nighties, running through the streets of Sheffield in the beer marathon, a motley group of weird vessels making their way down the River Don and the national headlines received for their publicity stunt of painting ‘HMS Twikker’ on the side of the QE II.
This is one of a large collection of films made by the University of Sheffield Student's Film Unit. They made a companion to this film of the same Rag Week, equally as good, as well as film of rag events from earlier and later years. Sheffield RAG started out in 1920 as ‘Hospital Saturday’ where medical students raised funds for local hospitals, while the Rag's magazine (renamed Twikker in 1930) came out in 1925 – one of the first. Neither Rag Week nor the Twikker remains, though Rag continues as an all year fund raiser: apparently the Rag Week became too big and boisterous for police and residents alike. Twikker was always notorious for jokes in bad taste, and had to be pulled in 1975 after protests against its sexism.
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