The Media Archive for Central England is the public screen archive for the East and West Midlands. An independent charity and company based at the University of Lincoln, MACE acquires, catalogues, preserves and makes widely available moving image materials that inform our understanding of the diverse cultures and histories of communities between the Lincolnshire coast and the Welsh border.
This film is part of Free
Surprising a Picket
A reconstruction of a Boer War atrocity made by one of early cinema's greats.
From the collection of:
Overview
Faced with the immense logistical issues of taking the new film technology to far away South Africa, the British pioneers sought ingenious ways round the problem. Here we have a Boer War reconstruction shot by R.W. Paul, one of seven he produced during 1899. Many years later he told the British Kinematograph Society that he had filmed on the golf links next to his Muswell Hill studio supervised by Sir Robert Ashe, a former officer with Cecil Rhodes's forces in the Transvaal.