Northern Ireland Screen's Digital Film Archive is a free public access resource for teachers, students, historians and anyone who has an interest in moving images. Spanning from 1897 to the present day, the films in the Digital Film Archive cover all aspects of life in Northern Ireland and includes everything from dramas to documentaries, newsreels and features, animation to amateur footage.
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The "Dry Village"
The village of the crooked lake brags six pubs for 98 people but the model village boasts neither pawn shop nor police station. Which will you choose?
From the collection of:
Overview
Enjoy James Boyce’s cautionary tale of two villages, one with no pub the other with no newsagents. Hear what the residents of Bessbrook think of their founder John Grubb Richardson’s social experiment. He believed that the absence of a pub would remove the need for both the police and pawn brokers. But are the beautiful surroundings compensation enough for the lack of drink? And would the residents of Camlough be willing to give up their six pubs to find out?
Bessbrook is one of many Quaker model villages, it was founded more than 30 years before Bournville, the well-known model town founded by the Cadbury family. Despite Grubb's philosophy of the “three P’s” there is now a police station in Bessbrook however you will still not find any pubs or pawn shops. The reporter James Boyce was a French teacher by trade and his teaching methods were as unconventional as his broadcasts. He rarely failed to entertain viewers by becoming immersed in the subjects he covered and often poking fun at himself in the process. His reports are a treasure trove of the eccentric and strange aspects of Northern Ireland’s people and history. This material is Courtesy of the UTV Archive.
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