The Life Boys Newcastle on Tyne Area

This endearing amateur recruitment film, made to attract young blood to junior sections of the Newcastle Battalion of The Boys’ Brigade, was shot when Depression era soup kitchens flourished in the city. The trappings of team games and rambles in the countryside near Hawthorn Towers and military style marches in the city no doubt appealed to these young urban Life Boys, documented during hard times.

The founder of The Boys Brigade youth movement in 1883, William Alexander Smith, wished to be remembered as “the man who taught people to spell Boy with a capital B”. As a Sunday school teacher and officer of the 1st Lanark Rifle Volunteers, he based the organisation on a Christian and semi-military code of manliness (long spread through boys’ adventure literature and public schools), building character through physical exercise and sporting virtues, which fused with calls to serve the Empire during the First World War. The Life Boys motto was ‘Play the Game’. The Newcastle Battalion Boys Life Brigade was formed on 27 June 1908 as separate from the Boys Brigade Battalion, and survived until 1959.