This film is part of Free

University (Leeds)

This rare self-promotion of a redbrick university gives a fascinating portrait of the University of Leeds in the 1920s, showing its facilities, its students, and its benefits.

Promotional 1925 23 mins Silent

From the collection of:

Logo for Yorkshire Film Archive

Overview

Here the University of Leeds makes an appeal for funding in a film that presents the full range of the University’s courses, especially highlighting its impressive industrial departments. The film offers an inside view of a redbrick university in the 1920s, and great insight into its mind-set. Students are seen at work and play while outlining University’s benefits for local communities and industry with its appeal specifically to “Yorkshire Men and Women.”

This is a rare example of a university commissioned film, especially for fund raising, made prior to the Second World War. Enlisting the cameraman at the Scala Cinema in Leeds to make the film, the appeal is principally for a new library, under the then Librarian Dr Richard Offor. As it turned out, the money for this came entirely from a donation of Ј100,000 from Lord Brotherton, a former Lord Mayor of Leeds. He laid the building's foundation stone in 1930, the year in which he died, and it was opened as the Brotherton Library in 1936. Brotherton’s collection of some 80,000 rare books and manuscripts was also donated to the University, including a copy of the First Folio of Shakespeare’s works.