Rhyl Cycling Club Outing to Nant Hall, Prestatyn

Members of Rhyl cycling club wobble about and dismount before taking a well earned rest and posing for the camera.

In this fragment, members of Rhyl Cycling Club mount their cycles during a visit to their President’s hotel in nearby Prestatyn, staging what a local paper calls a ‘comical spill’ for Arthur Cheetham’s camera. With no harm done, next up is a grassy picnic, the bonneted ladies and manly cyclists clearly relishing their time out on the lawn during a day that was, by all accounts, quite full-on.

Arthur Cheetham (1865-1937) was an entrepreneur, cinema proprietor and pioneer filmmaker - the first in Wales to film events for his own shows. 12 of his 47 films, shot mostly from 1898 to 1904, survive partly or wholly, including the oldest extant British short of a competitive football game (1898). From 1889 to at least 1919 Cheetham was based in Rhyl, and on 6 June 1903 a local paper reported that the outing shown in this film fragment took place on 28 May and included games, races and a march past held ‘for the purpose of enabling Mr Cheetham to take a cinematographic portrait’.