good morning and welcome to the deanery garden at canterbury cathedral on this morning of wednesday the 27th of april wednesday in the second week of easter wherever you are in the world please bring out your prayers and feel welcome here as we worship together we pray first of course for ukraine and all those who are living with the danger of war and those who have left that country to seek safety leaving members of their family behind we can do no more than hold them in prayer and also hold in prayer the leaders across the world who have to make very sensitive and difficult decisions to try to bring this to a peaceful conclusion and our prayers are urgent day by day so we ourselves bring our own intentions and whatever we would like to pray for across the world as we begin our prayers in this week of easter tide we've come here into the woody wednesday spot and i'm surrounded now by fully flowering spanish bluebells uh both blue and white and they are really lovely the english bluebells are taking off in a different part of the garden and they will be scented and a completely different head shape to these but these are a lovely sea of blue this morning and there's also a blue alcanet here and jack in the pulpit this flowering and scented plant is called schemia and we've got some other plants just coming up little flowers here milk milkmaids which aren't in flower yet but around us are all kinds of areas where wildlife can flourish and we have the log pile there which is a home for invertebrates for slow worms and and uh also for uh the uh stag beetle uh as uh that was flesh's imitation of a stag beetle who was reminding me that we have stag beetles here as well who are magnificent when they when they appear we don't see them very often hedgehogs wander around here as well but it is actually when you put a loose pile of logs and brush wood around it's a home for all kinds of wildlife and i'm sitting under the sycamore tree here and next to the mulberry tree so we are enjoying a spring morning but it's a thin layer of cloud this morning no sunshine yet perhaps we'll get some later on let's begin our prayers oh lord open our lips and our mouth shall proclaim your praise in your resurrection o christ let heaven and earth rejoice alleluia blessed are you lord god of our salvation to you be praise and glory forever as once you ransomed your people from egypt and led them to freedom in the promised land so now you have delivered us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of your risen son may we the first fruits of your new creation rejoice in this new day you have made and praise you for your mighty acts blessed be god father son and holy spirit blessed be god forever the night has passed and the day lies open before us let us pray with one heart and mind does we rejoice in the gift of this new day so may the light of your presence o god set our hearts on fire with love for you now and forever amen i'm sitting here with leo he came out with me before i came out and uh i was coming back from matin special was setting the scene here helped by the robin but then the robin saw leo coming across the lawn and began to make his angry noise and you may hear that from time to time because he's up in the tree here but then leo arrived and when he saw the robin he began to make his angry noise as well so um he's now turning his back on all of us because he's fed up with the robin even being nearby but i'm sure he'll get over it we're going to say psalm 121 today that is one of the psalms for this morning of the month the 27th of the month i lift up my eyes to the hills from where is my help to come my help comes from the lord the maker of heaven and earth he will not suffer your foot to stumble he who watches over you will not sleep behold he who keeps watch over israel shall neither slumber nor sleep the lord himself watches over you the lord is your shade at your right hand so that the sun shall not strike you by day neither the moon by night the lord shall keep you from all evil it is he who shall keep your soul the lord shall keep watch over your going out and your coming in from this time forth forevermore we're going to return now to john chapter 14 and you remember that i said yesterday this conversation written down by the evangelists and put together by the evangelists many years after it happened and it could be that the conversation happened in bits and pieces and jesus would have said many of these things over and again but it's set in the poignancy of the farewell of the last supper in the fourth gospel and jesus is trying to prepare the 11 disciples for what lies ahead i'm going on this morning from verse 15 of chapter 14 of saint john's gospel and we are remembering all of this with the sense of the disciples themselves recalling it afterwards it says that so often in saint john's gospel they did not understand then but after his resurrection afterwards they began to perceive exactly what he was meaning here is verse 15 of chapter 14 of saint john jesus said to the disciples if you love me you will keep my commandments and i will ask the father and he will give you another helper to be with you forever even the spirit of truth whom the world cannot receive because it neither sees him nor knows him you know him for he dwells with you and will be in you i will not leave you orphans i will come to you yet a little while and the world will see me no more but you will see me because i live you also will live in that day you will know that i am in my father and you in me and i in you whoever has my commandments and keeps them that is the one who loves me and the one who loves me will be loved by my father and i will love them and manifest myself to them judas not iscariot said to him lord how is it that you will manifest yourself to us and not to the world jesus answered him if anyone loves me they will keep my word and my father will love them and we will come to them and make our home with them whoever does not love me does not keep my words and the word that you hear is not mine but the fathers who sent me these things i have spoken to you while i am still with you but the helper the holy spirit whom the father will send in my name will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that i have said to you peace i leave with you my peace i give to you not as the world gives do i give to you let not your hearts be troubled neither let them be afraid you heard me say to you i am going away and i will come to you if you loved me you would have rejoiced because i am going to the father for the father is greater than i and now i have told you before it takes place so that when it does take place you may believe i will no longer talk much with you for the ruler of this world is coming he has no claim on me but i do as the father has commanded me so that the world may know that i love the father rise let us go from here it's an interesting passage and it's very very full of the imagery which jesus is trying to convey of his total presence with them through the gift of the spirit and it's that gift which he is promising to them but it's a gift which really has to be perceived by faith and believed in when they talk about the the question saying to them um how is it that you're making yourself known to us but not to the world well what that word the world is meaning is the fact fetch is saying i should drink some tea because i'm coughing what that word is meaning is the fact that the world is the finite world the world of ends and beginnings lived out in space and time jesus is beginning to open out the gifts of the eternal kingdom which can be received here and now by the very spirit which was poured onto jesus at his baptism and seen to be descending in the form of a dove all of all of those things are in this very tightly composed paragraph which sees the end of chapter 14. i will not leave you as orphans he says speaking of of them almost as if they're children but i will come again come to you yet a little while the world will see me no more but you will see me that would be with the eye of faith and with the gift of the spirit the presence of christ in the holy spirit sent from the creator and that's exactly how we in the western church say it i believe in the holy spirit the lord the giver of life proceeding from the father creator and the son jesus christ and the gift that the spirit gives is the comforting gift of presence and peace that the power of the creator is now a gift for us and the spirit will be with us for ever as jesus says because those gifts trans transcend the finite world into the infinite world opening the gate to eternal life it's the same spirit as i said has descended on christ in the river jordan at his baptism and gave him power to accomplish his own human ministry as the word made flesh not without all the distress and pain and struggle of earthly life because he'd come to share that but with the constant presence and sense of the presence of god and now that same gift is to be given to the body of christ on earth each individual who believes who embraces even sometimes without knowing it those gifts of belief and seeing and then it's the same spirit that engendered christ in the blessed virgin marians in luke's gospel in nazareth on that day of the annunciation so it's a gift of the present but it's outside time and can once embraced promises always to be with us received as a gift parakletos is the word for the spirit in the gospel the greek word and that's um a word which is coming from a multitude of different meanings a helper an intercessor an encourager a comforter an advocate a counselor sometimes the word paraklete which is simply the derivation from the greek word itself is used but how many times have we had different words used for the holy spirit in interceding for us in encouraging us along the way in comforting us sometimes the word in translations of saint john's gospel is the comforter sometimes the advocate pleading on our behalf and the promise given that when the members of the early church face their persecutors they don't need to think of what they will say for the spirit will give them words to utter sometimes leading to their martyrdom as with since stephen and james the brother of john quite early in the story of the early church in the acts of the apostles it is the spirit who speaks through them and the spirit coming from the father and the son is therefore the spirit of jesus himself the word made flesh and in reading of that in this gospel we begin to shall we say unwrap that gift of eternal life and in perceiving it we know a peace that the world cannot give peace is my parting gift to you is one of the translations of that my peace i leave with you so as we sit here among the gifts of the creator's world in the flowering of a spring in the northern hemisphere we give thanks most of all for the spirit of life given in the holy spirit and the way in which jesus not only promises but gives that spirit to the eleven in the fourth gospel now i'm wanting today to use a date of a man whose name you you may not know is elliot martin brown brown with an e and normally he's called e martin brown he died on the 27th of april this day in 1980 aged 80 having been born in january 1900 and was a theater director best known for the production production of 20th century verse plays let me sketch his life early on and then you'll see why he's important to us he was born in zeals in wiltshire very near to the village of tisbury that i was wrecked here of um and a lovely part of wiltshire and went to eaton and to christchurch oxford to read modern history and theology and then between 1923 and 1930 here's the vocation opening up he worked at a variety of jobs related to drama worked in kent worked in doncaster worked in london worked in the united states and in 1924 he married an actress hensey rayburn who appeared in his productions they had two sons there's the life and in 1930 he returned from the united states to england bishop george bell of chichester who had been dean of canterbury here between 1924 and 1929 um and was now a bishop in chichester appointed him as the director of religious drama for the diocese of chichester and at the same time george bell then approached the poet t.s eliot who was already famous for his wasteland and asked him to write choruses in verse for a pageant which was going to be performed to raise money for anglican churches and the um producer of this was going to be e martin brown it was put on in the satellite theater and choruses from the rock of course form part of tias eliot's collected poetry and then when that was quite a success uh bishop bell having been here in canterbury and as the dean and i had founded the canterbury festival invited t.s eliot to write a play for the cathedral now you know where i'm going um and he invited e martin brown to produce it and it was to be a really creative partnership for brown was able in dramatic ways to interpret elliot's words and these weren't just choruses of his in the middle of words as as were in the rock this was the whole play and elliot wrote murder in the cathedral about the uh murder martyrdom of thomas becket by the four knights of henry ii as opposed to the play by anui he henry ii doesn't appear everything is set in canterbury and everything is set with the arrival of beckett back from exile and is concentrated around that time um of the days leading up to christmas 1170 and the days which followed until the 29th of december 1170 when the four knights arrive to kill the archbishop and brown was set to produce this in the chapter house the acoustics in the cathedral itself would have been impossible and also there was a still a sort of nervousness of putting on drama in the holy place itself but in the chapter house it was thought to be a good thing to do and martin brown uh e martin brown as he's always known was collecting a group of local people and also of um actors who could play the main parts and they began their rehearsals and maybe we've said this before but in the middle of rehearsals brown would say to elliot those lines aren't working there um i could you could you remove them or alter them or and eliot humbly as he said trusted the instincts of brown as a producer of plays he knew that brown had the vision for what he wanted to convey and at the same time he was able with his child the the the play to cut out lines here and there and we've probably said before there was one line time present and time passed are both perhaps present in time future which was cut out and eliot kept that line and while rehearsals were going on and the play was being shaped he wrote the poem burnt norton which is the very first of his wonderful four quartets and it's all about the sense in which we live in time but there is also an eternity a dimension we can reach out for in terms of redemption and salvation and burnt norton is about that i don't want to talk about burnt norton this morning nor the full quartet so we shall be here all morning because they have such a seminal work as far as i'm concerned um but burnt norton shaped itself from a visit that elliot made with a friend to a country house in gloucestershire and that's only the beginning of the poem the poem goes from the rose garden and the beauty of creation and the thrush leading them around the garden and the sense of time there and then into the london the london underground where everyone is governed by time they're on their way to work and the mechanics of of human life is governing the pitch and then to a church yard where time is very different and that's the burnt norton landscape but it came about because e martin brown asked for those lines to be taken out nevertheless the play was an immense success now with some old footage in black and white courtesy of our friend uh tim jones who collected he's the professor of film at our anglican university here crying university of christchurch at canterbury and jim jones has collected much footage from amateur uh filmmakers in those days and one of them sydney bly created enormous amounts of film and within that there are little snips of of how this play was produced and we'll put that on at the end of our prayers this morning if you want to look at canterbury in those days and you'll see how it was being shaped the filming is done of the people i think outside in the cloister as far as i remember but here are the people some of them actors some of them local and t.s eliot himself and brown is there producing now we think of murder in the cathedral being performed here but after it was performed here in the chapter house it went to london and for almost a year had a run in the west end in london still with brown producing it and then it went to new york and it was the same production but this time brown um played the fourth tempter he must have enjoyed that his wife also was was playing a part there hensey his wife was called she was now hensey brown and she was an actress who played in many of his productions so that from that time onwards brown's career was sad but he never let elliott down so he became the president of the religious drama society of great britain he formed during the war a touring company called the pilgrim players and he was really interested in helping amateur dramatics and at the same time the production of mystery plays which would go on became between 1948 and 57 the director of the british drama league and in in that way was able to help amateur players i think of my time as director of tisbury where there was an amateur arts group still exists the tisbury arts group tag and every year they would produce a pantomime a musical sort of operetta show um a a a concert a choral concert normally performed in the parish church and a play for things and lots of other little things throughout the year and it was that kind of thing that brown was wanting to have a hand in making better for groups he went to york and supervised the the york mystery plays in the ruins of st mary's abbey in york and from 1956 to 1962 spent half of each year as a visiting professor of religious drama at the union theological seminary in new york actually teaching ordinance the value of drama which george bell was very very sure of and so was elias in communicating the face the gospels themselves are dramatic representations full of real characters and the mystery plays and the lives of the saints which he wanted to represent or even the old testament stories when he's doing mysteries here and and mystery plays have been done in canterbury even in my time around the precincts they were wonderful and the citizens all played their parts and many people came to see them so that finally in 1962 he became the drama advisor to the newly created coventry cathedral and the medieval mystery plays were performed in 62 and 65 and he wrote books about what he was doing books on the pilgrim players and and books on the the way in which he uh helped elliot produce because he never let elliott down he was the producer of elliot's play family reunion he was the producer of elliot's play the cocktail party the confidential clerk the elder statesman and he had been the originator without knowing it of that finest in my mind of elliott work the four quartets which then began with band norton and then went on through uh and the um dry salvages and east coca and little kidding joined the quartet on the way through but brown had been the genesis of that right at the beginning this sense of elliot wanting to focus on time present which he sees as the only gift we have the gift of this new day for time past is unchangeable time future is not yet known time present is the gift we have today to use the creator's gifts and also to receive the gift of the spirit into our creativity but also into our concept our spiritual concept and realization which gives us inner peace that we are now within the spiritual realm which never ends and is eternal all those things come from that name e martin brown and i give thanks for him the way in which he took elliot's words and gave them to people in well-produced drama and the trust that elliot placed in him there's nothing worse than someone saying i love your play but could you cut those lines out that that really really hurts because uh anything one writes is is one's own child and it's shaped in the way you want it yet elliot humbly did and used it as siege for more creativity creativity to give a spiritual message in a wonderful way so we give thanks for all that on this day of woody wednesday surrounded by the flowers of creation uh it's also uh on this day the day that the church remembers on the the church of england remembers as uh just a commemoration the peritus christina rosetti now we've done lots about christina rosetti um but in terms of the sense of what can give sadness in human life but then at the same time the joy of that which is spiritual and being creative her lovely poem uh when i'm dead my dearest sing no sad songs for me and uh that which i think i've said before was my sister's favorite poem of hers and with music to richard shepard it was sung at our funeral well we have a uh a a a track of of our choral scholar helen vincent singing that from when we kept christina rosetta's year's mind on the very day of becky's assassination 20 29th of december and we're going to play it again this morning because it's a very beautiful song just to give a tribute to christina rossetti on this day when we won't be thinking too much about the details of her life so let's um see what we're praying for this morning we are praying in the anglican communion for the diocese of lahore in the united church of pakistan and then we are praying in this diocese for justin our archbishop for rose bishop of dover fort emma bishop at lambeth and in the sitting born deanery the villages around sitting sittingbourne we're praying today for those who work as chaplains in all organizations a multitude of different organizations if i start reading the list of schools uniformed organizations residential care communities community clubs businesses health care groups prisons police armed services sport all of those and many more where people serve as chaplains some of them in retirement and and giving of their time freely in those roles so let's say the collect for today this week and then we'll say the our father together almighty father you have given your only son to die for our sins and to rise again for our justification grant us so to put away the leaven of malice and wickedness that we may always serve you in pureness of living and truth through the merits of your son jesus christ our lord amen so we say together across the world in whatever language you'd like to use the prayer our savior taught us our father who art in heaven hallowed be thy name thy kingdom come thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil for thine is the kingdom the power and the glory forever and ever are men moment then for your own reflection on this morning [Music] songs for me [Music] is [Music] grass [Music] one day i shall [Music] see lord [Applause] [Music] again the city around us is anything but peaceful at the moment we've been listening to a police helicopter and uh sirens and all sorts so i hope there's there's nothing too dangerous for people happening outside or not too bad an accident has happened i'm sitting here by leo whose life is is is full of all kinds of worries and at the moment he's worrying that not the robin will steal the show who has been around but tiger whom i'm looking at through the hawthorne hedge and his face is totally innocent he's not really uh worried that leo is looking at him but you spend your life worried that somehow the limelight will be taken from you the chief actor don't you so well you're the chief actor this morning don't worry martin e brown would be i mean e martin brown rather would be very proud of you the god of peace who brought again from the dead our lord jesus that great shepherd of the sheep make you perfect in every good work to do his will working in within you that which is well pleasing in his sight and the blessing of god almighty the father the son and the holy spirit be upon you upon those whom you love and those whom you would pray for today and always are men well let's look at a riddle and i think we we're looking at six legs two heads two hands one long nose yet i use only four legs wherever i go the answer is a horseman two legs of his and four legs of the horse um and the other one was i'm not a bird but i can fly through the sky i'm not a river but i'm full of water what am i and that is a cloud of course uh now i'm going to ask i am the kind of nut that is empty at the center and have no shell no plant will ever grow from me what am i and then i have three feet but no arms or legs what am i that's two for tomorrow um and an esop's fable here's the book let's have a look and see where we are we were with the jack door yesterday fine feathers do not make fine birds and today we are with the lion and the wild donkey it's quite short so we'll perhaps do two the lion and the wild donkey sorry leo i'm actually masking you which is the bad thing you'll be jealous of the lion soon if i do that a lion and a wild donkey went out hunting together the latter was to run down the prey by his superior speed and the former would then come up and dispatch it they met with great success and when it came to sharing the spoil the lion divided it all into three equal portions i will take the first said he because i am king of the beasts i will also take the second because as your partner i am entitled to half of what remains and as for the third well unless you give give it up to me and take off pretty quickly the third believe me will make you feel very sorry for yourself and sadly the uh motto for that is might makes right well there are plenty of people in all aspects of human life who believe that to be true but it certainly doesn't come within the compass of the gifts and graces of the kingdom of heaven and here too is the next one the lion and the mouse here's the mouse here's the lion and here a group of hyenas with bright eyes looking in a lion asleep in his lair was awakened by a mouse running over his face losing his temper he seized it with his paw and was about to kill it the mouse terrified piteously entreated him to spare its life please let me go it cried and one day i will repay you for your kindness the idea of so insignificant a creature ever being able to do anything for him amused the lion so much that he laughed aloud and good humidly let it go but the mouse's chance came after all one day the lion got entangled in a net which had been spread for game by some hunters and the mouse heard and recognized his roars of anger and ran to the spot without more ado the mouse set to work to gnaw the ropes with its teeth and succeeded before long in setting the lion free there said the mouse you laughed at me when i promised i would repay you but now you see even a mouse can help a lion and then the motto no act of kindness no matter how small is ever wasted so we end our prayers on this wednesday morning and wish you a good day and i'll take leo away from his staring at tiger so he can be relieved of his worry that he might lose center stage all right funny little boy aren't you in late 2011 one of the largest and most important collections of early amateur films was discovered in a house just outside canterbury the film had languished almost forgotten for the previous 70 years the films were made by electrical engineer sydney bly starting in 1924 until his early death in 1943 after more than 70 years he is a figure rarely remembered now through his rediscovered films his granddaughter helen jarrett who was born long after his death is hoping to find out more about him i think i'm hoping to find out about the grandfather i never knew and why he filmed these people where he filmed to them you know what was the reason behind it all really [Music] between 1934 and 1939 sydney bly produced an annual newsreel of the local area and he screened these to raise money for charity through this means he raised three thousand pounds an enormous amount of money for the time each newsreel lasted for an hour and a half and covered all types of local news these films now represent a priceless record life in the area at that time [Music] do [Music] from the late 1920s canterbury put on an annual arts festival the main highlight were the cathedral plays specially commissioned each year and written by famous playwrights such as t.s eliot and dorothy l sayers the films that sydney took of these are unique [Music] hello helen it's really nice to see you hi let's go and look at this cathedral [Music] george bell the great dean of canterbury had got this vision that he wanted to establish drama back in the church and he'd been to salzburg in the 1920s and seen the great dramas performed outside the cathedral there and he had the idea of creating an arts festival in england that would echo that and reproduce it and thereby in fact did something quite remarkable because the canterbury festival was the first ever arts festival we think nothing now of arts vessels in every town every village lots of cathedral cities all had their arts festivals but they all began here and what's so remarkable about your grandfather's filming is that he documented that key moment so here we are standing on the garth and this is the section of the play by t.s eliot that he's shot outside why do you think he would have shot it outside well i think that the technology really wasn't uh advanced enough for it to be filmed inside we do know that the lighting was pretty rudimentary so it'd be quite dark it would have been dark inside so i think they needed to bring it outside also i imagine the cameras they were using probably weren't up to dealing with that kind of light so here it looks like we've actually got elliott standing in the corner and that is an amazing picture of elliot himself standing there somehow or other your grandfather persuaded these very famous people to allow themselves to be filmed um and then later on to reenact little bits of the play because we do see sections of the play so do you think that's what they're doing coming out of here and walking around here re-enacting possible yes they're trying to capture the spirit of the play by reenacting small parts of it here we see the the body of becket being carried through the cloisters and here are the women of canterbury this very famous chorus of women who'd come down from london these were all students from the central school of speech and drama and they'd been trained by a remarkable lady called elsie fogerty so the main characters would they have been professional actors yes although um some of the amateurs reached a really high level of expertise but it's fascinating to read about the experience because the country plays were unique in that they were a mixture of professional amateur actors there's i know of no other example in theater history of where they work together so so well for meeting ken this morning i've learned that the films are very important and my grandfather was obviously really well respected because the actors specifically put on the plays so that he could film them sydney ran an electrical shop on north lane specializing in radios the company was also involved in the installation of electrical wiring and had a portable loudspeaker system that would be hired out for public events sydney was well known in the local community through his business he was vice chairman of the chamber of trade president of the canterbury rotary club and a member of the freemasons all these links gave him unprecedented access when filming his newsreels he was able to gain permission to film in places that might be closed to other filmmakers [Music] [Music] i'm trying to get a sense of the kind of man sydney was and his personality but that's not easy all these years later what we've got to go on is what was written in the newspapers and taking a look at his obituary which was on the front page of most of them it's very glowing and the thing that does come across was that he was very modest and sincere with integrity and i like that he was clearly ambitious and determined however there is an article where he brought a court case against a former partner so that shows that he must have been quite tough as well the fact that it was his brother-in-law implies relations were not always that cordial apparently when sydney first met my granny his wife mary her family were very wary of him i have to remember they were victorian landowners and had a very traditional outlook on life he on the other hand was very modern he invented his own radio equipment and even rode a motorbike the earliest film in the collection is a drama from 1924 in the style of hollywood films of that era the man playing the villain is gans sporowski one of the world's richest men who lived just outside canterbury [Music] the film features the 15-inch gauge railway that ran for a mile around swarovski's estate this railway has long fascinated enthusiasts partly because it only existed for just a few months until spodowski's sudden death and partly as no known photographs or film were thought to exist so here we are at high um helen uh the uh home for zobroski from 1912 to 1924 his unfortunate death what a lovely house isn't it yeah it's gorgeous and in one of the films you can see a car drives up and they rescue a lady out of the window and then they drive away and you can recognize the front of the building because it's just hardly changed at all i have got some other bit of film that i'd like you to have a look at that shows the train and see if we could identify where it's going yeah of course well look at that it's the prophecy's loco little giant um that is amazing i've never seen pictures like that let alone moving images and it's crossing that lane well i think that that was over that way there because the road that we've come up didn't exist at that time so let's go over that one [Music] [Music] so looking at those pictures and looking along the lane i think we're there i think that the railway went across here somewhere yeah but what's really interesting about this is that we can now start to uh estimate where the where the railway actually went around the estate so looking at the pictures and looking at the map we now know that the the track went across the lane at about this point here you can see it there the engine is going around to the right there that would suggest that the railway went around the rear of the house in a sort of circular direction okay the next um shots of the track coming across a big field oh yeah where do you think that might be well i think looking at the terrain we should be going over that way there no one is alive now who remembers the route taken by the train track but sydney bly's film provides a clue in the background behind the signal can be seen an estate cottage that no longer exists but a map from 1907 clearly shows its position on the edge of a small area of woodland at the end of a footpath across a field so here we are on the footpath that leads up to where the cottage was actually located then if we look over to our right and looking at the pictures we can see the loco rolling down the hill coming round here to approximately where the signal actually was and then rolling across that way to the lane so from what we've seen this morning we know that the railway went through this area crossing the footpath here then around through here and crossing the lane approximately there so from there we can guess that it went around the rear of the house and made a full loop count sparrowski was a keen racing driver who built his own cars using first world war aircraft engines many years after his death he would become the inspiration for ian fleming's book chitty chitty bang bang [Music] now that i've looked through all of his films i realize there's a fantastic range of material as you would expect there's quite a lot of film showing the middle class world of canterbury and of course that's the world that he lived in but he's not just interested in that he's also interested in capturing the ordinary in the everyday so for example there's a lovely sequence at a local primary school where he films them having their lunch and shows them playing with various toys and games i feel also what comes across is that he seemed interested in capturing his changing world so [Music] helen is on her way to see tim jones an expert on amateur film to find out what it was like to use cine technology from sydney's era so here we are in my little studio where i keep my collection of amateur film equipment and um so we've got film equipment right from the beginning of amateur filmmaking over there for example uh there projectors a bit dusty need to dust them called a baby and then we move our way through the 50s and there's a whole range of different types of camera here and these are all cameras on the wall there over here they're all cameras but they are different types of cameras so there's some for standard eight film some for nine point five film which sheds pockets down the middle and some for 16 mil film so the different formats that amateurs could choose to use and they varied in price and the one your grandfather used 16mm was the most expensive one and do you know which kind of camera he would have used i've actually got here the camera that we know he had and actually we got a bit of film with him using it and it's a lovely camera it's called a cine kodak b and i believe you want to have a go at making a film um be interesting to try and recreate something he filmed i'm going to teach you how to use this okay okay right so before we use the camera we've got to do a few technical things yeah look on the front here and this is to do with the brightness of the shot okay so let's look at the light we've got to tell the camera how bright it is yep and the sun is behind clouds most of what we can see is in the shade alright so if you look on those choices you've got here the top one's probably the right one okay for subjects not in very bright light more close-ups yeah that should be right because most of it's in the shade yeah and in fact i've checked it on my light meter and that's the right one so it does okay it matches okay when it starts getting noticeably stiff start yeah that's getting yeah okay that's fine don't force it alright so the shot lasts about seven seconds so make sure you film for at least that much hold it really still and we just count that shall we just count yeah let's count to ten that'll give us plenty go for it yeah yeah it's noisy isn't it six seven eight nine huh hey that's cool yeah so there we go you've just recreated a shot exactly the same as how sydney shot it in 1937. yeah since i last saw you i've sent the film off and it's come back from the lab okay and um we use negative film if you look there you can see we've got a nice clear picture yeah which is good news um and that's of the westgate town was actually it's difficult to see so i didn't do it completely wrong then you didn't do it completely wrong no it's not at all and what i've done is i've copied this and it's in the computer and i can show you now how it's come out oh doesn't it too bad does it no it's just the way it flickers it makes it look cold doesn't it yeah and i think the scratches and the fact it's got grain these are all indicators of it being film and that gives it an old look yeah bit wobbly yeah a little bit but when i was holding it it felt like it was moving just don't just jolting slightly now what i've done is i've set up a little sequence to compare your shots with with sydney blighs that he took in 1937. okay so this is 1937. coronation um of georgia 6 celebration here and here is 2013. and that's probably one of the shots that's the most different isn't it with the ring road going straight through but actually of all the shots the next one is the most exciting um for showing change so here we go let me just pause it standing outside marks and spencers looking towards the church tower and every single building here has gone and been replaced with this it's it's bizarre isn't it seeing that this is the same spot this is the same view yeah and nothing's the same it's completely changed but after this canterbury hasn't really changed quite so dramatically [Music] this one is quite interesting because clearly there was a great big building there that's no longer there and that was this building's opposite where your grandfather's shop was yes because the shop would have been just down there yeah there's it's just here isn't it and this got damaged by the bombing so the bombs must have landed really near your grandfather's shop yeah because we've got photographs of this bit down here and all the buildings that side went that are now the car park so it's been really interesting to learn all about the filmmaking and do my own little film as well so why do you think that my grandfather made his films um tricky i can explain it in some ways i think he would have found using all this lovely uh new technology cutting-edge technology of his day appealing he also got the chance to invent some of his own equipment so we know for his newsreels he used to play over 50 gramophone records in sync alongside them and he went in his shed and built it but they're logical reasons and i think there was probably something more subconscious going on where like a diarist he had this need to record his life record the world around him and i i would call him obsessed obsessed in a good way but obsessed having such a vast collection of films is brilliant for me but i think the most important bits are the family films the bits of films of sydney and his wife mary and i just love the little bits of them just walking up up a road with the dog but i also really like a part where there's i think it would be quite formal in those days and there's a shot of them sitting in the garden having tea and he comes from behind the camera joins in the conversation and gives my granny a kiss and it's just the niceness between them i think he has a real warmth so they were married for quite a long time before they had my mother married in 1928 and she was born in 1939 and um it was also a month before war broke out so it was quite a turbulent time [Music] i loved being at the house um i really felt that they were kind of looking down on me and i felt very privileged to have been wandering around and looking at their past really okay i think this would have been the room it's quite emotional being in here i've seen these pictures quite often of the pair of them with their new baby obviously in those days they would have had to stay in bed for about a week but it's a lovely room daddy does his best while we wait for mummy and there he is sitting in front of the fireplace over there talking to his little baby that's lovely having that shot of him sitting up here really get a shot of what a nice family man he was yeah it's very emotional standing in this room i think i always knew the films were really important and you know my mum and i had looked at some of it but we really didn't know anything about it and now i just feel like so privileged to to have this film and you know to be able to look and find out about it all and find out how that they were actually much more important than i thought and much more significant for that period of time i've loved being able to observe parts of their lives have a snapshot of what was going on at that time but there's still so much more to find out he was clearly very clever man very talented and driven and just must have been so busy with all these commitments that he had [Music] [Music] i feel really sad being here it's um where they held his funeral and he died very suddenly right in the middle of the war and i can't even begin to imagine how dreadful that must have been for my grandmother with a young child as well [Music] do [Music] you