TRAVELLING LIFE AND THE IMPRINT OF EARLY CINEMAMitch Miller

‘BIDDALL’S WALK’

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Nomadic entertainers, in Scotland or elsewhere, do not as a rule, erect buildings or keep much in the way of written records.

Living as they do, on the margins of society, largely unnoticed and abstruse, the history of Travelling Showpeople and other travellers is dependent on occasionally hostile appearances in the official records or local press, or most likely in oral history and ephemera such as photographs and handbills. Scotland has between 3-5,000 Travelling Showpeople who operate in its fairs and markets, most of whom (nearly 80%) spend the winter months in over 50 caravan sites (known simply as grounds or yards) located in Glasgow and its environs. Travelling Showpeople could be described as a minority cultural group. Linked by bonds of marriage, kinship and common interest, members of this group are descended from the itinerant artisan and entertainer castes that formed into modern circus and sideshow performers, owners of carousels and fairground rides, hawkers, street vendors and stallholders.1 They do not, as a whole, refer to themselves as an ethnic minority, though there are cases of racial/ethnically motivated discrimination against Travelling Showpeople, and many elements to their culture that are ethnic in their operation and expression. Culturally distinct from other Travellers or American carnival people, they have many affinities with their English and Welsh counter-parts and the French Forains industriels. And, like their counterparts, this modest community, gradually being forced out of their regular winter homes in the industrial steppeland of the cities east end by Commonwealth Games and motorways, are an excellent resource of information on the beginnings of cinema.

This is because, between 1897 and the eve of the First World War, Fairgrounds were the primary site of encounter between ordinary people and ‘living pictures’. At this time the majority of films were one-reelers of less than 3 minutes long, depicting local scenes and simple theatrical sketches. The spareness of these films offers a stunning contrast to the grandiosity of the show fronts where they were screened. The ‘walk up show’ of the Edwardian fair offered an imposing

façade behind which was a fairly generous performance space. The presentation was aided and abetted by the gag card, the blaring fairground organ and the showman’s repertoire of tricks. As a testy article from a 1906 edition of the Bridgwater journal remarks, the showfronts frequently eclipsed the films themselves;

‘Though it may be unkind to say so, the exterior of the shows are more interesting than the interior, for the proceedings prior filling the house are more lengthy and attractive than the show itself, which usually consists of three living pictures and the thanks of the showman for the audience’s patronage.’

Nevertheless, in possessing these augments to the new technology Travelling Showpeople became a helpmeet to the aspirations of early filmmakers looking to reach wider audiences. A relatively small investment of around £60 put state of the art cameras and projectors within their reach – relative to the cost of the gilded sideshows which could be valued at as much as £8,000. Comparatively speaking it was no great risk to add the latest scientific novelty to an exist-ing show. Travelling Showpeople incorporated films into existing showground practices with rela-tive ease, packaging and selling it much as they would the appearance of a ‘crab-boy’ or admit-tance into the hall of mirrors. The scholar Mervyn Heard describes the Fairground bioscope as a natural outgrowth of existing forms;

…a timely distillation of three of the most popular, old existing showforms; namely, the theatrical booth, the conjuring show and a wide ever-changing array of up-to-date optical curiosities.

Of these sideshows, the Ghost Show – a travelling theatre and magic show – was the best suited to show bioscope films and was first to be used in Britain under the auspices of the somewhat legendary Randall Williams. A fillm, analysed in detail later in this essay entitled Biddall’s Funeral was first shown on a Ghost Show and ‘Spect-o-

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“STYLE IS CHARACTER” CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

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rama’ that toured Scotland and Northern England at the end of its long service. A major catalyst of the renewed interest in early cinema, at least in Britain, was the discovery and release of the

‘cinematic dead sea scrolls’ of the Mitchell and Kenyon archive. Found in a remarkable state of preservation in a shop in the north of England, the study of the 829 uncored reels of film has plugged several gaps in our understanding of cinema’s origins. Overnight, this increased the number of English, Scottish Welsh and Irish films from the very early period several times over – by way of comparison, the Scottish Screen Archive has only two films known to have definitely been shown on bioscopes, and a handful of others that were likely to have been shown in these contexts.

Broadly speaking the role of fairground exhibitors had traditionally been dismissed them as aberrant, quaint and an irrelevant cul-de-sac in cinema’s development, a conceit largely unchallenged until Tom Gunning formulated his

‘cinema of attractions’ which allowed different standards to be applied to the judgement and appreciation of cinema, and subsequent scholars, such as Vanessa Toulmin demonstrated that Travelling Showpeople played a much larger role in cinema’s development. A more detailed and coherent understanding of fairground history in of itself, has shown that cinema fitted naturally into an oft-repeated pattern where showpeople pioneered popular entertainments that eventually outgrew the confines of the fairground; bingo, amusement arcades, roller-coasters, popular photography circus and theatre being just a few of those entertainments to break out and become ‘mainstream; elsewhere. They were pioneered, exhibited then given up as they ceased to earn their keep. It was much the same with the movies. Travelling Showpeople played their part in cinema history and cinema played a part in theirs. They

were no rubes; cinema was admitted into the fairground sideshow for as long as it served the important purpose of supporting their families, and was ruthlessly dispensed with once it started to decline in the 1910s, with only large-scale studio outfits providing he a credible financial model for producing the kinds of films people wanted to see. Thus, in casting them as the unwitting ‘losers’ in the cinema game, Gaumont’s Edwin Lawrence, somewhat overplays their naivete;

[The Showman] nursed the infant cinema, saw it through all its early trials and troubles, mothered it or fathered it through its many illnesses until it became a strong, sturdy, robust youth. Then, like the good-natured, unbusinesslike creature he was, he gently handed it over…

Legends of great grandparents enticed with the possibility of settling down in small towns and open picture houses surface in many of the oral histories collected from Glasgow Showpeople (twice in my own family tree) that hint at dilemmas and hard choices made over new but fleeting opportunities. These were moments when the family branch split, with younger or more adventurous siblings striking out into picture houses in small town Scotland – Annan, Saltcoats or Motherwell. But a more common refrain in the oral record is the decision to turn this offer down and continue travelling. For many of those families the purpose of the new attraction had been not to get them into the ‘film business’ (hardly even a concept then) but sustain their way of life. Scottish Showground families who did take up the opportunity included the Pooles, Kemps, Greens and a branch of the Biddalls, but they were the exception. This folklore of families offered a head start in new territories only to

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reject it has even produced it’s own cliché, when at the moment of refusal the showman or woman says something along the lines of ‘when the sun shines, I’ll want to be back on the road’. There seems to be some truth in it. Travelling Showpeople knew a life lived in wagons on roadsides and village greens, in close proximity to family and friends and with – as they saw it – mastery of their own time and destiny. This appears to have been more valuable to them than the potential rewards of opening up a La Scala or Playhouse. Cinema had sustained this for a while; once that was no longer possible, Travelling Showpeople felt it was literally, time to move on.

Scotland’s answer to the Mitchell and Kenyon collection at the BfI is an archive of 90+ films held in the Scottish Screen Archive that were either of fairground bioscope origin, made for ex- Fairground entertainers who had entered into permanent cinema exhibition (the bulk of the collection, in themselves a fascinating document of continuities between the various phases of cinema), or films about fairground subjects. Among them are the very early films such as Biddall’s Funeral (1909) or Lord and Lady Overtoun’s Visit to McIndoe’s Show (1908), the latter providing a rare glimpse of a travelling cinematograph show in action.

Film history traditionally accorded Travelling Showpeople, Forains and carnival exhibitors in popularising cinema a largely compensatory role; peripheral to the films themselves their task was to ‘make up’ for the severe limitations under which early films laboured; black and white, fixed camera, silent, short and usually, fairly innocuous. Gunning’s seminal work on the cinema of attractions, and those who followed, such as Joe Kember, Mervyn Heard and Deac

Rossell shed a great deal of light on the timely conjunction of interests between Travellers and the makers of early cameras and projectors, whereby the brilliance of the sideshow fronts and the cunning of their proprietors made such an event of the pre-show, or parading activities, they offset the relatively slight spectacle of the ‘living pictures’ inside. But the Mitchell and Kenyon collection (see The Drouth issue 18) with its astonishingly high quality footage and wealth of material has allowed us a much deeper understanding of how this interaction shaped the films themselves. The careful analysis of the archive by Vanessa Toulmin has given us a more nuanced view of early filmmaking. The Showpeople were not just crafty exhibitors, but important in bringing the traditions of showmanship and performance into the films themselves. Unable to create long stories or move the camera much, filmmakers found that Showpeople had a considerable repertoire of tricks that could introduce incident and make the films interesting. Showmen found that applying the same principles they used at their stalls and shows in front of the camera created action – they were in a sense, a combination of film director and actor.

One of the most spectacular examples of this collusion between long established arts and new technology is found in Sedgwick’s Bioscope, a Mitchell and Kenyon film. Dewsbury vs Manningham is a sports film from 1901 that shows a travelling showman employing the ‘gee’ to incite the crowd to react in excitement and thus, make the picture more appealing. North Sea Fisheries is another Mitchell and Kenyon film from the same year in which a rather adventurous showman mingles with the Scottish fishing fleet and stages mock fights among them. This was an old trick common to boxing and theatre shows

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that took the action into the crowd itself and hopefully, drew it into the show to see the main act. The difference here is that the use of this technique is spatially and temporally separated from the audience, and is in many regards, the very thing that is being shown itself. It was also not uncommon to use children to advertise shows and provide a link between audiences milling around the show fronts on the fairground, and the action behind it. They might be lifted onto the head of an elephant as a circus cavalcaded into town, or encouraged to dance on the show front, or act as a plant in one of the many theatrical sketches performed outside the ‘parading shows’ to draw people over. An example of this can be found in McIndoe’s Show where the filmmakers have encouraged two young children (most likely the daughters or nieces of the family) to stray into shot before the show front in the role of awestruck spectators. More subtle, or hidden methods can be detected in a number of the early bioscope films, in the way scenes were subtly staged to ensure schoolchildren walked by a camera at the right angle, or that some comic incident would be introduced into an innocuous street scene, all of which have a direct bearing on the structure and action of the films.

As well as these physical artefacts there are oral testimonies that can take us back to the era to understand, and even sympathise, in the exact sense, with these unwitting pioneers. The ‘say’ or ‘sayso’ is a documentary oral tradition still extant (to a degree) among Showground communities and has been a primary method of contextualising these films for academic, archival and creative purposes. The say preserves genealogical and historical narratives of particular importance to a family, extended family or wider social circle. Popular themes and topics I have stumbled upon include family ‘founder myths’ biographical sketches and celebrated instances of show- manship, oral artefacts around which the collective identity of Travelling Showpeople can be rallied and reinforced. Great emphasis is put on the style, mode and spectacle of the telling, with familiar stories being recycled and even borrowed by other families and good ‘performers’ widely recognised and valued in social gatherings, most of which take place around the stalls and rides of the fair in the summer, or on a greater and more intense scale during the winter months when families are ‘laid up’. These were collected formally, through filming or taping, but also through less formal means, by noting stories told at weddings, birthday parties or just in passing. The aim was to

gain something of a sympathetic understanding of the late nineteenth century Showpeople who took a risk on the untried gimmick that was the cinematograph, and to clarify the relationship between films such as Biddall’s Funeral (1909), and the relationship between a traditional peripatetic culture and emerging cinematic techniques.

In getting the material to study these factors I had to emphasise my own connections with the community – the Biddall in Biddall’s funeral is my great grandfather, and almost all of my informants knew my parents. I had to embody the research as an assurance the material would not be distorted or misrepresented as in commonplace in the generally hostile Scottish media. My physical presence was crucial to the film crew I worked with to record interviews, or the artist Chris Dooks, who I worked with for an art show, to meet with success. Acknowledging this fact recalled – somewhat aptly given the role of shows in the project – into Erving Goffman’s notions of front and backstage, of carousel riders and ‘shills’ and the many issues raised by his idea of ‘dramaturgi-cal sociology’ in his introduction to The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life;

‘The expressiveness of the individual (and therefore his capacity to give impressions) appears to involve two radically different kinds of sign activity; the expression that he gives, and the expression that he gives off… The second involves a wide range of action that can others can treat as symptomatic of the actor, the expectation being that the action was performed for reasons other than the information being conveyed in this way.’

This was evident in what I was doing but also, as shall be explained, what I was seeing in the film Biddall’s Funeral, which showed the pomp and circumstance around my Great Granddad’s burial. The film offers its own clues as to how ‘low level’ showmanship could double as a clever means of overcoming the prejudices of local townspeople. Ostensibly a memorial of the celebrated Showman commissioned and screened by his children just days after he died, its two minutes shows him in life, death and his final journey to be interred. The opening scene is taken from an earlier piece of film showing street scenes.’ George Biddall with his dogs in Maryport’ introduces the still living title character ambling through a crowd of children and street loafers. It is followed by the posthumous footage commissioned by his children. Scene two is a long shot showing the coffin with Biddall in it

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being manoeuvred down the steps of the Ghost Show where he was waked. The camera has been deliberately positioned to capture the maximum number of spectators in the foreground – all potential customers for the show later. The film closes with the funeral procession making its way to the cemetery. The stock has deteriorated here and very little can be seen. It is unknown if this is truly the last scene or if others have gone missing.

Family history fleshes out the background to this slightly macabre spectacle. As an event held in the public eye, the funeral provided an excellent opportunity for Biddall’s surviving family to rake in some coin to pay for the headstone. Ghoulish, maybe but it may well have been with the consent of George himself. The lifestyle meant he would be buried where he dropped; money had been set aside in the locker under his bunk for the funeral, always major events in travelling communities that reunite disparate troupes and strands within a kindred. If Biddall’s grand plan for one last, spectacular show came off, he would be interred with great pomp and occasion, that was bound to create a major spectacle. And where there is spectacle, there is opportunity. The Biddall’s knew what Charles

Rearick, historian of the Belle Epoque noted of the ‘spectacular’ street culture of the badaudes and flaneurs of the French belle époque, that;

‘Funeral Processions, dog fights, collisions of wagons and omnibuses, a fallen horse being beaten by its master were special dramas that invariably drew audiences.’

I can imagine Biddall laid out beneath the preserved tail of his favourite horse Captain spending his last hours whispering instructions and ideas to his children when they brought him water or sat dutifully by the deathbed. When he finally gave up the ghost he knew that his body was dressed and laid out inside his own Ghost Show, the fundament on which he had built his claim to join the top rank of showmen. With these elements in place, it didn’t take much to find the raw material for a watchable film, presenting a cocktail of life and death, as well as the same interest in seeing oneself depicted onscreen as fuelled Tom Gunning’s ‘Cinema of Attractions’.

The film itself was likely commissioned from Gaumont, who seemed to have provided many of the films for the Biddall shows. It conforms very much to the actualite style identified in the work

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of Gunning; short films taken from life, showing local sights that audiences could recognise – and in which, ideally, they would recognise themselves. The method was to shoot the scene wide and long so that the maximum number of street amblers and spectators made it into the shot- which meant more people likely to cough up the admission to watch themselves appear in ‘living pictures’ when the film was later shown on the fair. Rumours seem to have been spread – and stuck – that the very top rank of showland were to attend. True to some extent – branches of the Biddall family were found in every part of the United Kingdom at that point, and George and my grandmother Selina were recognised as among the first six families to take film shows into the Bitish fairs, and a lot of people came but, contrary to popular legend (probably spread by my Great Grandfather and his sibling) Buffalo Bill Cody was almost certainly not among them

But it is the first scene of the film that offers the most complexity. Constantly smiling, Biddall seems to share a few jokes and is clearly at ease as the centre of attention. He is well dressed and effects the jaunty elegance of the flaneur; but is in fact no idle observer. The Biddall who graces this film is clearly playing the part of the man of leisure for largely professional reasons. The Biddall’s had spent time touring in France, so it is quite pos-sible that they had picked up on the style of the flaneurs and badauds although it is more likely they had an instinctive, ground level knowledge of popular tastes among their British counterparts. Charles Baudelaire, very much the prototype flaneur, defined the fraternity as ‘person[s] who walked the city an order to experience it’; the flaneur was a unique product of the industrial age, a ‘botanist of the sidewalk who could, at one pole be a cynical observer and at the other someone passionately involved in the life of the city. Travelling Showpeople were likewise a product of an industrialised age, turned increasingly from strollers and tumblers, who used their physical bodies to entertain, to speculators of mass culture and apostles of mechanical tricks and wonders – the mirror illusion of the travelling ghost show, the wild spins of carousels (and subsequent variations on that theme), the mysterious boxes of the penny arcade, or the light tricks of peep shows and inevitably, the cinematograph. The ‘advance men‘ of such travelling shows – the role Biddall is clearly playing here – combined a touch of both; their motives were in one sense cynical, engaging with the locals in order to attract them to the show setting up on the village green, but

also, necessarily, gregarious and open, willing to speak with, and win over anyone. They are, rather like the Baudelarian artist who immerses himself in the metropolis, working, rather than idling in the fashion ascribed to the badaude; the rubber-necking idler of the street corner, although these distinctions were often class based – the flaneur’s protestations of a higher calling were rarely so credible as they would make out. Nevertheless, A flaneur’s eye for spectacle in the ordinary was a skill much needed by the early filmmakers and their showman collaborators, and in her essay On Photography Susan Sontag went so far as to make a direct connection between flaneurism and street photography, of which much early cinema, with its focus on capturing street scenes and incidents, resembles. Rearick touches upon how flaneurism, for all its elitism, caught the popular mood that hungered for the simple factory gate films and street scenes of the early cinematographs, and gives us a very good suggestion as to the part he happens to be playing;

Like a noble or dilettante, the flaneur enjoyed freedom from work or any utilitarian activity; he was free to enjoy experiences for their own sake, finding amusement and beauty in the unexpected as well as in everyday sights.

So if Biddall is not just a flaneur caught mid- excursion, what was he doing? What went through George Biddall’s mind as he walked towards the filming site? Who did he think he was?

Goffman argues that all conceptions of self are to some extent performed. Individuals create performances that give off something of their interior selves. But our ‘self’ is also, inevitably, shaped by that performance. There is almost no documentation for Biddall’s Funeral and George Biddall left no diary. But we can usefully speculate. Once he left his living wagon (which incidentally, joined with another to form the physical front of the show) there was an element in which he seems to have been aware that he was the embodiment of the Ghost Show itself. The Biddall that appears on film seems to conjure the gentile persona of, a purveyor of popular delights; dressed in his best clothes and with

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dogs in tow he makes an event of himself. Clearly, being an entertainer meant a great deal to his own conception of himself.

If we assume Biddall was typical of his fraternity, then this is supported by oral accounts, ephemera and handbills that articulate a self-consciousness among Showpeople of their unique nature based on the idea of themselves as travelling performers. Shared experience of the fairgrounds that spanned generations gives them a common ‘mythical’ origin – or rather, a series of origins that overlap and are mutually recognised between family groups. Working from the Jewish diaspora as an example, the Israeli historian Eviatar Zerubavel describes this in his essay Time Maps in terms of a socially powerful, and exclusive idea of

‘pedigree’, through which a community draws a ‘sacred thread’ where genealogy and shared values intertwine. Travelling Showpeople in Scotland forged a robust group identity based on the idea of an ‘entertainer’ pedigree that persisted after parading shows and sideshows died out. Amateur cinema has left us a record that shows this link with a performance based past was not so long ago for Travelling Showpeople., The home movie Fairground Friends was taken in the north of Scotland sometime around the 1950s. It features a group of circus and sideshow performers hanging out around the lorries and wagons at the side of the fair to show off their more racy balancing acts and tricks. Ostensibly relaxed and informal, the film is a memorable record of circus performers casually enjoying their prowess and revelling in their status as artistes – a

‘front’ that survived beyond the opening hours of the sideshows, just dressed and employed for a different purpose.

Of course, nomadism also contributes to this sense of group identity among Travelling Show-people. This way of life leads to close knit family groupings and methods of maintaining boundaries against the ‘outside world’ as constant outsiders and strangers to the towns they visited, something which separates Travelling Showpeople from others in showbusiness, such as actors or theme park operators. The virtues they seem to value – acumen, cunning and smooth talking refer very much to the performing era, and there is considerable nostalgia for those times, as expressed by Show-woman Olivia Newsome;

You don’t see the shows you used to see today. They used to have girls dancing at the front and clowns and acrobats at the front of the shows. You don’t see anything like that today. There’s no real showmen today like there used to be.

And open admiration for the cunning of the proprietors, such as Stanley Mitchell, here remembered by Olivia;

‘The giant rat, do you remember that? At the Green…Uncle Stanley Mitchell, he was a character – he’d put up a sign saying ‘ come and see the stone of destiny’ and everyone would come in – and it was a big chookie stone he’d got off the beach… ‘Come and see, the fair by night’ – or ‘Kirkcaldy by night’ it would say, and everyone would be outside and going ‘oh, what’s that?’ And they’d go in the show and look up - he’d taken the top tilt [tarpaulin] off and there was the sky!’

‘Telling the tale’ is a phrase freely used by Travelling Showpeople to describe moments when quick wits or an ability to ‘spin’ events got them out of a spot of trouble or allowed them to overcome certain obstacles. This notion of being by heritage performers creates social bonds and offers the chance to commune and celebrate these shared origins when, in the winter months the Glasgow community reassembles after months on the road. This is when they have their weddings, christenings, football matches and benefits. Even in their off-season, Showpeople maintained certain core myths about themselves

– their commitment to their way of life, their service to the idea of the show;

The funny thing about Travellers was that you got married and christened in the winter. And half the time you died in the wintertime an all! We used to say he was a true traveller if he never died during the gaff time [the high point of the season, between June and September].

Sociologists and anthropologists would see in this statement the very half-truths and fancies that glue distinct social groupings, cultures and societies together. This notion of the ‘true traveller’ was linked inextricably to an idea of constant performance, even more so when performing became less central to ‘The Shows’ themselves. From at least the forties, when physical performance on shows was in itself becoming ever-rarer, and up until the present day there was a persistent tradition of punctuating the enforced idleness of winter by putting on semi-professional shows, revues and cabarets

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aimed not at the public, but other travellers. This was often organised and performed by residents of a showman’s yards or group of yards, or by larger groups of travellers who took up various names – the ‘Ladies night’, or the ‘Showman’s Fellowship’ to organise events. The various Travellers’ football teams that play over the winter would typically include a cabaret show as part of after-match celebrations. The appeal of these events was mainly participative as most families on a yard would do a turn, but the audience was entirely made of friends and families keen to see what their relatives had come up with. The high watermark of these get-togethers lasted between the mid-1940s and 1970s. One well-preserved handbill commemorates the ‘Mosshouse Tenant’s’ revue, put on in 1944 to raise money for the war effort. Even today, such entertainments still resurface from time to time and they are often used to raise funds for good causes such as benevolent funds for older travellers. In so doing, they play a vital role in confirming community bonds and reinforcing a sense of shared identity. At a ‘lower level’ there are other instances where this idea of showmanship makes itself felt. The camera crew used to record interviews noticed that project interviewees gave almost without exception, powerful and often highly sophisticated oral performances to camera. They felt the Showpeople were ‘well rehearsed’ and entirely comfortable with the process.

But to return to Biddall’s Funeral, further digging in the oral record raises other interpretative possibilities behind Biddall’s carefully projected image. Even in its fleeting, flickering moment, there is evidently the same degree of self- awareness and possession displayed by that French churchgoer who will be forever renowned as the first individual to sue a filmmaker over copyright of his own image when it was captured by the French Forain Abraham Dulaar for a

‘topical’ of his visit to the Church of Saint Just in the 1900s. As Goffman would know, there is a deeper seam of motives and sensitivities – call it history, if you will – to be found here. It may be provided for us through a conversation I had with

my great auntie Charlotte (1905–2005) that so struck me I added it verbatim into notes I hastily scribbled down afterwards. The story is a simple one and concerns her father’s childhood travelling from town to town as one of the family turns on ‘Miller’s Theatre of Varieties’. The story had the smoothness and wear of a say already passed down one or two generations before it had reached Charlotte, but there is a ring of truth beneath its narrative contours and proverbial simplicities, enough to further complicates the use of ‘soft’ showmanship as shown in Biddall’s Funeral.

Auntie: Granddad had nine sons, and every town we went to, on the Sunday he’d put my Daddy and his brothers in their best suits and march them right through the town to the Church, all nine of them in a line. Every town they was in he made them do that – so’s the people could see. Me: See what? Auntie: That they was respectable, that they went to Church just like everybody else. And when they saw us they know’d Daddy and them’d come back since last year.

This scene can be dated to the mid 1880s-90s, so occurs a decade before George Biddall’s own walk down the street. It develops a theme that returned again and again in the oral record – the various tensions between putting on a show and being yourself, of knowing a town because you visit it every year, and being a stranger in its midst, dressing differently, living differently, even talking differently to the townsfolk.2 An account from the film agent Kellow Chesney from the 1900s is suggestive of how Travelling Showpeople could come across as exotic, even outlandish;

While the family that ran… [a bioscope] might be seen cooking their dinner in black pots outside their caravans like so many gipsies, the gaffer’s name on the bill could well be good for a substantial sum.’

The disparity between the splendour of show-fronts, the bankability of ‘the gaffer’ and the living conditions of the Travellers, squeezed into small wagons of no more than 12 or 14 feet in length hint at the mixed messages picked up by those settled people looking in from the outside. ‘The exchange with my aunt was part of a long conver-sation we had about the experience of going from town to town and being marked out as something different. She spoke of the different attitudes of the locals, the feeling they were always in some respects, on display, and the various ‘strategies’ they employed to reassure the local populace.

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The aim was to pre-empt negative impressions before they could even form. ‘Van Dwellers’ had even been legislated against in the late 1880s via the Moveable Dwellings Bill, necessitating the formation of a chartered guild of showmen and a heightened awareness of what in a later age might be called ‘PR’ as part of what its co-founder Thomas Murphy called ‘a defensive war’. Always a minority in the towns and villages they visited it was important for Show families to show common ground rather than difference. A certain degree of low-level diplomacy was – and continues to be – necessary. At small fairs, where only a few families (maybe even just one) were in attendance at a fair, this was even more important. During a wide-ranging round of tale –telling on the subject of ‘jumping the shutters’ (fighting with locals), a female Traveller explained to me that her father always adopted a more conciliatory approach than those who went to larger, better attended urban or county fairs, as he was generally one of very few males on his circuit of fairs in Inverness-shire. Should violence break out he could not count on the same support, and so had to use his wits more.

There is some evidence, in other words, to suggest that Biddall’s walk, staged for the camera, is in many respects part of a longer and more ingrained practice of putting on a good front for the townspeople. He has worn his best suit and taken his dogs to spark interest from the local youths, and may even be handing out free tickets as he walks around probably with much the same bluster he employed on the parading front of the bioscope. What is important is that he is embodying his show and giving off what he wants the townsfolk to know. He gives the citizens of Maryport the information that his ‘Spect-o-rama’ had returned for another year, and gives off, by nature of his gentlemanly appearance, an idea of his family’s good reputation, in much the same fashion as the Millers in their Sunday suits. Their walk to church is more subtle still, based entirely on ‘giving off’ of information. It was arguably as much a part of the advanced publicity for their show as was parading on the steps when it was open; it has made their presence known, and caused some amusement over their mob-handed, if pious cavalcade to the Kirk.

Paying at least some attention to the social reality of being a stranger in close knit towns and potentially persecuted as Gypsies and gangrels give these antics an added dimension. In this regard the personal and professional dimensions of the showman combine, and it was through showmanship that potential points of friction between ‘travellers’ and ‘flatties’ could be mediated. Travelling Showpeople lived fully integrated lives – then and now –within as well as behind their show, so it should be no major surprise that in their gift for artifice, they left a subtle impression on a medium that would further conflate these initial tendencies into escapism, into distorting spectacle and the aggressive reinforcement of stereotypes. Given that cinema was born of a world where the show did not just

‘go on’ but never really ended, that a film such as Biddall’s Funeral should betray such traits should not be entirely surprising. Other apparently sim-ple films, such as the aforementioned North Sea Fisheries, or some of the simple stunt films betray similar borrowings from the ducking and diving of the lively Victorian fairgrounds. But because so much of this nitrate film was quickly disposed before it caused a major conflagration there is little opportunity to ascertain just how great an impression this made, or how. All we have are a few hints, such as a funeral that functioned as burial, spectacle, film memorial and appeal to common ground between tober and town. Biddall’s walk to his final appointment endures not only as a moment captured in cinema, but also one that shaped it.

1 As defined in Sharon Bonn Gmelch’s ‘Groups That Don’t Want In: Gypsies and other Artisan, Trader and Entertainer Minorities’. Annual Review of Anthropology 15:307-30. 1986.

2 It is indicated in the work of Eric Partridge and the journalism of Henry Mayhew that that Travelling Showpeople in the UK use an argot based primarily on Parlyaree or Polari, a lingua franca derived from Italian and French and heavily inflected with Romany. This is augmented by a very detailed and wide ranging jargon based on articles of the fairground trade, relict words and in Scotland by Cant, a hybrid language of Scots and Romany.

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