1930s Paglesham Buckland House

Weekend Party Film-makers

By Anthony Dinsmore

To Rochford Historical Society, District Community Archive,

The photographs attached date from the 1930s, certainly before WW2, and the location is Buckland House, Paglesham.

I found the originals, amongst others, while researching my wife’s family tree and their wider significance is such that I thought they may be of interest for your organisation or website.

The snapshots show some of my wife’s family (a great aunt, an uncle and their son), with friends and work colleagues from the British & Dominion Studios (later Pinewood Studios). They appear to be having a wonderful time shooting their own short comedy films, purely for their own amusement, at weekends in Paglesham.

We have the photos, the script and cast-list of the comedy being filmed, which was one of several, but appears to be the only extant. The films themselves, alas, are not in our possession and are very unlikely to have survived the eighty-or-ninety years since they were taken. Some of the cast and crew pictured - identifiable from the cast-list and other sources we have - later had distinguished careers in the film industries. One became a double-Oscar winner, another renowned  as a war-photographer (risking all in capturing news-reel footage of the battle of El Alamein and the liberation of Tunis) and yet another worked as a cameraman for some of the most well-known British Film and TV output of the fifties, sixties and onwards.

It is not exaggeration to say that without the weekend “house-parties” in Paglesham and the obvious enthusiasm of those taking part, the history of British cinema in the twentieth century would have been considerably different. Their influence was also evident in many US films in the seventies and later: perhaps, with only one mildly-speculative step, even as far as the early Star Wars films.

If you would like to know more, I am contactable via phone, email  or mobile.