1960. I was lucky. All young people were lucky in those days of full employment and unprecedented opportunities but I was especially lucky because my wonderful father met Lewis Gilbert at a cricket match and asked him (as presumably he asked a number of people) what he could do with his fifteen year old son who'd run away from school and wanted to be an actor.
"You don't want to be an actor" Lewis said as he elegantly manipulated his silver grey Alvis Convertible down the traffic free lanes of the Thames Valley. "You want to tell them what to do." "Right Guv." I said and, before my sixteenth birthday, found myself working at Shepperton Studios as a third assistant trainee editor in Peter Hunt's cutting room on Lewis' production of Rumer Godden's 'A Greengage Summer'.
There was little to do at first. The crew were in France and the rushes were easily dealt with every day by us three assistants, so, apart from sending me to the store to fetch a packet of sprocket holes and other initiatory tests, Peter delegated my services to Wyn Rider. Wyn was completing the sound-track of 'Spartacus' on eight track stereo.
Although the film was to be released and I think was shot on 70mm and I did set eyes on some of that monstrous format, our machines and our work were on 35mm. My duty was to go down stairs with cans of magnetic coated film loops bristling with paper clips, there to make the joins on a heated cement joiner and return the finished job to Wyn’s assistant but I can claim to have worked for Kubrick on one of his greatest films. I also was allowed to help Reggie Beck who, in the next cutting room to ours was editing a low budget B movie with only one assistant. Peering into the bull's eye screen of his Acmade as the film rattled through, Reggie introduced me to the mysteries of timing and composition and the great difference a single frame can make to a cut.
After 'The Greengage Summer' I went with Lewis' son John to work for Roger Cherril editing John Schlesinger's 'A Kind of Loving' in the same studio. I had to work harder on this film as Gilbert jnr. had his time taken up playing poker with Steve McQueen on the set of 'The War Lovers'. It must have been 'A Man for All Seasons' that was filming there as well at the time and I had to dodge Orson Welles' great bulk as I scurried about the corridors.
I don't recall how the transition took place but the next film I worked on was at Pinewood Studios. Still part of the Rank empire, Pinewood in those days was a much less relaxed working environment than Shepperton, an almost military hierarchy was maintained. The film, a Rogers and Thomas production, was appalling and as a lowly second assistant I had the temerity to think so. I tendered my resignation after only a few weeks. The Studio Manager told me I'd 'never work in the industry again' and I thought I didn't really care if it was his industry he was talking about.
I took that summer off and attempted to get to Turkey in a van with two companions. We only made it as far as Corfu, sleeping on mountain tops and boozing in tiny late-night rural tavernas. and I remember driving along a motorway at night only to grind to a halt in a pile of gravel. A new Europe was being built. I have more vivid memories of an earlier Continental trip when I was a scholar with the Hampstead Parish Church Choir (Martindale Sidwell, Choirmaster). We consumed bratwurst and apfelsaft from street stalls admiring the rubble of Bremen, Hamburg and Frankfurt with no idea of how it came to be there. Rubble, bombsites, ration tickets were the unquestioned normality of my childhood. This summer of the failed attempt on Turkey we paid many visits (including on the Isle of Ischia at the house of Norman Douglas) to acquaintances of one of my friends who was a member of the Murray family, the publishers. The high point was a stay with Freya Stark in Asolo and a visit with her to see Aida in the magical candlelit setting of the arena in Verona. The local cats were obviously opera fans and upstaged the players in the death scene with their brawling on the ramparts.
After this holiday I worked again in the cutting rooms, this time on 'Anglia TV's 'Survival'programme and then on Granada's 'World in Action'. This was an education. Working on 16mm, fitting images 'by the foot' to a rigid commentary, alternating with another crew we edited a programme every two weeks, spending two or three days before transmission in Manchester, working full time to get the programme done. It was another world to the Studio and, thanks to the unionised long hours, extremely well paid but it wasn't my world and I drifted out as easily as I'd fallen in, as unhappy with this aspect of the film business as I had been with the Studio system.
This time, with Granada's gold in my pocket, I took a longer holiday. My brother Thomas and I bought the Victorian racing yacht 'Marigold' for a few hundred pounds. I tried to persuade him to drop out of Oxford so that we could lead a life of adventure on the high seas but he resisted me. Without him to do all the work my life of piracy was short lived and I returned to London and thoughts of film. Another world of Cinema might exist, I thought and one doorway to it would be through the film school at Lodz in Poland. I found language lessons at the Polish Institute but I had to have money so looked for a job. Luck again, through the pages of the Union's vacancies list, brought me to Marlene and John Fletcher who were just starting their own post-production company, Dateline Films in London's Soho. John and Marlene had worked for the luminaries of Free Cinema and, apart from earning their bread and butter (and jam) editing commercials, they were deeply engaged with every attempt at low budget film making which was going on at the time. Thoughts of Poland left my head as I began to see what 16mm and small crews could achieve.
Though I never met him I heard at the time of Michael Winner as someone who was making his own films somewhere in Kensington. It was amusing to have him as our guest at the second Portobello Film Festival (in 1997), presenting the film that he must have been working on at the time; 'W Eleven', arguably his best film if only because it's in black and white.
More relevantly, John and Marlene were shooting a short drama film with the boys at a Paddington Youth Club and this introduced me to an idea: accessible, free, working class Cinema which, first leading to 'Bronco Bullfrog' has been a faltering light to me ever since. While the world of Cinema, especially under Hollywood's baleful influence, has tended more and more towards loud-mouthed extravagant spectacle I have trodden another path. Now I would rather see the VHS stumblings of a school kid or any amateur than the technically polished output of film school alumni and I find the theatre that untrained young people can make in school and community halls or in the street, far more engaging than anything now available in the West End.
While working for Dateline Films I met James Scott who had approached the film industry differently from me, through the London International Film School, and already had a forty minute story film in the can, 'The Rocking Horse'; he'd shot it on 16mm and had arranged showings in public halls and libraries himself. He had another short drama film: 'Changes' starring Anthony Hopkins. It was on 35mm and he wanted help with editing. James was more ambitious than I and he had connections in the world of Art. One of these connections was Nicholas Gormanston, the Premier Viscount of Ireland who found us our first job: a cinema commercial for the clothes boutique 'Hung on You'. Together with Nicholas we formed Maya Film Productions in 1966 and, again through James' connections got our first commission. David Hockney, already famous for his Royal Academy Gold Medal, his deceptively simple art and frankly expressed views, lived round the corner from us in Powys Terrace, Notting Hill and was preparing a series of etchings to illustrate poems by C. P. Cavafy. James got us a commission to film Hockney while he worked and explained the process to us in his flat. The most important thing, we thought, was to have the right cameraman, one who would capture rather than impose and who would reflect the direct and simple approach that Hockney had to his work. We knew most of the young cameramen of the time and Charles Stewart, Chris Menges and Peter Suschitsky were up for the job if I remember correctly but we plumped for the inexperienced and reclusive Adam Barker-Mill who was already working as an assistant for us. Adam did a wonderful job on Kodak DoubleX 16mm negative using only the occasional Photoflood bulb. I stuck the pieces together using the skills learnt off Reggie more than those that World In Action taught and James made a film"Love's Presentation", which though little seen is 'arguably the best ever made about an artist at work'. That is according to Archie Tate of the ICA Cinema and I'm inclined to agree with him.
James Scott had a cushy job teaching film at the Bath Academy of Art and Adam and I wouldn't give him peace until we got in on it. There were almost as many tutors as students for a while and we were all of much the same age. This must have been the Summer of Love, 1967. James managed to maintain a highbrow posture with films about the Bauhaus and Edward Muybridge while I lead my handful of students astray shooting a forty-five minute film about the work of the Rudolf Steiner organization with autistic children, first at St. Christophers School, Bristol then at Botton Village in Yorkshire. Miss Grace, the principle of the school, was an early opponent of words like 'maladjusted' and 'handicapped' and said that it was the society around which should be asked to adjust as much as that demand should be made on the children. She thought that the growing incidence of autistic and Downes syndrome children which was evident even then, spelt a lesson for our increasingly de-humanised society. Thanks to Adam 'St. Christophers' is good looking and it is extremely human. It is probably worth seeing and was shown in the House of Commons at the time but only exists now as a 16mm A & B roll negative. I still owe my brother Jo the thousand pounds that I borrowed off him to complete the film. As he ended up as a director of the 'unacceptable face of capitalism' Lonrho, my depredations haven't done him too much harm. I shall endeavour to bring the film out on this website soon.
One of Dateline Films' first clients was the new company formed by Maurice Hatton, Richard Delamere, Tim Pitt-Miller and John Irvin, Mithras Films. It was they who asked me to put in some time editing a documentary film which Joan Littlewood was trying to make to support her idea for a 'Fun Palace' in the East End of London. Joan was at the pinnacle of her career. "Oh What a Lovely War" had crowned her efforts with what looked like solid commercial success but she was already justly famous for her work with Brendan Behan and with the Theatre Workshop. Her actors, from Sean Connery to Barbara Windsor, were everywhere and she herself was in the running for first Artistic Director of the emergent National Theatre. Probably, on reflection, Joan's ideas were never of much interest to the powers-that-be but what a difference it might have made in removing the dead hand of building contractors, architects, landowners and surveyors which has lain so expensively on Britain's Cultural Industry and which the Dome so clearly represents, if she had got the job. Joan wanted the National Theatre to be truly national, an idea rather than a building, a source of energy, inspiration and opportunity, engaging talents all over the country in many different venues and available to everyone. So?
My work, attempting to edit what Joan was failing to shoot lead me to follow in the great woman's train as she toured the East End, surveying her empire and planning to colonize the whole Lea Valley with her Fun Palace. I loved and admired her as many did and though she returned my affection with scorn, referring frequently to 'kunstlichers' and 'do-gooders' which she suspected I was, she allowed us into her theatre and into the 'Playbarn' which backed onto it. This was the only place that some of her Fun Palace ideas saw the light of day or, more correctly, the dark of night for here in the evenings she let the kids in. The local young teenagers who would otherwise vandalise her theatre and torment her actors on the way home were here given a place of their own. It was short lived, doomed as nearly everything in the neighbourhood to make way for vast transport developments, and it was ill-nourished. Joan's earnings were little able to support the demands made daily on them and, despite the apparent egalitarianism of sixties youth culture, the success enjoyed by many people from working class backgrounds, there was no more support from official sources then than there is now for genuine, order-threatening, creative activity. But there was a glimpse of something and a glimpse that I tried to capture in "Everybody's an Actor, Shakespeare Said." The thirty minute documentary film was funded by the National Film Finance Corporation who's boss, John Terry and his assistant Annette Caulkin became firm friends although, or perhaps because, I never rifled their pockets again.

1969. BRONCO BULLFROG. What did I know about film theory? Very little but I had an idea of what 'Neo-Realism' meant. It had been mooted in British Cinema with films like "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning" and "This Sporting Life" but I had read somewhere what Rosellini recommended. As I understood it he proposed that one take a neighbourhood and make a film to represent or reflect that place by using the stories that emerged from the people's experience and getting the people themselves to act them out in their natural locations. I thought I could manage it. I'd done my bit on Dateline's Youth Club film and had my head filled with Joan's strictures so when the boys who'd worked with us at the now closed Play Barn insisted that we should try to make a 'proper' film I saw little reason not to comply with their demand. Roy, Dougie, Dave, Del had gone on working with us, finishing off 'Everybody's an Actor', and had grown used to visiting at the flat which Adam and I shared in St. Stephens Gardens (it was similar to the flat in nearby Powis Square which figures in 'Performance'. Rachman territory)
The Yacht Marigold was still part of our lives, all my brothers had chipped in with saws, hammers and opinions to keep her afloat, and the boys from Stratford used to come on her as well. One summer we moored up in the bay for the Isle of White pop Festival, it could have been '68. Friends of ours were filming the festival, Eric Burden was there and by reference to the program I'd remind you who, of Bob, Jimmi, Doors, Floyd, Mamas, Papas or Who was on the stage but I can't remember a thing except it was a great deal more pleasant than any festival I've been to since. And everyone enjoyed it.
By this time we had met with Andrew St.John and he had joined Maya Films as producer. It was his drive and sense of direction which first got me to sit down for three weeks and write a script and then shepherded the whole venture through the ruthless fund raising, getting a professional crew who would work with Adam to shoot 35mm in our minimal situation, creating the circumstances that would let our dedicated actors give of their best and eventually bringing the finished work to the attention of the public.
In those days, despite the free love of the swinging sixties, sexual segregation was a fact for young teens in Stratford and few girls ventured into the Playbarn. If a girl was there it would be as a focus of attention, comment and rivalry. If she was a local she'd have a 'history' or the boys would brag about it in any case. We recruited 'Irene' from West London. I saw Anne Gooding, working in the dairy shop and got Andrew to ask her if she'd like to be in a film. As with the boys, we got her time off work and paid her twice what she was getting there. They all had shares as well but, despite the film's eventual notoriety, with the distribution system that then prevailed this meant little.
All the actors were remarkably reliable and capable. The core came from the Playbarn; Del, though in fact he had been a key trouble-maker initially, playing loud music and challenging Joan's or anyone's authority, the Shepherd family, Sam, Chris and Freda, and Roy Haywood. All these had experience of 'drama' and the discipline that Joan required of her actors but others had none at all. They all behaved with easy confidence in front of the camera, hitting marks, getting eye-lines right, repeating things four or five times exactly the same because of faults with the camera, lights or sound; they were rarely at fault themselves. Most striking and professionally conducted was the 'post-sync' session. Re-recording dialogue from location scenes where the original track was unusable was standard practice but one which has caused professional actors in my experience a lot of trouble. The film is made up into loops of picture and original sound track (the same work that I did on 'Spartacus'). The actor sits in a sound-proof booth seeing the loop projected. Numbers come up, one, two, three, the picture appears, a line dashes across the screen and, to an accompanying roar from his head-phones the actor has to say his line into the mic. poised in front of him. One can understand that it might cause anxiety and many professional actors find difficulty with it, find difficulty getting the pitch, the tone or the feeling right. Maybe it was because we didn't put any pressure on them that the kids performed so well. There wasn't pressure, none of that phony sense of importance, none of that expectation of fame and easy money which everyone associates with cinema these days. We didn't raise these expectations and to everyone it was just a job, a better job than usual, more interesting and a bit better paid, but still only a job.
I don't know that one can re-create that atmosphere now. British society has changed; the extreme narrowing of the horizons of opportunity for the great majority of young people in this country has been accompanied by strident insistence on the validity of personal financial success. Celebrities and the Lottery assure them that a way can be found but most young people face a contradiction which is most easily resolved in the negativity of drugs. Drugs too, thanks to the malicious cynicism of legislation, offer the only way to financial success or even livelihood for many people. There is pressure on space and pressure on time, particularly in London, compared with that era when 'liberating' vacant buildings was a regular pastime and pundits published treatises on the problems that increasing leisure was going to create.
'Post-sync' comes near the end of a production obviously. We were in Soho. David Bowie was recording above the pub next door and Jimi Hendrix was rehearsing at the Marquee ('Hey Jo' I recall) while our boys and girl came in and did their job punctiliously. Jonathan Gili edited the film. He came to us from assistant editing on Stephen Frears' 'Gumshoe' and he was to be my assistant on this but my idleness asserted itself, the pinball table beckoned and Andrew wanted another script.
Sometime around now, maybe a little later with the support of Bronco's rapidly swelling reputation, Andrew was playing golf in Florida with Bob Hope. This had something to do with Izzy Diamond and added up to Andrew being introduced to someone who thought that a half million pound revolving fund was a perfectly reasonable thing to put at a young man's disposal, so Andrew was looking for product. Even in those days a half million wasn't enough money for more than one and a half 'low budget' films from the industry but with our budgets we were looking at a comfortable half dozen. There is an interesting, rather eccentric I thought, piece in the Monthly Film Bulletin about 'Private Road' on its release. I was making a 'British film' within the rules, they were right about that. We decided to use professional actors, mainly to support our contention, as producers, that the film industry could be more securely (and interestingly) settled on the basis of far lower production costs. Bronco cost £18,000 with a six week shooting schedule, Private Road £28,000 with an eight week schedule and shooting in colour.
With Bronco finished we did what we'd done before and showed it to people we knew with the vain expectation that we might be offered a little money for it and it would soon be running 'in a cinema near you'. The money we needed to cover all our costs was ten percent of the budget of a comparable British film like 'Taste of Honey' or 'Saturday Night and Sunday Morning'. If the film had been distributed or exhibited with the panache with which it was made it might have been a different story. As it is it didn't come out in a London Cinema nor get to Cannes 'til over a year later during which time a lot had happened.
In the winter of 1970 I had glandular fever, a peculiar and debilitating disease which is little understood. It's effects are long lasting and I was not a coherent contributor to events nor do I have a good recollection of them for quite a long time.

When John Boulting (the head of British Lion Films who were distributing Bronco Bullfrog) saw the script of 'Private Road' he opined that it was 'vin ordinaire'. He might have been right, in the upshot, it was much improvised on by Bruce Robinson and Micky Feast, the stars of the film but, on reflection I think that a good deal more vin ordinaire might result in some vintages really worth drinking, whereas this pretended insistence that every film is a classic leads only to synthetic productions. By that time he and I were on bad terms because of his failure to give us any money but to make us beholden instead to his company by spending money on our behalf. There were many variations on this theme but that was the essence of it for me. The praise of reviewers and promises of 'deals' in future did nothing to compensate for the lack of actual reward for our efforts. There were reviewers who commented adversely. One in the... I forget but a big circulation rag of the time, thought it among the ten worst films ever made and disparaged particularly the actors' efforts. It seemed pressingly unkind and irresponsible that this, and similar papers which the actors' friends and family were more likely to read, gave such a bad impression of the critical response which, failing hard cash, was all we were offered. This reviewer was starving the kids of the only reward we were offered - a swollen head; the esteem of our peers and our elders. When you consider that the Times thought their acting 'impeccable' and that they had in fact worked better than hardened troupers his review was a distortion. I'm sure he used the word 'amateur' and this brings us properly back to the subject. 'Amateur', meaning one who works with love, is a word which, like 'vin ordinaire', though leveled as an insult can be taken as the greatest compliment. Isn't an every day subject, played with love, the basis of some of the best cinema - 'L'Atalante' for example or "Shadows', the works of Capra or Ozu? I don't suggest that 'Private Road' compares too well with those films. It is an everyday subject which would have benefited from being made with more love but Andrew and I were intent on making it 'professionally'. We wanted to fit it into an established framework and I was as interested in the mechanics of the budget as he was. I can say that, as with 'Hero' some years later, the film was sacrificed to an idea surrounding it. 'Bronco' didn't suffer like that but grew coherently out of the circumstances of our lives.
We, Maya Films, had a press agent in those days, his name was David Peel and as he doesn't get a mention on the films, only joined us as they were about to be released, I should remember him here. He died swimming in a lake in Canada in the late ninteen-seventies. Someone suggested to me that he'd swum out too far on purpose not to get back. It might be true, he had become pretty unhappy by then. At the time he was as much 'Maya Films' as anyone and, together with Andrew, did phenomenal things for no money in the way of publicity for the films. His PR was less successful and, one Cannes night, he notoriously drove the 'grande damme' of Sight and Sound, Penelope Houston, into such a rage that she battered him near senseless into the gutter with her handbag. He was a light weight fellow with more hair than body to him. Her defence might be that he was senseless already. He was a clever operator and hard worker and, like many people in those days, he felt able to do whatever he set himself. Getting the front page of the newspapers seemed plausible to him, so he set about and did it twice.
Later, about '73 or '74, when I set up the 'Prodigal Trust', Inner London Schools Video Project, it was David who, armed with his 'Guerilla TV Handbook', trudged around the streets of the East End with motley crews of school-children, laying plans for London's first pirate television station. It was he who nursed the reel to reel Portapaks and edited the tapes with Sellotape joins to avoid copying them to produce finished works of drama. Perhaps he realized how long it was going to be before it became a viable system. It is only now, with digital, that truly economical production and distribution are possible technically. Unfortunately, society, at least British society, has moved on into far more acceptance of the rights of authority than the rights of the individual and perhaps the social climate makes it no longer possible politically.
'Private Road' was popular with audiences, had people cheering when the junky character 'Stephen' makes his reappearance. Audiences in Sidney and Melbourne apparently shared this enthusiasm with the punters who came to see the film in the one London cinema it ran in, in Notting Hill Gate. Determined to show that we could do everything ourselves we got a distribution licence, registered the film to qualify for Eady payments, arranged press screenings and 'four-walled' the Gaumont (now theCoronet) Cinema to release the film. We began to get good audiences, interestingly noting the power of advertising - a small ad. in the Evening Standard could double the audience. This was worth less to us than it should have been because... we didn't have the ice cream sales.  Is that what independent cinema means? Worrying about the ice cream sales? I was worrying about this business of more rather than less love, less rather than more money but 35mm is relentlessly tied up with money. And did we have to go through this in every city in the land, every capital in the world? We didn't have the energy or the will for it.
Andrew, exhausted and defeated, more, I believe, by myself than by the real world, willing to put his money where his mouth was, if it was honest and accessible cinema we were looking for, up-rooted his family and headed to Glasgow to work for Rev Geoff Shaw's 'Gorbals Group'. The first reel-to-reel 1/2” video decks were out and Andrew made use of them to propose a people's television for the Gorbals. He, I mean the gang he quickly gathered around his cold-water tenement in Cumberland Street, published a magazine, 'Puffa and Blow', recorded local music and made video tapes. He couldn't help but get involved in the more traditional social-work roles, visits to the country, to hospitals and the Courts.
It must have been before this that we were in New York for the openning of 'Bronco' at Dan Talbot's 'New Yorker' Cinema. Andy Warhol's films had been part of our underground scene, in Notting Hill Church Halls we'd thrilled to the machinery rattling away energetically projecting hours of his movies of a perfectly static image. And there'd be three more reels the same in the cans at the projectionist's feet. But now Andy was in the heyday of his cinema career with 'Trash' and 'Flesh' released and big plans underway for everyone involved. Bob Montgomery, our New York lawyer, introduced us to him and we found ourselves daily entertained by Andy and his entourage - at his flat where Jo Dalesandro was hanging and the room was dominated by multiple television sets, silently playing different channels, pre-dating today's digital choice by thirty years - at the Union Square Factory where Pat Hackett, Bob Colacello and of course, Paul Morrisey stay vividly and fondly in mind and I got involved with one of their stars. I found myself, late at night in the heart of one of the West side 'Projects', taking her cat to the emergency vet. What a glamorous life! And Andy made it all real, riding in the hired limo to a party at Duke's house on the Park or maybe down to Chelsea for an art show, to a fashion launch on 5th Avenue, anywhere he felt that the glamour surrounding him reflected what he was prepared to put out, paid him back for the effort he made.
Andrew St.John decided that life in Cumberland Street was better, more alluring.  One of the 'Puffa and Blow' gang, Samuel Z. Colclough, made it through the intervening years (you'll notice I haven't dared put a date on any of this, my memory is so inexact) to play the part of the wizard Moden in 'Hero'. 
I joined Andrew for a while, stayed outside the Gorbals with a flat just over the River Clyde, in St. Vincent Crescent, reporting erratically for work at Cumberland Street or in the old Synagogue, soon to be demolished to make way for a judges' car park for the Law Courts being built nearby on the site of the John Knox Church. I betrayed my bourgeois nature by wanting to work on a more stable platform than that provided by 1/2" reel-to-reel video machines. I'd refer to them as 'Portapaks' but this might have been before them, with a table-top deck and a long lead going to the 'portable' camera. The resulting material could be copied only with rapid loss of quality and was, in the best case, unshowable on broadcast television and non-transferable to film. I wanted a wider audience for anything we might do and, also needing to be paid, thought we should, on the strength of our glorious reputation, approach my old pals Granada Television for a budget for 16mm shooting. This talk of getting paid was too much for Andrew's monk-like stomach and he issued a fatwah against me. His gang was coming over the Clyde to execute the judgement. Death! For attempting to cash in on their work; death. I beat a hasty retreat to East Kilbride.
Although I hung around for a bit, around my flat and the streets of the Gorbals to put a brave face on things, and we all pretended we'd come to some kind of understanding, my lack of enthusiasm for Social Work had been severely re-inforced. With the 'petrol crisis' in full swing, I thought I should try the increasingly fashionable 'self-sufficiency' and soon proceeded to Caroline Younger's estate on the West Coast of Scotland to set about the large walled-garden and greenhouses and a row of grandly gothic Victorian gardeners' cottages by the sheltered sea of Loch Craignish.
It must have been before this or perhaps around now that Dave brought some of the school kids from Prodigal Trust up to Craignish. I vividly remember an interview with one of the boys, sitting on top of a deserted island in the immense silence of the dead calm Firth of Lorne, speaking of the friend who's death he had witnessed two years before, blown up while playing in a booby-trapped vehicle, victim of the wars that divided his native Cyprus. It is a tape that, with many others, I regret the loss of.
I'm hoping that some of the material that has been lost over the years might, as this website becomes more widely known and visited, come to the surface again. It's mere chance that any of it has survived, including 'Bronco Bullfrog' who's 35mm negative was rescued for the N.F.A. by one of the graders who spotted it on the rubbish at the bankrupt Humphries Labs. I'm hoping that this web site will be a growing and communicative thing. In this past tense I confess to my fallibility and will welcome corrections and additions and, as we come to the present which we surely will do, even more do I look forward to comments and information.

END OF PART ONE.