The British Pathé Archive

In tribute to London Fashion Week, we give you trends that you thought had been forgotten in our FASHION FIX GALLERY.

Dressed for the occasion? London Fashion Week Arrives!

Some tips from yesteryear. 
 

Changing the face of things (British Pathé)

W. T. Benda, aided by his charming wife, shows you some of his world-famous masks.

(via operatory5)

Future Fashions

Fab story from 1939 predicts what women and an unfortunate man will be wearing in the year 2000: http://www.britishpathe.com/video/eve-ad-2000

leighwoosey:

Vogue London in 1946 - The Making of Vogue Magazine [HD] (by britishpathe)

A lovely youtube channel.

“… order suddenly appears out of confusion.”

Perhaps the best description I have heard of pagination and page imposition.

Dancing the night away, London (1925).

From our collection of clips showing how Londoners spent their free time during the Twentieth Century. Explore our “London At Leisure” collection here: http://www.britishpathe.com/workspaces/jhoyle/London-at-leisure-London/thumb

Amazing automatic car parking machine from 1932.

A motorised bath features in our WordPress blog post celebrating British inventions both brilliant & barmy: http://britishpathe.wordpress.com/2012/12/18/british-inventions-the-good-and-the-not-so-good/

Get vintage fashion tips from Londoners of the past in our “Fashionable London” collection. 

In this still, models show off some fabulous nylon swimming caps, London (1963)

Little Bruin, the “Talking Teddy” from an early animated series. A link to this film and other classic cartoons can be found here.

Just updated Pinterest & have merged some boards. So if you were only following 1 board, check you’re still with us! http://pinterest.com/britishpathe/

British Pathé only recently joined Pinterest, but we’re really enjoying sharing our stills and have just created two new boards. One, In the News…  has stills from our archive that are relevant to recent news stories or important anniversaries. The other, our Science and Technology board, features natural events and disasters, key British inventions, and bizarre vintage tech.

We’ve only just begun these boards, so they’re not going to blow you away, but follow them now if you don’t want to miss out on our updates! Our Pinterest page also features war stills, fashion and beauty images, popular YouTube videos, and more.

Visit our Pinterest page.

Like the British countryside? Then you’ll love these! Here’s a selection of 66 classic clips from our archive chronicling the story of the countryside from the 1930s to the late 1960s.

http://www.britishpathe.com/workspaces/show/jhoyle/British-countryside/thumb

This still is taken from one of the films in the collection, a travelogue about picturesque Shaftesbury in Dorset.

As well as producing regular news stories, British Pathé often included additional forms of entertainment mixed in to add a bit of variety. These pieces could be more comedic or quirky in tone, such as the Pathé Pictorial series, or entirely fictional pieces such as Dave and Dusty. In the early days, they also produced some animated shorts. In the late 1910s, there was a series of John Bull cartoons, which sadly we cannot find in the archive. There was also, most notably Jerry The Troublesome Tyke and the somewhat similar Adventures of Pongo the Pup, both from the mid-1920s.

 

Jerry was a cartoon dog from the silent era who actually “worked” for Pathe News.

“The Adventures of Pongo the Pup!” Classic animation from the 1920s.

The archive also contains a great deal of other animated productions and series. But of immense interest are the war propaganda shorts, particularly the marvellous “Britain’s Effort“, made by Lancelot Speed, but also the Sinking of the Lusitania and the brief Star-gazer, a still of which is below.

A still from “Run Adolf Run” from 1940.

The Pathé Animation archive also contains plenty of educational and information cartoons, such as this Ministry of Information film “Peak Load Electricity“ from 1943. Plus, there’s a lot of fun John Noble shorts and film of cartoonists at work. Pathé had fun with its shorts by showing the animators interacting with their creations, sometimes (in the case of Jerry), arguing with them.

 

 

Still from Ministry of Information trailer “Export or Die”, 1944.

So there’s a wealth of different styles and genres within the archive to explore. We’ve presented just a taster of them here, in our efforts to promote aspects of the archive which have been somewhat neglected by the understandable focus on Twentieth Century politics, royalty, and the two world wars.

To search our Animation Archive, click here.