Miners Leaving Pendlebury Colliery

Showman Albert Sedgwick, conspicuously raffish in homburg and moustache, bestrides and controls this film. Sedgwick has 'planted' the poster board advertising the show in which it's to be screened - as well as, probably, the Afro-Caribbean man whose presence in Edwardian Lancashire so surprises us. And he is choreographing, right before our eyes, the procession of colliers for the camera.

This film was included in Tate Britain's 2013 retrospective of L.S. Lowry's art. Lowry had himself lived in Pendlebury - although he didn't move there until 1912, 11 years after this film was shot. It's not impossible that the artist may have seen this or other local films in his youth. In any case, it's hard not to think of Lowry's deeply personal paintings when contemplating Mitchell and Kenyon's highly commercial filmmaking. Both are at once innocent and artful, their gaze alternately warm and cold, capturing industrial and human worlds by casual observation and careful orchestration alike. In contrast to the dozens of 'factory gate' films arranged by Mitchell and Kenyon outside textile mills and

Morecambe Church Lads' Brigade at Drill
Screenshot from the film
Directed by	James Kenyon Sagar Mitchell
Produced by	James Kenyon Sagar Mitchell
Cinematography	James Kenyon Sagar Mitchell
Production company	Mitchell & Kenyon
Release dates	· July 3, 1901
Running time	2 mins
Country	United Kingdom
Language	Silent

Morecambe Church Lads' Brigade at Drill is a 1901 British short silent documentary film, directed by James Kenyon and Sagar Mitchell, showing the parade drill of the Morecambe Church Lads' Brigade on 3 July 1901. The film, which was premiered at the Wintergardens in Wigan on the same day it was filmed, was popular and went on to be shown at other venues in the North of England.^[1]

Moving pictures were already a popular entertainment in Morecambe by 1901, and this film was apparently a hit when shown alongside other local films, including Mitchell and Kenyon's Panoramic View of the Morecambe Sea Front, at the Lancashire resort's Winter Gardens. "Needless to say these pictures are followed with intense interest," said a Morecambe Visitor reporter who was in the audience.

Like several other films in the Mitchell & Kenyon collection, this film was shot not by Mitchell & Kenyon themselves but by Thomas-Edison Pictures, the company run by flamboyant showman and regular M&K collaborator AD Thomas.

The Church Lads' Brigade was formed in 1891, inspired by the Boys' Brigade (formed eight years earlier). Similar youth organisations, typically with a semi-military ethos, were on the increase during the Edwardian period, which also saw the rise of the Girls' Brigade and the Scouts movements.

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