I’m very pleased to be able to say that the Video Archive Blog has returned. I took early retirement in January of 2011 but have recently been asked to restart and update my entries. So, we can look forward to more videos that are currently held in the video collection. I’ll also be trying to sort out and access the 15 year archive collection from STOIC the Student TV of Imperial College. That collection dates from about 1970 to 1985, or there abouts.
Working from home (and sometimes from Imperial) I can now devote as much time as I wish to this Blog. There are so many videos just waiting to be seen again. In fact I already have a few Blog entries awaiting the click of a button to make them live. The most time-consuming thing is the transfer of videotape into a digital format. What I’m currently doing is to make a DVD in maximum resolution of the video, before creating an on-line video held on the server. The DVD is stored along with the original videotape to make access easier. But the problem is that a 30 minute video takes 30 minutes to copy into a new format. That can take a lot of time!
Anyway, keep looking to see what’s changed or been added and let me know if you have any special requests or material that would be of interest to Imperial College.
On the 19th October 1988 the beginning of the mergers with the medical schools started. This was the merger between Imperial College of Science and Technology and St Mary’s Hospital Medical School, located just north of Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park at Paddington. The end result of the mergers was the formation of the Faculty of Medicine.
St Mary’s main entrance arch
To my knowledge this is only the second time that the college’s Great Hall has played host to a royal event. The first of these was the opening of the building (then called College Block and subsequently Sherfield Building) and the hall itself by HM the Queen in 1969. The hall was packed as you would imagine and that didn’t leave all that much room for the two cameras and tripods we had proposed for the live recording. We were also limited in terms of man-power so my colleague Chris Roberts operated the main camera whilst I located the second camera next to where I had the vision mixer and recorders. This meant that I could not only cut between the cameras, but also operate the second camera to change the shots slightly. What I could not cope with was the fact than when people stood up, they almost blocked the shots from the camera next to me.
The ceremony starts with the fanfare “St Mary’s”. There are then several musical interludes during which you’ll see a very young Richard Dickins and these 22 years later I must apologise to Richard because we got the spelling of his name wrong on our end credits. But, it’s a wonderful record of music from the college symphony orchestra playing Walton’s ‘Crown Imperial’. Also the late Eric Brown conducts the college choir with music from Carmina Burana. And finally in terms of music you’ll hear the electronic organ that’s located within the hall. Princess Anne, (The Princess Royal) as Chancellor of the University of London presented the Chairman of the Governing Body (Sir Henry Fisher) with a specially bound copy of the Imperial College Act and its revised Charter. The Imperial College Rector at the time was Professor (later Sir) Eric Ash.
As always, I’ve had to tweak the image on the video to make it look at bit better. Technology has advanced a lot since this was recorded and the lighting levels required to get good images is a lot lower these days. The Great Hall have never been fantastic for shooting video unless extra light is thrown at the stage area and that then leaves the audience rather dark, whilst the wood panels around the hall make a very warm image when light bounces off it. The whole video is around 45 minutes in duration.
Since the start of this archive blog people have asked me various things about the videotape collection. Questions range from: when did the collection start; how many tapes are there; and what formats of tape do you have. So, I thought that just for once I’d write an entry without an actual video in it. Some questions I’ve been asked are answered in the “about this video archive blog’, but I’ll go through them again anyway.
Some of the 700+ tapes in the video archive
The earliest videotape (one inch ‘A’ format) dates from about June 1970 and is on our original videotape format made by the American company Ampex. This company invented the world’s first commercial videotape format back in the mid 1950’s (2 inch Quadruplex). So, our oldest tape was made only 15 years after the invention of videorecording itself. Sadly, playing these tapes back is slowly becoming a problem. Equipment is no longer accessible on campus to run some of the formats we have, but it is possible to use commercial facilities (at a cost). Recently, the earliest collection from the student TV service (STOIC) came under our access.
Ampex ‘A’ format tapes have gone sticky
I’d forgotten just how many of the original one inch videotapes they still had. There are gems yet to be seen, dating from the early 1970’s through to about 1980, in fact their collection now has more one inch tapes than we do (many of ours are long gone). Anything of importance was transferred to another (the latest at the time) videotape format, but some items (mainly STOIC’s) remain, frozen in time, awaiting that day of playback once more when finances allows us to transfer them into a new digital format.
Playing these early tapes back has recently become a problem anyway. There is an effect called Sticky Shed Syndrome which means that the binder, which sticks the oxide onto the plastic tape, is breaking down. What appears to be happening is that the binder is taking in moisture and going sticky. It’s SO sticky in fact that when tapes are run, the oxide and binder come off the plastic tape and stick to all parts of the videorecorder that the tapes run past. After only a few moments of playback there will be a very loud screeching noise followed by the video head clogging and the machine grinding to a halt. If you put your finger onto the guides inside the machine it will be sticky and covered in tape oxide and a sticky goo.
Oxide is shedding from magnetic tapes
In the recent blog entry called “seen and gone” I found some old audio recordings of the soundtracks of erased videotapes. These audio tapes also suffered the same problem of shedding oxide. When I started to play them the oxide came off the plastic, as you can seen in the photo. My fingers can be seen through the plastic tape. The one good thing was that whilst running the tapes through the recorder I was also copying it onto computer to then go onto disc.
The U-matic videotape format suffers too
These playback problems have happened because some tape manufacturers got various chemical mixing formulas wrong. It was only in the mid 90’s or so that the problem was fully appreciated. There is only one way around the problems of playback. The tapes, audio and video, have to be baked. That is, the tapes have to be heat treated at something like ±50 oC for a few hours or more. This draws the moisture out, allowing immediate playback to get the material onto another modern format. The temperature used is critical, too high and the ‘Curie point’ can be reached and the tapes automatically erased, or at least the magnetic properties will be lost and thus the recording data will be gone for ever. So there are problems and dangers anyway with this method of recovery!
The various tape formats we have to work with sitting on the edit suite desk
We are therefore faced with a slight problem of playback, even with tapes still in use today like the U-matic system. Most of the tapes seen on the shelves in the top photo are of this format and many are causing playback problems. I’ll be experimenting with heat treatment soon to sample a few tapes for transfer. In most cases I’ll put these onto DVD, assuming they’ll play back okay after treatment. Today, we have many tapes formats as can be seen in this last photo. We’ve gone through: One inch open spool both low and high band; U-matic low and high band; Betacam and now DVCam. Also we’ve encountered half inch open spool, Philips cassette, VHS and so on. With some 700 tapes now being held in the collection, the question is how long will we be able to play back any of the many formats of videotapes that we have?
So now we come to the second Seen and Gone and this is when we get to see something interesting (and yes I do mean see). In December 1971 STOIC showed their Christmas edition of the then regular news programme Topic. I’ll try to recall the background to this programme if my memory serves me well!
Although by this time we had two videotape recorders in the studio, the programme was shown live to the JCR (Junior Common room), whilst the recorders were used to replay some inserts into the programme (maybe one did also record I can’t remember). At this time it was still not possible to easily record items outside of the studio so some cunning ideas came into use. To enable STOIC to capture external events an 8mm cine camera was used. The footage was then edited together and a simple background audio track of, for example, street noise, was created to play in the background. These inserts were then run into the live programme whilst one of the presenters did a voiceover. In later years a magnetic sound stripe was added to the film to allow sound to be pre-recorded in synch. Things didn’t always go to plan however, the splices in the film sometimes broke during projection or whilst being made ready to be shown. On one occasion a splice broke on the film that was going onto the take-up reel, the easiest thing to do at the time was to ignore it and therefore the film simply spooled directly onto the control room floor in a large pile. This edition of Topic was a good example of where things could and did go wrong. You’ll hear two situations where something happened and the presenter is called on the phone from the control and asked to ‘pad’ until it’s resolved. I thought it was fun if I left those in what you’ll be hearing.
Lord Penney interview in 1971
Now, I have called this Seen and Gone, but that’s not strictly true in this case. When I found the audio recording I remembered several spools of 8mm film. These are the original films used to insert into the programmes until portable video became available. They have sat there for 40 years waiting to be seen again. However the videos which they appeared in have long gone. But, in this case I had the soundtrack! So, what you are about to see is the recreation of a lost programme from 40 years ago. I remembered too that I had some photos of STOIC setting up and using the studio at Christmas…..bingo, it was THE same programme I had on audio. So, I’ve been able to use them and the 8mm films to insert at the appropriate places. There does appear to be one film missing and you’ll only hear the commentary and background sound effects. I discovered photos of Lord Penney being interviewed and those too are from the same programme.
So, you’ll be hearing and/or seeing: Guilds Motor club A-Z rally; NUS day of action; Silly Football in Hyde Park; Morphy Day rowing, the London to Brighton vintage car rally and the Lord Mayor’s Show. An interview with Lord Penney (then Rector) was prerecorded and I used the three photos taken at the time of that. Former Union President Piers Corbyn is included and I found a photo taken of that as well. And there’s an added bonus too. Many of the 8mm films were shot with normal Kodak 8mm film stock, so for the first time ever these will be seen in colour. Other items were shot using black and white film. So here is my recreated Christmas Topic from December 1971 with mistakes and technical breakdowns left in.
One area where the archives are sadly lacking in both audio and videos recordings is on the subject of Imperial’s Nobel Laureates. And, as always, my appeal is to anyone who may have something to boost our collection, in either audio/video/film and so one. This current entry will focus on those Nobel Prize winners for whom we have recordings.
Professor Dennis Gabor
In 1948 Dennis Gabor (1900-1979) joined Imperial College as Reader in Electron Physics, he was appointed FRS in 1956 and Professor of Applied Electron Physics in 1958, retiring from the Chair to become Professor Emeritus and Research Fellow in 1967. His experiments on holography began in the 1940’s and on the flat television tube in the 1950’s. The model for his flat TV tube is held by the college archives. I met him only once when he was in our TV Studio to watch a film. On leaving, he spoke to me about the Sony colour TV we had. He said “Ah you have a Sony colour television” to which my reply was along the lines that the Japanese were very clever with their technology. He put his hand on my shoulder and told me that the principle of its workings (the TV’s single electron gun cathode ray tube) was something that he had proposed and suggested, but for which funding could not be found at that time and that the idea went to Japan and was used in those Sony televisions.
For the Invention of Holography, Gabor was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1971. A few months later on 22 February 1972 Gabor repeated his Nobel lecture, but this time for a special audience at Imperial. For us we are fortunate that a sound recording was made of the event. It’s not amazing quality, but I’ve done what I can with the sound to help improve it and also slowed down the tape that was clearly running too fast when I played it back. It’s introduced by the Rector at the time Lord Penney and there’s a vote of thanks by a departmental colleague, Professor Colin Cherry. That itself is interesting as the only sound recording we currently have of Cherry speaking at Imperial ++. Even more interesting are the references by both Penney and Gabor to power cuts. This was because of the 1972 Miner’s Strike and the so called “three day week”. Imperial, like all other places was subject to limited mains power during the day and at specified times the entire campus would be plunged into darkness….even Nobel Prize winners!
In 1981 I made a promotional video for the department of chemistry. A section within the video included one of the current students talking to Professor Sir Geoffrey Wilkinson (1921-1996) in the office. At the time, Wilkinson was head of department. It’s a pity that this is such a general video and that we never recorded anything more in-depth with him. I’ve been able to go back to the original ‘rushes’ (that is the original videotape shot at the time) of this interview to improve quality slightly, but it was made 30 years ago on our original low-band U-matic colour recording system (a single-striped faced, vidicon tube camera).
The only other recording of him was made in February 1992. this was for a video called “Snapshots”. The video brought together some of the current research being carried out at Imperial and showcased it for, primarily, an external audience. This sequence however is very short indeed and is the only record we have of Geoffrey Wilkinson in his research lad. And, for what ever reason, I don’t seem to have the original rushes any more so can’t see if there was anything else recorded at the time.
Finally we take a look at Professor Lord George Porter (1920-2002). He became chairman of the Centre for Photomolecular Sciences (and Professor of Photochemistry) at Imperial in 1987. He received a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1967. He was a former Director of the Royal Institution (1966-1985) and this was when I first met him. That was during the 1966 televising of the Christmas Lectures with Eric Laithwaite (see Laithwaite blog entry). This first recording is fun because we recorded it in his lab in the basement of the Beit Building. It’s full of lasers, for which I’m sure he should have been wearing safety glasses.
George Porter’s 1995 Singapore lecture with Martin Sayers on cameras
Lastly, a unique recording of Lord Porter. This was not actually a planned videotaped lecture as such. In August 1995 he was asked to give the 10th Lee Kuan Yew lecture in Singapore. As he was unable to attend in person it was suggested he gave the talk via a videoconference link. We re-arranaged our TV studio to allow it to link into our videoconference system. You may spot him looking down at a monitor which was showing him the audience in Singapore and at one point talking to Martin Sayers behind the camera to confirm timings. He was very easy to work with and like Eric Laithewaite skilled in presenting on TV and film.
Prior to the day, he telephoned me several times to discuss details. He had a habit (so I was told) of sitting in his garden in summer months and making calls on a cordless phone. However, he was always at the limit of range of the base unit and was barely audible, so the call was full of hiss and crackle. It was only by chance that I happened to put a videotape into a recorder to make a record of the event and I’m glad I did. So here is the lecture, given live to Singapore, on a very hot London day on 2 August 1995. And because it was so hot, we left the usually noisy air-con unit switched on and you may hear that in the background.
Last time, in STOIC One, we looked at the very start of STOIC with clips from things like: an early promotional video to join the club and Morphy Day on the tow path at Putney. Staying with that line of thought, this time we’re going to see an early example of coverage of a rag event, Election Results ‘live’ from the Great Hall and the days when students had a “Mooney” for lunch rather than an sandwich.
Firstly though, the idea for IC Radio started in 1974. In the days prior to the internet, to be able to hear radio, you needed a radio. For a radio to hear your broadcast you needed a transmitter (a legal one too). So, for IC Radio to operate it would need to be able to transmit.
By the time that IC Radio was about to open, there were ways to achieve this ‘within’ a building (as opposed to an actual transmitting aerial as such). As you will hear in the interview, a ‘leaky feeder’ cable was the method used to enable broadcasts on the medium wave. Mark Caldwell (a former STOIC Chairman) and main presenter at the time, interviewed John Allen who became IC Radio Station Manager. This video is from 4 March 1976 and has a few glitches in its playback, but it’s not bad for 35 years of age. John Allen has his own archive website with loads of old photos and sound clips, so you may wish to hop over and read more about it, click here.
Coverage of rag events was a regular and popular item within STOIC’s programme schedule. Whether it was: a simple collection; tiddlywinks down Oxford Street or, as we’re about to see, “Guilds Silly Sports” outside Harrods in Knightsbridge. This was always a good location for all involved, as it’s about 10 minutes from the South Ken campus. So, no one had to travel too far and this was important for STOIC when a rag took place on a Wednesday afternoon – the time in the week when STOIC’s news programme was recorded and edited. So, returning with the videotape to start editing was always the main thought for those waiting back in the studio. This is one of the earliest rags recorded back in 1979. Colin Palmer interviews those taking part and more importantly, those giving money…
Mark Caldwell in January 1975
Hustings, elections and the UGM, (where the results were announced) were also high on the STOIC list of events to be covered each year. When, in the early 70’s, parts of the college were linked by both video and audio cables an idea came to mind. Why not try and link from the great hall and report the UGM live via STOIC? When the idea was first suggested the technology was not quite in place to allow video as well as sound to be relayed back to the TV studio.
So, in year one, Mark Caldwell presented live segments in sound only, with a photo of him showing in vision! Year two was a lot better and technology allowed a full linking in vision and sound. So, five years on from the first attempt, here’s a clip from the UGM of 1980 with Paul Johnson presenting.
But…this is just a bit different again. Why? Well, because by now STOIC was running its own live programme AND also linking into IC Radio at the same time. You’ll see what I mean in this clip and you’ll hear me on the earphone cue system which was clearly too loud that day! The slight pause before Dave Fuller starts speaking is because they were waiting for a cue from IC Radio to confirm the link-up between the two networks, all rather complicated for those early days.
Finally, if you were a student in the 1960’s to 1980’s you may well remember going for a “Mooney” at lunchtime. What was this? Well the answer is simple. Victor Mooney (Died on December 27th 2012 aged 89) was college Catering Manager from 1953 to his retirement in 1985. He became part of college tradition and so did his food, hence the reference “Mooney”. It’s a bit like saying you’re using a Hoover I guess. Over the years he came in for some serious complaining by the students, but, as he always said, if he was given a serious budget he could provide a serious meal. Here he is from 1979 talking to STOIC regular Dave Ghani.
My involvement with the City and Guilds College (C&G) started during its centenary year in 1985. A week of celebrations were held (26 February – 1 March) and as part of that the Junior Common Room was transformed into an impressive exhibition called Tech2000. The exhibition was officially opened by the then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Can you spot the famous handbag in the photo?
Besides making some 12 individual videos for various exhibits, an official video record of the week was also commissioned. This would capture the build-up, the opening and tour of the exhibits by the Prime Minister and the banquet held at the Guild Hall with the main speaker being HRH Prince Philip and this itself was not without its own problems. I was told in advance that we could not use too many lights when recording his speech because he didn’t like lights in his face.
Prince Philip at the Guild Hall
The problem was the size of the Guild Hall and the area we were trying to cover. Illumination within the hall was to be mostly from the candles on the tables, but this was far too low for our camera. A compromise was reached and we used a 2kw floodlight that would only be switched on moments before any one of the speeches started. Although this sounded good, we were located high up on a balcony some distance away, so the end result was better, but not great. It was also such a vast increase in light levels (compared to the candles) that actually switching the light on caused most of the people to turn around and look up at us! Although I’d requested a feed from the sound system to plug into our video recorder, I had not actually spoken with the engineers operating it on the night. Everything turned out OK and we received a cable with audio from the hall sound system. We were intending to video record most things, but our tapes would only run for 20 minutes at a time, so tape changes were going to have to be made. I was concerned that from an archives point-of-view we should not lose any of the speeches. I asked the engineer if he had been asked to make a sound recording of the whole evening, only to discover that no one had thought to do so! This was corrected and the tapes now reside in the college archive.
Let me just mention Prof Bruce Sayers (1928-2008) who was Dean of City and Guilds at the time. In fact he was Dean during the period 1984-1988 and again from 1991-1993. It was during his last period in office that Bruce commissioned the first video to be made showcasing City and Guilds – that was in 1993 with a second following in 1994 and a final in 1998. The 1993 video was more of an historical look-back at City and Guilds, with the further two looking more at the research work within the departments making up C&G. So, back to the C&G centenary and the video that covers the events making up the week. Hopefully it gives a flavour of what was happening within C&G and is also a wonderful snapshot of Imperial College life in 1985.
“City and Guilds, a celebration” was made in 1993. It was, as the title suggests, a celebration of C&G from its earliest times, right up to the date of making the video. We found some interesting photographs and film to help illustrate a commentary recorded by Bruce Sayers himself. We had previously discovered the film of the old City and Guilds building (1960), so we looked for more visuals that C&G alumni might remember. We achieved this with some film shot in 1928 of both “Sports Day” and “Morphy Day”. At that time, Sports Day was clearly still being held at the Stamford Bridge ground of Chelsea Football Club (this apparently being the case until the 1930’s). The film shows a lot more of sports day than we had time for in the video and this is something that I’ll feature in more detail in a later blog. You will see a couple of shots of the Queen’s Tower from a distance. These were from a hotel long since demolished. Located near Gloucester Road tube station the Forum Hotel had a number of floors almost equal to the Queen’s Tower in height. A simple phone call gained us access to their roof area and the result was some splendid views of London and the Queen’s Tower. Going back briefly to the 1960 film of the old guilds building it’s worth mentioning that this was an amazing discovery that was made after Sir Owen Saunders died in 1993. The 16mm colour film was found in his office drawer and passed to the college archivist who in turn asked me to see what it was! We’ll show that complete colour film in a later blog.
One person mentioned in that video was Herbert Cecil Booth (City and Guilds 1893) who invented the process of cleaning fabrics by sucking air through them. More can be seen on him in Tim Hunkin’s TV programme “The Secret Life of the Vacuum Cleaner“.
In 1994 we were asked to make a follow up which was to be called “City and Guilds College 1994 – an update”. This was very much a promotion for the research work being carried out within City and Guilds. It also included a section with Bob Schroter talking about the Old Centralian’s Trust fund, the charitable arm of the City & Guilds College Association. To give a flavour of the departments featured, research work was shown from Civil Engineering; Aeronautics; Electrical Engineering; Chemical Engineering to name but a few. Having just celebrated 10 years of operation, the Centre for Composite Materials showed their work relating to the aircraft industry, whilst Bio Mechanics demonstrated the work being carried out on knee joints. Again, this video’s audience was industry and alumni, particularly those overseas. Unlike the previous video, we commissioned a professional voice-over which was read by former BBC ‘Tomorrow’s World’ presenter Michael Rodd.
The final video made with Bruce Sayers for City and Guilds was in February 1998 and was entitled “City and Guilds: the challenges of tomorrow”. It makes reference that this was now 12 years into C&G’s second century and the fact that many changes were going on within Imperial College. In fact this video is a nice record of the South Kensington campus just a few years before major rebuilding works would change its appearance with: the new main entrance and Business School on Exhibition Road; Dalby Court and the (then) new Faculty Building.
For the very first time the City and Guilds Institute was mentioned and it’s connection with C&G explained. We went to their central London headquarters to get shots both outside and inside. Following on from this we shot at one of their lunches held each year at the college, which is attended by fellows of the C&G Institute and the Rector of Imperial. At the time of making the video the construction of the new Sir Alexander Fleming building was well into the completion stages and shots of both the initial building work and completed building were shown. Dame Julia Higgins, a former Dean of C&G, spoke about the many changes across the campus with the opening of the new SAF building and the intake of many new medical students.
The video ends by asking the question: “What would City and Guilds look like in 2025 and would those who know it now, recognise it then?”
