Workers at Jesse Crossley & Sons Ironworks, Ripley (1900)

Victorian ironworkers leave their Derbyshire factory in carefully stage-managed fashion.

Mitchell and Kenyon's workplace films are rarely 'pure actuality', as this example makes clearer than most. A showman not only directs the crowd but opens and closes the gate itself. A mass of children patiently await the signal to sweep in front of the camera. The showman gestures to the cameraman that everything's done, but the camera keeps running until the film inside it runs out.