Trinity School Trip to Whitby

A charming portrait of school boys from Stockton on Tees in the first age of austerity.

Here’s a rare example of a woman behind the camera in the late 1940s. A teacher at the Holy Trinity Church of England Boys School in Stockton on Tees creates an affectionate portrait of the teachers and pupils - juniors enjoying a spot of rigorous landscape gardening, a toddler’s first steps, and young lads on a day trip to Whitby. The boys are pictured as a sea of scarlet school caps in the cliff-top Abbey graveyard as they sightsee around the historic Yorkshire fishing town.

Norton-born Agnes Dorothea (‘Dodie’) Allan (1905 – 1996) qualified as a teacher at Neville’s Cross Training College, Durham, in 1926 and subsequently taught at Stockton’s Bailey Street School and Holy Trinity School (located in Yarm Lane when this film was made). Her surviving films consist mainly of silent 16mm home movies of holidays, friends’ weddings, and a few fictions, which drew on her experience working with school children in amateur theatre. Women’s role in inter-war cine club and independent amateur film-making was rarely credited, and was overlooked in the amateur film magazines of the day, despite being increasingly active in collaborative and individual productions.