John Mills Collection Film 37 - China/Hayley-Bells

An amateur film of rural China in the early 1930s shot by the actor John Mills’ father-in-law, showing farming and transport methods in Tianjin.

This home movie was probably shot around Tianjin in northern China, where Colonel Francis Hayley Bell (father of John Mills' wife Mary) was Commissioner in 1930-31. Bell’s rather shaky film records aspects of rural life - harvesting, irrigation and river transport. While the boats are distinctive and donkeys replace horses, the methods used are not so different to those of pre-mechanised British farming.