A few weeks ago I purchased the latest acquisition for the Broadland Memories archive – a lovely amateur cine film dating from the early 1930s which records a holiday on board the wherry yacht Norada and includes some wonderful footage of the 1930 Beccles regatta and the 1931 Horning regatta.
As our 16mm projector is not working at the moment, I made immediate arrangements to get the film up to Norwich for transfer into a digital format. Ken, who does the transfers for me, was very kind and managed to get it sorted for me within a fortnight and we rushed back up to Norwich just before Christmas to collect it. Having been unable to view the film before transfer, the mini DV tape was put straight into the camera as soon as we got indoors! What I’ve got is about 12 minutes worth of footage which firstly shows the family on board Norada, the skipper and his mate going about their duties, followed by some superb shots of racing at the Horning regatta of 1931. The last part of the film shows similar scenes at the Beccles regatta of 1930. I’m really pleased with it and it’s an extremely important little piece of Broadland’s history.
I transferred the film onto my PC (before I had to stop using it completely) and managed to do a couple of DVD copies for my own viewing and took a few stills. I hope to eventually get this edited and put out onto DVD alongside the other Broadland Memories titles, but I will need to gather some further films together to accompany it as it is rather short. This certainly won’t happen in the immediate future but I hope that it may end up being a project for 2013. As I have mentioned in the past, my knowledge of Broadland sailing craft is woefully limited, so I thought I’d post up a few of the stills I took from the film in the hope that one of the experts out there might be able to help with identification. I think that the half deckers at Horning are possibly white boats (Yare & Bure One Design) and that those featured at Beccles are brown boats (Broads One Design) ….. but stand to be corrected as I’m really not certain!
The first four stills show Norada which was built by Ernest Collins at Wroxham in 1912. Norada is currently under the care of the Wherry Yacht Charter Charitable Trust and I believe that she is due to begin sailing again during the summer of 2012 to mark her centenary year.
The next two stills were taken from the section of film which was captioned as “Small yachts racing at Horning” and also dates from 1931. As previously mentioned, I wondered whether these were white boats?
The final four images were taken from the footage of the 1930 Beccles regatta and I believe that these may be brown boats? This is actually some really nice film as it shows lots of close ups of the crews as they pass – I’m sure that someone out there may well be able to identify some of the faces!
Once my computer is fixed I will try and put a few clips together from the new cine film and will upload them to YouTube, but unfortunately it looks as though it may be a couple of months before I get it all up and running again properly. If you can help with identifying any of the classes of boat seen above then please do get in contact.
