TO THE RESCUE

GB
1952
21mins
Dir: Jacques Brunius
Starring: Richard Massingham and Jacques Brunius

After a prize winning poodle is stolen, a cross-country chase ensues led by an eccentric local grocer

This short family caper was an early Children’s Film Foundation production, the final car chase of which lends much in appearance to the silent era. The grocer is played by Richard Massingham, a filmmaker who made a variety of strange short comedies and entertainingly eccentric public information films around this time. Massingham wrote and produced this film, which was evocatively shot in and around the picturesque country village of Biddenden, in Kent. There is a short sequence in the film’s latter half whereby a car passes across an open level crossing narrowly missing an approaching train. In reality, this dangerous stunt does not actually take place. Instead, the car crosses the track only for the film to cut to footage of a train passing across hauled by a former SECR Wainwright C Class 0-6-0. A little before this we get better glimpses of the locomotive plus a glimpse of a mixed train passing the same location, but we do not see the locomotive on this occasion as the film has been cropped. Although it is not known exactly where this was filmed it was almost certainly on the Kent & East Sussex Railway, which passed through Biddenden on its way from Headcorn-Robertsbridge.

A Wainwright C Class 0-6-0 approaches the camera hauling a single carriage of equal vintage
We get to see the locomotive in closer detail, but it remains unidentified
A vintage Austin Seven Tourer on an open crossing carrying a country lane across a country branch line
Moments later and a train crosses hauled by a Wainwright C Class 0-6-0
Another shot of the train at the crossing, which is undoubtedly the same train seen in the first two shots
Shortly before the above sequence we get to see this train, which the background trees show was filmed from the same location. It is a mixed passenger and goods service, typical of such lines, but in this instance it appears to be more of a goods train with a passenger coach hitched onto the front!