I’ve been looking at it. Thinking about things.
There are no motor vehicles. Even the double-decker bus is horse-drawn. The smell of the poo from all those horses must have been overpowering.
None of the people in it, except maybe the baby-in-arms during the girls’ dance, is still alive. Probably not the baby either.
The little boys posing on the bridge and jumping in the river would have been of military age, if not at the outbreak of WWI, then at least at its end. Survivors might have formed the backbone of Britain’s WWII strength.
The only functioning airplane in existence was owned by two brothers in Dayton, Ohio.
Hitler was 15 or 16; his father had just died the previous year, and this year he would drop out of school.
Winston Churchill met his furure wife at a dinner.
I’ll let others add as they see fit.
Jeez, you are a downer.
And I’m sure half the children you see in the clip died of whooping cough or scarlet fever or measles or polio or tuberculosis before they made it to eighteen.
There, feel better?
“The people you see here lived in the time of King Edward.
Rich or poor, handsome or ugly, they are all equal now.”
It is interesting looking back. There it was, just 10 years before The Great War, and as you say, many of those young boys probably fought and died in that war that in 1910 was not even a glimmer on the horizon. It is bittersweet to see those images.
I have a reel of 16mm home movie film from around 1946 from a friend's attic; the people in it are probably relatives of her late husband, but she has no contact info. I wonder what the best way is of tracking down people in movies? The children in the movie would be getting old, but they could still be alive.
Old candid movies are neat. They provide a glimpse into another era.
Actually for a brief moment you can see a “horseless carriage” in the very first sequence maneuvering between the wagons.
Other things come to mind—notice how many people are walking, unlike our modern times where most people are moving by car. The scenes are just packed with people. Gives you a whole different feeling for what living in an urban area then must have been like.
Also fascinating is the scene where you can see a train complete with steam locomotive moving on an elevated rail system. It must have been much noisier than we probably think of those times as being. (And smellier, as you’ve pointed out.)
Finally, watching the people closely is fun. The one who cracks me up the most is the young man with big moustache who starts clowning for the camera. And watch the little boy on the bridge doing the same thing.
Here’s a similar thing from almost the same time period: riding on a streetcar in Berkeley in 1906. If you watch this one closely, you will see they had wackos in Berkeley even back then:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BK9CekGF3Ho
Wonder what the story behind all that was?!? Bonus points if you recognize where in Berkeley the streetcar is (the road still looks like that, except without the streetcars of course).