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Like Phil, Newark is local to me. It is still very recognisable today from this film particularly the town centre which structurally has survived well and other than the shop fronts modernised has barely changed at all. Certainly survived far better than Nottingham centre. What is shown as the cattle market is now a car park but almost unchanged. The cattle market has moved down the road a little away from the centre. Obviously massively expanded with a huge industrial estate. Currently it’s suffering as several of the major shops in the town have closed.

A few years ago when I was the chair of the local history society we had a speaker who was a retired farmer from the area. He had a large collection of old films and this was one he showed. Nice to see it again.

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I can still see it.   I watched it earlier - does that make a difference as to why I can still see it?

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I still can't. You may be able to see it because your computer still has it in its cache.

 

We'll know when someone who hasn't viewed it previously tries to watch it for the first time.

 

I'm not getting paranoid just yet.

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I’ve just played it to my wife who found the commentary amusing. Country people seemed to be treated like an alien species. As she said, things have not changed that much over the years. One thing we don’t seem to have now is the old country characters. We’ve only got perhaps a couple left in our village and no one to follow on! They used to speak in an unintelligible dialect which was hard to follow. Now the local villages have become upmarket areas for professionals that work in Nottingham. I’ve known some that even commuted daily by train from Newark to London.

 

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Just opened it and can see it. I am using a proxy server.

 

"A film of market day in an old Nottinghamshire town. The roads are full of traffic, of country people bringing their cattle,
poultry, fruit and vegetables. Farmers show each other samples of grain; they crowd the cattle market. A market town is the
centre of the life of the surrounding countryside."

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Cheers Ben, just knew you'd put me right. Just watched a YT video on how to make Spam. Interesting it was. Wished I knew how to post video clips onto NS.

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I'd also just discovered the workaround which Letsavagoo has posted - looking at it via Youtube.

 

I think the problem is something to do with the fact that Notty Ash's original post was linking the video via Facebook, and even though I'm on FB I couldn't see it.

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Thats right Phil..............then cycled down to Balderton to deliver Mrs Petigrew's grocerys...........

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  • 1 year later...

I think I read somewhere that the film was designed as an introduction to England for American servicemen. Due to wartime censorship Newark was not mentioned by name, nor were the local factories which of course were dedicated to munitions production. Ransome & Marles was bombed by the Luftwaffe in March 1941.  National reporting restrictions hampered any direct reporting of where the bombs fell so the Newark Advertiser had to headline its story Raid on Buildings in North Midlands Town.

 

There is an interesting book called Newark in the Second World War published by Notts County Council and Newark & Sherwood D C in 1995.

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15 hours ago, Newarker said:

I think I read somewhere that the film was designed as an introduction to England for American servicemen.

According to this spiel about the film it was more likely a propaganda film about how well Britain was doing producing food. There is a film specifically aimed at US forces about how they should behave in Britain while they were here in WW2. Probably made by the military.

 

This promotional film bills the market town of Newark as central to the farming industry, with a seductive array of regional produce and livestock. It was sponsored by the British Council and intended for an international audience. Experienced nature director Mary Field had worked for Gaumont-British Instructional for years, and was drafted in to send a strong message about wartime agricultural production in the UK.

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