Boat Race Film
My first effort was to photograph the boat race-it must have been the one of 1898, I think-and I took the negative to Wrench's place in Gray's Inn Road to develop on a pin-frame. With the arrogance of youth and the experience of one fifty-foot film behind me, I then said that that was not the proper way to develop a continuous strip like a kinematograph film and that it ought to be developed continuously in a machine.

---

Kinematograph Weekly, jeudi 19 décembre 1946, p. 48.

My first job in connection with it was to film the Oxford and Cambridge boat-race of March, 1898, which I did from the top of a factory building giving a long view of the course and consequently a very distant view of the boats. 'Panoraming' the camera was first used a long time later. Then, according to instructions, I proceeded, as the policemen say, to Alfred Wrench's shop at 50, Gray's Inn Road (Lanterns and Accessories), and in the cellar there I developed the negative, using Wrench's primitive outfit. This consisted of a metal frame, carrying a number of upright pins on which the film could be wound spiral-wise-in the dark-room, of course-and subsequently immersed in the developer in a suitable dish and then rinsed and fixed in the same way. So I made my first film ever, and it was the only film of mine ever to be developed in this primitive manner. For with my usual egotism I enunciated the theory that that static method was not the proper way to process a continuous thing like a fifty-foot film. I said it ought to be passed continuously through troughs of the several chemicals in proper order by mechanical means.

---

HEPWORTH Cecil, Came the Dawn: Memories of a Film Pioneer, London, Phoenix House, 1951, p. 38-39.