Super 8 Stories: The Last Milk Round

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Super 8 Stories: The Last Milk Round

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Details

Location

Newtownards

Year

1970s

Date

10 October 2004 (first transmission)

Length

04min 54sec

Audio

sound

Format

Super 8

colour

Source

BBC NI

Courtesy

BBC NI, Doubleband Films, George McMeekan

Rights Holder

Doubleband Films, George McMeekan

It is illegal to download, copy, print or otherwise utilise in any other form this material, without written consent from the copyright holder.

Description

The heart-rending story of the final day's work carried out by a Newtownards milkman before his retirement. We join him on his last round in his milk float with reminiscences from his two sons, George and James McMeekan, and show footage of the milk float being transported to its new home at the Ulster Transport Museum. This clip appeared in Series 2, Programme 2 of Super 8 Stories.

Notes

George McMeekan was a civil engineer at the time he was making amateur films, including his favourite, “The Last Pinta”. It was a film motivated by his father’s ill health and an attempt to capture him at work on his milk round before he was forced to retire. “I had started off in stills photography developing my own pictures and progressed into movie making in 1968. I was motivated by starting to have a family and I wanted to film them growing up and going on holidays”. George began using a Canon E60 Super 8 Sound camera and became a member of the North Down Movie Makers in 1972, a club he is still a member of today under its new guise of the Northern Ireland Camcorder Users Club having moved onto using video cameras himself in 1992. George’s memories of watching his movies on his projector include how, “everyone always liked to see themselves on the big screen, even though they said it was ‘a chore’ at the time of filming!” Unfortunately, George doesn’t often get the chance to view his movies today as he has no video or digital transfers of them and “the projector is broken with no one to fix it”. Looking back at his film-making days George reflects, “Unfortunately I did not take enough of the changes that happened around me but I did take a lot of footage of my family life. My three daughters got married and I had three cameras at each occasion! Then I had to try to edit them all together afterwards”. His fondest memories though are reserved for the film which was included in Super 8 Stories and which now resides in the Digital Film Archive. “My brother, James, and myself are very glad we made ‘The Last Pinta’ about our father, especially after it was shown on TV with such a warm response from our local community”.

Shot List

Milk float driving down Newtownards street and milkman handing out milk to residents on their doorsteps. Loading milk float onto the back of a lorry. Milkman visiting the retired milk float at the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum. Float sitting in a yard and Milkman returning home after day's work.

Credits

Narrator - Maire Jones; Camera - Michael Quinn; Sound - David Kilpatrick, Kevin McCarthy; Music Consultants - Jim Meredith, Ralph McLean; Production Accountant - Anne Hegarty; Production Assistant - Tammy Moore; Dubbing - One Zero Zero; Online Editor - Alan Perry; Researcher - Ronan Feely; Archivist - Evan Marshall; Assistant Producer - Jenny Waugh; Executive Producers - Deirdre Devlin, Michael Hewitt; Editor - Greg Darby; Producer - Diarmuid Lavery; Director - Brian Henry Martin

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