The Mendip Cave Registry and Archive (MCRA), in conjunction with Wells and Mendip Museum, holds an ever-growing collection of historical films of interest to cavers.

A select number of these films, with more being added all the time, has now been made available to a much wider audience via You Tube.  Dating from the 1930’s to the 2000’s, the films cover caving, diving, early cave rescue techniques and the popular Mendip sport of cave digging.

Some of the highlights of the archive include the University of Bristol Speleological Society at camp in 1933, early scenes of descending Lamb Leer in 1937, and Swildon’s Hole captured in colour in 1964.

In today’s world of super-bright LED lighting and 4K cameras its worth a pause for thought as to just how hard many of the early caving film makers had to work to achieve the results they got.

Twenty four films are available already, so head over to the MCRA’s You Tube channel and please take a second of your time to click the subscribe button so that you can be kept up to date with new videos as they are added to the archive.

Caver Jonathan Williams who has worked on this along with Maurice Hewins and Alan Gray says: “We would really like to get some publicity for the channel, firstly so people can actually see some of the collection, and secondly so we can achieve 100 YouTube subscribers which unlocks a number of extra features on our channel.” So please, do click to subscribe, and do pass this link around you friends and club so we can help the MCRA get maximum publicity for this!

We thought we’d bring you one example:

The full film archive can be found here on You Tube. Just remember to click the subscribe button while you’re there.

Correspondent: Jonathan Williams