The rhythms and rituals of rural life have seldom been conspicuous in British cinema. But in this feature from our August 2010 issue, Rob Young looks back to feature films of the 1960s and 70s, and to documentaries across the decades, and finds that traces of the ‘old, weird Britain’ can still be unearthed.
Fifty years after the release of his debut feature, the kitchen-sink classic A Kind of Loving, we plot a course through the career of John Schlesinger, the Oscar-winning British director of Billy Liar and Midnight Cowboy.
THE lavish contents of one of Britain s most beautiful stately homes are being auctioned off in a £1m everything-must-go sale run by a Dorchester auction house. Wormington Grange has been owned since the 1970s by John Evetts, the grandson of Lord Ismay, Winston Churchill s chief military strategist during World War Two. Mr Evetts has sold the neoclassical Cotswolds mansion for a multi-million pounds sum as he is downsizing to a smaller property in the area. The sale features over 1,000 items ranging in value from £50 kitchen glasses to £100,000 works of art. Auctioneers Duke s of Dorchester say it features the most important collection of country house furniture to emerge on the market for decades.