Edited and titled amateur film showing episodes in the life of the Royal Horse Guards at the beginning of the war and their transportation to Palestine, February 1940.

This film is again part colour and part black and white. There are colour shots of exercises at Warminster in the winter of 1939/40. These feature cavalrymen in full battle dress during a mission in a large open park. This is shot to demonstrate bad tactics - sabres glinting in sunlight and men outlined against a horizon giving their position away - but comes over as good photography. The next sequence features the transportation of the regiment, 9 to 22 February, from Newark (Nottinghamshire) to Tullkarm (near Haifa). There are shots of horses on a train passing through Oxford and Banbury, at winter stables in the snow, on board a ship somewhere in the Mediterranean. In Palestine there are colour shots of the camp in the desert and an army motor convoy passing through the hills. There are street scenes in Jerusalem and at the Dead Sea. There are shots of a horse display before an Arab audience. The other two reels appear to be off cuts from this material.

Notes

Documentation/associated material: see the Legge Bourke folder for detailed notes and a copy of an article about the transportation of the horses to the Holy Land in 1940.

Summary: reels three, five and seven of the Harry Legge Bourke collection.

Remarks: the material is a fascinating chronicle of this famous regiment in the early part of the war. Much of it however is very poorly shot and edited together. The colour is frequently of a high quality.