The documentary movement in the ‘30s was a very progressive movement. They showed up terrible living conditions. The first film I made was about delinquent children in Scotland called Children of the City, and I had never seen slums like that. In Dundee we filmed in a large tenement building ten floors high, and there was one lavatory on each floor, and about four or five families lived on each floor, and one tap — one cold tap – I could see on the... on the landing, on the balcony outside. And the stink of the lavatory was terrible, and the people were very, very poor, a lot of unemployment. The children were of course not delinquent children but chosen for their acting capability. It was the first film for Budge Cooper who was one of Rotha’s people and married to Donald Alexander later on, who headed our cooperative when they split up from Rotha. And she was very anxious, and I didn’t have much experience. It was my first film as a proper cameraman, but I didn’t know the grammar of film, and she was worried when somebody goes around the corner, which way should they look and so on, and had to phone Donald Alexander in London to find out how it’s done. But it turned out well, and it’s still at recent — not so recent — some years ago I had an exhibition in Edinburgh of photographs, and it happens that they could curtain off part of the hall where it was... where the exhibition was placed, and they showed this film there. It was very well attended, the exhibition, because it was on the way to a very popular cafeteria this museum... this gallery had. It was the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. So they had to walk through my exhibition to go to the... to the cafeteria, and a lot of people working around the museum were very interested to have a look at it before lunch or after.

Anyway, after the opening of the exhibition when they had shown the film and the photographs, three women came up to me and said... well, one of them said: ‘I was the wife of one of these boys you showed in the film, and these are his two daughters’. And she had a photograph I had given the boy at the end of the film, or sent it to him, of just his portrait, so I was very glad to meet them, and the boy wasn’t alive anymore, unfortunately, and sent them more prints to give to relatives. It’s nice if something like that happens after so many years. On the Charing Cross Road series, I photographed a knife grinder, and many years later I had a letter from America that she had seen my little book on Charing Cross Road, and the man pictured as the knife grinder was her father, could I send her a print, which of course I did. He had an Italian name, or she had an Italian name. She may be married to an Italian, I don’t know. Well, it’s nice if things like that happen, and I often meet people who say: Oh, you photographed me when I was a child’. That is nice if you get old if you find you have some connection with people in the past.