H.J. Ayliffe

H.J. Ayliffe (b. Bath, Somerset, 10/10/1882 - d. Germiston, 27/12/1949) was a cinematographer.

Biography

Herbert (Bert) John (Jack) Ayliffe was one of thirteen children of William Ayliffe and his wife, Annie Williams. Like all his siblings, he was born in Bath where, at the time, his father was a domestic steward. At the age of 17 he was an engineer in the Royal Navy, but by 1911 he was a “bioscope operator” in Castlereagh in Ireland. Three years later he was with the Weisker Brothers in Belfast and supervised the filming of the launch of the Britannic in February 1914 for them. When he resigned from the local branch of the Freemasons in 1915, his profession was given as electrical engineer. The trade journal The Bioscope reported that he was going to join his brother (probably William Henry Ayliffe) to farm in South Africa, though it has also been suggested that a contributing reason was the state of his wife’s health. In any case, the couple came to South Africa in 1915.

He soon joined African Film Productions as a cameraman and was one of the cinematographers who filmed the military campaign in German East Africa. In addition he worked on Harold M. Shaw’s De Voortrekkers (1916) and was a regular contributor to the African Mirror newsreel. From December 1920 he spent some three months on the Kerguelen Islands in the southern Indian Ocean to produce The Roaring Forties, filming the hunting of seal elephants. Some of this footage is said to have been used later in Cherry Kearton’s film on Dassen Island (1930). In May 1921, Ayliffe was in the Eastern Cape at the time of what became known as the Bulhoek Massacre. The footage he shot was going to be used by African Mirror, but in the event AFP was prevented from doing so. The segment, "Defiant Natives: Israelites at Bulhoek", was debated in Parliament and it was decided that not only should it be banned, but that all copies should be destroyed. One copy survived long enough to be used in the subsequent trial, but it is not known what happened to it afterwards.

In 1922, Joseph Albrecht and Ayliffe travelled to Portuguese East Africa for location work on The Reef of Stars (1923), the film based on a novel by H. De Vere Stacpoole, which was directed by Albrecht. After that he spent nearly six months in East Africa, obtaining material for the series The Great African Rift in areas such as the Rwenzori Mountains (better known as the Mountains of the Moon). It included a programme on the cave dwellers of Mount Elgon, which he described in an article written for The Wide World Magazine (1926). There are no specific credits for him after that, though it is generally assumed that he continued to work on travel and industrial shorts for AFP. It is thought that he married his wife, Margaret, while he was in Ireland and the couple had a daughter shortly after they came to South Africa. His wife died in 1921 and when he died on 27 December 1949, his death certificate stated that he was a special representative for African Films. (FO)

(Note: One source identifies the cameraman who shot the Bulhoek Massacre as F. Ayliffe, but it seems unlikely that African Film Productions would have employed two cameramen with the same surname at precisely this time.) (FO)

Sources

South African Pictorial, 4 June 1921

The Cinema, 22 March 1923

South African Pictorial, 27 December 1924

Green, Lawrence – Almost forgotten, never told (1965)

Gutsche, Thelma - The history and social significance of motion pictures in South Africa 1895-1940

Le Roux, André I. & Fourie, Lilla – Filmverlede: geskiedenis van die Suid-Afrikaanse speelfilm

Makobe, D.H. - Understanding the Bulhoek Massacre: voices after the massacre and down the years (Scientia Militaria, South African Journal of Military Studies, Vol. 26, Nr. 2, 1996)

Parsons, Neil - Black and white bioscope: making movies in Africa 1899 to 1925

National Archives of South Africa

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