Tommy Crellin
(b. Hammersmith, London 20/01/1883 – d. Port Elizabeth, 16/02/1949) British-born cameraman. There is a family story that, at the age of 16, Thomas Frank Crellin won a photographic competition in London’s Daily Mail. He made his first visit to Africa when, between July and September 1907, he accompanied Dom Luis Felipe, the Portuguese Crown Prince, on an extended tour of the country’s African colonies as “pictorial representative”. Towards the end of November the following year he arrived in South Africa as manager of the kinematograph department of Lennon Ltd., in charge of equipping cinemas and training projectionists. In September 1910 he was joined by his wife-to-be, Annie Punter, and early in October they were married at St. Paul’s Anglican Church in Durban. That same year he was part of a team of cameramen employed to photograph a unique documentary called From the Cape to the Zambezi for the South African Railways & Harbours. This film, which was partly shot from the front of a locomotive, was subsequently distributed by Lennon Ltd.
In 1912 Rufe Naylor’s Tivoli Theatres Company amalgamated with the Union Bioscope Company to form Africa’s Amalgamated Theatres. In order to attract customers to new cinemas such as the 1,500-seater Orpheum Theatre in central Johannesburg, AAT started screening “local scenes” shot all over the country, a precursor of the newsreel African Mirror, which was launched soon afterwards when AAT became part of the African Theatres Trust. In the early days Crellin, together with R.C.E. Nissen, was one of the key cameramen involved in providing “topical shorts”. Screening of the footage they shot of the strike at the New Kleinfontein mine on the East Rand was prohibited in Johannesburg, but extensive coverage was given to the second Johannesburg to Durban motorcycle race in 1914, primary because the African Theatre Trust’s I.W. Schlesinger was the President of the Rand Motor Cycling Club and would award the Schlesinger Vase to the winner. Thelma Gutsche also makes mention of Crellin’s “outstanding film” of the waterfalls of Natal.
In June 1914, Annie Crellin died and in January of 1915 her husband returned to London. It’s not certain what he did there, but in April 1923, when he was 40, he was in South Africa and married his second wife, Lilian McCarthy, at St. Mark’s Cathedral in George. Soon afterwards the couple returned to England and, travelling via North America, went to China, where by that time Crellin was the representative of Eastman Kodak, based in Shanghai (a number of his photographs taken there between 1923 and 1926 are available for viewing on the internet). Towards the end of 1926 he again passed through South Africa, but in 1927 he was back with Kodak in England. There is some evidence that during World War II he worked on aerial reconnaissance photography, but in May 1946 he came back to South Africa and eventually he joined his youngest son, Kenneth, in Port Elizabeth where he died in February 1949. (FO)
Sources
The Kinematograph & Lantern Weekly, 15 December 1910
The Kodak Magazine, July 1923
Gutsche, Thelma - The history and social significance of motion pictures in South Africa, 1895-1940
Return to
Return to ESAT Personalities C
Return to South African Personalities
Return to The ESAT Entries
Return to Main Page
