Meet the family who let the 20th century pass them by

IN the summer of 1969, Newhaven filmmaker Philip Trevelyan made a 65-minute documentary film about “a Sussex family who hid in a forest”.

The Moon & The Sledgehammer became a cult hit, consisting of interviews with the Pages, the elderly Mr Page, a former aircraft engineer known as “Oily”, and his four grown-up children, and footage of them as they went about their lives in near isolation in their six acres of woodland at Swanbrook, near Chiddingly.

Mr Trevelyan, the son of artist and poet Julian Trevelyan and potter Ursula Mommens, a great-grand-daughter of Charles Darwin, grew up in South Heighton, near Newhaven, and his first contact with the family was through Jim, one of the Page sons, who worked in an engineering shop in the village.

It took a year for Trevelyan and producer James Vaughan to complete the film, which will be screened in Brighton on Saturday. Shot on location in East Sussex using natural light, it documents how the family lets the 20th century slowly pass them by as they live in a ramshackle house without mod cons such as running water or electricity.

The two daughters, Nancy and Kathy, busy themselves with the more 'traditional' roles of gardening and embroidery, and playing the harmonium, as well as looking after the men. Mr Page and his two adult sons Peter and Jim earn a living doing casual repairs on tractors and farm machinery and, dressed in “suits caked with dirt and grease”, the men “tinker, hammer and braze” machines ranging from steam engines to a boat in their own forge.

The wood is “littered with rusty iron carcasses, parts of old engines, disembowelled car bodies, a pile of giant spanners” and it is where the men drive their steam traction engines thunderously and to no apparent purpose.

“My first impression of the family was that they were eccentric, intelligent and very interesting,” Mr Trevelyan told The Argus. “I was impressed by their enjoyment of life, the way in which they lived their lives on their own terms, the way they made the things in the wood despite the fact that the machinery was out in the open.”

Part of a once-thriving self-supporting rural community whose lifestyle became unsustainable when the government changed land policies after the war, the Page family has a strong resistance to the 20th century, believing that work is no longer done properly.

Mr Trevelyan comes to the view that the family has an almost child-like joy in living and working, saying, “The more we stop doing things for ourselves, the more lifeless we become. There’s terrific life expressed by the family in that film – gaiety, innocence and openness.”

In the film, made as the world was about to send people to the moon, we see one son describing how he has observed the moon through a homemade telescope. We hear Mr Page expressing his concern about the problem of feeding the population and the quality of food, and as the film progresses, it becomes clear that there are some tensions within the family despite their apparently idyllic lifestyle.

Their eccentric beliefs and philosophies, including the view that steam power will come back, are eerily prescient of today’s concerns about global warming, and the film is described as leaving viewers with “much to reflect on”.

“It is actually quite a good reflection of the current state of things, even though this film was made nearly 50 years ago,” said Mr Trevelyan. “I was young when I made the film and there are some things I would have done differently now. One of the problems was the lack of Mrs Page, who had died 10 years earlier. She wasn’t talked about in the film. And also the complexity of a family living so closely together, away from society.”

Nearly 50 years later, Vaughan Films has released a restored version of The Moon & The Sledgehammer on DVD, with colour grading supervised by Mr Trevelyan so “the dappled sunlight through the trees, the deep dark shadows, the intense colours of the peacock” are intensified. "The film has come alive again," he said.

The reworking has triggered a resurgence of interest in Mr Trevelyan’s work, led by the USA’s Harvard University. It is preparing to hold the first retrospective of his films, describing the director as “a legendary yet sorely unheralded filmmaker” who is “largely unappreciated, even in his native land”, and lauding his “rare sensitivity to the subtlest nuances of place and gesture”.

The Moon & The Sledgehammer also screened at America's leading documentary festival Art of the Real festival at the Lincoln Center in New York in April and will play at MoMA's Festival of Preservation in November.

There has also been renewed interest in his films in the UK, prompting the release of a new digital version of the film and a flurry of screenings around the country this year. The new version was premiered at a sellout screening during this year’s Brighton Festival, when Mr Trevelyan appeared in a Q&A session, and there will be an extra screening at the Duke of York’s cinema in Brighton on Saturday, when it will be shown alongside Lambing, his 1964 award-winning student film from the Royal College of Art and filmed at a farm in South Heighton.

Among his other works are The Ship Hotel, Tyne Maine, a documentary made in 1966 about a group of people who went every Sunday to drink and sing, and The Farmer’s Hunt, a 1968 BBC film about stag hunting on Exmoor. His last film, about Surrealism, was made in 1985, with commentary by George Melly.

Katy MacMillan, of Vaughan Films, said: “This new interest in Philip Trevelyan’s work is wonderful. And it is very very timely that The Moon & The Sledgehammer has become a hit today because it looks at matters that should have been looked at then, such as the quality of food and looking after the land.”

Mr Trevelyan said that he is “very pleased” in the new interest in his films, adding that he contacted the Page family again earlier this year when he came to Sussex for the screening of his film at the Brighton Festival.

The only surviving member of the Page family from the film is Nancy, who is now deaf and cared for by a neighbour, and he believes the house is now empty.

“There are still several other members of the Page family living in the area,” Mr Trevelyan said. “There were other younger sons, seen on the traction engine driven through Horsham at the end of the film, and a 90-year-old brother who is still driving traction engines.

“The Page family is much loved locally.”

Since 1974, Trevelyan and his second wife Amy have run a hill farm in North Yorkshire, when he temporarily put filmmaking aside to concentrate on organic sheep farming with Swaledale sheep. He is also the founder of Lazy Dog Tool Company, which designs innovative hand tools that remove toxic weeds without the use of pesticides, and in 2005 he founded specialist grain-milling project Yorkshire Organic Millers.

• To find out more about The Moon & The Sledgehammer, visit themoonandthesledgehammer.com. For more details about the screening of The Moon & The Sledgehammer (U) and Lambing at the Duke of York’s Picturehouse, Preston Circus, Brighton, at 3.30pm on Saturday, visit picturehouses.com.