The Allotment Holder’s Enemies (1918) is a short film made to advertise The Smallholder, a magazine for allotment owners, providing exciting instruction on how to rid your garden of pests. It was made by Charles Urban, some of whose films I’ve looked at here before.
Alongside slightly strident title cards like the one above, The Allotment Holder’s Enemies contains five minutes of surprisingly lovely and vivid footage of various kinds of fairly benign British garden wildlife, all of which are probably far less benign if they’re about to eat the last cabbage in the country. But it’s still quite amusing to see such ferocious disgust at, well, sparrows.
Poor sparrows.
(Incidentally, that reminds me of this beautiful old bestiary description of bees, which is, and shall always be, one of my very favourite things.)
Anyway, these most destructive birds are then presented to the viewer with some footage (see image immediately below) that doesn’t exactly do much to illustrate the dire biblical plague that obviously at the time they represented.
Just terrifying.
So to calm you down, here are some lovely pictures of snails, caterpillars, grubs.
Although even caterpillars can be quite ferocious.
“Especially to ladies.”
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Notes
1. I watched this on the BFI Player
2. And gleaned, as usual, most of my information from there.
3. A sequel/companion to this, The Allotment Holder’s Friends, was made at the same time.
4. But unfortunately, except for mention of its title in various online catalogues, can find no evidence of its existence.
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Film Information
Title: The Allotment Holder’s Enemies
Director: Charles Urban
Year: 1918
Duration: 5 minutes
Watch: BFI Player
