I went to visit Derrick Knight and his wife Brenda at their home in Banbury on a showery Friday afternoon. Although I’d brought along various questions about Derrick’s background and his work on Travelling for a Living, most of them weren’t necessary in the end; we retreated to his attic hideaway for an hour, and the stories came tumbling out. As I was leaving, Brenda joked ‘you’ll have to come for the weekend next time.’ And it’s true, filmmakers like Derrick Knight are an amazing living resource on how non-fiction film has changed over the years. Now getting into his 80s, this man’s CV includes the government’s first ever anti-smoking film, a pivotal role in filming the Aldermaston march 50 years ago, humanitarian films made in the Phillipines, Africa and South America... another project for the future.

A bit of background first. Knight was running his own independent production company in Soho in 1965, at a time when it was a real struggle for independents to get work out of the BBC. Hull-based singing group the Watersons were in their first incarnation - siblings Norma, Mike and Elaine, or Lal, and their cousin John Harrison – and just starting to attract a national reputation on the folk scene.

Left to right: John Harrison, and Mike, Norma and Lal Waterson

An introduction to folk music
“Philip Donnellan is responsible for my getting into folk music. [Documentary maker based at the BBC in Birmingham for many years. See also: the 7inch Landmarks project.] One time he rang up and said we’re going off to Hull, do you want to come along? I met Henry Bloggs who was the coxon of a rescue up on Flamburgh Head, and spent a wonderful day with them recording up there while these old boys sang and ranted and told stories of accidents at sea. This was one of the key things that made me excited about the idea of using folk music in film... Later Philip introduced me to the sessions at the Princess Louise pub in Soho where there was a kind of hootenanny every weekend with the principal folk singers of the time – Ewan [MacColl] and Bob Davenport, Bert Lloyd, plus anyone who happened to come in. I’d got very much into this – and then Bob Davenport took me down to the Troubadour in Chelsea one night.”

Meeting the Watersons
“I had made a film about the music scene in Harlow which was very well received [Pied Pipers of Harlow], and Humphrey Burton [the BBC’s Head of Music and Arts] was quite ready to discuss a film about the revival British folk scene. But I didn’t know how I was going to do it. It was at that point that I went to the Troub and the Watersons were doing a set down there, and I thought they were quite extraordinary. I got talking with their agent, and got talking with Norma, and it became more extraordinary as it went along. I went up to Hull and spent a lot of time with them and the whole thing came alive. I decided that these lot were absolutely ideal; they were talkative, they were coherent, they were serious, they were humble. And they didn’t bother about the camera, they weren’t showing off. They weren’t the kind of folk singers that stand in the middle of the hall and hold everybody together, you know, like a theatrical act. They would be perfect in a documentary if they could be captured.”

Norma Waterson

Getting it on film
“...And Humphrey said yes OK, and gave us some money, paid for the film stock, paid for the lab costs, only about two-thirds of the cost. We had to make this film under immense pressure. All the films I made were made under pressure; when you talk about documentaries today it’s tens of thousands of feet of digital stuff being rolled into the editing room. We had to work on a ratio of 3 or 4:1, and in very little time – I think we made the Watersons in ten days of shooting. We were losing money visibly but I wanted to build up the arts side of our business... I was not only very lucky but I was extremely choosy about putting together a team, there had to be the best possible person at a price I could afford. We grew up with a team of cameramen and editors who worked through the 60s on these different films, taking the learning from one film onto the next. It was the time when new 16mm cameras with live sound had come in and we learnt how to use them well... You had no rehearsals whatsoever, you just went and did it – and that depends on a really good cameraman and a really good sound man doing things that they wouldn’t ordinarily contemplate.“

A night at the Blue Bell in Hull
“I’d sent for a second team from London just for that one night, and it was bitterly cold and they’d come up by truck. They arrived at 6 o clock at, and the camera didn’t have time to warm up – so it steamed up, and we lost the first half of the programme and had to do it on one camera. The second camera never really caught up and paid its way. You can see parts where you’re missing the action because the camera is in the wrong place. That killed off the Louis Killen piece as well, which needed more in terms of close-up.”

Living with the Watersons
“They were very happy to have us around. We were a very small crew – not even a sound assistant or an assistant director. We arrived in the morning in their place to find the sink full of teacups, because they lived on tea, and every ashtray in the house was full of ash and stubs, because they all smoked like chimneys. While stirring them up we’d do the housework, before even starting to think about shooting anything. In all it was probably 4 to 5 days filming in Hull, then the short sequences in London. I reckon that if I hadn’t had an editing background, we could never have done it. I wince about some parts, like the artificiality of Louis Killen’s arrival – although it turned out to be a very significant moment that little discussion in the kitchen. It was just something that Mike threw in really, and it turned out to say a lot about the folk scene although it wasn’t planned that way.”

Youtube clip from Travelling for a Living

Mike Waterson: “We can sing to ourselves, and there’s so much enjoyment there, amongst ourselves, that the audience catches onto this...”

Norma Waterson: “That’s the point – to bring the audience in to you instead of projecting your particular personality out to the audience”


John Harrison, the fourth Waterson
“His background was totally different – he was almost middle-class, trained as an accountant or something, and I thought this was an element that can’t be left out... He was the only who could read music, and he was able to transpose some of the music they found. The Watersons loved some of these songs but didn’t know how to transpose them into their own idiom. And John was capbable of doing this and guiding them in so that then they could use their creative intelligence on the particular harmonies. Although he was taken in to play the squeezebox, he also found that he had a voice, and his voice actually adds an important baritone element to the pieces. He broke away eventually. When I brought the video out a few years ago I got in touch and he was building guitars in Kent.”

Norma Waterson and Martin Carthy today
“They’re very modest about their gigs – they don’t insist on having big high spots, although they’re not afraid of somewhere like the Albert Hall. They’ll do modest gigs; it’s a kind of religious thing, spreading the word and making people love the music.”


7 Inch Cinema will be showing Travelling for a Living, with an introduction by Derrick Knight, at the Hare and Hounds in Kings Heath on Sunday 18 May 2008.

Interview © 7 Inch Cinema.