Barrie's Freedom of Kirriemuir speech extracts

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On 7 June 1930, Barrie was awarded the Freedom of Kirriemuir, his old home town in Scotland. On hand to record excerpts were both Pathe and Movietone newsreels with their early recording equipment, playback systems having only been installed in most British cinemas the previous year.

I found these recordings in the National Film Archives in 1976, and had 16mm copies made, from which these videos are taken. My main reason at the time was to show them to Nico, who had never seen or heard "Uncle Jim" since the day he died in 1937.

I took the film along with a sound projector and screen to his house in Kent, and showed them to him and his wife Mary. Unsurprisingly, it reduced him to tears.