Hepworth Company Employees
This page contains some details of the employees of the Hepworth Film Company.
If you are related to any of these people please contact us to fill in the gaps!
Walter George Thomas Summers was born into a theatrical family in Barnstable, Devon on 2 September 1896. He gained considerable stage experience before joining the London Films Company in 1912 as an assistant to George Loane Tucker. The First World War temporarily put his film career on hold, but on leaving the Army as a captain awarded the Military Cross and the Distinguished Service Medal, Summers was employed by Cecil Hepworth. Disliking the novelettish type of subjects the company made, he left and, after further service with the Territorial Unit in India in 1920, joined GB Samuelson as a scriptwriter. More from Screenonline.
George McLeod Baynes
George McLeod Baynes (c.1869-?) was a Canadian, who served in the British army
as a captain before joining Cecil Hepworth in 1914 as sales manager. He went to
America independently in 1916 and met
Charles Urban at a time when the latter was struggling to place Britain
Prepared and other British war films on the American market. Baynes
concocted some lively publicity (too lively for the tastes of Urban's British
Foreign Office controllers), then engineered the formation of Official
Government Pictures at the end of 1916, with money from William K. Vanderbilt,
and with Urban masterminded the successful distribution of British war films
throughout America in 1917-1918. After the war Baynes and Urban formed the
newsreel Kinograms, which Baynes then controlled until its demise in the
early 1930s.
Geoffrey Faithfull
Geoffrey Faithfull (b.28 Jan 1893-1979) was, as his name suggests, a long-serving cameraman for the Hepworth studios. One of his early accomplishments was the first filming of "Alice in Wonderland" in 1903.
Stanley Faithfull
Stanley Faithfull, brother of Geoffrey, was also a cameraman and film technician. According to Chrissie White, the brothers were both accomplished swimmers and often had a dip in the River Thames locally.
