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9.5MM GEAR

I have said somewhere on this site that 9.5 was a "gear" hobby; that is to say, Pathé and others made available huge amounts of stuff for you to spend tour money on piecemeal as your pocket money mounted up or your wages came in. Colourful packaging was used to tempt the unwary. It is now time to demonstrate the truth of my assertion. This is just part of it; I bet there's a lot more out there I don't got. Trouble is, much of it was designedly ephemeral, and survival in good condition is less frequent than one would hope.

  This is a Baby with quite a few of the bits you could buy. Motor, super reel attachment, rewind attachment, enlarger lens. To this must be added unseen items like various lamps and a special condenser lens, and other stuff I don't got (all offers gratefully received) like tilting attachment, slide copying thing, dynamo, colour wheel - was there more? On the right are various projector mats. (The lenses are for a Coronet - forgot to put them in the right picture). The rubber ones tend to harden, discolour or warp, but the card ones (for Lux as well as Baby) seem to do better. Why so many types? So you spend more money! And none of this covers the extensive range of variations in the design of the machine itself, and the cartouches on the side of the mech housing.

Here is a variety of packagings and bits. Notable features are three different models of notcher, an early wooden-based splicer (I am told there was an even earlier all-wood one) and the incredibly deceptive rainbow packaging for B&W film.

As Paul van Someren notes in his History of 9.5mm, there were far too many types of film charger and other loading systems. I've never been big into cameras, so these are just odd bits I have accumulated over the years.

All of these cameras came in cases, usually of that same stuff they made suitcases out of - shoddy by name and shoddy by nature - which gets hard and inflexible with age. Mostly the cases I have aren't fit to be seen, but I have included one because it's unusual in being a "solid" box rather than mock leather. I just love the Prince camera - it's the only one I have ever used (strictly family home movie stuff) and one of these two I actually won at a raffle at a 9.5 do somewhere in about 1970. I love this kind of colouring and styling - how they came to pair it with the bizarre - but not unattractive - Princess is a mystery.

Finally a few camera bits - a circular exposure guide, a much more elaborate squarer thing called, with no knowledge of the different meaning poser has today, the Posagraph, a set of portrait/close-up lenses and the variety of different spools (including one from Film Office) your films might come back on after processing. Got a lot of so-so spools of the 60ft-ish size if anyone has a use. The Kodak oiler is there to prove 16mm did gear, too.

There's no doubt a lot more of this stuff, eg the Lido, Rio and Webo cameras, so I defy anyone to say 9.5 (and no doubt other gauges, too) was not a "gear" hobby. For more proof, see under Pathé Catlogs.

Most of the lamp boxes below are David Richardson's. My version of the early 1:1 rewinder is not in such good condition. There are there other versions of the notching device that I have seen - why on earth did they make so many versions of the same thing? The penultimate pic pic is a thing I have not come across before - I believe it puts the clips into the centre of Baby cassettes to hold the film - see final pic.

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