Up for sale on eBay (not from me), a local 16mm documentary film by Bob Boote apparently titled “The Pacemakers”. The BFI reveals what it is…
“1969 – 1971. The Pacemakers was a series of twenty-six colour film programmes produced by the Central Office of Information. #18: Bob Boote, chairman of the European Conservation Committee and Deputy Director of the Nature Conservancy, discusses the measures taken to combat pollution in Stoke-on-Trent. Each programme was around thirteen minutes and often presented by the subject themselves, as with the pioneering conservationist Bob Boote.”
The BFI has a copy, so it’s not the only one. But for a tenner someone may want it. There may be potential for remaking as a new “before and after” film, if there are many on-site shots of the polluted landscapes without the presenter present. Showing first the ravaged landscape, and then the current restored landscape. That might make a nice student project at the university, potentially. Apparently the film was later edited and re-released in 1970 under the title Black Spot to Beauty Spot. So there may be later footage there.
Only snippets can be found for Boote, though the Telegraph has an obituary behind a paywall. But enough to assemble at least a partial outline of the man. Boote served in the Second World War, rising to the rank of Major and leaving the Army in 1948. He was appointed “principal of Nature Conservancy”, apparently since its formation in 1949. This body had responsibility for all British fauna and flora. By all accounts he was something of a ‘force of nature’ himself, and was very active and outspoken and seems to have had the ear of Prince Phillip. He was instrumental in setting up an early research project to determine the exact adverse effects of the over-use of pesticides. He was later the first director-general of the Nature Conservancy Council, at the time of Dutch elm disease and rabies. Forward thinking, he saw that most “air and water pollution could be eliminated in 10 or 15 years” given the will, along with new methods and new technologies. He seems to have seen Stoke as a tough test-bed for speedy land reclamation for nature, and he brought The Civic Trust conference to Stoke-on-Trent in April 1970, “which took as its theme ‘Derelict land'”. The Garden Festival site later bore out his theories magnificently.
As “Robert Arvill” he penned the 1967 Penguin/Pelican mass-market paperback Man and Environment, which set out his ideas on conservation and restoration.
It appears he was from Stoke himself, though I can’t discover which town he grew up in. A New York Times profile had…
Robert Edward Boote was born on Feb. 6 1920 in Stoke-on-Trent
The New York Times ($ paywall) has a snippet which reveals he attended school at Hanley High School, Stoke-on-Trent.
All this suggests that the remaking of the above as a new “before and after” film might also be extended into being a bit of a film biography of a pioneering British conservationist.