Silents are Golden: Jessica Borthwick, A Forgotten Front Lines Filmmaker

Jessica Borthwick, A Forgotten Front Lines Filmmaker

We’re all familiar with the adventurous silent era cameramen who coolly took their equipment into dangerous situations, whether by trekking Arctic tundras or crossing broiling deserts. The excitement of capturing actual life led many to take greater and greater risks to find the most fascinating footage. Soon the most intrepid filmmakers were even tramping the front lines of war. One of the most surprising personalities who risked life and limb to capture battlefield footage was Jessica Borthwick, who decided to film the Second Balkan War at the young age of twenty-two–after only three days of learning to use a motion picture camera.

Likely the first woman to ever capture war footage, Borthwick’s family connections made the venture possible. Her father was General George Colville Borthwick, a high-ranking officer in the Turkish army in Eastern Rumelia, now part of southern Bulgaria. Thanks to him she was allowed to spend a year traveling with the Bulgarian army, armed with both a revolver and a remarkable self-reliance.

The Second Balkan War had broken out in the summer of 1913 when tensions between the Bulgarians, Serbs and Greeks came to a head. Considering her lack of experience with both location filming and filming in general, we might wonder why Bothwick decided to turn war photographer. She later explained it was partly due to “curiosity pure and simple,” and partly due to her deep interest in the welfare of the Balkans, considering how well known her father was in the area. In fact, she would discover that everywhere she traveled in Bulgaria she would be admired as “General Borthwick’s daughter”–a big help during several tough situations.

Her only equipment during the adventure was one small plate camera for taking still photos and one motion picture camera designed for her by Arthur Newman. Newman and his business partner James A. Sinclair were known for their lightweight, reliable cameras, one of which was the Aeroscope favored by many explorers. Although lacking an assistant, a proper dark room, an instruction manual, or even decent tools to fix the camera when it inevitably needed repairs, Borthwick managed to keep it cranking for the full twelve months.

Described as a slender, youthful-looking gal whose voice was “deep and like a resonant organ note,” Borthwick was apparently gifted with nerves of steel. She described the difficulty of trying to set up her tripod at the various scenes of action, where the action was usually over by the time she started cranking. While in Macedonia her tripod was smashed by a shell–luckily both the camera and Borthwick survived intact. While on the battlefields, she would sometimes salvage working cameras from the dead bodies of officers, “but most of these I lost again.”

She would also recall witnessing a bad breakout of cholera in Adrianople, Turkey, where the carts used to haul away cholera victims and the coffins used to bury them were all painted black. This lead to a grim experience when a number of citizens noticed Borthwick’s black box camera and assumed it was some unusual new technology for fighting cholera: “Quickly surrounding me, they came and knelt upon the ground, kissing my feet and clothing, and begging with dreadful pathos that I should cure them. It was a task as sad as it was difficult to explain that their hopes were mistaken, and that I was impotent to help them.”

Adrianople was also the scene of a more darkly amusing event. After losing one of the screws from her tripod, Borthwick attempted to explain to a Turkish officer that she needed a new one. Seeming to understand her gestures, he hailed a taxi and they drove together across the city to…a nearby prison. “However,” Borthwick recalled, “I turned the misconception to advantage by securing some excellent snapshots and having some very interesting talks with the prisoners. One convict–a German of considerable education–invited me to go and see him hanged the next morning, and gave me a souvenir.”

Another story not only dealt with a language barrier, but the awkwardness of dealing with camera issues at the time when many rural areas had never seen one in use. While in a small village in the Rhodope mountains of southern Bulgaria, Borthwick’s camera broke and she needed to scramble to create a makeshift dark room so she could open it up without ruining the film. Coming upon a man making rugs out of sheeps’ wool, she managed to convince him to cover her with the rugs and in that “unusual and very stuffy ‘dark room’” was able to save the film–no doubt to the man’s utter confusion.

Following her year abroad, Borthwick returned to her home in England with her stockpile of footage, although some of it was unfortunately ruined by Bulgarian customs authorities. She gave an illustrated lecture series on the Balkan War in London, although it was less successful than she hoped and she was sued by her projectionist for a lack of wages. Undaunted, she then headed to Spitsbergen, Norway where she farmed reindeer and hunted seals, hoping one day to start a colony “for the cure of consumption and other diseases.”

World War I interrupted these dreams, and she would volunteer the use of her steam yacht the Grace Darling to deliver Red Cross supplies and help refugees escape out of Ostend, Belgium. She then worked as an ambulance driver in Belgium, eventually being recognized as an honorary corporal for her efforts. During the last half of the war, she saw a gap in the toy market thanks to the lack of German imports and started a doll manufacturing business.

Borthwick would spend her later years living with her mother among the “artsy” set in South Kensington, known for her sculpting and fondness for pipe smoking. She would arrange concerts of Russian traditional music and went through a period of promoting herself as a psychologist. Unfortunately, none of the Balkan War footage she risked so much to obtain survives today. She would pass away in 1946 of accidental gas poisoning, a tragic end to a most unusual and adventurous life.

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Quotes source: “A Girl Cinematographer at the Balkan War: An Interview With Miss Jessica Borthwick.” The Bioscope, May 7, 1914, pages 625 and 627.

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–Lea Stans for Classic Movie Hub

You can read all of Lea’s Silents are Golden articles here.

Lea Stans is a born-and-raised Minnesotan with a degree in English and an obsessive interest in the silent film era (which she largely blames on Buster Keaton). In addition to blogging about her passion at her site Silent-ology, she is a columnist for the Silent Film Quarterly and has also written for The Keaton Chronicle.