New film footage of Larne gun-running

By The Newsroom
Published 16th Aug 2015, 09:00 BST
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Remarkable new film footage has just been made available which shows Larne’s important role in the gun-running of April 1914.

Britain on Film is a new National Lottery-funded project from the British Film Institute that reveals hidden histories and forgotten stories of people and places from the UK’s key film and TV archives.

By 2017, thanks to National Lottery funding and the support of the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, 10,000 film and TV titles from 1895 to the present day will be digitised.

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The project has uncovered extraordinary footage of ordinary people at work and play in Northern Ireland, as well as a fascinating piece of political footage called ‘Machine Guns Ready: Sir Edward Carson watches machine gun drill and presents Colours at Drumalis, Larne 1914’.

The Larne gun-running was a major operation that took place on the night of April 24, 1914. In the footage viewers can see Ulster Volunteers demonstrate their freshly-smuggled bounty, one man proudly displaying a machine gun mounted in the back of a motorcar.