News on Screen

Jack Wiggins joined the film industry in 1897 with the British Mutoscope and Biograph Company, apparently working both as a cameraman and in the darkrooms. By 1908 Wiggins was chief of photographic staff with Wrench Film Company, and he afterwards worked on the Warwick Bioscope Chronicle, which the Warwick Trading Company launched in 1910. This was the start of a long association with William Jeapes [qv]. When the Kine Cameraman’s Society was formed in December 1918, Wiggins was its first President, with Woods-Taylor [qv] as Secretary. After 1918 Wiggins worked for Barker Motion Photography, and then spent a long period with Jeapes at Topical Budget, where he was in charge of the darkrooms. Wiggins subsequently joined Jeapes’ Universal Talking News, which was launched in 1930, but by 1935 he was ‘works chief’ of Film Laboratories Limited, another of Jeapes’ creations. In September 1937 it was announced that Wiggins would be managing the processing of a new colour newsreel called the National News, after having ‘vacated after many years the Works Managership of Film Laboratories.' It was added that ‘his daughter, Miss Nellie Wiggins [qv - Helen Wiggins], will be in charge of the negative cutting.' The first issues of the National News appeared in October 1937, but production was almost immediately suspended, and the newsreel folded in February 1938 when its camera gear was put up for sale.

Sources

Kine Year Book 1920, p.19: Cine Technician, November 1935, p.68; October-November 1937, p.146, ‘Newsreel’; March-April 1938, p.220, ‘Newsreel’; September-October 1938, pp.76-7; May-June 1939, p.21; January-February 1952, pp.2-5: NFTVA, Luke McKernan’s biographical index of Topical Budget staff.