News on Screen

Adam Prentice was a sound engineer who in about 1936 featured in a Gaumont British publicity photograph, with his sound equipment set up next to a camera car. Prentice was listed as working for Gaumont British in 1938 and 1939, and in August 1941 he went to Iceland on board a battleship with cameraman Eddie Edmonds [qv] to film ‘MR CHURCHILL RETURNS FROM MEETING MR ROOSEVELT’ for Gaumont British News No.797. Prentice aftewards became a war cameraman for the Gaumont British News, and from 1942 was attached to the RAF and Navy in England, North West Europe and the Far East. In September 1944 Prentice filmed the new RAF fighter the ‘Tempest’ on operational duty in Holland. By the end of 1945 he was once again listed as a sound engineer with Gaumont British News, but in March 1947 he was one of Gaumont’s cameramen for ‘ENGLAND V SCOTLAND RUGBY’ in Gaumont British News No.1378, and in October 1947 he turned out again to film silent inserts for ‘RUGBY - AUSTRALIAN WIN AGAINST THE SERVICES’ in No.1435. Prentice may afterwards have worked for the BBC Television Newsreel, for Ronnie Noble [qv] recalled working with him in February 1953, filming the East Coast floods.

Sources

BUFVC, British Paramount News files, Number 1094 (rota shotlists, 16/8/1941), Number 1426 (A. S. Prentice rota shotlist, September/October 1944), Number 1675 (Prentice rota dopesheet, 15/3/1947), Number 1732 (Prentice rota dopesheet, 1/10/1947): Kine Year Book 1946 (1945), p.275: NFTVA photograph: R. Noble ‘Shoot First!: Assignments of a newsreel cameraman’ (London, 1955), p.265: J. Ballantyne (ed) ‘Researcher’s Guide to British Newsreels’ (BUFVC, 1983), p.89.