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up to make 20-minute fillers for the newsreel programs. The quality of the film
impressed him, and he wanted to take the matter further.
With the backing of the Film Group and the cooperation (and, one suspects,
bemusement) of Gerry Tayler, Morris set about reconstructing the best complete copy
of the feature he could piece together from the surviving cut down segments. In order to
make new prints, a negative had to be struck, and this was initially bankrolled by the
Film Group – until the project attracted sufficient interest in the press for the National
Library to be persuaded (Morris says “shamed”!) to back it. Today The Kid Stakes is a
classic, recognised as one of Australia’s best silent features, and John Morris’s
reconstruction has never been improved on.

Morris went on to a diverse and
impressive career as a film producer
and executive, running the South
Australian Film Corporation in its
1970s heyday, and finally heading the
Australian Film Finance Corporation
until his recent retirement. In late
1999, a new cinema complex in
Sydney was opened with a screening
of The Kid Stakes supported by a live
orchestral accompaniment. On that
occasion, when John Morris stood up
and “took a bow”, his pioneering work
as a film restorer was publicly
recognised for the first time, nearly 50 years after the event.

National Films’ story has other strands. When Gerry Tayler died and the company
folded, his widow Dorothy inherited its stock in trade of nitrate film, which was relocated
out of the Pitt Street premises – no doubt to the landlord’s relief – to wherever it would
fit in her house. Dorothy spent her twilight years carefully repairing, recanning and
disposing of this inventory. Much of it came to us at the National Library, and in the
1960s I became a regular visitor to her small weatherboard home in one of Sydney’s
seaside suburbs. She had constructed a rudimentary examination bench, using a few
old LP records as winding plates, and she checked and identified material before putting
it into newly painted cans (she did the painting herself – it lengthened the life of the
can). On each visit I collected a consignment of film to take back to Canberra in my car,
and the “Tayler Collection” steadily grew.

Among the inventory was a set of dupe negatives and prints of the Mutual Chaplins,
mentioned above, which Dorothy offered to us. With a heavy but very rational heart, I
had to reject the offer on the grounds that we did not then have the means or manpower
to look after them, and that logically they should be offered to an American archive. I
facilitated a contact with the American Film Institute to whom they were ultimately sent.
According to the AFI at the time, they turned out to be the best surviving negatives of
the Chaplin Mutuals.

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