The story
Half a century on the dining bus
What is known, what is documented, and what is still being matched against the record — kept apart on purpose.
Every film you have ever watched was made by people who had to eat. On a location unit that is not a detail — it is a logistical operation that moves with the shoot, sets up in a field or a desert or a car park before first light, and feeds several hundred people to a schedule that costs thousands of pounds a minute when it slips.
The business began in 1946, run out of a house, with a pair of ex-service canteens and nobody in the family who could drive them. It ran for half a century, through two generations, and it followed British film wherever British film went. It is gone now.
This is the first history of that trade, told from the dining bus rather than the director's chair. There is no book on it. The industry that remembers everything about itself — every camera, every cut, every row on every set — has kept almost no record of the people who fed it, and gave them no screen credit at all for the first several decades.
The trade has no memory of itself.Which is the reason for all of this
Timeline
Only the dates that survive a look at the record.
Two years are documented. Everything else is in order but undated — the date columns are still being matched, and nothing is guessed in the meantime.
- 1946 Documented The business begins Run out of a house, with a pair of ex-service canteens and nobody in the family who could drive them.
- 1956 Documented The Location Caterers Ltd is incorporated Ten years after the business began, it becomes a limited company. Both dates are true, and they are different facts.
- Aged 15 Documented The son joins He leaves school at fifteen to work for the company.
- Aged 17 Documented He takes it on The founder dies, and his son runs the company from seventeen. Published as ages rather than years: the sheet gives the ages, and the years are still being matched.
Keep up with it
Hear when the research moves.
One letter a month, when there is something worth sending. If there is nothing, nothing gets sent.