Influence and lasting impact of local Eric

Bristol's Cinema Rediscovered festival later this month features a 1920s German animation with music by a Bristolian who would have a major influence on British culture in the 1920s. Pam Beddard tells the story of Eric Walter White.

- Pam Beddard

WHEN the Cinema Rediscovered festival returns to Bristol from July 23 to 27 it will share some of the earliest work by a local man who went on to support dozens of the 20th century's best-known artistes and have a lasting impact on the UK's cultural life.

Among the very many whose work he championed for British audiences were a Russian composer, a future Poet Laureate, a playwright whose song lyrics influenced The Doors, David Bowie and Bob Dylan and the reason for his inclusion in the Cinema Rediscovered lineup a pioneering German animator.

Meet Eric Walter White author, screen writer, musician, poet, opera expert, singer, composer, translator, a driver of multiple still thriving arts organisations, Bristolian.

Eric was born in 1905, the oldest of the three sons of Percy Walter White, a doctor and partner in Avery's, the wine merchants, and Ethelind Charlotte Chambers, a noted amateur soprano before their marriage at St Mary's, Tyndall Park.

All three sons attended Clifton College where Eric's schooldays overlapped with those of three other cultural notables: John Houseman, the Oscar-winning actor, colleague of Orson Welles and midwife to numerous stage and screen careers as head of acting at New York's famous Julliard school; Thorold Dickinson, director of the film, Gaslight, which gave us a new term for these fake news days and the actor and acting dynasty founder Sir Michael Redgrave.

Programmes unearthed by Clifton College's archivist Dr Charles Knighton show that Eric was a regular piano soloist at school concerts although unlike Michael Redgrave he never won the individual prize in the annual instrumentalist competition.