Terence Gallacher 1928 – 2014

Terence Michael Gallacher died on the 3rd October 2014, almost 69 years to the day he entered British Movietone News for the first time in 1945, he was eighty five. We started this blog in 2010, to recall all the stories Terry told, all the people and all the places he saw but it grew into something else as we added new facts and pictures to Terry’s stories. We found his colleague Richard Clark sat next to Walter Cronkite at the Nuremburg trials, told the story of cameraman Frank Few and his exploits at Guadalcanal during the second world war. Terry has written about his time at British Movietone News, as General Office Manager, Foreign Editor and Assignments Manager – a unique insight as well as recollections of colleagues such as Paul Wyand, Norman Fisher and Jack Ramsden.

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He created forty four podcasts on “The Movietone years“, wrote about his adventures in Australia and the start of television in January 1957 at GTV, and his time at ABV2 in Melbourne, including his remarkable film on Operation Crowflight. As a result of this website he was interview by the BBC about the Funeral of King George VI and the 50th Anniversary of Coventry Cathedral. He recorded a long interview for the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia’s Oral History Program about television in the 1950’s and early 60’s.  In addition the website is being archived by the Australian Pandora Archive as well as the British Library.

Film historian Luke McKernan wrote an article about Terry and this website, entitled The Newsreel Man. He writes of this blog: “This is truly a life online – recorded, shared, active, a memoir shaped not by the writer losing himself in past times but by the media of today. Gallacher writes of a way of film production that is now lost, and part of his purpose is to document somewhere that which was once important, but his writing feels that it belongs to these times, and so matters.”

Perhaps the best way to look at Terry’s career is to look at his timeline, it stretches decades and is a rich history of innovation, talented colleages from the point of view of someone who was there.

In the end after nearly 350 articles, Terry concentrated on another project, his story of “Movietone At War”, chronicling from 1938 to 1946, how Movietone worked during the war and how remarkable film was brought back by ingenious means to the public at home – it was only recently Terry finished the project. In addition there are two more competed blogs “Terry’s eating places“, which was recently published, as well as a history of his father Patrick Joseph Gallacher, who played for Tottenham Hotspur and later the Footballer’s battalion during the First World War.

We miss him terribly.

Ian Gallacher.