Watch the first-ever surf films from Hawaii – and Scotland

First, we see a couple of surfers riding gently-breaking waist-high waves some way offshore – they’re little more than silhouettes, but they are unmistakably surfing. Next, we see various well-heeled tourists walking slowly along the sand or staring out to sea. Then there are more long-distance surf shots (including what must be the first wipeout ever captured on film), and finally we see a gaggle of kids goofing around in the shorebreak, a couple of them riding waves on wooden bellyboards, while behind them a group of men paddle an outrigger canoe.

As it turns out, the footage the Surfer story links to isn’t quite what the headline implies. Firstly, it wasn’t Edison himself standing there on the beach, sand between his toes, training an early camera lens on the action out to sea. Although the project was commissioned by Edison’s company, the cameraman dispatched to do the filming was in fact one Robert Kates Bonine, a storied photographer and filmmaker who also captured footage of the Klondike Gold Rush, the coronation of Edward VII, the aftermath of the San Francisco earthquake and the construction of the Panama Canal. Also, Edison wasn’t really setting out to make a “surf film” as such – Bonine’s brief was to record scenes showing all aspects of Hawaiian life as part of a wider project aimed at promoting tourism. (You can watch all 43 minutes of the resulting film, titled Hawaiian Islands, on YouTube; the two surfing segments only make up a small part of it.)

Still, while it might not be accurate to say Edison made the first-ever surf film, it seems likely that Bonine may have been the first person to film the act of surfing, and there’s a real buzz about seeing moving pictures from that particular time and place. Photographs of the original Waikiki Beach Boys riding enormous wooden surfboards have long been familiar to anyone with even a passing interest in the history of surfing, but to see moving pictures from that era brings it to life in a much more immediate way. Yes, these early surfers strike noble, timeless poses as they ride towards shore, just like they do in the famous photos, but they also fall and smile and lightheartedly splash around.

What’s also striking is the contrast between the people in the water and those on land. As far as it’s possible to tell, the surfers Bonine captured are mostly just wearing long boardshorts​ plus or minus sleeveless tops; on land, though, it’s a very different story. In one shot we see a western couple walking along the sand beside the water. She carries a parasol and wears a very formal-looking full-length dress (in spite of what must surely have been fairly punishing​ heat, it being August in Hawaii) plus white gloves and a white hat with what looks like some sort of feather in it. Her partner, meanwhile, wears a dark suit over a shirt and tie, topped off with a light-coloured boater with a black band. It’s such spectacularly inappropriate gear for the conditions that it’s hard not to laugh – and it’s also hard not to see these strangely attired interlopers through the eyes of the locals, who had only had their island home annexed by the United States of America eight years earlier, and were presumably wondering if, under this new political arrangement, they too would be expected to dress as impractically at some point in the future.

READ MORE: Welcome to St Andrews, Fife’s answer to Bondi Beach

Stepping through this little window into the distant surfing past made me wonder what the earliest surfing footage ever recorded in Scotland might be, so I emailed Andy Bennetts, one of the pioneering Scottish surfers of the 1960s and the nearest thing Scotland has to an official surf historian. He pointed me in the direction of two videos showing one of his contemporaries, the late George Law, riding waves at Aberdeen Beach in the 1960s.

In the first ​o​ne, titled “First surfer at Aberdeen Beach 1967 on Super 8”, we see Law checking the surf through​ a fixed, pay-as-you-go telescope on the waterfront, but we don’t actually see him surfing. There’s footage of him walking out into the waves, board under his arm, and there’s footage of him walking back in again, post-surf, but nothing of him actually surfing.

The second video, however, titled “George & Lorna surfing at Aberdeen Beach 1960s” (Lorna being Law’s wife), does indeed show him riding waves. The film is so overexposed that in some frames that Law disappears completely, but​ you can still make him out clearly enough most of the time, unquestionably on his feet and trimming along a series of crumbly right-handers. And as with Bonine’s Waikiki footage from 1906, the imperfections hardly matter – it’s the moment being captured that’s important, even if the people in the shot probably didn’t think it was all that important at the time.

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