From Trevor Webster

Well known Sound Supervisor Trevor Webster doesn’t a have skeleton in his cupboard (well, he might have, I suppose), but he did find a Heron.

Actually, an operators handbook for a Mark 1 Vinten Heron Camera Crane, with Camera Dept stamped inside the front cover. Trevor has no idea how he had it, and he doesn’t have too many times when he needs it these days, so he sent it to me, where it joins other material in my memorabilia folder.

Here are a few highlights –

The cover. I’m not sure when they were introduced, and the book has no date, but I guess around 1964.

My introduction to these was Top of the Pops in Studio G at Lime Grove in 1967. The later version of the Heron was already in service, with footpedals all round, but for some ancient Tech Ops reason, the two kept at Lime Grove for the most difficult show of each week were Mk1s. The manual says that they were easy and natural to operate, but forgets to mention that the steering wheel worked backwards when in crab, and the operating levers for the tracker went from stop to full in about a twentieth of their travel.

Also the cameraman had two panning handles, one with a zoom control, and the other with a progressive hydraulic crane control. Most of the time on TOTP he needed to work both at once, and the focus with the other hand

– and change his shot cards with his….

As a 20 year old tracker, I was the proud designer of a modification to the ground speed controller, which consisted of camera tape wrapped round the quadrant to restrict the movement of the lever at the point where it started working

It was the mark of a man if you could drive a Heron in a figure 8. Long after I left tech ops I tried it again one day, and it was like riding a bike – my hands and feet still knew what to do, though the rest of me had long forgotten.

Here’s page 1, in your basic typewriter (a mechanical writing machine of the last century) – unreadable of course, unless you look at the large version.

I can pdf the rest, if anyone wants a copy.