2012 Essays

Jenny Gilbertson

Evans, Barbara

Growing up in Glasgow in the early part of the 20th century, Jenny Brown should have had a conventional upper-middle-class future, attending parties and balls, marrying a man from a “suitable” family, and living an easy life as a respectable Glaswegian society matron. But this was not at all the life Jenny Brown, later Jenny Gilbertson, was to carve out for herself. Her mother wanted her, Gilbertson told Ann Black, to “stay home, drive the car, play golf and dust the legs of the dining room table” (2010). Against her family’s wishes, she attended the University of Glasgow, where she received her MA, followed by training as a teacher. Wanting to expand her horizons, she traveled to London to study journalism, and while she was there, an event occurred that would change her life. She attended a screening of an amateur film about Loch Lomond and, with a typical burst of enthusiasm, decided that filmmaking was to be the career for her. Acquiring a 16mm Cine-Kodak camera, she taught herself the fundamentals of cinematography while shooting footage of scampering squirrels in Kensington Gardens and barges on the River Thames.