The History of Geoffrey Round, the Geoffrey Round Trophy, Peter Coles, and the Peter Coles International AV Competition
Geoffrey Round FACI was IAC Chairman from 1963 to 1965. He died on 18th April 1966. He lived with his wife Mary in Weston-Super-Mare and it was he who arranged the first IAC AGM to be held outside London. In October 1963 the AGM took place in Weston-Super-Mare. At the London Amateur Film Festivals in February 1970 the first IAC Tape/Slide Competition took place at the St. Ermins Hotel, Caxton Street, Westminster, and the then President, George H. Sewell FRPS FBKS FACI presented the new trophy which he had asked the IAC Council to provide in memory of the late Geoffrey Round. This was called “The Geoffrey Round Memorial Cup”. The entries were preselected by George Sewell and the three judges were George Sewell, Michael Tickner FRPS (one of the pioneers of the technique in this country) and George Malthouse FRPS FACI. It was intended to hold this competition annually to satisfy the growing amount of Tape/Slide work that our IAC members were producing. The first competition was won by a member from the USA. Sadly there were very few entries and probably the idea was a little premature. The art of Slide/Tape was in its infancy.
In February 1971 at the Festival, again at the same venue, the Sunday morning programme was devoted to Slide/Tape – a discussion on “The relationship between Slide/Tape and the Amateur Film Maker”. Again, little interest was shown and the annual competition was dropped.
It was not until the International Film and Video Festival, held at Keele University in April 1994, that the idea was revived, and a “new look” AV Competition was slotted into the Festival as the Friday evening event. This time interest was greatly aroused and the organisers, Bill and Dorothy Every LRPS managed to attract quite a reasonable number of entries. The Festival at Buxton in 1995 attracted even more entries, and it appeared that the AV Competition was by now firmly established as an integral part of the Festival.
Sadly, when the original winners of the Competition were eventually contacted by the IAC representative in the USA, it was learned that a serious fire at their home had destroyed the Trophy some years previously. They had never bothered to notify us, for they probably thought that the Trophy was their property! As a goodwill gesture they sent us some dollars as compensation, but this was hardly the value of the solid silver Trophy. A new Trophy was purchased and this “Geoffrey Round” scroll was presented to Richard Brown at Keele University for his sequence The Story of a Hymn.
I found out about the Geoffrey Round Competition in 1997, the year when the IAC wanted to encourage more people to enter and offered a prize of £100 for the Winner! Really! And guess what? I won! With my AV Carnival in Venice, and I remember driving home from Kidderminster with Maggie, both of us high as kites. It never happened again!
Bill and Dorothy Every ran the competition successfully for several years until 1999 when I received a letter from Dorothy saying that Bill was in hospital for a serious operation so the event had to be cancelled and my cheque was returned. Bill and Dorothy did so much to cement the links between the moviemakers and the AV world as we have so much in common. Bill died in March 2021 and Dorothy joined him soon after, they were so inseparable.
Peter Coles took the Geoffrey Round Competition on and very soon made it an International competition which ran for twelve years until 2011. Naturally the locations changed – mostly in the North at Leeds, Bradford, Haworth, Lowton and near Peter’s home in Hebden Bridge, but with a couple of deviations to Aldbourne in 2005 and in 2007 to Capel Curig in North Wales, when Marion Waine was firmly on board as one of Peter’s team. Marion has written about “The Capel Curig Years” in the June 2025 issue of FVM so I won’t repeat all that here except to say that the move to Capel Curig became a regular feature in the AV calendar in 2010 and we all looked forward to meeting our AV friends in that iconic setting, hoping for snow, squeezing into the old School House and wondering if the dog would bark during our AV.
In 2011 Marion and John had taken over the organisation of the Geoffrey Round and Maggie and I were invited to judge the competition with Peter as Chairman. We were so looking forward to working with Peter. Peter was a great friend of us both, helped me a lot in the early days of my AV career, and was the reason I found out and became involved in the wider AV community in the UK and abroad. It was a great disappointment when Peter had to pull out because of ill health but Ron Davies came to the rescue to replace Peter. Peter died shortly afterwards, an immense loss to the AV world. I made the suggestion that the competition should be renamed The Peter Coles International AV Competition in memory of Peter and that’s how it has continued.
Marion organised the competition for a record fifteen years but Covid struck and for the last five years the event has been on Zoom. Covid has been a blight on the AV movement. On the one hand we were grateful for the ability to keep going during lockdown and hold events and meet people online. It has held us together. On the other hand Zoom is a pale substitute for experiencing our work in cinema quality sound and vision on the big screen, in the company of a live audience where we feel their reactions, share the emotion, and chat over a cup of tea and a meal together. Sadly Covid has also had the effect of making a lot of people reluctant to make the effort to leave the comfort of their living room and TV. When Marion made the decision to hand the reins to someone else I stepped up as Peter Coles and the Peter Coles Competition means so much to me. I was determined to return to its roots as a live event, but I will be relying on you folks for your support if it is to be a success.
Here’s to Peter Coles 2026!
Malcolm