In 2007 I bought a box of old cine films, ¼” audio reels and lecture notes on eBay. It came from a house clearance, with no real information attached to it. Just a set of carefully made travel films and documentation attributed to a couple called Stella and Tiny (Thomas Ian Nemo Young).
For a long time I didn’t really do much with it, but in 2010 I started to look properly at what I had.
What followed wasn’t a structured investigation so much as a slow accumulation of fragments. An envelope in the box gave me the title of one of the films—The Hammer and the Sickle and the Road to Samarkand—along with a partially obscured address linked to Angus District Council in Arbroath. That small trace became the starting point.
From there I began writing to archives, libraries, and newspapers in Scotland. Angus Council forwarded my enquiry to their archive department. The local press suggested I write a letter to the editor of the Arbroath Herald rather than place an advert. That letter then began to open things up in ways I hadn’t expected.
What came back were people.
Stella and Tiny
A handwritten letter from a woman called Anita Walker confirmed that Stella and Tiny were real, lived lives, and were now both dead. She gave me a last known address and suggested further contacts. Through her I was put in touch with George Dall, a colleague of Tiny. Then others followed.
The archive stopped being just material at that point. It became relational.
One man got in touch after reading the letter in the paper and told me he appeared in You in Your Small Corner. A woman called Morag, who had lived in Muirhead all her life, spoke about Stella and Tiny with real warmth. She said the village had often wondered what had happened to that film. She was also gathering her own local history of the area.
Bit by bit, a picture formed.
Stella had been a St Trinnean’s pupil in Edinburgh. She served in the ARP during the war. Tiny had been a police officer, and later an RAF navigator. They were caught up in the Baedeker raids while returning from London in 1942 and lost all their possessions in the bombing of York station. Later that year Tiny was posted to Canada and returned in 1946. It’s hard not to think that this early experience of movement, loss and displacement shaped the way they later travelled and filmed.
They went on to make at least ten films.
Travelogues across America, Russia, Norway, Holland, Africa. Carefully shot 8mm and Super 8 films, accompanied by lecture notes and soundtracks, shown in village halls. There is something very specific about that form—part cinema, part lecture, part social event. Not broadcast, but shared directly with a local audience.
You in Your Small Corner
You in Your Small Corner is a five-reel film that documents a full year in the life of in Muirhead and Birkhill. Unlike their other travel films, this one doesn’t look out at the rest of the world, but at life back home.
In 2012 I took that film back to Scotland and we screened it in the Millennium Hall in Muirhead to a packed audience. People recognised themselves, their families, the landscape as it was. It was one of those screenings where the film stops being “found footage” and becomes something else entirely—something shared again, briefly returned to the place it came from.
After that screening, things changed again.
The urgency of the search softened. Other projects came and went. The material went quiet for a while. And I’ve realised recently that I’ve left it sitting in that space for over a decade.
So what’s next?
Now I find myself coming back to it again, but from a different position. Not as an investigation trying to solve who Stella and Tiny were. That part feels, in many ways, already answered. But as a question about what to do with this material now.
There are the travel films, the lecture notes, the sound recordings, the village film. There is a body of work that sits somewhere between amateur cinema, personal archive and something more formally constructed than home movies, but less institutional than documentary.
And there is also me, still holding it all.
I don’t think I want to simply make a conventional documentary about “finding Stella and Tiny”. That would be too neat, and in a way it would misrepresent what this actually is: a long, uneven relationship with an archive that has moved through chance, loss, and return. Part of me wonders whether the film is already partly complete—at least in its most important moment—in that screening in 2012. Another part of me feels there is still something unresolved in how the work now exists, detached from its makers and from its intended inheritance.
I keep coming back to a simple question: what does it mean to carry someone else’s images for this long? And what responsibility, if any, comes with that?
At the moment I don’t have a fixed answer. But I do know the material is still alive, in the sense that it continues to ask questions back. So perhaps the next step isn’t to close it down into a finished story, but to find a way of making space for it again—on its own terms, not mine.
And to finally decide what it is now asking to become.