'We Never for One Minute Envisaged We Would Be the Only People in the World to Shoot Man's First Star...'

Summary

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VISIBLE as a faint glint of light shimmering against the darkness, Morris Allan's world exclusive rose slowly in the skies above the Firth of Forth. For three nights, he had sat out on a hillside atop a Dunfermline farm, with scant idea of what he was looking for. He was confident, though, that whatever form it took, the unknown would be a thing of glory.

At precisely 5:30am on 11 October 1957, his persistence paid off. Springing to his feet, the 33-year-old grabbed for the starter button on his Pathe Webo 16mm cinecamera. "I can see it!" he shouted, gesturing far off into the north-west. Ronnie Mills, his photographic assistant, swung his plate camera around, while George O'Brien, Allan's father-in-law, wearing a pair of high-powered binoculars around his neck, began his stopwatch.

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Extract

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'We Never for One Minute Envisaged We Would Be the Only People in the World to Shoot Man's First Star...'

"We operated almost by instinct," Allan recalls. "It was rising towards the south-east, and we took image after image. We had been waiting all our careers for that moment, and ...

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