(This has now been despatched along with Barnsley Cinemas).

Collector’s corner has been updated

Bioscope 107 - Cover: The Queen’s, Palmers Green Photograph from Winfield section, Gould Theatre Collection
Contents:
Reel Enthusiasm / Trotter & Murray cinemas extra / Cinemas of Brighouse / Those Were The Days … / An Itinerant Cinema Outfit / Clowne Palace / Review–Old Theatres of the Midlands / Committee matters / Letter / Notes & Queries

This is the latest publication from the Society- it will be sent free to all Members with Bioscope 107.

Barnsley Cinemas - Kate Taylor A5 60pp saddle-stitched. Laminated card covers. £4.95 retail

Last year we lost Len Davies: this year, the March meeting opened with a minute’s silence in memory of another long-serving member, Anthony B. Phillips (1935-2007). The chairman writes in tribute :

With great sadness we learned of the death of Anthony (Ant) Phillips at Whipps Cross Hospital, Walthamstow, on 29 November 2007. Ant was the Society’s honorary treasurer for ten years during the 1990s, retiring at the annual meeting in 2000. He was always meticulous in keeping our accounts and prompt in paying our bills. And he did all the work with considerable grace and charm. He provided his autobiography - or at least the story of his life as a cinema-lover - for the 75^th Bioscope of May 2000. There is no need to repeat that except, perhaps, to note the essentials of his career. Ant began work as an office boy with Warner Brothers in Wardour Street, London (probably in 1950) at £2 10s a week. After national service in the RAF, he joined the film-booking department of the Circuits Management Association as their statistics clerk. A colleague there introduced Ant to greyhound racing and he became hooked, owning his own bitch and racing her regularly. Watching greyhounds of several generations led to an interest in genetics. For two years he worked on the editorial staff of The Greyhound Express. When the paper ‘folded’ he joined the Central Training Department of the Civil Service where he remained until his retirement in 1995. Following his retirement, Ant eked out his pension for some time as a door-to-door Betterwear salesman finding the casual approach of his customers intensely frustrating.

Ant moved to an Edwardian mid-terrace house in South Chingford in 1987. Here he lived alone with his cats - sometimes as many as five - his two endlessly running video recorders and massive collection of videos. When his health allowed, he greatly enjoyed going on the excursions organised by the Cinema Theatre Association, or seeing films at the Rex, East Finchley, which he referred to as ‘my most beautiful and comfortable house’ and never called the Phoenix. He had a season ticket for the Everyman, Hampstead. A second love was of cinema organs but confessed that there were few organists whose playing and personality he liked. He made the exceptions of Simon Gledhill and of Doreen Chadwick, whose performances he attended at the State, Grays, and at the Granada, Walthamstow.

Sadly Ant suffered from poor health for many years. He had diabetes and epilepsy, had an operation on his prostate gland in 1995, and had cataracts removed from his eyes in 1997.

None of the Mercia committee knew of Ant’s death until some long time afterwards. We learned later that there were only five people at his funeral, on 7 February. Had we known, we would surely have been there to say farewell to a lovely, albeit lonely, man.

1987 photo by Martin Tapsell sent by Harry Rigby, Editor CTA Bulletin

We welcome two new co-opted members to invigorate us -

IAN MEYRICK’S excellent book,Oxfordshire Cinemas, was published in the Tempus Images of England series in 2007, appearing to good reviews. He is a member of CTA and PPT, and looks forward to service the committee. He writes:

…caught the cinema bug at a very early age, playing with an old 9.5mm projector and silent films at home, and attending ABC Minors and any other films he could persuade his parents to take him to at the Regal, Bicester, Oxfordshire. Later progressed to 8mm and 16mm film making, and as a student worked at the Empire Watford doing anything that came to hand, including selling ice creams with a neat little Wall’s tray around his neck, After-wards had 35mm projection experience at the Scala, Oxford and so has retained a life-long fascination for projection matters. For some years he wrote and photographed for various Oxfordshire papers on a variety of topics, naturally some being cinema and theatre related! He is now researching the post-1991 Coventry cinema scene as After-piece up-dating the late Gil Robottom’s book (see rear cover).

Ian Houseman has been a member since the middle nineties, and has a long history of service to Mercia. All the illustrations in Boston & Spalding Entertainment were produced by him in his father’s dark-room, many from copy negatives he had taken; he worked on the Mercia conferences - helping to set-up and dismantle, and running a taxi service to the station; revising illustration digital scans for our publications, most recently designing covers for York Cinemas, Basingstoke Entertained, and Barnsley Cinemas. In ‘outside’ life he is an aerospace non-destructive tester, and the photograph (by David Firth) shows him well-wrapped-up in a winter-temperature aircraft hanger.

His first job after election was to reverse the Mercia page-boy logo - a trickier and more time-consuming job than would be thought. We use it for the first time in this issue, and wonder how many readers had noticed the change! Like Ian Meyrick, he will be working on the Coventry book.