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

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

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.

MEMORIES OF A FLEA-PIT

19th December 2006 marks (marked) the 25th anniversary of the closure of the Pavilion cinema, Ormskirk, Lancs. Although I provided the news to the Mercia Bioscope at the time, it was never reported. Here follow my reminiscences combined with such facts as I have been able to obtain.

Ormskirk, a market town presently of some 20,000 people, is situated about ten miles north east of Liverpool and seven miles south east of Southport. In the early days films were shown at the Institute, then in about 1911 the Pavilion (known as the ‘Pivvy’) was built in Moorgate for Lancashire Picturedromes Ltd. By 1927 the proprietor was E.W. Locke, of Liverpool, and the Institute had evidently ceased showing films. In 1935 competition arrived in the form of the 1000 - seat Regal and the following year the Pavilion was taken over by a Mr. F. Donaldson. In that same year Noal Orme became manager and later married Alice Winrow, one of the usherettes. The Regal bowed out in the mid 1960s in favour of a Tesco supermarket, leaving the Pavilion on its own again.

I had been commuting on a weekly basis between the Wirral and Blackburn, Lancs, via the Ormskirk bypass, since 1974 but it was not until 1977 that I ventured into the town to seek out the Pavilion. It was then being run by Mrs. Lily Prince, widow since 1959 of Arthur Prince who had taken it over in 1955 (he also ran the Imperial and Palace, Bootle, among the others he had inherited from his father, cinema pioneer George Prince).

The Pavilion was a typical example of cinema buildings erected between the passing of the Cinematograph Act of 1909 and the start of the First World War and was still structurally unaltered by the time I arrived. It had a characteristic though not especially ornate frontage and a rectangular auditorium with approximately 350 seats (500 originally) on a single, slightly raked floor and a barrel-vaulted ceiling. Tickets were bought prior to entering the building, via a hatch to the left of the main entrance. (When the wind blew, pound notes would be scattered all over the office behind !) When the cinema was not open to the public, a rickety wooden gate was unfolded across the entrance. On passing through the front doors, one could walk straight ahead down the central aisle of the auditorium or turn left into a passageway, passing the sales kiosk on the left, before turning right into the aisle down the left hand side of the auditorium. Or one could turn right into the passageway, passing the toilets, then turn left into the auditorium’s right-hand aisle. There was no foyer other than this passage. The sales kiosk was in fact a hatch from the same room which contained the paybox at the other end. This narrow room also served as the office, fridge room and staff room. From the passage on the right hand side of the entrance there was a door leading to a staircase, so steep that it was little more than a ladder, from which one emerged onto the roof before entering the projection room. Also leading from this passage were the toilets, containing just one pot for the ladies and one for the gents. There were no wash basins or toilet paper in either and the gents was always awash with an inch of water (or worse) which seeped into the passage carpet.

The projection room, above the entrance and behind the Pavilion roundel, contained Western Electric 206 (3A) soundheads (with two canvas belts driving a large flywheel) and Westar 2001 mechanisms. There was evidence that the previous mechanisms had been Kalee 7 or 8 and up to 1936 a Culkin sound system was listed in the Kine Year Books. It was remarkable to discover that this cinema, so basic in other ways, contained 4-track magnetic stereophonic sound reproducers; also equipment for MGM’s ‘Perspecta’ sound system. By this time, however, only the basic mono sound was needed or even operational, and much of the ancillary equipment was defunct or had been cannibalised.

The auditorium was lit by three large, rather curious and incongruous Chinese lantern -style houselights, but had no permanent form of heating. The previous gas heating system had been condemned or else the fuel bills had not been paid, I’m not sure which. The seating was in two price brackets : the rear half, priced at 85p, was in reasonable condition and contained some double seats; the front section, almost dropping to bits, cost 75p; there were reduced prices for children. The contoured screen curtains appeared to be a GB-Kalee installation of CinemaScope vintage, and, rather surprisingly, parted in the middle. The screen itself looked as if it had been keelhauled and had at some time been resprayed without the masking having been covered up. On closer inspection, it was also discovered to be covered with gardening staples, presumably fired by an elastic band by the younger element of the audience. There were four exit doors, two on each side of the auditorium, leading directly outside. On the left side, however, there was a lean-to canopy for the benefit of customers awaiting admittance. Through the bottom left exit one could also reach the switch room and another room containing the arc lamp rectifiers, above which someone had thoughtfully installed metal canopies to protect them from the leaking roof. Another room contained the emergency lighting battery. Either side of the stage there was a doorway and a short flight of stairs leading to a room on one side and a door to the shallow stage on the other. The rooms had presumably been dressing rooms for cine-variety, but now contained only rubbish and reeked of dry rot.

At the time of my first visit the auditorium was being heated by a calor gas radiant heater which was removed prior to the start of the film, after which the atmosphere soon cooled to freezing point. After a short time a paraffin blow heater, such as was used in garage workshops or warehouses, was hired. This was installed next to the rectifier and ducted into the hall. The initial equipment was badly designed or maintained and filled the auditorium with fumes which made one’s eyes water and gradually obscured the view of the picture. This was soon replaced by another model which worked on the same principle but was actually quite satisfactory, except for the audible drone and the fact that people forgot to fill it up from time to time.

The projectionists, all part-time, were Tony Winstanley, who was the mainstay, Billy Stuart who did Friday nights and Lil, one of Mrs. Prince’s daughters, who filled in and did some of the matinees; the cinema was always closed on Sunday. Tony, who worked for a Ford garage by day, was moved to another establishment and I soon got sucked in to help. Another enthusiast, Harry Woodcock, who was caretaker at a couple of mothballed cinemas in Wigan, also participated. Being of a rather non-technical disposition and a little highly-strung he could, on occasions of breakdowns or such disasters, be found on his knees in the projection box crying out, alternately, “Hail Mary” and “Shittin’ hell”. Within a short time we were joined by a couple of lads from the nearby Focus cinema at Skelmersdale, then a friend of mine from another cinema did the odd day and between us we kept it going till the end, joined for the last few weeks by David Raybould, a projectionist who had worked there in earlier years.

I often ended up with Monday and Thursday nights and was regularly called in at the last minute to do Saturdays when others cried off. Mondays, and frequently Thursdays, were in those days the start of a new programme, often a double feature. It would be quite a rush to get from my day job in Blackburn via a 45 minute journey to Ormskirk and then start making up the programme in time to be on the screen for about 6.15pm on some occasions. This usually meant getting a couple of reels onto spools, starting the show and then making up the rest as I went along. What with film prints of variable condition, a cement splicer and the adverts and trailers to assemble as well, it was usually well into the main feature before I had finished making up ! If the heating in the auditorium was erratic, it had nothing on the projection room. It was freezing in winter and I had to take the precaution of wearing about three pairs of socks and a pair of fell boots. Evening meals, when time allowed, were obtained at ‘the Grease’, as the local chip shop was called.

We projectionists were all enthusiasts and skilled in our various ways. I, for one, always felt that on each occasion I left the cinema better in some way than when I arrived. The projector illumination left a lot to be desired (at matinee shows in winter, the sunshine low in the sky could obliterate the picture when the front doors were opened) and eventually I replaced the erratic Monarc arclamps with a pair of Peerless Magnarcs which I had cobbled together out of spare parts. There were three circuits of footlights which I put into working order using light bulbs and gels which I had scrounged from somewhere. This was the pattern, especially towards the end; carbon rods, light bulbs, trailer titles and various odds and ends were begged from other cinemas where I was working at the time. One problem which was never dealt with was the two poster frames either side of the entrance. First one was vandalised or fell apart, then the other. After that there was no front-of-house publicity except for a small category board above the paybox window.

The annual licensing inspection was always an anxious time. There were light bulbs to be replaced, carpets to be tacked down and the emergency lighting battery (whose cells gradually collapsed one by one) to be put to rights; not to mention repairing the seats. The electrical certificate was the main problem. The authorities would not be satisfied that the installation was safe (which it, er…, wasn’t) and eventually remedial work was insisted upon. Luckily the local authority made a grant towards this. The work was done and although the lights in the ladies’ toilets and other circuits were subsequently found to have been disconnected, we did at least have an electrical certificate. Another dubious benefit was that the switch for the cleaner’s lights was now positioned next to Mrs. Prince’s seat at the paydesk. Her solution to any uproar in the auditorium (typically on a Friday night) was to switch these lights on. Unfortunately she didn’t always remember to switch them off again. Even after the work was finished the amber footlights still blew their fuse on a fortnightly basis, for reasons I never discovered.

Vermin became a problem. A black-and-white kitten was employed for their disposal, but escaped to what I hoped was a better life. He was replaced by a little tabby, who also had to spend about 20 hours a day on his own. Many times I stayed after the end of the show just to play with the cat ! Eventually the poor creature was given to the RSPCA and I hope that he, too, found a better home.

Other fond memories include the occasion when all the felt was blown off the roof on the right hand side and for a period we had to seat the audience on the left. Then, on a (fairly rare) busy night I was ushering two old ladies to their seats. “But there’s no seat here !” - “Oh, so there isn’t; I’m terribly sorry madam”. Then there was the time that the screen curtains split, due to the rufflette tape having hardened and cracked. I had to link the hooks with cord to stop it getting any worse, but the curtain was never repaired.

In due course Mrs. Prince went into hospital for the first of what turned into three hip-replacement operations (one was a failure and had to be re-done). We muddled through with Mrs. Prince’s daughters taking it in turn to manage. We all mucked in and for several weeks I compiled the newspaper advertisements. But it was the beginning of the end. I believe the daughters may have given an ultimatum and a decision was made.

Mrs. Prince was back in harness for the last few months, but a closure date was announced. The usual expressions of regret were made in the local paper, combined with people’s reminiscences.

The last night was Saturday 19th December 1981, with a double-bill of ‘Friday 13th Part 2′ and ‘The Warriors’, an all x-certificate programme. The snow was so deep that I couldn’t open the projection room emergency exit in order to clear it from the roof and stop the water dripping into the foyer passage. The performance came to an end, the National Anthem was played specially and the audience of 30 or so filed out for the last time. My four-year association with the Ormskirk Pavilion came to an end; it had been hard work, but it was good fun. And daughter Lil kindly confided that if it hadn’t been for me, the cinema wouldn’t have lasted as long.

It could have been my first professional cinema opportunity. I approached Mrs Prince about the chance of taking over. Our respective solicitors were put in touch, but the required information was never passed from hers to mine. The prevarication continued and the lease expired before it could be transferred to me. It was not to be the only time that my ambitions of taking over particular cinemas were (perhaps deliberately) thwarted. In this case maybe it was just as well. I was newly married and the time and money required to turn the business round would have been tremendous. But if someone could have renovated the cinema, I believe they would have had a good business for at least 20 years before the multiplexes encroached.

A week or so later I returned to remove the Peerless arcs and a few seats (including a double !) for my private cinema. The snow was thawing and I could hear water dripping at various places in the building.

In due course the cinema was incorporated into the indoor market next door and an upper floor created which became a pub / club, known initially as ‘Brahms and Liszt’. I believe it still stands.

C. Morris, November 2006 (version two)

Ormskirk Pavilion from Keith Parkinson, St Helens

Charles Morris’s Memories of a Fleapit, Mercia Bioscope 102, differ from my own memories of that market town cinema, which I visited in the 1950s and 1960s. Of course twenty years makes a big difference. The Pavilion regularly played to almost full houses and it was a good idea to book seats for Saturday evening performances.

I lived in Rufford, a small village some six miles distant from Ormskirk. My local cinema was the Derby in Burscough Bridge. The Derby was just three miles away from home and with a thrice-weekly change of programme it served most of my picture-going needs in those days of double bills. My cinema visits to Ormskirk only occurred once every two or three weeks. When the Derby closed in the early 1960s I used to travel to Ormskirk to visit either the Regal or the Pavilion. When the former became a Tesco supermarket that left the Pivvy, which happened to be my favourite of the two anyway.

Despite Charles’s memories, the gent’s toilets were always in a decent state. I have memories of the CinemaScope experience being enhanced by the striking effects of stereophonic sound in what was a comparatively small auditorium. There were other added sound effects from time to time. That is because there was then a main railway line from Liverpool north to Preston and beyond which ran some way at the back of the Pavilion, Although it was nothing like The Smallest Show on Earth experience it was still possible to check whether or not British Railways was adhering to the published timetable. Well into the 1960s there were also Sunday evening, for one night only, presentations. The Pavilion must have changed to Monday to Saturday only in the 1970s. At least it never disgraced itself by going over to bingo.

I passed the Pavilion a couple of days ago. As Charles stated, it is now a Brahms and Liszt nightclub. The back cover of the last Bioscope shows the cinema’s final programme - a double bill of Friday the 13th Part 2 and The Warriors. Later this month the newly formed Ormskirk Film Society screens its first film. Attendance for the inaugural presentation is free. That film happens to be The Warriors.

I was pleased to receive as an early Christmas present a copy of an interesting book by Mervyn Gould, one of a series published by the Mercia Cinema Society, which was founded in 1980 to promote and publish research into the history of picture houses.

Basingstoke
Entertained

A History of Cinema in this
Hampshire Market Town
I was amazed to see that ‘Basingstoke Enter­tained’ is the Society’s 63rd book, and delighted know that this is Mervyn’s fourth book about the history of cinema and the theatre, and that he has three more in preparation, which are expected to be published this year. Mervyn cer­tainly knows his stuff - he started his career in 1963 in the projection room of a 1937 cinema, and after touring and West End work, became a university technical tutor in stage management and lighting.

The book was of special interest to me. Basing­stoke was the town that I moved to when I first came ‘down south’ to work in 1970 - it was the only place I could afford a four-bedroom detached house within an hour’s commuting distance of Oxford Circus, and turned out to be a very pleasant town which had recently expanded from its historic market town origins to include a much larger ‘new town’ area which included a surprising number of green spaces as well as the expected range of modern shops and facilities and a large number of traffic round­abouts for which the town became notorious. I have to confess that this book about cinemas in Basingstoke took me completely by surprise - I kept trying to think `where on earth was this cinema?’ as the author rolled out lists of venues that had existed over a period of nearly 100 years, but after a few chapters the truth dawned - by 1970, when I arrived, the only remaining cinema was the ABC / Waldorf on the edge of the then market square, (picture below) all the others having disappeared in the years prior to the town’s redevelopment.

The only historic cinema-related building that I actually recognised had by my time become the Haymarket Theatre ( I remember seeing ‘Gaslight’ and ‘The Ghost Train’ there) and I was fascinated to learn from the book that this historic building had once been The Corn Exchange (animated pictures were evidently shown there in 1900) and The Grand Exchange Cinema. Mervyn manages to weave in a fasci­nating series of small-town tales of local business entrepreneurs and more or less villainous local town councillors, and presents a very interesting picture of how cinema developed in the first half of the twentieth century. He suggests that George Casey, who leased the Corn Exchange in 1913 and converted it into the Grand Exchange Cinema and Vaudeville Theatre, was perhaps the man who had the most impact on Basing­stoke entertainment, subsequently converting the old drill hall into the Pavilion dance hall, reconstructing it as the Plaza, and opening the purpose-built Waldorf in 1935.

The book tells of three early cinemas, converted from the Corn Exchange, a swimming baths (converted into The Electric Theatre), and the Drill Hall. It records the fire which destroyed the Grand in 1925, the race to show the first talkies in 1929, and the building of a super cinema on a concrete raft on swampy ground in 1935. It notes the first incursion of a national cinema circuit when Union Cinemas acquired three Basingstoke venues in 1937 and of the muted opening of the Savoy in the first months of the second world war. There are nostalgic mentions of the formation of the ABC Minors’ Club in 1945 and the experiments with 3D and Cinemascope in the 1950s. The struggles of the cinema industry nationally are reflected in the closing of the Savoy in 1966 and the conversion of the ABC to provide two screens in 1977.

The book is very up to date, mentioning the cur­rent multiplexes in the new Festival Place shop­ping centre (Vue) and at an out of town leisure site (Odeon), even mentioning that the Odeon has a digital cinema projector, and surprised me with the news that The Anvil, Basingstoke’s 1990s Concert Hall, has film projection facilities for an audience of about 800 on a 10 metre wide screen.

The book will obviously be of great interest to anyone with Basingstoke connections, but I am sure that many more Cinema Technology readers will find this a fascinating read. It is only £8.95, and contains lots of interesting old photos of cinema interiors and exteriors, with copies of cinema posters and playbills from the earliest times. You will enjoy it!

Jim Slater

Basingstoke Entertained, by Mervyn Gould. 98pps, paperback ISBN: 0-946406-62-6 A5 Available post-free by sending a cheque made payable to Mercia Cinema Society to Stuart Smith, Mercia Sales, 100 Wickfield Road, Hackenthorpe, Sheffield, S12 4TT.

cinema technology - march 2008

(Entries are FREE for members, and 4 x 34p. stamps per ten words (name & address free) for non-members. Copy for this service to the Administrator.

This also appears in the Bioscope colour supplement)

UrbExers are drawn to large buildings like abandoned hospitals, factories - and theatres. Often the photos taken of a venue are the last ones ever likely to be seen before demolition or internal destruction beyond recognition.

The Society are grateful to the site www.exploremanchester.co.uk for giving us permission to publish a number of photographs taken of an incursion into the derelict Manchester Odeon, the original 2,920 seat Paramount Theatre of 1930. The CTA broke the story of how much of the decorative interior plasterwork had been stripped out (to minimise the risk of re-listing) and these photos collaborate this (but also show that much remains).

The photographers were not intimately acquainted with the building before their visit so have not always been in a position to clarify where the photos were taken inside. The commentary is therefore speculative based on the Webmaster’s intimate knowledge of the similar 1931 Paramount Newcastle.

The original building had three audience levels (two balconies) and over the last thirty years or so was progressively carved up into seven screens. Here are the details from Odeon Cinemas: From J. Arthur Rank to the Multiplex:

Opened 10 June 30. Architects: Sam Beverley & Frank Verity. 2,920 seats.
To Odeon 27 Nov 39. Re-named 8 April 40.
By 1966: 2,737 seats.
Closed 21 July 73.
Re-opened 25 Jan 74 - 1,030 (2: ex-stalls), 1: 629 ex-circle
10 June 79 - 3rd screen in mezzanine
1992 - ex-stalls (No 2) closed for tripling + on-stage & ex-restaurant screens:
So:
3 in former stalls - 326, 145, 142
1 in former circle - 629
1 in former mzzanine 211
1 on stage - 97
1 in former basement restaurant - 97

Closed 2 Sept 04.

Note that all photographs are taken using improvised lighting conditions and are presented in camera sequence order. Because there are a large number of photographs which would make the page slow to load, please click on the read the rest of this entry below to unfurl the posting.

We start in the main lobby, looking towards the street doors which are boarded up on the outside.

One of the two mini-cinemas constructed in the rear stalls area.

This is thought to be the larger screen in the front stalls area, seats mostly stripped out.

The other rear stalls mini-cinema, smaller than the one next door.

We now move on to the Boiler House. These modern gas fired systems replace a pair of large Lancashire Boilers that were originally coal fired and then converted to fuel oil.

A typical backstage corridor, this one probably underground.

Some curious structural steelwork in the basement. Note the concrete footer for the upright, the angled girders appear to be providing some form of lateral bracing.

We are now in the Plenum Chamber. A cast iron column in the foreground (or possibly a steam pipe), a belt driven impellor fan beyond. The safety guard would have been added at a later date. There are several photos taken in the Plenum area.

Photos looking up and down Oxford Street

There are a few more miscellaneous views at the end of the sequence, possibly from another camera:

A staff closing day behind the scenes “in joke”

There is one other image of the circle foyer, exposed to show the extent of the plasterwork stripout. It is credited “converse1″. Note that the lights are on in this photograph.

(Photos courtesy of http://www.exploremanchester.co.uk )

Mervyn Gould

Mercia Cinema Society, 2007

Paperback, 98pp., £8.95

ISBN 10: 0-946406-62-6

Since Basingstoke has never had a purpose built theatre this book, perhaps naturally, centres on the history its cinemas. However there is a record of plenty of live entertainment within its pages and its author, long time SMA member, Mervyn Gould, in his fourth book (and there are three more in the pipeline!) has, as usual, spared no effort in his research to provide an exhaustive study of his subject. We may read about strolling players, live entertainment at the Hiring Fairs, and fit-ups in various venues both under cover and al fresco, long before the moving pictures came on the scene. Later there was still room for variety, pantomime and even weekly rep. and no theatre history is complete without a fire.

For this reader a gazetteer would have been useful to help keep track of the frequent changes of name and the rebuilds at the numerous sites enumerated in this work. Much at the centre of cinematic activity in Basingtoke for more than twenty years was George Casey, who in 1913 converted the Corn Exchange, at that time a skating rink, into a cinema and variety theatre. He later converted the old Drill Hall into a variety theatre before it was reconstructed as a cinema. His other interests and activities are fully explored.

Appended is a lengthy newspaper report of the fire which all but destroyed the Grand Cinema, formerly the Corn Exchange, in 1925. The fire occurring at night, there were no fatalities, but a touring revue company, currently in occupation, lost all their props and costumes. The shell of the building was later redeveloped and eventually renamed the Haymarket.

The expansion of the cinema industry, developments in sound technology, the rise of the national circuits and the more recent arrival of the multiplex cinema, are all subjects examined in as far as they were manifested in Basingstoke.

The book concludes with a study of the formation of the Horseshoe Theatre Company at the Haymarket, later developments at that venue, the building of the Anvil concert hall in 1994 and the current provision of public entertainment in Basingstoke.

The author’s thoroughly readable style, is, as usual, enriched by the provision of numerous illustrations, from photographs, plans, programmes and advertisements. Interwoven throughout are details of both amateur and professional live entertainment and wider aspects of social history, making this a valuable aid to our understanding and a wider knowledge of our national culture.

(Reviewed by Graeme Cruickshank)

Basingtoke Entertained is available from

Stuart Smith, Mercia Sales 100 Wickfield Road, Hackenthorpe, Sheffield, S12 4TT

At £8.95 post free (payable to Mercia Cinema Society)