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Our newest book is now available to purchase and advance orders are now being shipped. Details on our Publications page
(Below is the draft Press Release and back cover)
COVENTRY PICTURE PALACES
Mercia Cinema Society, 2008. ISBN-10: 0-946406-64-2 ISBN-13: 978-0-946406-64-7 £14.50 / £12.50 (members). Available from Mercia Sales: 29 Blackbrook Court Durham Road Loughborough LE11 5UA
Before being 'Coventrated' on the night of 14 November 1940, the mediaeval city of Coventry was home to twenty-two cinemas, though others had closed earlier. At the end of the war there were still seventeen, and one of the damaged ones, the Imperial, later re-opened.
By the 1980s there were only three houses left devoted to the silver screen.
Gil Robottom traces the history of Coventry's old cinemas - all the local flea-pits, picture palaces, and super cinemas. There are plans, photographs, and advertisements here to display the places where people queued to sit in the warm darkness and be conjured away from the industrial Midlands to their faraway dreamlands.
At the opening of the moving picture period in 1896, Coventry's 1819 Theatre Royal was closing, reduced to being a music hall, but other venues exploited the new wonder - the Sydenham Palace, for instance, a public house music hall on the corner of Cox and Ford Streets. On the opposite corner was a 'Coffee Tavern', which in 1917 responded to the craze for war news by becoming the Alexandra Theatre.
Even this early cinema was by no means the first. Existing halls like the Empire, a 1906 internal rebuild of the city's 1858 Corn Exchange, had taken the opportunity to show films, and an odd-shaped hall in Hales Street, next to the Opera House, was purpose-built and opened on 17 January 1911 for the new entertainment, followed in September by the imposing white arch of the Picture House Smithford Street.
A 1931 fire at the Empire proved the opportunity for re-building, and in 1933 the ABC circuit opened the new Empire Cinema inside the shell of the old theatre. At the same time as the fire, however, another national circuit - Gaumont-British - was building a super-cinema in Jordan Well, where earlier Frank Turner had run out of money before being able to complete his Coliseum. The Gaumont Palace may not have had much of a stage, but it had everything else - triple colour-change lighting around the proscenium arch, an organ console rising from the orchestra pit on a lift, a tea-room and restaurant above the art déco foyer, and even a flat for the manager on the top floor.
A nationally-known cinema architect, Robert Cromie, was responsible for the Philpot brothers' Corporation Street flag-ship, the Rex. The most splendid Coventry super-cinema ever built, with an organ, snack bar, restaurant and dance floor; the Rex was to have the shortest life of all, as it was bombed in August 1940 on the night before the eagerly-awaited Gone With The Wind was to be shown.
As in all cinema histories, every entry charts the decline in audiences as BBC and Independent television kept older people at home, and the increasing supply of what were then luxury items, such as vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, and fitted carpets, became more widely available and increasingly affordable through the widening of hire-purchase schemes.
The Rank Organisation, owners of the Odeon and Gaumont-British circuits, split their buildings to provide several screens - at Coventry, eventually, five. ABC took a different approach here: demolishing the Empire as the city centre was being re-built and building an entirely new cinema with a new, simple, circuit name - the ABC.
But British cinema exhibition was utterly changed in 1985 when The Point, at Milton Keynes, opened as the country's first multiplex. Cannon closed the former ABC, the independent Theatre One (originally the Alexandra) closed for the latest fashion - a nightclub, and finally the Rank Organisation closed the former Gaumont as the last traditional city-cinema, by then the five-screen Odeon, in 1999.
Gil Robottom died last year, but an Afterpiece by cinema historian Ian Meyrick brings the book right up to date, with accounts of the area's two modern multiplexes, and the sadly ill-fated attempt to provide a suburban twin-screen operation in the former Rialto-Casino building.
The book is well-presented, with colour laminated covers, and unlike many local history books, a full index is provided.
REVIEWS
Coventry Picture Palaces Gil Robottom
Coventry : the City where Cupid rubs shoulders with Godiva
As a country boy (by persuasion, anyway), I am always staggered by the number of cinemas that were busy in cities during the heyday of film-going. In the case of Coventry, the tally is over 30, some of which had several names, as the managements changed. Of course, where you have such a number of cinemas, you have a rich variety of independents and the names of Bill Edkins, Charlie Orr, Gus Pell and H T L Philpot, to name a few, feature throughout the pages of this very comprehensive book.
The accessibility of the detailed information is exemplary. There is an elaborate index where Architects, Builders, Circuits, Companies, Decorators, Organs, Projectors and Sound Systems all merit sub-headings. The Organs themselves rate a chapter in the book and it was good to see that the Mustel instrument at the Grand is defined as a reed organ, as opposed to the serried ranks of pipe organs that otherwise kept Coventry harmonised. In fact the Mustel was probably that superior sub-species of reed organ known as an Art Harmonium. The Forum’s 1934 Conacher 3(coupler) / 8 rank organ is illustrated - looking uncannily like the Compton-made Drury Lane 1950 Strand Electric 216-circuit Light Console.
The history of first openings and last shows is dealt with first, not forgetting the emergence and disintegration of various local chains of cinemas and the personalities that forged them. Then the cinemas themselves and their landmark years are listed chronologically. The longest entry refers to the 1939 to 1945 war years, when four cinemas and a theatre were lost to enemy action. After a page that lists the buildings remaining in November 2008, we have a page giving every cinema (with all its names), its years in use and the page of its main entry in the book.
The detail in the text from here on is prodigious. We have first-hand information from ex-cinema workers and from letters and financial records of the managements. A picture is built up of how complex the entertainment scene was in Coventry and how the launch of a new cinema led to some older houses closing. The only possible omission and one that would be so difficult to execute, due to the war damage and the subsequent re-build of the city, is a map showing where the cinemas were in the conurbation.
Gil Robottom uses the research documentation to get beyond the factual to a point where you can sense what seeing a film in each cinema was like and how you, the audience, would be treated. He is at his best when he uses his vast knowledge to interpret the merits of the various houses, as in his evaluation of the super-cinemas and the merits of the later tripling or rebuild.
This book is generously illustrated, with some early floor plans as well as the more usual 1930s opening souvenir book sketches and elevations. There are contrasting advert blocks from 1938 and 1952, as well as a lively set of colour promotion items on the back face. I particularly liked the exterior photos of the Redesdale and the Regal, both taken at night, after rain.
The Coventry cinema scene has been brought up to date by Ian Meyrick, who takes the story into the multiplex era. No amount of darkness, rain, and soft-focus, could make these latter-day sheds look alluring but it is good to read that there are still 24 screens, albeit in just three venues.
Sadly, Gil Robottom died in October 2007. This very readable account of Coventry’s cinemas will be a great way to remember him. He leaves a cornucopia of cinematic delights for you to dip in to. If, like me, you don’t know the City, by reading Coventry Picture Palaces you will find yourself in the two-and-nines and that lovely colour-flooded festooning is just about to lift for the main feature…
James Laws
Mercia Cinema Society, 2009, £12.50 members. Demy, section-sewn, laminated card colour covers. ISBN-13: 978-0-946406-64-7. Mercia Sales: Martin Hall, 23 Thrice Fold, Cote Farm, Thackley, Bradford BD10 8WW 01274 583251 sales@merciacinema.org
Here is the book cover.
Mercia's next publication -
The PICTURE PALACES of COVENTRY
will be at the printer shortly
Gil Robottom's history - very fully illustrated with plans, programmes, and photographs of the buildings
After-piece bringing the story up-to-date by Ian Meyrick - author of Oxfordshire Cinemas. Over 170 pages. Fully indexed.
Laminated card colour cover. As soon as details of price and availability are known, they will be posted on the web-site.
Expected to be ready for the AGM in December. Please keep checking.
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