Spring Gallery- May 2006

This month, we have another departure from the Gallery norm, what has to be the longest (and least illustrated) Mercia Gallery online so far. Presenting a feature by our Administrator, Mervyn Gould...

The GOULD GAZETTEER
of Provincial Cinemas, Music Halls, and Theatres.

"This is offered as work in progress. I have a very, very, long way to go. I have put together A to C, and offer it as a Gallery for any help, comments and information. The backbone is the 1941 KYB, with the 1907 Green Room Book, the 1946 Stage Guide, my own index cards, and notes, Bioscope indices, and Jeremy Perkins’ cinema list.

Information gratefully received toMervyn.Gould@virgin.net

PLEASE NOTE: This is NOT the Mercia Cinema Society’s Survey, which is being dealt with by Colin Sanders".

M.S.G May 2006, revised and updated June, August, September, October 2006 and January 2007

***NEW*** Introduction by the Author

GOULD’s GAZETTEER of England’s provincial
THEATRES, MUSIC HALLS, PALACES of VARIETY, and
KINEMATOGRAPH EXHIBITIONS

Compiled by

MERVYN GOULD

SNAPSHOTS in TIME - a few fore words

AT LAST! I hear you cry. A complete list of every cinema and theatre in the country, complete with owner, architect, and opening and closing dates. Wonderful ! .... And so it would be, if only it were true. But the following pages may be construed, to quote the gentle Miss Austen, as a by ‘a partial, prejudiced, and ignorant, historian.’ Every reader will snarl at the omission of a favourite hall, or wonder at my paucity of information over another. In such a work, this is unavoidable.

I was a fledgling theatre historian from the closure of the Boston New in 1960. In 1973, I started a card index, after seeing the Grand Theatre Houghton-le-Spring (I was working then at Sunderland Empire), as I felt cinema architecture should be celebrated and recorded as much as theatre buildings. My index was seen and encouraged by Michael Sell, later to be co-editor of the Theatre’s Trust Guide to British Theatre.

Many years, index cards, and computer files later, I present the results to an under-whelmed nation. Even so, it is a work in progress, and can never be complete. Any list-maker is dependent on, and grateful to, earlier and other compilers. The back-bone of the book is the Directory of Kinemas from the 1941 Kinematograph Year Book, conflated with the list of venues in The Stage’s 1907 Green Room Book, the 1922 Kinematograph Year Book, and the Stage Guide 1946. The 1941 KYB was chosen as it includes late cinemas opened in 1939 and 1940, thus having the largest number of operating halls. An earlier edition would have included organs – some of these have been put in from various lists. Much extra information is included, principally from the KYB 1914, 1920, and 1966 editions, the Civic Theatres Directory and the Stage Guide 1971. I retain copies of the 100-odd survey forms I submitted to Elizabeth Grice for the Curtains!!! survey, which have been put to use here. Some of the sixty-odd (so far) books published by the Mercia Cinema Society have been consulted, together with a few modern issues of the society’s quarterly journal, the Mercia Bioscope. I wish that time and stamina had allowed me to thoroughly go through the longer-running CTA Bulletin. Other modern sources include the meticulous work of Allen Eyles in his circuit histories, published by the Cinema Theatre Association, the Theatre Trust’s Guide to British Theatres, the late Geoff Mellors’ Picture Pioneers and The Northern Music Hall, Rosemary & Chris Clegg’s Odeon, and Brian Hornsey’s forest of facts in his self-published Fuchsiaprint of Stamford series Ninety Years of Cinema in ...

Stage lighting designer Roger Frith lent me the date-book of his aunt, Emma Hannah, touring at the end of the 19th century. Paul Bland, very generously, has shared his unpublished research list of cinemas with me, and I have drawn on Jeremy Perkins’ internet list of modern buildings for updates on multiplexes.

I have left out London, as there are so many existing publications on the area, and so much research is available – probably the most remarkable, for theatre information, being Diana Howard’s London Theatres and Music Halls. Boundaries changed over the years, though, so that there are entries for what are now London boroughs. County boundaries moved, too, but the counties here are left as pre-1974.

The KYB is a wonderful resource, but the compilers were dependent on owners and managers sending in forms. There are, therefore, errors, omissions, and double listings on change of name or ownership, plus compositors’ typos (more common in this war-time edition as the compositing was done amongst bombings in Covent Garden). I and my scanner will have added to those, though I have corrected what little I could. Some entries are out-of-date, being listed in the 1941 edition when a building was destroyed by fire in 1938, for example. Presumably the prices were the last known. Of course, in all annuals the information refers to the previous year. Where ‘Closed’ is in brackets, it is taken from the KYB.

Prices were beginning to rise through the effect of war and rising Entertainment Tax (introduced as ‘a temporary measure’ in May 1915, yet not abolished until 1960). The Splendid, Bromley opened in 1930 with prices at 6d to 2/-. By 1940 this had become 9d to 2/6. The Regal, Boston opened in 1937 with a top price of 1/10d, which had nearly doubled by 1951 at 3/7d, mainly through massive rises in tax, during and after the war.

Seeing the names above, a tiny point not mentioned elsewhere is that the cinema trade followed the variety side of ‘the business’ in terminology – the Arcadia, Skegness, for example, or the Odeon, Loughborough. The ‘legitimate’ side of ‘the profession’ reverses the order: Newcastle Royal or Bristol Hippodrome.

>From the 1880s to post-WWII, theatres were divided into groups by touring managements – No 1, No 2, No 3, and f. for fit-up, where the company took trestles and planks for a stage, and erected a proscenium frame and lighting. Bracketed numbers alone indicate the order of different buildings bearing the same name, whether on the same site or another.

Beware of audience figures stated. Theatres and music halls had benched galleries, and many Assembly/ Public halls, and early cinemas, had benches in the front. To give only one confirmed example, the Bootle Picture Palace opened in 1912 with a capacity of 1,000. When the front stalls benches were replaced by seats, the total dropped to 722.

When I have found one reference to a venue only, I have resorted to the Latin word ‘fluvius’ – abbreviated as fl. – to indicate the period open.

Even so, I am responsible for faults, even when faithfully copied from the KYB, perhaps. A few entries have received fuller treatment, but I am afraid that the title above is true – these are glimpses through and over the years at many, but not all, of the entertainment venues throughout the country. I am very happy to hear of any corrections, and new entries, for my data-base, for any future edition.

Why publish this imperfect list? Well, it shows the range and number of ‘venues’ available at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, before the explosion of 20th century building. Entertainment didn’t travel in a tin or on a disc in those days! Before the onset of railways it travelled on legs, or at best in a cart, on top of the props and scenery. So here are the fairground and circus pitches, villages halls and schoolrooms, mixed with the range of ‘real’ theatres available at various times.

Just as importantly, we find names of bookers and managers listed. We don’t find George Aspland Howden, managing his father’s and uncle’s Bioscope Show ‘Aspland’s Pictureland’, but we do find him as managing director of Boston Scala Theatre and Spalding Picture House, Ltd. after he had left the fairgrounds. We see Pat Collins, who built several permanent cinemas whilst still touring as a fairground proprietor; and Frank E. Spring, from promoting shows at the Public Hall, St. Anne’s-on-Sea in 1907, to being booker and managing director for a chain of cinemas from his 1930s Manchester office. Ben Popplewell is found at Shipley in Yorkshire, before his and his sons’ long stewardship of the Gaiety, Ayr. Here is the actor Edward Compton, founder and leader of the Compton Comedy Company, in partnership with that hard-headed theatrical businessman Milton Bode, as the owner of multiple theatres. Another early chain was that of Robert Arthur, most of whose theatres were taken by Howard & Wyndham, a respected theatrical force until an ignominious fade-out in the 1970s. Oswald Stoll and Moss & Thornton appear with their Empire Palaces, as does Ralph Pringle with his alliterative Pringle’s Pictures Palaces, and that former variety artist Leon Vint, with his ramshackle empire of converted legitimate theatres running as Vint’s Hippodromes.

But if you don’t fancy erudition or education, how about entertainment, which, after all, is what the buildings represented? Find the most inappropriate names and places. The Widnes Bozzadrome is too obviously nonsensical, perhaps, but what about the Salford Arcadia or—the author’s favourite—the Elysian Palace, Bradford?

So here, encapsulated in tablet form, as it were, is the excitement of ‘a night out’ – from the naphtha flares and hissing steam engines of a fairground; the elephant pulling the ring-master’s wife as Britannia in a chariot when the circus enters town; the M.D. raising his baton on the opening chorus of the latest musical comedy; the ‘tabs’ rising to reveal a box-set, empty apart from a maid on the telephone artlessly introducing the succeeding characters and the beginnings of the plot; to the anticipation as the Mighty Organ console sinks and the footlights (‘floats’ in theatre, ‘foots’ in cinema) dim in a provincial Regal, Ritz, or Majestic, while we hold hands in the back row of the circle as the Big Picture starts ....

A to C & M to R