Loughborough Stage & Screen- Mervyn Gould

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Loughborough’s Stage And Screen - together with those of Coalville & the Deeming Cinema Circuit

Mention Lougborough’s former Victory Cinema and Coalville’s Regal cinema to anyone over a certain age and they will recall immediately the double seats in the back two rows of the Balcony. For generations of courting couples, those seats were a must on their weekly visit to the cinema. The Victory was in Loughborough’s Biggin Street from 1921 to 1967, and the tower with neon sign could be seen from the Market Place. The Coalville Regal is still there as Flutters, the redecorated and restored casino club.
Loughborough’s first purpose-built cinema was the Empire in the Cattle Market, where the Curzon is now, while the Picture Playhouse was a converted roller-skating rink standing on what is now Sainsbury’s car park next to the Eastern garden restaurant building. After a fire on the stage, the Theatre Royal in Market Street was reconstructed as a dual-purpose hall for alternate weeks of film and stage shows.
1936 was the seminal year for local film-going, for it was then that the two local art deco super cinemas opened — the Odeon (now Beacon Bingo) and the town’s last operating cinema, the Curzon. The main streets of the town were blocked twice in quick succession as the two main balcony girders were delivered. A chapter is devoted to the Odeon theatres circuit and the founder Oscar Deutsch.
In both towns there was 20th century theatre activity — in Loughborough at the Theatre Royal, and in Coalville at the Olympia / Regal. Earlier theatres are covered too, most notably the still-extant 1822 Sparrow Hill Theatre at Loughborough. Also mentioned are the Ashby theatre, the Palace Rugeley, and the Nottingham Palace.
Coalville had the former Theatre Royal running as the Electric Theatre since 1910, which later became the Grand. The Regal was a rebuild of the Olympia, which had been opened in 1909 as a skating rink before becoming a theatre and cinema. Coalvjlle gained it’s own super-cinema in February 1938 with the opening of the Rex.
Those days are recalled in Loughborough’s Stage and Screen: together with those of Coalville & the Deeming Cinema Circuit charts the history of that and the other cinemas, theatres and dance halls in the two towns. In Loughborough, from the shop opposite the Post Office which was built in 1822 as the town’s first purpose-built theatre, to the newest rebuild of the university’s Sir Robert Martin Theatre, the book recounts the history of each building. Coalville’s four entertainment houses are listed and described.
Photographs, plans and programmes are all used to bring the buildings back to life. Even two cinemas that were proposed for Loughborough but never built are mentioned — the Regal on Ashby Road and an un-named one on Woodgate suggested for the site later to be the Mann Egerton garage site.
Also covered by the volume are the life and times of the Deeming family, Charles and his son Edward, who for twenty years from 1933 dominated the town’s amusements by owning the Victory, Theatre Royal, and Empire (later the Essoldo and now the Curzon). For even longer, they also owned the cinemas of Coalville, starting with the Grand in 1920. The Deeming Cinema Circuit at one time or another included cinemas in Rugeley, Cannock. Sutton Coldfield, and Polesworth: all these are listed, too, with photographs.
Edward Deeming recently retired from the final operation of the former circuit — the Coalville Casino club at the former Regal - having closed the Coalville Rex in 1984, the year of the lowest cinema admissions recorded in the country. His archives. memories, and records have seen placed at the disposal of the author, thus ensuring a much wider range of information and higher level of accuracy.
He and his father spanned seventy-two years in local entertainments, and there are thousands of former patrons or both cinemas and ballrooms in both towns who are grateful to them. The film titles mentioned alone with give much pleasant nostalgia. From the epics of the twenties such as Napoleon the early talking pictures The Donovan Affair and Rio Rita, to thirties comedy with Will Hay in Boys Will Be Boys, drama with Gold Is Where You Find It!, swashbuckling with Errol Flynn in The Charge of the Light Brigade, and backwoods integrity with Gary Cooper in Mr. Deeds Goes To Town. All these and many more stare out at you from the many illustrations.
Three long newspaper accounts at the pear of the book recount the three theatre fires that have occurred in the area, and each give a flavour of the times in Loughborough. In the New Theatre fire, a budgie in an Ashby Road house was suffocated by the smoke, the Theatre Royal cat was left homeless when the stage was burned down, and tea and sandwiches were served during the Charnwood Theatre fire.
Loughbough’s Stage And Screen is published by the Mercia Cinema Society whose Administrator, Mervyn Gould, has written it. They acknowledge gratefully a grant from The Foundation for Sport & the Arts towards the cost of publishing this book. Mercia is the main publisher of cinema building history books in the country: Their currently available books cover Wharfedale, the Swale area of Kent, and Northampton and shire.
Mervyn Gould has been in professional theatre since the age of seventeen when he went on his first tour as A.S.M. for Barry Wood of Leicester’s Babes in the Wood starting at the Regal Boston. He toured the provinces, and has worked at several West End theatres including Drury Lane, and first came to Loughborough as a Stage Manager for East Midlands Arts. He spent fifteen years at the Sir Robert Martin Theatre on the university campus. Many articles on theatre history have been written by him, and his book on South Lincolnshire cinemas and the local Aspland Howden family is to be published next year. He received a grant from the Society For Theatre Research towards his work on Richard Thornton and the origins of Moss’ Empires.

Loughborough’s Stage and Screen may be ordered from any local bookseller, or direct from the society’s sales officer. The ISBN is 0 946406 32 4