The long gone Cinemas of Swale (Kent)

Price £4.50- Members £4.00

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The press release is below

A national society for the promotion and publication of research into the history of the cinema
MERCIA CINEMA SOCIETY

PRESS RELEASE

Issued: 1 March 2003 Contact: Mervyn Gould ' 01509 218393
mobile 07812 723 270 e-mail: Mervyn.Gould@virgin.net

Book: The Long-Gone Cinemas of Swale

Picture houses have served the people of Swale since 1910 when the Empire opened in Sittingbourne and another Empire and the Gem opened in Faversham.
In the years before the Great War further cinemas arrived, not only in Sittingbourne and Faversham, but now, too, in Sheerness and Queensborough.
The golden years of cinema in the 1930s saw six super-cinemas built, including two Odeons, in Sittingbourne and Faversham, the Argosy in Faversham, and the Argosy, Rio and Ritz - all in Sheerness.
Today, after the devastation of the picture-house industry in the late 1950s and 1960s, only the New Century (the erstwhile Odeon) in Sittingbourne, and the New Royal (again a former Odeon) in Faversham remain.
Now the story of these and other picture houses in the area is told in The Long-Gone Cinemas of Swale by local historian John Clancy. The 72-page, fully illustrated, book is published by Mercia Cinema Society and is available from bookshops at £4 50p or by post from Stuart Smith, 100 Wickfield Road, Hackenthorpe, Sheffield, S12 4TT.
The book is both factually detailed and enlivened by anecdote provided by Mr Clancy’s contacts amongst patrons and cinema staff. One of the first of the cinemas, the Empire, in East Street, Sittingbourne, was a conversion of a Wesleyan school. Here, before the show started, usherettes would ‘scamper around pushing up the shutters over the windows’.
There was no mains electricity when the Queen’s Picture Theatre opened in Sittingbourne in 1912 in converted brewery premises so that, like the Empire, it had a gas-powered engine to drive a generator. Its limited output meant that some of the house lights had to be switched off before the projector could be started up.
The Arcadia in Sheerness was built over the Wellington public house and patrons reached the ticket office via a steep flight of wooden stairs. ‘It was no fun queuing on the staircase,’ a cinema-goer remembers.
Mr Clancy recalls the days when silent films were accompanied by a pianist who would capture the spirit of the action on the screen. The sound of a train accident was produced by ‘elbow crash’ when the whole arm was ‘bashed down on the keyboard’. It was ‘a technique certainly not taught in classical colleges of music,’ the author remarks.
Recycling buildings is a regular phenomenon where cinemas are concerned. More stringent licensing regulations and competition from super cinemas brought about the closures of many of the older buildings nationally in the 1930s. Faversham’s Gem Cinema became a drapery store in 1935 and the Faversham Empire was reopened as a Catholic church in 1937.
Mr Clancy writes of the glamour of the new picture houses and films in the 1930s, when interiors were the height of luxury and exteriors made bold architectural statements, like the octagonal tower on the corner of the 1936 Argosy in Sheerness. ‘The 1930s were a time of acute economic depression,’ he says, and people needed something to get them out of the rut of day-to-day life, albeit for only a few short hours. For this reason most of the films were pure escapist fiction - romance and adventure, westerns, musicals and comedy.’
The later story of Swale cinemas is carefully chronicled as they changed hands, switched to bingo, or fell prey to the developers.
In the course of his research, Mr Clancy discovered that one of the pioneers of moving pictures, Albert Smith, was born in Faversham in 1874 and a chapter of his book is devoted to Smith’s story.
Sittingbourne author and local historian John Clancy (62) compiled this, his latest book, The Long Gone Cinemas of Swale, for the Mercia Cinema Society after learning about them in the course of his work as a freelance writer. The society seeks to preserve memories of former cinemas whose buildings have either been demolished or put to other uses. They were seeking information from new sources for their quarterly journal and John contacted them, offering a couple of cinema-related articles. In the journal he noticed that the society publishes a series of books about the history of the cinema in certain towns. He offered to write such a book about his home town, Sittingbourne, but it was felt it was too small for such a book. Undeterred he offered to expand it to cover the whole of the administrative district of Swale, i.e. Sittingbourne, Faversham and Sheppey. Along the way, John discovered that one of the film industry's earliest pioneers once lived in Faversham. He said, ‘This book will be my first excursion into the history of our local cinemas.’
Since becoming a full time freelance writer in 1993 after leaving his former job in local government, John has written three books, his first on how to become a part time disc jockey, something that occupied his spare time for twenty years until 1998. He received an award for this book from the Thames Valley DJ Association in 1996. It was whilst working as a disc jockey that John first became a wordsmith, writing about the nightclubs in the southeast for a couple of the leading disco magazines of the day. This was followed in 1999 by a book of comparative photos of Sittingbourne showing how parts of the town once looked compared with how it looks now. John's latest, The Story of Sittingbourne and Milton Regis, a concise and comprehensive history of the area, came out earlier this year. Currently he is working on a history of Milton Regis church and a naval battle that took place in the Indian Ocean in 1942 in which his father was involved. Had this battle been lost by the British it would have been another Pearl Harbour for Ceylon.
John said, ‘This book on the cinemas is literally a labour of love. I shall not be getting any royalties for it but money's not always everything. I think it's more important to record aspects of local history. If anything, this book will be costing me as I shall be buying many copies for publicity purposes.’
As well as writing books, John also has two columns in his local newspaper, the Kent Messenger. For one he writes about local history and for the other, covers village news around his area. As though this is not enough, he is also doing a Distance Learning Degree Course in Archaeology with the University of Exeter. He said he'd long been fascinated in this subject, thanks to certain TV programmes and is finding that it helps him further understand certain aspects of local history. John is a member of the Kent Archaeological Society.
Mercia Cinema Society is a registered charity and is a national society promoting and publishing research into picture-house history.

Ends

To contact John Clancy phone 01795 476812