More on Coventry
(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.
