Musician seeking a venue for performing with silent films…
See our notes and queries page for details.
Coventry book on sale- in Coventry!
(Personal buyers in Coventry can get a copy from The Herbert Museum & Art Gallery bookshop).
Coventry book launch
The new Coventry Picture Palaces Book was publicly launched at the Herbert Art Gallery in Coventry on Saturday 21st Feb. The book has been published posthumusly by the society after the unfortunate death of Gil
Pictured, Mercia Cinema Society Chairman Kate Taylor gives the first copy to Lynne Robottom, Gil’s Widow. Also pictured are Ian Meyrick (left) who wrote the after-piece chapter and Ian Houseman (right) who designed the cover and prepared the illustrations. Behind them can be seen the former Coventry Gaumont.
In: News, Publications
Research help wanted- Albert T C Bridge
Having only just been connected to the internet and only come across
your web-site may I ask if you can be of assistance in my research of
a past Cinema Manager by the name of Albert T C Bridge.
Mr Bridge before the 1st WW was a Manager of the Lozells Roller
Skating Rink, Erdington, Birmingham, in 1911 or may be a few years
earlier. He continued there but the roller skating rink at some time
before the War closed, possibly due to the War or may be the rink
became a Cinema ?
Unfortunately, I have found no other information on him except the
date of his death from his death certificate. This was on 23rd
November 1938. His address being at Glebelands, Cinema Nursing
Retirement Home ? at Wokington, Berks. His occupation then was –
retired cinema manager.
I contacted this Retirement Home a little while ago for any
information but they were not helpful quoting the Data Protection
Act. All I simply wanted to know was where had he been a Cinema
Manager from after the 1st World War until he entered the Retirement
Home.
I have searched the Birmingham Library records of Cinema publications
in the area with no success but an retired Birmingham ex-cinema
manager recalled his name vaguely, and thought that he may have
worked in Nottingham ?
My interest in Mr Bridge is because he was the founder of the
National Roller Hockey Association in 1904 and was in those days a
Roller Skating Rink Manager fancy trick roller skater and a former
roller speed Champion.
Can you please help in this matter.
Your sincerely
Roger Pout, 68, Bognor Drive, Herne Bay, Kent CT6 8QR
Hon Life Member NRHA and Historian,
Gen Sec, Kent County Roller Hockey Association,
Publisher; “The early Years of English Roller Hockey 1885 – 1914″
Coventry now on sale
Our newest book is now available to purchase and advance orders are now being shipped. Details on our Publications page
Bioscope 110 at the printers
Contents :
Jarrow memories / Birmingham – a check-list / Reel Enthusiasm – 4 / Mansfield Ritz / The Sam Graham circuit / Obituary – Frank Wright / Review / Letters / Notes & Queries/Reviews: - Kent Cinemas Revisited and Suburban London Cinemas.
Cover : The Imperial Continental, Coventry in 1950 – photograph by owner W. G. Edkins
Research request for help, Percival/Patel
Annual General Meeting
The 2008 Society AGM is being held this Saturday in Newcastle (at the Tyneside Cinema) at 2pm, with a guided tour of the Cinema at 12:30.
Details were included as a flyer with the recent edition of Bioscope. However, should any Member have misplaced the flyer, a softcopy of the details (and map) can be downloaded as a PDF file.
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.
In: News, Publications
Coventry Picture Palaces
Here is a sneak preview of the forthcoming book cover.
