I gained my first glimpse of such favourites as Max Miller, Teddy Brown, Max Wall, Jimmy James, Caryll and Mundy, Hutch, Eddie Gray. (For descriptive matter on such imperishables, I refer you to Roy Hudd’s excellent Cavalcade of Variety Acts and John Fisher’s equally loving Funny Way to be a Hero.)
With the Holborn Empire gone, its long-time Musical Director, Sidney Caplan, moved to the Watford Town Hall Music Hall, where I was General Manager. Sidney was not an easy man to get close to but if you caught him at the right moments, his stories of the Holborn Empire’s great names could be fascinating, especially if, like me, you believed Variety to have been the most pleasurable of public entertainments.
After I had wrung a sizeable number of these reminiscences from him – it entailed sieving out a certain amount of malice – I asked him whether he would be prepared to relate some of them on radio, using gramophone records of the artists concerned by way of illustration. After obtaining his slightly grudging consent, I contacted Anna Instone, the Head of the BBC’s Gramophone Record Department at the time, and asked her if she would be interested in putting on six radio half-hours entitled A History of the Holborn Empire, with none other than the theatre’s Musical Director as narrator, the script to be supplied by a newcomer to the broadcasting medium.
Thus was born my first BBC radio series. Transmitted early 1942, all that remains of it is a mention somewhere in the archives of Radio Times.
During the early forties I did some RAF training in Blackpool, where I discovered the cinemas were in the habit of interrupting the main feature sharp at 4 p.m. every day, regardless of what point in the storyline had been reached, in order to serve afternoon tea. The houselights would go up and trays bearing cups of tea would be passed along the rows. After fifteen minutes, the lights would dim down again, the trays would be passed back and the film would resume. Anyone unwise enough to be sitting at the end of a row at that point could be left holding stacks of trays and empty cups.
When I began my stint as General Manager of the Gaumont, Watford, they had only recently discontinued the practice of serving afternoon teas while the film was still showing. The cessation of this amenity was, I soon discovered, much regretted by various members of the front of house staff. Prior to my arrival, the Gaumont’s patrons could, by giving their order to one of the ushers or usherettes on their way in, enjoy a choice of four types of afternoon tea. Without taking their eyes off the big picture, they could partake of a plain pot of tea, a pot of tea with a sandwich, a pot of tea with a piece of cake, or a Full Cinema Tea, which consisted of a pot of tea with both sandwich and piece of cake.
A few of the more observant front of house staff had noted that many patrons who ordered the Full Cinema Tea did not consume both the accompanying items. If they ate the sandwich, they left the cake; if they ate the cake, they left the sandwich.
As a consequence, before certain ushers and usherettes returned a tray to the cinema café, they would lift off any unconsumed item and stow it behind the small velvet curtains that masked the back-stalls radiators. The next time a patron asked for a Full Cinema Tea, they would relay the order to the kitchen as a plain pot of tea, make up the deficiencies from the supplies they had secreted behind the radiator curtains, accept payment for the Full Cinema Tea and pocket the difference.
Our wartime cinema-goers would sit there in the darkness, munching on a sandwich and/or cake which had sometimes been gathering dust under a radiator for days and, to the best of my knowledge, we had not received one complaint.
Rarely were there any empty seats in places of entertainment during wartime. There were, however, certain differences in cinema-going habits. At the larger inner city houses, such as the Trocadero or the State, Kilburn, audiences went to see a particular film or a particular star in the accompanying Variety show. At the Gaumont, Watford, on the other hand, I found that, irrespective of what was showing, they liked to go to the same cinema every week, on the same day, at the same time and, not infrequently, many of them expected to sit in the same seat.
To meet this need, we had inaugurated a kind of unofficial Advance Booking System. It included me being in the foyer as they arrived, welcoming them by name, leading them upstairs to the Circle (most of them preferred the Circle), showing them into the seats that had been kept empty for them and leaving them with a warm ‘Enjoy the show.’ For their part, if there was any week they couldn’t make it, they would punctiliously telephone the cinema and let us know.
But the protocol did not end there. When the programme was over, they would expect me to be in the foyer as they came out, both to let them know if it was raining outside and to receive their reasoned critique of the programme.
For them, it was all part of their weekly cinema-going ritual and I can’t deny there were aspects of it that I found equally pleasing. For one thing, I always used to enjoy watching audiences emerge from the darkness after a movie. In those more innocent days, their faces would still have that tranced, slightly dazed look as they struggled to get into their coats, some of them unconsciously adopting the mannerisms of whatever big star they had just been watching.
My other reason was slightly more shady. There was a small cash sum I could draw on for ‘Entertaining regular patrons’. What this meant in practice, was delivering an ice cream tub to a few of them during the intermission, ‘With the Management’s compliments.’ As my Ice Cream Sales Account rarely seemed to balance, this could prove very useful for remedying deficiencies.
One mystery I never managed to solve was the inordinate number of ladies’ shoes that found their way into the cinema’s Lost Property cupboard at the end of each day. My apprenticeship as an usher had shown me how many female patrons would gratefully slip off one or both of their shoes as soon as they’d settled in their seats, while the variety of other items that turned up in the cupboard had demonstrated how the steep rake of the auditorium floor could cause any objects placed under a seat to slide forward beneath the row in front, and sometimes further.
I could understand why the retrieval of some of these might be neglected as not worth the trouble, but shoes? To deepen the mystery further, in all the hours I spent bidding a managerial farewell to patrons as they made their way out of the cinema, I never came across one who emerged shoeless.
What’s more, although a regular Saturday night patron known to the Gaumont, Watford, staff as ‘Rear Row Rita’ once contacted our Lost Property with a view to recovering a missing pair of pale pink panties, we never once received an enquiry in respect of missing shoes. They would pile up in the cupboard and every now and again we sent a representative batch of them to the Salvation Army.
After I had been at the Gaumont, Watford, for a while, Kine Weekly printed a few paragraphs about me, headed ‘Britain’s Youngest Cinema Manager’. If that was so, it was mainly because most of the other managers were now in the forces and, sure enough, late in 1942, I received my own call-up papers.
The Gaumont staff, plus those at the Town Hall Music Hall, which I was also managing by then, combined to present me with a splendid fitted leather suitcase as a leaving present. We had a boisterous party and the following noon, I turned up, as ordered, at the Induction Centre, RAF Padgate.
Two days later, I was back in the Gaumont foyer. Padgate, for their own good and sufficient reasons, had deferred my enlistment, instructing me to return whence I came, holding myself ready for recall at twenty-four hours’ notice. The Hyams Brothers
