“Cinemas Remembered”
June 2002 Meeting Report
Guest Speaker - Ron Staten
The June meeting of the Keyworth & District Local History Society was attended by a slightly smaller than usual number of people for the presentation of “Cinemas Remembered”. Unfortunately the scheduled speaker, Mr Edward White, was indisposed but he had entrusted the responsibility of the evening to two of his trusted lieutenants, Ron Staten and “Ben”. Ron gave a brief synopsis of Edward White’s career in the cinema; how he left school at fourteen and went to work, with his father, at the Kinema on Haydn Road as the fourth projectionist and his subsequent rise to become the youngest, at twenty one years of age, Chief Projectionist in Nottingham. We were also regaled with a brief summary of the various architects, and their individual styles, which were responsible for many of the designs that were to be seen in the Nottingham theatres.
The evening then progressed to a slide show which must, initially, been very evocative of the early years of the silent screen. The projectionist had quite a bit of trouble with his equipment. The slides wouldn’t focus properly; the programme started going backwards, then forwards, then backwards again. Some slides were upside down, others on their side. The audience were in stitches. The mirth was increased by the nature of the slides. They were facsimiles of messages of public address requests from the days of the silent screen. “Please Do Not Read the Subtitles Out Loud”, “Ladies Please Remove Your Hats”, “No Smoking Please”, “For Your Benefit This Theatre is Disinfected with Izal”, “Ladies, If Someone Is Annoying You, Please Tell the Management”, and so on. And all the time the slide projector seemed to have a mind of it’s own and show whatever slide it felt like. Poor Ben didn’t know what to make of it until someone twigged the problem; the projector was set on automatic and resented Ben’s manual intervention. The device was duly set to manual and Ben’s troubles were eliminated. From then on his performance was flawless.
The audience were then shown slides of most of the cinemas that have graced, (or not as the case may be), the fair city of Nottingham during the course of the last hundred odd years. We were shown slides of the cinemas in their early days, their heyday and their sad fate; bingo halls and carpet warehouses seeming to be the most numerous lot for many once proud and popular establishments. Not all, however, seem to have enjoyed the esteem that they might have, the old Palladium in Beeston apparently having been known locally, (though not affectionately), as “The Bughouse”!! Nevertheless it was a nostalgic trip down memory lane for most of the audience since a great many of the establishments shown had been visited at one time or another by many of our members. All in all a very entertaining evening’s entertainment with special thanks to Ben for his sterling work on the projector and the mirth that it occasioned for the audience.