used to spend my free Wednesday afternoons acting as interpreter at a hostel the Salvation Army had set up in Clapton to house refugee children from the Spanish Civil War. In order to keep up with the questions the kids used to ask me, I paid close attention to the war reports from Sefton Delmer, the distinguished foreign correspondent of the Daily Express. I had long been attracted by the term ‘Foreign Correspondent’ and when I noticed that the photographs of Sefton Delmer invariably showed him wearing a belted raincoat with epaulettes, that clinched it. I wrote to him, outlining the marks I had been getting for Conversational Spanish and English Essay and asking whether there was any chance of joining him out there as an apprentice.
A little to my surprise, his reply was favourable. Less surprisingly, the reaction of my parents was not. Reasonably enough, they pointed out the sacrifices they had made to send me to a public school and the strong likelihood of my perishing on some foreign field before I reached seventeen.
As it was impossible for me to go to Spain without their consent, I went into a sulk and decided to leave school anyway. Rather than go on to university, I would start paving the way towards my next-on-the-list ambition, to become a highly paid Hollywood screenwriter.
The only person I could think of who might possibly have some access to Hollywood was the father of a girl I had recently taken out. His name was Sid Hyams, one of three brothers who owned and operated a small chain of London’s largest cinemas. He agreed to see me and suggested I come along to his office at the Gaumont State, Kilburn (‘Europe’s Newest, Largest and Most Luxurious Cinema’).
Having learned that the Hyams brothers also owned a film studio, I brought with me the synopses for two screenplays I had roughed out between making the appointment and setting out to meet Mr Sid, as he was called on his own turf; his two brothers being Mr Phil and Mr Mick.
I think he must have had a word with my parents in the interim, because he nodded my manuscripts into an in tray and made a counter-proposal. Before launching into a career as a writer for the cinema, might it not be prudent to spend some time learning the preferences and predilections of cinema audiences? And surely the best way to do that, he ventured, would be to work for a while as a cinema manager.
With that end in mind, he was prepared to put me through a training programme that would leave me conversant with every aspect of the cinema. Starting with a course in looking after the boilers, I would progress to electrician, stagehand, projectionist, member of the front-of-house team, thence to Assistant Manager and, finally, General Manager.
My apprenticeship began at the Gaumont State in 1939, when my blue boiler suit brought my mother close to tears every time she saw me leave the house in it. (‘Is this what all the sacrifices have been for?’) In 1941, I was transferred from Assistant Manager at the Trocadero, Elephant & Castle, to General Manager at the Gaumont, Watford. A few weeks after I arrived there, our feature film was Alfred Hitchcock’s first Hollywood movie, Foreign Correspondent. It starred Joel McCrea, wearing a belted raincoat with epaulettes.
The Gaumont Super Cinemas, built by the Hyams brothers, were palaces of Renaissance-style grandeur located in some of the poorest and dreariest parts of London. They included the Troxy, Commercial Road, the Trocadero, Elephant & Castle, the Regal, Edmonton, and the brothers’ proudest achievement, the Gaumont State, Kilburn, a 4,000-seater, the largest cinema in Britain (‘In Europe!’ insisted Mr Phil), with a tower you could see from miles away.
Mr Sid was the quiet, reflective brother, Mr Mick was the youngest, a restlessly energetic go-getter and Mr Phil was the powerhouse, loving the limelight and constantly proclaiming the role their Super Cinemas played in furnishing drab suburbs with buildings that reawoke magical expectations.
The larger cinemas in the chain featured Cine Variety, combining films with three or four top-line Variety acts. In addition to the two big general release movies and the stage show, you were offered a newsreel, an organ solo and a cartoon or ‘short’, not to mention the trailers. Sometimes the stage element would be in the form of a touring revue, a circus, a pantomime or even, though rarely, an opera.
All this for sixpence. Occasionally the full programme lasted over four hours, every minute of which, Mr Phil would warn his managers, had to live up to those magical expectations.
To a great extent, this meant observing certain rules of showmanship that are now considered irrelevant. ‘Never open the curtains on a white screen’ was one I remember, and today’s disregard for it can still irk me occasionally. Mr Phil held the view that allowing that large white oblong to glare at our patrons before they saw it occupied by a film image impeded their passage from reality into illusion, in those days the main reason for going to the pictures. We used to protect the illusion by making sure the curtains in front of the screen were closed when we projected the preliminary Censor’s Certificate, never revealing the screen until it was filled by the MGM lion or the Universal biplane and our patrons were well on their way to Hollywood.
While I was serving my time as Assistant Boilerman at the Gaumont State, we were sometimes told to raise the temperature inside the cinema in order to promote the sales of ice cream and soft drinks. It would generally happen when the feature film was set in the tropics or the desert and it always resulted, I was told, in a noticeable rise in sales.
When I came to the Trocadero as Assistant Manager, one of my more difficult duties was to superintend these sales. In addition to my less than perfect grasp of the monetary side, I had the daily responsibility of nominating the usherettes charged with carrying the ice cream trays.
When fully loaded with tubs and wafer-bars, the trays were a considerable weight, so it was a job the girls hated. To alleviate this, we had instituted an alphabetical rota system to ensure the work was shared out fairly.
For me, the snag in this system was that, as P. A. (known as Bill) Fowler, the General Manager explained, a girl could be excused ice cream tray duty and the rota bypassed if it happened to be her ‘time of the month’. Accordingly, at the daily general assembly in the main foyer before the doors opened, when all the front of house staff would be inspected for clean uniforms and fingernails, I would consult my rota-list and read out, ‘Miss Robinson, your turn for the front stalls ice cream tray.’
Not infrequently, Miss Robinson would answer, ‘Not today, sir. Time of the month.’
I would consult my list again. ‘But, Miss Robinson, you said that two weeks ago.’
Like as not, she would fix me with that bold Elephant & Castle stare and answer, ‘So?’
Barely eighteen years old and wearing my father’s dinnersuit, I was aware – as were they all – that I did not know enough about the mechanics of the matter to pursue it. ‘All right, Miss Robinson. Excused ice cream tray.’
The Hyams brothers enjoyed their reputation as ‘the last of the great showmen’ and never neglected an opportunity to live up to it. Of the three, Mr Phil was the most flamboyant and forceful. A tall, heavy-set man with hunched shoulders, he always seemed to be in a hurry, glowering and snapping out his words, although at unexpected times he would suddenly bestow a surprisingly friendly grin. The eldest of the brothers who had given London its most spectacular suburban cinemas, he acted on snap decisions and hunches, most of which worked out as anticipated. And while there would be some fearsome scowling when they failed, he would still flash the occasional conspiratorial grin.
I liked him enormously and jumped at the chance of attending his 100th birthday party, at which he sat in a very fancy wheelchair attended by two trim, short-skirted nurses, like old Mr Grace in Are You Being Served?. When I commented on this, I was given the same grin as sixty-odd years ago.
One of Mr Phil’s dicta that