Bentley’s sole cinema, when it opened its projectors were supplied by Gaumont, from their branch in Leeds. An A.W.H. sound system was installed in September 1931. Depending on the configuration AWH’s installations ranged from £400 to £750. Payment was either cash within 14 days of installing, or 18-months on hire purchase. There was a £50 installation charge which covered an engineer for two weeks. Thereafter, service support was £2 weekly or £5 monthly. It is telling that the vastly more expensive Western Electric system was installed around 1935.
The location marker is in the wrong place. The location was much further north; on the right hand side of Hoe Street at its junction with Forest Road. The cinema was directly across the road from The Bell.
It was opened by the Lord Mayor of York as the Electric Theatre on the afternoon of Saturday 3 June 1911, and was reported to be 125ft long and 38ft wide with 600 seats. The screen measured 21ft by 14ft and was made of ‘special cement plaster’. The Yorkshire Evening Press reported the building was originally destined to be two shops. The report emphasised the prodigious ventilation system, the plentiful exits, and the fireproof construction of the ‘operating room’.
The Empire opened on 8 May 1913 and was still presenting live acts and films in 1929. It looks to have closed in April 1932, which was recorded as the reason why the manager committed suicide by gassing on 3 May in his office. It probably become the Empire Ballroom Rothwell. The earliest mention (so far found) is 30 October 1935 in the Yorkshire Post: notice of a General Election meeting to be held there. From 21 October 1936 the Yorkshire Evening Post carried advertisements for the Empire Ballroom in Rothwell. Annoyingly, the street address was not given; but it does seem a coincidence. It’s interesting to see that, on the web, someone commends the ‘fabulous’ dance floor at Blackburn Hall.
(Apropos an earlier contribution: Queen Victoria had been dead for 12 years when the Empire opened.)
People are ghoulish and thoughtless. On the web I’ve seen ‘holiday’ photos of people standing on the railway lines leading to Auschwitz. ‘The Crowd’ was being shown in the evenings at the Glen at the time of the fateful children’s matinee. The photo shows the gates which were at the centre of the subsequent ‘culpable homicide’ trial. It was alleged they were locked closed. The manager was found not guilty.
See “Photos” for the correct building which housed this cinema. The story is complex.
There is confusion about the opening day. The cinema opened on Boxing Day 1909. Christmas Day was on Saturday. The next day was Sunday, so Boxing Day was Monday 27 December 1909. Theatres and the like did not open on Sundays.
The Bioscope 11 August 1910, in an item about the near-completed ‘New Picture Palace’ on Cavendish Street, which opened on 10 December 1910, reported that the Russell Street cinema ‘was intended originally for a warehouse’. However, The Bioscope of 30 December 1909 had reported ‘the building is an entirely new one built specially for a picture hall’. If the latter is correct, the Picture Palace on Russell Street would claim to be Keighley’s first purpose-built cinema.
A personal advert for engagements placed in The Stage in November 1912 by (with apologies) Eric Cunliffe ‘A Coloured Ragtime King and C**n comedian’ appearing at ‘The Premier Picture Palace, Russell St, Keighley’ indicates that live entertainment was on the cinema’s programme. There are also newspaper notices of public meetings being held there, though the operator reneged on a Sunday afternoon booking by the Independent Labour Party in February 1916.
The ‘lessees’ in ‘1922’ (that information from Mercia Cinema Society’s Cinemas of Keighley & the Aire Valley) were Richard Ramsbottom and Arthur Lewis from Haslingden in Lancashire. Their established line of work was fish-mongering and fish & chips. They were the Russell-Street Cinema Co (not limited), created in March 1923. In April 1924 they were fined for infringing the Cinematograph Act. An exit was blocked with a couch and chairs, film was left exposed in the projection room where doors were jammed open, and people using an adjacent ‘dressing room’ were smoking. (This may sound odd, but a licence hearing in 1924 heard that live acts had one dressing room next to the projection room. The acts had to make their way through the audience to the front.) As a result of the April 1924 prosecution, the West Riding County Council refused to renew the cinema’s licence. The pair’s business failure bankrupted them. Their hearing on 6 August 1924 heard they had paid £900 for the cinema in May 1923, but were total novices and had not examined the books. Weekly takings averaged £25; and outgoings £35 to £40. The cinema was put up for auction in early April 1924, but was withdrawn when bidding stalled at £200.
The picture theatre on Cavendish Street in Keighley opened on 10 December 1910. It had a single, sloping floor and was operated by the owners of the Picture Palace on Russell Street (which closed in 1924). The architects were J B Bailey & son of Keighley. It is listed in the Kinematograph Year Book 1914 as the Electric Theatre with a capacity of 800. By KYB 1927 it had become the Palace operated by Keighley Palace Ltd.
Still called the Palace, it was sold in December 1952. It closed on 31 December and was extensively refitted, the proscenium moved back, and new equipment (presumably including CinemaScope) installed. It reopened on 6 April 1953, rebranded as the Cavendish. KYB 1954 has 600 as the capacity and Palace (Keighley) Ltd as the owners.
Commencing 8 June 1961 it ran bingo two days per week; then three days per week from 6 August. The last film show was on 13 September, and bingo took over. Along with neighbouring premises, it has been demolished.
The Cosy Corner Picture House opened 26 August 1912 in the former saleroom of Weatherhead’s auctions. It closed 30 March 1957. It is listed in the 1914 Kinematograph Year Book as having 800 seats and being operated by the Cosy Corner Picture House Co Ltd. The Ordnance Survey 25-inch map, revised in 1913 and published in 1919, shows the cinema was down a side-alley on the south side of Low Street. The 1890 OS map shows the premises described as Auction Rooms.
In the Keighley Year Book 1917 the seating capacity was claimed to be higher: ‘Cosy Corner Picture House Low Street. Proprietors Cosy Corner Picture House Ltd. This highly popular place of entertainment was opened in June (sic) 1912 and has accommodation for 1,000 people. High-class and up to date pictures have made the “Cosy” a household word in both borough & district. The management is in the capable hands of Mr Arthur H Needham who has had a wide experience in the world of entertainment. Secretary M.P. Cryer, Accountant.’
By 1938 Cryer was the sole owner. Western Electric sound came in 1930 and Cinemascope in 1954 (when the capacity was 600).
On a Keighley local history web page, in 2008 someone put: ‘I can remember going there when I was quite young and getting in on a Saturday morning by taking a glass jam jar. You were given a stick of barley sugar and had to sit in the PLANKS first 3 or 4 rows which were wooden and right under the screen. Came out with stiff necks. The cinema was off Low Street, down a little alley by The Fifty Shilling Tailors.’
This is surely an error. It is a photograph relating to Sunday Night at the London Palladium.
HJHill
commented about
Cinemaon
Oct 20, 2021 at 3:36 pm
According to The Bioscope of 13 January 1921, the cinema at Thurcroft had opened recently. It was said to accommodate ‘about 1000’. The KYB 1931 shows it had an ‘Edibell’ sound system. It was a Morrison system in KYB 1935 and BTH in KYB 1947. Edibell, incidentally, was the Edison Bell Co Ltd known mainly for its records up to the early 1930s when the company folded. Its horn speakers for cinema were designed by Paul Voigt - a name known to aficionados of hifi loudspeakers. The company was not, as is sometimes claimed, a subsidiary of the US Edison company.
This photo dates from shortly after the opening in May 1939. According to Kinematograph Weekly of 22 June 1939, the projection throw was 137 ft and the screen 24 by 18 ft (4:3 ratio). There were “two Ross projectors with Type D lamps, two Ross spots, and a Premier Bi-unial slide projector”. The following week the magazine had a footnote adding that the sound was “Western Electric Mirrophonic”.
For accuracy: the rear of the stage of the Pavilion faced the far side of the Regal. The length axes of auditoria of the Regal and the Pavilion were at 90° to each other.
The auditorium at the lower left is a development that was stymied by the outbreak of the war. As a shell, it served as a wartime grain store; and looks not to have ever been fitted out and opened to the public. An auction advert from October 1940 called it the ‘New State Theatre’.
In ‘The Stage’ on 17 June 1947 there was a display advert for the Denville Players which had repertory companies at several theatres from Guernsey to Scotland, and was head quartered at the Pavilion Theatre, Northwich. The advert described the latter as “this theatre converted from a cinema”.
The auditorium rake followed the steep natural slope of the site; and one had the feeling of sliding forwards out of the seat.
The entrance shown in the photo was for the dearest and the mid-priced seats. The foyer had glazed, tiled walls (green and white, I recall) with doors either side of a central (dark wood and glass) pay box. The doors were at the heads of the two longitudinal aisles. One walked through the doors into a dark curtained triangle with the apex a few feet down the aisle.
Entrance to the cheap seats was via the right hand side of the building (shown in the photo), under a metal canopy to an entrance at the far end of the side wall. One entered a small lobby where there was a ticket counter in a wall opening; then walked into a dimly-lit a wooden box in the corner of the auditorium, turned right through double doors, and emerged at one end of the cross aisle below the screen (looming up on the right).
The only other cross aisle ran between exits located half-way down the side walls. It separated the cheap and mid-price seats. A heavy ornamental rope was hung between the rearmost cheap seats at either side of the aisle.
There was always an aroma of old-fashioned air freshener about the place.
There were three or four central large house lights hanging on chains from the high point of the barrel roof. They were hexagonal in shape, made of sheets of frosted/coloured glass, and very dated. They were supplemented with hexagonal-pillbox shaped glass lights fitted to the ceiling. The total effect was illumination with no atmosphere.
Above the screen (second half of the 1950s) was a pelmet from which the screen tabs hung in the air. There was no stage surface nor any sides into which the curtains were drawn. The screen was large and rather square, with Cinemascope shown as a rectangle across the middle. The masking did not move (if I recall correctly).
The view in the exterior photo is on the east side of Manchester Road, looking south (i.e. up the gradient and out of town). Manchester Road’s junction with Croft Street is not very far behind the camera.
The pointer on the map is way out – far too south out of town. I have uploaded part of the 1921 15-inch OS map. It shows the Grand on the east side of Manchester Road just north of Clifford Street, which no longer joins Manchester Road. The site of the Grand is probably beneath the tarmac of the latter. There is also an aerial view of the district.
Bentley’s sole cinema, when it opened its projectors were supplied by Gaumont, from their branch in Leeds. An A.W.H. sound system was installed in September 1931. Depending on the configuration AWH’s installations ranged from £400 to £750. Payment was either cash within 14 days of installing, or 18-months on hire purchase. There was a £50 installation charge which covered an engineer for two weeks. Thereafter, service support was £2 weekly or £5 monthly. It is telling that the vastly more expensive Western Electric system was installed around 1935.
The building in front on the left is the dwelling shown on the right in the photo of the Coop entrance. It was never part of the cinema.
The location marker is in the wrong place. The location was much further north; on the right hand side of Hoe Street at its junction with Forest Road. The cinema was directly across the road from The Bell.
The location marker is in the wrong place. The location was further north; opposite and immediately south of the junction with Cairo Road.
The location marker is in the wrong place. The location was further north; opposite and immediately south of the junction with Cairo Road.
I see the (cataloguing) logic, but it’s a shame that most readers will regard this multiples as Walthamstow’s only/original Empire.
There was an Empire cinema at ‘Bell Corner’ Wlathamstow.
It opened in December 1913. The company was created in January 1913.
It was opened by the Lord Mayor of York as the Electric Theatre on the afternoon of Saturday 3 June 1911, and was reported to be 125ft long and 38ft wide with 600 seats. The screen measured 21ft by 14ft and was made of ‘special cement plaster’. The Yorkshire Evening Press reported the building was originally destined to be two shops. The report emphasised the prodigious ventilation system, the plentiful exits, and the fireproof construction of the ‘operating room’.
The Empire opened on 8 May 1913 and was still presenting live acts and films in 1929. It looks to have closed in April 1932, which was recorded as the reason why the manager committed suicide by gassing on 3 May in his office. It probably become the Empire Ballroom Rothwell. The earliest mention (so far found) is 30 October 1935 in the Yorkshire Post: notice of a General Election meeting to be held there. From 21 October 1936 the Yorkshire Evening Post carried advertisements for the Empire Ballroom in Rothwell. Annoyingly, the street address was not given; but it does seem a coincidence. It’s interesting to see that, on the web, someone commends the ‘fabulous’ dance floor at Blackburn Hall. (Apropos an earlier contribution: Queen Victoria had been dead for 12 years when the Empire opened.)
People are ghoulish and thoughtless. On the web I’ve seen ‘holiday’ photos of people standing on the railway lines leading to Auschwitz. ‘The Crowd’ was being shown in the evenings at the Glen at the time of the fateful children’s matinee. The photo shows the gates which were at the centre of the subsequent ‘culpable homicide’ trial. It was alleged they were locked closed. The manager was found not guilty.
UPDATE/EDIT:
See “Photos” for the correct building which housed this cinema. The story is complex.
There is confusion about the opening day. The cinema opened on Boxing Day 1909. Christmas Day was on Saturday. The next day was Sunday, so Boxing Day was Monday 27 December 1909. Theatres and the like did not open on Sundays.
The Bioscope 11 August 1910, in an item about the near-completed ‘New Picture Palace’ on Cavendish Street, which opened on 10 December 1910, reported that the Russell Street cinema ‘was intended originally for a warehouse’. However, The Bioscope of 30 December 1909 had reported ‘the building is an entirely new one built specially for a picture hall’. If the latter is correct, the Picture Palace on Russell Street would claim to be Keighley’s first purpose-built cinema.
A personal advert for engagements placed in The Stage in November 1912 by (with apologies) Eric Cunliffe ‘A Coloured Ragtime King and C**n comedian’ appearing at ‘The Premier Picture Palace, Russell St, Keighley’ indicates that live entertainment was on the cinema’s programme. There are also newspaper notices of public meetings being held there, though the operator reneged on a Sunday afternoon booking by the Independent Labour Party in February 1916.
The ‘lessees’ in ‘1922’ (that information from Mercia Cinema Society’s Cinemas of Keighley & the Aire Valley) were Richard Ramsbottom and Arthur Lewis from Haslingden in Lancashire. Their established line of work was fish-mongering and fish & chips. They were the Russell-Street Cinema Co (not limited), created in March 1923. In April 1924 they were fined for infringing the Cinematograph Act. An exit was blocked with a couch and chairs, film was left exposed in the projection room where doors were jammed open, and people using an adjacent ‘dressing room’ were smoking. (This may sound odd, but a licence hearing in 1924 heard that live acts had one dressing room next to the projection room. The acts had to make their way through the audience to the front.) As a result of the April 1924 prosecution, the West Riding County Council refused to renew the cinema’s licence. The pair’s business failure bankrupted them. Their hearing on 6 August 1924 heard they had paid £900 for the cinema in May 1923, but were total novices and had not examined the books. Weekly takings averaged £25; and outgoings £35 to £40. The cinema was put up for auction in early April 1924, but was withdrawn when bidding stalled at £200.
The picture theatre on Cavendish Street in Keighley opened on 10 December 1910. It had a single, sloping floor and was operated by the owners of the Picture Palace on Russell Street (which closed in 1924). The architects were J B Bailey & son of Keighley. It is listed in the Kinematograph Year Book 1914 as the Electric Theatre with a capacity of 800. By KYB 1927 it had become the Palace operated by Keighley Palace Ltd.
Still called the Palace, it was sold in December 1952. It closed on 31 December and was extensively refitted, the proscenium moved back, and new equipment (presumably including CinemaScope) installed. It reopened on 6 April 1953, rebranded as the Cavendish. KYB 1954 has 600 as the capacity and Palace (Keighley) Ltd as the owners.
Commencing 8 June 1961 it ran bingo two days per week; then three days per week from 6 August. The last film show was on 13 September, and bingo took over. Along with neighbouring premises, it has been demolished.
The Cosy Corner Picture House opened 26 August 1912 in the former saleroom of Weatherhead’s auctions. It closed 30 March 1957. It is listed in the 1914 Kinematograph Year Book as having 800 seats and being operated by the Cosy Corner Picture House Co Ltd. The Ordnance Survey 25-inch map, revised in 1913 and published in 1919, shows the cinema was down a side-alley on the south side of Low Street. The 1890 OS map shows the premises described as Auction Rooms.
In the Keighley Year Book 1917 the seating capacity was claimed to be higher: ‘Cosy Corner Picture House Low Street. Proprietors Cosy Corner Picture House Ltd. This highly popular place of entertainment was opened in June (sic) 1912 and has accommodation for 1,000 people. High-class and up to date pictures have made the “Cosy” a household word in both borough & district. The management is in the capable hands of Mr Arthur H Needham who has had a wide experience in the world of entertainment. Secretary M.P. Cryer, Accountant.’
By 1938 Cryer was the sole owner. Western Electric sound came in 1930 and Cinemascope in 1954 (when the capacity was 600).
On a Keighley local history web page, in 2008 someone put: ‘I can remember going there when I was quite young and getting in on a Saturday morning by taking a glass jam jar. You were given a stick of barley sugar and had to sit in the PLANKS first 3 or 4 rows which were wooden and right under the screen. Came out with stiff necks. The cinema was off Low Street, down a little alley by The Fifty Shilling Tailors.’
This is surely an error. It is a photograph relating to Sunday Night at the London Palladium.
According to The Bioscope of 13 January 1921, the cinema at Thurcroft had opened recently. It was said to accommodate ‘about 1000’. The KYB 1931 shows it had an ‘Edibell’ sound system. It was a Morrison system in KYB 1935 and BTH in KYB 1947. Edibell, incidentally, was the Edison Bell Co Ltd known mainly for its records up to the early 1930s when the company folded. Its horn speakers for cinema were designed by Paul Voigt - a name known to aficionados of hifi loudspeakers. The company was not, as is sometimes claimed, a subsidiary of the US Edison company.
This photo dates from shortly after the opening in May 1939. According to Kinematograph Weekly of 22 June 1939, the projection throw was 137 ft and the screen 24 by 18 ft (4:3 ratio). There were “two Ross projectors with Type D lamps, two Ross spots, and a Premier Bi-unial slide projector”. The following week the magazine had a footnote adding that the sound was “Western Electric Mirrophonic”.
For accuracy: the rear of the stage of the Pavilion faced the far side of the Regal. The length axes of auditoria of the Regal and the Pavilion were at 90° to each other.
The auditorium at the lower left is a development that was stymied by the outbreak of the war. As a shell, it served as a wartime grain store; and looks not to have ever been fitted out and opened to the public. An auction advert from October 1940 called it the ‘New State Theatre’.
The mystery theatre was the never-opened State or New State Theatre.
In ‘The Stage’ on 17 June 1947 there was a display advert for the Denville Players which had repertory companies at several theatres from Guernsey to Scotland, and was head quartered at the Pavilion Theatre, Northwich. The advert described the latter as “this theatre converted from a cinema”.
This item from the Lancashire Evening News of 7 October 1938 gives the official opening as Wednesday 5 October 1938.
The auditorium rake followed the steep natural slope of the site; and one had the feeling of sliding forwards out of the seat.
The entrance shown in the photo was for the dearest and the mid-priced seats. The foyer had glazed, tiled walls (green and white, I recall) with doors either side of a central (dark wood and glass) pay box. The doors were at the heads of the two longitudinal aisles. One walked through the doors into a dark curtained triangle with the apex a few feet down the aisle.
Entrance to the cheap seats was via the right hand side of the building (shown in the photo), under a metal canopy to an entrance at the far end of the side wall. One entered a small lobby where there was a ticket counter in a wall opening; then walked into a dimly-lit a wooden box in the corner of the auditorium, turned right through double doors, and emerged at one end of the cross aisle below the screen (looming up on the right).
The only other cross aisle ran between exits located half-way down the side walls. It separated the cheap and mid-price seats. A heavy ornamental rope was hung between the rearmost cheap seats at either side of the aisle.
There was always an aroma of old-fashioned air freshener about the place.
There were three or four central large house lights hanging on chains from the high point of the barrel roof. They were hexagonal in shape, made of sheets of frosted/coloured glass, and very dated. They were supplemented with hexagonal-pillbox shaped glass lights fitted to the ceiling. The total effect was illumination with no atmosphere.
Above the screen (second half of the 1950s) was a pelmet from which the screen tabs hung in the air. There was no stage surface nor any sides into which the curtains were drawn. The screen was large and rather square, with Cinemascope shown as a rectangle across the middle. The masking did not move (if I recall correctly).
The view in the exterior photo is on the east side of Manchester Road, looking south (i.e. up the gradient and out of town). Manchester Road’s junction with Croft Street is not very far behind the camera.
The pointer on the map is way out – far too south out of town. I have uploaded part of the 1921 15-inch OS map. It shows the Grand on the east side of Manchester Road just north of Clifford Street, which no longer joins Manchester Road. The site of the Grand is probably beneath the tarmac of the latter. There is also an aerial view of the district.
The Grand was very close to the city centre.
The Grand is the ‘Cin’ to the left of the words Marshall’s Mill.