Volume 1 of Cezar Del Valle’s Brooklyn Theatre Index gives operating dates of 1908 to 1931 for the Fulton Auditorium, and October 28, 1948 to 1976 for the Banco Theatre. That fits in with the 1935 Certificate of Occupancy for a cabaret and show room on the ground floor, cited in an earlier comment by Ed Solero.
Brownstoner has this page for the building at 1298 Fulton Street, which says that the plans for the 1913 conversion of the theater into a movie house were by architect James Boyle. This project was probably fairly extensive, as the July 6, 1910, issue of The Film Index ran a brief article about the Fulton Auditorium which said that it then had about 300 seats.
The article is worth quoting in full for its depiction of the nascent star system, which had barely begun, as well as its brief description of the Fulton Auditorium itself:
“Popular Vitagraph Player Receives Ovation at Fulton Auditorium
“Filled with photographs and announcements of the ‘Vitagraph Girl’s’ appearance and reception, the lobby of the ‘Fulton Auditorium’ of Brooklyn, presented a very brilliant display. A large automobile stopped in front of the theatre and Miss Florence E. Turner, ‘The Vitagraph Girl’ with the Vitagraph representative alighted from the tonneau and were greeted by Mr. Charles Cranides, the Manager, and a large congregation of spectators who were waiting to get a look at Miss Turner to see if she is as attractive in reality as she is in the pictures. Entering the Auditorium which was already crowded, ‘The Vitagraph Girl’ was introduced to the audience by the representative and received a royal welcome. In response Miss Turner said: ‘I don’t know what to say in addition to my flattering introduction to you. I don’t know that I look all that has been said about me. I am glad to know I am so well thought of and I will do my best to sustain and merit your good opinions and kind appreciation of me. I thank you all and hope I shall meet you often in person as well as in the Vitagraph pictures.’
“This little speech was greeted with applause, three or four attendants came forward and handed Miss Turner several bouquets and baskets of flowers which almost hid her from view.
“Mr. Arthur Ogden in a rich baritone voice sang the popular motion picture ballad ‘The Vitagraph Girl’ illustrated by a series of beautiful colored slides followed by two or three Vitagraph films in which Miss Turner featured. Afterward an informal reception was given to the guest of the evening by the audience who came forward to shake her hand and make her acquaintance. Manager Cranides arranged a very delightful supper for Miss Turner and her friends and did everything possible to make things pleasant for everybody.
“There is a right and a wrong way of doing things. Manager Cranides has the right one. His theatre is run right with all conveniences and comforts. It seats about three hundred; has a pipe organ for special music as well as a piano. The auditorium is large and airy and always filled with an exceptionally refined audience who are always greeted with a welcome smile or a cheerful good evening from Mrs. Cranides who is just as nice as her husband.”
I’ve been unable to discover the name of the original architect, or of whoever planned the alterations that must have been needed when the house was reopened as the Banco Theatre in 1948.
The December 22, 1917, issue of The Moving Picture World mentions the Palace:
“HECTOR, MINN. — Dr. Erickson has disposed of the Palace theater to George Holland of Red Lake Falls and A. W. Fisk of Gettysburg”
Something puzzling is that the Internet has a couple of pages about the theater department of the Buffalo Lake-Hector-Stewart schools presenting school plays at the Palace Theatre, 301 Main Street South, Hector. The Internet also gives that as the address of the Hector City Hall.
Google Maps' street view of the location shows a modern building that looks nothing like a theater. It could be that the City Hall has a multi-purpose room both for council meetings and community events, and they call it the Palace Theatre when it’s used for the school plays. It’s a corner location, and might be on the site of the original Palace Theatre.
A. R. Anderson was the original operator of the third Orpheum Theatre in Twin Falls, and had operated the second Orpheum and the Gem Theatre as well. He was a regular contributor of capsule movie reviews to trade journals Motography and Exhibitors Herald between 1918 and 1922.
The aka Colonial Theatre should be added for this house, per CSWalczak and BillCounter’s information in the previous comments.
This item from the July 23, 1919, issue of Building & Engineering News most likely pertains to the Colonial Theatre:
“MONROVIA, Los Angeles Co., Cal.
Class ‘C’ motion picture theatre, 88x54. Owner — Mrs. Castle. Architect— S. M. Cooper, 802 Story Bldg., Los Angeles.”
The original building being only 88 feet deep would have left plenty of room for the stage house that was added in 1921. Sanson Milligan Cooper appears to have started out as a contractor and gradually eased into architecture in the late teens and early twenties.
A historic resources survey of Santa Paula (enormous PDF here, though there are only a couple of pages about the theater) says that this house was the Electra Theatre in the 1910s. We have the Electra Theatre listed at 118-120 E. Main Street. It’s possible that Santa Paula went through a renumbering at some point, or it is possible that the Electra Had two different locations, but I think the renumbering is much more likely. Modern 118-120 E. Main is well outside the town’s historic business district and is surrounded by mostly modern residential or industrial buildings. In the 1910s it was probably just scattered houses and small orchards, which would have been a very unlikely location for a movie theater.
There was a proposal to build a new theater in Santa Paula in 1919, noted in the June 25 issue of Building & Engineering News, but I haven’t yet discovered if it got built or not. It’s possible that it was a new home for the Electra, and is the building standing today.
As it was open by very early 1920 (mentioned in the January 18 issue of The Los Angeles Times,) the California Theatre might be the project noted in the April 16, 1919, issue of Building & Engineering News:
“Plans Prepared.
“THEATRE, ETC., Cost, $80,000
“SANTA BARBARA. Cal. West Canon Perdido St. Two-story reinforced concrete and brick theatre and store building, 65x150 (excavation started.) Owner — E. A. Johnson. Architect— J. Corbley Pool, 10 Bothin Bldg., Santa Barbara. A large pipe organ will be installed.”
The May 3 edition of The Moving Picture World also mentioned the project, saying that it would be exclusively a picture house, with all seats on one saucer-shaped floor that would feature a tunnel exit (which sounds as though it might have had a stadium-style section.) The pipe organ for the house was budgeted at $30,000.
A biographical sketch of architect J. Corbley Pool published in 1917 said that he was also noted as an acoustical engineer. He served as a consultant in the design many churches and auditoriums across the United States. Perhaps that $30,000 organ had something to do with the choice of Mr. Pool as architect for this theater.
This theater for which the May 21, 1921, issue of Building & Engineering News said plans were being prepared was probably the Maybell Theatre, but it turned out that the original architect didn’t design the house after all:
“BELL, Los Angeles Co., Cal.
“One and two-story brick and terra cotta theatre, store and office bldg. Owner — Dr. T. G. De Vaugh and J. V. De Vaugh. Architect — J. T. Payne. 426 Western Mutual Life Bldg. Los Angeles.”
The item got the names of the clients wrong (it was supposed to be T. G. De Vaughn and J. V. Spaugh) according to the documents generated by a court case that ensued. De Vaughn and Spaugh found that Payne was not a licensed architect, and so they had a Mr. Zeller prepare new plans for their theater and supervise its construction, much to the displeasure of Payne, who subsequently sued.
The upshot is that the Maybell Theatre as built was designed by architect Julian T. Zeller, who a few years later also designed the Alcazar (aka Liberty) Theatre a couple of blocks east.
This item from the May 21, 1921, issue of Building & Engineering News could have been about the house that became the National Theatre:
“Construction To Start Immediately
THEATRE. ETC. Cost. $85,000
“WOODLAND, Yolo Co., Cal. West Main Street. Brick drama and motion picture theatre and store building, 40x160. seating 900 persons. Owner — W. W. Stuart Webster. Architect & Contractor — E. L. Younger Porter Bldg., Woodland, Calif. A Robert Morton organ to cost $15,000 has already been purchased.”
The Majestic Theatre operated from January 1, 1917 to June 4, 1943, with at least one lengthy interregnum during the depression.
The December 24, 1935, edition of The Mansfield News-Journal said that Warner Bros. would reopen the newly redecorated Majestic Theatre on Christmas Day. The house had been closed for more than a year. Warner planned to have daily shows at the Majestic until January 5, after which it would return to a policy of operating on Saturday and Sunday only.
A readers' question-and-answer column in the December 23,, 1966, issue of the News Journal told of the end of the Majestic Theatre:
“The Majestic met its un-majestic end Dec 26, 1944 when the roof collapsed under the weight of tons of snow and ice following a three-week storm. It had not been used as a theater since June 4, 1943. The theater was built in 1915 at a cost of more than $100,000. Nobody was hurt when the roof collapsed.”
This web page reproduces a list of the events of 1917 as published in the December 31 issue of The Mansfield News, and it says that the Majestic Theatre opened on January 1, 1917.
Plans to convert the Normandy Room of the Fairmont Hotel into a theater were afoot as early as 1919, according to an item in the April 16 issue of Building & Engineering News:
“SAN FRANCISCO. Blk Bded by Powell, Mason, California and Sacramento.
“Extensive alterations to Class ‘A’ hotel (build garage, alter tunnel and remodel Normandy Room into elaborate theatre of 400 seats).
“Owner — Hammond Ohlerich.
“Architect — Reid Bros.. 105 Montgomery St., San Francisco.
“NOTE — This work has been contemplated for over two years and it is now expected to go ahead.”
I’m not sure if the Nob Hill Theatre of 1944 was located in the former Normandy Room or not. It seems unlikely that the Fairmont would have been installing a movie theater as early as 1919, so that project might have been for a legitimate house. I don’t know if these plans were carried out or not.
The Rialto was located at 406 Oak Street, and has been demolished. Its site is now a parking lot.
Here is the PSTOS page for the Rialto Theatre in Hood River. The Rialto’s Wurlitzer organ, installed in 1921, was moved to the Egyptian Theatre in Coos Bay in 1956, but it has recently been returned to Hood River where it is installed in The History Museum of Hood River County and undergoing restoration.
The History Museum has two photos on this page. One is a close view of the theater entrance during a renovation sometime around 1930, and the other shows the Wurlitzer organ being played by Vera Kolstad, wife of the theater’s first owner, Arthur Kolstad.
As we know the name of the theater’s owner, it must have been the Rialto that was the subject of an item in the April 9, 1921, issue of Building & Engineering News which said that architect Henderson Ryan was preparing plans for a two-story theater to be built at Hood River, Oregon, for A. S. Kolstad. The Wurlitzer was installed in 1921, so the theater must have been completed and opened before the end of that year.
The Stockton history site maintained by Wright Realtors says that the Roxy Theatre opened as the Lyric Theatre and was later called the National Theatre and the Studio Theatre before finally being renamed the Roxy. There are photos of the building about 1/5 of the way down this web page, though the page mistakenly gives the address as 124-130 Sutter (the site’s Stockton Theatres Over the Years page gives the correct address, but only has one of the photos.)
The Lyric Theatre was in operation by 1915. That year a feature in the July issue of the trade journal The Architect and Engineer of California attributed the design of the Lyric Theatre to the Stockton firm Stone & Wright. Stone & Wright were also the architects of the Lodi Theatre, built in nearby Lodi in 1918.
The Facebook photo page for Zoe Jakes House of Tarot has two recent photos of the auditorium of the Palace Theatre. The are no seats on the main floor, but there are in the balcony. It doesn’t look as thought here’s been any restoration, but the building appears sound and the atmospheric decor is intact, though painted a uniform beige with a bit of dark brown trim.
The history of the Strand/Varnville Theatre on this web page features a photo of the building taken during its post-theatrical period. The roof collapsed in 2000, and the building was subsequently demolished.
This web page has dozens of photos of Johannesburg’s movie theaters, including a late photo (no earlier than 1955) of the Bijou, about ¼ of the way down the page.
Street View is a block too far north, but the Google map’s pin icon is about ten blocks too far south. The Adelphi’s building was at the northeast corner of Main Road and Rhine Road.
Photos of the Adelphi Kinema and two other theaters here. The Adelphi was in a splendid Streamline Modern building with a rounded end at the corner of Rhine Road. The site is currently occupied by a Pic ‘n Pay store in a building that is anything but splendid.
Because these blocks of St. George’s Mall and Waterkant Street were inaccessible to Google’s camera car there is no good street view of the site of the Metro Theatre. If you look southwest along the Mall from Riebeek Street, the African Bank on the right is at 6 St. George’s Mall, so the Metro’s site was under the footprint of the gray concrete building just beyond it, which extends to the corner of Waterkant Street. The Colosseum Theatre was across the mall from the African Bank building, so this block had two of Cape Town’s movie palaces.
The only photo I can find showing the Metro is this general view of St. George’s Street, probably taken around 1950m lookingsouthwest from a block northeast of Riebeek Street. The Metro is on the right in the second block. On the left side of the street the first four letters on the Colosseum’s vertical sign can be seen.
According to this web page, the formal opening of the Colosseum Theatre took place on February 14, 1938, and it was converted to shops and offices in 1972.
Three photos of Cape Town’s Colosseum Theatre are at this link. The building has been converted into a residential-commercial condominium which has a web site. It’s difficult to tell for sure, but from the virtual tours of the units it looks as though they demolished the auditorium to use the space partly as an atrium and partly for new construction.
Two photos of the auditorium and a drawing of the facade of the Grand Theatre in Pietermaritzburg can be found on this web page.
A photo of the exterior of the Grand can be seen on this web page, which also mentions three other movie houses in Pietermaritzburg; the Rinko, the King’s, and the Excelsior. An additional cinema, the 20th Century, which opened in 1941, is not mentioned.
The thumbnail image on this web page wouldn’t load for me, but I clicked where it should have been and got a page with a photo of the building that housed the Odeon Cinema and Thelma Court Flats. The photo shows that architect Max Policansky’s design was Midcentury Modern (or Streamline Modern, if we must bundle them together) rather than Art Deco.
Artefacts' web page for Hanson, Tomkin & Finkelstein doesn’t list this theater among their works, though it does list the 20th Century Cinemas in Pretoria and Johannesburg.
Three interior shots dated 1933 are among the four photos of the Plaza Theatre found on this web page. The decor features some nice Art Deco touches, though the overall design is less ornate than was typical of the style. Werner Wagner, then employed at the architectural firm of Kallenbach, Kennedy & Furner, was the design architect on this project.
This web page says that the Plaza Kinema was designed by Kallenbach, Kennedy & Furner, with Walgate & Ellsworth. This was the same team that designed the Capitol and Adelphi Theatres in Cape Town.
This web page says that the Prince’s Theatre was designed by architect William Hutchinson Mason. The renovation of this house and the adjacent Playhouse Theatre as the Playhouse Theatre Complex in 1985-86 was handled by the firm of Small & Pettit & Robson.
Volume 1 of Cezar Del Valle’s Brooklyn Theatre Index gives operating dates of 1908 to 1931 for the Fulton Auditorium, and October 28, 1948 to 1976 for the Banco Theatre. That fits in with the 1935 Certificate of Occupancy for a cabaret and show room on the ground floor, cited in an earlier comment by Ed Solero.
Brownstoner has this page for the building at 1298 Fulton Street, which says that the plans for the 1913 conversion of the theater into a movie house were by architect James Boyle. This project was probably fairly extensive, as the July 6, 1910, issue of The Film Index ran a brief article about the Fulton Auditorium which said that it then had about 300 seats.
The article is worth quoting in full for its depiction of the nascent star system, which had barely begun, as well as its brief description of the Fulton Auditorium itself:
I’ve been unable to discover the name of the original architect, or of whoever planned the alterations that must have been needed when the house was reopened as the Banco Theatre in 1948.The December 22, 1917, issue of The Moving Picture World mentions the Palace:
Something puzzling is that the Internet has a couple of pages about the theater department of the Buffalo Lake-Hector-Stewart schools presenting school plays at the Palace Theatre, 301 Main Street South, Hector. The Internet also gives that as the address of the Hector City Hall.Google Maps' street view of the location shows a modern building that looks nothing like a theater. It could be that the City Hall has a multi-purpose room both for council meetings and community events, and they call it the Palace Theatre when it’s used for the school plays. It’s a corner location, and might be on the site of the original Palace Theatre.
A. R. Anderson was the original operator of the third Orpheum Theatre in Twin Falls, and had operated the second Orpheum and the Gem Theatre as well. He was a regular contributor of capsule movie reviews to trade journals Motography and Exhibitors Herald between 1918 and 1922.
The aka Colonial Theatre should be added for this house, per CSWalczak and BillCounter’s information in the previous comments.
This item from the July 23, 1919, issue of Building & Engineering News most likely pertains to the Colonial Theatre:
The original building being only 88 feet deep would have left plenty of room for the stage house that was added in 1921. Sanson Milligan Cooper appears to have started out as a contractor and gradually eased into architecture in the late teens and early twenties.A historic resources survey of Santa Paula (enormous PDF here, though there are only a couple of pages about the theater) says that this house was the Electra Theatre in the 1910s. We have the Electra Theatre listed at 118-120 E. Main Street. It’s possible that Santa Paula went through a renumbering at some point, or it is possible that the Electra Had two different locations, but I think the renumbering is much more likely. Modern 118-120 E. Main is well outside the town’s historic business district and is surrounded by mostly modern residential or industrial buildings. In the 1910s it was probably just scattered houses and small orchards, which would have been a very unlikely location for a movie theater.
There was a proposal to build a new theater in Santa Paula in 1919, noted in the June 25 issue of Building & Engineering News, but I haven’t yet discovered if it got built or not. It’s possible that it was a new home for the Electra, and is the building standing today.
As it was open by very early 1920 (mentioned in the January 18 issue of The Los Angeles Times,) the California Theatre might be the project noted in the April 16, 1919, issue of Building & Engineering News:
The May 3 edition of The Moving Picture World also mentioned the project, saying that it would be exclusively a picture house, with all seats on one saucer-shaped floor that would feature a tunnel exit (which sounds as though it might have had a stadium-style section.) The pipe organ for the house was budgeted at $30,000.A biographical sketch of architect J. Corbley Pool published in 1917 said that he was also noted as an acoustical engineer. He served as a consultant in the design many churches and auditoriums across the United States. Perhaps that $30,000 organ had something to do with the choice of Mr. Pool as architect for this theater.
This theater for which the May 21, 1921, issue of Building & Engineering News said plans were being prepared was probably the Maybell Theatre, but it turned out that the original architect didn’t design the house after all:
The item got the names of the clients wrong (it was supposed to be T. G. De Vaughn and J. V. Spaugh) according to the documents generated by a court case that ensued. De Vaughn and Spaugh found that Payne was not a licensed architect, and so they had a Mr. Zeller prepare new plans for their theater and supervise its construction, much to the displeasure of Payne, who subsequently sued.The upshot is that the Maybell Theatre as built was designed by architect Julian T. Zeller, who a few years later also designed the Alcazar (aka Liberty) Theatre a couple of blocks east.
This item from the May 21, 1921, issue of Building & Engineering News could have been about the house that became the National Theatre:
The Majestic Theatre operated from January 1, 1917 to June 4, 1943, with at least one lengthy interregnum during the depression.
The December 24, 1935, edition of The Mansfield News-Journal said that Warner Bros. would reopen the newly redecorated Majestic Theatre on Christmas Day. The house had been closed for more than a year. Warner planned to have daily shows at the Majestic until January 5, after which it would return to a policy of operating on Saturday and Sunday only.
A readers' question-and-answer column in the December 23,, 1966, issue of the News Journal told of the end of the Majestic Theatre:
This web page reproduces a list of the events of 1917 as published in the December 31 issue of The Mansfield News, and it says that the Majestic Theatre opened on January 1, 1917.Plans to convert the Normandy Room of the Fairmont Hotel into a theater were afoot as early as 1919, according to an item in the April 16 issue of Building & Engineering News:
I’m not sure if the Nob Hill Theatre of 1944 was located in the former Normandy Room or not. It seems unlikely that the Fairmont would have been installing a movie theater as early as 1919, so that project might have been for a legitimate house. I don’t know if these plans were carried out or not.The Rialto was located at 406 Oak Street, and has been demolished. Its site is now a parking lot.
Here is the PSTOS page for the Rialto Theatre in Hood River. The Rialto’s Wurlitzer organ, installed in 1921, was moved to the Egyptian Theatre in Coos Bay in 1956, but it has recently been returned to Hood River where it is installed in The History Museum of Hood River County and undergoing restoration.
The History Museum has two photos on this page. One is a close view of the theater entrance during a renovation sometime around 1930, and the other shows the Wurlitzer organ being played by Vera Kolstad, wife of the theater’s first owner, Arthur Kolstad.
As we know the name of the theater’s owner, it must have been the Rialto that was the subject of an item in the April 9, 1921, issue of Building & Engineering News which said that architect Henderson Ryan was preparing plans for a two-story theater to be built at Hood River, Oregon, for A. S. Kolstad. The Wurlitzer was installed in 1921, so the theater must have been completed and opened before the end of that year.
The Stockton history site maintained by Wright Realtors says that the Roxy Theatre opened as the Lyric Theatre and was later called the National Theatre and the Studio Theatre before finally being renamed the Roxy. There are photos of the building about 1/5 of the way down this web page, though the page mistakenly gives the address as 124-130 Sutter (the site’s Stockton Theatres Over the Years page gives the correct address, but only has one of the photos.)
The Lyric Theatre was in operation by 1915. That year a feature in the July issue of the trade journal The Architect and Engineer of California attributed the design of the Lyric Theatre to the Stockton firm Stone & Wright. Stone & Wright were also the architects of the Lodi Theatre, built in nearby Lodi in 1918.
The Facebook photo page for Zoe Jakes House of Tarot has two recent photos of the auditorium of the Palace Theatre. The are no seats on the main floor, but there are in the balcony. It doesn’t look as thought here’s been any restoration, but the building appears sound and the atmospheric decor is intact, though painted a uniform beige with a bit of dark brown trim.
The history of the Strand/Varnville Theatre on this web page features a photo of the building taken during its post-theatrical period. The roof collapsed in 2000, and the building was subsequently demolished.
This web page has dozens of photos of Johannesburg’s movie theaters, including a late photo (no earlier than 1955) of the Bijou, about ¼ of the way down the page.
Street View is a block too far north, but the Google map’s pin icon is about ten blocks too far south. The Adelphi’s building was at the northeast corner of Main Road and Rhine Road.
And Walgate should have only one “l”.
Photos of the Adelphi Kinema and two other theaters here. The Adelphi was in a splendid Streamline Modern building with a rounded end at the corner of Rhine Road. The site is currently occupied by a Pic ‘n Pay store in a building that is anything but splendid.
Because these blocks of St. George’s Mall and Waterkant Street were inaccessible to Google’s camera car there is no good street view of the site of the Metro Theatre. If you look southwest along the Mall from Riebeek Street, the African Bank on the right is at 6 St. George’s Mall, so the Metro’s site was under the footprint of the gray concrete building just beyond it, which extends to the corner of Waterkant Street. The Colosseum Theatre was across the mall from the African Bank building, so this block had two of Cape Town’s movie palaces.
The only photo I can find showing the Metro is this general view of St. George’s Street, probably taken around 1950m lookingsouthwest from a block northeast of Riebeek Street. The Metro is on the right in the second block. On the left side of the street the first four letters on the Colosseum’s vertical sign can be seen.
According to this web page, the formal opening of the Colosseum Theatre took place on February 14, 1938, and it was converted to shops and offices in 1972.
Three photos of Cape Town’s Colosseum Theatre are at this link. The building has been converted into a residential-commercial condominium which has a web site. It’s difficult to tell for sure, but from the virtual tours of the units it looks as though they demolished the auditorium to use the space partly as an atrium and partly for new construction.
Two photos of the auditorium and a drawing of the facade of the Grand Theatre in Pietermaritzburg can be found on this web page.
A photo of the exterior of the Grand can be seen on this web page, which also mentions three other movie houses in Pietermaritzburg; the Rinko, the King’s, and the Excelsior. An additional cinema, the 20th Century, which opened in 1941, is not mentioned.
The thumbnail image on this web page wouldn’t load for me, but I clicked where it should have been and got a page with a photo of the building that housed the Odeon Cinema and Thelma Court Flats. The photo shows that architect Max Policansky’s design was Midcentury Modern (or Streamline Modern, if we must bundle them together) rather than Art Deco.
Artefacts' web page for Hanson, Tomkin & Finkelstein doesn’t list this theater among their works, though it does list the 20th Century Cinemas in Pretoria and Johannesburg.
Three interior shots dated 1933 are among the four photos of the Plaza Theatre found on this web page. The decor features some nice Art Deco touches, though the overall design is less ornate than was typical of the style. Werner Wagner, then employed at the architectural firm of Kallenbach, Kennedy & Furner, was the design architect on this project.
This web page says that the Plaza Kinema was designed by Kallenbach, Kennedy & Furner, with Walgate & Ellsworth. This was the same team that designed the Capitol and Adelphi Theatres in Cape Town.
This web page says that the Prince’s Theatre was designed by architect William Hutchinson Mason. The renovation of this house and the adjacent Playhouse Theatre as the Playhouse Theatre Complex in 1985-86 was handled by the firm of Small & Pettit & Robson.