Cameo Cinema

Balsall Common is a large village which is, today, in the Metropolitan Borough of Solihull, in the East Midlands. However, it is 4.5 miles northwest of Kenilworth, 7.5 miles west of Coventry and 8 miles east of Solihull, so it could lay claim to ‘ownership’ by any of these major towns. However, I have followed the lead set by the Kinematograph Year Books (KYB), which listed this village under Coventry.

This is a particularly obscure cinema, presumably due to its village location. It does not appear in the 1928 KYB; the next one I have access to is for 1932, when the Balsall Palace is listed. The proprietor is Coleshill Cinema, Warwickshire, but no other information is provided.

The following year’s edition adds that it was using a Gyrotone sound system, while, in 1935, it is said to have 450 seats. Rather surprisingly, in 1936 only 270 seats are listed. However, the owner was then Gyrotone Ltd, of Coleshill, and this change of ownership could have led to some extensive refurbishment, possibly replacing bench seating (or basic wooden seating) with individual tip-up seats.

There were no further changes until the 1947 KYB, which lists the owners as J. G and M. B. French, still of Coleshill, and the cinema is now the Cameo Cinema, with another, less drastic, reduction in seating capacity, to 218.

This had reduced further (or simply been ‘rounded down’) to 200 by 1955, when the KYB for that year records one show daily, Monday to Friday, with two shows on Saturday and Sunday. There were three changes of programme each week, the screen measured 12ft by 9ft and the proscenium was 20ft wide (down to 17ft the following year).

The Cameo Cinema is listed in the 1959 KYB. Frustratingly, I do not have access to one from 1960, because it is not listed in the 1961 edition. However, a local reminiscence records that the former cinema was a second-hand car showroom “until 1961”, so presumably it closed closer to the end of 1959/early-1960 - unless the car business was particularly short-lived.

The building was subsequently demolished. The appropriately named Cameo Court apartment block stands on the site.

Despite its relative obscurity, the Cameo Cinema does have one claim to fame: At the age of twelve, Jeremy Brett cycled the two miles to the cinema, from his home in the nearby village of Berkswell, to see Laurence Olivier’s “Henry V”. So impressed was he by the film that he decided to become an actor - and, arguably, the definitive Sherlock Holmes on TV.

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