Sundays at The Alexander
During the golden age of cinema, Geoff Andrews’ parents were the projectionists at the Alexander Picture Palace – housed in the old dye works that eventually became St Margaret’s Hall.
If you weren't a practising Christian, Sundays in Bradford on Avon must have been very boring a hundred years ago. Especially in the winter. But my dad was happy.
Actually little had changed when I was a child 20-odd years later; trains were running on Sundays by then, but crucially to me the swings and roundabout in the Poulton playing field were padlocked sunrise to sunset by the grumpy caretaker, a Mr Churchill.
Even in summer the nearest to a highlight happened on fine Sunday evening. Then respectable people put on their Sunday best for an after-tea walk. A hat was obligatory, with the men tipping or raising their cap or trilby to everyone they passed, and polite words were exchanged. The most popular walk was down the canal from Frome Road to the swing bridge and back along by the river.
But back to the 1920s, and why was my father, Bill Andrews, happy as he walked through the town on the probably dreary, certainly joyless, Sunday morning of 26 November 1926? Because he was going to spend the morning more or less alone in the dark with his soon-tobe fiancée, locked in at the pictures. Cinemas only opened Monday to Saturday then, and for many years after.
Picture this: Bet and Bill Andrews, co-projectionists at Bradford’s popular cinema, the Alexander Picture Palace
My mum and dad could excuse themselves from the usual Sunday tedium only because they were working. For the rest of the morning they would be running through the three reels of Mary Miles Minter in Judy of Rogues Harbour, the silent film that would be shown from Monday to Wednesday. Frame by frame, they had to check that it was not damaged, to cut out and splice any imperfections, and then to run the film so that the three-person orchestra down in the pit could synchronise their music to the action, often having to master the sheet music that went with the film too.
That trio, probably piano, drums and violin, plus assorted whistles, coconut shells and a slapstick for sound effects, would be playing for every performance that week. "We always had good houses," my father remembered, many years later.
In a time when it was still probably a bit fast for an unmarried couple to spend hours together in the dark, they could climb the ladder into the flame-proof projection box at the back of the Alexander Picture Palace (or sometimes it was called a Picture Theatre) and be safe from prying eyes.
My father was a painter and decorator, having served most of a four-year apprenticeship with Alexander’s, an old Bradford company that had recently been bankrupted. “Not by me,” he insisted. He was now decorating with another firm and in his spare time playing French horn in the Bradford town band. He dropped that in the mid-20s – either when he was invited to be assistant projectionist at the Alexander, or when he was promoted to the top job a little while later.
That promotion meant he needed an assistant, so why not invite Bet Hobbs, the attractive young woman he fancied who ran the ticket office? Or did she make the first move?
As the youngest of eight children, she was expected to stay at home and be an unpaid servant to her parents, but she had kicked over the traces, had her long hair cut into a fashionable bob, and got herself the cinema job. Both acts outraged her father.
Back at the Picture Palace, she got the assistant projectionist job too. Bill and Bet worked together for some time until work took him to Manchester and she became the first and only woman head projectionist
in the West Country. In April 1928 they married (in a snowstorm).
In December 1930, a few week before Christmas, the Alexander showed its first talkie, a special matinee in aid of the nurse fund. It was a Harold Lloyd film, Feet First: his first talkie too. It had minimal dialogue, not only because he was alone on the screen most of the time, re- enacting his amazing climbing antics of the silent Safety Last. Lucky for her it was mainly background sound because it came from records being played to synchronise, as near as possible, with the action. You can still watch that film by Googling ‘YouTube Feet First’.
I’d love to be able to ask her how she worked that system, (changed the records, adjusted the speed, etc) but we left it too late. This was the cheaper version of the talkies, because many cinema owners thought the very expensive equipment necessary for synchronised voice wouldn’t pay, and that sound was just a flash in the pan.*
The projection box was flame-proof, probably with asbestos, because the projector used a very intense, and hot, carbon rod arc lamp, and the film was nitrate-based and extremely flammable. It passed very close in front of the light source, so if the film snagged even for a second going through the projector gate, it was liable to catch fire fast and disastrously.
In that year alone there were at least three significant projection box fires that killed or seriously injured projectionists and patrons. My parents had scar tissue on their hands and arms from frequent smaller fires that they had doused with a bucket of sand or an asbestos blanket.
The dramatic and devastating nitrate-fuelled fire in the lovely film Cinema Paradiso is a graphic example of how easy it was for things to go wrong.
My mother’s career as a projectionist did not last long. After they married my parents bought a house in Westbury and my sister was born (Gill Bowden, who volunteered for many years in the tourist information shop in Bradford).
The big slump arrived, my father was unemployed, the house was repossessed and they scraped a living back in Bradford, renting a house from my grandfather.
Many years later, as a councillor and mayor, dad was a prime mover in the council taking over the now derelict cinema and converting it to St Margaret’s Hall.
* The idea of electrically amplifying sound, via a Panatrope, was still quite new and very expensive. A typical price for a cinema to convert to have the full synchronised sound system (‘the orchestra that draws no salary’ declared the adverts) would at this time be about £1,500 – the cost of a couple of houses. Presumably the trio were given their marching orders.
