This book examines how the projection of moving pictures became a mass entertainment medium in Britain. 1 This is not the same thing as a history of the birth of cinematography. The technology of animated photography was introduced in the mid-1890s and was successfully exploited during its first ten years of existence in variety theatres and by various types of touring showmen. However, the establishment of a dedicated nationwide film exhibition industry, consisting of fixed-site venues that primarily screened films, did not begin until the late 1900s. 2 The emergence of ‘cinemas’ as a ubiquitous part of the urban landscape was a very distinctive process in Britain because it happened later, and then at a more accelerated pace, than in other industrialised countries. Jean-Jacques Meusy dates the emergence of ‘a great number of dedicated cinemas’ to the second half of 1906 for Paris, and the following year for the rest of France. 3 There were hundreds of small cinemas in the largest cities of Germany and the USA by 1907, typically taking the form of converted retail units. 4 But at the end of that year, it was noted that the ‘scarcity of picture theatres in London … has struck every visitor to this country who is aware of the vastly different state of affairs in America and the continental countries’. 5
It can be precisely established that in March of 1909 there were 87 specialist picture theatres operating in London, the majority of which replicated the cheap shop-front model that had taken root overseas. 6 Yet, as more work is done to document the earliest cinemas in other large British cities, it is becoming clear that the nickelodeon-style venues that could be found in the metropolis were not replicated everywhere. 7 The scale of entrepreneurial activity amongst British film exhibitors remained relatively modest until November 1909. This month marked the beginning of an intensive five-year period of development—without antecedent or subsequent equal—in which thousands of cinemas were opened throughout the country, until the fervour for such ventures was retarded by the outbreak of the First World War.
The question of exactly how many thousands of cinemas appeared has never been satisfactorily answered, and estimations have varied considerably. In June 1914, the chief statistician of the Cinematograph Exhibitors’ Association suggested that there were nearly 7000 cinemas in Britain. 8 By triangulating data from national cinema directories compiled in late 1914/early 1915 and published in the two trade paper yearbooks, one reaches a considerably lower figure for the state of play at the end of 1914: 3365 venues in England, Scotland and Wales that were primarily and regularly used as cinemas or cine-variety theatres, plus a further 942 sites at which film screenings featured on a more occasional and/or subordinate basis. 9 The trade directories also provide rough seating capacity figures for 91% of the cinemas listed, and this represents particularly significant and revealing data. These sources suggest that in 1914 the average-sized picture theatre auditorium in Britain contained 747 seats. Michael Quinn has noted that in 1916 it was thought that 85% of cinemas in the USA accommodated fewer than 600 people, and that about half of these had fewer than 300 seats. 10 By contrast, at the start of the First World War, only 4% of British cinemas had space for less than 300 people.
When British entrepreneurs finally moved to develop a mass market for moving picture shows, they made up for lost time, one might say, by building bigger and more elaborate and luxurious cinemas than their international peers. Throughout the early 1910s, American industry representatives who visited Britain repeatedly expressed astonishment at the nature and calibre of the local picture theatres. Will C. Smith, the editor of the projection section of Views and Film Index, suggested in 1911 that ‘American managers have much to learn from their English cousins. The style of building and its interior decoration was far superior to those on the other side of the Atlantic, and the audiences were of the elite class.’ 11 Two years later, Horace Plimpton , the production manager at Thomas Edison’s New York studio, noted of a recent European trip that
I visited a great many theaters in London and found that they were far superior to anything on this side. The English exhibitor provides for the comfort of his patrons to a remarkable degree. … The prices obtained are much better than here. In all the houses I visited I found nothing that would correspond with the usual New York house. 12
In 1914, the former Vitagraph director Larry Trimble , who had set up a production company in Britain, remarked that ‘The theaters here are much more elaborate than those in America … I visited one in Glasgow that I could not believe was a moving picture exhibition. To me it seemed more like a large hotel and instead of watching pictures I felt I should have been asking for a cocktail.’ 13 Similar opinions were expressed in confidential business correspondence. In 1912, Frank L. Dyer , the president of Thomas A. Edison, Inc., explained in a memo to Edison himself that on a recent European trip he had found that ‘In Great Britain the theaters are very much finer than in this country and charge much higher prices—generally from 12c to 75c. More films are shown—generally from six to eight, so that ordinarily not more than two shows per evening takes place.’ 14
The way in which investment capital was mobilised to fuel such rapid and comparatively extravagant expansion of the film exhibition sector was quite unprecedented in the field of spectatorial entertainment. Tracy C. Davis, the foremost economic historian of the British theatre, suggests that the closest parallels to the surge in cinema ventures are to be found in investment booms previously experienced in the railway (1844–1845) and mining (1895–1896) industries. 15 These earlier instances of intensified financial speculation have been typically characterised as ‘manias’, in which investors momentarily abandoned their default cautious attitudes towards risk and provided an abundant supply of ‘cheap’ capital. And in these particular cases, the speculative ‘fevers’ were in part fed and manipulated by unscrupulous company promoters promising spectacular investment returns from sketchily planned schemes, whilst fraudulently inflating share prices and asset values. 16 The cinema business in Britain was thus apparently facilitated by—and established a new model for—the colonisation of popular visual culture by bull market forces.
This book will attempt to establish where and why the capital required to launch so many cinemas was found in such a short space of time, and to understand the consequences for the early British film industry of being shaped by an intense development boom. In so doing, I shall be asking questions and using methods that may seem more appropriate to the field of business history than film history. Back in 1985, one of the foundational texts of what has come to be known as the ‘New Film History’ presented a model for future research in which the study of film exhibition as a business occupied a prominent place. Film History: Theory and Practice contains a case study by Douglas Gomery on ‘The economics of local exhibition’, and concludes that ‘there is a great deal of local economic history to be researched—all beginning with someone someplace asking “Who has owned movie theaters in my town?”’ 17 This has arguably been the path least followed of all those suggested in this highly influential book. There is a growing body of scholarship that deals with such topics as corporate finance, organisation, strategy, labour relations and trading performance in the domains of film production and distribution, but business histories of film exhibition are considerably scarcer. Whilst there have been important studies of individual silent era exhibitors, these have generally focused upon exceptionally prominent, innovative and flamboyant figures, and prioritised analysis of relatively creative practices such as promotion and programming, rather than finance. 18
Scholarship concerned with film exhibition has predominantly aligned itself with broader trends in the study of social history, by concentrating its focus on the subject of cinema audiences . Luke McKernan has gone so far as to suggest that the appearance of Britain’s first cinemas was ‘an expression of popular will’, rather than an innovation created by exhibitors. 19 The call made by Richard Maltby, in his 2007 article ‘How Can Cinema History Matter More’, for us ‘to write histories that are concerned not with the “great men” and women of Hollywood but with their audiences’ has found many adherents. 20 It is harder to find work which takes its cue from Maltby’s final point: that we also need to study ‘the small businessmen who acted as cultural brokers, navigators and translators constructing a creolised culture out of their community’s encounters with the mediated external world shipped to them in tin cans two or three times a week’. The crucial intercessional agency of exhibitors has been occluded in many accounts of the emergence of the cinema industry.
There have been some notable exceptions to the general tendency to concentrate upon audiences as the key drivers of development, the most thought-provoking of which is a frequently cited essay by Nicholas Hiley , published in 2002. 21 Hiley suggests that the creation of the film exhibition industry in Britain served the needs of middle-class investors, rather than the tastes of working-class consumers. In fact, he argues that before 1914 projected moving pictures were a form of entertainment for which audiences had not yet demonstrated anything like the level of demand implied by the scale of provision. In short, these expensively constructed and furnished picture theatres were...