Читать книгу Clips From A Life - Denis Norden - Страница 9

As an insomniac from as far back as I can remember, I have always kept in mind a story I heard about Ronald Knox. At the age of six he was a solemn, clever child but could not sleep at night. When someone asked him, ‘What do you think about when you’re lying awake?’ he replied, ‘I think about the past.’

In 1938, age sixteen, having opted for Spanish rather than German at City of London School, I used to spend my free Wednesday afternoons acting as interpreter at a hostel the Salvation Army had set up in Clapton to house refugee children from the Spanish Civil War. In order to keep up with the questions the kids used to ask me, I paid close attention to the war reports from Sefton Delmer, the distinguished foreign correspondent of the Daily Express. I had long been attracted by the term ‘Foreign Correspondent’ and when I noticed that the photographs of Sefton Delmer invariably showed him wearing a belted raincoat with epaulettes, that clinched it. I wrote to him, outlining the marks I had been getting for Conversational Spanish and English Essay and asking whether there was any chance of joining him out there as an apprentice.

A little to my surprise, his reply was favourable. Less surprisingly, the reaction of my parents was not. Reasonably enough, they pointed out the sacrifices they had made to send me to a public school and the strong likelihood of my perishing on some foreign field before I reached seventeen.

As it was impossible for me to go to Spain without their consent, I went into a sulk and decided to leave school anyway. Rather than go on to university, I would start paving the way towards my next-on-the-list ambition, to become a highly paid Hollywood screenwriter.

The only person I could think of who might possibly have some access to Hollywood was the father of a girl I had recently taken out. His name was Sid Hyams, one of three brothers who owned and operated a small chain of London’s largest cinemas. He agreed to see me and suggested I come along to his office at the Gaumont State, Kilburn (‘Europe’s Newest, Largest and Most Luxurious Cinema’).

Having learned that the Hyams brothers also owned a film studio, I brought with me the synopses for two screenplays I had roughed out between making the appointment and setting out to meet Mr Sid, as he was called on his own turf; his two brothers being Mr Phil and Mr Mick.

I think he must have had a word with my parents in the interim, because he nodded my manuscripts into an in tray and made a counter-proposal. Before launching into a career as a writer for the cinema, might it not be prudent to spend some time learning the preferences and predilections of cinema audiences? And surely the best way to do that, he ventured, would be to work for a while as a cinema manager.

With that end in mind, he was prepared to put me through a training programme that would leave me conversant with every aspect of the cinema. Starting with a course in looking after the boilers, I would progress to electrician, stagehand, projectionist, member of the front-of-house team, thence to Assistant Manager and, finally, General Manager.

My apprenticeship began at the Gaumont State in 1939, when my blue boiler suit brought my mother close to tears every time she saw me leave the house in it. (‘Is this what all the sacrifices have been for?’) In 1941, I was transferred from Assistant Manager at the Trocadero, Elephant & Castle, to General Manager at the Gaumont, Watford. A few weeks after I arrived there, our feature film was Alfred Hitchcock’s first Hollywood movie, Foreign Correspondent. It starred Joel McCrea, wearing a belted raincoat with epaulettes.

The Gaumont Super Cinemas, built by the Hyams brothers, were palaces of Renaissance-style grandeur located in some of the poorest and dreariest parts of London. They included the Troxy, Commercial Road, the Trocadero, Elephant & Castle, the Regal, Edmonton, and the brothers’ proudest achievement, the Gaumont State, Kilburn, a 4,000-seater, the largest cinema in Britain (‘In Europe!’ insisted Mr Phil), with a tower you could see from miles away.

Mr Sid was the quiet, reflective brother, Mr Mick was the youngest, a restlessly energetic go-getter and Mr Phil was the powerhouse, loving the limelight and constantly proclaiming the role their Super Cinemas played in furnishing drab suburbs with buildings that reawoke magical expectations.

The larger cinemas in the chain featured Cine Variety, combining films with three or four top-line Variety acts. In addition to the two big general release movies and the stage show, you were offered a newsreel, an organ solo and a cartoon or ‘short’, not to mention the trailers. Sometimes the stage element would be in the form of a touring revue, a circus, a pantomime or even, though rarely, an opera.

All this for sixpence. Occasionally the full programme lasted over four hours, every minute of which, Mr Phil would warn his managers, had to live up to those magical expectations.

To a great extent, this meant observing certain rules of showmanship that are now considered irrelevant. ‘Never open the curtains on a white screen’ was one I remember, and today’s disregard for it can still irk me occasionally. Mr Phil held the view that allowing that large white oblong to glare at our patrons before they saw it occupied by a film image impeded their passage from reality into illusion, in those days the main reason for going to the pictures. We used to protect the illusion by making sure the curtains in front of the screen were closed when we projected the preliminary Censor’s Certificate, never revealing the screen until it was filled by the MGM lion or the Universal biplane and our patrons were well on their way to Hollywood.

While I was serving my time as Assistant Boilerman at the Gaumont State, we were sometimes told to raise the temperature inside the cinema in order to promote the sales of ice cream and soft drinks. It would generally happen when the feature film was set in the tropics or the desert and it always resulted, I was told, in a noticeable rise in sales.

When I came to the Trocadero as Assistant Manager, one of my more difficult duties was to superintend these sales. In addition to my less than perfect grasp of the monetary side, I had the daily responsibility of nominating the usherettes charged with carrying the ice cream trays.

When fully loaded with tubs and wafer-bars, the trays were a considerable weight, so it was a job the girls hated. To alleviate this, we had instituted an alphabetical rota system to ensure the work was shared out fairly.

For me, the snag in this system was that, as P. A. (known as Bill) Fowler, the General Manager explained, a girl could be excused ice cream tray duty and the rota bypassed if it happened to be her ‘time of the month’. Accordingly, at the daily general assembly in the main foyer before the doors opened, when all the front of house staff would be inspected for clean uniforms and fingernails, I would consult my rota-list and read out, ‘Miss Robinson, your turn for the front stalls ice cream tray.’

Not infrequently, Miss Robinson would answer, ‘Not today, sir. Time of the month.’

I would consult my list again. ‘But, Miss Robinson, you said that two weeks ago.’

Like as not, she would fix me with that bold Elephant & Castle stare and answer, ‘So?’

Barely eighteen years old and wearing my father’s dinnersuit, I was aware – as were they all – that I did not know enough about the mechanics of the matter to pursue it. ‘All right, Miss Robinson. Excused ice cream tray.’

The Hyams brothers enjoyed their reputation as ‘the last of the great showmen’ and never neglected an opportunity to live up to it. Of the three, Mr Phil was the most flamboyant and forceful. A tall, heavy-set man with hunched shoulders, he always seemed to be in a hurry, glowering and snapping out his words, although at unexpected times he would suddenly bestow a surprisingly friendly grin. The eldest of the brothers who had given London its most spectacular suburban cinemas, he acted on snap decisions and hunches, most of which worked out as anticipated. And while there would be some fearsome scowling when they failed, he would still flash the occasional conspiratorial grin.

I liked him enormously and jumped at the chance of attending his 100th birthday party, at which he sat in a very fancy wheelchair attended by two trim, short-skirted nurses, like old Mr Grace in Are You Being Served?. When I commented on this, I was given the same grin as sixty-odd years ago.

One of Mr Phil’s dicta that he and his brothers managed to live up to most of the time was, ‘Always give an audience everything they expected to see plus something they weren’t expecting.’ Sometimes he would couch it as ‘If they’ve paid sixpence for their seat and you give them nine-pennorth of entertainment, you can hold your head up with anybody in any business.’

The other lesson he taught me was ‘Never be slowed down by a cup of tea.’ What this meant in practice was learning how to drink a cup of tea while it was still scalding hot, never wasting valuable time waiting for it to cool down.

Among the Gaumont State’s wondrous new technical amenities was the ‘rising mike’ system, a set of microphones positioned at various places underneath the stage floor. Operated by remote control, each of them could rise silently into view through a small hidden trapdoor to whatever heights had been preselected, then just as silently slide down out of sight again, leaving the floor of the stage as flat and smooth as before.

Soon enough, that inconspicuousness was to provide its own hazards. I recall one of the big dance bands that played a week there when I was a stagehand. For reasons I never discovered, the bubbly blonde vocalist who was one of the band’s main attractions missed the rehearsal call on Monday morning and arrived only just in time for the opening show in the afternoon.

She bounded on stage for her first number dressed in a long, full skirt and, smiling radiantly, stood directly over the little trap door through which the rising mike slid upwards …

In 1939 the next Royal Command Performance was due to take place in November and, for the first time, the Hyams brothers were being given a chance to produce it.

Their plans for it were typically ambitious. It would be staged at the Gaumont State and, with the intention of bringing Hollywood to Kilburn, Eddie Cantor would be flown over to compère a bill that would include Shirley Temple, a song-and-dance duet by Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney, comedy from Laurel and Hardy and a sketch by the cast of MGM’s enormously successful series of Andy Hardy films. In addition, there would be lavish numbers from four West End musicals and contributions from whoever was topping the bill at the Palladium.

For the finale, we would see Deanna Durbin, alone on a darkened stage and lit only by a pin-spot, singing ‘Ave Maria’, while 400 choirboys, each bearing a lighted candle, would descend from the upper circle to the stage on specially built ramps attached to the side walls of the vast auditorium.

That was the scene I was looking forward to most. But then, along came 3 September …

The Trocadero, Elephant & Castle, where I graduated to Assistant Manager in 1940, had one of the most elaborate interiors in the Hyams brothers’ cinema chain. The auditorium, seating 3,500, was resplendently Italianate, sumptuously decorated, the marble columns and pink mirrors extending to the waiting rooms and loos.

On the second Sunday after I arrived, the General Manager left me in sole charge, a responsibility I shouldered fairly adequately until we came to the stage show.

Sunday nights were Amateur Talent Night and by the second performance, it was plain that things were slipping beyond my control.

On the stage, a thin blonde girl was trying to get through ‘Alice Blue Gown’, to the accompaniment of Bobby Pagan at the organ, but the audience was becoming restive. As I watched helplessly from the back of the stalls, the whistles and barracking grew louder and the girl’s voice was becoming ever more quavery.

How it would have ended I don’t know, but I suddenly became aware that a bulky figure in a heavy overcoat and with a pushed-back black Homburg on his head was standing beside me. It was Mr Phil. ‘What’s happening? What’s going on?’

I could only gesture, ‘I’m sorry. They just won’t – I don’t quite –’

But he was gone, striding down the aisle towards the steps that led up to the side of the stage. Mounting them, he came to the mike and motioned to the girl and Bobby for silence. As the noise from the audience died away, he stood centre-stage and, taking off his black Homburg, addressed them. ‘You all know who I am.’

Indeed they did. Mr Phil often took the opportunity to talk to an audience from the stage and sometimes he would stop by the sixpenny queue to solicit their opinions individually. Tonight, they gave him an encouraging round of applause. He stilled them.

‘I want to tell you something that happened here a few years back. I dropped into the Troc, as I often do, but this time I came in through the stage door. And as I came up the steps, I heard the sound of sobbing coming from one of the dressing rooms. I went to investigate and there sat a young girl crying her eyes out. I said, “What’s the matter?” and she said, “It’s them. That audience. I can’t do it. I just can’t face them. I’m sorry.”

‘So I said to her, “Listen. I’ll tell you about the Elephant & Castle audiences. Yes, they’re hard. They’re the toughest audience in the country. But let me assure you of one thing. However hard they are, they’re fair. They’ll give you a chance. Will you take my word?”

‘She nodded and, sure enough, she went on. And, ladies and gentlemen, may I tell you that girl’s name? That girl’s name was Gracie Fields.’

There was a respectful silence. Then from the audience came a yell of appreciation and a storm of applause. Mr Phil nodded to the girl, gave Bobby the go-ahead sign, descended the steps and rejoined me at the back of the stalls. The audience heard the girl out in a silence that was almost reverent and rewarded her with another vociferous round of applause.

When we had retired to the office to inspect the night’s takings, I ventured, ‘That was a wonderful story, Mr Phil. I’ll remember that.’

He gave me that sudden, unnerving grin. ‘Pack of lies.’

A prodigious amount of eating went on during the early evening programmes in thirties and forties suburban cinemas. Mothers with basketfuls of food would pick up their children from school and feed them their tea while they were all watching the movie. The consequent chomping, munching, slurping, rustling and muttered instructions was often so distracting to other patrons, someone at one of our weekly managers’ meetings suggested dividing the stalls into eating and non-eating areas, as some cinemas went on to do with smoking and non-smoking.

Nor did the families dutifully deposit their detritus in the rubbish bins provided, as happens (sometimes) with later generations. The result was that when the cleaners came in at the end of the day to vacuum the stalls’ carpeting, their first task was to pick up the overlay of eggshell, orange peel, apple cores, biscuit wrappers and the scattered assortment of bread crusts which, thanks to the surrounding darkness, children had found it so easy to leave uneaten. These were in addition to the ever-present topping of monkey nut shells, which always made walking between the empty rows sound like a giant eating celery.

It was, though, another measure of the way in which going to the pictures in those days was regarded as a family experience. Indeed, there were many mothers who used their local cinema as a crèche, a warm and safe place to deposit their young whenever there was a need to offload them for a few hours. I still treasure the memory of a small boy tugging at the sleeve of one of our tall Trocadero doormen to ask, ‘Please, Mister. Mum says what time is the big picture over three times?’

The great majority of men wore hats of one kind or another in those days, placing them carefully on their laps when they sat in the cinema. As it was also a time when cigarette smoking was soprevalent as to be practically compulsory, Frank Muir and I found great satisfaction many years later in combining the two habits for one of the many Sherlock Holmes pastiches we wrote back then.

‘Something else I observed, Watson, was that our quarry had recently been to the cinema?’

‘Good Heavens, Holmes, how did you discern that?’

‘There was ash in the crown of his trilby.’

In forties cinema-going, there were more scenes of a sexual nature enacted in the audience than on the screen. B-movie scenes that were played in shadow or darkness were the most conducive to back-row action and I have sometimes wondered whether that might account for the prevalence of ‘film noir’ during that decade.

It was an era when the local picture-house was about the only place that offered affectionately disposed couples both warmth and darkness, particularly the back row, known among the GIs as Hormone Alley. None of the theatres I worked in had installed the special banquette-style ‘Couples Seats’, a purpose-built facility that was often a feature of North of England cinemas, but every usher and usherette on the Hyams Brothers circuit was instructed to exercise discretion when shining their torch along that area.

Among the more venturesome males of the period, a body of back-row folk-wisdom had gradually developed, some of its tips more helpful than others. Of the only two I remember, one was the initiatory manoeuvre that could be described as ‘slide of hand’, while the other strongly recommended beginning the proceedings by kissing the nape of her neck. Not only was it believed to promote arousal, it also allowed you to watch the picture at the same time.

When I arrived at the Trocadero, the General Manager was Bill Fowler, a large, easy-going man with huge hands and amused eyes. He was unfailingly forbearing with me, allowing me completely free rein except on one point. At five o’clock every evening he would go up to his office, lock the door and I had to make sure no one on any account disturbed him. At half past five I had to go round to the side-door of the adjoining Rockingham pub and collect ‘Bill Fowler’s usual’, a quarter bottle of Scotch. Concealing this under my jacket, I would return to the cinema and knock softly on his office door. It would open just wide enough for his hand to take the bottle from me.

At a quarter past six, he would reappear, in evening dress, freshly shaven, good-humoured and ready to take his place in the foyer to welcome incoming patrons. ‘I was born three double Scotches under par,’ was the only confidence I had from him about our nightly procedure. ‘If anything happens to the Rockingham, stay clear of me.’

As things worked out, I had been transferred to the Gaumont, Watford, by the time the Blitz started in earnest, the Rockingham got hit and the wartime whisky shortage began to bite. I can only report that Bill Fowler continued to turn up at all the managers’ weekly meetings, as good-humouredly imperturbable as ever and still surveying the world with an expression of private amusement.

It was an afternoon in June 1940 and a two-thirds full house at the Trocadero, Elephant & Castle, was under my sole command, Bill Fowler having decided to take a day off. So when the telephone call came from Head Office I had to deal with it on my own.

The voice at the other end was both grim and urgent. ‘The news has just come through that France has surrendered. That means England is on its own, so you’d better let the audience know straightaway.’ I quickly alerted the projection room to stand by and hurried into the auditorium.

Making my way down the side of the stalls to the door leading into the back-stage area, I reached the organ pit and, from there, phoned projection to stop the film and bring up the houselights. Then, eighteen years old and dimly aware this was some kind of historic moment, I pressed the organ’s Up button and ascended with it to stage level.

A spotlight hit me as soon as I came into view. With a preliminary cough to make sure the mike was working, I said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I have to inform you that France has fallen and Britain is now fighting the War alone.’

I paused, uncertain how to continue. There was a moment of complete silence, then from somewhere at the back came a solitary shout that was immediately taken up by the rest of the audience. ‘Put the bleeding picture back on.’ As the shouting increased, I signalled the projection box, the houselights went down and the picture was resumed.

When, many years later, I described this incident to Dilys Powell, soon after she joined My Word!, her immediate response was totally characteristic. ‘What was the picture?’

Fortunately, its title was difficult to forget. ‘It was Old Mother Riley in Society.’

She nodded understandingly. ‘Well, there you are,’ she said. ‘Arthur Lucan. He really was very good.’

In the years before the Clean Air Act, fog could be a cinema-going hazard. On the Hyams Brothers’ circuit, whenever there was a particularly dense one, a commissionaire would go up and down the outside queue shouting, ‘Owing to the fog penetrating the hall, the clearness of the picture cannot be guaranteed.’

This was not a universally followed procedure. Indeed, a cinema in Norwood, known locally as ‘Ikey’s Bug Hole’, would put out a placard proclaiming, ‘It’s clearer inside.’

After one of his appearances on Looks Familiar, Larry Adler told me that his earliest London date had been in Cine Variety at the Troxy, Commercial Road, another of the Hyams Brothers’ cinemas. Nobody had warned him that it was a custom at the Troxy to allow the first row of the stalls to be occupied by nursing mothers, their prams in front of them. Even more disconcertingly, when they were feeding their babies, they would turn themselves sideways on to the stage and continue watching from that position. It presented performers with a spectacle Larry had never encountered before or since.

At the Trocadero, we had a ‘Barred List’, a not very extensive assortment of minor miscreants whose descriptions and (rarely) photographs were pinned on the inside of the cashier’s window for easy reference.

Among the more persistent offenders was ‘Tossoff Kate’, a mild-mannered, middle-aged lady with a greasy black fringe. If she managed to evade the cashier’s scrutiny, she was still fairly easy to spot as her line of work necessitated constantly changing her seat. Moving from row to row, she would, I discovered, adjust her fees to match the seat prices she found herself in. While offering the same service all over the cinema, she charged more for it in the one-and-nines than she did in the sixpennies.

I found this graduated tariff rather admirable and would have liked to put some questions to her about her specialised trade. Had she found, for instance, that one type of movie was better for business than others? Did the contents of the newsreel affect customer demand? Did takings tend to peak during the trailers?

During my time as a Cinema Manager, none of the illicit practices I had to contend with proved more intractable than what became known as the ‘Untorn Tickets Fiddle’, ‘fiddle’ being the forties word for ‘scam’.

When you bought a ticket at the cinema box office in those days, the cashier receiving your money would push a button on the Automaticket machine in front of her and up through a little metal trapdoor would pop a numbered ticket, differently coloured for the various prices.

You took this ticket to the door of the stalls or circle, where a uniformed member of the front of house staff would tear it in two, handing you one half and, using a bodkin, thread the half he retained on to a length of string.

At the end of each day, the ticket strings would be collected, placed in a sack and dispatched to a place in Crediton, Devon, where Entertainment Tax officials would, I presumed, count them and check their numbers against those shown on the Automaticket machine. (How anybody had the patience, let alone the eyesight, for this task I never discovered.)

The flaw in the system was this: ninety-nine per cent of patrons on receiving their half of the ticket would let it flutter to the floor once they had entered the auditorium’s darkness. The cleaning staff would, of course, vacuum up the discarded half-tickets the following morning – but not before certain members of staff with a mercenary turn of mind had scooped up a few and pocketed them.

Now the fiddle came into play. The next time one of them was allocated ticket-tearing duties, he – in practically all the cases I came across, it was a ‘he’ – would take up his position at the stalls or circle door with a quantity of his collected half-tickets secreted somewhere nearby. Careful to select patrons who were engaged in conversation, or were in other ways inattentive, he would take their proffered ticket and, with a show of tearing it in half, ‘palm’ it and hand them back one of the half-tickets from his secret cache.

Later in the day he would take his collection of untorn tickets to the girl in the box office – again, they were practically always girls – and she would dispose of them one at a time to the next lot of patrons arriving at her desk; generally on the pretext that it had been handed back by someone who had mistakenly asked for too many, something that happened frequently enough to be unremarkable. At the end of the day, the pair would split the take, in what proportions I never found out, but over the course of weeks, the two of them could net a tidy amount.

They were always careful not to make their substitutions when the manager or anybody supervisory was about, so it was a difficult operation to police. At the Hyams Brothers weekly meeting of managers we would discuss ways of getting on top of it, sometimes going to the lengths of using ‘dummy’ patrons. We finally had to agree to concen-trate on the scheme’s main weakness, which was the degree of com-plicity it required between female cashier and male ticket-taker. With this in mind, we paid close attention to any such pairings, keeping a special eye out for the emotional outbursts the stress of that kind of relationship could lead to. Occasionally this watchfulness would turn up a culprit, but not often.

All in all, it was a fiddle we never even came close to mastering. In fact, I have it on good authority that, to a lesser degree, it’s still being played today.

At the State, Kilburn, my training as a projectionist included operating a Stelmar spotlight during the stage shows. As the ‘spot room’, a little space high up in the cinema’s roof, was above the projection booth, manipulating the bulky Stelmar’s powerful white beam to capture one of the tiny figures capering on the stage far below was a singularly empowering experience for a teenager.

And there were circumstances when one’s prowess could really be put to the test. If a performer suddenly decided to make an unrehearsed entrance from the wings, it needed something special in the way of reaction speed and accuracy of aim to make sure he was spotlit the moment he appeared and didn’t have to take his first few steps on-stage unnoticed.

Most satisfying of all were the occasions when I was called on to help bring about an affecting finish to a sentimental song. To achieve this direct assault on the audience’s emotions, nothing worked better than having the stage lighting slowly fade while, gradually and imperceptibly, I dwindled my spotlight’s circle down till it became no more than a pin of light on the singer’s face. Then, as the last note died, my headphones would relay the Stage Manager’s whispered ‘Dead Blackout’ and, ‘snap!’ – all was darkness.

A second of deep silence, then – if everyone concerned had done it right – up would come the roaring applause. I would hear the Stage Manager’s urgent ‘Full Up White!’, and it would be ‘snap!’ again as the whole stage became ablaze with light.

Umpteen years later, when David Bernstein and I planned our yet-to-be-staged ‘Festival of Schmaltz’, we agreed this was a moment that had to be included.

The week the Trocadero offered a full-scale circus as its on-stage attraction was a unique one in many ways. The first problem was finding suitable accommodation for all the performers and animals in wartime South-East London. This our never-fazed Stage Manager, Jim Pitman, accomplished successfully until it came to the question of housing the three ‘forest-bred lions’.

It was wintertime and their trainer refused point-blank to even consider housing them anywhere outdoors. After being turned down by every warehouse and factory in the neighbourhood, Jim was driven to keeping their cages in the back-stage area, flush up against the rear wall.

When a boilerman experienced the heart-stopping sensation of a large, furry paw silently reaching out to him while he was going from one side of this darkened area of the stage to another, I had notices hastily printed warning staff and visitors to exercise caution when crossing the stage.

What made this makeshift arrangement really memorable, however, was that we were showing an MGM movie that week. Every time the film’s opening came on screen and MGM’s Leo emitted his trademark roars, from somewhere behind him came a trio of answering roars.

It impressed audiences no end, while Jim and I enjoyed some time-wasting sessions trying to guess what the visitors were saying to Leo.

Among the acts we played in Variety or Cine Variety, one that has lodged himself securely in my memory is Olgo, the Mathematical Genius. He was a refugee from Nazi Germany, a charming little man who could square any three-figure number instantaneously in his head.

Unfortunately, first house Monday, when he explained his special powers and asked for volunteers to call out three-figure numbers for him to square, nobody in the audience had the faintest idea what he was talking about. His request was met by a silence, which grew and grew. As manager, I had to be out front during the first performance of every programme, so I hastily shouted, ‘Three hundred and forty-six’, to which he snapped out the answer while I hurried over to the other side of the auditorium and shouted, ‘Seven hundred and nineteen.’ I kept this up until someone in the stalls grasped the idea and called out, ‘Nine hundred and ninety-nine.’ Other members of the audience caught on and shouted their own numbers out and soon the act took on a brisk pace and the Mathematical Genius was beaming.

As the week went on, I had to break the ice in this fashion for him at the start of every performance, with the organist taking over my role on my day off. Audiences never failed to pick up on it and, as far as I could verify, his answers were always correct. It was a rare talent, though I sometimes wonder how he adjusted to the introduction of the pocket calculator.

Another sharply etched memory is the unusually amusing conjuror who turned up for one of our Sunday Night Amateur Talent competitions at the Gaumont, Watford. While I was watching him from the back of the stalls, two uniformed military policemen appeared at my side. They told me that he was an Army deserter and would I give them permission to go backstage, in order to arrest him? As we made our way together down the side-aisle to the pass door, I could see him watching us from the stage, although his patter did not falter. Arrived in the prompt corner, the redcaps agreed to let him finish his act and, while we waited, told me that he had been on the run for more than six months, picking up money to live on by going from one talent show to another across the home counties.

Well aware we were waiting there for him, he brought his performance to a smooth finish and as he came off-stage held his hands out good-naturedly. Snapping handcuffs on them, one of the redcaps said, ‘Okay, Houdini, let’s see you get out of these.’

I had been secretly hoping he would make his exit on the other side of the stage, where a panic-bolt door would have taken him straight out into the High Street and on to a passing bus.

Another memory that has remained undimmed is the act performed by Edna Squire Brown. She was a dignified lady who did a genteel striptease, employing trained white doves. They would flutter above her, only alighting on her whenever and wherever concealment was required.

Although it didn’t happen on my watch, I was warned about certain occupants of the sixpenny seats who used to turn up for her Saturday night performances carrying packets of birdseed.

If there was such a thing as a ‘resident’ band on the Hyams Brothers circuit during the time I served there, it was the one conducted byTeddy Joyce. An almost forgotten name now, he was a Hyams Brothers’ favourite and hugely popular with South London audiences.

For my money, he led the best stage band I ever saw, with the possible exception of Jack Hylton’s. But while Hylton himself did little more than stand in front of the band looking benevolent, Joyce was at all times the centre of attention, using the band as background to his own antics, very much as Cab Calloway did in America.

A Canadian, tall, slim, narrow-faced, slicked-back black hair, Joyce’s customary costume of high-waisted, tight-fitting black dress trousers and equally tight-fitting black bolero jacket made his legs seem endless. He would put this to good effect in his snake-hips style of dancing, particularly when, as he often did, he performed alone on a darkened stage in front of a white screen, dropped in to mask off the band. Lit only by a small spotlight shining up from the centre of the footlights, the silhouette of his undulating figure would be projected on the screen behind him, elongating to giant size as he advanced, diminishing to human proportions as he retreated.

It was as skilful as it was effective. For another of his showpieces, the band left their instruments on the rostrum, came downstage and formed a tight semicircle around Joyce, who was seated on a low stool, his back to the audience. The band thrust out their hands towards him, revealing that they were all wearing white gloves, each finger of which had a thick, black line along the top. The picture it presented was that he was seated at the keyboard of a three-rank organ. Joyce would then complete the picture by ‘playing’ their outstretched hands, each touch producing a sonorous hummed response. It was an illusion I have never seen duplicated, its music so carefully orchestrated and rehearsed, the effect was irresistible.

He was full of novel presentation ideas, though not all of them worked out as planned. I’m thinking of a surprise opening he devised for one of his early visits to the State, Kilburn. The audience heard the Teddy Joyce signature tune, ‘The World is Waiting for the Sunrise’, coming from behind the closed front curtains. But when the curtains rose, the stage was empty. Then, from somewhere above the top of the proscenium arch, the band slowly descended into view, seated on a platform hung on wires, its leading edge decorated by a bank of plywood clouds.

Slowly, if a little fitfully, they came down, their unusually spectacular entrance winning an appreciative round of applause. Then, about four feet from the floor, the platform began to tilt sideways …

A firm favourite with the Trocadero’s patrons was Jack Doyle billed as ‘The Singing Boxer’. Less than highly successful in the ring, he toured in Variety, singing sentimental Irish ballads, thus inspiring Tommy Trinder’s observation that ‘Instead of singing Mother Machree, Jack Doyle’d do better fighting her.’

On the Trocadero stage Jack usually appeared with his wife, the sexy Mexican film star Movita. They would perform romantic duets, always ending with ‘by popular request’, the ‘Come, Come, I Love You Only’ ballad from The Chocolate Soldier. This they would sing standing face to face, gazing into each other’s eyes, and, on the final fervent ‘Come, Come!’, clutch each other convulsively, groin to groin. It was a finish that never failed to stir the Troc audience.

I had never heard of the touring revue that was to be our next on-stage attraction at the Trocadero. It bore the unpromising title of Red Hot & Blue Moments and this was its first London date after going round the provinces for months. Consequently, when I found myself a seat in the stalls the following Monday afternoon to watch it, I knew nothing about its principal comedian, Sid Field.

No point in making a meal of this. From the moment Sid Field made his first entrance, I was entranced. For the rest of the week, I not only watched every one of his three-a-day performances, I came in on my day off to see two more of them.

It’s an abiding shame that no trace of his quality remains on film. Do not, I implore you, assess him on the basis of what you see of him in London Town. Shot in an empty studio without an audience, his reproduced stage sketches are given a stilted, not to say embalmed, look, offering no hint of the delicacy of his comic touch.

Months later, whenever I came home on leave, I would go to see him in his hugely successful revues at the Prince of Wales Theatre. He repeated several of the sketches I had first seen him perform in Red Hot & Blue Moments. But when it came to his portrayal of ‘Slasher Green’, the archetypal spiv, nothing in the West End could match the additional ingredient the Trocadero lent to it.

Hobbling awkwardly in an ankle-length, wide-shouldered black overcoat, knotted white scarf and turned-down black trilby, he would wring tears of laughter from the packed Elephant & Castle audiences, most of them dressed in long black, wide-shouldered overcoats, knotted white scarves and turned-down black trilbies.

Phil Park, for many years the organist at the Regal, Edmonton, was more than just a gifted musician. A superb showman at the organ, he also composed much of the music for some of the London Palladium’s most successful revues and brought to the Wurlitzer a keen grasp of technical innovation.

In a bid to replace the narrow bench on which organists sat, occasionally sliding sideways along it to reach one of the end foot-pedals, he sought a means by which they could remain in one position. He came up with the idea of a seat fashioned along the lines of that used in boats by solo scullers. It consisted of two cunningly shaped halves, one for each buttock, connected by a central spring. Seated on this, the occupant was no longer obliged to slide his whole body sideways, he merely stretched out a leg.

A prototype was built and, a few weeks later, the Monday first house audience heard the opening notes of Phil’s signature tune and saw him rise slowly into view upon his new seating arrangement. Then, as the music was reaching a crescendo, it suddenly stopped, and in its place came a shrill cry of agony.

As Phil himself good-humouredly agreed afterwards, the strength of the spring appeared to need something of a rethink. He never entrusted himself to it again, however, leaving his invention to live on in cinema organ folklore as ‘The Nutcracker Seat’.

My earliest venture into what I suppose, stretching it a bit, you could call ‘writing for the screen’ was at the Trocadero, when I foundmyself providing the words for the slides that were projected on the iron curtain during the organ interludes.

In those days, the Mighty Organ was a popular element in the cinema-going ritual, though admittedly, it could drive some people to distraction. (Graham Greene called it ‘the world’s wet mouth drooling’.) At the time, it was the loudest musical noise around, always in danger of sounding overwrought, bombastic or syrupy, but in the hands of a Quentin MacLean or a Sidney Torch it would offer a pleasurable quarter of an hour.

The organ interlude’s place on a cinema’s list of attractions may well have been prompted by the prevailing Fire Regulations. These demanded that the proscenium-size fireproof curtain separating the stage from the auditorium (the ‘iron’) be lowered at least once during each programme.

It was sometimes a laboriously slow process so, as the iron descended, up from the circular pit in front of it, to the strains of the organist’s signature tune, would rise the mighty Wurlitzer. (There has never been a better illustration of the phrase ‘to come up smiling’ than the cinema organist.)

The organ itself could verge on the spectacular. Shaped like an enormous, intricately fluted jelly mould, its panels were illuminated from within in constantly changing pastel colours that nicely set off its occupant’s white dinner jacket.

As for the content of the interlude, that would take the form of either a recital or a sing along (in those days known as ‘community singing’). One of the most frequently requested items in the repertoire was ‘In a Persian Market’, with its tinkling bells and dramatic cymbal clashes. Another crowd-pleaser was ‘Coronation Scot’, in which some organists would ostentatiously hold their hands above their heads and use only the foot-pedals to play the opening ‘puffing out of the station’ bit. It invariably drew a round of applause.

Whatever the music, it would be illustrated, and occasionally enhanced, by a succession of slides projected on the iron. These would bear text appropriate to the musical theme and we ordered them from Morgan’s Slides of Gray’s Inn Road at a cost of ninepence per slide.

One week at the Trocadero, Bobby Pagan, ‘popular broadcasting organist’, didn’t have time to write the linking text for his interlude and asked me to help out. It was a medley entitled ‘Memories of Albert Ketèlbey’ and as my knowledge of the composer was something less than sketchy, I suggested to Bobby that I convert the recital into a sing along by fitting words to all the melodies. I feel it is to my credit that I can recall nothing of this desecration, except that I opened one of his flimsier pieces with the words, ‘When Ketèlbey’s feeling bright, / He will write Something light. / Dainty dances, melodies sweet, / Making your feet tap to their beat.’ Nevertheless, Bobby was pleased with the package and recommended it to the other organists on the circuit. So, within weeks, my writings were achieving a kind of syndication, displayed to audiences in Edmonton, Commercial Road, Norwood, Kilburn and far-flung Watford.

I continued working in this now vanished area of literary endeavour until my managerial duties left no time for it. This was despite the fact that, in addition to my shameful ignorance of musical matters, I was so totally unaware of copyright laws, I never even considered applying for permission whenever I set about parodying current popular songs. We found these were what went down best with wartime audiences, so I wrote umpteen of them, without ever receiving one reprimand from any publisher. As always happens, the only example Time has not scrubbed from my memory is one hardly worth preserving, a version of an almost totally forgotten ‘Last Waltz’ of the period, ‘Stay in My Arms, Cinderella’. Its new words were projected against a background photograph of Neville Chamberlain and began ‘Stay on my arm, Umbrella’.

Perhaps the reason why that one has remained with me is that it was, I believe, the first time I saw an audience laugh at something I had made up.

An incident that revealed the Wurlitzer could occasionally be something less than Mighty happened at the Troxy one afternoon when I was acting as relief manager. At the end of the interlude, the organ’s lift mechanism failed and the organist had to remain perched up in the air during the ensuing film, while all available staff searched the cinema for the winch handle that would wind him down manually.

The bomb that destroyed the Holborn Empire fell on the night of 11 May 1941. Probably the best loved of London’s Variety theatres, next in prestige to the Palladium as a showcase for top-line stars, it was also the annual home of the children’s patriotic Christmas classic, Where the Rainbow Ends. For me, it was where I gained my first glimpse of such favourites as Max Miller, Teddy Brown, Max Wall, Jimmy James, Caryll and Mundy, Hutch, Eddie Gray. (For descriptive matter on such imperishables, I refer you to Roy Hudd’s excellent Cavalcade of Variety Acts and John Fisher’s equally loving Funny Way to be a Hero.)

With the Holborn Empire gone, its long-time Musical Director, Sidney Caplan, moved to the Watford Town Hall Music Hall, where I was General Manager. Sidney was not an easy man to get close to but if you caught him at the right moments, his stories of the Holborn Empire’s great names could be fascinating, especially if, like me, you believed Variety to have been the most pleasurable of public entertainments.

After I had wrung a sizeable number of these reminiscences from him – it entailed sieving out a certain amount of malice – I asked him whether he would be prepared to relate some of them on radio, using gramophone records of the artists concerned by way of illustration. After obtaining his slightly grudging consent, I contacted Anna Instone, the Head of the BBC’s Gramophone Record Department at the time, and asked her if she would be interested in putting on six radio half-hours entitled A History of the Holborn Empire, with none other than the theatre’s Musical Director as narrator, the script to be supplied by a newcomer to the broadcasting medium.

Thus was born my first BBC radio series. Transmitted early 1942, all that remains of it is a mention somewhere in the archives of Radio Times.

During the early forties I did some RAF training in Blackpool, where I discovered the cinemas were in the habit of interrupting the main feature sharp at 4 p.m. every day, regardless of what point in the storyline had been reached, in order to serve afternoon tea. The houselights would go up and trays bearing cups of tea would be passed along the rows. After fifteen minutes, the lights would dim down again, the trays would be passed back and the film would resume. Anyone unwise enough to be sitting at the end of a row at that point could be left holding stacks of trays and empty cups.

When I began my stint as General Manager of the Gaumont, Watford, they had only recently discontinued the practice of serving afternoon teas while the film was still showing. The cessation of this amenity was, I soon discovered, much regretted by various members of the front of house staff. Prior to my arrival, the Gaumont’s patrons could, by giving their order to one of the ushers or usherettes on their way in, enjoy a choice of four types of afternoon tea. Without taking their eyes off the big picture, they could partake of a plain pot of tea, a pot of tea with a sandwich, a pot of tea with a piece of cake, or a Full Cinema Tea, which consisted of a pot of tea with both sandwich and piece of cake.

A few of the more observant front of house staff had noted that many patrons who ordered the Full Cinema Tea did not consume both the accompanying items. If they ate the sandwich, they left the cake; if they ate the cake, they left the sandwich.

As a consequence, before certain ushers and usherettes returned a tray to the cinema café, they would lift off any unconsumed item and stow it behind the small velvet curtains that masked the back-stalls radiators. The next time a patron asked for a Full Cinema Tea, they would relay the order to the kitchen as a plain pot of tea, make up the deficiencies from the supplies they had secreted behind the radiator curtains, accept payment for the Full Cinema Tea and pocket the difference.

Our wartime cinema-goers would sit there in the darkness, munching on a sandwich and/or cake which had sometimes been gathering dust under a radiator for days and, to the best of my knowledge, we had not received one complaint.

Rarely were there any empty seats in places of entertainment during wartime. There were, however, certain differences in cinema-going habits. At the larger inner city houses, such as the Trocadero or the State, Kilburn, audiences went to see a particular film or a particular star in the accompanying Variety show. At the Gaumont, Watford, on the other hand, I found that, irrespective of what was showing, they liked to go to the same cinema every week, on the same day, at the same time and, not infrequently, many of them expected to sit in the same seat.

To meet this need, we had inaugurated a kind of unofficial Advance Booking System. It included me being in the foyer as they arrived, welcoming them by name, leading them upstairs to the Circle (most of them preferred the Circle), showing them into the seats that had been kept empty for them and leaving them with a warm ‘Enjoy the show.’ For their part, if there was any week they couldn’t make it, they would punctiliously telephone the cinema and let us know.

But the protocol did not end there. When the programme was over, they would expect me to be in the foyer as they came out, both to let them know if it was raining outside and to receive their reasoned critique of the programme.

For them, it was all part of their weekly cinema-going ritual and I can’t deny there were aspects of it that I found equally pleasing. For one thing, I always used to enjoy watching audiences emerge from the darkness after a movie. In those more innocent days, their faces would still have that tranced, slightly dazed look as they struggled to get into their coats, some of them unconsciously adopting the mannerisms of whatever big star they had just been watching.

My other reason was slightly more shady. There was a small cash sum I could draw on for ‘Entertaining regular patrons’. What this meant in practice, was delivering an ice cream tub to a few of them during the intermission, ‘With the Management’s compliments.’ As my Ice Cream Sales Account rarely seemed to balance, this could prove very useful for remedying deficiencies.

One mystery I never managed to solve was the inordinate number of ladies’ shoes that found their way into the cinema’s Lost Property cupboard at the end of each day. My apprenticeship as an usher had shown me how many female patrons would gratefully slip off one or both of their shoes as soon as they’d settled in their seats, while the variety of other items that turned up in the cupboard had demonstrated how the steep rake of the auditorium floor could cause any objects placed under a seat to slide forward beneath the row in front, and sometimes further.

I could understand why the retrieval of some of these might be neglected as not worth the trouble, but shoes? To deepen the mystery further, in all the hours I spent bidding a managerial farewell to patrons as they made their way out of the cinema, I never came across one who emerged shoeless.

What’s more, although a regular Saturday night patron known to the Gaumont, Watford, staff as ‘Rear Row Rita’ once contacted our Lost Property with a view to recovering a missing pair of pale pink panties, we never once received an enquiry in respect of missing shoes. They would pile up in the cupboard and every now and again we sent a representative batch of them to the Salvation Army.

After I had been at the Gaumont, Watford, for a while, Kine Weekly printed a few paragraphs about me, headed ‘Britain’s Youngest Cinema Manager’. If that was so, it was mainly because most of the other managers were now in the forces and, sure enough, late in 1942, I received my own call-up papers.

The Gaumont staff, plus those at the Town Hall Music Hall, which I was also managing by then, combined to present me with a splendid fitted leather suitcase as a leaving present. We had a boisterous party and the following noon, I turned up, as ordered, at the Induction Centre, RAF Padgate.

Two days later, I was back in the Gaumont foyer. Padgate, for their own good and sufficient reasons, had deferred my enlistment, instructing me to return whence I came, holding myself ready for recall at twenty-four hours’ notice. The Hyams Brothers had not yet found a replacement, so they asked me to stay on until the RAF was once again ready for me.

The fitted leather suitcase was an embarrassment. I offered it back but, on behalf of all of them, Sidney Courtenay the organist, who had been acting as my stand-in, insisted I keep it. A couple of months later, when the RAF hauled me back again, this time for keeps, the staff of the two theatres clubbed together again and I found myself trying to wave away a pair of silver hairbrushes. When I pitched up at Padgate again, I must have been the most luxuriously equipped recruit in the intake.