Category: Research in Focus

Research in Focus

‘Make your public curious’: The highs and lows of being a cinema manager

In this blog Dr Rob James, Senior Lecturer in History, discusses the challenges of being a cinema manager in Britain in the first half of the 20^th century. Rob specialises in researching society’s leisure activities and teaches a number of units on film and the cinema, including, as part of the Problems and Perspectives unit, ‘History at the Movies’ in the first year, ‘The Way to the Stars: Film and cinema-going in Britain, c. 1900-c. 2000’ option in the second year, and a Special Subject on ‘Cinema-going in Wartime Britain, 1939-1945’ in the third year.

Going to the cinema is the result of a series of choices. A number of ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors operate in those decisions. Simply put, ‘push’ factors are things like bad weather, where patrons would go to the cinema in order to keep cosy and warm; ‘pull’ factors are those that draw cinema-goers in, such as the film being shown. In the first half of the twentieth century, when cinema-going was, to use the often quoted phrase by A.J.P. Taylor, the ‘social habit of the age’, cinema-goers were offered a wide variety of films to watch and a large number of cinemas in which to watch them. [1] Here in Portsmouth, for example, there were 29 cinemas located across the town at the start of the Second World War. [2] On top of this, consumers had a host of other leisure activities – pub-going, dancing, reading – competing for their free time, so going to the cinema was a conscious decision made after taking a series of choices. Cinema managers knew that if they were to run a successful and profitable business, they had to respond to the needs of the public. As a result, they paid close attention to their patrons’ film preferences, and many managers ran extravagant publicity campaigns in order to attract customers into their cinema halls.

Odeon Cinema, North End, Portsmouth

Across the country cinema mangers went to significant lengths to promote the films their cinemas were due to screen, and their campaigns were often mentioned in the film trade papers. One of the most important cinema managers’ journals of the period, Kinematograph Weekly, ran regular features that detailed the techniques local managers employed to advertise a film, using feature titles such as ‘What managers are doing’ and ‘Showmanship’. [3] The paper often awarded prizes to managers who ran the most enterprising campaigns. One particularly active manager operating in Portsmouth during the 1930s and 1940s, Patrick Reed, won a prize for the campaigns he ran while managing the Odeon cinema in North End in 1938. As part of his film promotion strategies he arranged tie-ins with a large number of shops to advertise fashion house drama Vogues of 1938 (1937), and overprinted the pay envelopes of the employees of several large companies in the town with notes about the musical film Something to Sing About (1937). [4]

Queens Cinema, Portsea, Portsmouth

Cinema managers faced a number of challenges, however, and not just competition from other cinemas operating in the area. One particularly sad event took place in April 1931 when the manager of the Queens cinema in Portsmouth, Mr H. E. Bingham, took his own life after a film failed to arrive in time for what would have undoubtedly been a busy Easter weekend, leaving a note written in chalk on the wall reading ‘NO SHOW. FINISH’. [5] The cinema was situated in Queen Street, near the naval barracks and Dockyard, and had attracted cinema-goers who lived in the immediate vicinity along with those working in and around the Dockyard and naval barracks. Problems started for Mr Bingham when the Council initiated a policy of slum clearance and moved lots of the district’s working-class residents to a new housing estate in Hilsea. [6] Mr Bingham had repeatedly complained to the Council about the effects of their policies on his business, and threatened to close the cinema a number of times due to the fall in takings at the box-office. [7] The failure of the film to arrive clearly tipped him over the edge.

Harry Sanders

For many managers, though, the cinema industry offered a long and productive career. One particularly successful manager, Harry Sanders, ran a number of cinemas in England from the early 1920s until the mid-1960s, most notably the State cinema (later renamed Granada) in Grantham, where he served for over 20 years until his retirement in 1963. [8] Sanders recognised the importance of film promotion and, in October 1933, wrote a piece for Kinematograph Weekly in which he advised managers to ‘Make your public curious’ in order to obtain ‘big box-office business’. [9] Many of Sanders campaigns were highly flamboyant, but one particularly noteworthy campaign occurred in 1952 when he arranged for a herd of elephants to be paraded through Grantham in order to promote the circus film The Greatest Show on Earth. What a sight it must have been for the residents of that modest Lincolnshire market town to see elephants roaming through their streets! The stunt was, of course, remarked upon for making quite an impact, and it is still mentioned in popular histories of the town whenever ‘Uncle Harry’ – as Sanders was affectionately known – is remembered. [10]

Promotional poster

Cinema managers like Sanders expended considerable energy ensuring that their businesses were successful. Unfortunately, most of their activities have been forgotten and the material they collated over the years has been lost to the historical record. I will, therefore, end this blog with an appeal. Harry Sanders kept much of the material that documented his life as a cinema manager – cinema ledgers, promotional material, exhibitors’ diaries, etc. – and his papers were donated by his son Howard to the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford. If you have (or had) a relative who worked as a cinema manager, or know of any such material, please get in touch with me on robert.james@port.ac.uk. It would be a great way to add to our limited knowledge of cinema managers’ lives in the twentieth century.

Notes

[1] Cited in Jeffrey Richards, The Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society in Britain 1930-1939, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), p. 11.

[2] Robert James, ‘Cinema-going in a Port Town, 1914-1951: Film Booking patterns at the Queens Cinema, Portsmouth’, Urban History, 40.2, 2013, pp. 315-335, p. 317.

[3] See, for example, Kinematograph Weekly, 12 February 1931, 35 and ibid., 30 June 1938, p. 52.

[4] Kinematograph Weekly, 7 April 1938, p. 50; ibid., 23 June 1938, p. 62.

[5] Sue Harper, ‘A Lower Middle-Class Taste Community in the 1930s: Admissions Figures at the Regent Cinema, Portsmouth, UK’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 24.2, 2004, pp. 565-587, p. 566.

[6] For an analysis of the Council’s housing policies in this period see C.P. Walker, ‘Municipal Enterprise: A Study of the Interwar Municipal Corporation of Portsmouth 1919-1939’ (unpublished University of Portsmouth MA dissertation, 2003).

[7] Evening News, 8 April 1931; Kinematograph Weekly, April 16 1931, p. 29.

[8] Harry Sanders Collection, National Science and Media Museum, Bradford.

[9] Ibid.

[10] See ‘Sanders, Harry – Uncle Harry put the fun into Grantham’, http://www.granthammatters.co.uk/sanders-harry/ (accessed 21 March, 2018).

March 30, 2018
James Greenwood – Social Reformer or Opportunist?

Rory Herbert, final year History student and President of the History Society at the University of Portsmouth, has written the following blog on the 19^th century social investigator James Greenwood. Rory is Gale Ambassador at the university and contributes to The Gale Review Blog. The role of the Gale Ambassador is to increase awareness of the Gale primary source collections available to students at their university. The University of Portsmouth Library hosts a large collection of Gale primary sources which History students can use when undertaking archival research for their dissertations and other research projects.

James Greenwood was an author of relative obscurity who came to fame abruptly following the publication of his serial A Night in the Workhouse in the 1860s by the Pall Mall Gazette. He soon found himself rising through the ranks of the Victorian social ladder and became one of the leading social commentators of his age. This revolutionary piece saw Greenwood experience the conditions of a workhouse first-hand in one of the first examples of investigative journalism. Yet, while his work was quickly adopted by social reformers and critics alike, it seems the author himself was somewhat less interested in the people he claimed to support and, instead, focused on appealing to a wider audience.

To read the rest of Rory’s blog, click here.

Exterior of Whitechapel Workhouse. Image courtesy of Gale Primary Sources

March 8, 2018
Homophobia surrounding the 1980s AIDS crisis

Rory Herbert, final year History student and President of the History Society at the University of Portsmouth, has written the following blog on the 1980s AIDS crisis and the homophobic behaviour it triggered. Rory is a Gale Ambassador at the university and contributes to The Gale Review Blog. The role of the Gale Ambassador is to increase awareness of the Gale primary source collections available to students at their university. The University Of Portsmouth Library hosts a large collection of Gale primary sources which History students can use when undertaking archival research for their dissertations and other research projects.

During the early 1980s, AIDS became an ever-growing concern in the minds of Americans, and brought to the fore the deep-seated tensions and homophobic tendencies that plagued the nation’s media and political institutes. Gale’s Archives of Sexuality & Gender provides access to a wealth of sources that help us to understand the issues and struggles experienced by these long-oppressed and ignored members of society during a particularly trying period.

To read the rest of Rory’s blog, click here.

February 20, 2018
Don’t believe everything you read…

Dr Rob James, Senior Lecturer in History, recently worked with a local community group, Portsdown U3A, on a Heritage Lottery Funded project that sought to find out the impact of the Battle of Jutland on the people of Portsmouth and the local area. With the help of research assistant and PhD student John Bolt, and a team of Online Course Developers at the University, Dr James created an online map using the data collected by members or Portsdown U3A. One of the most interesting findings made by the U3A when conducting their research was that one celebrated V.C. holder – Commander Loftus William Jones – was born in Portsmouth, not Petersfield, as had been originally claimed.

Historical ‘facts’ are always open to question. This has never been more evident than in the research uncovered by Portsdown U3A, a local community group based just off Portsea Island. Members of Portsdown U3A, keen historians of the Battle of Jutland – the most famous sea battle to take place during the First World War – had always believed that Commander Loftus William Jones, who served on the destroyer H.M.S. Shark during the battle, had been born in the leafy market town of Petersfield, Hampshire. They had very little reason to doubt this. The town had long-celebrated ‘their’ war hero. Loftus William Jones’ parents, Admiral Loftus Francis Jones and Gertrude (née Gray), called Petersfield ‘home’ and it was long-believed that this was the town where Commander Jones was born. Documentary evidence supported this. The UK’s official public record, The Gazette, recorded that Jones was born in the town on 13 November 1879. The UK Victoria Cross Medals 1857-2007 website similarly documented Petersfield as his place of birth. In 2014, The Telegraph repeated the claim, and as recently as 2016 a biography of the Commander was published carrying the title Commander Loftus William Jones: Petersfield’s Only VC. A brief internet search undertaken while writing this blog still throws up a series of entries claiming Petersfield as the town in which Commander Jones was born.

Commander Loftus William Jones

However, research by members of the Portsdown branch of the U3A has uncovered startling new evidence: that Commander Jones was not born in Petersfield as originally believed, but in Southsea, Portsmouth! While undertaking their research into the casualties of the Battle of Jutland who had been born in Portsmouth, one of the Portsdown U3A researchers decided to look into the life of Commander Jones because he had been awarded a posthumous V.C. It was while doing this research that they went through the census from 1881-1911 and found a record showing that Commander Jones was born in Southsea. Astonished to discover this, the U3A researcher investigated further at the Portsmouth History Centre. Here they discovered that a ‘Loftus William Jones’ had been baptised at St Jude’s Church in Southsea on 7 December 1879, and that his parents were Captain Loftus Francis Jones RN and Gertrude Jones, residing in Southsea. Finally, they managed to uncover a copy of Jones’ Birth Certificate at Portsmouth Register Office, and this demonstrated without doubt that he was born in Portsmouth on 13 November 1879. [1] A long-believed ‘fact’ had been shown to be a falsehood!

It is no surprise that the life (and death) of Commander Jones has garnered such interest. He had an illustrious career in the Royal Navy. He was educated at Eastman’s Royal Naval Academy in Fareham, near Portsmouth, and rapidly rose through the ranks. On 30^th June 1914 he was promoted to Commander, and from October of that year he was appointed as Commander of the destroyer HMS Shark. Later that year HMS Shark led a flotilla of four ships along the east coast of England against a number of German light cruisers and destroyers. This action culminated in the Scarborough Raid in December 1914, for which the work of Commander Jones was commended by the Admiral of the Fleet, David Beatty. [2]

On 31^st May 1916 Commander Jones led HMS Shark at the Battle of Jutland. The ship came under heavy enemy bombardment in the battle, and shells hit the bridge and main engines, causing major damage. Commander Jones was wounded but attempted to carry on despite facing significant enemy fire. After the Shark was struck by a shell Commander Jones lost most of one of his legs but continued to command the vessel by giving orders to his gun’s crew. Finally, a torpedo struck the Shark and the ship rapidly sank. There were only six survivors. Commander Jones was not one of them. Despite being helped onto a raft by two of his crew, his injuries were too severe and he died, along with 7 other officers and 79 men. [3]

Commander Jones was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross, the highest award of the honours system in the UK, because of his brave actions. It is no wonder Petersfield wanted to claim him as one of its own. However, thanks to the diligent work of the Portsdown U3A the birthplace of Commander Jones can be settled once and for all, and the community group can rightfully state that ‘Portsmouth has another V.C.’! [4]

Notes

[1] ‘The Battle of Jutland: Don’t believe everything you read’, The Battle of Jutland Exhibition, Exhibition panels produced by the Portsdown U3A Jutland Research Project 2016-2017.

[2] Information Sheet no 090, Loftus Jones VC, Library and Information Services, National Museum of the Royal Navy, http://www.nmrn-portsmouth.org.uk/sites/default/files/Loftus%20Jones%20VC.pdf, last accessed 27 January 2018.

[3] The London Gazette, 6 March 1917, http://www.roll-of-honour.com/Hampshire/Petersfield.html, last accessed 27 January 2018.

[4] ‘Battle of Jutland: Don’t believe everything you read’.

The online map and full details of the project undertaken by Portsdown U3A and Dr James is available to view on the Port Towns and Urban Cultures website http://porttowns.port.ac.uk/.

February 5, 2018
History is not always written by the winners

Dr Katy Gibbons is Senior Lecturer in History, and specialises in the religious and cultural history of 16^th century England and Europe. She teaches amongst other units, a Special Subject ‘Conflict, Conspiracy, Consensus? Religious Identities in the Reign of Elizabeth I’, which covers some of the themes addressed in the article below. The article for this blog accompanies a publication in the international journal Etudes Episteme.

2017 has seen a range of events to mark the 500th anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation (http://www.reformation500.uk/). Celebrations have been conducted in ways that deliberately avoid confessionalised interpretations of the past, including efforts at mutual dialogue between the Lutheran and Roman Catholic churches (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-37827736), and a wealth of historical scholarship, from new biographies of Luther to studies of the ways in which he has been remembered and celebrated.

But how did contemporaries and near contemporaries make sense of the dramatic times they witnessed? It is a commonly accepted aphorism that History is told by the winners, but what of those who were not part of the triumphant side in the Reformation? In the English context, the Reformation meant a series of dramatic shifts imposed from the top, the direction of which changed with each successive monarch in the 16^th century. Having gained a papal title ‘Defender of the Faith’ for his attacks on Luther, Henry VIII then repudiated papal authority and claimed the royal supremacy for the Church of England. There was more decisive Protestant change under Edward VI, then a return to Pope and Catholic practice under Mary. With the accession of Elizabeth, Mary’s reign proved to be a brief exception in what has often been presented as a story of Protestant triumph, which became enshrined in ‘official’ Protestant history writing.

But what of those subjects of the English Crown who remained Catholic? By constructing their own version of the recent past and its consequences for their own time, they offered a counter to the Protestant story. In doing so, they wrote history, and contemporary history, that was highly controversial. They aimed to tell the story of the Reformation whilst trying to explain the situation they found themselves in: how had a Catholic country come to break a centuries-long connection to the international Church? In seeking to explain this, they laid the blame firmly at the feet of their own monarchs.

Intellectuals including Reginald Pole (later Cardinal Pole and architect of much of the Catholic Reformation under Mary I) and the exiled Elizabethan priest Nicholas Sander wrote from the relative safety of Catholic Europe, with the opportunities it offered to engage with an international community of readers. They employed the language of condemnation and moral judgement in explaining why Catholicism lost and Protestantism seemingly won in England – apparently, because they hoped the situation was reversible. Perhaps most notorious was the work of Nicholas Sander, who set out to write a history of the English Schism from the reign of Henry VIII until the present day (later sections were completed by a number of contributors after his death). His published work De Origine ac progressu schismatis Anglicani (The Origins and Growth of the English Schism), first published in 1585, stated in print what had long been a rumour: that Anne Boleyn, whose marriage to Henry was viewed as invalid by Catholics, was not only his mistress but also his daughter, the product of Henry’s earlier relationship with Anne’s mother. This formed a key part of the explanation for how Protestantism had gained the upper hand in English politics – the growth of Protestantism was explained as the product and consequence of an inherently corrupt and illegitimate ruling dynasty.

Recent scholars have observed how important history-writing was in the 16th century for a number of different groups struggling to assert their presence and identity. The Catholic writers were no exception here. For writers like Sander, this was not just ivory-tower material, to be debated and discussed within the confines of a learned circle. These were urgent issues concerning life and death, and the fate of souls, which had to be fought for. The history writing of this losing side in the English Reformation was polemically embarrassing for the Tudor regime, but was also a call to arms, a way to rally the Catholic community to bring about the intended re-Catholicisation of England.

To read more, you can find the full article here.

January 26, 2018
‘Pleasure in reading is the true function of all books’: Cultural critics, public librarians, and working-class reading in early-twentieth century Britain

In this blog Dr Rob James, Senior Lecturer in History, looks at the growth of reading as a leisure activity among the working classes in Britain during the early twentieth century and considers how broader society viewed this expansion. Rob specialises in researching people’s leisure practices, and teaches a number of units that focus on one of the most popular leisure pursuits of the first half of the twentieth century, going to the cinema.

An early British lending library

Do you ever think about how other people view the books you choose to read? Over the course of the last hundred or so years, people’s reading habits have been subject to intense scrutiny, particularly the habits of working-class readers. A wide variety of individuals, including cultural critics and public librarians, wanted to shape working-class people’s reading habits to ensure that they only read the ‘right’ type of fiction. Of course, relaxing with a book, particularly a work of fiction, was well-established as a popular leisure activity within British society from the nineteenth century onwards. It was, however, an activity that was mainly enjoyed by the country’s more leisured classes up until the early-twentieth century. After the First World War, though, changes to the publishing industry’s working practices, coupled with the growth of the ‘open access’ system in public libraries in the 1920s – when people could choose books freely from the shelves as they do today – and the spread of cheap lending libraries in the 1930s, created a new type of reader, drawn principally from the country’s working-class communities. This spread of the working-class book reading habit raised much concern among people higher up the social ladder, and there was lots of discussion about it within the publishing trade.

The wide-scale commercialization of the book trade was believed to be one of the reasons for the growing interest in reading by the working classes. After the First World War publishers began to use modern, aggressive marketing techniques to advertise their wares. As one contemporary noted, the publisher ‘now elaborately prepares the ground for any new book, plans a campaign for it, advertises much more largely, and vies with his competitors in the use of every legitimate means of publicity.’ [1] Many of the publishing trade’s heavyweights were very critical of this trend towards commercialization, however, and in 1933 a leading article in the trade paper The Publishers’ Circular and Booksellers’ Record pointedly noted that: ‘Books are not in the same category as soap, chocolates and cigarettes.’ [2] Cultural critics were equally dismissive of the mass marketing of books, and in 1932 the literary critic Q.D. Leavis argued that: ‘The effect of the increasing control of Big Business […] is to destroy among the masses a desire to read anything which by the widest stretch could be included in the classification ‘literature’. [3] It was this aspect, the effects of commercialization on the reading habits of ‘the masses’ that was really at the heart of the matter. Time and again, it was the working classes’ desire to consume, as Leavis disapprovingly put it, ‘fiction that required the least effort to read,’ that attracted most criticism. [4]

An example of ‘good’ fiction

Many public librarians were equally disapproving of their library users’ reading practices. For example, Edward Green, who was chief librarian of Halifax public libraries observed: ‘In recent years a vast army of new readers – the product of the elementary school – has been recruited from a lower mental strata, and the intelligent use of the printed page needs more encouragement and direction.’ [5] Manchester’s chief public librarian, Charles Nowell likewise noted that the library’s principal aim should be ‘to maintain a healthy public interest in the novels and romances which are worth reading.’ [6] Other public librarians were less concerned, however, and one of the most vocal supporters of including fiction in public libraries was chief librarian of Swinton and Pendlebury library service, Frederick J. Cowles. Despite making it known that he preferred readers to borrow ‘good’ fiction, Cowles championed the public librarians’ right to include all types of fiction, for all classes of reader, in their libraries. This led to a long-running debate being played out in The Publishers’ Circular and Booksellers’ Record, and Cowles attracted much criticism. However, some librarians did jump to his defense. Arthur E. Gower, for example, who was librarian and secretary in Grays, Essex, defended the public library’s practice of stocking all forms of fiction by stating that librarians were merely the ‘servants of the public.’ [7] Indeed, Gower claimed that he wanted ‘no higher office,’ concluding that ‘Pleasure in reading is the true function of all books.’ [8]

Despite these concessions to the working classes’ reading tastes, the mutual improvement ethos – which had been so central to the setting up of public libraries in the first place – continued to hold sway well in to the twentieth century, particularly due to the large numbers of readers from that social class choosing to turn to the written word for entertainment and relaxation. So when you next sit down to read a book, perhaps you’d like to think about what these public librarians and cultural critics would have had to say about your reading tastes. Would they be nodding approvingly as you read through the works of Charles Dickens or Thomas Hardy, or would they be shaking their heads with despair as you browsed the pages of the latest ‘trashy’ novel? [9]

Notes

[1] Frank Swinnerton, ‘Authorship’, in John Hampden, ed. The Book World: A New Survey (London, 1935), pp. 12-35: p. 14.

[2] Anon., ‘Books as commodities’, The Publishers’ Circular and Booksellers’ Record, 22 April 1933, p. 395.

[3] Q.D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (London, 1932), p. 17.

[4] Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public, p. 27.

[5] Edward Green, The Publishers’ Circular and Booksellers’ Record, 3 June 1933, p. 605.

[6] Charles Nowell, ‘The Public Library’, in John Hampden, ed. The Book World: A New Survey (London, 1935), pp. 181-194: p. 188.

[7] Arthur E. Gower, The Publishers’ Circular and Booksellers’ Record, 26 March 1932, p. 327.

[8] Ibid.

[9] The novels of Dickens and Hardy were repeatedly mentioned as the types of ‘good’ fiction that the working classes should be encouraged to read.

To read the article that examines these issues in more depth, published in the Journal of Social History, click here.

January 8, 2018