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