Clips From A Life

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’.