I visited a lot of halls in the early 1960’s and can never recall the neons causing any major problems. Occasionally one letter of a set would fail but the defect was always repaired within a week of being reported to Claude Gen.In those times some managers made a practice of instructing that the neons be switched off during thunder storms as a safety measure. However, I cannot recollect any sets of neons being hit by lighting although some did suffer occasional gale damage.
Each set of neons had an on / off switch usually located within the downstairs main switch room of the hall .The Ninian, did not have a big switch room and instead had it’s neon switch located on the back outside wall of the box. Outside of the halls, high up on the fascia and immediately beneath the neons. was always a white plate bearing very visible red writing. Next to the plate was a waterproof red switch box. The plate displayed the words “Danger High Voltage” written in large letters.Beneath this was added “In Case Of Emergency Switch Off Here.” Below was the name Claude Gen and a telephone number to be used in an emergency.
Nearly all of the Withers circuit halls,by 1960, had neon external lighting that gave out the name of the hall. Most of the neon lighting sets were purple, red or yellow.The Ninian was the only cinema that I can recall with green neons.The neons were installed by a company called “Claude Gen” who continued, under contract, to maintain them well into the 1960s.
I did relief work at this hall several times in the early 1960s. The box was not well ventilated which made it very hot in the summer. The sound system, with a silver and black, top fastened, external label reading “Western Electric” was contained in a very big and ancient black casing.Therefore, from Element54’s posting, I’m now assuming that this must have been the original unit installed in 1930.I once saw this sound unit case opened during an engineer’s visit. The inside was crammed with very large glass valves which were obviously of some antiquity.I did not fully appreciate the age of the amplifier at that time as most of the other halls I worked in had similar set ups.
When I started at Warner Pathe in late 1955 most South Wales Cinemas took Pathe News.There were exceptions – Rank cinemas had their own Gaumont British News.Willis cinemas did not take Pathe either. By 1960 the take up of Pathe News was becoming very much reduced.It could not compete with the up to the minute news and news reels offered by the BBC and ITV. I can remember the shock and horror in the office when Jackson Withers decided not to renew their Pathe contract. Pathe news reels had a two week life. One week in a first run house and then a week in a 2nd tier house. After that the reels were dispatched back to London via FTS. Rumour had it that the expired news copies were later burnt to recover the silver in the film. I’m not sure now about the truth of this rumour but that is what all the vault staff believed at that time..
Outside of timing constrictions, managers had the choice of how the show was presented. That is to say how house lights, footies, breaks and interval music choices were operated and presented. For historical reasons nearly every Withers house was equipped differently and thus presentation routines were very varied. For example you could usually raise festoons while the silent BBFC certificate was showing and fade the music out in the few dark seconds before the feature came up.With drapes you had to open up the screen prior to the BBFC certificate being projected as it could not not be seen against the usual dark velvet material. Thus the footies were left on and faded out during the certificate to minimise the effect of a blank screen.
What normally happened was that Jackson Withers managers were given the starting times of the features as advertised in the papers.For obvious reasons the features were presented at those times.They also knew that they had to run the main advertisements (they were Pearl, Dean and Younger in those days)twice. The aim being to complete showing the main feature at around 10.30 pm.
The term “Interest” was another term for what the staff called “Balancers”. That is to say shorts which filled in timing holes. Usually presentations would start with advertisements followed by trailers and then either a balancer or straight on to the feature.
I visited the Gaiety many times as a child when staying with relatives in Roath. Later I did some sessions there as a Bingo checker. One of the great failures of the Gaiety’s design were the two shops either side of the entrance. They were rented out to independent retailers for a great variety of retail purposes. Every time I visited the place the shops seemed to have changed hands. This rapid change over of tenants continuing during the early years of Bingo.
I did visit the Canton a few times but cannot recall if it was using its drapes. Could it have been a management decision not to use them?
However, when houses were converted for scope it was quite common for halls to install festoons instead of drapes. I don’t think I ever operated at a Withers hall, post 1960, that did not have either drapes or alternatively festoons fitted.
Unlike other circuits, the Jackson Withers circuit did not lay down that many hard and fast rules as to how programmes were presented.These decisions were left to their individual managers. The only demands were that trailers and advertisements were shown during each round of the complete programme.Most of the Withers halls did two rounds of the programme each day starting with either the second feature or a one off showing of a short balancer. An example of a balancer being the “Look at Life ” series which lasted between fifteen and twenty minutes. All the Cardiff houses made a point of finishing by 10.35 pm as the last buses left the city centre at eleven pm sharp on their routes through the suburbs.
The Canton had a projectionist named Mac who was employed there for almost twenty years. After the Canton closed he did relief work for the local Withers circuit halls until his retirement around 1970. He often spoke about his time at the Canton, boasting of the high standard of presentation his cinema achieved when compared with the standards of his rivals at the nearby Coliseum.
Sometimes a cinema would report that they had a print which for some reason could not be shown.The normal causes being a film that had run off sprocket at a previous hall and therefore possessed serious unreported scratches or sprocket holes. The film distributing company would then have the problem of rushing another copy to the cinema concerned. The first line of attack was to use rail transport to the nearest station. If the cinema was not on a rail line then often a member of staff took the replacement copy by bus or taxi to the cinema. It was through making these film deliveries that I got to know many local projectionists and their boxes, eventually becoming a projectionist myself.
If a cinema complained about a copy, it was sent to a repairer as soon as it arrived back at the vault.Repairers, wearing cotton gloves, would place the open reels on spools and wind the film through their gloved hands. When a snag was felt, the film would be inspected and repairs made. If the damage was just one broken sprocket hole – then a V cut was made to remove the outside of the hole.If the frame was seriously damaged then the frame would be removed and the film spliced. The favourite tool for this task was the Premier Film Splicer. Neat Acetone was used as a cement A cut and splice would never take more than a minute to complete.
When FTS van arrived all of the vault staff (and often some office staff)turned out and the containers were quickly sorted out and claimed by their respective company staff. Some were immediately relabeled and sent out again on the same van. Others were taken back down into the vaults. There the boxes were opened and the cans of film placed back on the vault shelves.All of the companies had repair workshops where prints were maintained. The three big companies had large rooms that employed at least four repairers in each. The smallest company (MGM) employed one repairer who was located in the MGM dispatch office and not in a separate workshop.
These vaults were very busy and operated to dispatch and delivery timetables operated by a specialist film transport company named FTS (Film Transport Services).Access to the vaults was via a bay at the back of the building connected to a heavy duty lift that conveyed the film cases down into the vaults proper. Busy times were Sunday mornings,Thursday mornings and Friday afternoons. The FTS lorries would come into the bay and unload a large quantity of metal film containers plus the many cardboard containers that held Pathe News,Gaumont British News, Look at Life and other short reels.
The replacement building for the Electric Cinema included some specially designed accommodation for the use of the big film distributors. At the arcade level there were offices for Warner Pathe (where I worked) MGM, Rank and Anglo Amalgamated. The arcade being better known as little Wardour Street. However, below the surface were a set of fire proof vaults that the distributors originally used to house their inflammable film and the later non flammable stock.Each company had their own area of the vaults with the film storage rooms being guarded by heavy steel, fireproof doors.
Jackson Withers directors had already decided to close one of their Ely Cinemas – the preferred choice being the older and less well designed Regent.However, they were persuaded instead, by vested interests, to close the Avenue. This was because it was located on the busy A48 route between Newport and Swansea. Hundred of cars passed along that road every hour making it an ideal site for a car sales showroom. Thus the fate of the Avenue was sealed and in due course it was converted to become Howell’s new car showroom. At the same time the old car showroom in the Hayes was converted into a Harrods style food store and delicatessen.
The story went that Howell’s had a garage in the Hayes that sold up market cars. It was located somewhere opposite the Central Cinema and the new Andrews owned Self Service Supermarket sited next to the South Wales Electricity Board offices. This was the first supermarket of its type to open in Cardiff and the Howells management enviously watched it enjoy a tremendous trade. Howells management immediately decided to open their own Food Store in what was at that time their car sales premises. The problem then was where to move the car sales business? There was no other suitable site in the Hayes/St. Mary Street area where Howells store was located.
I never worked at the Avenue but met quite a few projectionist who had.They told me that the box and cinema had beena paradise to work in and could never understand why it was closed in favour of the less pleasant Regent.Some years later when I was working in Swansea, I was told by a Withers manager that the decision to close the Avenue was a commercial one based more on the needs of Howell’s Department Store in St Mary Street, Cardiff than on retaining the better of the two Ely cinemas..Some of the Howells directors were apparently also Jackson Withers directors.
I clearly recall the coming of both the transmitters that were built to serve South Wales in the 1950s.The first to be built was the BBC transmitter at Wenvoe. It was constructed with some haste so as to be in service by the time of the Coronation in June 1953. Its opening had an immediate effect on cinema attendances plus did wonders for the sale of single channel television sets.The later transmitter was the ITV mast built at St.Hillary Down in 1957/8.This mast meant that for the first time people had a choice of channels to watch. Once more cinema attendances dropped over most of South Wales. It was only the coming of the 1961 Bingo boom that saved many halls from complete closure and extended their use for a few more years.
The hall has received much renovation and continues to be used as a community centre. It is not known if the hall has retained it’s capability to present film and theatre shows.
Errors have been made when transposing my original entry. The Rex Willis circuit did not have it’s offices in the Globe Cinema although the Cardiff Globe was a part of their cinema empire. The Globe cinema stood on a corner site at the junction of Albany Road and Wellfield Road.There was a small office space in the Globe that was only used by the manager. The Willis offices were actually located in the first house in Wellfield Road. This just happened to be next door to the Globe. The correct spelling of “Penlyn” should be Penylan.
Some time around 1962/63 I met a projectionist who had worked at this hall immediately prior to it’s abrupt closure. He told me that the Tivoli was sited on land that had originally been adjacent to a long vanished canal.The main reasons for its sudden closure was the fact that parts of the building were subsiding and that it was not making much of a profit.Thus the Jackson Withers management were reluctant to undertake expensive renovations to what was obviously fast becoming a failing asset
I never worked this hall as it had closed before I took up projecting in 1960. However, I was lodging in Whitchurch between 1955 and 1961 and often went to watch films at this hall via the 24 bus service. It was a small cramped hall and, on most of the nights I visited, seemed to have very rowdy patrons. The management was continually walking up and down the aisles threatening to remove people.
This was a well patronised cinema circa 1962 so it was not hit by the 1961 bingo revolution.Unusually for a Withers lesser hall, it had a staff that included a manager and an assistant manageress. Most 2nd tier halls in the Jackson Withers circuit only had a manager.This assistant manager (Miss Studley) was well respected by all of the circuit staff and frequently appeared at other local Withers halls as a relief manager covering for the regular manager’s night off. I can remember her being at the Regent and the Ninian. The lady was always immaculately dressed with noticeably smart hair styles.When doing relief work she always stood along side the pay box and made a point of personally welcoming patrons.
I visited a lot of halls in the early 1960’s and can never recall the neons causing any major problems. Occasionally one letter of a set would fail but the defect was always repaired within a week of being reported to Claude Gen.In those times some managers made a practice of instructing that the neons be switched off during thunder storms as a safety measure. However, I cannot recollect any sets of neons being hit by lighting although some did suffer occasional gale damage.
Each set of neons had an on / off switch usually located within the downstairs main switch room of the hall .The Ninian, did not have a big switch room and instead had it’s neon switch located on the back outside wall of the box. Outside of the halls, high up on the fascia and immediately beneath the neons. was always a white plate bearing very visible red writing. Next to the plate was a waterproof red switch box. The plate displayed the words “Danger High Voltage” written in large letters.Beneath this was added “In Case Of Emergency Switch Off Here.” Below was the name Claude Gen and a telephone number to be used in an emergency.
Nearly all of the Withers circuit halls,by 1960, had neon external lighting that gave out the name of the hall. Most of the neon lighting sets were purple, red or yellow.The Ninian was the only cinema that I can recall with green neons.The neons were installed by a company called “Claude Gen” who continued, under contract, to maintain them well into the 1960s.
I did relief work at this hall several times in the early 1960s. The box was not well ventilated which made it very hot in the summer. The sound system, with a silver and black, top fastened, external label reading “Western Electric” was contained in a very big and ancient black casing.Therefore, from Element54’s posting, I’m now assuming that this must have been the original unit installed in 1930.I once saw this sound unit case opened during an engineer’s visit. The inside was crammed with very large glass valves which were obviously of some antiquity.I did not fully appreciate the age of the amplifier at that time as most of the other halls I worked in had similar set ups.
When I started at Warner Pathe in late 1955 most South Wales Cinemas took Pathe News.There were exceptions – Rank cinemas had their own Gaumont British News.Willis cinemas did not take Pathe either. By 1960 the take up of Pathe News was becoming very much reduced.It could not compete with the up to the minute news and news reels offered by the BBC and ITV. I can remember the shock and horror in the office when Jackson Withers decided not to renew their Pathe contract. Pathe news reels had a two week life. One week in a first run house and then a week in a 2nd tier house. After that the reels were dispatched back to London via FTS. Rumour had it that the expired news copies were later burnt to recover the silver in the film. I’m not sure now about the truth of this rumour but that is what all the vault staff believed at that time..
Outside of timing constrictions, managers had the choice of how the show was presented. That is to say how house lights, footies, breaks and interval music choices were operated and presented. For historical reasons nearly every Withers house was equipped differently and thus presentation routines were very varied. For example you could usually raise festoons while the silent BBFC certificate was showing and fade the music out in the few dark seconds before the feature came up.With drapes you had to open up the screen prior to the BBFC certificate being projected as it could not not be seen against the usual dark velvet material. Thus the footies were left on and faded out during the certificate to minimise the effect of a blank screen.
What normally happened was that Jackson Withers managers were given the starting times of the features as advertised in the papers.For obvious reasons the features were presented at those times.They also knew that they had to run the main advertisements (they were Pearl, Dean and Younger in those days)twice. The aim being to complete showing the main feature at around 10.30 pm.
The term “Interest” was another term for what the staff called “Balancers”. That is to say shorts which filled in timing holes. Usually presentations would start with advertisements followed by trailers and then either a balancer or straight on to the feature.
I visited the Gaiety many times as a child when staying with relatives in Roath. Later I did some sessions there as a Bingo checker. One of the great failures of the Gaiety’s design were the two shops either side of the entrance. They were rented out to independent retailers for a great variety of retail purposes. Every time I visited the place the shops seemed to have changed hands. This rapid change over of tenants continuing during the early years of Bingo.
I did visit the Canton a few times but cannot recall if it was using its drapes. Could it have been a management decision not to use them?
However, when houses were converted for scope it was quite common for halls to install festoons instead of drapes. I don’t think I ever operated at a Withers hall, post 1960, that did not have either drapes or alternatively festoons fitted.
Unlike other circuits, the Jackson Withers circuit did not lay down that many hard and fast rules as to how programmes were presented.These decisions were left to their individual managers. The only demands were that trailers and advertisements were shown during each round of the complete programme.Most of the Withers halls did two rounds of the programme each day starting with either the second feature or a one off showing of a short balancer. An example of a balancer being the “Look at Life ” series which lasted between fifteen and twenty minutes. All the Cardiff houses made a point of finishing by 10.35 pm as the last buses left the city centre at eleven pm sharp on their routes through the suburbs.
The Canton had a projectionist named Mac who was employed there for almost twenty years. After the Canton closed he did relief work for the local Withers circuit halls until his retirement around 1970. He often spoke about his time at the Canton, boasting of the high standard of presentation his cinema achieved when compared with the standards of his rivals at the nearby Coliseum.
Sometimes a cinema would report that they had a print which for some reason could not be shown.The normal causes being a film that had run off sprocket at a previous hall and therefore possessed serious unreported scratches or sprocket holes. The film distributing company would then have the problem of rushing another copy to the cinema concerned. The first line of attack was to use rail transport to the nearest station. If the cinema was not on a rail line then often a member of staff took the replacement copy by bus or taxi to the cinema. It was through making these film deliveries that I got to know many local projectionists and their boxes, eventually becoming a projectionist myself.
If a cinema complained about a copy, it was sent to a repairer as soon as it arrived back at the vault.Repairers, wearing cotton gloves, would place the open reels on spools and wind the film through their gloved hands. When a snag was felt, the film would be inspected and repairs made. If the damage was just one broken sprocket hole – then a V cut was made to remove the outside of the hole.If the frame was seriously damaged then the frame would be removed and the film spliced. The favourite tool for this task was the Premier Film Splicer. Neat Acetone was used as a cement A cut and splice would never take more than a minute to complete.
When FTS van arrived all of the vault staff (and often some office staff)turned out and the containers were quickly sorted out and claimed by their respective company staff. Some were immediately relabeled and sent out again on the same van. Others were taken back down into the vaults. There the boxes were opened and the cans of film placed back on the vault shelves.All of the companies had repair workshops where prints were maintained. The three big companies had large rooms that employed at least four repairers in each. The smallest company (MGM) employed one repairer who was located in the MGM dispatch office and not in a separate workshop.
These vaults were very busy and operated to dispatch and delivery timetables operated by a specialist film transport company named FTS (Film Transport Services).Access to the vaults was via a bay at the back of the building connected to a heavy duty lift that conveyed the film cases down into the vaults proper. Busy times were Sunday mornings,Thursday mornings and Friday afternoons. The FTS lorries would come into the bay and unload a large quantity of metal film containers plus the many cardboard containers that held Pathe News,Gaumont British News, Look at Life and other short reels.
The replacement building for the Electric Cinema included some specially designed accommodation for the use of the big film distributors. At the arcade level there were offices for Warner Pathe (where I worked) MGM, Rank and Anglo Amalgamated. The arcade being better known as little Wardour Street. However, below the surface were a set of fire proof vaults that the distributors originally used to house their inflammable film and the later non flammable stock.Each company had their own area of the vaults with the film storage rooms being guarded by heavy steel, fireproof doors.
Jackson Withers directors had already decided to close one of their Ely Cinemas – the preferred choice being the older and less well designed Regent.However, they were persuaded instead, by vested interests, to close the Avenue. This was because it was located on the busy A48 route between Newport and Swansea. Hundred of cars passed along that road every hour making it an ideal site for a car sales showroom. Thus the fate of the Avenue was sealed and in due course it was converted to become Howell’s new car showroom. At the same time the old car showroom in the Hayes was converted into a Harrods style food store and delicatessen.
The story went that Howell’s had a garage in the Hayes that sold up market cars. It was located somewhere opposite the Central Cinema and the new Andrews owned Self Service Supermarket sited next to the South Wales Electricity Board offices. This was the first supermarket of its type to open in Cardiff and the Howells management enviously watched it enjoy a tremendous trade. Howells management immediately decided to open their own Food Store in what was at that time their car sales premises. The problem then was where to move the car sales business? There was no other suitable site in the Hayes/St. Mary Street area where Howells store was located.
I never worked at the Avenue but met quite a few projectionist who had.They told me that the box and cinema had beena paradise to work in and could never understand why it was closed in favour of the less pleasant Regent.Some years later when I was working in Swansea, I was told by a Withers manager that the decision to close the Avenue was a commercial one based more on the needs of Howell’s Department Store in St Mary Street, Cardiff than on retaining the better of the two Ely cinemas..Some of the Howells directors were apparently also Jackson Withers directors.
I clearly recall the coming of both the transmitters that were built to serve South Wales in the 1950s.The first to be built was the BBC transmitter at Wenvoe. It was constructed with some haste so as to be in service by the time of the Coronation in June 1953. Its opening had an immediate effect on cinema attendances plus did wonders for the sale of single channel television sets.The later transmitter was the ITV mast built at St.Hillary Down in 1957/8.This mast meant that for the first time people had a choice of channels to watch. Once more cinema attendances dropped over most of South Wales. It was only the coming of the 1961 Bingo boom that saved many halls from complete closure and extended their use for a few more years.
The hall has received much renovation and continues to be used as a community centre. It is not known if the hall has retained it’s capability to present film and theatre shows.
Errors have been made when transposing my original entry. The Rex Willis circuit did not have it’s offices in the Globe Cinema although the Cardiff Globe was a part of their cinema empire. The Globe cinema stood on a corner site at the junction of Albany Road and Wellfield Road.There was a small office space in the Globe that was only used by the manager. The Willis offices were actually located in the first house in Wellfield Road. This just happened to be next door to the Globe. The correct spelling of “Penlyn” should be Penylan.
Some time around 1962/63 I met a projectionist who had worked at this hall immediately prior to it’s abrupt closure. He told me that the Tivoli was sited on land that had originally been adjacent to a long vanished canal.The main reasons for its sudden closure was the fact that parts of the building were subsiding and that it was not making much of a profit.Thus the Jackson Withers management were reluctant to undertake expensive renovations to what was obviously fast becoming a failing asset
I never worked this hall as it had closed before I took up projecting in 1960. However, I was lodging in Whitchurch between 1955 and 1961 and often went to watch films at this hall via the 24 bus service. It was a small cramped hall and, on most of the nights I visited, seemed to have very rowdy patrons. The management was continually walking up and down the aisles threatening to remove people.
This was a well patronised cinema circa 1962 so it was not hit by the 1961 bingo revolution.Unusually for a Withers lesser hall, it had a staff that included a manager and an assistant manageress. Most 2nd tier halls in the Jackson Withers circuit only had a manager.This assistant manager (Miss Studley) was well respected by all of the circuit staff and frequently appeared at other local Withers halls as a relief manager covering for the regular manager’s night off. I can remember her being at the Regent and the Ninian. The lady was always immaculately dressed with noticeably smart hair styles.When doing relief work she always stood along side the pay box and made a point of personally welcoming patrons.