Old Princess Cinema

Torchlight on August 7, 2024 at 5:51 am

Within a few months of opening his East Belfast Skating Rink, local businessman W. J. (William John) Anderson made an application to convert the premises to a picture palace. The building was set back from the Newtownards Road with access via Campbell’s Row East, a narrow entry off the main road. Around this time the Jaffe Spinning Mill (from the 1930s it became the Strand Spinning Mill) was in the course of erection on the east side of the entry.

The Princess Picture Palace opened its doors on Easter Monday 28th March 1910, promising ‘animated pictures and select vaudeville'. It was the first of the five cinemas which opened in Belfast that year (the same year the Cinematograph Act came into force). The Princess was also the first cinema to open outside Belfast city centre.

The Belfast Evening Telegraph described the interior of the Princess as ‘commodious and well-equipped’ but the truth was that it was all rather rudimentary. Seating, initially for 800 (according to the plans, other estimates suggest it was over 1,000), was on wooden benches and to enforce the price structure barbed wire was, apparently, placed between the cheaper and dearer seating areas.

The opening had been something of a rush job for in the last week of July the Princess closed for alterations. The floor was not raked so in September application was made to build a large gallery (at the back) to hold 800 persons. Aimed at attracting the local working-class population, prices were pitched low, at 2d, 4d and 6d. There were two shows nightly, at 7pm and 9pm, matinees on Monday and Wednesday at 4pm and a Saturday show at 3pm. Live acts were sometimes included in the programme, which in 1911 included singing manager Leslie Clare who regaled the audience with popular ballads.

Business appears to have prospered for the first couple of years but this happy state of affairs did not endure. Across the road a rival purpose-built cinema was under construction. W. J. Anderson was a realist and so, very likely at an early stage of the new development, appears to have entered into an arrangement to transfer his business to the new cinema’s owners.

On 13th July 1912, a press advert for the Princess Picture Palace announced that Monday 15th July would be ‘positively the last week’ and ‘The New Princess, opposite the old, will be opened in a few days.’ However, within two weeks of those notices there was a U-turn, with the old Princess Picture Palace announcing - ‘This house will reopen on Monday 12th August.’ An advert for the New Princess Picture Palace (see separate entry on Cinema Treasures) on 27th July included the following - ‘We have entirely severed connection with the old building.’ Whatever arrangements had been agreed between the two parties (no details were ever made public), it was clear that relationships had rapidly soured and the deal was off.

And so it came to pass, there were now two cinemas situated cheek by jowl on the Newtownards Road, sharing virtually the same names and locked in mortal combat. There was never much doubt about who would win this unequal contest. Aside from having superior modern premises, the New Princess was part of a burgeoning chain, Irish Electric Palaces, who had the necessary financial clout to wear its smaller competitor down.

Nevertheless, Anderson persevered for more than a dozen years before finally closing the doors of the Old Princess around 1927. The newspapers of the time seem to have chosen to ignore that event. The Old Princess no longer bothered to place advertising in any of them, relying on word of mouth and front of house posters to promote its programmes. A rare exception was a press advert placed in January 1915 in which it described itself as ‘Ye Olde Princess'.

The building which housed the Old Princess is long gone and the site on which it stood now forms part of a larger site occupied by James Brown Funeral Directors. Although the old Campbell’s Row East entry is in situ, it has remained nameless for many decades.