Crown 1 & 2

The Prince’s was always a full-time cinema. As mentioned, it opened on 7 October 1929, the opening film being “Movietone Follies”. The weekly programmes for the rest of the month being “The Trial of Mary Dugan”, “The Singing Fool”, and “Broadway Melody”. When Gaumont acquired the Princes, it then took over the Gaumont release from their existing cinema, The Boro which then took alternative programmes. An oddity of programming in the thirties and forties was that the main feature would play twice in the evening and also once in the afternoon supported for the afternoon only by a revival of an older film. I have not come across this elsewhere – other northeast Gaumont cinemas played conventional double bills. The stage facilities saw very occsional use in the fifties and sixties when the theatre was hired out to the local Amateur Operatic Society, which despite the name staged musicals.