Cecil M. Hepworth — Came the Dawn — Chapter 01 (1951) 🇬🇧
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This is the story of a man whose life was devoted to the making of films, but it is not a categorical account of the film industry, although the two stories ran parallel for many years. Mine begins — as for complement it must — with my birth, in 1874, in a humble house in South London, long before films were thought of. But the goodness which should go with humility was certainly not mine. Not to put too fine a point upon it, I was a thoroughly naughty, and very unpleasant, child.
My father was the dearest and best of men and he was very clever. His only fault was a lack of business acumen, and, though everybody liked him, I suppose no one expected him to make money out of his numerous abilities. He was very diligent and worked far into the night when the house was quiet, writing articles for various technical papers, mostly photographic, for he was an ardent photographer; one of the early workers of the old wet-plate process which you never hear of now except as a vague memory of the distant past, but it was one of the fertile places in which the seeds of the modern ‘pictures’ first began to germinate.
Watch him at work when I was about three years old. He had an immense camera which he must have picked up at a sale somewhere. He set it up in our back yard — we never had a garden — and after focussing it he retired to the scullery which must have been darkened for the purpose, sensitised the big sheet of glass and then placed it all wet in the dark-slide, took it out to the camera and made the exposure before the plate got dry.
When dry-plate photography came to be invented a year or so later, he made the plates in large batches at a time and stored them for future use. He had a smaller camera by then but he still coated upon large glasses and cut them up later, and that sometimes left a narrow strip which I won — to experiment with! My eyes were just high enough to see over the edge of the table, gloating, and longing that there might be a strip of waste for me. Once he had a run of bad luck with his diamond and made a whole lot of faulty cuts. Then, for the only time in his life, so far as I know, he lost his temper. He smashed up all the pieces with the back of his diamond, and I burst into a flood of tears.
Many years later as I sat beside his bed in his last illness we talked of things which somehow had never been mentioned between us before. I was a grown man by then, married and full of business cares, but our talking often concerned my early childhood and that is why it crops up in this place. He reminded me of this dry-plate episode, and then he told me how utterly ashamed he had been when his outburst of temper made me cry. But it wasn’t his feelings I was crying about — it was the loss of the little strips of glass I had been counting upon.
I told him that one of my very earliest memories was of him carrying me up in his arms from floor to floor of a huge windmill. He remembered it, too, but was very surprised that I did, for I was only eighteen months old. I could remember the strong pressure of his arms as he held me tight to him while he climbed the ladders, and it was the comfort of those arms that saved me from being terrified by the noise and the shuddering and shaking of the whole place.
I remember my first homecoming. I had been sent to stay with my grandmama, probably while my sister Dorothy was being born — she is fifteen months younger than I — and then, because of severe financial stringency at home, I was left to stay there for another year or so.
Grandmama lived in a tall old basement house in Lansdowne Road, Clapham. She was one of innumerable sisters; a stream of great-aunts who were always floating in and out around her. They varied very much but most of them were nice and had quite good knees. She also had a husband; a gruff man who said ‘Damn.5 He seemed to keep in one frightening room, and he had a beard and a very red face and he didn’t like children. Besides the great-aunts there were two ordinary-sized ones who, I gathered, were my father’s sisters, and there was also an assortment of uncles, but only one of them, Uncle Wheldon, lived in the house and he was its support and mainstay. He was a very great friend and he loved me with all his big heart. Between him and grandmama, and sweet Aunt Maud, I had a gloriously happy time.
Aunt Maud was a very kind and gentle lady, much given to high-church religious observances and to painting on china, at which she worked professionally and very skilfully. She almost always painted saints for the decoration of altar-panels. Once she painted me — a peculiar aberration, for by no stretch of imagery could I possibly be included in the category. But I loved to watch her at work when I went to stay with grandmama. China has to be ‘baked’ after painting. The colours — powder in little glass tubes, I remember — are often quite different from what they will be when they are baked, and, unless I have forgotten, flesh tint was bright blue to start with, which must have made painting very difficult. It certainly made the saints look peculiar. It intrigued me immensely to see how they changed after cooking — and even a sinner might be improved that way!
This dear old house, with all the happy people in it, was a great joy to me whenever I could have the opportunity to go there. The only drawback was the black beetles. There were thousands of them in the basement kitchen, and if you went down there with a candle at night you could hear the gentle scrabble of their feet as they hurried away from the light. I was terrified of black beetles: I am still.
But the time came at the end of my first visit, when my mother decided she must have me at home. The news was broken to me as gently as possible but black despair curled round my heart. They carried me home weeping. It must have been a wretched disappointment for my parents, although it was natural enough. I had scarcely seen them since my babyhood: grandmama’s house meant everything of home to me. I remember vaguely how miserably I blubbered and I think there was in me a flickering of regret that I could not put up a little show of filial decency. My mother’s sorrow was very genuine — I remember that — and I am sorry that I was such a little beast.
37, St. Paul’s Crescent, Camden Town
But I had very little understanding. My mother was, I realise now, a good, hard-working and essentially unselfish woman. On practically no money she kept our little household going, not smoothly certainly, but without the disaster which must often have been threatening. She ruled us with the proverbial rod of iron and to us children (there was soon a third one, another girl) she seemed to be a veritable dragon, to be dodged and hidden from whenever we could possibly manage it. All this, of course, made dad dearer to us than ever. He never by word or sign took our part against her, and indeed I know he was very fond of her, but his gentle unspoken love wrapped itself around us and healed our little wounds almost before they hurt.
Saturday night was bath-night for us children. A round flat bath, like the lid of a cake tin only bigger, was put down in front of the kitchen fire and a mixture of cold and boiling water poured into it to a depth of about two inches. Then we three, who had been slowly undressing in preparation, stepped into it together and sat down, bottoms to the edge and toes together in the middle. Then the fun began: the thing was to see who had the blackest legs. It was an important point and was carefully and impartially considered. I think I generally won that round. That decided, we set to work and scrubbed and cleaned one leg each, getting it as clean and bright as we possibly could. The contrast between the black and the pink one in each of the three sets was a sheer delight to all of us. Then, of course, there followed a general cleaning up, the usual trouble with the ears and the soap in the eyes and so on, but we were soon dried and night-dressed and down in a row at mother’s knee to say our prayers.
After we were in bed, I think poor mother had a little rest — the first she had had all day — but whether she allowed daddy to have any I do not know. I know he had to account for every penny he spent and I know he usually sat up writing far into the night, for most of the little money we had came from that mysterious writing.
We were living at that time at 37, St. Paul’s Crescent, Camden Town, in North London. My mother always insisted that the address should be given as of Camden Square which she held to be much more respectable. It was not the place of my birth for that occurred on the other side of London, either at Blackheath or Lewisham I think. I cannot be expected to remember the details of that event. Our house in St. Paul’s Crescent was the last one in the road, which terminated abruptly in a coal-yard belonging to the railway company. My little bedroom at the side of the house overlooked the yard. One night there was one of those curious and very unusual thunderstorms in which the lightning seems to stand still in the sky for a second or more. My parents had gone to an early performance of H. M.S. Pinafore at the Park Theatre, Camden Town (now, of course, a picture-house). I woke in the middle of one of those long flashes, took one look at the floodlighted coal-yard, closed my eyes quickly again before the flash ended, and kept them closed. I fully realised that the world had come to an end — and that my mother and father were out!
People seldom understand what dreadful things happen to children. They say a coward dies a thousand deaths. I died a dozen before I was ten years old. My father, among other things, was a popular scientific lecturer. He had one lecture on electricity. It was a simple lecture, for electricity in those days was a simple thing. The lecture needed a number of simple experiments and he carried a battery of two or three bichromate cells. Bichromate of potash is a considerable poison. He made up a saturated solution, mixed it with a proportion of sulphuric acid and kept it in old wine bottles. I strolled into his den one afternoon when he had gone to lecture, found a wine bottle apparently with a heel-tap of wine still in it and tipped it straight into my mouth. I tasted the acid and knew instantly what I had done. I knew that I was bound to die in a very little while. But do you think I said anything about it? Not a word. I just waited for the end. This was not courage: it was sheer cowardice; I didn’t want to get into a row. I was very violently sick and that, no doubt, saved my life. One of my bilious attacks, they thought, and I did not tell them about it until many years afterwards.
I tell you these things to show that I was brought up in an atmosphere of moderated science. It probably had its effect upon my future career.
Once when Uncle Wheldon had been to see us he gave me a half-crown. A huge sum; the first half-crown I had ever seen. Then from the half-landing overlooking our back yard, my parents spotted a hole in the ground filled with water. Charged with this misdemeanour I promptly lied and said T never!’ The lie was brought home to me and my half-crown was confiscated. It was an awful punishment. It cramped my career for the rest of my life, for I have never been a good liar since. This is a severe handicap in trade — even in the film trade. Also the half-crown has never been given back to me!
As I lay awake in my cot one night, in the subdued light of the nursery, I looked up at the wall just above my head and saw a black mark which I instantly said to myself might be a black beetle. Of course I knew it was nothing of the kind, but it gave me a nasty turn because if it had been a beetle, it was just where it might fall on my face. I knew it was only a hole in the plaster, but every time I opened my eyes, there was the sinister black thing and I even began to imagine I saw it move. At last I screwed up enough courage to settle the question once and for all by touching it. I put up my ringer. It was a black beetle; and it did fall on my face.
My mother’s great pride — and my despair — was my long golden hair which she insisted in doing up into long curls all round my head and one prodigious sausagey one right across the top from front to back. Then she put me into a black velvet frock with white lace cuffs and trimmings and sent me off to a party. There I gained notoriety by bowing down so low that my careful coiffure fell over the top of my head and touched the floor in front. This anecdote would have no value except for the fact that it was at this party that I fell in love with a girl in a pink-and-white muslin frock. A man’s first love affair inevitably sets its mark upon him.
In St. Paul’s Crescent, further up where it is a crescent, there lived a man whose name was Mr. Belton. He had a peculiar trade. He made and sold sheets of sensitised albumenised paper such as photographers used to print their cartes-de-visite and cabinet portraits upon. I could buy these sheets for ninepence each — not often, for ninepence was a lot of money. Then, with old negatives begged from dad, and a cheap printing-frame, I could produce veritable photographs.
So there I was, at say four years old, equipped with a tiny but basic knowledge of electricity and photography, a film-producer in embryo, and with a forgotten love affair to build up the heart interest.
But though my father was without doubt the great vital spirit; the mainspring of my future career — the setting, the background, the atmosphere, were all provided by the Polytechnic. He and that, were the two grand factors which prepared me for my future life — and then blind chance tipped me into it.
The Royal Polytechnic Institution, as it was called, was a building in Upper Regent Street, in London’s West End. Upon that site the present Polytechnic was later built. The old ‘Poly’ was a wondrous place of delight to the small boys, and even to some of the small girls, of Queen Victoria’s days. It was opened about the time she came to the throne but it languished and died several years before her reign came to an end.
I remember the thrill of joy which went through me every time I climbed the half-dozen steps which led up to the great front door: the surge of delight as I passed into the wonderful Great Hall and sensed the magic of its atmosphere. For in this place were gathered together examples of all the latest scientific wonders of the day. First, just inside the entrance, was a huge plate-glass static electricity machine. Given a boy big enough to turn the handle — it was too heavy for my little arm — you could have long sparks of miniature lightning at will. At the far end of the Great Hall there was an immense induction-coil whose spark, they told me, could kill a horse. There was a long narrow lake the whole length of the hall, shallow for the most part but deep enough at the far end to sink the big diving bell. Right above the lake and along the whole length of the hall was slung a tight-rope upon which, at stated intervals, an automatic full-size figure of a man would walk from end to end. There was a gallery all round this hall and here there was a model railway with electric trains which ran ‘all by themselves’ in a day when there was scarce a real one to be found anywhere. And here in this gallery there was a ‘wheel-of-life’ — a cinematograph in embryo. It was a big disc which you could turn quite easily and it had narrow slots cut at intervals all round its edge. Between these slots, on the other side of the disc, a little dancing figure was painted in consecutive stages of movement. When you turned the wheel and peeped through the slots at a mirror hung a foot or two beyond it you saw the little figure dance as though alive.
For sixpence you could take your seat with a lot of other boys in the huge diving bell and be completely submerged. Just below your feet there was the surface of the blue water, for the bell was open at the bottom, but as it descended the surface of the water went down too and you didn’t get your school boots even wet. I have been told since, but I don’t believe it, that the band played particularly loudly while the diving bell was going down to smother the screams of the drowning people inside it.
Alongside the Great Hall was the part I liked best of all — the theatre. This was a rather complicated mixture of an ordinary theatre, with stage and scenery and so on, and a projection theatre more elaborate than would be found in any cinema today. The operating box ran the whole width of the theatre at dress circle level, and with a galleryful of seats above it, I think, though I can’t be sure about that. In the operating box there were about fifteen magic-lanterns of all sorts and sizes, but all worked by limelight. I think some of the lantern slides were photographic, though of that I cannot be sure, but the majority of them were hand-painted and many were of great size, eight or ten inches in diameter. There were any number of trick slides too, of the Sleeping Man Swallowing Rat description, and revolving geometrical patterns which gave some very fine effects upon the screen. Also there was a Beale’s ‘Choreutoscope,’ a curiously interesting anticipation of a modern cinematograph though not the least like it in effect. It had a cut-out stencil of a skeleton figure in about a dozen different positions which changed instantaneously from one to another. The interesting thing about it now is that the means of that quick movement was practically the same as the ‘ Maltese cross’ movement of a modern film projector. If you can imagine a Maltese cross straightened out into a line with an ordinary pin wheel working it, and at the same time closing and opening a very rapid shutter, you will understand the ‘Choreutoscope,’ which was showing its crude pictures on the screen at the ‘Poly’ ten or fifteen*years before anyone had a film to show. For it was in or about 1878 or 1879 when I saw it and it had been showing long before that.
It was intermittent movement which made the cinematograph possible. Many films had been made years before any of them could be projected on a screen. Here was the intermittent movement almost exactly as it is used today — and everybody overlooked it!
The Polytechnic stage was small but very well equipped for those days — no electric light, of course, but plenty of gas, Argand burners and so on, and limelight in the wings and perches. There were plenty of trap-doors including a star-trap through which a man could be shot up from below on to the stage and land on his feet on the spot he had just come through. ‘Pepper’s Ghost’ was born in this theatre and later that very clever ghost illusion invented by J.*J.*Walker, the organ builder.
In this theatre there were daily lantern lectures, mildly educational but always entertaining, by such lecturers as B.*J.*Maiden, Professor Pepper and my own father, T.*C.*Hepworth, who were on the regular staff of the ‘Poly.’ And that is how it is that I was so frequently there and was able to gain an insight into the wonders of the operating box and the delights of the stage and all its contraptions behind and below. My little mind became stored and almost clogged with details which were to serve me wondrously well in after years.
The crowning tragedy of my childhood was on the day when the Polytechnic was closed for ever and I could draw no further upon its riches.
It was about this time that the family migrated to a slightly larger house at 32, Gantelowes Road in the same neighbourhood. Here, fired with the stage enthusiasm inspired by the ‘Poly,’ we children fitted up the nursery as a theatre. There was a drop curtain of the proper roll-up-from-the-bottom type (not your modern drapery which flies up solid into the roof), side wings, gas footlights — by rubber tube from the burner over the mantelpiece — and a very moderate store of home-made scenery which, Shakespeare-like, ‘played many parts.’ The curtain and scenery were painted on unbleached calico at a penny three-farthings a yard, and the whole outfit could be taken down in a few minutes and stored away, according to parental decree.
Our repertory varied from nursery stories to such little things as Macbeth — in which Dorothy played Lady to my lead and Effie had the whole of the rest of the cast to herself. Imagine the effect upon grown-ups of hearing a little girl of five lisping the immortal lines: —
I have given suck and know how tender ‘tis To love the babe that milks me —’
I am told I was a fierce stage-manager, insisting upon letter perfection and strict attention to detail. Those who worked with me in later years were inclined to make the same complaint.
Alternating with the theatrical phase there was a deeply religious period in which Church took the place of stage and I, as parson, read all the prayers of the English Church service and insisted upon the correct responses in the proper places. We spent very many hours upon our knees. My sisters especially disliked the litany, but as that was my favourite they had to go through with it.
As a kind of moral (not too moral) background to all this there was the deadly governess period. The poor, wretched governesses came one at a time, saw, and were conquered. It was our part, not deliberately conceived but tacitly understood and immediately adopted, to make their lives miserable and get rid of them as quickly as possible. I remember one incident which, though far worse than the others, was typical of all of them. The victim was a poor old thing of uncertain age, poor health and very weak eyes. Gentle and helpless she was, yet in some now forgotten way she incurred our relentless wrath. It was I who invented and carried out the diabolical scheme of revenge which put an end to her regime and gained me a thoroughly deserved thrashing.
I stole up to her room when she was out and painted a deep ring of non-drying coal-tar all round the top edge of a private but humble article of bedroom furniture.
After that, the deluge! I was seated by my father at his study table as he worked, when the door literally burst open and framed that weak governess, now a quivering tower of rage, spluttering out her wrath and the story of her woe. She had on a tight petticoat bodice of scarlet, a very short skirt and long thin naked arms in one of which she brandished the offending article with most of the tar still upon it: her lips quivering, her poor weak eyes full of hot tears. It was a pitiful, horribly comical sight. I did not dare glance at my father. I do not know how far his quick sense of humour fought with his pity and anger. And if anyone thinks I triumphed in my sorry revenge I would like to punch his head. I believe I almost enjoyed my thrashing.
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