Cecil M. Hepworth — Came the Dawn — Chapter 02 (1951) 🇬🇧
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After the closing of the Polytechnic my father took up itinerant lecturing on several popular scientific subjects. This involved a great deal of preparatory work which had a considerable bearing on my unofficial education. It began each season with the sending out of large numbers of circulars giving the syllabus of each of some fifteen or twenty lectures, from ‘A Trap to Catch a Sunbeam’ (meaning a camera), Electricity, Telephony, the Phonograph — all as unknown to the average audience then as atomic fission is now — to ‘The Footprints of Charles Dickens’ and, very much later, ‘The Rontgen Rays’ and the Cathode Rays of Crookes. It does not need much imagination to visualise the effect of all this on the receptive, adolescent mind of the growing boy. Then add to it the fact that, in a little while, that boy was called in from time to time — glorious times! — actually to operate the biunial limelight lantern with which the lectures were illustrated. Oxygen gas had to be generated and stored in a huge gas-bag and transported to the scene of action, with the pressure boards, the big double lantern, the box of slides and the lantern screen.
These days of wonderful adventure were rudely shot through by the necessity of going to school, which followed naturally upon the sack of the governesses. School seemed to be a horribly unnecessary interruption to an education which was going along famously and developing exactly as one wished. Natural laziness, mixed with inarticulate resentment, led inevitably to the almost complete neglect of opportunities, and only science lessons and drawing produced any appreciable results.
But it was in my first school — Shaw’s, in the Camden Road — that I met my one and only real school chum, a wild Irish boy named Jim Flanagan. We were always together and our talks were of all sorts of things; chiefly girls, but that was later on. It was at this school that I first became conscious of my inveterate and incurable shyness which was to be one of the banes of my existence. I was too shy and nervous to go into the playground with the other boys and used to skulk in the empty classroom, pretending to study. This was the negative side of my education. It’s a pity I wasn’t driven out to play; I should have made a better film-producer afterwards.
From about this time the family seems to have quieted down to a comparatively settled existence. It made another move, this time to 45, St. Augustine’s Road, still a little nearer to the coveted Camden Square, and meanwhile increased its numbers — after a long interval — by another girl and a boy. The boy, being the last of the line, was so terribly spoiled by his doting mother that all the others disliked him intensely and he ultimately went abroad and after a few letters, disappeared and could never be traced. The rest of us, including the youngest girl, Kitty, are all very good friends after our turbulent youth and meet very happily whenever we can.
Jim Flanagan’s widowed mother had a house a little larger than ours and actually in Camden Square. That may have prompted her to like to be known as Mrs. O’Flanagan, for which there appeared to be no other justification. With this little touch of pardonable pride she was a kind and very pleasant lady, and she had a very nice little girl, named Nita, with whom brother Jim quarrelled and fought most happily. It is possible that they even had a bathroom in their big house, but of that I never heard. Nice people were careful not to mention such things to their less affluent neighbours.
The still rather unpleasant youth who is the centre figure of this story was moved to a new school at Hillmartin Crescent, Jim Flanagan remaining behind at the old one. Here again, ‘playground funk’ seems to have been his principal characteristic, coupled with most assiduous inattention to lessons. He had two slight excuses: hopeless at arithmetic, ‘figure-blind’ as some people are tone-deaf, and with an all-absorbing home interest in ‘inventions,’ photography, electricity and heaven knows what besides. His mother complained that it was almost impossible to get him in to meals or to bed or anything. His homework was the despair of his every schoolmaster. There was one school interest however. With another boy, named Hutchinson, he started a school magazine, printed by lithography, of all things! A lithographic press came from father’s den and these two blessed infants wrote backwards and made drawings upon the stone and printed the magazine in genuine printer’s ink!
My father had become the editor and, I think, part owner, of a languishing weekly journal called the Photographic News, and I joined the ‘staff’ at a salary of five shillings a week and my keep. I held that job down — on those terms — for four years but I had to find other means to augment my salary. I did what I could on the advertising side, collecting overdue accounts on commission and sometimes getting in new advertisers. I wrote articles and illustrated them in pen-and-ink, and got paid seven shillings and sixpence a column — half the usual rate — and all the time I saved and saved every penny I could get.
But I had my small extravagances. On the left-hand side of Peckham Rye as you face south, there is, or there was then, a very appetising little shop where they sold lovely beef-steak puddings, hot, at fourpence each. Several of my customers from whom I tried to collect accounts lived in this neighbourhood and there was one in particular who was a very sluggish payer and I used to have to call upon him three or four times for every once I collected any cash. When I succeeded I used to turn into this little shop and celebrate with a beef-steak pudding, hot. And if I failed I sometimes had a hot pudding, then, to comfort me.
There was a small chemist’s shop by the railway bridge at Blackheath kept by people by the name of Butcher. I liked going there, not merely because the collection of the money was easier but principally because I liked to see them growing steadily bigger, a little bigger every time I went there. There were two or three brothers and a father I think, and I suppose they must have had between them that curious flair for business which makes a few people always choose the right path and be led on to prosperity. Their name became one of the biggest in the photographic trade before I was very much older and they were among the first people to take a tentative interest in the new-fangled Living Photographs when that strange adventure sprang itself upon the world. Even now, the name of Butcher has an important place in the industry of the moving pictures.
In the middle of 1891 when the Hepworth family were spending their summer holiday at Deal as usual, we struck up a friendship with the Macintosh family and among them was a very pretty little girl named Blanche who, very much later, became chief scenario writer to the Hepworth firm, makers of cinematograph films, which up to that date had not yet been invented. It was at Deal and at this time that I had my first self-taught lessons in sailing — afterwards the great passion of my life. I had had an early inoculation when, as a very small boy, I sailed across the Solent from Newtown to Lymington in the cutter Mary (Skipper, Fleuss, of diving-dress fame) with my father and mother. There was a lovely breeze and mother lay full length in the lee scuppers — a picture of perfect bliss. We were delayed at Lymington with a fouled anchor which took hours to clear and it was dark by the time we got outside. Then it fell a dead calm and my father and friend Fleuss each took an oar and gave me the tiller, to my unbounded joy. Whether the skipper gave me the wrong light to steer for or whether I got it mixed up with another one half-way across I do not know, but when we reached the island at dead of night we learned from a coastguard tramping along the beach that we had been swept by the tide far below our proper place and could do nothing until the tide turned again. I wanted to stay aboard and see the adventure out, but mother and I were put ashore and the coastguard saw us home. That was the beginning: that was when the lovely poison entered my blood stream.
When, years later, at Deal mother bought herself a dinghy for me to row her about in, I saw to it that a mast and sail and rudder were included in the bargain. It was a terrible old boat, with a length scarcely in excess of its breadth, like some of the old ladies standing around, and we always called it ‘she.’ Mother, being musical, also called it the Vivace which was hopelessly unsuitable; Largo would have been much more appropriate. One day I offered to sail the pater and his brother Wheldon to Pegwell Bay for the day. We had the flood tide and a fair breeze from the south and did the passage comfortably.
I was relying upon the ebb tide to bring us home as the Vivace was very little good on the wind. But we hadn’t been very long on the return journey when we found the breeze had freshened very much and being now against the tide was knocking up a considerable jobble. Soon we began to take in a fair amount of water. I asked Uncle Wheldon, being the heavier, to sit on the floor to balance us better, which he obediently did though it was three inches deep in water before he sat down and much deeper afterwards. Soon I saw we’d never make it and I said I thought we ought to turn and run for Ramsgate. I don’t know whether they were scared, for if they were they didn’t show it. They quietly agreed, feeling, I suppose, that if I didn’t know what I was about they didn’t either. So I managed to put her about, thanking heaven I did not have to gybe. I allowed for the tidal outrush from Pegwell Bay and we drove into Ramsgate Harbour in great style.
At the big electrical exhibition held at the Crystal Palace in 1892, my father and Professor Ambrose Fleming (Thermionic Fleming — we called him the ‘cough-drop’) gave several illustrated lectures in the theatre there. I worked the electric lantern for them. It was a beast. The lamp, which was supposed to be automatic, kept going out and had to be started again, in the dark, by twiddling the nearly red-hot knob between finger and thumb. I used to wake up in the night and go blundering around in my dark bedroom, trying to find the lantern which I had dreamed had just gone out again.
This, and the many opportunities of wandering about the show and talking to the exhibitors, had a very important effect upon my career as I will show.
In July, 1893, Birt Acres, who afterwards came into my life quite a lot, told me he had been invited to give a show of some films that he had made, at Marlborough House at the wedding of the Duke of York to Princess Mary of Teck. At that time I had never heard of ‘films’ and could only guess what he was talking about, but I must have surmised that some kind of lantern was involved and that would have been enough for me. He was very excited, naturally, and admitted that, while he was competent to work the projector, he would be very glad if I would come along and look after the electric lamp. I willingly agreed and we duly arrived at Marlborough House with the gear, projector, lamp, resistance and wire and all the rest of it. The whole place was gaily decorated and there was a considerable air of fuss and tension. Birt Acres was a man who perspired easily. He fully lived up to his reputation in that respect. We didn’t have any real difficulty in obtaining the few things we wanted and we set the whole apparatus up in a sort of tent which was an annex to the room where the guests were to assemble for the show.
I remember being mildly surprised when the Prince of Wales — afterwards King Edward VII — came over and talked to us when we were getting the show ready in this kind of small anteroom. He seemed to speak with a fairly strong German accent. But I do not remember being greatly impressed with the pictures. Probably I was a bit excited too, and was thinking far more of keeping the light burning properly than of looking to see what the pictures were like. One of them did startle me, though: it was a picture of a great wave rushing into the mouth of a cave and breaking into clouds of spray.
Looking back, it seems very curious to me that a subject to which I was destined to dedicate all my future life should make so little first impression on me. I suppose I was so obsessed with the behaviour of the arc-lamp that I paid no real attention to the pictures: yet at that very early date they must have been ‘a dainty dish to set before a king.’ It is true that Friese Greene had had many ideas and at least one master-patent before that time but I cannot learn that he ever actually produced anything to which that poetic description could be applied.
Some twelve years later when I read that the brothers Wright in America had actually lifted off the ground in a flying machine I was intensely excited, though that had no effect upon my future life except for one little incident. My father had some time previously bequeathed to me the writing of the science notes for a monthly journal and I reported, perhaps glowingly, this most important adventure as it seemed to me. The editor asked me to discontinue the column. He may have thought that ‘flying’ — till then unheard of — was too fanciful and flippant for a staid and solemn journal, or it may have been only that my work generally was not up to his standard. I shall never know; but I got the sack from that job.
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