Cecil M. Hepworth — Came the Dawn — Chapter 03 (1951) 🇬🇧
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On my twenty-first birthday in 1895 the dear old pater gave me a little lathe which he had managed to stump up for, secondhand. He held, rather unsoundly, that if I mastered the art of metal turning I never need be without a job. It must have strained resources very badly but it was a great joy to me and the beginning of all sorts of things. Looking back, it does seem to me that Fate had a very clear notion from the beginning of what she intended to do with me and had all the time been steadily pushing me along in the selected direction. If I have told the story fairly, that general trend should have become apparent to the reader also.
My first camera was one I made for myself when I was a small boy at a cost of ten-pence — ninepence for wood and a penny for a magnifying-glass which I mounted in a cardboard tube for a lens. I took a successful photograph with it from the nursery window. The first cinematograph camera I ever had my hands upon was one made by Prestwich and owned by Thomas R. Dallmeyer. He was a great chum of my father’s, and those two, with Thomas Bedding, the three Thomases, were dubbed the three Musketeers of photography. Dallmeyer asked me to go with him and film the Diamond Jubilee in 1897, but the camera jammed at the critical moment and I failed. Whether this was my fault or its, I do not know, but I used those cameras for many years afterwards and had no trouble with them.
But between the coming of my lathe and the incident of the Diamond Jubilee there were a couple of years which were pregnant with many things that, all unknown to me, were to have a profound influence upon my subsequent film-life. I worried about that red-hot electric lamp at the Crystal Palace exhibition. Being used to limelight which required manual attention every thirty or forty seconds, I couldn’t see why an electric lamp, used for a similar purpose, shouldn’t be similarly trimmed by hand. I determined that as soon as I had sufficient dexterity I would make a hand-feed lamp for use in magic or optical lanterns. I did in fact design and make and patent1 such an arc-lamp exactly three months after I received the lathe and before I had attained sufficient dexterity to make it decently, but it worked and it was good enough to serve as a model for others to work from. Soon it was put on the market by Ross, the opticians, and presently the makers of the finest cinematograph projectors.
Then my father and I went to Olympia and saw among other things a little side show of ‘Living Photographs’ by R. W. Paul, who was projecting through a translucent screen some films made by Edison for his peep-show Kinetoscope. This was a modern miracle I shall never forget. We had somehow missed the first showing, several months earlier, of Lumière’s ‘Living Photographs’ at the New Polytechnic in February, 1896, and I hadn’t even read about it, so I was completely unprepared and immensely impressed, and my first reaction was that here was a chance to sell my electric lamp. With a sudden access of unusual business enterprise I pushed through the crowd and into the operating room behind the screen and tackled Paul about it. He said I could come and see him at his office at 44, Hatton Garden in the City. I went there and found that his work-room was at the very top of a tall building and I stumbled up the narrow staircase, trying not to tread upon the dozen or more sleeping Polish and Armenian Jews who had been waiting there for days and nights for delivery of ‘Animatographs,’ as Paul’s machines were called. And there at the top was Paul himself, perspiring freely and cranking away at his big clumsy machines in the hopeless endeavour to run them in and make them usable by the weaker brethren outside. Robert Paul later became one of my best and firmest friends, and on this occasion he purchased half a dozen of my lamps at a profit of over a pound apiece and thus laid the foundation of my fortune.
Thus, at about 21 years old, was I caught in the outer fringe of the film-net that Fate was spreading and baiting for me, but even then I did not know that I was snared.
It was then that in my working hours — always to be distinguished from the hours when I was working — I was taking care of an office in Dashwood House in the City for a Dutchman named Noppen, who was trying to sell reflex cameras, I think he had something else on his mind that took up very much more of his attention than did his business. I had come upon him when I was trying to sell advertising space for the Photographic News. One morning, early, I found him anxiously scratching round London searching for someone to take his place while he went back to Holland ‘on business.5 I stood by him, as a fellow should when another is in distress, and I never left him until late in the evening he engaged me at thirty shillings a week, to look after things in his absence. Those business trips to Holland took place with increasing frequency and then one day he never came back. I sold the cameras as well as I could and paid the rent and my salary out of the proceeds, and when that source came to an end, I closed the office and went home.
Well, now I must either sink or swim. Either I must be prepared to invest my poor savings or hang on to them and look for another job. Investment was decided upon and my young cousin, Monty Wicks, agreed to come in with me for a small wage and the lark of the thing. Early in 1897, we took a shop in Cecil Court, Charing Cross Road, and set up there to work an agency we secured for the sale of cameras and dry-plates. We enjoyed the lark and waited for custom — which never came.
I was still being bitten by the thought of those film pictures of Robert Paul’s, and it was at some time during the first months at Cecil Court that I discovered the possibility of buying an experimental film-projector from a man named Bonn in High Holborn. I bought it for a pound, modified it and coupled it to my existing lantern, and thus I had a means of projecting films.
A kinematograph projector is in essence nothing but an ordinary optical or magic lantern with a mechanism fitted in front in place of the slide carrier. The film in fact takes the place of the slide and the mechanism is merely a contraption to pull it through the optical system intermittently and at sufficient speed. Just in case this should come to the notice of anyone who does not already know it, that speed is one foot or sixteen ‘frames’ a second for silent films. It is faster still for sound pictures.
The mechanism I bought from Bonn was just this movement complete with its objective lens. I made a simple alteration to my lantern, fitting its objective lens (for the slides) into a sliding platform, on the other end of which I attached the film mechanism. Now I could at any moment change over in a second from lantern slides to ‘living pictures’ or vice versa by merely sliding the platform across.
Paul had some ‘throw-outs’, cheap films, in a junk basket. I bought one or two for four shillings each. We now had a means of producing a film show in our cellar. Each film ran for forty seconds.
Remember my early life: photography — limelight — lantern shows — lectures. The next step was obvious and inevitable. I had some hundreds of lantern slides from my own negatives accumulated over several years. What more natural than that they should be grouped into a few short series having a ‘story content,’ be fertilised by suitable films from the said junk basket, built up with lecture and music and taken all over the country to halls where many in the audience had never seen a living photograph in their lives before.
My father was still travelling with his several lectures to various halls about the country but things had changed a little. He seldom travelled his big biunial lantern and all the accessories but had to be content with carrying a box of slides under his arm and trusting to local showmanship to see him through. He never grumbled and I did not think of it at the time, but I expect now that fees were shrinking in value and shortage of cloth meant cutting his coat to fit. In any case lantern shows would not have stood up long against moving pictures, though many of the slides were very beautiful and there are others now more beautiful still in the hands of really clever amateur photographers.
Other things were changing their pattern too. It ceased to be necessary to travel oxygen-making plant and heavy gas-bags, for both gases could be bought and carried in comparatively small cylinders. That is what I used and even with film-showing apparatus my luggage was smaller than his used to be. As to subject matter, I remember one little series which always went down very well indeed. It was called The Storm and consisted of half a dozen slides and one forty-foot film. My sister Effie was a very good pianist and she travelled with me on most of these jaunts. The sequence opened with a calm and peaceful picture of sea and sky. Soft and gentle music (Schumann, I think). That changed to another seascape, though the clouds looked a little more interesting, and the music quickened a bit. At each change the inevitability of a coming gale became more insistent and the music more threatening; until the storm broke with an exciting film of dashing waves bursting into the entrance of a cave, with wild music (by Jensen, I think) .
I did the commentary, of course, as well as working the lantern and films. The influence of my father kept cropping up everywhere. I must have followed his technique somehow in getting the engagements for these shows, though I cannot quite remember what I did. I remember as a child helping, with the rest of the family, to fold up circulars and putting them into envelopes addressed to mechanics’ institutes and all sorts of likely halls and societies and I suppose I must have done something of the same in my own case, though I am not clear how I found the addresses. However that may be, we went to many halls and with only one exception we met with invariable success. That was somewhere up in the north of Lancashire where the people spoke with a very funny accent. I couldn’t understand them and I like to think that my failure there was only because they couldn’t understand me.
One of the essential conditions of good showmanship in a show of this kind is a means of rapidly changing over from lantern-slide to film without noticeable interval but that was not beyond the limits of my mechanical ability. I have never in my life before or since witnessed such intense enthusiasm as these short, crude films evoked in audiences who saw films for the first time. At one hall, at Halstead in Essex, we had fifteen re-engagements, counting the repeats when we were asked to stay over for a second showing on the following day, which of course were actual repetitions of the same programme. The re-engagements strained our resources rather badly for then we were expected to supply new material.
But if the films were terrible faulty, as they certainly were, the projector was little better than a nightmare. I soon had to do something about it. Charles Urban had just come over from America bringing with him a new projector mechanism called the ‘Bioscope,’ which was of good and substantial design. It was reputed to be flickerless, which it was — because it had no shutter! But a shutter is absolutely necessary in order to cover the momentary change from one ‘frame’ to the next. The black moment on the screen, sixteen times a second, causes the distressing flicker. It is obviated in modern practice by having two or three extra unnecessary blades to the shutter. The consequent forty-eight or sixty-four interruptions are too many to be seen and the picture appears to be flickerless. But without any shutter at all the ‘rain’ on the screen is far worse than any flicker — the whole idea was a bad mistake. I bought one of these otherwise excellent mechanisms, fitted it with a shutter, a ‘gate’ which did not scratch the films, and a ‘take-up’ to rewind them as they came from the machine, instead of letting them fall into a basket or on to the floor, which was the very reprehensible custom of the time. Then I adapted the machine to my change-over device and I had a good and reliable apparatus.
But though my first attempts at the travelling show business consisted of half a dozen forty-foot films from Paul’s junk basket, plus a little music and a hundred or so lantern-slides, it required considerable ingenuity to spin that material out to an evening’s entertainment. I showed the films forwards in the ordinary way and then showed some of them backwards. I stopped them in the middle and argued with them; called out to the little girl who was standing in the forefront of the picture to stand aside which she immediately did. That required careful timing but was very effective. But with it all I very soon found I must have more films and better ones.
So I collected from Fuerst Brothers, in Dashwood House, some ? films, and some others from Paul. There is a little story that I have told so often that I have almost come to believe it. Maybe it belongs to the si non e vero class: I will admit that it is perhaps a little exaggerated. I was ready to begin my show in a crowded hall built beneath a chapel. I do not know its denomination and that doesn’t matter. The apparatus was set up, as was quite usual in those days, in the very middle of the audience, quite regardless of fire risk or panic. Everything was ready to make a start when the pastor came and sat down beside me. He said that, of course, he was quite certain that there would be nothing in my programme which could possibly be offensive to any of the pure young people who formed the majority of his congregation, but, as the pastor of his little flock and merely as a matter of form, he would ask me to show him a list of my titles. I handed it to him and watched him reading slowly down and nodding approval until he suddenly frowned and said he couldn’t possibly allow a vulgar music-hall actress to be shown in his hall. It was my chef d’oeuvre, a beautifully hand-coloured film of Loie Fuller in her famous Serpentine Dance. It was completely innocuous, and I told him so with some heat. He was adamant and absolutely insisted that the show must be abandoned altogether if, as I had told him, the film could not be omitted. For the unfortunate picture, besides being the best of my series, was for that very reason occupying the place of honour as the last but one on my first reel. There was no time to cut it out; no chance to bypass it, for I felt quite certain that if I attempted to run it through with my hand over the lens, the pure young persons all around me would protest with anything but their expected docility. So, feeling rather like Abraham going up the mountain with his son for a sacrifice, I proceeded with the show and hoped against hope for the best.
Then, just before I came to the fatal film I had a brainwave: I announced it as Salome Dancing Before Herod and everyone was delighted — especially the parson! He said in his nice little speech at the end that he thought it was a particularly pleasant idea to introduce a little touch of Bible history into an otherwise wholly secular programme. And then he added that he had had no idea that the ‘Cheenimartograrph’ had been invented so long ago!
Talking of fire risk, I was one of the first to point out the danger of using celluloid in a lantern without proper precautions. This was in a weekly article I was writing for the Amateur Photographer. A large firm of photographic dealers sent a letter to the editor in which they claimed that celluloid was no more inflammable than paper. Whereupon I experimented: I put pieces of paper and pieces of celluloid in my projector in turn and noted carefully the number of seconds which each took to ignite. I published the results. The firm notified my editor that if he valued their advertisements he would be well advised to get rid of this contributor. The editor notified me, regretting that he had no alternative but to take the hint. Thus I got the sack from that job.
There occurred about this time, 1897–8, a rather strange interlude which I cannot place in exact order of date. This was the incursion into the incipient cinematograph world of Messieurs Lever and Nestle — surely an odd combination of soap and Swiss milk — to exploit the possibilities of the film for advertisement purposes. The impact was a big one for those days, for they purchased no less than twelve complete Lumière projection outfits for a start. Each consisted of a limelight lantern together with all its accessories, a condenser which was a large spherical bottle of water, a Lumière mechanism, being camera, printer and projector in one, and a suitable objective lens, all mounted on a strong wooden stand. Their operator and general manager for film purposes was a man named Spencer Clarke who was my contact in the matter, though where I came in I cannot at all remember. In my recollection it feels as if the whole fantastic outfit burst upon me in a day and dropped out of my life again a few weeks later, though I seem to have travelled about with Spencer Clarke quite a lot in the meantime. And I have in my possession now two Lumière mechanisms which, I think, can only have come to me somehow through that connection. It is certainly very strange that two such important businesses should have joined hands and plunged together into the almost completely undeveloped sphere of the ‘pictures’ — and plunged in such a big way too — apparently without any idea of what they meant to do about it. They faded out just as quietly as they came in and I never heard another word of them.
It was during our tenancy of the shop in Cecil Court that I conceived the idea of adding to the interest and value of a film show by improving the presentation of the films — setting the picture in a coloured frame or similar device on the principle that a jewel is improved by setting it in a splended mount. It must be remembered that although there were a larger number of films available they were all of about the same length and took a little under one minute of running time. I built up a sort of multiple projector — four machines, two above and two below — each with its own arc-lamp and all converging upon the same screen. One projected the film, another threw around it by lantern slide a brightly coloured proscenium; a third showed the title of the picture just underneath and the fourth had another film ready to dissolve from the first when it was nearing its end. This was probably the first time that titles had been associated with films and the last for a long while until tides came into general use some years later.
At the big Alhambra music-hall in Leicester Square, R. W. Paul was giving his film show by back-projection through a transparent screen from a little cubby hole at the very back of the stage. This device of ours was supposed to improve upon it. So we invited Alhambra impresario, Alfred Moul, to come down into our cellar and have a demonstration. He wasn’t very much impressed. He said it was always the subject, not the presentation, that mattered. Subject, subject, subject he kept on saying. And he was dead right. The only thing that really matters is the subject; that is the story: it has been dead right ever since. If the story does not ring true, neither artists nor scenery nor colour — nothing can save it.
I was writing at the time for the Photographic Dealer, whose editor was my associate, Arthur C. Brookes, and on the advertising staff of the paper was J. Brooke-Wilkinson, who afterwards became one of my very dearest friends. Arthur Brookes invited me to give a film show in a Congregational chapel in which he was interested. I set up my apparatus in the centre of the front row of the gallery and got to work. About half-way through, I became aware that the ‘take-up’ was not working and that, while much of the film as it came out of the machine was sliding over the gallery-rail into the hall below, the rest of it was accumulating round my legs. Realising the danger that a spark from the limelight might at any moment drop upon it, I instantly extinguished the light and began in the dark to wind up the loose film. Brookes was at the back of the gallery and he kept calling out in a loud stage-whisper, ‘Tell Cecil not to strike a match — don’t strike a match — ‘ I was feverishly trying to continue my lecture while hauling in the film from below, hand over hand, when the heavy brass spool which should have been winding it up, fell off its spindle into the body of the hall. I whispered to a small boy to go down and retrieve it and when he brought it back he reported that it had cut two good tramlines on the bald head of an old gentleman, who was very annoyed and intended to apply for damages as soon as the show was over. It will no doubt have been realised that a great many important things had all this while — and for some time before I impinged upon it — been happening in the growing industry. They are not mentioned here, not because it is not recognised how very important they are, but because this writing has no pretension to be a record, or in any sense a history, of cinematography but merely an account of the doings of one man connected with it. Moreover, it is very incomplete and often wrong in chronological order, for it is based upon memory and generally without the support of any archives.
Here, then, we come to the end of what may be called the ‘showmanship’ side of this personal history, for though the showing of films continued to the end to be occasional and sporadic events in my life, the main interest now shifts to the actual photography of them.
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