Cecil M. Hepworth — Came the Dawn — Chapter 04 (1951) 🇬🇧
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The new period begins with the coming to Cecil Court of the great Charles Urban to see what I had done to his ‘flickerless Bioscope’ projector. He was sufficiently impressed to commission me to alter several of his mechanisms as I had altered mine, and after a little while he offered me five pounds a week to go over to his place and work for him there. I promptly accepted on condition that he found a position for cousin Monty Wicks, too, and we shut up and went. And so the trap closed upon me and never again was there a chance to escape.
It is not to be assumed from this that there was any desire to escape. On the contrary there was then, and there still is, so much fascination about the film industry that practically no one being in, has ever voluntarily come out again. But we are a race of inveterate grumblers and it is considered the proper thing to curse the industry and stay put. I never had the slightest inclination to get out.
Maguire & Baucus of Warwick Court, Holborn, were our new masters with Charles Urban as manager. I do not remember meeting Maguire, but Baucus I remember well as one of those urbane and very nice Americans whom you feel you can absolutely trust. The style of the firm was shortly changed to the Warwick Trading Company Ltd., with Charles Urban as managing director. My first job in connection with it was to film the Oxford and Cambridge boat-race of March, 1898, which I did from the top of a factory building giving a long view of the course and consequently a very distant view of the boats. Tanoraming, the camera was first used a long time later. Then, according to instructions, I proceeded, as the policemen say, to Alfred Wrench’s shop at 50, Gray’s Inn Road (Lanterns and Accessories), and in the cellar there I developed the negative, using Wrench’s primitive outfit. This consisted of a metal frame, carrying a number of upright pins on which the film could be wound spiral-wise — in the dark-room, of course — and subsequently immersed in the developer in a suitable dish and then rinsed and fixed in the same way. So I made my first film ever, and it was the only film of mine ever to be developed in this primitive manner. For with my usual egotism I enunciated the theory that that static method was not the proper way to process a continuous thing like a fifty-foot film. I said it ought to be passed continuously through troughs of the several chemicals in proper order by mechanical means. Then I proceeded to construct a machine according to this plan, using sprocket-wheels and other parts of two or three Edison ‘Kinetoscopes’ pulled to pieces for the purpose. When the first machine was finished and tested I showed it to Urban and told him I thought it ought to be patented. He agreed and said that he would like his name associated with mine as co-inventor, and that was done. A printer was added in a little while so that the positive stock, in contact with the finished negative, was passed into the machine at one end and came out at the other, finished and ready to be dried. At a much later stage, a drying bank was added and then the process was complete.
Printing and developing machines to this pattern and covered by the same patent were in sole use in my laboratories until the end of my film-life. It was not, however, until the advent of talking films, pointing to the importance of continuous processing to do away with the necessity of making joints, that the film trade woke up to the desirability of printing and developing by machinery, and of course, the patent had expired long before that. I was too early. Sometimes the tortoise is also wiser than the hare.
The machine was fitted up in the dark-room cellar at Warwick Court, and although it spoiled a lot of film by unforeseen faults which came to light from time to time, it did, on the whole, a great deal of good work and earned good money for the firm.
A conspicuous member of the staff was the genial Jew, Joe Rosenthal, who was sent out as special correspondent to South Africa where the storms of war were brewing. He and his sister, Alice, a plump and pleasant lady, and Miss Lena Green, a thin one, were, with Mont and myself, the whole staff below the principals. Between us we developed and printed and listed and sold all the stuff Joe sent home. One way and another there was a lot of work to be done. I nearly always, and Mont very often, stayed on till eleven at night, and Urban and Baucus, being Americans, used to talk till about that time, and then we repaired to the pub at the corner of the court for a meal.
I came to the conclusion that the idea of American hustle is just an unconscious bluff. They don’t work any faster than we do but they talk about it a great deal more. It seemed to me that they talked the whole day long and then worked feverishly for an hour or two in the evening to make up.
I have no regrets about Warwick Court. On the whole I had a very happy time. I was with nice people and doing the sort of work I have always liked; doing it fairly successfully and being fairly paid. True, I had no other actual film to my credit but the one of the boat-race but I had the handling and printing of Joe Rosenthal’s work and I picked up a lot of knowledge of the film business. I was the most surprised person you can possibly imagine when, one Monday morning, I found on my desk a short note enclosing a week’s wages in lieu of notice and saying that my services were no longer required. Monty Wicks had a similar note.
I saw Urban and pointed out the unfairness of such a sudden action and tried to discover a reason for it. He could give no reason but did agree to allow us two weeks’ salary instead of one. Then the question of the patented machine came up and he said he didn’t want it, and I could have it and the patent too if I liked to reimburse the company for the patent fees so far incurred. Thus I got the sack from that job.
I have often wondered since what was the reason for that curt dismissal and the only one I can think of is that some time before I had asked for and been given — apparently without grudge — a royalty of a farthing a foot on all good work turned out on the machine. It would be a fairly big charge on modern machines but did not amount to much at that time. Or maybe Urban had been persuaded that the old method was better and cheaper in the end.
My young colleague and I decided that we would start again on our own. I went that same day to Thames Ditton where I had been the year before for a holiday and knew there a factory worked by electricity. I hoped to be able to buy a supply from them to run a small film-processing plant. They wouldn’t or couldn’t co-operate, however, and I walked on, abandoning the hope of buying electricity, to Walton-on-Thames. There in a little side-road with a dead end I found a small house which a gardener-landlord was willing to let for £36 a year. We took it. That was in 1899; — probably early summer.
The whole idea in taking up this little house at Walton was to start again to do the work we had been doing in London for the past half-year or so: cinematograph film-processing, that is developing and printing. We proposed to work for the trade, although to be sure there was very little of that. It had been half suggested to us, for instance, that Urban himself might give us some to do and we felt that it was likely that other firms would be glad to put out work of this description. It was just taking in other people’s washing, of course, but what of that? We hadn’t the faintest idea at first that we might ever come to make pictures on our own account.
We needed several things and our tiny capital had to be very carefully laid out. There was a funny little central electricity station near Clapham Common, all run by strange little vertical gas engines direct-coupled to dynamos, and there were also some for sale. We bought one and rigged it up, with its fifty-volt dynamo, in the scullery of our little house, where it made a terrible noise when it was running. We bought a second-hand battery of twenty -seven accumulator cells from a man at Burgess Hill. We wired the whole house for electric light, moved the developing machine from Warwick Court and re-erected it in the drawing-room, rigged up the two bedrooms as film drying-rooms and the front sitting-room as an office. That left the kitchen and bathroom for general domestic use. It is not true that we ever contemplated taking in a paying guest. Indeed, I don’t remember how we arranged our private lives. I know we prepared and ate our meals in the kitchen and I suppose we must have slept somewhere.
Somewhere about the middle of the summer of 1899, a young lady from Weybridge came in daily to do our secretarial and office work. She was a Miss Worley, and she stayed with us and was very helpful for many years. But the work didn’t flow in as we hoped it would, and after a while, for lack of other occupation, we began to take a few little fifty-foot films and then we started a List with ‘Film No. 1, Express Trains in a Railway Cutting.’ That was the very first of the Hepworth Films, but, like many another important baby, its birth was scarcely noted!
Then a young girl named Mabel Clark joined the ‘staff’ as what would now be called ‘cutting expert’ and we decided to carry on with the making of these tiny films until Fortune turned her face our way and sent us a few orders. But Fortune knew better. She only smiled a little and turned her face away, so we were left with the baby.
Thereafter there followed at short intervals a small number of fifty-foot films of a very simple and elementary character, such as Ladies’ Tortoise Race, Donkey Race, Procession of Prize Cattle, Drive Past of Four-in Hands. All simple little things obtainable locally at no cost save that of the film-stock, and of very little interest to anybody. The fact that we took them and sold them, is proof that the interest in mere movement in screen pictures had not yet completely faded out. Then came one which showed some slight perception of scenic value; a ‘Thames Panorama’ from the front of a steam launch. Then, evidently, we went to a cycle gymkhana, which is described as ‘so familiar a sight as to need but little description.’ It would appear that even bicycles in those days were still so new that the riding of them attracted attention and people flocked in quantities to these gymkhanas to see a Musical Ride by Ladies and Comic Costume Race for Cyclists. Nine of these epics, each of fifty feet, of course, take up numbers 12 to 21 in our first catalogue. Then we went further afield and bagged four little sea-side pictures at Blackpool.
My camera at this time was a curious contrivance, for remember, photography for us then was still only a side-line. I have already mentioned the possession of a couple of Lumière camera-projector mechanisms. One of these we fitted up on a camera stand and so arranged it that the film, as it was exposed, dropped through into a light-tight bag slung between the legs of the tripod. The bag was made with light-tight sleeves into which I could slide my hands — one with a box in it — wind up the exposed film in my fingers and put it into the box. Then it only remained to attach another box with fifty feet of fresh film in it to the top of the camera, and all was ready for the next scene. One of the ‘Ladies’ Gymkhana’ films I still have and use, with many others, in my lecture of The Story of the Films. The other Lumière mechanism was used as a printer to duplicate these early masterpieces and they were processed on the developing machine brought from Warwick Court.
Perhaps it was lucky for me, and for some scraps of posterity, that the idea of taking in other people’s washing fizzled out and never came to anything, for hard circumstance forced us into attempts at film production and so started a business which afterwards became interesting. It happened something like this. We got together a small collection of such puerile efforts as those I have mentioned, made a little list of them and managed to sell some prints to fair-ground proprietors and others of that sort. Being young and keen, a very little encouragement served to fire our enthusiasm, and though most of our customers couldn’t even sign their names and were wont to pay us in threepenny bits culled from the roundabouts and swings, they were absolutely honest and never cheated us for a penny. The exhibitors of a later date did not necessarily inherit this propensity.
And so we gradually went on to better things. I find that Henley Regatta of 1900 attracted our roving attention for seven scenes and that perhaps suggested the possibility of taking two or three ‘scenics’ on the upper Thames, punctuated with a river panorama of a Cornish mining village. Then we became patriotic and immortalised some modern warships and contrasted them with old sailing frigates used as training ships for the Navy.
Then around 1901, we came to a definite milestone in the shape of the Phantom Rides which became tremendously popular about this time. These were panoramic pictures taken from the front of a railway engine travelling at speed. The South Western Railway Company whose line ran through a great deal of very beautiful scenery, especially in and around Devonshire, possessed some engines particularly suitable for this work in that they had long extensions between the front of the boiler and the buffers — iron platforms looking as though they had been made for a camera to be strapped upon. I approached them with the idea of gaining publicity for their line through a number of Phantom Rides and they agreed to put one of these engines at my disposal on certain sections and gave me a station-to-station pass all over their system for as long as was necessary to complete the arrangements.
But first I had to obtain a suitable camera — it was no use tackling that job in fifty-foot driblets and I determined to construct a camera big enough to take a thousand feet of film at a time and take no chances. What eventually emerged was a long, narrow, black box, rather like a coffin standing on end. It had three compartments. The centre one contained a Bioscope mechanism, modified to do duty as a camera instead of a projector, and the top one held a thousand feet of film on a spool, while the bottom compartment held a similar spool on which the film was automatically rewound as it came out of the camera.
It was a fairly easy matter to lash this contrivance to the rail which had been fitted for safety to the front of the engine extension, and the box-like seat contrived for me and a station-master to sit upon completed the arrangements.
I think it was the American Biograph Company, during their long run at the Palace Theatre, London, who started this fashion of Phantom Rides, but it was rather strange that the public should have liked it for so long. Before the craze finished, however, it was given a new lease of life by the introduction of an ingenious scheme called Hales9 Tours. A number of small halls all over the country were converted into the semblance of a railway carriage with a screen filling up the whole of one end and on this was projected from behind these panoramic films, so that you got the illusion of travelling along a railway line and viewing the scenery from the open front of the carriage. The illusion was ingeniously enhanced by the carriage being mounted on springs and rocked about by motor power so that you actually felt as though you were travelling along.
The Biograph Company had none of these fancy touches, of course, at the Palace Theatre. Their work was very interesting from another aspect, however, for they used film over four times the usual size. Partly because of this their pictures were far better than anything the rest of us could obtain and it rather looked for a time as if their method would have to come into general use. But the clumsy size and great cost proved their undoing in the end, and the smaller films, constantly growing brighter and better, soon had the field to themselves.
The American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, to give them their full name, seem to have started with an ingenious viewing device in opposition to the ‘Kinetoscope’ of Edison. It was an attractive-looking instrument for a drawing-room table, not at all large or clumsy. A long series of pictures in consecutive movement as in a cinematograph film, but all separate paper photographs mounted on cards, was arranged to be ‘flipped’ over one after another when the handle of the instrument was turned. I am only guessing now because I did not come on to the scene until later, but I imagine that in order to produce these paper pictures a long multiple negative was made upon film and the paper prints made from it. When the popularity of the ‘Mutoscope’ began to wane it would be natural for the company to turn their attention to the ‘projection’ of transparent films made from these negatives and to design a projector for that purpose. However, that is what they did and that, I suppose, is why they used so large a film: for their negatives had to be large enough to make the paper prints of suitable size for the ‘Mutoscope.’
That, as I see it, is how the ‘Biograph’ came into being as a separate entity. The film was unique in having no perforations to steer it through the camera or projector, but used an ingenious device which I described and illustrated in my book, The A.B.C. of the Cinematograph, published in 1897 by Hazell, Watson and Viney. Don’t ask me to lend a copy for I haven’t got one. It has been out of print for half a century and I lent my only copy years ago to a ‘lady’ journalist with several valuable photographs and other things, none of which she ever returned in spite of my pleading.
I must, however, I think, venture upon one point which was of some importance in this connection. The original Edison films, used, it will be remembered, only for peep-show purposes and not for projection upon a screen, had four pairs of holes for each picture or ‘frame’ and were drawn through the apparatus by sprocket-wheels engaging in these perforations. The pictures were not steady because the perforations were not very accurately spaced and the teeth on the sprocket-wheels were not very accurately cut. Lumière had a better idea. He used only one pair of holes to each ‘frame’ and a claw, engaging in those holes, to pull the film through the mechanism. Remember, too, that he used the same mechanism indifferently as camera, as printer and as projector, so that if the holes were not accurate, the error cancelled out and the picture on the screen was remarkably steady. The trouble was that this method could only be used with very short films; the inertia of a larger roll could not be overcome quickly enough by the claw without tearing and destroying the film. Steadiness depends upon ‘registration5 — upon each successive frame coming into place and occupying exactly the same position as the previous one. Lumière’s method died; we reverted to four-hole perforation and, with better workmanship, secured steadiness in the end.
Our railway scenes perhaps led naturally to other scenic possibilities and the catalogue now owns to several fifty-footers of the Departure of a Steamer variety, which bring us to No. 68 in the list. No. 69, however, is Mud Larks — a number of urchins scrambling for pennies thrown to them, and that argues incipient ‘direction.’ Then we have a Macaroni Eating Competition which is evidently ‘directed,’ though there is still no trace of a stage. Then the call for comic pictures became insistent. We were quick to respond to it — and the river was just round the corner. two men fishing from a boat, quarrelling over the jug of beer and finally falling over into the water — shrieks of laughter! Me, in long skirt of fashionable lady’s costume, seated at the back of a punt being towed by a steam launch, tipping over backwards when the tow-rope tightens! More shrieks, but it is exceedingly difficult to swim in boots and trousers and a long skirt over the lot!
Then when each ‘epic’ of this sort was finished we went on the road and tried to sell it, came back and printed the copies for which we had taken orders, posted them, and then sat back and said, ‘Well boys! What about another subject? How would it be to —?’ and so on. Always we were glad that we dealt in a trade whose product was small and light, like jewellery, and presented no difficulties of transport. I often think of this when I see a storeroom filled with hundreds of iron transit-cases and the many tons of films a dealer must handle today.
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