Cecil M. Hepworth — Came the Dawn — Chapter 10 (1951) 🇬🇧
On the day of the Walton Regatta of 1910 I went in a punt with some friends and we happened to pull up a little way from another punt where the occupants surprisingly burst into song. They were ‘buskers’ recently returned from some seaside town at which they had been performing in a local hall, or perhaps on the beach. Anyhow, their work was obviously very good and it was suggested that I might find them exactly suitable for further productions for the ‘Vivaphone,’ then in the heyday of its popularity. I took the hint and got them to come round and see me. Their names were Hay Plumb, a jolly young fellow beginning to show incipient rotundity, which is supposed to be but isn’t always, a sign of good living, Jack Hulcup and his wife, Claire, afterwards Claire Pridelle, who were both much too slight to imply any such suspicion.
They proved to be a good acquisition both for acting and production of ‘Vivaphone’ subjects and for other things as well. For though they did not set our near-by Thames on fire, their work was sound and good as far as it went and they were decent and friendly people, several cuts above some of those we had been scratching from the boards of the smaller theatres. Hay Plumb in particular was a very useful man and he soon came to take important parts before the camera and afterwards beside it.
In the autumn of that year practically our whole company migrated to Lulworth Cove, armed with a number of suitable scripts and a firm determination to make as many good small films as it possibly could, and to enjoy itself into the bargain. I could not spare the time to be with them for long but I went down there very frequently and helped where I could and hindered where I must. Once when with my camera I was up to my knees in seawater, and Fitz was nearly up to his waist in it, directing several girls who were in it too, he began to get a little ratty trying to hear my suggestions over the noise the sea was making. I called out to him to get one of the girls a little nearer. ‘Nearer to what?’ he said crossly. ‘Nearer, my God, to thee!’ I shouted back, and they all recovered their tempers in the gust of laughter that followed.
In the following year, ‘Plummie’ was on contract — on two pounds ten a week, and very happy on it he has since assured me; and he and Gladys Sylvani, who joined us about that time, did a lot of very good work. Gladys Sylvani was a very beautiful young woman of striking colouring and she became our leading lady for several years. Her work was so good and her appearance so effective that if our films had been of the importance and calibre to which they afterwards attained she would have left a very significant mark upon them and made an even greater impression upon the industry.
The tangible results of the excursion to Lulworth that year were good enough to warrant a similar trip in the autumn of the following year, and among others there was an attractive story of Grace Darling to be attempted. Now the script in this case called for a cottage on the beach so that the heroine could go straight from her front door, so to speak, into her boat without wasting any time. But at Lulworth Cove there was no cottage built upon the beach. We did not want to build a cottage so we selected a suitably attractive one in the village and proceeded to carry the beach up to it. There was no pavement in front of it of course, only a gently sloping green bank which made a very good support for the beach stones. When we hauled up a boat on it, ready for Grace to push off into the putative sea, you would never have supposed that there was anything artificial about it.
By 1912 we were coming in sight of a more important period of our work in which we were destined to recover all the ground we had lost in the thin years both before and after the time of the fire. I cannot account for that thin time except by supposing that I was not sufficiently alive to the many changes which were occurring in the industry; not aware enough of the great possibilities which lay in the future. It is perhaps charitable to assume that I was lured by the apparent security of our trade with America and other countries, into the feeling that change and progress need not be too seriously contemplated.
Perhaps the first small step in the right direction was asking Blanche Macintosh to write a script for us instead of relying upon our own puny efforts. She, too, began very humbly, for her first scenario only earned her a guinea. It was called In Wolf’s Clothing and I am afraid that is all I know about it.
A very important event in the story of English films was the appointment of a film censor. I mentioned near the beginning of this book that there occasionally appeared unpleasant little films which were ostensibly for ‘smoking-room’ use, and that, though some of us took a little fright that they might spread and become a danger to the trade, they did not then grow beyond being ‘no bigger than a man’s hand.’ But in these later years, when there were fifty ‘producers’ for every one there was before; when there were fifty times as many markets with the temptation to make a little quick money and hang the consequences, the danger was certainly growing. Although there was as yet no overt evidence of it, we felt it might flare up at any moment.
We remembered hearing what happened to the stereoscope in the days when our fathers were young. That very attractive instrument, showing beautiful scenery in natural deep relief, was to be found in nearly every ladies’ drawing-room, until in an evil day some unprincipled persons began selling indecent photographs for use in it. That was its knell. It speedily acquired such ill-repute that it was totally banished and never again came back into favour.
And some of us took fright. We visualised the possibility of a like fate overtaking our cinematograph. It was Will Barker [William Barker] who took the first step. He called Bromhead and me and one or two others into consultation and we put our heads together and agreed that the best safeguard would be to set up a censorship and somehow compel all film-makers to submit all their films to its judgment. It was rather a large undertaking but it was a big danger with which the whole industry of film-making was threatened. I need not go into details. There was in existence the Kinematograph Manufacturers Association to which we all belonged, and it was arranged that that body should inaugurate the scheme. Its very capable secretary, J. Brooke-Wilkinson, entered heartily into the arrangement and as secretary of the British Board of Film Censors carried on the affair so very excellently that not only did the whole body of film-makers (after a little struggling) come into it and support it heartily, but it became the example to other censorships everywhere, in spite of the fact that it belongs to, and is supported by, the very people who have to obey its edicts.
If ever the true story of the British film industry comes to be written it will be found that there is one name which streaks along it like a bright ray of light, from near the beginning, and on through its most important years. It is not to be found on any advertisements, scarcely appears in any trade paper, was never seen on any programme or list of important people. Yet there is no name better known through all the industry than that of Brooke-Wilkinson .
I met him first in the offices of the Photographic Dealer, run by my friend, Arthur Brookes, for whom I occasionally wrote some semi-technical articles. Mr. Wilkinson as we called him then was a dapper little man, without obvious personality or any hint of the skill and extraordinary tact which he displayed in after years. He was on the advertising staff of the Dealer and was understood to possess considerable knowledge of photographic and chemical apparatus, and he had a quietly genial and pleasant manner.
When the Kinematograph Manufacturers Association was formed I was, I think, its first chairman. Anyhow, when its work began to accumulate and we came in need of a secretary, I remembered the dapper little man in the office of the Photographic Dealer and suggested he should be approached. He duly accepted the job and held it to the end of his life.
Thus it came about that when three or four of us, in a little informal committee with W. G. Barker, began to discuss the matter of a trade censorship to keep undesirable elements out of the films, it naturally fell to the K.M.A. to father the scheme and to Brooke- Wilkinson to be its secretary. And then he began to unfold. He pointed out that we must have a prominent and well-known man to be its head and at a salary which made us gasp. But we felt he was right and T. P. O’Connor was approached and he accepted the post of first film censor.
But for all practical purposes Brooke- Wilkinson was himself the censor. It was he who suggested Tay Pay and he who approached him and fixed it all up. He did the same in the case of each succeeding official censor and it was he who selected and appointed the staff of the board of examiners. It was he who received and dealt in the first place with any complaints — and at first there were many — discussed them between the complaining film dignitaries and the examiners concerned, and in the last resource put the case before the official censor.
I remember when, very many years later, he told me in confidence that he had found a beautiful old house which he believed he could secure; one which would be a worthy home for the British Board and be a credit to it not only in the eyes of the film trade in this country but also of all the visitors from other lands who came over here, as they occasionally did, to study our censorship methods. He took me to see it. It was a kind of furniture repository at the time but even so I could see that it was a wonderful old building, a beautiful house built by Christopher Wren and the Adams. I shared his enthusiasm though I wondered a little where the money was to come from.
However, he bought it himself at a very moderate price and the old furniture was cleared away. Then people began to hear about it and almost immediately he was offered a price which would have showed him a tremendous profit on his outlay. He refused. He furnished the whole place in keeping with its style and antiquity, got his staff installed — and then turned it over to the Board at exactly the price he had paid for it.
I think that was the proudest moment in his life, and I know that his very heart was in that building; the crowning monument of his whole career. It was called Carlisle House at the end of Carlisle Street, Soho Square. Incidentally, it was the house selected by Charles Dickens as the home of Dr. Manette in The Tale of two Cities.
One night, in the middle of the war, a bomb dropped upon it and smashed it to a mere heap of rubble: not one brick was left standing upon another in its proper place. I heard about the calamity early next morning and hurried round in the hope of intercepting poor old Brookie and breaking the news to him before he came upon it unawares. I thought it would kill him for he was an old man by then. But I was too late to help him. I found him seated on a kitchen chair at the corner of Carlisle Street, calm and gentle, waiting to give directions to the staff as they arrived to ‘work’!
I sometimes wonder whether it would be any exaggeration to say that Brooke-Wilkinson was, by and large and from beginning to end, the best-known man in the British film industry. He had the most difficult job of all and he held it down with such gentle forceful dignity that he was loved by all and was the friend of every man who might so easily have been his enemy.
That sincere appreciation of a very honourable man had to come in in its proper place at the point where the Board of Censors was appointed, but as it also concerns the greater part of a man’s life it has carried us far beyond that proper place and indeed beyond the scope of the whole of this book. I must, therefore, call back your attention to the point where it left the main stream. So we are back again in the day of the very short picture.
But if my company had not yet begun to make the long and important films which were to make future years memorable, it was certainly industrious in the making of short ones. 1912 was extraordinarily prolific, for, apart from the two ‘Vivaphone’ subjects every week without fail, there were also three or more ‘shorts’ of anything from five hundred to a thousand feet long, mostly with Gladys Sylvani and Alec Worcester or Flora Morris, Harry Royston, Marie de Solla, Harry Gilbey, to quote a few of the stock-company names which come to mind.
The year was also memorable for some delightful productions in quite a different idiom by Elwin Neame, for instance The Lady of Shalott with Ivy Close who was for some time a member of the stock-company, and The Sleeping Beauty by the same two people.
A less artistic but commercially more important venture was Oliver Twist. I think I have mentioned that my father was a popular lecturer when I was a youngster and that one of my greatest joys was to go with him and work his ‘Dissolving Views’ for him. His most successful lecture was The Footprints of Charles Dickens in which I gloried and heard over and over again. As a result I read every book that Dickens wrote and got myself thoroughly saturated with him. So when Thomas Bentley presented himself to me as a ‘great Dickens character impersonator and scholar,’ my heart naturally warmed to him and I was readily receptive when he offered to make a Dickens film for me. In the end he made several, but I think Oliver Twist was the first and its length was nearly four thousand feet. It may not have been outstandingly good but it was very successful and it marked the beginning not only of a Dickens series but also of a long range of increasingly important pictures from other popular novels and plays.
Gladys Sylvani was our very popular leading lady all through 1911 and for the two or three following years. She frequently appeared with Alec Worcester or with Hay Plumb in films of what was then the considerable length of over a thousand feet, but there is little use in quoting titles which must of necessity be quite meaningless now that the films themselves are forgotten.
There was a curiously interesting adaptation of the cinematograph to the legitimate theatre which was introduced about this time by a man named Messter [Oskar Messter], who called it Stereoplastics. It was an ingenious combination of the old Pepper’s Ghost idea with films instead of living actors. In the Pepper’s Ghost illusion, as everybody knows, a very large sheet of glass was stretched across the stage at an angle so that it would reflect a white-robed actress standing in the wings. She would appear to the audience as if she were standing in the middle of the stage. The crux of the illusion was that the ‘ghost’ would be invisible until a bright light was shone upon the figure in the wings and would gradually fade away again when the light was slowly extinguished.
In the Stereoplastic illusion the white figure in the wings was replaced by a sheet upon which a picture could be thrown from a projector out of sight on the opposite side of the stage. Both lantern and screen were invisible to the audience, until the specially devised film was thrown upon the screen, when the figure or figures appeared in the centre of the stage among the real people and the coloured scenery and furniture. There was no trace of the screen and the figures certainly looked very round and solid; or they could be made more transparent and ghost-like by reducing the brilliance of the light in the projector.
We had quite a lot of fun in the making of these special films for which we had to follow very carefully the instructions which were given to us. The actors had to be clothed entirely in white and have their faces and hands whitened too, and they had to be photographed against a very dark background of black velvet. The films were so processed that the figure was very white and clear and the surroundings so black and dense that no trace of light could get through and make any part of the screen even faintly visible as a screen.
The show was put on at the Scala Theatre in London where it was shown for several weeks. I do not remember that it attracted any marked attention. It suffered, I suspect, from the usual fate which almost always dogs the steps of any ghost-illusion. Very few people are interested in an illusion of that kind just as an illusion. They may think it is clever but do not bother to wonder how it is done; they don’t even care. Unless it tells some story, or belongs to some story which cannot well be told without it, it very soon ceases to intrigue them.
That is, indeed, at the basis of all entertainment. The conjurer is no good without his patter, and his patter must be interesting in itself. The cleverness of a ventriloquist goes for nothing unless the story his doll tells is both funny and clever. Radio and television are so amazingly wonderful in themselves that if you think of that your very hair stands up on end: but you don’t. All you think about is their message, the story they have to tell. So it is with the films. Hundreds of thousands of pounds spent on making them marvellously wonderful go for nothing at all if you are bored with the story. And how bored you sometimes are!
One of the most portentous events in my film-life was the coming to England of Larry Trimble [Laurence Trimble], with John Bunny and Florence Turner, to produce The Pickwick Papers with John Bunny in the name part. He came to me to see whether he could use my studio and I was honoured and very glad to agree that he should. They were three of the most delightful people, all experienced in modern American practice and quite willing to impart their knowledge. They were polite enough to imply that they found reciprocity on my part which made us quits.
Larry and I became excellent friends and had long discussions on the details and ethics of film production. We found that our views coincided to a very remarkable extent considering we came from and belonged to opposite hemispheres. It was he who persuaded me to try my hand at the actual ‘direction’ of a film, as they call it in America. Alma Taylor had been appearing in several short films made by Fitzhamon and when I supervised them and did much of their camera work I had been attracted by her charm and growing skill. Blanche Macintosh had by then written several short scripts for us and one of these entitled Blind Fate seemed to me like an excellent medium both for Alma’s acting and for my first efforts at ‘direction.’
The result was very successful and earned for both of us warm commendation. I think the nicest compliment I have ever had was when the shy little girl said to me afterwards: ‘My! You are hot, aren’t you?’
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