Source: Extract from interview with Edward William Wifen, C707/9/1-2, Thompson, P. and Lummis, T., Family Life and Work Experience Before 1918, 1870-1973 [computer file]. 7th Edition. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Archive [distributor], May 2009. SN: 2000, http://dx.doi.org/10.5255/UKDA-SN-2000-1
Text: But there’s one thing I put in my other notes, about the cinemas. I can remember when I was ever so young and I suppose I was just at that age when you can remember, that my sister … one of my sisters taking me to the Corn Exchange here to what they call Pools Morama, and that was a kind of a … must have been when the moving pictures was in the very early stages, became I can’t remember very much about it except that they were all horses dashing along and they seemed to be coming towards you. That was called Pools Morama, and I think that that was connected with Ipswich because for years there was a Pools picture house in Ipswich, and I’ve got an idea that that was the same thing, and then eventually they went over to the ordinary pictures. But you don’t hear anything about that sort of thing, but that definitely was so, because I can distinctly remember going and I know that they were horses. They were men on horses and they seemed to be coming to you. Probably that was something to do with the Boer War. The picture may have been, you see, with all the horses, may have been that. But I can’t remember whether they were soldiers on the horses, or not. I couldn’t have been very old, but I do remember that.
Comments: Edward William Wifen (1897-?) was the youngest of eight children of a Colchester gardener, and his memories here relate to Colchester. Poole’s Myriorama was a travelling panorama show, organised by the Poole family, which toured widely across the UK in the late Victorian period and early 1900s. The Myriorama combined scrolling panoramas with cut-out figures, music, lighting effects, and narration, often illustrating military adventures (the Anglo-Boer was was 1899-1902). Ipswich did have a Poole’s Picture Palace, managed by the Poole family business. Wifen was one of 444 people interviewed by Paul Thompson and his team as part of a study of the Edwardian era which resulted in Thompson’s book The Edwardians: The Remaking of British Society (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975).
