Tag: Nottingham

The Journals of Sydney Race

Source: Ann Featherstone (ed.), The Journals of Sydney Race 1892-1900: A Provincial View of Popular Entertainment (London: The Society for Theatre Research, 2007), pp. 85-86

Text: 1898, October 6th, 7th, 8th
Goose Fair

I have not the patience to describe the Fair fully, but these were the shows:

Bostocks menagerie
Wall’s ghost (opposite Market Street)
Lawrence’s Cinematograph (facing Spaldings)
Wadbrooke’s Cinematographe (commencing the avenue from Binghams to Lambs)
Day’s Menagerie
? Cinematographe
Wallace the Untameable Lion
A second sight woman
Coxswain Terry’s Crocodiles
Randall Williams’s Cinematograph (looking down Wheeler’s Gate)
Count Orloff, the transparent man
The bear-faced woman
A child-dwarf
Ayme’s Mechanical Exhibition
Radford and Chappell’s Marionettes (late Ghost)
Buckley’s Performing dogs etc.
A swimming exhibition
Prof Burnett’s Military Exhibition
(opp Wombwell’s) Baby incubator and midgets

I am not sure this is a correct list as I cannot find the particulars I took down at the Fair, if indeed I did take any. But it is substantially correct.

I saw the child-dwarf. She was a poor little thing, the size of a baby a few weeks old, but said to have been born three years ago. She sat in a little chair and was lifted up by her mother for us to see her; but it was a poor exhibition and the child was not ‘all there.’

I went in most of the cinematograph shows and saw some really good pictures. Most of them showed a bull-fight – views of the actual thing – and very savage did the bull show himself. We did not see the actual death, but we saw several poor horses knocked down and dragged out of the arena lifeless. Randall Williams had a capital picture taken at Lords on Dr Grace’s Jubilee Day, taken as the two elevens were making a ceremonial parade of the ground. The Doctor came first and raised his hat most affably, as he got up to us. Walking with him was Arthur Shrewsbury whom it was quite easy to recognise, and the great Gunn came a little way behind, and also W. Nixon, the Notts Captain.

Walls showed two coloured pictures – the first I have seen – and also a view of the Gladstone funeral procession. This last was a very good picture. The Commons came first, marching four abreast, then there was a little interval and the Lord Chancellor wobbled across preceded by his mace bearer. After him came the Archbishop of York, walking alone, some of the temporal peers in fours, a group of bishops, and another set of peers. Last came the mourners, before whom walked the Bishop of London and then the body. The pall bearers who walked beside the hearse were quite recognisable – of Lord Salisbury we had a particularly good view and the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York we could see at the end. Among the mourners were some little boys who hardly seemed to comprehend the ceremony and at the rear walked the Revd. Gladstone by himself. Any faces one knew were easily picked out. Sir Mathew White Ridley and other Front bench men who headed the Commons I quickly recognised.

Another capital picture shown here was taken in front of a train as it dashed through the country. The hedges, the signal posts and telephone wires all went quickly by and the bridge which we could see ahead grew larger and larger as we approached until we had passed under it. Then we rushed by a station and could see the people walking up and down its platform and rapidly drew near a tunnel ahead. We saw the train entering it, then the sheet went black as we were [pages missing]

Comments: Sydney Race (1875-1960) was the working-class son of a cotton mill engineer and worked as an insurance clerk in Nottingham. His private journal documents the different kinds of entertainment he witnessed in Nottingham. The above is part of his account of visiting the Nottingham Goose Fair in October 1898. Dr Grace is the cricketer W.G. Grace and the film described is W.G. Grace Celebrates at Lord’s on His 50th Birthday (1898), made by the Prestwich Manufacturing Company. William Gunn and John Dixon were both Nottinghamshire players. The jubilee procession took place on 18 July 1898. The funeral of former prime minister William Gladstone took place 28 May 1898 and was filmed by several companies. Lord Salisbury was the serving prime minister. The ‘coloured pictures’ would have been hand-painted. Films taken from the front of moving trains were a common attraction in early film shows, often being given the name ‘phantom rides’.

Family Life and Work Experience Before 1918

Source: Extract from interview with Joseph Flower, C707/321/1-3, 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: Q: Cinemas while you were still at school?

A: Yes. Now then. This is where the’ fun starts. We had – tickets. Now wait a moment – the shop where I lived was a tailor’s shop of course. Well now in the window we used to display these – advertisement – bills for these different things you see. And – there was – a picture house opened in Shakespeare Street called Hibberts. Well used to get a ticket – given us by – with, you know, with these – chaps that brought the bills , and that entitled you to go in for – abou[t] a penny. And you’d see the whole – programme you see for a penny. Well – we’d take advantage of this and – these fellows – that brought the bills, they weren’t particular just giving you one, they’d give you a dozen, to get rid of ’em. Well we used to dish ’em around to our friends and so on you see. Well we used to go to those pictures, and become a bit of a nuisance sometimes. Used to play – bits of tricks, like everybody else, yes. There was a fellow there that – well of course they were silent pictures of course. And – there was this fellow used to sit behind the curtain – with a – these coconut shells during these – horse – clip-clop, well we should – we should take – get – cut down reeds, open the centres – take all the pith out the centre, and use – hawthorn hips, and – sit over in the balcony over this end and keep – pipping ’em down to him and he’d got a bald head you know and it –

Q: Could you aim straight?

A: Oh yes, hit him plenty of times. ‘Til eventually we got turned out of course. And then – at this particular – picture house, they first started to synchronise a gramaphone [sic] record with the picture. And of course then we changed our seating, from the – balcony onto the front row of all. Now they had this gramaphone [sic] on a stand, and they’d start it off and it was pretty good, for a time it was pretty good. But of course – we could always stretch a hand out and just put a finger on the turn table for a second which would throw the whole thing all – haywire. That went on for a bit and then of course they rumbled us and we were – thrown out.

Q: I should think it was very funny wasn’t it?

A: Well it was to see the picture – you know, going along and then the – all of a sudden the – the sound and the – picture – was all – distorted all sorts. But it – that was a – these were – these are the kind of tricks we used to get up to. We never did any real damage like vandalism, it were just sheer devilment. You see, and it – gradually the – these people that – that run these places, they got to know us and – sometimes they’d let us in and sometimes they’d just say, well now look, let’s have no – bother with you lot today and that kind of thing. There was no real hardship, they didn’t knock us about or anything like that you see.

Q: Was your lot all roughly your age?

A: Oh yes.

Q: Did it have an actual leader or did you all sort of things these things up together?

A: Well, no, there was no leader. It was just a matter of – someone might suggest a new idea you see and – we’d – we should – try it out once and if it was a success well of course that’d carry on ’til we got stopped.

Q: Any other things you can remember like that?

A: Well we’d go to the Albert Hall on a Saturday evening and – I don’t know how much we used to pay there, I don’t know whether it was a penny or tuppence, and – it’d open out – with a – the parson – saying a prayer, and we’d probably sing a hymn. Then the – picture would start. And then –

Q: S[o] this was pictures too was it?

A: This was pictures, yes, on a Saturday evening. And then of course – we should start our little bit of devilment, kicking up noises and things like that, generally trying to upset things and which we in those days thought funny, you see. And this went on for a time until the – we’d get thrown out of there, and – we’d go back the next week and it was all right again, but it – they – they never bore any malice or anything, they just put it down to boys – high spirits, that was all. And of course at the – interval we – we would help, you see, as a kind of a – retribution we would – they used to sell – chocolate, and things like that, and we should – take it round on the trays and – and sell it for them, amongst the – people that were gathered – you know, went to the pictures. But – I think by doing that and – trying to help what we could – part of the – time, they’d – it made up for the devilment and trouble.

Comments: Joseph Flower (1899-?) was one of six children of a Nottingham pavier but was brought up by foster parents and saw little of his own family. He lived in the Sneinton suburb of Nottingham. He 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). Nottingham’s Albert Hall was a Methodist mission which put on concerts, film screenings and other entertainments. Hibbert’s Pictures operated in Shakespeare Street 1910 to 1920 before becoming the Lounge Picture Theatre. Films synchronised with gramophone recordings (usually to depict a song being sung) were common in the early 1910s but are seldom mentioned in memoir evidence for the period.

The Journals of Sydney Race

Source: Ann Featherstone (ed.), The Journals of Sydney Race 1892-1900: A Provincial View of Popular Entertainment (London: The Society for Theatre Research, 2007), pp. 78-79

Text: Saturday January 20th, 1897
Caldwells have been showing the ‘Living Pictures’ in their shop on Long Row for some time past now and tonight I went there to see them. This marvellous invention which only appeared last year is, I take it, a development of Edison’s Kinetoscope. In each case, I believe, an enormous number of photographs, taken consecutively, are whirled with speed of lightning, before your eyes. In this case the pictures are thrown onto a screen by a magic lantern. The screen at Caldwells was placed between us and the operator and when all the lights had been put out the pictures were thrown on it, in size about five feet by three or four I should think. The following were among the views I saw:

Place of the Opera, Paris with numerous buses, cabs and passengers continuously passing.

Some children skipping with a gentleman or two playing about with others, a boy watering the garden with a hose, and at the rear the traffic of a street seen through the railings.

Two gentlemen playing cards in a Restaurant. One accuses the other of cheating and after an argument they fight, the table, etc., at the finish being cleared off by a grinning waiter.

The sea washing over the promenade and some watering place. The photograph did not bring out the waves very clearly, but we could see them dashing up and down and at times leaping the promenade.

Three girls in a skirt dance. These showed up well.

Fire engines turning out of the Fire Station.

Two men wrestling.

A scene, apparently at an Exhibition; a fountain in the centre and a circular train coming in and discharging its passengers.

The Czar in Paris. This was very good. We first saw the road lined on each side with mounted soldiers. At his side was a row of Cuirassiers and it was very strange to see a horse shake its head while the man sat quite motionlessly. The effect of standing figures making a sudden movement was the most curious of all in the pictures. Down this road pressed by the military came the procession; squadrons of cavalry, carriages, a troupe of Arabs (easily distinguished by their dress and manner of riding), more carriages and more cavalry and then the Czar and Czarina and their escort. The cavalry rode in bunches and you could almost hear them trotting so lifelike was their manner, and it was curious to notice officers, every now and then, forging ahead of their troops.

A railway station. A porter and one or two officials came bustling along and then the train came slowly in. Passengers got out and hurried off and others got in and after an interval the train moved off, some in carriages put their heads out of the windows as it did so. It was funny to see a door open and a lady and gentleman jump out, apparently from a flat surface containing nothing.

There were other scenes which I do not remember and the affair was distinctly novel and wonderful. The pictures lasted about a minute and unlike the Kinetoscope did not seem to disappear almost as soon as they appeared. You had time to take in the scene fully and there was a leisurely air about it though you know that the operator was working as fast as his machine would allow him.

Comment: Sydney Race (1875-1960) was the working-class son of a cotton mill engineer and worked as an insurance clerk in Nottingham. His private journal documents the different kinds of entertainment he witnessed in Nottingham. This show featured either Lumière or possibly Pathé films.

The Journals of Sydney Race

Source: Ann Featherstone (ed.), The Journals of Sydney Race 1892-1900: A Provincial View of Popular Entertainment (London: The Society for Theatre Research, 2007), p. 50

Text: February 1895
During this month Edison’s last greatest invention – the Kinetoscope showing living figures – has been on exhibition in a shop on the Long Row. The figures were contained in a big box and one looked down through a glass and saw them within.

I saw at different times a dancer and a barbers [sic] shop the latter with several figures and everything was true to life. The figures appear a brilliant white in outline on a black background but in the barber shop it was possible to distinguish a negro from the white man. The figures have been photographed continuously and two or three thousand of them are whirled before your eyes by Electricity in less than a minute.

Comment: Sydney Race (1875-1960) was the working-class son of a cotton mill engineer and worked as an insurance clerk in Nottingham. His private journal documents the different kinds of entertainment he witnessed in Nottingham. The Edison film he describes, Barber Shop (1893) (or its 1895 remake New Barber Shop), does not feature a black character.

Links:
Entry on Sydney Race at Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema