The Cinema & The New Cross Empire

The Cinema
Before the war we went to see a film almost every week. There were two main cinema chains, the Gaumont and the Odeon. Each week we had to decide which was the better film. They always showed the trailer of next week's film so there was a tendency to keep going back to the same cinema. The programme always had two films and the news film in between them. During the interval, they go sell ice cream as chocolates and cigarettes. Ice creams chocolates, cigarettes, cigarettes

On a Saturday morning I would walk to Brockley Cross [ 0.8ml] and go to a special children's performance there. There was always a serial. Each episode would end with the hero just about to be killed. This made a strong incentive to go back next week to see if he had survived. One serial dealt with a hero, Flash Gordon, who travelled around in a spacecraft. I later found it amusing that when the Americans did travel to the Moon everybody on Earth was able to watch them on television. The creative film writers had not even imagined that possibility.


The New Cross Empire
Before the war we sometimes went to the New Cross Empire (a music hall). I remember seeing Max Miller and a model called Jane. She featured in a cartoon in the Daily Mirror. Every week there was an excuse for her losing most of her clothes. This was the nearest we had to the topless girls on page 3 that is common nowadays. Nudity on the stage was discouraged. It was permitted only if the model had to remain perfectly still. It was permitted to have classical nude statues in museums, so the Lord Chamberlain had to accept her posing as a statue on the stage. The Lord Chamberlain was the censor of all stage shows until 1968.

There were two evening performances and kids would collect programs from people coming out after the first performance and sell them at half price to those of us who stood in the queue for the second performance. Some time in the 1960s the New Cross Empire was knocked down and replaced by a petrol station. There were many more people driving cars, and many fewer going to a music hall.

https://cinematreasures.org/theaters/29251

The Arrival of Electricity Changed How We Lived

The Arrival of Electricity Changed How We Lived.
The landlord of the house we rented in Shardeloes Road must have been quite a decent landlord by the standards of those days. We moved there before I started school in 1934. He agreed to install electricity, providing my father shared the cost with him. My father was keen to improve our living conditions and it made a lot of difference. Electric light was much better for me to read by and do my homework. We had an electric water heater in the bathroom, and a wireless set that worked off  mains electricity. Before the war, most people had a wireless set that worked from a large high tension battery and a lead acid accumulator, slightly smaller than half of a modern car battery. The accumulator had to be taken to the shop to be exchanged for a recharged one every week.

The Wireless.
From five o'clock until six o'clock every day there was Children's Hour. There were some lovely stories such as Toytown. The character of Larry the Lamb was played by an actor, whose voice was recognised by everybody. The only alternative to the BBC  was a commercial wireless station called Radio Luxembourg. On Sunday evening, I would listen to a programme advertising Ovaltine. There was supposed to be a club called the Ovaltinies. To join the club your parents had to buy tins of Ovaltine. A special coded message was sent out to members of the club. My parents did not buy Ovaltine so I did not know the code  but somehow I managed to work it out for myself. I'm quite sure my father did not help me. It was a very simple code, where one stood for A, two stood for B. Looking back, I am surprised that I managed to work out the code with no help, because I would I would have been only about eight years old at the time.
Our wireless set worked off  mains electricity and was quite sophisticated. It would have cost about £10 in 1935 [=£440 in 2010]. It was powerful enough to pick up short wave wireless  programmes and also could amplify sound from a separate electric turntable but  we did not have one until I got married. We used it for this purpose in the late 50s. Some people had a very expensive [=£900]piece of furniture called a radiogram. It had a gramophone turntable, a wireless, a big loudspeaker and sometimes storage for records, but it would have been very bulky.

[You may wonder how I have converted prices to their equivalents today.  I used the Retail Price Index for that year to the RPI for Jan 2010. There is no simple way of comparing how 'expensive' things seem because wages, taxation, housing, availability of credit have not increased in the same ratio.]

How Did You Pass the Time When There Was No TV?

How Did You Pass the Time When There Was No TV?

During the 30's we spent very little on commercial entertainment. Family  members used to visit each other quite frequently, using bus or tram. We moved from Peckham to New Cross before I was old enough to go to school. When we lived in Shardeloes Road, New Cross my mother took me on the tram [1.7 ml according to Google Earth] to see her parents in Peckham almost every week. There was a strong tradition of the family coming together for tea on Sunday. We had a piano in the house, and on Sunday evening several people would play.

We also had a wind up gramophone [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:78tours.ogv] so we could listen to music. The standard record was 10 inches in diameter and each side played for 3 minutes. There were 12 inches ones mainly used for long orchestral works. The  case of the gramophone was about 18" x 18" and about 9 inches deep. You lifted up the lid in order to put a record on the turntable and then very gently lowered the needle on to the record. Mounted above the needle was a small sound box. Our gramophone stood on top of a cabinet which was about 3 feet high. It had a cupboard with vertical partitions in which were stored about 20 records. The records had to be stored carefully because they were made of brittle shellac.

Until I was old enough to do jobs to help my parents I had a lot of spare time. My primary school was Mantle Rd Junior Mixed. It had no grassy sports field, but after school we would play on the asphalt playground kicking a tennis ball around. At home we had a slate bed billiards table and a dart board. I learnt to play on them when I was about eight. There were no electrical toys, but I had a clockwork train set. There were lots of board games such as Ludo, where you rolled  the dice and moved your counter on the board. On Friday my father would buy me a lead soldier or a farm animal. I played with my military band and my farm. I sometimes went to a rather dull youth club attached to the local church.

Public Libraries

I spent a lot of my time reading and was lucky that there was a public library a short distance away. During the school holidays I would have all day long to read. Sometimes I would read a book in a day and go to the library next day to get another. In 1938 we had the Munich crisis and the news was very worrying. Sometimes I would deliberately read in the library so that I did not get home until the Six o'clock News had finished.