Came the Dawn : Memories of a Film Pioneer
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ICIL M. HEPWORTH a film pioneer The Dawn comes to Flicker Alley Still a familiar figure in Wardour Street, Mr. Cecil Hepworth is a pioneer of British Cinema. In his autobiography he has a fascinating story to tell. They were simpler, sunnier days. Hepworth began in the 'showmanship' period in the late 'nineties, carrying his forty-second films to lecture-halls all over the country, where frenzied audiences demanded their repetition many times at a sitting. From the 'fairground' period he helped nurse the cinema to the time of the great Hepworth Company at its Walton-on- Thames studios. To those studios came famous stage actors, men of mark in many fields, anxious to try the new medium. In those studios many 'stars' of yesterday made world-wide reputations: Alma Taylor, Chrissie White, Gerald Ames, Ronald Colman, Violet Hopson, Stewart Rome, names remembered with deep affection four decades later. From Walton-on-Thames films were dispatched in quantity to the world, even to the United States before the Hollywood era. Conditions, if not primitive, were rudi- mentary in the earlier days; the grandiose notions of the industry today were un- dreamt of; and, most marvellous of all, leading actors and actresses played for as little as half a guinea a day (including fares), and were not averse to doing sorting, filing and running errands in their spare time. [ please turn to back flap MANY 16s ILLUSTRATIONS NET bih'iij II. .niij 37417 NilesBlvd §£g A 510-494-1411 Fremont CA 94536 www.nilesfilmnniseum.org Scanned from the collections of Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum Coordinated by the Media History Digital Library www.mediahistoryproject.org Funded by a donation from Jeff Joseph GAME THE DAWN CECIL M. HEPWORTH Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2012 with funding from Media History Digital Library http://archive.org/details/camedawnmemoriesOOhepw Portrait of Cecil Hepworth CAME THE DAWN Memories of a Film Pioneer by Cecil M. Hepworth Hon. Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society, of the British Kinematograph Society and of the British Film Academy. Chairman, History Committee, British Film Institute ILLUSTRATED WITH DRAWINGS BY THE AUTHOR PHOENIX HOUSE LIMITED LONDON // may not be reproduced either whole or in part without written permission. Application should be made in the first place to Phoenix House. Made igji in Great Britain Printed at Letchworth by The Garden City Press Limited for Phoenix House Limited, 38 William IV Street, Charing Cross, London, WC2 First published igji - - £(, 00 1 250 PLATES After page Frontispiece: Portrait of Cecil Hepworth The old Polytechnic: The Royal Polytechnic Institution, about 1880, showing the diving bell, extreme left, and 'Wheel of Life' in the Gallery 24 At Algiers I filmed the solar eclipse of May, 1900 24 Early 'news-reel': Queen Victoria's Funeral, 1901. King Edward VII, hearing the camera, stops the cortege 24 'Rover,' 'Hepworth Picture Player,' hero of Rescued by Rover, with the 'rescued,' 1905 24 Alma Taylor and Henry Ainley in Iris 56 Violet Hopson and Henry Ainley in The Outrage 56 Mary Brough, Frank Stanmore, and (front) Henry Edwards, Chrissie White in Simple Simon, 1915 56 Alma Taylor in Tansy 56 Alma Taylor in The Forest on the Hill 64 John MacAndrews and James Garew in Helen ofFour Gates 64 Alma Taylor playing two parts in Anna the Adventuress 80 Gerald Ames and James Carew in Mr. Justice Raffles 80 The Funeral of King Edward VII at Windsor 104 In readiness for Hamlet, Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson, Lady Forbes-Robertson, and on left: Geoffrey Faithfull, Cecil Hepworth; on right: Hay Plumb, Bill Saunders 104 The 1 91 3 Hamlet played at Walton Studios and Lulworth Cove 1 04 After page Leslie Henson in Alf*s Button, 1921 104 Ronald Colman and Alma Taylor in Anna the Adventuress 128 George Dewhurst in The Tinted Venus 128 Alma Taylor and Shayle Gardner in Comin' Thro' the Rye, at Walton 144 Another scene from The Rye 144 Chrissie White and Tom Powers in Barnaby Rudge 160 Stewart Rome, Warwick Buckland and Violet Hopson in The Chimes 160 Stewart Rome in Barnaby Rudge 1 60 Harry Royston in Oliver Twist 1 76 Diesel engines and generators from German submarine U20 in engine house at Walton, 1923 176 CAME THE DAWN CHAPTER i This is the story of a man whose life was devoted to the making of films, but it is not a categorical account of the film industry, although the two stories ran parallel for many years. Mine begins —as for complement it must—with my birth, in 1874, in a humble house in South London, long before films were thought of. But the goodness which should go with humility was certainly not mine. Not to put too fine a point upon it, I was a thoroughly naughty, and very unpleasant, child. My father was the dearest and best of men and he was very clever. His only fault was a lack of business acumen, and, though everybody liked him, I suppose no one expected him to make money out of his numerous abilities. He was very diligent and worked far into the night when the house was quiet, writing articles for various technical papers, mostly photographic, for he was an ardent photographer; one of the early workers of the old wet-plate process which you never hear of now except as a vague memory of the distant past, but it was one of the fertile places in which the seeds of the modern 'pictures' first began to germinate. Watch him at work when I was about three years old. He had an immense camera which he must have picked up at a sale somewhere. He set it up in our back yard—we never had a garden —and after focussing it he retired to the scullery which must have been darkened for the purpose, sensitised the big sheet of glass and then placed it all wet in the dark-slide, took it out to the camera and made the exposure before the plate got dry. When dry-plate photography came to be invented a year or so later, he made the plates in large batches at a time and stored them for future use. He had a smaller camera by then but he still coated upon large glasses and cut them up later, and that sometimes left a narrow strip which I won—to experiment with! My eyes were just high enough to see over the edge of the table, gloating, and longing that there might be a strip of waste for me. Once he had a run of bad luck with his diamond and made a whole lot of faulty cuts. Then, for the only time in his life, so far as I know, he lost his temper. He smashed up all the pieces with the back of his diamond, and I burst into a flood of tears. Many years later as I sat beside his bed in his last illness we talked of things which somehow had never been mentioned between us before. I was a grown man by then, married and full of business cares, but our talking often concerned my early childhood and that is why it crops up in this place. He reminded me of this dry- plate episode, and then he told me how utterly ashamed he had been when his outburst of temper made me cry. But it wasn't his feelings I was crying about—it was the loss of the little strips of glass I had been counting upon. I told him that one of my very earliest memories was of him carrying me up in his arms from floor to floor of a huge windmill. He remembered it, too, but was very surprised that I did, for I was only eighteen months old. I could remember the strong pressure of his arms as he held me tight to him while he climbed the ladders, and it was the comfort of those arms that saved me from being terrified by the noise and the shuddering and shaking of the whole place. I remember my first homecoming. I had been sent to stay with my grandmama, probably while my sister Dorothy was being born—she is fifteen months younger than I—and then, because of severe financial stringency at home, I was left to stay there for another year or so. Grandmama lived in a tall old basement house in Lansdowne Road, Clapham. She was one of innumerable sisters; a stream of great-aunts who were always floating in and out around her. They varied very much but most of them were nice and had quite good 10 — knees. She also had a husband; a gruff man who said 'Damn. 5 He seemed to keep in one frightening room, and he had a beard and a very red face and he didn't like children. Besides the great- aunts there were two ordinary-sized ones who, I gathered, were my father's sisters, and there was also an assortment of uncles, but only one of them, Uncle Wheldon, lived in the house and he was its support and mainstay. He was a very great friend and he loved me with all his big heart. Between him and grandmama, and sweet Aunt Maud, I had a gloriously happy time. Aunt Maud was a very kind and gentle lady, much given to high-church religious observances and to painting on china, at which she worked professionally and very skilfully. She almost always painted saints for the decoration of altar-panels. Once she painted me—a peculiar aberration, for by no stretch of imagery could I possibly be included in the category.