At the Heart of Decadent London

After the Lumière Cinématographe opened at the Empire Theatre of Varieties in March 1896, its neighbour in Leicester Square, the Alhambra, moved quickly to sign up Robert Paul, renaming his projector the ‘Animatographe’. Almost overnight this young electrical instrument maker found himself part of the programme at one of the key venues of Decadent London.

The audiences of Leicester Square’s music halls would have cared little which device was playing at their favourite theatre, apart from its novelty. What soon mattered was the actual subjects being shown as part of the rich programme of ballet, song and drama that catered for a surprisingly diverse audience at these vast halls. For many, they represented the fleshpots of depravity, hell-bent on ‘demoralising’ their audience. They were also known to cater for the West End’s large population of ‘ladies of the night’ and their wealthy clients. Which led to the Empire erecting a canvas screen to separate the sexes on its promenade, in response to Mrs Ormiston Chant’s morality campaign. On 3 November 1894, a group of military cadets from Sandhurst, led by the 19-year-old Winston Churchill, triumphantly tore down the screen, with Churchill proclaiming ‘Ladies of the Empire, I stand for Liberty’.

Nothing in the Lumière show at the Empire would have offended ‘prudes on the prowl’. But next door at the Alhambra, Paul’s Animatograph programme already included two films of the theatre’s own famous ballet troupe, celebrated by the poet, journalist, and self-styled ‘music hall aficionado’ Arthur Symons in his journal The Savoy. Symons defended his praise of ‘the charm of rouge on fragile cheeks’, describing in sensuous detail his delight in seeing the performers backstage, as well as from the front stalls ‘as the curtain falls on the last grouping [when] the front row applauds violently… and every man, as he applauds, is looking in a different direction’.

In May 1896, the Alhambra’s manager, Alfred Moul, realised that the Animatograph programme needed something fresh and perhaps more in keeping with the style of the theatre. He proposed to Paul that they ‘add interest to wonder’, as Paul later recalled, and make use of the theatre’s resources to stage a comic scene on the roof. The result was The Soldier’s Courtship, starring the Alhambra’s leading dancers, Fred Storey and Julie Seale, as lovebirds whose passionate tryst is disturbed by a large matron installing herself on their park bench. When they fail to dislodge her, the soldier tips over the bench and she retreats furiously, leaving the pair to return to their lovemaking.

The Soldier’s Courtship was immediately popular, hailed by the showman’s paper The Era as adding ‘humour’ to the animated pictures by means of ‘clever invention’. How successful it was could hardly be appreciated until 2010, when the Cineteca Nazionale in Rome co-ordinated a restoration of this pioneering film, drawing on material from various archives. Compared with Edison’s contemporary The Kiss, a rather tame moment from a play filmed in close-up, Paul’s three performers throw themselves into the action with style and commitment. And the production would have a lasting significance for Robert Paul, when eighteen months later he married the dancer who had played the ‘lady of mature years’, as described by The Era – Ellen Daws, padded up in her costume and just twenty-nine at the time.

There would be more ‘adult humour’ in another film made by Paul in August that year. 2 a.m. or The Husband’s Return was, like Edison’s Kiss, taken from a popular stage work of the day. In this case, it is the Parisian actor Paul Clerget, rolling drunk after a night out, who is coaxed into bed by his exasperated wife, played Ethel Ross-Selwicke. But it would be a mistake to judge the few brief extant films of this period solely on what we see. Contemporary audiences were capable of reading much more into them, especially in the novel darkened conditions needed for early film projection, unlike the normal theatre lighting.

A striking example of this comes in an 1897 story by the ultimate man-about-town George R. Sims, described in his Times obituary as ‘a highly successful playwright… a zealous social reformer, an expert criminologist, a connoisseur in good eating and drinking, in racing, in dogs, in boxing, and in all sorts of curious and out-of-the-way people and things’.   ‘Our Detective Story’, published in The Referee, is narrated by a private detective who visits the Alhambra, then showing Paul’s series A Tour in Spain and Portugal, where he sees a former client and his wife. The detective’s brief had been to shadow the wife, suspected of adultery, in Madrid; and as they talk, the lights go down and the pictures begin. When they reach a scene in a Madrid park, both the husband and detective recognise the wife with another man. ‘Stay madam,’ the husband hisses, ‘I will see the end of this.’ The story ends ‘In Court’, where the divorce case is being heard, with the film as evidence of adultery. The idea that films could provide evidence of wrongdoing would be exploited often in the years to come, but this early example reveals a shrewd understanding of what Victorian imagination could bring to early film shows. Whether Paul’s Tour in Spain does include a kissing couple must remain a mystery, since all but one fragment of the film is lost – like 80% of Paul’s output.

George Sims (1847-1922), journalist, writer and publisher, at home in Regents Park in 1902

Paul didn’t exactly’ run away with the circus’, but he had at least several years of backstage life around London’s music halls, racing from hall to hall every night by cab, and getting his ever-growing programme of films onto improvised screens. He soon hired projectionists, and built a studio in Muswell Hill in 1898. But while researching his somewhat mysterious life, I was surprised to discover from a family friend’s memoir that he and Ellen were the life and soul of parties at the Café Royal, notorious as ‘the haunt of Bohemian London’, with habitués that included Oscar Wilde, Aleister Crowley and Max Beerbohm. To learn that the Pauls often visited ‘that exuberant vista of gilding and crimson velvet set amid opposing mirrors and upholding caryatids’, as Beerbohm described it, gives an unexpected new perspective on their life.

Above: paintings of the Café Royal by Charles Ginner and William Orpen in the 1910s.

Norway with the Animatograph

In 1903 Robert Paul visited Norway and very probably shot the eleven films he made there personally. It seems not to have been his first visit, since the series was titled ‘Norway Revisited with the Animatograph’. Most of the subjects were scenic, with waterfalls and rapids a focus. But there are panoramas of Bergen and Hammerfest – this latter the only one of the set known to survive. What it shows is the port consisting entirely of wooden buildings – now an historic record, as the town that had been rebuilt after a disastrous fire in 1990 was destroyed again by the retreating German army in 1945.

Paul seems to have had a special feeling for Norway, not only indicated by this series of films, but also by a sighting in the late 1930s, when his car was being unloaded from a Fred Olsen line ship on the quayside, presumably at Bergen. He was recognised by a Norwegian filmmaker, who struck up a conversation and photographed him. Paul asked for a copy of the photograph, and said he would send a film of HMS Victory in Portsmouth. The film never arrived, and unfortunately is now among the 90% of Paul’s lost films. A few recent discoveries, however, have turned up in Norway and Sweden.

Everything about Paul’s visits to Norway is probably undiscoverable – how he travelled around the country at this time; how often he went; who he met and knew? But I’m finally following in his footsteps tomorrow, setting off for a post-boat cruise around Norway’s coast up into the Arctic Circle this Saturday. I’m armed with a list of Paul’s original subjects, wondering if I’ll be able to re-make or update some of them. Perhaps returning with a set of ‘Norway Visited with Digital Camera’. I’m sure Paul would have approved.

Imagining Paul’s Eureka Moment

An intriguing posthumous footnote to Robert Paul’s career appeared in 1952, in the form of an advertisement for the Reed Paper Group. No doubt aiming to liven up the subject of paper making, Reed had their illustrator Roy Carnon work up a scene that supposedly coincided Albert E Reed starting his paper business near Maidstone. Reed, we’re told, was ‘one of the purposeful men who made the 1890s a period of promise unique in our history’ – just like Robert W. Paul.

In Carnon’s vivid illustration, seen in Punch and other popular periodicals, a remarkably convincing Paul is seen projecting ‘strange new pictures on a magic lantern screen’ in his Hatton Garden workshop. The audience of three or four viewers aren’t in anything like period dress – they look more 1952 than 1895 – through the image on the screen, of a horse-drawn bus and kerbside shoeshine, tries harder to look Victorian. But the machine Paul cranks is accurately modelled on Paul’s Theatrograph projector of 1896.

Questions abound… Who had the bright idea of choosing Paul as Reed’s ‘purposeful’ contemporary? Paul had been dead for nearly ten years, and was largely ignored in the tide of enthusiasm which followed Muriel Forth’s book about William Friese-Greene, Close-Up of an Inventor, and the film that would canonise him as Britain’s forgotten film pioneer, The Magic Box. This all-star tribute was on national release when the Reed advertisement appeared in 1952, and it makes no mention of Paul.

We now know that the film’s climactic scene, when Robert Donat’s Friese-Greene demonstrates his projector to a sceptical policeman, was in fact a fictionalised version of a scene that did happen in 1895, when Paul and Acres produced their first film, made to run on a Kinetoscope, and their jubilation attracted police attention in Hatton Garden. And Paul would go on to create the projector seen in Carnon’s illustration, sometime between December 1895 and January, in  time to demonstrate it at Finsbury Technical College on 20 February.

Could Carnon have seen the projector that Paul had donated to the South Kensington museum, when the ground floor of what is now the Science Museum housed a Science display as part of the Festival of Britain in 1951? He would certainly have known about the promotion of Friese-Greene, then at its height, but the advertisement makes no mention of this. Instead it accurately pin-points Robert Paul as the true pioneer, even if it backdates his success by a year.

And there’s more to this illustration and its creators than just nailing the ‘origin’ story more accurately than anyone else in 1952. Just over a decade later, Roy Carnon would paint one of the most famous images of science fiction cinema, as a sketch artist for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey: the iconic double-wheel circular space station. Thereafter he would contribute to many more sci-fi and fantasy films of the 60s and 70s, including Superman, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Star Wars IV: Return of the Jedi. For more on Carnon’s career in cinema, see https://www.2001italia.it/2013/10/the-art-of-roy-carnon.html For more on Paul’s early career and Science Museum holdings, see https://www.scienceandmediamuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/robert-paul

Peeping into the Past

This image feels like time-travel, literally, or perhaps time-viewing. It was taken through the viewing lens of a peep-show currently in the collection of the Bill Douglas Museum at the University of Exeter, having previously belonged to the British Film institute’s Museum of the Moving Image. And what’s initially remarkable is that you can’t see anything at all with the naked eye.

So what is it? According to the peepshow’s label, it shows the crypt of Lastingham Church, and it’s thought to date from the 19^th century. If that rings no bell, as it didn’t for me, some quick research reveals that St Mary’s at Lastingham in North Yorkshire is a remarkable structure. It dates back to the years immediately after William the Conqueror arrived in 1066, and survives in remarkably original form.

But the large crypt is apparently unique, with walls nearly a metre thick: the oldest Norman crypt in the world, with pillars which may even date back to a pre-conquest abbey on the site. A structure that has impressed everyone interested in historic English architecture, from Pevsner and Betjeman to Simon Jenkins. So perhaps not totally surprising that someone thought it was worth recreating that eerie sense of history in a peepshow – even one that must have been hard to peep at with 19^th-century illumination, and impossible to photograph?

Peepshows (or boîtes optiques in French) are a relatively neglected tradition that continue the 17^th century Dutch tradition of Perspective Boxes in a variety of forms. One of these, which would have been called a Raree Show, appears in Bill Douglas’s 1986 film Comrades – the prop version seen here, with the collection’s co-founder Peter Jewell showing it to Birkbeck students on our visit.  

In the early 19^th century, Perspective Views were sold to be viewed via a diagonal mirror in smaller boxes. Later, telescopic or concertina peepshows made of cardboard became popular, and the BDC has fine examples of one made for Queen Victoria’s Coronation and another of the Tunnel under the Thames that opened in 1843.

The Victoria and Albert Museum also has a fine collection of these forms of Peepshow, appropriately donated by Jacqueline and Jonathan Gestetner (of the printing device family), usefully catalogued at   https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/paper-peepshows.

And what do they have to do with early cinema? Edison’s Kinetoscope would have been recognised by Victorians as a superior form of moving peepshow, with many portable forms derived from it that offered animated images , such as the Filoscope – invented by Robert Paul’s associate Henry Short, and well represented in the BDM collection in Exeter (see earlier post, “A Pope in Your Pocket’). More about what close study of these can reveal about early film in a forthcoming blog…

With thanks to BDM Curator Philip Wickham for generous access to the collection and permission to reproduce these pictures.