On 31st December 1929 the Glen Cinema in Paisley, Scotland, caught fire during a matinee performance, with almost one thousand children inside. Many of the children tried to escape through back doors that should have been left open but turned out to be locked. Seventy-one children died that day and forty were injured. The ensuing investigation implicated the picture house manager, who admitted to sometimes locking the doors during the show to stop children sneaking in without paying. The subsequent enquiry found that the fire had been started by a short circuit when a metal box containing film stock was placed on top of a battery in the projection room. The tragedy was made worse by the limited number of exits, insufficient attendants and overcrowding. The manager, Charles Dorward, was put on trial for culpable homicide, but found not guilty. This was my inspiration for The Picture House Murders. I relocated the event to Whitley Bay, brought it forward six months and decided to not let any children die (if only we could erase tragedies like this in real life so easily).
My inspiration for a Tyneside movie mogul buying up small picture houses and theatres came from the real-life Dixon Scott, great-uncle of the Hollywood directors Ridley and Tony Scott. He was the founder of the much-loved and still operational Tyneside Cinema on Pilgrim Street, Newcastle. Dixon, however, was nothing like the wicked Humphrey Balshard, and was respected by all who knew him.
Another historical marker is the North East Coast Exhibition. This was a world fair, opened on 14th May 1929 by the Prince of Wales and attended by over four million people by the time it closed on 26th October 1929. As I describe in the book, it was aimed at building investor confidence in the North East of England as a thriving commercial and industrial region, while celebrating its pioneering engineering heritage. The North East had suffered greatly in the years after WWI with the decline of its shipbuilding industry and a series of coal-mining strikes reaching their zenith in 1926. It was hoped that initiatives like the North East Coast Exhibition would help reinvigorate the region. And that looked like it might very well happen until events on Wall Street in New York between September and October 1929 – with the biggest sell-off of shares in US history on 29th October (Black Tuesday) – would send shockwaves around the world.
As we leave Clara and her friends on the beach in mid-September 1929, they have no idea of what is to come – but you can read about it, dear reader, in book two of the Miss Clara Vale Mysteries, The Pantomime Murders.
Finally, a word on the financial rights of women at the time. As noted in the book, the law of male-preference primogeniture was abolished in Britain in 1925. Prior to this an inheritance would go to the eldest, closest male relative to the deceased, even if this meant bypassing a closer female relative. Financially though, women still struggled for monetary independence, with most banks refusing to allow them to hold bank accounts in their own name without a male relative’s permission, and sometimes, even then, their applications would be declined. It was only in 1975 that this practice was outlawed, and it took a further five years, until 1980, for women to be able to apply for credit on their own.
On a personal note, when I was researching this aspect of the book in February 2021, my daughter turned sixteen. I took her into Lloyds Bank on Grey Street, Newcastle, the same bank Clara deals with, and transferred an account I’d opened for her as a baby into her own name. One hundred years before that, in 1921, my great-grandmother, Mary Jane Gill, then forty-one, opened a bank account after the murder of her husband near the village of Clara Vale. She needed a letter of permission from her brother to do so.