We all remember a moment when the silver screen worked its magic on us, when a movie first dazzled us with its power to touch our emotions and transport us to other worlds. Bear with me, then, while I take you back to my teenage years, some time in the late 1960s. My schoolfriends and I had gone to Hampstead in north London to see To Have and Have Not, the 1944 film directed by Howard Hawks and starring Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart. I can’t tell you anything about the plot. All I remember is that Bogart was unbelievably cool and Bacall, who was in her first film role, radiated a heady sexuality that had us swooning from the first frame in which she appeared.
The dialogue drips with sex – that famous one-liner in which she says provocatively, ‘You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and ... blow,’ still makes me hot under the collar. And the atmosphere between Bacall and Bogart absolutely sizzles. It’s no surprise that they were having an affair during the shooting of the film and would subsequently marry. What amazed us was that in the 1940s, in a movie in which not an item of clothing is shed, they could pack in so much eroticism.
I was thinking of Lauren Bacall, and that moment when she first made me fall in love with her, as I stepped off the train into a rainy Bradford in West Yorkshire. Dodging puddles I navigated west, through the usual urban clutter of highways and traffic, till I spotted my goal. It occupied an entire city-centre block and was swathed in scaffolding and plastic sheeting, like a piece of furniture covered in a dust sheet. It could have been an old bus station – except for the octagonal towers still visible at either end; or a vast, Italianate church – except for its bulky shape. In fact it was a palace. A picture palace. A palace of dreams, where the likes of Lauren Bacall and a thousand other stars enraptured generations of Bradfordians just as she once put a spell on me.
This is the former New Victoria Cinema. In its heyday, an era that coincides with the golden age of Hollywood films and musicals, it was one of the biggest and grandest movie theatres in the country. Every night more than 3,000 people packed into the lavish auditorium, with its superb acoustics, giant screen and state-of-the-art clean-air system, to be entertained, distracted and consoled. Its history parallels and illuminates the wider history of public entertainment in the twentieth century and the art form – the moving picture – that would come to dominate the landscape of popular culture.
As was evident from its appearance, the New Vic, as it was once known, is now closed and has been since 2000. My host, when I arrived, was the local historian Mark Nicholson, who knows it inside out – which is just as well, as it has undergone many changes and suffered many humiliations since it first opened in 1930. In the past eighteen years it has also fallen into a pretty severe state of disrepair. ‘It was a place where you would go to escape your life, whatever it was – working down the pit, working in a factory somewhere,’ said Mark, as he led me into the dank foyer and his torch beam showed the rain dripping down from the shattered ceiling.
He took me up a flight of service stairs to the flat roof, where we looked down on people scurrying through Centenary Square beneath umbrellas. We escaped the rain through a hatch and I followed him down a staircase and along a series of wooden walkways within a steel superstructure. ‘These are the roof girders of the New Victoria when it was first built back in 1929, 1930, and we are now beneath what was the dome of the auditorium,’ he said.
He paused and flashed his torch upwards, revealing a circular section of elegant moulding in faded cream and maroon paint, decorated with gilded curlicues. ‘Fortunately, we still have this central section here.’ He produced a black-and-white photograph of the dome in its entirety – a magnificent centrepiece fit for a Renaissance palace and intended to be very much part of the cinema-going experience. ‘It’s one of the things about the original theatre, that it was designed so that no matter where you were sitting – if you were in the cheap seats of the front stalls or in the upper balcony – you would still have a magnificent view of marvellous architecture like this,’ Mark explained.
Entering this leaky shell of a place was a somewhat dispiriting experience. I failed to detect any cinematic stardust still clinging to it. But here, suddenly, it was – a beautiful and poignant fragment of former glories. I was now getting a sense of the sheer scale of the original cinema, and the special experience it must have delivered to interwar audiences.
Bradford in those days was a city that epitomized the Yorkshire phrase, ‘Where there’s muck, there’s brass’ – there was even a claim, much disputed by nearby Huddersfield, that there were more Rolls-Royces per capita in Bradford than anywhere else in the country. The city had boomed in the Industrial Revolution, growing rich on its textile mills and engineering works. Bradford’s municipal buildings reflected pride in its achievements – its Gothic City Hall and Wool Exchange, the Renaissance-style Alhambra Theatre with its large domed turret and, directly across the street from the Alhambra (and complementing its style), the New Victoria Cinema.
When I arrived the scaffolding and plastic sheeting prevented me from appreciating the exterior of the New Vic. But Mark had brought along photographs of its brick and white terracotta façade, the Moorish copper domes at either end, the ornamental pilasters and arches that together created such an opulent and alluring appearance. The programme for the official opening, on 22 September 1930, featured a Mickey Mouse cartoon, ‘Leslie James at the Mighty Wurlitzer Organ’ and a ninety-minute talking feature entitled Rookery Nook, which was billed as ‘One long laugh from start to finish’.
The first feature film with synchronized singing and dialogue, The Jazz Singer had been released only three years before, and cinemas like the New Vic were intended to catch the new wave of talking pictures. Up and down the land the old fleapits, where punters had crammed in on uncomfortable seating, were being replaced with dazzling new ‘picture palaces’ opened by the Gaumont and Odeon chains. And Bradford, as my glimpse of this fragment of the old dome confirmed, was one of the biggest and finest in Britain. The beautiful dome hung above an equally gorgeous auditorium, as another of Mark’s old photographs showed. But he warned me that it was going to take some digging to find it today.
In 1950 the cinema changed its ownership and name to Gaumont. In 1968, with cinema audiences dwindling despite the success of blockbusters such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, a much more drastic change took place when the Gaumont closed and the building underwent radical refurbishment to turn it into an early ‘multiplex’. A new shell was built within the existing structure to accommodate two screens side by side on the level of the former circle. Down below, the old stalls became a bingo hall.
Mark and I returned the way we came, up to the roof then back down through the centre of the main building and into the space that was once the grandest of entrance halls. The octagonal towers at the north and south corners of the building were the original twin entrances. They were linked inside by a curving foyer with sofas, potted palms, ornate mirrors and a central marble fireplace. This was all gutted to make way for the bingo hall and the foyer of the multiplex was relocated up a central staircase on the first floor, which we now entered. The giveaway was an old ‘Price of admission’ board left on the floor from the days of pre-decimal currency (i.e. prior to 15 February 1971), which revealed that seats in the Front Stalls cost 2 shillings and those in the Front Circle were 3s 9d.
Inside one of the multiplex screens, created immediately below the original dome, we looked in vain for traces of the original grandeur – the pink damask on the walls, the old proscenium arch, built in three gilded layers with concealed lighting in between. Hidden from view there are traces of the original arch – a few light bulbs and some plasterwork – but the huge screen, measuring 50 feet wide by 30 feet high, has gone. ‘When they talked about the “big screen” in those days, they meant it,’ said Mark.
But the screen, of course, meant nothing without the projector that brought it to life. That beam of light that played over the heads of the audience, occasionally throwing across the screen the shadows of people who stood up in front of it, was the silver thread that spun cinematic gems. High on the back wall of the multiplex auditorium I spotted the two windows of the projection room. We accessed the suite of projection rooms by a back staircase and found them crammed with abandoned equipment, including an old Kalee projector, film canisters and rolls of old film that were now brittle and fused together. This was where cinematic alchemy took place night after night.
It may sound ridiculous, but when I first went to the cinema as a child it took me a while to realize that the images on the screen were of an exaggerated size. Big people, big faces, big eyes. Then it hit me: this wasn’t reality but the illusion of reality, a literally larger-than-life version of the world. And the illusion started in this darkened cave at the back that no one could see into, where a kind of wizard lived who nobody saw.
I arranged to meet a couple of those wizards here. Dion Hanson is one of cinema’s leading projectionists, as well as being a restorer of old projection equipment. Indeed, his first action when he walked into the ‘switch room’, where we talked, was to go over to the old projector, which was tipped on its side. ‘Unfortunately, vandals have been in and thrown it in the corner like this,’ he said. ‘We’ll take it back to our workshop in Halifax where we’ll restore it.’
He then talked about the importance of cinema on his life: ‘I started going to see films when I was about six – Roy Rogers [the ‘singing cowboy’ of countless films in the 1940s and 1950s] at the local cinema, things like that. It was the thing that you did, you always went to the cinema on a Tuesday night.’ In a long professional career behind the projectors, he was a regular at key movie events such as the Cannes and Venice Film Festivals.
‘When we were doing screenings I quite often sat with the film directors – Spielberg and people like that. My favourite experience was sitting with Barbra Streisand watching [the 1983 film] Yentl. Fantastic.’ He said it was ‘daunting’, to be up close with such major movie figures in the confines of the projection suite, but he quickly realized that they were on edge too: ‘You feel you’re having to calm them down a little bit because they’re very nervous about what their film’s going to be like.’
Steven Spielberg once said, ‘Every time I go to a movie, it’s magic, no matter what the movie’s about.’ Now we talked about that ‘magic’, the spell cast over an audience when the lights dim and the curtains part. The process is technical – the projection of still images, each one slightly different from the last, in quick succession to create the impression of movement. The result is enchantment and glamour. ‘It has life to it,’ said Dion. ‘If you look at a roll of film it’s just a piece of plastic – until you project it. Then it becomes a moving, living thing.’
The other projectionist I meet is called Graham Bird. He was the last projectionist to work here before it closed in 2000 and his association with the New Vic is long and affectionate. ‘The first time I went to the cinema it was actually in this building,’ he said. ‘I was five years old and I went to see Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. I remember queueing around the block to see Herbie Rides Again.’
He said he didn’t immediately pay much attention to the beam of light over his head or wonder where it came from: ‘That happened when I went to see Star Wars. The projectionist was a bit of a showman. He had put a mirrorball and a spotlight in the middle of the ceiling. And prior to the film starting the auditorium went dark and these sound effects would kick in and after a few moments he would light the mirrorball with the spotlight to create this star field in the auditorium. He created a real buzz. And instead of looking at the screen I started to look back to see where the image was coming from. I was fourteen years old and from that point on I knew that I wanted to be a projectionist.’
The feeling I was getting, from talking to Dion and Graham, was that working in films was not merely a job, whether you were behind or in front of the camera, in the projection or editing suites, or even in film distribution. It was a calling that came with a responsibility to entertain. Every square inch of the New Vic was dedicated to that aim.
I continued my explorations with Mark Nicholson. Down in the basement he pointed out grilles and fans that were all that remained of the original clean-air system, an ingenious forerunner of air conditioning. ‘If you can imagine back in the 1930s, the air wouldn’t have been very clean in the cinema, with lots of people smoking. It was important for a building of this size to have lots of clean air,’ he said.
A brick wall rose to street level where there was a grille letting in daylight. ‘Fresh air from the outside was drawn into the building,’ he explained. ‘This space we’re standing in was full of water jets that washed the air that passed through with atomized water.’ It was then blown by the fans into the auditorium to mitigate the smoke of all those Woodbines and puffing pipes.
I can see the need for such a system, and the solution was indeed innovative. But did it make any difference? I have my doubts when I consider the likely quality of the air being sucked in off the streets, blackened, as it would have been, by the city’s many coal-powered textile mills – not to mention the emissions from all those gas-guzzling Rolls-Royces that Bradfordians liked to boast about. But I was getting the picture – nothing was too ambitious for the New Vic.
The other thing I had not yet fully grasped is that it was far from being just a cinema where films were shown. It was designed from the outset as a multi-purpose place of entertainment. Besides the auditorium, where live shows were put on as well as movies, there was a restaurant behind the tower on the north side and, directly above it, a ballroom. This was our next destination. We tiptoed through the north-side tower, where water damage has destroyed the walls, revealing the timber frame beneath, and climbed a staircase that opened into a large, musty space that was once full of music and movement.
This was the ballroom, which closed in 1961 and was converted into a third screen in 1988. But traces of former grandeur remain in the glass-panelled windows and ornate surrounds and, crucially, in the floor. For Mark invited me to lift one of the loose covering boards and beneath it was the original sprung wooden floor that once undulated to the foxtrot and the Lindy hop.
There was an obvious link between the cinema and the ballroom for the 1930s, 1940s and early 1950s were the heyday of the classic Hollywood musical, from Top Hat with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers to Singin’ in the Rain with Gene Kelly. The glamorous tone of the films was unashamedly escapist in an era of war and austerity, and cinema audiences were no doubt inspired by the hoofers they saw on screen to try it for themselves in the New Vic’s ballroom. A flyer from those days promises ‘the finest ballroom in the UK’ with ‘Every Facility – Every Civility’. Daily tea dances cost 2 shillings and dinner dances were 3s 6d.
On Saturday 31 August 1940, the ballroom was at the centre of an event that could have been thought up by a wartime propagandist for the purpose of rallying the populace. Late in the evening, the Luftwaffe carried out a bombing raid on Bradford that caused extensive damage to city-centre buildings. The ballroom escaped damage, but it was full at the time as people took the chance to escape the worries of war for a few hours.
‘Dancing was in progress when the first bomb dropped,’ according to a local newspaper report. ‘The band stopped only momentarily, and dancers were actually indulging [sic] in “jitterbugging” for some time while the raid was in progress.’ It was a fine an example of the ‘Keep calm and carry on’ mentality.
The New Vic, and cinemas up and down the land, were certainly an escape from the horrors of war. But war was also on the bill. Among the most popular films were morale-boosters such as In Which We Serve and The Way to the Stars, which reflected ordinary people’s wartime experiences. And the cinema was the place where the public learned what was happening in the war. Newsreels – compilations of topical news clips – had always been part of the cinema package. In the war they came into their own as a means of keeping people informed of vital developments. And in 1944 the Directorate of Army Welfare in the Far East came up with the brilliant idea of personalizing the news from the Indian subcontinent and Burma.
They made a series of short films featuring soldiers delivering messages to their families at home. Their loved ones were then invited to their local cinema to watch them. It was a kind of Skype for the analogue era and the results make poignant viewing now, as thin young men in lightweight khaki drill speak to the camera with awkward jauntiness: ‘Hello Eric, Mum and Dad, Bert. It’s Ron!’
I had arranged a special viewing of one of these films for a special guest. In February 1944, Anne Drake née Boardman was five years old and her brother Michael was four. Their father was serving with the Army in India and their mother had been invited to the New Vic to view a message from him on the big screen. We sat together on the raked flooring (the seats are long gone) of one of the multiplex auditoriums to watch a flickering image projected on the blank wall.
As the newsreel played, Anne showed me a cutting from the Daily Mail which summed up what had happened: ‘Little Anne Boardman, aged 5½, sat in the New Victoria Cinema at Bradford yesterday and heard a suntanned man on the screen say: “Hello Anne and Michael.” “Ooh. That’s my daddy,” she said. Her four-year-old brother Michael saw the same cheerful soldier and heard the same message, but asked his mother, “Who’s that man?”’
Anne chuckled at the memory and said she was particularly close to her father. ‘I remember vividly thinking, “He’s mine.” Because my brother was a mummy’s boy so I thought, “Right, I’ll have one [parent] for myself. But I wanted my dad home. I didn’t want to see him at the pictures.’
Such touchingly intimate moments had to be shared with an audience of hundreds. Even as they were overwhelmed by the sight of their husband, father or son – for the first time in months or even years – family members had to keep up appearances, choke back their sobs. But if any nationality could display suitable reticence it was surely the British, for whom the expression ‘stiff upper lip’ was coined.
A decade later, however, youthful audiences at the New Vic were beginning to ‘let it all hang out’ (in the vernacular of the day) in a most un-British way that must have shocked their elders. In 1950, the year the cinema changed its name to Gaumont, it reinvented itself as the biggest indoor, live-music venue in the north of England. The checklist of stars who played there through the fifties and into the early sixties is a roll call of rock ’n’ roll greats: Bill Haley and His Comets, Buddy Holly, Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran. Then, on 2 February 1963, a largely unheralded English group took to the stage beneath the New Vic’s fabulous proscenium arch.
The headliner was teenage singing sensation Helen Shapiro, who in 1961 had reached number one in the UK hit parade with ‘Walkin’ Back to Happiness’. One of her support acts was a group from Liverpool called The Beatles. Over ten months later, with ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ at number one in the charts, The Beatles returned to the New Vic as the most famous pop group on the planet for two sell-out Christmas performances on 21 December.
It’s not quite true to say that the old stage where The Beatles performed is gone – it was reused as a floor in the bingo hall. But with rain gushing through the roof, and red-and-white traffic cones blocking off areas where the floor was too dangerous to step on, I found it hard to picture those epoch-defining nights when the Fab Four breathed a new vitality into post-war Britain. Luckily, Paul Berriff was on hand to help me.
Paul was sixteen years old and a budding photographer when The Beatles played the New Vic. He decided to go along purely to practise his photography skills. ‘Though it’s dark and stark in here now, I can see all the screaming girls there in the auditorium,’ he told me. ‘I can think back to that crowded night when it was hot and sweaty, with the dim lights and everybody screaming away.’ He showed me some of the surprisingly accomplished pictures he took – one of John in the foreground, Paul behind, both in their high-collared Beatles suits; another of Paul and George at the same mic.
‘I was at the side of the stage,’ he recalled. ‘I couldn’t hear them singing at all. Afterwards I talked to Paul about it and he said he couldn’t hear either.’ When The Beatles returned to the New Vic on 9 October 1964 – John Lennon’s twenty-fourth birthday – Paul was there again to take some delightfully informal pictures of the four of them larking around an upright piano. ‘I don’t like posing pictures and the piano was there so I said, “Give us a sing-song,” and they just sat down and started singing.’
Not long after this, Paul told me, he boxed up all the apprentice work he had done at the New Vic and stored it in the attic. It lay there for forty-five years as Paul forged a distinguished career behind the camera as a documentary film-maker. ‘Then I found this box with six hundred negatives in it,’ he said. ‘About one hundred were of The Beatles, plus the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, you name it.’
Paul’s hoard was a time capsule from another world. For what struck me about his photographs was not just that they show how the still image made pop stars as instantly recognizable as film stars. It is that they celebrate a degree of access and intimacy between subject and photographer that is just not possible today. The modern celebrity, from entertainer to footballer, is a commodity who is surrounded by image consultants, PR people and sundry other hangers-on, all wanting a piece of their fame and wealth. The Beatles, it seems – at least in the early days – really were just a bunch of affable lads who happened to have a unique talent and chemistry, and did not think themselves above the person in the street.
This is borne out by a heart-warming story from 1964, which takes us back to when The Beatles played the New Vic on John Lennon’s birthday. For my next witness it was a memory of great significance. Karen Grimaldi was five years old when her father brought her along to the New Vic for a surprise encounter. Now she’d come back, for the first time in fifty years, to relive it. ‘I have butterflies,’ she said.
As we walked up the back stairs, trying to find the dressing room where it happened, Karen filled in the background: ‘My father was a journalist at the time. He had a contact and when he found out The Beatles were playing here he asked if he could bring me along to meet them – which they were very happy for me to do.’ Knowing it was John’s birthday, her father had asked Karen to learn to sing ‘Happy Birthday’. ‘I had spent months practising,’ she said.
We nosed around some smallish dressing rooms and found one with a window that could have been the one. ‘My strongest memory of the room is the number of people that they managed to fit in,’ she told me. ‘It seemed to be full of reporters and photographers. The Beatles and Mary Wells [the American singer – one of the support acts] were just to the side. And my father said to John I’d been practising singing, so he stood me on the table.’
She showed me a photograph of the moment – she in a pinafore dress with bobbed hair, standing there as if on stage, The Beatles looking on expectantly. But she was overwhelmed. No sound would issue from her lips. ‘My main memory is the heat and the sound of all the flashbulbs going off,’ she said. ‘I climbed back down off the table. But instead of going over to my dad, I actually climbed down onto John’s knee.’ Cue more flashbulbs. The Beatles, she said, sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to John on her behalf. ‘A few days later we received a beautiful photograph which I’ve obviously cherished ever since.’ She produced it proudly – it showed her five-year-old self with John and Ringo. Another group shot of the lads was signed on the back: ‘To Karen. Love from The Beatles’.
All this was touching and unexpected enough. But what Karen told me next makes the memory even more significant: ‘Unfortunately, four years after this my father tragically died. So this became a wonderful link to my father and something we did together that was hugely momentous. It’s very precious to me.’
This was a suitably reflective note on which to wind down my exploration of the New Victoria Cinema. Its history from those innocent and uplifting days of Beatlemania is one of managed decline. The ballroom closed in 1961 and by the late 1960s the growth of television ownership was causing a marked reduction in cinema attendances. Like many cinemas up and down the country the New Vic bowed to the inevitable. In 1968 it was closed for several months while its magnificent interior was gutted and covered over to provide two (later three) screens offering multiple viewing. In this way it could appeal simultaneously to different cinema tastes and fill seats that would otherwise remain empty. But the reprieve was only temporary.
The New Vic was built for a different age and in the end it could not compete with local purpose-built multiplexes offering a choice of many screens, as well as restaurants and other entertainments. It closed for the last time on 2 July 2000. Its proud exterior began to fade. Weather and vandalism took their toll inside. But it still occupied a special place in the hearts of Bradfordians and when the owners of the New Vic announced plans to develop the site, there was widespread opposition.
‘The regeneration company that owned it were saying there was nothing worth saving about it,’ said local historian Mark Nicholson, who rejoined me at the end of my tour. ‘All the original architecture had gone. It was just a decrepit death trap. “Forget it. Move on. We’ll give you an office block instead.” That’s not what we want for Bradford.’
The campaign to save the New Vic garnered powerful backing from the likes of the artist David Hockney (a proud Bradfordian) and the playwright Alan Bennett (from nearby Leeds), and culminated in a day of action, on 14 July 2007, named the Hug the Odeon event. ‘About a thousand people turned up,’ said Mark. ‘We encircled the entire perimeter of the building inching the land at the rear. It was amazing. A triumph.’
Since then a charity named Bradford Live has developed a plan to restore the New Vic to its former glory. The council backs them and the opening date is scheduled for late 2020. Its managing director and founder, Lee Craven, joined Mark and me to explain the project. But before he got on to that he pointed out that his mum and dad met here, in the ballroom, so he owes his existence to this place – it’s personal.
‘We’re going to strip out the old cinemas and restore the original size and shape of the main auditorium from the 1930s,’ he said. ‘Restore the ballroom and restaurant and run it as a big live music and entertainment venue, run by a big commercial operator.’ The vision is bold, romantic even, and it gave me a warm glow as we watched the raindrops falling in this dank place.
The New Vic has an air of ruined beauty. When I visited, vegetation was sprouting from the cracked walls, reminding me of some jungle-encrusted temple from an extinct civilization. The phrase sic transit gloria mundi came to mind – ‘so passes the glory of the world’. The truth is, of course, that however splendid the New Vic – and it was one of the country’s biggest and finest cinemas – its glory was only ever skin-deep.
Such picture houses offered an illusion of grandeur, for that was the nature of the movies. Scratch its decorated plasterwork and you’d have found utilitarian brick. Turn up the house lights in its heyday of the 1930s and you’d have seen cigarette burns in the velvet seating. But the power of that illusion – its capacity to transport and enthral us – was real. I, for one, will be back when the New Vic reopens.