Page 8 - Palace Memories Gerald Jervis

Redditch Heritage Palace Theatre Memories

My First Memories

My Own recollections begin at the pantomime of, probably, 1919?, anyway, there were
several glittering fairies that dazzled my four-year-old gaze. I also remember, at
about this time, a comedy play in which a fat man with his top hat askew danced with
glee as the canvas act-drop fell, rose, and fell again. That act-drop bore a figure, which
I imagined at the time to be Guy Fawkes, although I believe it was actually a

st
reproduction of a famous painting showing Charles 1 boating with his family.
It cannot have been more than a year or two after this when I started visiting the
Palace regularly, but by then it had become a cinema – Lillian Gish, Ramon Navarro,
Jackie Coogan; that period. Now, a myth has got about that silent films were generally
accompanied by a solitary pianist thumping out “Hearts and Flowers” and so on. Don’t
believe it; this belongs to the primitive period at the beginning of the century when
films were shown in converted shops and auction marts. All the local cinemas at this
time had each a quintet or sextet: the Palace, Treadgold`s Picture House (later the
Select, later still the Regal, and now a hole in the landscape next to the Barbecue Café)
and the afore-mentioned Public Hall or “Boscos”.

I recollect that when the Palace showed the Syd Chaplin film of “Charleys Aunt”, and
the orchestra played furiously, over and over again, a popular song called “I’m One Of
the Nuts from Barcelona”, which was probably the nearest they could get to Brazil,
where the nuts came from. The Ramon Navarro film of “Ben Hur”, however, had its
own especially composed score.

A vocalist was often engaged to appear with a film. There was a boy soprano, a few
years older than I, with golden curls, who sang “Circus Days”, for the Jackie Coogan
film of the same name, and “Peter Pan, I Love You”, for the Betty Bronson film of
Barrie’s story. Alas, I had measles for Betty Bronson. This boy soprano, George
Bullock by name, subsequently became a provincial film critic, and wrote a very
interesting biography of Marie Corelli.

The mid-twenties brought a terrific German film of “Faust” with a really frightening
performance of Mephistopheles by the great actor, Emil Jannings. For this three
singers were engaged: a soprano, a tenor and a baritone named Fred Bennett, who
was the well known Mavis Bennett’s brother. These loomed up at the side of the screen
at appropriate times in the narrative and sang arias from Gounod`s opera.

The Early Years of The Palace

At this time the Palace was still more or less as it was built. A film-operating box had
been built at the back of the circle, restricting the two rows of seats behind the rear
gangway to what was appropriately known as “the Jury Box”, but the entrance to this
was from the circle. The building had in fact no frontage on Grove Street at all; the
houses there ran right up to the corner.

The circle had no centre gangway. The rows of seats ran right across from one side
gangway to the other. This was probably true of “downstairs” as well. There was
certainly a solid two and a half foot high partition from one side to the other, cutting
off the stalls, approached from the foyer, from the pit, which was for rude people who

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