Cinema Memory and the Digital Archive

Cover of the 'Metro-land Guide', 1921. Cyril+A+Wilkinson, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Early in 1995, Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain contacted Pinner Local History Society to ask if any members might be willing to take part in the project. In April, Anthony Venis got in touch to offer help, eventually joining the eighteen CCINTB core informants based in and around the London suburb of Harrow. He was interviewed at his home in Pinner on 11 July and 27 July 1995.

Mr Venis was born in 1924 in Hampstead: his father was a postman, his mother a housewife. At the age of four he and his family moved to Wembley, where Mr Venis lived throughout the 1930s.On leaving school at sixteen he took a job as a draughtsman before entering war service in Africa, Burma and India. After the war he worked as a consultant engineer, and met his future wife through his job. He married and moved to Harrow in 1957.

In his first interview, Mr Venis notes that there were three cinemas close to where he lived in Wembley, and remembers attending with his mother and also going to the Saturday children's shows on his own. He recalls that some cinemas continued showing silent films into the 1930s, and that cinema newsreels were the main source of news at the time. He liked comedies, and enjoyed Hollywood musicals both before and after WW2. During the war he collected film star cigarette cards and had film magazines sent out to him. He talks about his interest in local history: the interwar housebuilding boom that created 'Metroland'; his study of local buildings; his special interest in cinemas (he names a dozen or so in the course of the interview), and his wife's collection of old postcards of the area. He donates three Pinner Local History Society publications to the project.

In his second interview (unfortunately marred by poor sound quality), Mr Venis again alludes to cinema newsreels and talks about a typical 1930s cinema programme. He expands on his enjoyment of musicals, on his preference for Hollywood musicals (in musicals, he observes, spectacle is more important than plot), on memorable songs in musicals, and on his particular fondness for the Bing Crosby/Bob Hope 'Road' movies.