'Film Lovers Annual' donated by Better Cooper
Betty Cooper heard about Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain via the Pensioners’ Association and contacted the project office in early February 1995. Born in London in 1934, the only child of a house decorator, she had lived in London, in Worthing, Sussex, and also in Glasgow, where she underwent post-secondary education. Her varied working life included administrative jobs in retail and in public services.
In a telephone conversation with Research Fellow Valentina Bold, Miss Cooper talked about her background and filmgoing history (her earliest visit to the cinema was to see
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs at the age of four) and kindly offered to donate five film books from the 1930s that had been given to her by her mother. She was sent a single-page questionnaire, which she completed and returned in March, enclosing a letter expanding on her responses to the questionnaire and mentioning some particularly impactful cinemagoing memories: the voice of Bambi’s mother urging Bambi to run from the fire; and seeing the newsreels of the liberation of Belsen and Auschwitz at the age of ten at her father’s insistence--“To this day I still see those images.”