Cinema Memory and the Digital Archive

In Spring 1995 Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain contacted Bentley Day Centre in the London suburb of Harrow, seeking participants in the project; and two interviews were conducted there later that year. On 7 July, a group interview took place involving four of the Centre’s clients: the participants were: Kathleen Wicks (born in Islington in 1916, moved to Harrow in 1950), who left school at the age of fourteen and entered the world of work as a nursemaid; Jessie (surname and year of birth unrecorded; born in Blackfriars, moved to Harrow in 1950), whose father was secretary of the local Labour Party; she left school at sixteen and worked as a shorthand typist; Pat (surname, birthplace, and year of birth unrecorded; moved to Harrow in 1950), who left school at eighteen and joined the Civil Service; and Lynn Chalk (born in Fulham in 1911). On 21 July Mrs Chalk was interviewed on her own as a core informant.

The group interview opens with a brief discussion of the participants’ early cinemagoing, which took place before they moved to Harrow from other parts of London. Prompted by photographs of stars and local cinemas, all agree that the Harrow Granada was particularly luxurious, and that while all the 30s stars were “nice” none stand out in recollection. Cinema and films, they affirm, were altogether “a better thing in those days”, when they would go to the pictures once or twice a week. The conversation turns to additional attractions—orchestras, cinema organs--available in some cinemas; to other leisure pursuits, dancing in particular; and thence to the role of dancing and picturegoing in courtship. The interview concludes with remarks on how much Harrow—still a largely rural area in the 1930s—has changed over the decades.

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