Cinema Memory and the Digital Archive

The ABC Coliseum cinema, Glasgow (uploaded by Granola). Creative Commons (Attribution) License via cinematreasures.org

Helen Smeaton made contact with Annette Kuhn in the Spring of 1992, in response to an item on 1930s cinema in a local newspaper in Glasgow. She was contacted again when Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain was launched in 1994, and eventually joined the project's seventeen Glasgow-based core informants. Born in Glasgow in 1917, her father was a gas maintenance engineer, her mother a nurse, and she lived in Glasgow most of her life. After a college education, she took a job as a secretary, and later became a college librarian. She was interviewed at her Glasgow home on 23 January and 28 June 1995.

Mrs Smeaton stresses that her childhood and family memories are very important to her; and her lively, wide-ranging interviews bear witness to this. Her first interview begins with an amusing story about going to the pictures one afternoon to see John Ford's The Four Sons, sitting through the film several times round, returning home late, and being met by a very anxious mother. She describes the neighbourhood cinemas she went to as a child, and her later visits to the Cosmo (now Glasgow Film Theatre), where she saw a film on her wedding day in 1939. She recalls choosing between going to the pictures and going dancing at weekends, joining long queues outside huge, busy cinemas, and bunking off work one weekday afternoon to see an Astaire/Rogers film. She talks about listening to music on the gramophone and the wireless, and about the plethora of new inventions and social changes in her lifetime, including the coming of sound and colour to films. She talks about how her parents met, and says her mother saw such poverty in her nursing job that she became a socialist and an active Labour Party member. She tells how she herself met her future husband, a typesetter at the 'Glasgow Herald', at badminton club. She recalls her sister's skilful juggling of boyfriends, among them the son of the Cosmo's owner.

Mrs Smeaton's second interview focuses more closely on films and cinemagoing and on the changes wrought by ageing and by cultural and social transformations. She talks about the smell of body odour and unwashed clothes in cinemas in the 1930s, when many houses lacked indoor plumbing; about how standing (or not) for the National Anthem was sometimes a contentious issue; about cinemagoing and courtship; and about the comfort she derived from solo visits to her local cinema when she was caring for young children and a disabled mother. She tells of her love of romantic films and musicals; how she wanted to be as slim as the film stars she admired: "I wanted life to be romantic, and I wanted to be thin." She remembers the pleasures of reading film magazines and mentions some favourite stars and the roles they played; and finally reflects on the different meanings of films and cinema in people's lives today as compared with the days of her youth.