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, four of the Centre’s clients took part in a group interview; and on 21 July one of the four, Lynn Chalk, was interviewed on her own as one of Harrow’s eighteen core informants. Mrs Chalk was born in Fulham in 1911; her father was a house painter and her mother a housewife. She left school at fourteen and was employed as a cashier for most of her working life. She moved to Harrow in 1934.

The group interview opens with a brief discussion of participants’ earliest 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 while all the thirties stars were “nice” none really stand out in recollection. All recall going to the pictures once or twice a week in the 1930s, and Mrs Chalk remembers weekly visits to the Embassy cinema in Harrow with her mother. There is general agreement that cinema and films were altogether “a better thing in those days”. The conversation turns to extra 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.

In her solo interview Mrs Chalk elaborates on cinema visits with her husband early in her marriage, recalling that their favourite venue in Harrow was the Dominion. Her eyesight is poor, but with the interviewer’s assistance she is able to refer to a 1930s film annual throughout the interview. Discussion of around forty film personalities ensues, with their ageing—not on the whole graceful—being a recurrent theme. Most of the stars that she names are male, and she maintains that she had no particular favourites among them: “We liked them all. You know?” Reverting to memories of going to the pictures with her late husband, she remembers enjoyable trips into London’s West End (“up town”): strolling around, seeing a film, and perhaps calling in at a Lyons Corner House for refreshment. Once again she recollects cinema visits in Harrow with her mother, noting that her cinemagoing days came to an end when her sight began to deteriorate.

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