Cinema Memory and the Digital Archive

In June 1995, Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain Research Fellow Valentina Bold contacted Westminster Nursing Home in the London suburb of Harrow with a view to interviewing residents for the project. Interviews took place there on 5 July and 25 July 1995 and involved five named residents in total, two of whom—May Godden and Celia Piggott--took part in both interviews as core informants.

In the first interview, Westminster Nursing Home residents Norma, John, and Lilian (surnames unrecorded) participated alongside Mrs Godden and Mrs Piggott. Born in Fulham in1897, Mrs Godden is the oldest of all the Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain interviewees. After leaving school at the age of thirteen she worked as a childminder before taking a job in a munitions factory during World War One. Norma was born in Wandsworth in 1904, and left school at fourteen to take up employment as a kitchen maid in a hotel; Lilian, who was born near King’s Cross in 1912, left school at sixteen and worked as a GPO telephonist; John, born in 1914 in Kentish Town, left school at fourteen and eventually became an artisan plasterer who worked on the decoration of Royal properties, including Buckingham Palace. In the first interview, the five participants share relatively vivid memories of visits to music halls, prompting each other in recollecting the names and locations of cinemas in Harrow and elsewhere in London and mentioning the ubiquitous cinema queues and the live acts that featured alongside film screenings. They recall the coming of sound, the rowdy audience behaviour at children’s matinees, and the key role of ‘the pictures’ in young people’s lives as they grew up and started courting. Prompted by the interviewer, they name and discuss a number of film personalities, with agreed favourites including Bette Davis. Mrs Godden admits to never having been an avid cinemagoer: she was well into her twenties when she saw her first film, she recalls, citing a dislike of sitting in the dark. She does however admit to a mild interest in the British stars Robert Donat and Jessie Matthews, a local resident: “She was walking along on the other side of the road. Just in an ordinary skirt and white blouse. And somebody said to me, ‘You know who that is? That's Jessie Matthews’.”

In the second interview, prompted by a 1930s film annual brought along by the interviewer, discussion returns to the question of film star preferences. Mrs Godden vouchsafes a liking for the singing duo Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy, refers again to Jessie Matthews, talks about the distinctive qualities of some of the cinemas in Harrow, and implies that she was rather more interested in football than in films.

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