Surprisingly,
Kilburn has had nine cinemas in the last 110 years, or ten if we include the
Queens Park Electric in Salusbury Road, but today there is only one.
The
early days of cinema
It
is generally agreed that the first moving pictures in this county were shown in
London in 1896. The early shows were given in ‘Penny Gaffs’ often with just a
sheet hung in a converted shop.
In December 1897, the
large Bon Marche draper’s shop near Kilburn’s main line station, hosted what
was probably the first moving picture display in the neighbourhood. They
advertised, ‘The Cinematograph, animated photographs’ at the cost of one penny.
They were showing early film of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee celebration parade
which was held on the 22 June 1897 and The Two Macs, a comedy act.
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| Bon Marche next to the Kilburn and Maida Vale Station |
Six-year old Charles
Landstone who lived locally at 32 Plympton Road went along. Remembering the
event he said, ‘I, of course, had no
idea what we were going to see, though one of my sisters told me it would be
like the pantomime. We were ushered down into a small basement at the store; my
puzzled mind could only make out a large white cloth which was stretched on the
wall facing us. Eventually to my surprise, the lights went out and moving
pictures appeared on the screen. It was all very murky and shaky, and it had no
perspectives: when figures approached the camera they looked like ghosts but it
certainly was intriguing’.
Here is a link to the 1897 Jubilee film:
As
they gained popularity in the 1900s, and people sat alongside the projectors
with highly inflammable film, the authorities brought in safety legislation to
separate the public from the projector. The Cinematograph Act of 1909 created
the need for purpose-built cinemas.
The number of UK cinemas rose rapidly from
about 1,600 in 1910 to 3,500 in 1915. It peaked in 1945 at 4,700 and then
declined from 1955 onward to 1,530 by 1975. Only 775 remained in 2018. The
decline has been attributed largely to the rise in popularity of TV in the
mid-1950s, but other social factors such as changing attitudes to work and
leisure also had an effect. Cinema admissions began to fall between 1945 and
1950 before the expansion in the number of TV sets. Their heyday was the 1930s with
the building of the super cinemas including the Gaumont State in Kilburn and
the impressive Odeons of Oscar Deutsch.
Kilburn
Cinemas
These are the 10 cinemas in the order in
which they opened, and we will look at each one in turn.
1. Kilburn Picture Palace and Kilburn Palace Cinema
1909 – 1940
256 Belsize Road
2.
Kilburn Electric Empire and Cosy Corner Cinema
April
1910 – 1916
10
Kilburn High Road, on the southern corner with Greville Road
3.
The Biograph
1910
– 1917
248
Kilburn High Road (previously numbered as 236)
4.
Queens Park Electric Theatre, Cinema Royal, The Troc
1911
– 1940
102
Salusbury Road
5.
Maida Vale Picture Palace
May
1913 – 1940
140
Maida Vale
6.
Grange Cinema
1914
– 1975
234
Kilburn High Road
7.
Essoldo, Classic and Broadway Cinema
1927
– 1981
9-11
The Parade Kilburn High Road, now the site of the London Marriott Hotel Maida
Vale
8.
Envoy and Classic Cinema
1937
– 1984
405
Kilburn High Road
9.
Gaumont State
Dec
1937 – 1981
195-199
Kilburn High Road
10.
Tricycle and Kiln
Nov
1998 – present
269
Kilburn High Road
Kilburn Picture Palace and Kilburn Palace Cinema
Local Kilburn developer Thomas Bate, built
Kilburn Town Hall at No.256 Belsize Road. Despite the official sounding name,
his intent was to provide function spaces that residents could hire, and not a local
government building. It subsequently went through many changes of owner and
type of entertainment on offer. Opening in
1876, there were two halls seating 800 and 250 people. It hosted plays and variety performances when it
became the Kilburn Theatre Royal. Thomas Bate went bankrupt in 1895 and that
August, Julien Davis Solomon opened the rebuilt Kilburn Theatre Royal to
accommodate 1,200 people.
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| Kilburn Palace, 1935 |
Next it became the Kilburn Picture Palace and
Theatre of Varieties which opened on 2 August 1909, and as cinema became
increasing popular, it was renamed the Kilburn Palace Cinema. It operated as a
cinema until late 1940 but was derelict by the end of WWII. Shannon’s Dance
Club was here from 1953 to about 1955, appealing to the large local Irish
community. It was a furniture warehouse in the 60s and then it housed various
offices. Decca Studios moved here in 1981, when their Broadhurst Gardens site
was sold to the English National Opera, and set up an editing and copying
facility, as opposed to a full recording studio. They moved out in 2016. Today
it has been redeveloped as apartments.
The Clozenberg/Clavering Brothers
The men behind the cinema were the four Clozenberg brothers
Joseph, Arthur, George and Albert,
who changed their name to Clavering when they entered the business. The
pioneers of cinema in Kilburn lived locally but their roots were in the East
End.
 |
| Arthur Clavering 1929 (Getty Images) |
In 1931 Arthur Clavering looked back at how they got started in an
interesting interview.
He
said that in 1909 the brothers were running a furniture making business in the City for his father Isaac
Clozenberg, who had retail premises in Curtain Street Hackney. ‘We used to lunch each day with a young
fellow (this was David Beck, see below) whose father had a large china shop in
Shoreditch and had turned it into a cinema. He used to regale us with stories,
sounding fantastic enough in those days, of how audiences were moved to cheers
and applause and laughter by motion pictures, and how much more profitable they
were than selling dinner services’.
‘Finally,
we were impressed, and we told him we would finance him if he could find us a
suitable shop to turn into a cinema. Our young friend went further and found an
old music hall (the Kilburn Empire in Belsize Road), which we spent some
thousands of pounds licking into shape and converting it into a cinema’.
‘We finally opened on August Bank Holiday in
1909, a very important date in all our lives. It looked like being a disastrous
date because we lost £50 or so a week for some months. How we fought to make
that place a success! Almost every day we changed the policy, prices and the
pictures. Joe used to come in every week needing £30 or £40 to pay
the wages and somehow we had to find it from the furniture business. We were
not popular with our father as you can imagine. When we were absolutely
desperate, the London General Omnibus Company who had a stable for their bus
horses next door (today this is Omni House) and wanted more space, offered to
buy the cinema from us and we decided to cut our losses and sell. We were on
the point of selling when a small technical dispute arose, and we put it off
for a few days. That slight delay vitally affected our future. Christmas
happened to intervene, and we had a bumper week at the cinema. It was the
turning of the tide. From then onwards we made £40, 50 or 60 a week, until at
last we were able to count the profit in the hundreds’.
‘That
cinema was the Kilburn Picture Palace. Years afterwards, having made thousands
of pounds from it directly, and very much more indirectly, through the
incentive it gave us to extend our film activities, we sold it and it is still
operating today very successfully under the control of Gaumont-British. Well,
that’s how we began, and we owe a great debt of gratitude to the LGOC for
putting a little clause in their agreement for buying the property, to which
our solicitors objected! From that time forward my career in the cinema
industry has been tolerably plain sailing, and my brothers Joseph, George and
Albert have all succeeded along more or less parallel lines’.
Arthur
and Albert formed a film booking company called Atlas Feature Films in 1911. A
little later, in partnership with C.W. and A.C. Lovesey who controlled Ruffells
Imperial Bioscope Ltd, they founded Ruffells Exclusives Ltd, which distributed
Vitagraph and other important films.
In
his interview Arthur talked about one of the most important films they distributed, ‘The Battle of
Waterloo’. He said, ‘When we had a good look in the projection room it proved
difficult to see whether Wellington or Napoleon had won the battle! There were
very few subtitles, and practically nothing of what today we should call
continuity. We had to get out our maps and our history and geography
books, and that I am afraid that, when we were unable to find the name of a
place or general, we invented it!’
The
brothers later formed the Film Booking Offices Ltd at 22 Soho Square, which
became a major film exhibitor. In 1921 they were the successful purchasers for
the distribution of Charlie Chaplin’s comedy ‘The Idle Classes’. They paid
£50,000 (worth about £2.2M today), outbidding the Stoll Company who offered
£45,000. It was an important coup, but they lost some money on it according to
Arthur, although it was great publicity.
By
1911 Isaac Clozenberg and many of the family were living at 30 Canfield Gardens
in West Hampstead. At this time Arthur had married and was nearby in 118
Broadhurst Gardens. The following year Isaac and Albert had moved to 220
Finchley Road.
Later Albert was at 54 Aberdare Gardens. In
1927 he became managing director of Universal Picture Theatres Ltd which controlled
16 London theatres. In 1931 he won the St Pancras seat in the local elections
and went into the LCC. The same year he was appointed director of film
propaganda for the Conservative Party, and in 1935 he was Knighted for
political and public services. During the War, Sir Albert was advisor to the
National Savings Movement. After the war he bought and moved to the 200-acre
Woodcote Farm at Graffham, near Petworth West Sussex where he built up a herd
of pedigree cows. For him, this was a long-held ambition, because when he was
16, he had immigrated to Canada and between 1904 and 1909 spent five years
milking cows on a farm in Quebec owned by a family relative. Albert died in
1972 in Hove.
Joseph
ran the Kilburn Palace Cinema and later the Piccadilly Theatre Company. He
lived at No.1 Hollycroft Avenue in Childs Hill from 1914 and had moved by 1922
to No.31 The Park Hendon where he stayed for many years. When he died in 1963, he was living at
the White House, Albany Street close to Regents Park.
George
was living at 7 Burgess Hill from at least 1925 to 1930. By 1935 he was at 11
Dunrobin Court, 389-391 Finchley Road. In 1939 he was at 4 Langland Mansions,
228 Finchley Road, with his father Isaac. George seems to have left the cinema
business and became a director of American Express. He died in 1967.
Arthur
was at 13 Lindfield Gardens Hampstead when he stood as the National Liberal parliamentary
candidate for Hampstead in 1922.
He had a novel method of campaigning using a travelling motor cinema which
visited every street in Hampstead borough. His speeches were flashed onto the
screen and an amplified speaker addressed the crowds that gathered. He came
second with over 5,000 votes to George Balfour Conservative, who won with
14,596 votes. Balfour had held the seat since 1918 and was an engineer who formed
the large construction company Balfour Beatty.
Arthur
was the most successful of the Clavering brothers and in 1928 became the
director of Warner Brothers in England. That year, he rented the Piccadilly
Theatre and on 27 September he showed the Warner Bros ‘The Jazz Singer’ with Al Johnson, which was the first feature-length
talkies film. He did this to prove that people would come to see talkie films,
despite the major American studios describing them as just a ‘nine-day
wonder’. He was right, and by 1930 about 150 of the 400 cinemas in London had
been wired for sound.
In
1938 Arthur was living at 55 Redington Road Hampstead. He died in July 1973 at
42 Markham Street Chelsea and left £1,597,411 - worth a colossal £19M today.
David
Walter Beck was the young friend of the Clozenberg/Clavering brothers. His
father Philip Beck converted his
shop on Shoreditch High Street into the Alcazaar Cinema and then opened other
cinemas in Holloway and the Electric Alhambra at 303-305 Kentish Town
Road. In 1911 he was at 15 Hillfield Road in West Hampstead, where his son
David lived with the rest of the family. Philip Beck was at 19 Inglewood Road
when he died in 1920.
David became a director with the Clavering
brothers when the Kilburn music hall in Belsize Road opened as a cinema in
1909. Later he moved to New York working as a building developer, and in 1942
joined the American Army. He was captured and held as a Japanese prisoner of
war. In June 1944 he returned to England, living in Cricklewood and near
Golders Green. When he died in 1963, David was at 4a Woodstock Road Hendon.
Kilburn
Electric Empire and Cosy Corner Cinema
The small Kilburn Electric Picture
Palace at No.10
Kilburn High Road on the corner with Greville Road, was a
short-lived enterprise, owned by the dramatist Austen Fryers. It was part of
the large National Cinematograph
Theatres chain who also owned cinemas in the Midlands and the North of England.
The Kilburn cinema was opened by Princess Marie Louise of Bourbon on 21 April 1910 who was
welcomed by Captain A.E. Raikes, chairman of the Kilburn Electric Palace Company.
By 1914 it had been renamed as the Cosy Corner Cinema which shut in 1916.
We have not been able to find a photograph of the cinema.
In 1917 the redeveloped site opened as the Kilburn Garage which later became part
of Raymond Way’s car sales business. Today a block of apartments occupies the
corner.
See Part 2 below for the rest of the story
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