Campbeltown Speaks: Small-Town Cinema and the Coming of Sound

Abstract

The popularity of cinema from its earliest days in small-town settings emphasises the importance of local circumstances in explaining the medium’s success. This article employs surviving business records relating to the Picture House in the Scottish burgh of Campbeltown to explore aspects of cinema-going peculiar to that corner of rural Argyllshire, including a propensity, hitherto unidentified among Scottish audiences, to support the productions of the British film industry. Beyond this, the Picture House has a broader significance. As a monopoly provider of commercial entertainment to an enclosed market, it offers telling insights into a key point of transition for cinema, that from silent to sound film. Placed in the context of national trends, documented by data relating to the taxation of entertainments, Campbeltown provides compelling evidence that the advent of the talkies marked a fundamental discontinuity in the history of the medium at all levels, from the local to the national.

Cinema’s capacity to flourish beyond metropolitan centres has gained increasing recognition of late. Shortly after the earliest public screenings, itinerant exhibitors and travelling troupes introduced populations in small towns and rural areas to the moving image.¹ As a result, dispersed populations constituted a reliable constituency for film from an early date, even in highly urbanised societies. For example, Scotland was second only to England in the degree of its urban concentration at the start of the twentieth century, with almost half its citizens, as recorded in the 1911 Census, residing in centres of 20,000 people or more.² Yet something like 40 per cent of Scottish exhibition venues listed in Kinematograph Year Books in the 1920s were located in areas of 10,000 population or fewer.³ One such was Campbeltown, close to the tip of the Kintyre peninsula. Dependent on varied forms of employment, from fishing to coal-mining and whisky distilling, the burgh’s peak population had been recorded in 1901 at 8,286. By 1931, the number had fallen to 6,309.⁴ Initially dependent for its access to film on visits by travelling showmen, Campbeltown acquired its own permanent picture house in 1912, a business that from its opening a year later would continue to function through to the century’s end, outlasting the majority of its metropolitan counterparts.⁵ The growth of this and other small-town and rural cinemas has encouraged reflections on the varied settings in which modernity as exemplified by the cinema was encountered and the degree to which exhibition practices adapted to the particular conditions under which shows were mounted. John Caughie has charted the different approaches adopted by showmen in Scotland according to whether the setting was maritime, rural, or industrial, as well as the degree to which prevailing cultural forces, from an aggressive Presbyterianism to a sizeable Gaelic-speaking population, operated to promote or inhibit engagement with the moving image.⁶ Comparable studies in the USA and across Europe have served to underscore the need for sensitivity to local particularities in explaining cinema’s development. The result has been a growing perception of the audience as diverse, with points of difference receiving as much, if not more, emphasis as characteristics held in common.⁷

This perspective may be extended to metropolitan areas. Cinema managers were repeatedly cautioned on the need to ‘know’ their audiences, using the perceived preferences of picturegoers in their area to shape their running of the business.⁸ Over the course of a career, however, managers across Britain were often subject to high rates of mobility, requiring them to transfer techniques publicising the business learned in one setting to another.⁹ This need to balance sensitivity to local difference with an awareness of the broader forces operating at regional, national, and international levels to shape the industry’s development is one that, as Judith Thissen observes, is as incumbent upon cinema historians as it was for the trade’s practitioners.¹⁰ So, while the experience of Campbeltown can be used to identify traits peculiar to that corner of rural Argyllshire, it is also of value in reflecting with unusual clarity issues common to the industry elsewhere, both in Scotland and beyond. This is especially so with the most profound technological change to affect the cinema after its emergence as a discrete entertainment form: the coming of sound pictures from the late 1920s. The rapidity and extent of the talkies’ triumph is most often explained in terms of supply-side pressures, as the declining output of silent subjects forced otherwise hesitant exhibitors to opt to wire for sound.¹¹ That reluctance, bolstered by advice from the national organisation of exhibitors to ‘wait and see’, arose primarily from doubts as to the likely appeal of sound films for cinema-goers habituated to silent modes of presentation.¹² The uncertainty surrounding the audience response to the talkies has carried over into later studies, especially with regard to the years of transition, so that estimates of audience size have varied markedly. Some have argued for little change in overall attendance levels as the silents gave way to sound.¹³ Even where increases in support are claimed, the extent of any change remains unclear. Trade and mainstream newspapers offer general statements on growing levels of patronage, but were rarely concerned to chart their extent with any precision.¹⁴ Where business records exist, the insights provided are, in most cases, partial. Most urban centres were serviced by more than one cinema, multiple venues competing substantially on the content of the programme offered. In the years from 1929, this could extend to whether that programme could be heard as well as seen. So, the Palace Cinema in the centre of Edinburgh, which remained a ‘silent’ house until the autumn of 1930, lost custom from the summer of 1929 to nearby halls which had made the transition to sound or had opened as talkie houses.¹⁵ If the effect on an individual business can be reconstructed with confidence, the net change in the cinema-going audience across the city as a whole remains obscure in the absence of comparable records for other picture houses in the area.

Campbeltown provides a means of addressing this issue. Here, the Picture House, active since 1913, remained the town’s only cinema until the late 1930s and indeed during that period was the sole regular provider of commercial entertainment locally. The nearest cinema accessible by land was the Picture House at Tarbert, half way up the Kintyre peninsula and one of only three other fixed cinemas operating across the county of Argyll.¹⁶ The Ayrshire coast offered more varied attractions, but journeys by steamer were not so frequent as to encourage their use by cinema-goers seeking no more than an evening’s entertainment.¹⁷ Effectively, then, the Picture House enjoyed a monopoly of cinema provision in the burgh and the surrounding district. In this case, records exist to enable us to trace the fortunes of the business, including a ledger detailing the daily operations of the hall for the financial years (running from late May) from 1929 to 1933, covering the better part of two operating years either side of the decision to convert to sound in July 1931.¹⁸ In the absence of local competition, changes reflected in the company’s accounts for this period also capture shifts in demand across the burgh and neighbouring districts during the key period of transition. The extent to which it may also act as a signifier for broader trends across the industry is considered in this piece. Before turning to examine the implications for Campbeltown and points beyond of the shift from ‘silence’ to sound, the burgh’s engagement with the moving image in earlier decades receives attention. This serves to locate Campbeltown in the pattern of exhibition practices observed across small towns in Scotland, but also in the development of cinema-going across Britain.

Campbeltown in the silent era

In common with settlements of comparable size, Campbeltown was introduced to the moving picture through visits by touring shows. The first was mounted at the burgh’s Victoria Hall in November 1897, some eighteen months after the cinematograph’s Scottish debut, by optical instrument makers, Lizars. This was one of a number of exhibitions by the firm across Scotland designed to publicise the cinematograph, hailed in advance copy as ‘The Wonder of the Century’.¹⁹ While the large attendance reflected widespread interest in the novelty, the show itself garnered a mixed response, as some voiced their discontent with the quality both of the projection and the supporting variety artistes.²⁰ This failed to discourage occasional visits by such established Glasgow entertainment entrepreneurs as Arthur Hubner, Prince Bendon, and J.J. Bennell’s BB Pictures, as well as leading Aberdeen exhibitor Robert Calder.²¹ If shows for the most part comprised subjects of national and international significance, local subjects were also given occasional prominence, a pattern observable elsewhere. Shows at Victoria Hall in September and October 1900 by Calder’s Famous Cinematograph, and The Empire Kinematograph and Concert party included footage of the Kintyre Cattle Show and landings at Campbeltown Pier by parties, including that of The Princess Christian of Schleswig Holstein.²² Three years later, Calder’s programme, again at the Victoria Hall, promised film of a Parade by Argyllshire Volunteers and held out the familiar prospect of potential identification of the subjects on screen by audience members: ‘You or your Friends will be there’.²³

In most cases, visits by the cinematograph occurred outside the peak holiday months of July and August, suggesting an explicit play for local custom. By 1912, interest had been sufficiently piqued to justify moves to establish a permanent venue with the flotation of The Picture House, Campbeltown, Ltd. In contrast to comparable centres, such as Oban, local figures supplied both the initiative to form and the share capital to fund the venture.²⁴ External assistance was, nevertheless, sought through the involvement as Managing Director of Fred Rendell Burnette, who had experience of the trade gained in halls in Glasgow, Partick, Rothesay, and Inverness.²⁵ From its opening in May 1913, the Picture House relied almost exclusively on film to populate its programmes, an approach shared with other cinemas whose location rendered them less accessible to circuits of live entertainments. Weekly newspaper listings thus gave priority to the principal features and the few occasions on which reference was made to supplementary forms of entertainments, as in early 1917 when patrons were assured of a strong variety programme, occurred when transport difficulties rendered the supply of films unpredictable.²⁶ By the late 1920s, all indications are that the Picture House lived up to its name by offering an evening’s entertainment based solely on the moving image.

Beyond the capacity to amuse and divert, the company acknowledged a broader civic purpose in mounting programmes, or providing facilities for shows, intended to raise money for worthy causes. In wartime, evenings were devoted to raising funds for the Red Cross or to encourage the take up of War Savings Certificates.²⁷ After 1918, the problems facing many local industries encouraged initiatives focused on the immediate neighbourhood. In January 1930, the Picture House hosted a theatrical entertainment by the Lochranza Amateur Dramatic Players in aid of the local Fishermen’s Relief Fund.²⁸ Such instances were, it must be acknowledged, rare and local causes were more often supported through voluntary efforts, comprising concerts, dances, and whist drives organised by churches, the Women’s Rural Institute, the Corporation and political organisations such as the ILP.²⁹ The Picture House, then, appeared but a small part of a still vibrant civil society in this part of Argyllshire, albeit contrasting with these mostly one-off ventures by providing entertainment all year round.

By the late silent period, the Picture House operated one show an evening with programmes that changed twice a week on Mondays and Thursdays. Each comprised one main feature supported by a combination of shorts, serials and newsreels/cine-magazines. The latter included two editions each week of Pathe Gazette, supplemented for the first three days each week by Eve’s Review, another Pathe production outwardly aimed at female cinema-goers, but whose diet of ‘Glorious fashions, bizarre beauty regimes, quirky home crafts, and astounding cabaret acts’, was often packaged in a manner designed to stimulate the male gaze.³⁰ This schedule of vaguely factual content was then rounded off later in the week with editions of Pathe Pictorial and Cinemag. Serials promised to maximise repeat business, as cinema-goers were lured back to discover how cliffhangers were resolved and the narrative advanced. By 1930, the Picture House’s last full calendar year as a ‘silent’ hall, serials figured in both programmes through the week, so that from early April, patrons attending early in the week could commence following episodes of the Pathe Exchange adventure starring Cyclone the Dog, The Yellow Cameo, while those attending from Thursday could thrill to the later instalments of Universal’s Tarzan the Mighty.³¹ Remaining shorts also offered the familiarity of recurring characters in series such as those featuring Buster Brown, and Mike and Ike, produced by Century Films, and the Hal Roach Studio’s Our Gang series.³²

The aim of such programming was to ensure stable and predictable levels of custom and therefore income, and monthly accounts which exist from the start of the financial year 1921–2 would suggest that this was in large part achieved. Allowing for seasonal variations, from January, when business was boosted by extended opening hours over the New Year holiday period, and the early summer months of May and June, a point in the year when improved weather and the availability of outdoor amusements combined to depress takings, net receipts varied by 17 per cent.³³ This might be thought to indicate a marked tendency towards habitual cinema-going, in contrast to metropolitan practice where, it has been noted, audiences exercised choice over the kind of entertainment sought and, if the cinema was the preferred source of amusement, the films they wished to see. Managements, obliged to account for the performance of the business to boards of directors, would note the various forces affecting patronage, and placed particular emphasis on the weather and the appeal of programmes offered at neighbouring houses.³⁴ For the Picture House, the range of alternatives was confined for the most part to locally organised entertainments, including performances by the local Amateur Operatic Society.³⁵ With the choice of amusement beyond the home comparatively restricted, the potential for attendance at the Picture House to become a matter of routine would seem all the greater.

To test how far this applied in practice, a comparison was drawn between Campbeltown and the one city-based cinema in Scotland for which detailed accounts exist for this period, the Palace in Edinburgh. Located at the east end of Princes Street, the city’s principal retail thoroughfare, operating close to well-established cinema businesses, the Palace sought to draw in part on a sizeable city centre trade of casual cinema-goers.³⁶ Box-office figures for the weekly programmes mounted by the Palace’s management are available from the start of 1928, and indicate that by that date, the last full year in which Edinburgh’s halls were ‘silent’, business had attained a marked stability. In 32 of the 52 weeks across 1928, income was within ten per cent of the weekly mean for the year as a whole. In 16, or some 30 per cent of cases, variation from the mean was within five per cent.³⁷ In Campbeltown, by contrast, returns covering the final two years of operations as a silent house indicate rather more volatility, especially in the first half of the week. Across the final seven months of 1929, programmes running from Monday to Wednesday generated takings within ten per cent of the mean for that period on only nine of 30 occasions. Taking the whole of 1930, such instances become even less frequent, so that net receipts diverged by more than ten per cent from the annual mean for 38 of the 52 programmes offered.³⁸ Greater regularity might be anticipated from Thursdays onwards, with demand for amusements at its height on Saturday, as the disposition of working hours and the payment of wages at the end of the week ensured that both time and money were available for recreational pursuits. The experience of the Picture House goes some way towards justifying these expectations, with Thursday to Saturday programmes in late 1929 and across 1930 generating receipts within ten per cent of the respective means on 30 occasions in all.³⁹ Yet even this falls short of the stability observed at the Palace in Edinburgh. This suggests that, contrary to what might have been predicted, cinema-goers in Campbeltown showed a greater propensity to exercise choice in attending the pictures than did their counterparts in central Edinburgh, despite a programming policy designed to maximise habitual attendance. For the business, this suggests that financial success rested on occasional patrons, whose choice of an evening at the movies could not be taken for granted. In this respect then, the non-metropolitan picturegoer emerges as a thoroughly modern consumer, capable of practising discretion over a range of possible uses of their free time.

It remains to determine how choice was exercised. Seasonal fluctuations have been noted and, in the case of Campbeltown, were exaggerated by the policy, applied in most years across the 1920s, of closing the house for part of the week during June.⁴⁰ This allowed for repairs and refurbishment in anticipation of visitors who would descend on the town around the time of Glasgow Fair from mid-July.⁴¹ The Picture House thus displayed features in common with urban cinema-going more generally, with higher levels of activity in the early months of the year and autumn, but also betrayed one of its functions as a resort with a temporary boost to the box-office occurring at the height of summer.⁴² The material generating these figures is also worthy of note. The part of the programme considered most likely to encourage attendance by occasional patrons was the main feature and so newspaper publicity understandably focused on those productions. In booking films, managers were obliged to balance the perceived preferences of local picturegoers with the product available from distributors. Many urban cinemas ensured a supply of available product by engaging in block-booking arrangements with particular studios, whose output came to dominate screenings.⁴³ There are suggestions of comparable practices at Campbeltown, so that MGM and Universal productions played more often than not across the second half of 1930.⁴⁴ On remaining dates, a marked propensity to book British films was evident and was sustained across the Picture House’s last two years as a ‘silent’ cinema; most were productions from one of the leading national studios, British International Pictures (Table 1).

Table 1. Number and proportion of programmes headed by British Films at Campbeltown Picture House, June 1929–June 1931.

Period	Number	Proportion (%)
June to Dec 1929	14	22.2
Jan to Dec 1930	35	32.4
Jan to June 1931	16	29.6

Sources: Moving Image Archive, Glasgow, CAPHA 1/2/3/1, Film Screenings and Takings Book, 1929–33; Campbeltown Courier, June 1929–June1931.

Note: the figure for 1930 includes five joint productions, three with Germany, and one each with Austria, and Germany and Hungary.

Such figures are considerably in excess of the legal minimum (quota) established for the screening of domestically produced footage set out in the Cinematograph Films Act of 1927 which for these years was set at between five and 7.5 per cent.⁴⁵ By contrast, patrons at the Palace in Edinburgh were far less likely to encounter British productions at this time. Prior to the Quota Act taking effect in 1928, only two of the 90 films screened across 1927 were British. With the Act in force, the number rose to seven out of 105 films exhibited in 1928 only one of which was the principal feature on the programme.⁴⁶ This minimalist approach to the quota would appear of a piece with attitudes to the measure across the cinema industry in Scotland, where an enduring resentment against the obligation to devote amounts of screen time to product that was regarded as overwhelmingly English in character would be voiced in the years that followed.⁴⁷

In such circumstances, it would be tempting to see Campbeltown’s commitment to ‘Buy British’ as a symptom of the problems a small exhibitor could encounter in seeking to secure attractive product. Yet audience response, registered at the box office, points to an altogether more positive interpretation. In the Picture House’s final two years of ‘silence’, British-produced films generated takings in excess of the mean in the second half of 1929 and the first of 1931. In both years, this involved programmes shown in the first half of the week. Where performances fell below the average, this was for the most part marginal and only exceeded 10 per cent for Monday to Wednesday shows across 1930 (Table 2).

Table 2. Performance of British Films at Campbeltown Picture House, 1929–31.

Period	Overall Mean (d.)	British Mean (d.)	Difference (%)
June to Dec 1929:
Mon to Wed	6092.66	6672.37	+9.5
Thurs to Sat	8360.87	7862	−6
1930:
Mon to Wed	5005.76	4425.78	−11.6
Thurs to Sat	7643.81	7216.61	−5.6
Jan to June 1931:
Mon to Wed	5304.077	5455.57	+2.8
Thurs to Sat	7723.32	7461.33	−3.3

Source: Moving Image Archive, Glasgow, CAPHA 1/2/3/1, Film Screenings and Takings Book, 1929–33; Campbeltown Courier, June 1929–June1931.

Figures are in old pennies (d.) of which there were twelve to every shilling (s.) and 240 to every pound (£).

Particular British titles ranked among the most popular features of their year, including Hitchcock’s The Ring, in 1929, E.A. Dupont’s Piccadilly, in 1930, and The Last Post, in 1931, a drama concerning a soldier whose brother, a Communist sympathiser, shoots another soldier during the General Strike, and notable for being one of only two films overseen by Britain’s only female director of features, Dinah Shurey.⁴⁸ Even growing problems in securing recent British productions by early 1931 failed to discourage Campbeltown picturegoers. In successive weeks, the Picture House screened titles reissued by Stoll Picture Productions, including one, Children of Courage, which had first been released in 1921 as Froggy’s Little Brother. Audiences were not deterred and all but one scored close to or above the mean both for British releases and for all films shown in the cinema’s last six silent months.⁴⁹ Overall then, the suggestion is that the frequency with which British films were booked at the Picture House owed less to legal obligations or an absence of choice when booking films and more to the preferences expressed by local cinema-goers for domestically produced features. That these invariably lacked any explicitly ‘Scottish’ content proved no obstacle to success locally. At no point does cultural nationalism appear to have influenced patterns of cinema-going in this corner of Argyllshire.⁵⁰

There is evidence then of a distinctive taste community in Campbeltown, confirming a view of the national audience, both British and Scottish, as marked by lines of division determined by geography, class, and local cultural forces among other factors. The business records, however, also point to behaviour which matched local picturegoers with their counterparts in towns and cities across Britain. All exercised choice in deciding to seek their pleasures at the cinema. From the end of the 1920s, a decisive factor influencing behaviour was the coming of sound, and the extent of its impact is caught with particular clarity in communities such as Campbeltown.

The impact of the talkies

The coming of the talkies effected a significant change in the cinema-going experience. In the Picture House’s first week after wiring for sound, which opened with the showing of Warner’s The Desert Song, the local newspaper remarked that ‘Campbeltown audiences which were inclined to be rather noisy at the silent shows, were completely silent, and in sympathy with the production of the film’.⁵¹ Speech as a vehicle for conveying plot demanded closer attention from picturegoers than had the occasional intertitle. How far this marked shift in behaviour carried over into later weeks is unclear and such comments, isolated in their nature, leave open the question how far those who sat in such rapt attention to early talkies were the same as those who had expressed themselves freely when the story was conveyed by the image alone. This remains, given available evidence, a question that eludes easy analysis. In the absence of accepted figures for changes in the aggregate national cinema audience with the coming of sound, we are often driven back to impressionistic accounts which point to growth in attendance of uncertain extent.⁵² The opinions of cinema-goers themselves, conveyed through responses to questionnaires or through diary entries, are often ambiguous, questioning the quality and entertainment value of early sound pictures while reflecting an enduring fascination with the technology’s potential.⁵³ Such uncertainty communicated itself to industry leaders dubious of the commercial benefits likely to accrue from converting to sound. Even the statistical precision offered by business records often proves of limited utility in cases such as this, enabling us to judge the talkies’ impact at the level of the firm but not more widely.

To illustrate, the coming of sound had a clear and immediate impact on the Palace Cinema, in Edinburgh. The talkies arrived in the capital in the summer of 1929, appearing in close succession at the New Picture House on Princes Street, Poole’s Synod Hall, close to the west end of Princes Street, and at the newly-opened Playhouse to the east.⁵⁴ The Palace, run by the same company responsible for the Playhouse, remained silent amidst a crescendo of sound. The implications of that decision were soon apparent. In the months between the opening of the Playhouse in August 1929 and the end of the year, takings at the Palace were down by some 26 per cent on the equivalent weeks a year earlier.⁵⁵ Losses continued into 1930, as the Palace’s conversion was delayed until October that year. Returns for the final quarter of operations as a silent house were barely 52 per cent of the level for the same three-month period two years earlier.⁵⁶ The dramatic shift in fortunes for a hall which, when built, was one of Edinburgh’s premier picture theatres and had enjoyed consistent profitability through the later 1920s conveys the extent to and speed with which cinema-goers changed allegiance in favour of the talkies. Once heard, the sound film eclipsed established forms of presentation. Yet, if we are able to chart trends at the level of the business, the net effect of gains and losses at the local box office on the size of the cinema-going population across the city as a whole cannot be gleaned from available evidence.

Campbeltown enables such uncertainties to be addressed. Here, the Picture House satisfied the needs of the local population, at least in terms of commercial entertainment, so that income taken at the box office reflects, with unusual fidelity, developments in the wider market. Initial indications are that the burgh’s remoteness offered protection against the first wave of talkie mania. Despite a late conversion to sound, the Picture House experienced little of the slide in business that affected the Palace. Over its final two years of offering silent film, net receipts showed some slippage for programmes in both halves of the week, but significantly, rather than the fall being maintained to the point of conversion, takings across the first half of 1931 showed a revival over the same period in 1930, rising by 6.5 per cent for shows from Thursday and by some 23 per cent for those at the start of the week.⁵⁷ There is little in this to suggest a growing disenchantment with silent footage and an impatience over the delayed arrival of the talkies.⁵⁸ Indeed, taking a longer term view, business had shown a gradual decline from a peak in 1925–6, so that drawings across the year were down by just short of nine per cent by 1930–1.⁵⁹ This may reflect to some degree local economic difficulties, as leading industries experienced downturns in the late 1920s. Distilleries closed and the fishing fleet was forced to curtail activity as a herring famine affected the Firth of Clyde.⁶⁰ For all this, it is the durability of business at the Picture House which remains its most striking characteristic in the last years of ‘silence’. This endorses the findings of surveys undertaken in more heavily urbanised areas that satisfaction with the silent film endured to the point at which sound was encountered. Such were the findings of an investigation of towns around Manchester covering some 54,000 cinema patrons in the later weeks of 1929.⁶¹ Inoculated against the talkies by distance, Campbeltown’s picturegoers continued to support established modes of presentation with barely diminished enthusiasm up to the Picture House’s temporary closure for installation of British Thomson Houston sound apparatus.⁶² In such circumstances, a sizeable boost to business following re-opening would seem far from inevitable.

Four months after the adoption of synchronised sound projection, the Campbeltown Courier remarked on the Picture House’s popularity ‘which the introduction of the “Talkies” has so substantially enhanced’.⁶³ Company accounts indicate that there was more to this than mere puffery. Comparing mean returns across consecutive six-month periods shows a broad doubling in takings compared to the final period preceding conversion (Table 3).

Table 3. Campbeltown Picture House: mean takings, 1931–3.

Period	First Half Programme		Second Half Programme
	Mean Takings (d.)	%ge Change	Mean Takings (d.)	%ge Change
Jan- June
1931	5214.5		7916.25
1932	10060.25	+92.9	15277.62	+93
1933	10392.14	+99.3	14332.24	+81.05
July to Dec
1930	5639		7849.42
1931	11800.76	+102.3	16680.25	+112.5
1932	11280.44	+100.04	15369	+95.8

Source: Moving Image Archive, Glasgow, CAPHA 1/2/3/1, Film Screenings and Takings Book, 1929–33. In each case, change is measured against the final period of silent exhibition.

The figures also indicate that the boost to business was largely sustained to the point at which detailed coverage ceases. Further east, at the Palace, any surge in patronage was quickly spent and although the first six months as a talkie house generated receipts 29.74 per cent above those of the final six months of silence, that figure was still 31.2 per cent below that for the equivalent period in 1928–9 before Edinburgh’s first encounter with sound.⁶⁴ To some degree, the picture is complicated by the Palace’s operation in the talkie era as a second-run cinema to the company’s bigger hall, the Playhouse.⁶⁵ No such changes worked to depress business in Campbeltown.

Explanations for the substantial upturn in income with the advent of sound are now assessed. It owed little if anything to a change in the price of admission. Ticket prices exclusive of tax had remained remarkably stable since the house’s opening in 1913, ranging from 1s for a balcony seat, to between 4d and 6d for parts of the front area.⁶⁶ The only change with conversion to sound was abolition of the lowest price raising admission to the front area to a uniform charge of 6d.⁶⁷ That minor amendment apart, prices net of tax were unaltered, so that growth in receipts after the adoption of sound substantially reflects an increase in admissions.⁶⁸ Crucially, that boost was facilitated by an increase in the number of shows. The original intention on the Picture House’s opening in 1913 had been to run two shows nightly, but this was cut back to one shortly after, in the belief that this would suffice to satisfy demand.⁶⁹ On converting to sound, management moved to offer a second screening each evening, extending opening hours by commencing at 6.30 rather than 7.30 pm.⁷⁰ In part, this was a rational response to escalating costs of film hire, which rose by 134 per cent in the first two years of sound compared to the last two of silence (although it might be noted that with payments for film hire increasingly calculated as a percentage of the box office, this figure is itself in part a reflection of higher levels of business).⁷¹ The move to double the number of shows clearly had the potential to raise ticket sales. Yet as an explanation for the boost to the cinema’s income, this would only prove decisive in itself if the Picture House had been operating at or close to capacity prior to turning to the talkies. As we have seen, such occasions were rare, with audiences in the late silent period fluctuating significantly according to the appeal of the programme. Even on Saturdays, when conditions were most favourable to cinema attendance and capacities were most likely to be tested, net receipts diverged from the mean by more than 10 per cent on almost two out of three occasions across the final eighteen months of silence.⁷² What is more, the growth in business observed from July 1931 extended across all days and was, if anything, most apparent on evenings when demand was at its lowest (Table 4).

Table 4. Campbeltown Picture House, increase in takings, comparing 1930 and 1931 (July to December in each year).

Day	Increase in Receipts (%)
Monday	+91.8
Tuesday	+118.1
Wednesday	+133.7
Thursday	+119.8
Friday	+168.5
Saturday	+83.2

Source: Moving Image Archive, Glasgow, CAPHA 1/2/3/1, Film Screenings and Takings Book, 1929–33.

Such figures dispose of one potential explanation for the higher takings from mid-1931: that the Picture House drew its audience from a progressively wider area. Sarah Neely has found that changes in transport arrangements, including inauguration on Orkney of a ‘talkie bus’, helped boost business.⁷³ Enhanced travel opportunities were most likely to be taken up on Saturdays, when a late return home would not impinge on work time the day after. That Campbeltown experienced growth across the week suggests that higher levels of demand were generated substantially within the burgh. The figures we have are more suggestive of a more even distribution of patronage, and might point to a further factor potentially contributing to the growth in receipts following the introduction of the talkies: that the attraction of the sound picture encouraged a greater number of visits among existing cinema-goers. Had this been the case, then it might be anticipated that fluctuations in attendance would be less pronounced, as cinema-going became more explicitly habitual. The Picture House ledger, however, provides no evidence of such a change. Of 211 programmes mounted from the start of the financial year 1929–30 to the final silent show in 1931, only 88 or just short of 42 per cent generated takings within 10 per cent of the mean, while for the first 196 talkie programmes, that proportion fell to 37.75 per cent.⁷⁴ If anything, habitual picturegoing appeared even less characteristic of audiences in the early sound era. Rather than acting to intensify the practice of cinema attendance among established patrons, the suggestion is that the talkies operated to extend the appeal of film as a source of amusement to a public for whom the movies had not been a regular or recurrent leisure pursuit, heightening cinema-going as an occasional practice. To a large extent, the Campbeltown evidence suggests, technological change had worked to alter significantly the market for entertainments.

This appeal to a substantially new constituency is indicated by the content of programmes at the Picture House from July 1931. Outwardly, continuity was maintained from the late silent era, with presentations headed by a single feature, and the balance made up of shorts and newsreels. Eve’s Review continued for a few weeks, although increasingly its content could not compensate for the absence of sound, and from the later months of 1931 its place was taken by Pathe’s Super Sound Gazette and Universal Talkie News.⁷⁵ Comedy remained a staple of sound programmes, with productions from the Roach Studios, featuring Laurel and Hardy, and Charley Chase, and appearances by the Tiffany Talking Chimps, balanced by British subjects showcasing the likes of Ernie Lotinga in a series of sketches recorded on DeForest Phonofilm.⁷⁶ By 1933, management at the Picture House was expressing concern at the quality of available comic shorts, despite which bookings remained consistent through the early sound years.⁷⁷ A key change from July 1931 was the absence of serials. A central attraction of the silent era, their place was taken by shorts whose subject matter made a particular virtue of sound by focusing on musical performance. Music inaugurated the talkies’ career at the Picture House with Warner’s version of Sigmund Romberg and Oscar Hammerstein’s The Desert Song.⁷⁸ The popularity of this feature, boosted by the novelty of sound presentation, was exceeded later that same year by another Warner’s vehicle, Gold Diggers of Broadway.⁷⁹ Even where music was not central to the main feature, it figured among the shorts on the programme. These varied from filmed recitals by prominent artistes from the operatic tenor Giovanni Martinelli, performing extracts from Il Trovatore and Martha, to Broadway star Jay Velie, to presentations of musical revues, including the British productions Song-copation and Pot-Pourri.⁸⁰ Into 1932, Campbeltown programmes were fleshed out by musical offerings from Gainsborough Pictures, featuring performers such as Hal Swain, Ena Reiss, Elise Percival and Ray Raymond.⁸¹ Across the first year of sound, films with prominent musical content featured on almost half the programmes at the Picture House. Measuring performance in comparison to the mean, such bills showed no tendency overall to attract larger than average audiences. However, where a musical headed the programme, receiving due attention in newspaper listings, the mean was more likely to be exceeded, and did so in 12 out of 19 such instances.⁸² Here, popularity may have received a further boost through advertisements placed in the Courier by local record dealers, which offered patrons the opportunity to hear tunes from such films as The Desert Song, On With the Show, and Sally, on the gramophone.⁸³ If this does not establish with certainty the degree to which the make-up of audiences changed with the coming of sound, it is suggestive of growing levels of support among a public able to afford entertainment technologies in the home and who perhaps had hitherto been satisfied by the amusement afforded by local concerts. Despite which, locally organised concerts and dances remained central to Campbeltown’s entertainment calendar well into the 1930s.⁸⁴ Occasional cinema-going may therefore be seen as one facet of a diverse musical and recreational culture, covering live and recorded performances, across the burgh in the age of the talkies.

Further evidence of a changed cinema-going public following the coming of sound may be found in enduring support for British films. If a fall in bookings of domestically produced features might be anticipated with the advent of talkies which proclaimed their ‘English/British’ character through the deployment of predominantly English images and patterns of speech, the opposite was the case in practice. The proportion of programmes at the Picture House headed by British films rose to reach a remarkable 58 per cent in the first five months of 1933.⁸⁵ Box-office returns broadly validated the intention to ‘buy British’, with returns for Monday to Wednesday programmes with domestic productions as the main attraction exceeding the overall mean by just short of four per cent and only falling below average takings for Thursday onwards by just over three per cent.⁸⁶ Bolstered by such figures, the local management observed that ‘Their [British films’] appeal to the picturegoer is unmistakable, for American pathos and humour do not, in some indefinite manner, appeal particularly to Scottish tastes’.⁸⁷ This was, as evidence from elsewhere suggests, not necessarily a representative view, but nevertheless is one which suggests a local audience at the very least less intolerant of and perhaps more receptive to the English idiom as transmitted through the screen.⁸⁸ One conclusion, highly speculative still in the current state of local evidence, is of a socially more diverse as well as substantially larger cinema-going public.

This interpretation gains plausibility when placed in the context of broader developments accompanying the coming of sound. From 1929, contemporary observers both within and beyond the trade noted a significant growth in patronage. Simon Rowson of the Gaumont British Picture Corporation, a diligent student of statistics regarding the cinema industry, pointed to a rise of between 25 and 50 per cent in numbers attending cinemas by late 1930.⁸⁹ The Cinematograph Exhibitors’ Association plotted a middle course between these estimates, arguing for growth over two years to the autumn of 1931 of just over 30 per cent.⁹⁰ Neither estimate was based on any close study of attendances across the close to 5,000 cinemas active across Britain at the end of the silent era. Nevertheless, officially generated statistics suggest that the trend outlined here had some basis in fact. From 1916, the government had imposed a tax on admissions to entertainments which were non-participatory in nature.⁹¹ The amounts collected each year provide, at the most basic level, a measure of changes in expenditure on a range of taxable amusements, of which the cinema was among the most significant. Over the later 1920s, the final years of movie silence and a period in which the incidence and levels of the tax were not subject to change, this total did not vary markedly.⁹² By contrast, in three consecutive years from April 1929, the take, boosted in the second half of the tax year 1931–2 by an increase in rates, rose by 31 per cent.⁹³ This was all the more remarkable given the wider context of deepening recession and escalating unemployment. The contrast between trends in entertainments expenditure and that on goods and services more generally was encapsulated in the tax year 1929–30, during which falling levels of economic activity reduced income from Customs and Excise duties by over £3 million below the estimates set out as recently as the 1929 Budget.⁹⁴ The Entertainments Tax alone bucked the trend, the amount raised exceeding the 1929 estimate by more than £500,000.⁹⁵ The buoyancy of receipts in this one area was noted by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Snowden, in his 1930 Budget speech and was ascribed by him to ‘the boom in talking films’.⁹⁶ If this view is accurate, and we attribute all growth in the tax receipts to greater demand generated by the talkies, then the growth in entertainments expenditure indicated was sufficient over the two financial years from April 1929 to raise the overall national cinema audience by more than 28 per cent.⁹⁷ However, growth was not confined to this source alone. In the years from 1929, the theatre trade voiced increasing concern at the threat to business posed by the talkies. The perception was that cinema and theatre were no longer discrete amusements and that the fare offered by the former so resembled that offered by the theatre, and at markedly lower prices, that the demand for one increasingly encroached on that for the other.⁹⁸ In the early 1930s, officials at the Treasury, and the Customs and Excise would come to see the talking picture and the changes in recreational behaviour that encouraged as the most significant threat to the viability of commercial theatre across the country.⁹⁹ Technological change which now allowed film actors to be heard as well as seen worked to reconfigure the market for entertainments in the cinema’s favour. Along with the overall boost to spending on amusements beyond the home, the share of that spending going on moving pictures also rose markedly in the years from 1929, from under half to almost two-thirds of taxable expenditure, adding to the 28 per cent growth indicated by the tax receipts alone.¹⁰⁰ Campbeltown, it may be suggested reflected such trends in microcosm, the Picture House like its counterparts elsewhere drawing on a larger and more diverse public to generate higher takings from the talking picture. At both local and national level, it may be suggested, the coming of sound did more than transform the presentation of films, it also effected a lasting change in the nature and level of support for the cinema as a medium of entertainment.

Conclusion

The study of small-town cinema has served to heighten awareness of the degree to which reception of the mass medium of the moving picture was determined by local circumstances. Cempbeltown’s status as an industrial but also tourist centre, shaped the rhythms of cinema-going both across the year and over the longer term. In common with burghs elsewhere, business suffered downturns in late spring and early summer. That slump was checked, however, by the advent of visitors from Glasgow Fair from mid-July, signalling an upturn that would endure through the shortening days that followed. Over the longer term, the problems that affected most local industries would ensure that the 1920s saw little if any secular growth in the Picture House’s income. Stability continued to characterise the box office through the final months of ‘silence’, as lack of alternative ready access to the talking picture ensured that the delay in wiring for sound did not carry the costs felt by silent houses elsewhere. A further idiosyncrasy, certainly when compared with what is known of attitudes elsewhere in Scotland, was the strong support, reflected in booking practices, for British films. Even the coming of sound, which served to expose Campbeltown ears regularly to cultivated English accents, did nothing to check this pattern, serving rather to strengthen it with time. To that extent, the view from Campbeltown serves further to fragment our perception of audiences, and the importance of local behaviours and preferences. Yet, as this article has sought to show, the local and the particular can also be used to capture broader trends with unusual clarity. The Picture House’s position as the monopoly provider of regular commercial entertainment in the burgh ensured that fluctuations in the company accounts mapped readily on to change in the wider market for organised leisure. In Campbeltown, as elsewhere, a period of stability in the late silent era was succeeded by radical change in the market for cinema, the product of the coming of sound. This process is caught both at the micro level of the firm but also at the macro level through national tax returns. The advent of the talkies thus emerges as a more fundamental departure for the entertainment business across Britain than has perhaps been recognised. It did not simply consolidate support for existing amusement forms; rather it reconfigured the market radically in the cinema’s favour. As a leisure pursuit, picturegoing was transformed both in the numbers and in the variety of people drawn in to the practice, making it more recognisably ‘the essential social habit of the age’.¹⁰¹

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to Professor John Caughie, Professor Judith Thissen, Dr Sarah Neely, and Laraine Porter for their comments on earlier drafts of this article. If I have been unable to respond fully to their observations, I remain grateful for the care and time taken to read this material. As a result, the author remains fully responsible for all errors of fact and interpretation herein.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Kathryn H. Fuller, At the Picture Show: Small-Town Audiences and the Creation of Movie Fan Culture (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996); Calvin Pryluck, ‘The Itinerant Movie Show and the Development of the Film Industry’, and Anne Morey, ‘Early Film Exhibition in Wilmington, North Carolina’, in Kathryn H. Fuller-Seeley, ed., Hollywood in the Neighbourhood: Historical Case Studies of Local Moviegoing (Berkley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2008), 37-52, 53-74.

2 Robert J. Morris, ‘Urbanisation and Scotland’, in W. Hamish Fraser and Robert J. Morris, eds., People and Society in Scotland. Volume II: 1830-1914 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1990), 74; John Caughie, ‘Cinema and Cinema-going in Small Towns’, in John Caughie, Trevor Griffiths and Maria Velez-Serna, eds., Early Cinema in Scotland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 52-67; John Caughie, ‘Small-Town Cinema in Scotland: The Particularity of Place’, in Judith Thissen and Clemens Zimmermann, eds., Cinema Beyond the City: Small-Town and Rural Film Culture in Europe (London: Palgrave/ British Film Institute, 2016), 23-37.

3 Kinematograph Year Book 1921 (Eighth Year), (London, Manchester, Glasgow: KInematograph Publications Ltd., 1921), 502-22; 1929 (Sixteenth Year) (London: Kinematograph Publications, 1930), 524-43.

4 Campbeltown Courier (hereafter CC), 18 July 1931, 1; 1 Oct. 1932, 4, for an occupational breakdown of the county of Argyll according to the 1931 census.

5 Norman S. Newton, The Wee Pictures: A History of The Picture House (Campbeltown) Ltd., 1913-89 (Campbeltown: Campbeltown Community Business, Ltd., 1989); Campbeltown Community Business Ltd., Campbeltown Picture House: A Century of Cinema (Campbeltown: Stenlake Publishing Ltd., 2018).

6 Caughie, ‘Cinema and Cinema-going in Small Towns’.

7 Richard Maltby, ‘New Cinema Histories’, in Richard Maltby, Daniel Biltereyst, and Philippe Meers, eds., Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies (Malden, MA, Oxford, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 3-40; Robert James, Popular Culture and Working-class Taste in Britain, 1930-39: A Round of Cheap Diversions? (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 203-8.

8 Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly, How to Run a Picture Theatre: A Handbook for Proprietors, Managers and Exhibitors (London: E.T. Heron & Co., 1910), 61; John F. Barry and Epes W. Sargent, Building Theatre Patronage: Management and Merchandising (New York: Chalmers Publishing, 1927), 94.

9 Trevor Griffiths, ‘Making a Living at the Cinema: Scottish Cinema Staff in the Silent Era’, in Caughie, Griffiths and Velez-Serna, eds., Early Cinema in Scotland, 72-77.

10 Judith Thissen, ‘Introduction: A New Approach to European Cinema History’, in Thissen and Zimmermann, Cinema Beyond the City, 4-6.

11 Nyasha Sibanda, ‘The Silent Film Shortage’, Music, Sound and the Moving Image, 12 (2018): 197-216; Bioscope, 2 Oct. 1929, 40; 17 Sept. 1930, 14; the period encompassing the transition to sound has recently been the subject of an AHRC-funded project based at De Montfort and Stirling Universities and works by Laraine Porter and Sarah Neely cited below are products of that project.

12 Laraine Porter, ‘The Talkies Come to Britain: British Silent Cinema and the Transition to Sound, 1928-30’ in Ian Q. Hunter, Laraine Porter, and Justin Smith (eds.), The Routledge Companion to British Cinema History (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), 89-91; ‘Golden Silence’, Bioscope, 6 June 1928, 32; 17 Oct. 1928, i. In reality, of course, cinemas were never wholly silent, with presentations underscored by music and punctuated by sound effects, Julie Brown and Annette Davison (eds), The Sound of the Silents in Britain (Oxford, 2012).

13 Nicholas Hiley, ‘”Let’s Go to the Pictures”: The British Cinema Audience in the 1920s and 1930s’, Journal of Popular British Cinema, 2 (1999): 42-3; the argument is echoed in Stuart Hanson, From Silent Screen to Multi-screen: A History of Cinema Exhibition in Britain since 1896 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 44.

14 See, for example, Sue Arthur, ‘Blackpool Goes All-Talkie: Cinema and Society at the Seaside in Thirties Britain’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 29 (2009): 27-39; Sarah Neely, ‘”The Skailing of the Picters”: The Coming of the Talkies in Small Rural Townships in Northern Scotland’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 17 (2020): 254-72, noting the problem posed by ‘talkie queues’ in Kirkwall.

15 National Records of Scotland [hereafter NRS], GD289/1/3, Palace Cinema, Profit and Loss Ledger, 1925-55.

16 Kinematograph Year Book 1921, the others being at Dunoon and Oban.

17 CC, 9 Feb. 1929, 1, for details of steamer services.

18 Moving Image Archive, Glasgow [MIA], CAPHA 1/2/3/1, Film Screenings and Takings Book, 1929-33; the ledger records daily takings and the titles of films shown. With the coming of sound, numbers of tickets sold at each price are also recorded for each show.

19 CC, 6 Nov. 1897, 2; on Lizars, see Trevor Griffiths, The Cinema and Cinema-going in Scotland, 1896-1950 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 18-19; Maria A. Velez-Serna, ‘Travelling Bioscopes and Borrowed Spaces’, in Caughie, Griffiths, and Velez-Serna (eds.), Early Cinema in Scotland, 21.

20 CC, 27 Nov. 1897, 2.

21 CC, 12 March 1898, 2 (Hubner’s Cinematograph and Operaphone); 28 Jan. 1899, 2; 4 March 1899, 2 (Calder); 19 Sept. 1908, 2; 18 Sept. 1909, 2 (Bendon); 11 Sept. 1909, 2 (BB Pictures).

22 CC, 1 Sept. 1900, 2 (Calder); 20 Oct. 1900, 2 (Empire Kinematograph); the importance of the local topical for early cinema programmes is set out in Janet McBain and John Caughie, ‘Local Films for Local People: “Have You Been Cinematographed Yet?”’, in Caughie, Griffiths, and Velez-Serna, Early Cinema, 130-46.

23 CC, 5 Sept. 1903, 2.

24 MIA, CAPHA 1/1/1/1, Campbeltown Picture House, Memorandum and Articles of Association of The Picture House, Campbeltown, Ltd.; CAPHA 1/1/3/1, Shares and Dividends, Applications and Allotments, Register of Members; CAPHA 1/1/3/2, Shares Certificate Book, 1912-33; on Oban,see John Caughie, ‘Cinema and Cinema-going in Small Towns’, in Caughie, Griffiths, and Velez-Serna, Early Cinema, 61, 63-4.

25 CC, 24 May 1913, 2; 31 May 1913, 3.

26 Caughie, ‘Small-Town Cinema’, contrasting Bo’ness and Lerwick; CC, 20 Jan. 1917, 2.

27 CC, 16 March 1917, 2; 30 June 1917, 2; 6 April 1918, 2; 29 June 1918, 2.

28 CC, 18 Jan. 1930, 2; MIA, CAPHA 1/2/3/1, Film Screenings and Takings Book, 1929-33, week commencing 27 Jan. 1930.

29 CC, 5 Jan. 1929, 2 (Lochend UF Church Choir Concert); 19 Jan. 1929, 2 (SWRI, Burns’ Supper); 26 Jan. 1929, 2 (Castlehill Parish Church, Whist Drive); 23 March 1929, 2 (SWRI, Country Dancing); 30 March 1929, 2 (Campbeltown ILP Grand Concert).

30 Jenny Hammerton, For Ladies Only?: Eve’s Film Review: Pathe Cinemagazine, 1921-33 (Hastings: Projection Box, 2001), 5-6, 56.

31 MIA, CAPHA 1/2/3/1, week commencing 7 April 1930.

32 MIA, CAPHA 1/2/3/1, week commencing 28 April 1930; 5 May 1930.

33 CC, 1 Jan. 1921, 1, announcing continuous shows from 2 pm over three days; MIA, CAPHA 1/2/2/1, Accounts Ledger, General Operations, 1912-32, Drawings Account.

34 Examples of such practice can be seen in NRS, GD 289/1/1,Playhouse Cinema [Edinburgh], Profit and Loss ledger, 1929-68.

35 In addition to annual opera performances, often supported by professional orchestras, the Society also ran Choral and Orchestral sections, CC, 23 March 1929, 2; 15 Feb. 1930, 2.

36 Kinematograph Year Book, 1928 ed.

37 NRS, GD 289/1/3, Palace Cinema, Profit and Loss Ledger, 1925-55 (until 1928, the ledger records profit figures only).

38 MIA, CAPHA 1/2/3/1, June 1929–Dec. 1930 (Monday to Wednesday programmes).

39 MIA, CAPHA 1/2/3/1, June 1929–Dec. 1930 (Thursday to Saturday programmes).

40 This usually involved closing on Mondays and Thursdays from early June, CC, 30 May 1925, 1; 29 May 1926, 1; 28 May 1927, 1; 2 June 1928, 1.

41 Numbers of visitors were recorded each year, with the peak on the first Monday of the holiday, CC, 20 July 1929, 1.

42 In 1929, the week of Glasgow Fair generated the fifth highest return across the final seven months of the year, a jump of over 60 per cent on the previous week’s take, MIA, CAPHA 1/2/3/1, June–Dec 1929.

43 As early as 1916, the centrally located Cinema House in Glasgow was publicising itself as ‘The Scottish House of Fox Films’, booking that studio’s output for six months ahead, Entertainer, 16 Sept. 1916, 9.

44 MIA, CAPHA 1/2/3/1, July–Dec 1930.

45 Margaret Dickinson and Sarah Street, Cinema and State: The Film Industry and the British Government, 1927-84 (London: BFI, 1985), 30-33; the full text of the Act was reprinted in Motion Picture News, no.1, Dec. 1927, 23-6; see also Kinematograph Year Book, 1930, Seventeenth Year (London: Kinematograph Publications, nd.), 197-204.

46 NRS, GD289/1/3, Palace Cinema, Profit and Loss Ledger, 1925-55, 1927-8

47 The issue occasioned debate in the pages of the Evening Times [Glasgow] in the early sound era, 27 Oct. 1932, 3; 3 Nov. 1932, 3; and in Parliament on debates over moves to increase quota obligations for exhibitors in the late 1940s, Scotsman, 22 Jan. 1948, 4; 5 Feb. 1948, 5.

48 MIA, CAPHA 1/2/3/1, week beginning 30 Sept. 1929 (The Ring); week beginning 17 March 1930 (Piccadilly); week beginning 23 Feb. 1931 (The Last Post); on the latter, see https://www2.bfi.org.uk/films-tv-people/4ce2b737a6daf (last accessed 16 July 2021); https://womenandsilentbritishcinema.wordpress.com/the-women/dinah-shurey/ (last accessed 16 July 2021).

49 MIA, CAPHA 1/2/3/1, week beginning 16 March 1931 (The Barnes Murder Case, reissue of 1924 release); week beginning 23 March 1931 (A Romance of Riches, reissue of 1925 release); week beginning 30 March 1931 (Island of Despair, reissue of 1926 release and Children of Courage reissue of 1921 release); week beginning 6 April 1931 (The Qualified Adventurer, reissue of 1925 release); week beginning 13 April, 1931 (The Way of a Woman, reissue of 1925 release); Denis Gifford, The British Film Catalogue, 1895-1970 (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1973).

50 For representations of Scottishness in films of this period, see John Ritchie, ‘How UK and USA Films Represented and Performed Scottishness from 1895 to 1935: With Particular Attention to the Transition to Sound (1927–1933)’ (unpublished Univ. of Stirling PhD. thesis, 2018).

51 CC, 18 July 1931, 4.

52 See above, notes 13 and 14.

53 Bioscope, 3 April 1929, 21; 6 Nov. 1929, xii; the diary of 21 year old Glasgow cinema-goer, Kitty McGinniss, indicated a slow acceptance of sound, Diary for 1929 (in the possession of Ms McGinniss’ daughter, Mrs Rita Connelly).

54 Scotsman, 8 June 1929, 1; 22 July 1929, 1; 30 July 1929, 11; 10 Aug. 1929, 9; Bioscope, 21 Aug. 1929, 44.

55 NRS, GD 289/1/3, week ending 18 Aug. 1928 to week ending 29 Dec. 1928, week ending 17 Aug. 1929 to week ending 28 Dec. 1929.

56 NRS, GD 289/1/3, week ending 7 July 1928 to week ending 6 Oct. 1928, week ending 5 July 1930 to week ending 4 Oct. 1930

57 MIA, CAPHA 1/2/3/1, week beginning 27 May 1929 to week beginning 29 June 1931.

58 Sarah Neely detects some turn away from the cinema in the last days of silence in Wick and on Orkney, but this seems to have no equivalent further south and west, Neely, ‘”The Skailing of the Picters”’: 257, 262.

59 MIA, CAPHA 1/2/2/1, Accounts Ledger, General Operations, takings in 1925-6 of £3,121 0s 7d, fell to £2,858 18s 9d by 1930-1 (years ending 31 May).

60 CC, 20 June 1931, 3, ‘Campbeltown would appear to have definitely passed out of the consideration of the distilling interest’; 8 March 1930, 3, where the report of the Fishery Board for Scotland noted the problems of herring supply in the Firth of Clyde; 1 Nov. 1930, 3; 20 Feb. 1932, 3, the herring fishery was also hit by declining exports and a perceived shift in domestic demand in favour of white fish.

61 Bioscope, 27 Nov. 1929, 21.

62 CC, 11 July 1931, 3.

63 CC, 14 Nov. 1931, 3.

64 NRS, GD 289/1/3, week ending 17 Nov. 1928 to week ending 18 May 1929; week ending 5 April 1930 to week ending 4 Oct. 1930; week ending 15 Nov. 1930 to week ending 16 May 1931.

65 NRS, GD 289/1/3, week ending 14 March 1931, the Palace showed All Quiet on the Western Front some seven weeks after its first run at the Playhouse.

66 CC, 24 May 1913, 2; 1 Nov. 1913, 2,

67 CC, 11 July 1931, 1, in 1917, the price of balcony seats had been raised to 1s 3d, 29 Sept. 1917, 2.

68 An increase in the tax on seats in November 1931 raised inclusive prices to 7d to 1s 4d, CC, 7 Nov. 1931, 1.

69 CC, 24 May 1913, 2; 31 May 1913, 2.

70 CC, 11 July 1931, 1.

71 MIA, CAPHA 1/2/2/1, Accounts Ledger, 1912-32, Film Hire Account, amounts expended, £1,007 8s 3d in 1929-30; £874 11s 9d in 1930-1; £2,114 1s 4d in 1931-2; £2,110 13s in 1932-3.

72 MIA, CAPHA 1/2/3/1, Jan. 1930 to June 1931.

73 Neely, ‘”The Skailing of the Picters”’: 262.

74 MIA, CAPHA 1/2/3/1, June 1929 to May 1933.

75 MIA, CAPHA 1/2/3/1, Eve made her final bow in the week commencing 27 July 1931. After a trial run in August, Universal Talkie News debuted in the week commencing 7 Sept. 1931.

76 MIA, CAPHA 1/2/3/1, weeks commencing 13 July 1931 to 26 Dec. 1932. Laurel and Hardy subjects played thirteen times at the Picture House across 1932, while Lotinga appeared six times in the later months of 1931.

77 CC, 1 April 1933, 1.

78 CC, 11 July 1931, 3. Accompanying publicity suggested that all tastes were catered for: ‘It is a story of romance, adventure, hot tropic nights, danger, comedy, love’.

79 MIA, CAPHA 1/2/3/1, 13-15 July 1931 (The Desert Song); 10-12 Sept. 1931 (Gold Diggers). Takings were, respectively £107 18s 10d and £109 14s, £58 and £40 above the relevant means.

80 MIA, CAPHA 1/2/3/1, 10-12 Aug. 1931 (Martinelli); 13-15 Aug. 1931 and 17-19 Aug. 1931 (Velie); 12-14 Nov. 1931 (Song-copation); 23-25 Nov. 1931 (Pot-Pourri).

81 MIA, CAPHA 1/2/3/1, 1-3 Oct. 1931, the musical review Black and White supported E.A. Dupont’s maritime epic, Atlantic; 11-13 Feb. 1932, Ena Reiss, supporting the Marie Dressler/ Wallace Beery vehicle, Min and Bill; 29 Feb.–2 March 1932, Elsie Percival and Ray Raymond, support for the MGM drama, The Easiest Way.

82 MIA, CAPHA 1/2/3/1, 13 July 1931 to 13 July 1932.

83 CC, 11 July 1931, 2 (Desert Song); 18 July 1931, 2 (Sally); 22 Aug. 1931, 2 (On With the Show); through the autumn of 1931, A.P. MacGrory’s on Main Street regularly advertised the availability of ‘Talkie Records’, 10 Oct. 1931, 2.

84 Based on a comparison of advertisements in the CC, 1929 and 1933.

85 MIA, CAPHA 1/2/3/1, 2 Jan.–27 May 1933; one of the few case studies covering this period suggests a shift in favour of British films from late ‘silence’ to early sound, but in this case the figure reached was only 23.9% by 1932, Guy Barefoot, ‘The Tudor Cinema, Leicester: A Local case Study’, in Hunter, Porter and Smith, Routledge Companion, p.106.

86 MIA, CAPHA 1/2/3/1, this calculation excludes the first week in the year when extra shows generated unusually high returns.

87 CC, 25 Feb. 1933, 3.

88 See above, note 47.

89 Kinematograph Weekly [KW], 11 Dec. 1930, 38.

90 KW, 10 March 1932, 33; 24 March 1932, 35.

91 Trevor Griffiths, ‘Quantifying an “Essential Social Habit”: The Entertainments Tax and Cinema-going in Britain, 1916-34’, Film History, 31 (2019): 1-26.

92 Between the tax years 1925-6 and 1928-9, the annual amounts raised by the tax varied between £5,714,476 and £6,119,978, Parl. Papers 1932-33: X (4455), Twenty-Fourth Report of the Commissioners of His Majesty’s Customs and Excise for the year ended March 31^st 1933, Table 77, Net Receipts, Entertainments Duty.

93 1928-9: £6,003,587; 1929-30: £6,695,847; 1930-1: £6,952,088; 1931-2: £7,868,908, Parl. Papers 1932-33: X (4455), Table 77.

94 HC Debates, 5^th ser., vol.237, 14 April 1930, col.2669.

95 Parl. Papers 1929-30: IX (3651), Twenty-First Report of the Commissioners of His Majesty’s Customs and Excise for the year ended 31^st March 1930, 115.

96 HC Debates, 5^th ser.,, vol.237, 14 April 1930, col.2669.

97 Griffiths, ‘Quantifying’: 14.

98 The argument was advanced in the pages of The Stage by theatre and cinema owner, Sir Oswald Stoll and was posed in terms of a growing contest between the human theatre and the machine, The Stage, 17 Sept. 1930, 6; 25 Sept. 1930, 14, 15.

99 See the debates on the Finance Bills of 1933 and 1934, HC Debates, 5^th ser., vol.278, 1 June, 1933, cols.2176-7; Scotsman, 8 June 1934, 9, where the Financial Secretary to the Treasury. Hore-Belisha, argued that the theatre’s difficulties owed more to changes in public taste and behaviour than it did to the tax.

100 The smaller share is indicated by figures collected in 1920-1, The National Archive, CUST 14365, Amounts Paid on the Basis of Certified Returns; Parl. Papers 1936-7: IX (5573), Twenty-Eighth Report of the Commissioners of His Majesty’s Customs and Excise for the year ended 31^st March, 1937, 107, which provides one of the first official estimates of the contribution of different entertainments to the total tax receipts.

101 The phrase is that of Alan John Percivale Taylor, English History, 1914-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 313.