County was centre of Poole family’s entertainment empire

STROLL down Cheltenham’s High Street today and about midway along you’ll pass a fashion store called French Connection.

Until 1954 this was the Palace Cinema, which showed its last film this week in that year.

Prior to being a cinema, the town’s Corn Exchange occupied the spot.

When it was decided that Cheltenham no longer had need of a place in which barley, wheat and oats could be mulled over and argued about, the building was acquired by a family who made their mark in the showbiz world.

They turned the old Corn Exchange into a venue for showing some of the earliest moving images seen by audiences in Gloucestershire.

The Poole family’s entertainment empire wowed Victorian audiences up and down the land with spectacular myriorama shows depicting epic battles, heroic feats and tales of derring-do.

Gloucestershire was the capital of this empire. The five brothers Fred, George, Joseph, Charles and Harry Poole came from a family of showmen.

They perfected the myriorama as a form of public entertainment and toured the country with their lavish shows.

What the people who paid their money and took their seats witnessed were hand painted scenes on vast rolls of canvas that were cranked across the stage.

By 1900 there were half a dozen or more Poole’s myrioramas touring Britain and Ireland for 40 weeks a year employing nearly 300 people.

The shows became ever more sophisticated with four or five canvases being used to give the illusion of 3D.

These were lit front and back with powerful gas lamps and there were plenty of special effects.

Accompanying the pictures was a narrative declaimed by the grandly titled Delineator, often one of the Poole brothers dressed in an elaborate uniform, who hammed up the performance for all he was worth.

In between scenes while the canvas rolls were being changed variety acts juggled and ate fire, musicians encouraged the audience into communal song, in fact anything could happen at a myriorama show, often unexpectedly.

For example, when too much gun powder was used to provide the sound effects for a show called “The bombardment of Alexandria” at Colston Hall in Bristol, the explosions brought the ceiling down.

In 1894 Charles Poole took a long lease on the Royal Albert Hall in Gloucester’s Westgate Street and converted it into a myriorama theatre. Musicians were needed for the band and an advert appeared in the Gloucester Journal that concluded: “Please note. Mr Poole wishes it to be understood that he requires instrumentalists to play, not to insult his audience by staring, spitting and winking at every female”.

Two years later Charles settled in Gloucester and won a seat on the city council, becoming an alderman.

He acquired a former chapel in the city, which was transformed into a studio where the myriorama canvases were painted.

The Poole family acquired two other theatres in the city, the Palace in Westgate Street, then the Hippodrome in Eastgate.

Joseph Poole lived in Cheltenham and with his brothers converted the Corn Exchange in the High Street into a

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myriorama theatre.

They later acquired the Coliseum in Albion Street as well.

Besides their myrioramas, the Pooles also staged ghost shows, which were toured by the splendidly named “Magnificent, original and wondrous Royal Polytechnic Spectroscope and Phantascopic Opera Company”.

Exciting though such entertainments no doubt were, the arrival of cinema meant that the days of the myriorama and the showmen who toured with them were numbered.

Realising this, the Pooles converted their theatres into cinemas.

The last myriorama show took place in Edinburgh in 1929.

Then all the canvases, props and such paraphernalia were brought back to Gloucester and stored in a threestorey warehouse in New Inn Lane near the Lemon and Parker pub.

There they stayed until the early 1960s when the site was redeveloped.

Unfortunately, all the myriorama equipment was destroyed.

» The pictures are taken from Poole’s Myriorama, by Hudson John Powell, published by ELSP in 2002 in which the full story of these local entrepreneurs is told.