Moving pictures proved a big hit with audiences
MANY people in Gloucester of the bus pass generation have fond memories of the Hippodrome cinema, previously named the City and later the Gaumont.
Perhaps you were a member of the kiddies’ club and trooped eagerly along on Saturday mornings to see if Lassie came home, or if the Lone Ranger and Tonto had once more thwarted the baddies.
The Eastgate Street cinema was owned by the Poole family, five brothers originally from Malmesbury who built an entertainment empire. Fred, George, Joseph, Charles and Harry came from a family of showmen. In Victorian times they toured the country with myriorama shows that astonished audiences everywhere.
Myrioramas were paintings on canvas cranked across the stage depicting scenes from naval battles, far flung places and other epic subjects. A particular favourite of the time was the sinking of the Titanic. As the pictures passed before their eyes, a narrator explained the story to the onlookers, usually hamming it up for all he was worth.
Sound effects were added. Wooden balls rumbling in a revolving barrel made thunder. Sheet steel bashed with a lump hammer provided lightning strikes. Flashes, bangs and drifting smoke added to the excitement, which in the pre-grand Theft Auto era drew crowds from far and wide.
In between scenes variety acts juggled and ate fire, musicians encouraged the audience into communal song, in fact anything could happen at a myriorama show.
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, eventually becoming an alderman. He acquired a former chapel in the city, which was transformed into a studio where the myriorama canvases were painted and around 200 people were employed by Pooles, preparing and touring the shows.
Poole’s venture was a huge success and the family acquired two other theatres in Gloucester, the Palace in Westgate Street, then the Hippodrome in Eastgate.
When cinema came along the family realised that the days of myriorama were numbered, so 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 three storey warehouse in New Inn Lane. There they stayed until the early 1960s when the site was redeveloped. Unfortunately, all the myriorama equipment was destroyed.
Joseph Poole lived in Sherborne Terrace, Cheltenham and the Coliseum cinema in Albion Street was bought by the Poole family in 1946. The cinema showed its first film in 1931, but opened as Gilsmith’s Hippodrome, a variety theatre, on September 22, 1913. Jack Judge is said to have written “It’s a long way to Tipperary” in the Coliseum’s number one dressing room and first performed the song on the Albion Street theatre’s stage. “Bonnie and Clyde” was the last film seen at the Coliseum, which shut up shop on 22 June 1974.
For all the years that Pooles owned the cinema its manager was Ernest Rogers who had toured with the family’s myriorama shows years before. Flats now occupy the site of the Coliseum.
The Poole family acquired Cheltenham Corn Exchange and converted it into a myriorama theatre.
When the High Street building was razed it was replaced by a cinema named the Palace. That closed in 1954 and anyone with a memory that stretches back that far may recall it became a furniture store, then a branch of Rumbleows.
The pictures you see here first appeared in “Poole’s myriorama”, which tells the story of this family of travelling showmen, by Hudson John Powell, published by ELSP in 2002.