Charles Thurston and the origins of the Electric Palace
The Grade 2* listed Electric Palace cinema in Harwich is one of the very few surviving examples of the earliest picture palaces to appear in the UK. It was commissioned and paid for in 1911 by a traveling showman, Charles Thurston. Our founder had established a reputation for staging popular cinema shows — before cinemas even existed. But how?
In our latest blog post, we look at the ‘pre-cinema’ history of film shows and we get to know the famous Thurston family, operators of countless fairground attractions throughout East Anglia, for generations.
During the 1900s the new ‘moving pictures’ that had wowed audiences in Paris and London in the 1890s became transformational: those early halting glimpses of moving objects or people had evolved into a novel type of consumer industry. Short reels of nitrate film were now depicting a dazzling variety of scenes of modern life.
From staged performances of actors and dancers to real life depictions of workers, babies, horse races and much more, films were fast becoming a popular novelty and as they increased in number and availability, venues were sought in which these astonishing inventions could be shown to a paying audience for entertainment and profit.
By now, various makes and models of portable film projector had become avalaible to buy and the type of film stock used in them had become more standardised. Commercial film companies were producing and circulating an ever growing range of films on popular topics. Showmen like those pictured here would visit film sales to obtain the latest titles.
The caption on the photograph above calls these showmen bidding for film reels ‘bioscope men’. In the first decade of the 20th Century, movie cameras and projectors were plentiful, but permanent picture houses for showing films were not yet established, so various temporary venues such as theatres, town halls and at fairgrounds were used. The Bioscope was a kind of travelling cinema show that became very popular at the end of the 19th century.
It is widely accepted that it was Randall Williams who introduced the first moving images into a fairground novelty attraction in 1896, when he added moving pictures into his Grand Phantascopical Exhibition. Randall Williams had travelled around fairs astonishing audiences with his ‘ghost’ shows since the 1870s, the new Cinematograph show had its public premiere at the show at a Valentine’s Day fair in King’s Lynn in 1897.
“Within a few months showpeople across the country were exhibiting moving pictures to the fairgoing public” — National Fairground Archive
It is within this showground tradition that we can trace the origins of the founder of our own Electric Palace, Charles Thurston, who, with his brother William and their father Henry, operated a number of such traveling picture shows. These shows incorporated films, live music hall acts and musical entertainment within a fairground booth. By 1909 Charles Thurston was operating two Bioscope shows, ‘The Original Royal Show’ and the ‘The Great Show’.
The frontage of the ‘The Great Show’ was splendid, it was built to house a 120 key Marenghi organ that had been purpose-made for Charles Thurston by Orton and Spooner in Kings Lynn. The organ was set into a carved and gilded frontage, surounded by coloured lights which changed automatically.
Before the start of a picture show, dancing girls, acrobats and trapeze artists would perform to entertain the audiences waiting to enter. The showman would stand outside the luxurious organ-fronted Bioscope and draw people to the show with accounts of the delights they were about to witness.
“Charles Thurston employed a ‘barker’ called Mr Norman, flamboyantly attired in a purple suit with gold braid”- Vanessa Toumlin
Another remarkable feature of the Bioscope show was the flamboyant steam-powered traction engine that the travelling showmen used. These engines hauled dismantled rides from fair to fair and when stationary, the engine’s belt drive would provide the electricity needed to run the attraction. Showman’s engines can be glimpsed in the two photographs above. Charles Thurston’s engine was a ‘Special Scenic’ Showman’s Road Locomotive, made by Charles Burrell & Sons in Thetford, Norfolk.
Showman’s engines were built to be powerful, but they were also designed with the fairground aesthetic in mind. The canopy that protected the engine from the weather was supported by twisted columns made of shiny brass, along the canopy edge was the proprietor’s name and the rest of the engine was covered in brightly coloured paintwork.
The engine pictured is now fully restored and on display at Thursford Museum in Norfolk.
Given how fabulous, luxurious and successful these travelling Bioscopes were, Charles Thurston might not have chosen to build a purpose built picture palace at all, but he was compelled to change his mode of exhibition by a new law brought in by the British government.
The 1909 Cinematograph Act was a piece of legislation designed by Walter Reynolds at London City Council. Its aim was to regulate the activities of those putting on moving picture shows.
Walter had worked in theatres before films started to be introduced and he saw that there was a need to protect audiences from fires caused by the highly flammable nature of nitrate film.
If the film jammed in the projection gate it could be ignited by the light source which made it burn ferociously, putting operators and audiences in danger.
In 1907 in Newmarket in England there had been a serious fire in the Town Hall, when it was being used as a temporary cinema space. The new Act sought to ensure that cinemas were in a suitable physical state to screen films safely, in 1910 it was signed into law and it brought cinemas under local authority control and required them to be licensed. One significant element of the Act was that it demanded that projection facilities in a cinema had to be completely separate from the auditorium and the audience. As a result of this new Act, purpose-built cinemas like the Electric Palace, started to appear across the country.
The Electric Palace was built in 1911, it took just 18 weeks to build and the cost was allegedly £1,500. This was the first of three cinemas that Charles Thurston owned and operated.
In the architect’s drawings of the Electric Palace, the ‘operating room’ where the projectors were housed is at the front of the building, above the entrance and entirely cut off from the interior space by a solid wall. What it doesn’t show is that the access route to the room is by a ladder attached to the side wall, which also descended into the basement where a gas-powered generator provided the electricity. It’s possible that the Electric Palace is the only cinema to have resolved the issues of safety and power in this way.
After Charles’ death in 1928, the family-run fairground attractions firm was continued by his sons. In a book published in 1968 by The Fairground Society, called ‘The Famous Thurstons’, author G. W. Essex suggested that Thurston was a household name in Norwich and the Eastern Counties.
Thurston is still a well known name in the fairground business to this day. On November 29th in 2021, 110 years after the Electric Palace first opened its doors, we pay tribute to Charles Thurston, who brought the movies to Harwich for the delight of audiences before any other operator.
