Came the dawn : memories of a film pioneer (1951)

CHAPTER i This is the story of a man whose life was devoted to the making of films, but it is not a categorical account of the film industry, although the two stories ran parallel for many years. Mine begins — as for complement it must — with my birth, in 1874, in a humble house in South London, long before films were thought of. But the goodness which should go with humility was certainly not mine. Not to put too fine a point upon it, I was a thoroughly naughty, and very unpleasant, child. My father was the dearest and best of men and he was very clever. His only fault was a lack of business acumen, and, though everybody liked him, I suppose no one expected him to make money out of his numerous abilities. He was very diligent and worked far into the night when the house was quiet, writing articles for various technical papers, mostly photographic, for he was an ardent photographer; one of the early workers of the old wet-plate process which you never hear of now except as a vague memory of the distant past, but it was one of the fertile places in which the seeds of the modern 'pictures' first began to germinate. Watch him at work when I was about three years old. He had an immense camera which he must have picked up at a sale somewhere. He set it up in our back yard — we never had a garden