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

CHAPTER 2 After the closing of the Polytechnic my father took up itinerant lecturing on several popular scientific subjects. This involved a great deal of preparatory work which had a considerable bearing on my unofficial education. It began each season with the sending out of large numbers of circulars giving the syllabus of each of some fifteen or twenty lectures, from 'A Trap to Catch a Sunbeam' (meaning a camera), Electricity, Telephony, the Phonograph — all as unknown to the average audience then as atomic fission is now — to 'The Footprints of Charles Dickens' and, very much later, 'The Rontgen Rays' and the Cathode Rays of Crook es. It does not need much imagination to visualise the effect of all this on the receptive, adolescent mind of the growing boy. Then add to it the fact that, in a little while, that boy was called in from time to time — glorious times! — actually to operate the biunial limelight lantern with which the lectures were illustrated. Oxygen gas had to be generated and stored in a huge gas-bag and transported to the scene of action, with the pressure boards, the big doublelantern, the box of slides and the lantern screen. These days of wonderful adventure were rudely shot through by the necessity of going to school, which followed naturally upon the sack of the governesses. School seemed to be a horribly unnecessary interruption to an education which was going along famously and developing exactly as one wished. Natural laziness, mixed with inarticulate resentment, led inevitably to the almost complete neglect of opportunities, and only science lessons and drawing produced any appreciable results. But it was in my first school — Shaw's, in the Camden Road — 22