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CHAPTER 3
On my twenty-first birthday in 1895 the dear old pater gave me a little lathe which he had managed to stump up for, secondhand. He held, rather unsoundly, that if I mastered the art of metal turning I never need be without a job. It must have strained resources very badly but it was a great joy to me and the beginning of all sorts of things. Looking back, it does seem to me that Fate had a very clear notion from the beginning of what she intended to do with me and had all the time been steadily pushing me along in the selected direction. If I have told the story fairly, that general trend should have become apparent to the reader also.
My first camera was one I made for myself when I was a small boy at a cost of tenpence — ninepence for wood and a penny for a magnifying-glass which I mounted in a cardboard tube for a lens. I took a successful photograph with it from the nursery window. The first cinematograph camera I ever had my hands upon was one made by Prestwich and owned by Thomas R. Dallmeyer. He was a great chum of my father's, and those two, with Thomas Bedding, the Three Thomases, were dubbed the Three Musketeers of photography. Dallmeyer asked me to go with him and film the Diamond Jubilee in 1897, but the camera jammed at the critical moment and I failed. Whether this was my fault or its, I do not know, but I used those cameras for many years afterwards and had no trouble with them.
But between the coming of my lathe and the incident of the Diamond Jubilee there were a couple of years which were pregnant with many things that, all unknown to me, were to have a profound influence upon my subsequent film-life. I worried
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