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the inevitability of a coming gale became more insistent and the music more threatening; until the storm broke with an exciting film of dashing waves bursting into the entrance of a cave, with wild music (by Jensen, I think) .
I did the commentary, of course, as well as working the lantern and films. The influence of my father kept cropping up everywhere. I must have followed his technique somehow in getting the engagements for these shows, though I cannot quite remember what I did. I remember as a child helping, with the rest of the family, to fold up circulars and putting them into envelopes addressed to mechanics' institutes and all sorts of likely halls and societies and I suppose I must have done something of the same in my own case, though I am not clear how I found the addresses. However that may be, we went to many halls and with only one exception we met with invariable success. That was somewhere up in the north of Lancashire where the people spoke with a very funny accent. I couldn't understand them and I like to think that my failure there was only because they couldn't understand me.
One of the essential conditions of good showmanship in a show of this kind is a means of rapidly changing over from lantern-slide to film without noticeable interval but that was not beyond the limits of my mechanical ability. I have never in my life before or since witnessed such intense enthusiasm as these short, crude films evoked in audiences who saw films for the first time. At one hall, at Halstead in Essex, we had fifteen re-engagements, counting the repeats when we were asked to stay over for a second showing on the following day, which of course were actual repetitions of the same programme. The re-engagements strained our resources rather badly for then we were expected to supply new material.
But if the films were terrible faulty, as they certainly were, the projector was litde better than a nightmare. I soon had to do something about it. Charles Urban had just come over from America bringing with him a new projector mechanism called the 'Bioscope,' which was of good and substantial design. It was reputed to be flickerless, which it was — because it had no shutter! But a shutter is absolutely necessary in order to cover the momentary change from one 'frame' to the next. The black moment on the screen, sixteen times a second, causes the distressing flicker. It is obviated in modern practice by having two or three extra unnecessary blades to the shutter. The consequent forty-eight or sixty-four interruptions are too many to be seen and the picture
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