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CHAPTER 4
The new period begins with the coming to Cecil Court of the great Charles Urban to see what I had done to his 'flickerless Bioscope' projector. He was sufficiently impressed to commission me to alter several of his mechanisms as I had altered mine, and after a little while he offered me five pounds a week to go over to his place and work for him there. I promptly accepted on condition that he found a position for cousin Monty Wicks, too, and we shut up and went. And so the trap closed upon me and never again was there a chance to escape.
It is not to be assumed from this that there was any desire to escape. On the contrary there was then, and there still is, so much fascination about the film industry that practically no one being in, has ever voluntarily come out again. But we are a race of inveterate grumblers and it is considered the proper thing to curse the industry and stay put. I never had the slightest inclination to get out.
Maguire & Baucus of Warwick Court, Holborn, were our new masters with Charles Urban as manager. I do not remember meeting Maguire, but Baucus I remember well as one of those urbane and very nice Americans whom you feel you can absolutely trust. The style of the firm was shortly changed to the Warwick Trading Company Ltd., with Charles Urban as managing director. My first job in connection with it was to film the Oxford and Cambridge boat-race of March, 1898, which I did from the top of a factory building giving a long view of the course and consequently a very distant view of the boats. Tanoraming, the camera was first used a long time later. Then, according to instructions, I proceeded, as the policemen say, to Alfred Wrench's shop at 50, Gray's Inn Road (Lanterns and Accessories), and in the cellar there I developed the negative, using Wrench's primitive outfit. This consisted of a metal frame, carrying a number of upright pins on which the film could be wound spiral-wise — in
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