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But, so far as wc were concerned, photographing the funeral was only the beginning. My friend, A. G. Bromhead, representative of Leon Gaumont of Paris, had collected for us many orders for the films of the procession and we had many more on our own account. We hurried back to Walton to develop the negatives and to start making the prints. We worked all through the night and the next day and the following night to fill these orders and the others which kept coming in. Then early on the morning after that, when we thought, thanking God, we had finished, we went up into the drying rooms (bedrooms you will remember) and found to our horror that all the prints, except those already despatched, were spoiled. Through some fault in the material the film stock had all turned milkywhite. We phoned Bromhead as soon as we could, but he said print them over again as soon as possible but in the meantime send up the spoiled stuff — I have any number of further orders. It seems that our negatives were better than others and very many people wanted prints. Before that job was done I had worked for eight days and nights with only nine hours off for food and sleep and the others did not fare much better. One of them, John Whitton, who had not been long with us, was found fast asleep on the floor of one of the drying rooms when Lawley and I went up to see how he was getting on before snatching an hour or two off for ourselves, and although we tried everything we could think of to wake him we just could not do it, and we had to leave him there.
I remember staggering home after one of these long spells of work and wondering at the continual pealing and chiming of the church bells all around me. It was early morning and there was only one church within miles, and that was silent. It was just illusion, a result of fatigue. But, never mind, we made a good deal of money and topped up our reputation quite a bit.
Although we had a stage of sorts and, between us, a considerable experience of film-making, we seem very seldom to have attempted pictures with more than one scene in them. One of the first of this kind we made had, about 1901, a rather curious history, but it was some time earlier than the events of this chapter. It was the story of a burglary, in three scenes. I was the burglar with a full black beard — I suppose we felt that a burglar couldn't possibly be clean shaven. The first scene, set up on the stage, represented the outside of a house with a window through which I — the burglar — climbed. We struck that scene and set the next, the
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