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CHAPTER 6
Now let us go back to the little story of film-making at Waltonon-Thames, which I had left awhile to dip into the cognate subject of showmanship. We can skip a number of films which were a little more varied and a little better made as time went on; we can turn over a few more pages which describe films of much the same kind as before, we come to a sad moment in our country's history and a very sad one in my own. We had mustered together every possible camera, settled the position of every man at our disposal, and indeed, had all our gear ready waiting on the stairs of our litde house, ready to start to photograph our biggest effort, the Coronation of King Edward VII, when the news came through that the King was seriously ill and the whole ceremony postponed.
The only thing I could think of to do was to go up to London and see what the people seemed to think of it. I found them all wandering about rather aimlessly looking at the decorations. And I took some views of Disappointed London — London without a single motorvehicle. But there were many thousands of Indians and Colonials who had come over for the coronation and they could not stay here indefinitely, so the Queen and the Prince of Wales held a wonderful review with Lord Roberts and a host of foreign princes, which gave us the chance to take half a dozen films of more than the usual length.
Then when the King was happily recovered, to the great joy of the people, the actual coronation took place and was duly and faithfully recorded by our cameras. We were, in fact, very successful in all our work of this description and served the country well with cinematographic news until the news-reels came into existence and took it over. In a sense the early film people were more 'Fleet Street minded' than the news-reel people when they followed later, for they went to extraordinary lengths to get their news pictures on to the screens on the day of the event. A railway
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