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van would be chartered and the negative of the Grand National developed while it was rushing to London. Or a motor-car would carry the wet film hanging out in a streamer behind to get it dry by the time it reached the theatre. I had no hand in any of these doings and do not quite know how far they were true. But we did do all that could reasonably be expected of us to put our pictures on at the earliest moment without spoiling them.
Our success with the Coronation seems to have inspired a spate of news-realism, what with Lord Kitchener at Ipswich, the procession of the King and Queen around London in October, the arrival of the German Emperor, Joseph Chamberlain's departure for South Africa, the state opening of Parliament in February of the following year, 1903, and the launch of the third Shamrock. All these, of course, and many others were interwoven with the usual little comedies and the like, and then we come to a more ambitious effort in Alice in Wonderland. This was the greatest fun and we did the whole story in 800 feet — the longest ever at that time. Every situation was dealt with with all the accuracy at our command and with reverent fidelity, so far as we could manage it, to Tenniel's famous drawings. I had been married about a year and my wife, broken-in to film work, played the part of the White Rabbit. Alice was played by Mabel Clark, the little girl from the cutting room, growing exasperatingly larger and smaller as she does in the book. The beautiful garden was the garden of Mount Felix, at Walton; the Duchess, the kitchen, the mad tea-party, the Cheshire Cat, the royal procession — all were there. The painting of the whole pack of cards human size was quite an undertaking and the madly comic trial scene at the end made a suitable and hilarious finale.
And so the story goes on. We had by now definitely broken away from the fifty-foot tradition and our films took whatever length, in reason, that the subject demanded. The great majority of them varied from 100 to 200 feet at that time (1903) though the fifty-foot idea persists in the system of numbering. This is because we had a lingering feeling that we might have to cut some of the 'long' films down to make them saleable to a few of our more prudent customers and then it would be convenient to have numbers in reserve to know them by. So Alice was numbered 430 to 446, but The Duchess and her Pig Baby could be purchased separately as No. 438. So when I jump from 450 to, say, 531, as I now propose to do, it doesn't mean that I have skipped as many
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