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think. He belonged somewhere up north and his product was marketed with the name of the European Blair Camera Company under the management of Cricks, who afterwards became prominent in the film-picture world as the moving spirit of the firm of Cricks & Martin.
Another was Birt Acres, who, many years earlier, in 1893, had given the show of films at the Royal Wedding at Marlborough House when I helped him with the electric-lamp arrangements. He swam into my orbit again when we opened a second time at Cecil Court and he had long conversations with me about all sorts of things, including his film-stock which, on the whole, was quite good though sometimes unreliable.
There was one dreadful time which I shall not easily forget. I am not sure but I think it must have been in the long, long week when we were printing day and night to meet the great demand for copies of our Queen Victoria Funeral films. Anyhow, I know it was after a whole night of printing, when in the dawn, we went up into the drying-rooms to have a look at our night's work before we went home to bed. According to our practice at the time all the thousands of feet of film was hung up in crowded festoons from hooks on wires along the ceiling. And we found that for the whole of its length, every foot, every inch, the gelatine with the pictures on it had parted company from the celluloid as it dried, and the two were hanging separately in the festoons — two loops instead of one! The substratum had failed, or perhaps by an accident, been omitted. We slunk down to the dark-room and started all over again.
All the very early film-stock makers in this country, except one, have now faded out of the picture. That one, by sheer effort and by insistence upon quality and fair dealing, has attained and retained the premier position both here and in America. We owe much to Kodak for the very sustenance of our career.
There was another very curious failure which occurred very occasionally in these drying-rooms but I don't think it had causal connection with the film-stock. The trouble took the form of hundreds of thousands of little faint white spots which appeared all over the film when it was drying. This only happened two or three times, but each time it affected the whole roomful of film at once, and when that was cleared it did not recur in any form until the next time, and then again the whole roomful was spoilt.
I gave a lot of thought to this puzzle and reviewed very carefully the conditions in which it happened. The drying-rooms were
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