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F. E. Smith, who afterwards became Lord Birkenhead, made a much better job of the same sort of thing. His speech was much better to begin with, and he seemed as if he were quite at home with the big funnel; and then, when he had to come to the studio to repeat the whole performance before the camera, while the gramophone threw his speech back at him, and he was expected to put in all the lip movements and expressions in exact time to every word, he never turned a hair. His performance was really excellent and I hope it did some good.
Several other Cabinet Ministers came in turn to a room in St. James5 Square, which I fitted up as a studio, and appeared before my film camera and afterwards arrangements were made by which we were to have photographed, although not in synchronism, an actual Cabinet meeting in full session. We rigged up our apparatus in the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street with a large number of Westminster arc-lamps, for which the power was supplied to us from somewhere in the basement, and when all was ready we had nothing to do but stand about and wait for Lloyd George and his ministers to troop in and begin their show. Instead, there came a short message that the whole idea was off, and we packed up and went home again.
We were not told the reason and were left to guess whether it was a sudden attack of stage fright or what it was. It was a sad disappointment to us for a film like that would have been something of a triumph at that time. However, our grief was assuaged by the authorities setting aside for us a room in St. James' Square where many of the members of the Cabinet came and sat for me to be filmed. The 'Vivaphone' had nothing to do with this. An unaccustomed silence was settled upon all these important personages, and I wondered if they, so different in appearance, had anything else in common besides their rank as ministers of the crown. I found it, to my delight. They all had a keen sense of humour, that rarest and best of the human senses, binding them together and linking them to the country.
That is my memory, after thirty-four years, of a very curious incident, but the incident is really much more curious than that. I had completely forgotten that at the time I had been asked to set out a full description of it for the Kinematograph Tear Book, but as it was published under my portrait and over my facsimile signature I am bound to admit its authenticity.
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