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as it possibly could, and to enjoy itself into the bargain. I could not spare the time to be with them for long but I went down there very frequently and helped where I could and hindered where I must. Once when with my camera I was up to my knees in seawater, and Fitz was nearly up to his waist in it, directing several girls who were in it too, he began to get a little ratty trying to hear my suggestions over the noise the sea was making. I called out to him to get one of the girls a little nearer. 'Nearer to what?' he said crossly. 'Nearer, my God, to theeV I shouted back, and they all recovered their tempers in the gust of laughter that followed.
In the following year, 'Plummie' was on contract — on two pounds ten a week, and very happy on it he has since assured me; and he and Gladys Sylvani, who joined us about that time, did a lot of very good work. Gladys Sylvani was a very beautiful young woman of striking colouring and she became our leading lady for several years. Her work was so good and her appearance so effective that if our films had been of the importance and calibre to which they afterwards attained she would have left a very significant mark upon them and made an even greater impression upon the industry.
The tangible results of the excursion to Lul worth that year were good enough to warrant a similar trip in the autumn of the following year, and among others there was an attractive story of Grace Darling to be attempted. Now the script in this case called for a cottage on the beach so that the heroine could go straight from her front door, so to speak, into her boat without wasting any time. But at Lulworth Cove there was no cottage built upon the beach. We did not want to build a cottage so we selected a suitably attractive one in the village and proceeded to carry the beach up to it. There was no pavement in front of it of course, only a gently sloping green bank which made a very good support for the beach stones. When we hauled up a boat on it, ready for Grace to push off into the putative sea, you would never have supposed that there was anything artificial about it.
By 19 12 we were coming in sight of a more important period of our work in which we were destined to recover all the ground we had lost in the thin years both before and after the time of the fire. I cannot account for that thin time except by supposing that I was not sufficiently alive to the many changes which were occurring in the industry; not aware enough of the great possibilities which lay in the future. It is perhaps charitable to assume that I
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