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say that Brooke-Wilkinson was, by and large and from beginning to end, the best-known man in the British film industry. He had the most difficult job of all and he held it down with such gentle forceful dignity that he was loved by all and was the friend of every man who might so easily have been his enemy.
That sincere appreciation of a very honourable man had to come in in its proper place at the point where the Board of Censors was appointed, but as it also concerns the greater part of a man's life it has carried us far beyond that proper place and indeed beyond the scope of the whole of this book. I must, therefore, call back your attention to the point where it left the main stream. So we are back again in the day of the very short picture.
But if my company had not yet begun to make the long and important films which were to make future years memorable, it was certainly industrious in the making of short ones. 19 12 was extraordinarily prolific, for, apart from the two 'Vivaphone' subjects every week without fail, there were also three or more 'shorts' of anything from five hundred to a thousand feet long, mostly with Gladys Sylvani and Alec Worcester or Flora Morris, Harry Royston, Marie de Solla, Harry Gilbey, to quote a few of the stock-company names which come to mind.
The year was also memorable for some delightful productions in quite a different idiom by Elwin Neame, for instance The Lady of Shalott with Ivy Close who was for some time a member of the stock-company, and The Sleeping Beauty by the same two people.
A less artistic but commercially more important venture was Oliver Twist. I think I have mentioned that my father was a popular lecturer when I was a youngster and that one of my greatest joys was to go with him and work his 'Dissolving Views' for him. His most successful lecture was The Footprints of Charles Dickens in which I gloried and heard over and over again. As a result I read every book that Dickens wrote and got myself thoroughly saturated with him. So when Thomas Bentley presented himself to me as a 'great Dickens character impersonator and scholar,' my heart naturally warmed to him and I was readily receptive when he offered to make a Dickens film for me. In the end he made several, but I think Oliver Twist was the first and its length was nearly four thousand feet. It may not have been outstandingly good but it was very successful and it marked the beginning not only of a Dickens series but also of a long range of
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