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that it struck any terror to our hearts at the time. It was, I supposed, all in the course of ordinary business. For very big ideas were taking shape in our affairs. Our films were growing ever bigger and more ambitious. Our two studios were neither enough in number nor size to cater for the quantity of our contemplated output, or for its size and importance. My ideas were taking form and growing. I wanted six bigger studios — two of them much bigger — all in a row so as to share as conveniently as possible the economy and accommodation of dressing rooms, carpenters' shops, scene docks, canteens, engineers' premises, crowd rooms and all the dozens of rooms which usually grow up afterwards around the studios. These were all to be on the ground floor with the studios above, served by a roadway running around the lot. All of this was carefully thought out and duly arranged and all the architect's drawings were made. Then we acquired the land and actually got as far as pegging out the positions of all the outer walls.
Then there was the question of the electricity supply, for, although I still clung to my archaic idea of using daylight as far as ever possible, the auxiliary arc-lighting would call for a very large amount of power. I approached the electricity suppliers and they quoted £20,000 for the necessary cable. (They afterwards said that that was only a preliminary suggestion, when they found that I was putting in diesels and generators for the needed supply.)
Diesels were frightfully expensive and not easy to obtain then, for all engineering was only beginning to recover after the wastages of war, but I heard of a couple of big engines with their attached generators out of a captured German submarine. I went and inspected them and I bought them. That, I see now, was almost certainly a false step. I realised that it would take a very long time to take them to pieces, transport them and get them re-erected on the site. So that involved me in the immediate building of a suitable engine-house.
It was built close to the projected studio building. Afterwards, when everything was cleared away, that engine-house became the auditorium of a theatre and had a stage built on at its rear. It is now known as The Playhouse, Walton-on-Thames, and it has been, and still is, the scene of many an amateur opera and play. It was taken over for this purpose by my very old friend, George Carvill, and opened by Ellen Terry, then a very old lady.
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