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Sam Manning, PhD candidate, Queen’s University Belfastc/o School of History and Anthropology, 15 University Square, Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, BT7 1NN. Email: smanning03@qub.ac.ukBiographical note: Sam Manning is a history PhD student at Queen’s University Belfast. His thesis examines post-war cinema-going in the United Kingdom and focuses on audiences, reception, programming and exhibition.Keywords: Cinema, Belfast, Northern Ireland, leisure, oral historyAcknowledgments: I am grateful to Sean O’Connell and Sian Barber for their constructive advice and feedback. An earlier version of this article was presented at the QUB History Staff/Postgraduate Seminar Series. I would like to thank all present for their questions, comments and suggestions. Word Count: 8,946POST-WAR CINEMA-GOING AND WORKING-CLASS COMMUNITIES: A CASE STUDY OF THE HOLYLAND, BELFAST, 1945–1962INTRODUCTIONSeveral historians have explored audience preferences and cinema-going habits in various localities in the United Kingdom. These studies show the regional variations in leisure habits and the ways that cinema-going was determined by age, class, gender and location. Brad Beaven’s research on 1930s cinema audiences highlights that textual analysis of films should not ‘cloud important issues such as the motivation for film-going and the audience behaviour while in the cinema’ This study therefore focuses on the social practices of cinema-going and follows the proponents of the ‘new cinema history’ who shift emphasis away from film texts to conceive cinema-going as ‘a social act performed by people of flesh and blood… situated within specific social, cultural, historical and spatial confines’. Studies by scholars such as John Hill and Kevin Rockett provide assessments of film production, exhibition and distribution in Northern Ireland. Furthermore, details of Belfast’s historical cinemas, such as location, opening date and seating capacity are well documented. The habits and customs of Northern Ireland’s cinema-goers remain unexplored and this article provides a case study of cinema-going in the Holyland, a largely Protestant working-class Belfast community, from the end of the Second World War to the early 1960s. There has been little focused analysis of everyday social habits in Northern Ireland and this study of leisure practices contributes to the social history of Belfast prior to the outbreak of the Troubles. Cinema-going was the most popular commercial leisure activity during the first half of the twentieth century. In the United Kingdom, cinema admissions increased from 903 million in 1933 to 990 million in 1939; these figures continued to rise throughout the Second World War and peaked in 1946 with 1,600 million recorded admissions. Rachel Low estimated that in 1948 there were 4,706 cinemas in Great Britain and the Kinematograph Year Book lists a further 119 cinemas in Northern Ireland. These cinemas varied greatly in terms of size, seating capacity, décor, facilities and status. During the 1950s, increased affluence, the introduction of television and the diversification of leisure activities meant that cinema attendance declined rapidly. By the end of the decade, Christine Geraghty argues, it was a ‘medium that was old-fashioned, uncomfortable and associated with past pleasures. For the general audience, cinema-going was changing from being the quintessential modern form of entertainment to an old-fashioned and somewhat marginal pursuit’. The number of operating cinemas fell from 4,391 in 1956 to 2,566 in 1962, when admissions stood at only 395 million. Sean O’Connell characterises the years between 1914 and 1968 as a period of ‘conservative modernity’ for Belfast, ‘marked by a dichotomy between new forms of work, consumption and recreation and a regressive cultural politics’. Despite the religious divisions in the city and the fact that wages and unemployment remained much lower than the UK average, the development of cinemas in Belfast mirrored many other industrial cities. Kevin Rockett summarises that ‘by the end of 1914, there were sixteen venues in Belfast where films were being shown full-time, while a further ten opened before the end of the war. By 1920, even though some early venues had closed, there were twenty-six cinemas in Belfast, a number not too dissimilar to Dublin’. Only two Belfast cinemas opened in the 1920s: the inner-city ‘bottom-of-the-market’ Diamond in 1920 and the more luxurious city centre Classic in 1923. Seventeen new cinemas were constructed in Belfast in the 1930s and the majority of these were located in suburban areas on the main arterial roads leading away from the city centre. By 1956, Belfast’s population of 443,671 was served by forty-four cinemas with a total seating capacity of 40,000. The delayed introduction of television and lower levels of affluence meant that cinema declined later in Northern Ireland than many other parts of the UK. The introduction of commercial television and the increased number of television sets in working-class households led to a precipitous decline in cinema attendance from 1959 and the number of Belfast cinemas fell to thirty-seven by 1961, and to thirty-one by 1963.In the period under review, the young urban working class were the most frequent cinema-goers and this article investigates changes in cinema-going habits of this generation as they moved from childhood into adolescence. It uses oral history testimony gathered by the author from individual and group interviews with eleven former residents of the Holyland born between the years of 1941 and 1950. This use of oral history testimony is a response to Richard Maltby’s call for more localized oral history studies that ‘consistently tell us that the local rhythms of motion picture circulation and the qualities of the experience of cinema attendance were place-specific and shaped by the continuities of life in the family, the workplace, the neighbourhood and the community’. Rather than ask participants to narrate their life histories, the interviews followed a thematic approach and questions focused on the social background of the participants, memories of cinema-going, film preferences, leisure habits and the wider social history of post-war Belfast. While a questionnaire was used throughout the interviews, participants were free to discuss other subjects and digressions from the topic of cinema-going were revealing in situating the place of the cinema-going in a broader context of post-war Belfast. This study follows the authors of an oral history of retailing in post-war England who used semi-structured interviews to place narratives in a wider context of participant’s lives, as changes in retailing ‘were experienced, observed, and... remembered by people immersed in broader societal and cultural developments’. To counter the problems of utilising memory in historical research, and to relate the subjective stories of interviewees to wider social and economic developments, this testimony is supplemented by articles in trade journals and local newspapers.This article is divided into three sections. The first outlines the range of cinema-going options available to residents of the Holyland and the social and economic distinctions that they made between them. Section two investigates the relationship between cinema-going, the life cycle and the built environment. It assesses how the experience of cinema-going changed from childhood to adolescence. It highlights the close connection between the social practices of cinema-going and the rhythms of daily life. Audience behaviour was highly place-specific and this section demonstrates the link between changing leisure habits, the use of public space and the built environment. The final section qualitatively assesses the reasons for the decline of cinema-going in Belfast and links the memories of Holyland residents to broader developments social and economic developments in Northern Ireland. It investigates the reasons for the closure of the Apollo—the local cinema for residents of the Holyland—in December 1962. CINEMA-GOING OPTIONS IN THE HOLYLANDWhile the residential area of Belfast known as the Holyland currently houses a largely transient population of students and migrants, during the period under review it was home to a largely Protestant working-class community. The area is located approximately one mile south of Belfast city centre and its title is a reference to the street names of the area (e.g. Palestine Street, Carmel Street and Jerusalem Street) named by developer James Rea and estate agent R.J. McConnell after their visit to Egypt and Palestine in the 1890s. The Holyland has no formal boundaries, though it refers commonly to the streets enclosed to the west by Queen’s University, to the south by the River Lagan, to the east by Ormeau Road and to the north by University Street. The Apollo was located at the south eastern boundary of the Holyland at the intersection of Agincourt Avenue and Ormeau Road, a major arterial road (see figure 1). In 1960, Emrys Jones described the housing as ‘speculative building of the kind that characterized industrial sectors, but of much higher standard than usual’. The interviewees described the area as distinctly working-class, yet ‘respectable’ and ‘upwardly mobile’. Former residents perceived themselves as economically better off than many other inner-city areas in Belfast. As one interviewee recalled, ‘there was a different socio-economic feel to the crowd that would have come up from both the Markets and Sandy Row. Both of which were one rung below us’. Interviewees emphasized the continued importance of the male breadwinner and stated that male heads of household often held skilled occupations in workplaces such as the shipyard, Mackie’s foundry and Gallaher’s Tobacco factory. One participant recalled that, in 1959, his father earned ?14 a week as the Senior Mains Foreman for the Electricity Department of Belfast Corporation. The 1951 Belfast street directory lists men from the Holyland employed in a range of skilled and unskilled manual labour roles, alongside white-collar roles such as clerk, transport official and civil servant. While the occupations of female residents include drapers, teachers and dressmakers, the majority are listed without occupation. The oral history testimony highlighted that many women held informal or part-time jobs to supplement household income. One participant recalled that, after his father died in 1961, his mother received a widow’s pension of around ?4, supplemented by ?2 10s weekly for a part time job in a local fruit and vegetable shop. Figure 1: Location of cinema-going venues in south Belfast, c. 1952. 1 – Apollo, 2 – Curzon, 3 – Belfast MuseumSource: RAF sorties aerial photograph, Map Library Archive, Queen’s University Belfast.There were two main cinema-going options available for residents of the Holyland: the Apollo and the Curzon, both designed by local cinema architect John McBride Neill. The Apollo opened in October 1933. It was the first cinema constructed in Belfast since 1923 and, following the transition from silent cinema to ‘talkies’, advertised itself as the ‘the first cinema in Belfast built for sound’ It held a superior status to many other inner-city cinemas and its Art Deco fa?ade and up-to-date modernism ‘heralded a new stylistic treatment for cinemas’ in Belfast. The Curzon opened on 12 December 1936, the same day as two other Belfast cinemas: the Park and the Broadway. It was located half a mile farther south of the Apollo on Ormeau Road and was one of the larger and more glamorous suburban cinemas built in the 1930s along the arterial roads of Belfast. It featured an exterior designed for special effect at night with an ‘illuminated glass tower on the front fa?ade’ that ‘intersected a horizontal glass lighting trough across the parapet of the entrance’. Its seating capacity of 1,400 included 360 balcony seats. The Apollo had a smaller seating capacity of 870 and seating was arranged in a single tier, divided into front and back stalls. In 1958, the most expensive tickets at the Apollo and the Curzon cost 1s 6d and 2s 3d respectively. While the latter provided a greater range of price categories and offered more expensive seats, the cheapest evening adult seat cost 1s at both cinemas. In the period under consideration, both the Apollo and the Curzon screened continuous performances and programmes changed twice weekly, on Monday and Thursday.A range of social and economic factors, often related to the local environment, determined the timing and frequency of cinema attendance. While interviewees recollected attendance at both the Apollo and the Curzon, they emphasized the contrast between the two cinemas. Interviewees highlighted the convenience, cheaper ticket prices, favourable location and geographical accessibility of the Apollo. Former residents of the Holyland characterized the Apollo as a mid-market cinema. It ‘wasn't quite a fleapit, but it wasn't just to the same standard [as the Curzon]’ recalled Norman Campbell. While it was larger and more expensive than many other inner-city cinemas, during the mid to late 1930s, it was superseded by more glamorous and expensive cinemas such as the Curzon and the Majestic that were built farther south along the arterial roads leading out of Belfast. Ann Gorman’s comments highlight the habitual nature of cinema attendance for young people: ‘there was a period in our lives when we were going every Saturday night, and we just went to whatever was on… it wasn't that we said "oh, that's a great movie, let's go and see it", it was just that's where we'd be going’. Norman Campbell also highlighted the weather as another contributing factor: ‘Before you actually got interested in the quality of the films, if it was raining hard we would have gone to the Apollo on the corner of the street. If it wasn't, we probably would have preferred the Curzon. For children, the price of admission was a key issue and David McConnell recalled that, while children’s matinees at the Apollo cost 4dIt really was a fleapit in the literal sense of the word. And my mother became expert at searching for them down the lining as well. So, we would have gone to the Curzon, but not quite as often because it was 7d to the front stalls. So it was slightly dearer, and I suppose was slightly more upmarket than the Apollo.The perceived higher status of the Curzon meant that it attracted patrons with greater amounts of disposable income and from a wider geographical area. Ann Gorman recalled that ‘the Curzon would have been a bigger treat because the Curzon was slightly more expensive and a wee bit more upmarket… the Apollo was a bit of a dump, but it was at the corner’. ‘We thought we were really upper crust going to the Curzon’, recalled Liz Smyth. She claimed that while the Curzon gave you the impression that you ‘were out for the night’, the Apollo—without a balcony or a grand foyer entrance—was both ‘darker’ and ‘dingier’. The balcony seats at the Curzon, however, were inaccessible to many children and there were visible social and economic distinctions in the cinema. As one interviewee observed, ‘You had to really be something else to go to the circle in the Curzon’. Both the Apollo and the Curzon were recalled as mixed social spaces and participants highlighted socio-economic rather than religious divisions. As Liz Smyth recalled the Apollo ‘was definitely a slightly rougher [cinema]. They were rougher boys who went of all religions’. Where divisions occurred, they were recalled as being of a different nature: ‘There would have been kind of trouble, but it wasn't necessarily sectarian’. The main concern was ‘gangs on the Ormeau Road certainly and people would have carried knives and sometimes razors’.A distinctive feature of the Holyland was its close proximity to institutions such as Queen’s University and the Belfast Museum. While none of the respondents recalled attendance at any of the cinema screenings organized by the University, many recalled attendance at film screenings organized by the museum. From November to March, free Saturday screenings in its lecture room provided an alternative cinema-going option that may have been inaccessible to children in other parts of Belfast. In 1948–9, 15,900 (11,950 ‘juveniles’ and 3,910 adults) admissions were recorded and while attendance at these screenings was far smaller than at either the Apollo or the Curzon, they demonstrate the distinctive range of film exhibition available in the immediate vicinity of the Holyland. The museum screened a range of educational films and emphasized the didactic nature of these screening on subjects such as natural history, food supply and geography. On 28 February 1959, for example, the programme included puppetry feature Rustic Delights and Canadian fishing film Battling Blue Fins. As Margaret McDonough recalled ‘it was either the Curzon for the general run-of-the-mill films and the museum for the slightly more informative films’. The contrast between the two was made clear: ‘when people went to the museum, they knew they were expected to keep quiet and actually watch the film… in the Curzon, people were more likely to be throwing things around and playing as well as watching’. In 1954, the museum claimed that its winter film programme was as important as its other exhibits as ‘it is upon the instruction of both the young and the intelligent adult in their own regional life and heritage that future support will largely depend’. They boasted that the screenings were ‘well patronised by children and adult audiences and on a number of occasions we have had to turn members of the public away through lack of accommodation’. Interviewees indicated that the distribution of these tickets was linked to academic achievement and Ann Gorman recalled that ‘we would have a mental arithmetic test at the end of… the first ten hands in the air with the correct answers won the ten tickets’.CINEMA-GOING, THE LIFE CYCLE AND THE BUILT ENVIRONMENTOral historian Annette Kuhn observes that ‘[o]ne of the most striking findings to emerge from oral history research into cinema-going has been the extent to which interviewees’ memories of cinema have revolved far more around the social act of cinema-going than around the films they saw. Memories of individual films have played only a small part in these recorded cinema memories’. This observation can be applied to the residents of the Holyland and memories of cinema-going in relation to the social context of cinema-going or to the built environment are far more common than memories of particular films or stars. One of the key features of these memories is the way that the social practices of cinema-going were linked closely to developments in the life cycle and increased mobility in the built environment. Many early memories of cinema-going were linked to a small geographical area and were largely confined to the cinema-going options available locally. These recollections were linked to parental supervision and associated with family and domestic life. Ann Gorman recalled the cinema-going practices of mothers in the Holyland: ‘There wasn't so much a culture of babysitting… it was not uncommon for people to take their baby, believe it or not, to the cinema. People would take babies in shawls… not in their prams, just carry them so they could get in to the cinema’. The cinema acted also as a cheap form of childcare and while participants often recollected the austerity and lack of disposable income during this period, they stated that parents were happy to provide money for cinema trips: ‘The cinema was a great place where children could safely go. And on rainy days, extra money would have been forthcoming from my parents. When we were children, our parents would have given us money to go the cinema. For instance, so as my mother could get on with the serious business of baking’. This research indicates that while the cinema was popular across a broad cross-section of the community, there were generational differences in times and days of attendance:At the evening screenings there weren't many children. Parents would have occasionally taken their children to see appropriate films and my parents certainly did. The film that I remember them taking me to at an early age was Ma and Pa Kettle. They were funny films and there would have been a family audience. But very often the evening screening in a cinema was for, in the 1950s, mothers and fathers having a night off, and also, of course, for courting couples.Saturday morning children’s matinees were an important feature of post-war cinema-going in industrial cities. In 1953, 42.3 per cent of British cinemas ran special children’s matinees and 79.8 per cent of patrons lived in industrial areas. In Belfast, the first Saturday children’s matinee club began at the Classic in September 1946, and in 1949, the ABC Minor’s Club began at the Strand and the Majestic. Children were more likely to attend these matinee screenings and while they are remembered for their affordability and accessibility, they are recalled against a backdrop of austerity. Ancillary purchases such as chocolate or ice cream were unavailable to many Holyland residents. Margaret McDonough remembered that ‘there would have been someone coming out in the interval and selling ice cream etc. and there would have been big queues. But the people that I was with wouldn't have been getting up to join the queue’. The Roy Rogers Club—retitled the Curzon Children’s Cinema Club in 1959—operated at the Curzon from 1953 to 1970. In October 1953, trade journal Kine Weekly reported that were sixty Roy Rogers Clubs in Britain and that in ‘the past two months the club has increased its membership to 40,000 among kinemas in all parts of the country’. For many interviewees, Saturday matinees at the Curzon represented their first trips to the cinema away from parental supervision. George Brown’s earliest memories of cinema-going are of trips to the Apollo, accompanied by his parents. As he got slightly older he ventured to the Curzon with friends: ‘It had the Roy Rogers Club on a Saturday morning. And the manager of the Curzon was a man called Sidney Spiers. He was known as Uncle Sidney. And he was quite religious in a sort of strict way… and he would have a prayer and then they would show Roy Rogers’. Memories of the Roy Rogers club often combined the social activities of the club with the Western serials that were shown. Anne Connolly, for instance recalled thatEverybody had to go there because you got prizes if the date was on the lollipop stick, then you got brought on to the stage and got a prize. So you had to go back every week because they always stopped it just as Roy Rogers or the Lone Ranger, whatever was on, he was just going to fall off his horse or get shot with a bow and arrow.For children, attendance at the Roy Rogers club often complemented and informed other leisure activities. George Brown recollected that the culture of B westerns ‘infiltrated the community… I mean the Roy Rogers, the white hat and the guys, the baddies with the black hat. It’s almost as crude as that. It did influence people's behaviour in a sense’. The street games that children played afterwards often revolved around the films that they saw. David McConnell recalled that ‘you could tell what kind of film it was by the way we came up Agincourt Avenue. Because if it was a western you shot your way up, if it was swashbuckler you buttoned your coat to make it a cape and fenced your way up’. Children were increasingly able to indulge these fantasies through the purchase of consumer goods. In November 1956, the Belfast Telegraph announced ‘it will be a “wild west” Christmas for Belfast children this year and cowboy and Indian dresses will be more in evidence than the space-suits which overwhelmed the toy market last year’.One potential pitfall of a project that focuses on a specific leisure activity such as cinema-going is the risk of the compartmentalisation of experience. Cinema-going was only one of many leisure activities that interviewees recalled and it was not necessarily the most important aspect of the social lives of children and adolescents who grew up in the Holyland. The Boys’ Brigade (BB), the Girl Guides, the library, youth clubs, cafes and radio were all recalled as alternatives to cinema. The latter, due to relatively low incomes in Northern Ireland, low levels of television ownership, the lack of regional television programming and the large number of local radio programmes retained its popularity longer than in other parts of the United Kingdom. For young Protestant males, the BB formed an important part of their social lives: ‘You went there two or three times a week. There was a club on a Saturday night, we played football, joined the band, there was a summer camp. So it really was a very significant part of your social and cultural life. George Brown recalled the church as a ‘dominating factor. There was about four major churches in the area. And the kids, you just automatically went to those. You went to the BB. I went to the ninth BB because it had a better football team than the sixteenth’. While participants recalled that children of different religious backgrounds played together in the street, the fact that the Boys’ Brigade was so active in the social life of Protestant children limited interaction with Roman Catholics. The fact that no Belfast cinemas opened on Sunday limited the possibilities for alternative leisure activities: ‘everything closed on a Sunday, there was nothing, it was very strict and you didn't, the only, I went to school, Sunday school, as all the kids did’.The transition from childhood into adolescence created opportunities for social interaction. In their 1962 study of The Northern Ireland Problem, Denis Barritt and Charles Carter observed that, due to fears of mixed marriages, ‘[m]ixing of the sexes in youth clubs is less common in Northern Ireland than in Great Britain’. They noted further that ‘[t]he informal activities of youth in the commercial dance-halls are of course free from any distinctions on grounds of religion, but we have not been able to assess which community uses these dance-halls most’. Dance-halls were often cited by interviewees as an important site for social interaction during adolescence and in 1956 the Belfast Telegraph reported that ’30,000 people attend dances in Belfast each week during the winter months’. The cinema held a different social function for adolescents and provided a space for behaviour and activities free from parental supervision. David McConnell recalled that his pocket money of 2s 6d would ‘get you in to the front stalls at the Curzon on a Friday night, and five cigarettes as well. And I just remember the smoke in the beam, and we must have stank when we came home. Which was good of course, because that way it was more difficult to be accused of having smoked yourself’. George Brown linked attendance at the cinema to his burgeoning smoking habit and school truancy:When I was about fifteen or so, I started to smoke… I didn't dare smoke it in the house, you know, but you would have sneaked cigarettes in when you'd have gone there… at grammar school, in my fourth year or fifth year. I used to look down my nose at people who played rugby. The people who went to, the school was a rugby school and I played football. And I thought people who played rugby just weren't good enough to play football. So I wouldn't play football, or rugby. So I used to sneak out on a Wednesday afternoon out of the game so I could go to the Apollo.The fact that children were absconding from school to attend the cinema was a source of concern for the Northern Ireland Child Welfare Council. In its 1954 report on juvenile delinquency, it observed that ‘[t]he fact that cinemas may afford truant children sanctuary from school welfare officers creates a problem deserving consideration’. Education, however, also provided an opportunity to attend new cinemas and view different sorts of films. Brian Hanna was a beneficiary of the changes implemented in the Northern Ireland Education Act (1947). From 1953 to 1959, he attended the Royal Belfast Academical Institution (more commonly known as Inst.), a grammar school in the centre of Belfast. He recalled studying Julius Caesar at school:I remember a film coming to the Ritz next door. Marlon Brando was in it. I can remember we were all taken round to see this film because we were studying it and so there was an opportunity sometimes to connect with what you were doing at school with what might have been made into a film. But most of the time we simply went to the cinema for entertainment and you perhaps didn't think about some issues as deeply as you should have.Greater amounts of disposable income and access to public transport led to attendance at the often larger, grander and more expensive city centre cinemas. For Norman Campbell, ‘that was a big adventure that didn't start really until we were teenagers’. While children’s matinees at the Apollo or the Curzon were easily affordable, utilising public transport to travel to city centre cinemas required greater expenditure. This also provided a means to impress the opposite sex: ‘when the big adventure started, and boys and girls started going out together, you tried to show off by taking the bus’. The Apollo, meanwhile, ‘wasn't the sort of place that you would have taken your girlfriend, had you been trying to show off to her what sort of a good guy you were’. In adolescence, many residents obtained informal weekend jobs to supplement money received from parents and this income was used often to visit more expensive city centre cinemas. Norman Campbell, meanwhile, recalled that in his teenage years ‘asking a girl out was asking a girl out to the cinema’ and that his parents increased his pocket money after they discovered he had started courting:Whenever my father became aware that I was going out with a girl… my pocket money suddenly increased from 2s 6d a week to 10s. Now, that was very kind and considerate. The thing that I never forgave him for was that the very thing that had prevented me from going out with girls a bit earlier was the fact that I couldn't afford it.The affluence and glamour presented in Hollywood films provided a fantasy space that contrasted with the austerity that residents of the Holyland experienced on a day-to-day basis. Recent studies by Mark Glancy and Adrian Horn highlight that the reception of American mass cultural products was mediated by local circumstances. While some participants contrasted the glamour of the city centre cinemas to those in their local area, for many female interviewees, the most noticeable contrast was between the local environment and depiction of America presented on screen. Selina Todd argues that English teenagers of the late 1950s and early 1960s ‘drew on popular culture to assert their desire for a more adventurous kind of life’. Rather than contrasting urban spaces ‘with wartime bomb sites or prewar slums’, they compared them with the American cities they observed in Hollywood films. This phenomenon was evident in the testimony of female residents of the Holyland. Anne Connolly recalled that she believed ‘everything was wonderful in America… I was a child just after the War, I mean anything American, they just had everything. You know, the style and the beautiful houses and it just seemed to be everybody had it all in America. In her study of female spectators in the 1940s and 1950s, Jackie Stacey emphasized the escapism, identification and consumption of Hollywood cinema and observed that memories of cinema-going often emphasized ‘the cinema as a physical space in which to escape the discomforts of their everyday lives’. Similarly, the respondents in this study contrasted their own domestic lives with those presented in American popular culture. Ann Gorman recalled that ‘you just wanted to go. You saw everywhere in Belfast looked so grey and so dismal and everywhere in Hollywood looked really fantastic. And then also, they would have shown you home and domestic life. As I say, the Doris Day movies, you know, what the kitchen was like then. We didn't have kitchens like that’. Dress was also an important factor and she was influenced by ‘the way they'd have rolled their dungaree jean trousers up and little things like that.The testimony also highlights how expressions of British national identity were received in everyday contexts. The playing of the national anthem at the end of the evening’s performance was a common practice in British cinemas. While it was less common in Irish nationalist areas of Belfast, it was standard procedure at both the Apollo and the Curzon. It is clear, however, that responses to the national anthem varied widely across Belfast and responses from former residents of the Holyland support the distinctiveness of this case study. For Holyland residents from a Protestant background, memories of the national anthem emphasized the rush to leave the cinema and defiance of this practice was linked to youthful rebellion or a desire to return home, rather than to disrespect for the monarchy or British institutions. My awareness coming from the Protestant side of the community was when the national anthem started, before the national anthem started, people left the cinema. Now, my understanding of it at the time, and it might well be na?ve, was that these were the ‘jack the lads’, the people who were too cool to stay for that sort of thing. It didn't ever occur to me that this might be the Catholic population.This was similar to many other locations in Britain. In 1952, Kine Weekly commented that ‘[w]e all know there is a scramble to beat the playing of the National Anthem by many patrons, but in most cases… this is not due to disloyalty as much as the sheer necessity of catching the last bus home’. These memories could also be influenced by the religious and cultural background of those recalling them. Anna Bryson investigated the ways that Protestants and Catholics presented their own past and observed ‘two distinct communal narratives, each carefully reinforced with reference to both the recent and distant past’. While many Protestants depicted the post-war period as ‘golden age of community relations… many Catholics opened their recollections of the post-war period with references to both public and private discrimination against their community’. This evidence gathered here, however, displays the distinctiveness of this case study as responses to the national anthem varied widely across Belfast. David McIlwaine, for instance grew up in a working-class area of west Belfast and recalled thatAt the Capitol everybody would have stood for the national anthem, no problem, till it finished, then everybody went home. But if you were in the Lycy [Lyceum], in right of the corner of New Lodge Road, Hallidays Road - really Catholic areas, only a quarter of them would have stood and the others would have very pointedly pushed past them to get out.THE DECLINE OF CINEMA-GOING AND THE CLOSURE OF THE APOLLOThe evidence presented here demonstrates the popularity of the cinema and the social role that it played in the social lives of young people throughout the period under review. Why then was cinema attendance in steep decline, did Northern Ireland display similar trends to the rest of the UK and what are the reasons for the closure of the Apollo in 1962? While the increase of television ownership in working-class households appears to be the most obvious answer, rising wages, increasingly comfortable living conditions and new forms of commercial leisure altered the way that people spent their time and money. In his study of cinema exhibition, Stuart Hanson highlights that television ownership, greater affluence, the growth of consumerism and new housing (often in different locations) all contributed to the decline in cinema attendance. He downplayed the extent of the causal relationship between cinema and television and, while the latter clearly affected the former, cinema attendance was also affected by the changing nature of capitalism and the emergence of the ‘affluent society’.Despite the fact that living conditions markedly increased in post-war Northern Ireland, it continued to display lower wage rates and higher unemployment than other parts of the United Kingdom. Though its populations was relatively small, these economic factors, combined with the late introduction of television and a separate system of Entertainments Duty (a tax levied by the Ministry of Finance on the sale of cinema tickets), provide an interesting counterpoint to other regions. While the decline in cinema attendance was a source of inquiry for contemporary statisticians and social scientists, their assessment excluded an analysis of Northern Ireland. As Barry Doyle highlights, the decline of cinema-going in Great Britain was geographically diverse and determined by a range of factors such as the timing of the introduction of television and the size, age and location of individual cinemas. Cinemas were more likely to close in areas where television was firmly established and in areas where BBC and commercial television was slow to emerge, cinema closures were a relatively rarity before the latter part of the 1950s. BBC arrived much later than in Northern Ireland than in many of the parts of the United Kingdom and did not broadcast in Northern Ireland until 1 May 1953, a month prior to the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II on 2 June. While the Coronation is rightly cited as a landmark event in the history of television broadcasting, the inability of working-class families to purchase televisions limited the impact of television in Belfast and in the year ending March 1954, only 10,353 television licenses were held. Gillian Macintosh highlights that, in Northern Ireland, the Coronation was experienced largely through radio broadcasts, local press reports and local events such as bonfires and street parties. The evidence gathered here suggests that, in working-class communities such as the Holyland, the Coronation was also an important cinematic event. Films were flown to Belfast on the evening of the event and ‘flashes of the coronation’ were screened at the Curzon. From 4 to 6 June they then exhibited a Coronation newsreel and, from the six days beginning 8 June, exhibited the twenty minute feature Coronation Day (1953), four times daily in support of their usual programme. Befitting its inferior status and close proximity to the Curzon, the Apollo only gained access to coronation footage from 8 June, which they screened for three times daily for three days in support of Who Goes There? (Dir. Anthony Kimmins, UK, 1952) and Range Land (Dir. Lambert Hillyer, US, 1949). Memories of the Coronation were often linked to the absence of television in households and early memories of television were often shared experiences with those friends or relatives able to obtain television sets. Even for the small number that had access to television, local cinemas provided the opportunity to review the footage: ‘my mother took me to see it on the Pathé News because they were the only ones showing it in colour. We only had black and white television. So we saw it, it was on television, and then the Pathé News showed it in colour’. The late introduction of television in Northern Ireland, alongside the inability of many working-class families to access television meant that the majority of Northern Ireland cinema closures occurred later than in many other parts of the United Kingdom. The closure of the Gaiety in 1956 was the first in Belfast since the Second World War and it was reported that the ‘falling off in admissions is not yet so noticeable here as across the water, but Ulster has yet to receive commercial television’. In December 1957, Kine Weekly reported that the construction of six cinemas in Northern Ireland since the end of the Second World War was ‘evidence of the faith of independent exhibitors in the prosperity of the industry in Northern Ireland’. It highlighted that three of these cinemas ‘are in areas on the Belfast outskirts, where large housing estates are growing up’. From 1951 to 1961 the population of Belfast’s outer suburbs increased from 103,976 to 162,570. The fact that they were all opened by independent exhibitors was key and the reporter suggested that it may be ‘that the big circuits are tied closely to plans which must take into account the health of the industry in the United Kingdom as a whole’.The ownership of the Apollo determined the timing of its closure. In January 1956, it was one of twelve Northern Ireland cinemas purchased for ?660,000 by Odeon (N.I) from local chain Curran Theatres. As Kevin Rockett highlights, the acquisition ‘brought Rank’s Northern Ireland cinema seat total from a low in 1949 of only 1,807 seats in one cinema to 25,037 across twenty-four cinemas’. In 1958, two Belfast cinemas closed: the Central and the Shankill Picturedrome. In Belfast, larger cinemas were coping better with the decline in admissions. The Apollo and the Curzon also experienced falls in attendance, though the former witnessed a more precipitous decline. Records of Entertainments Duty show that, in 1953, dutiable admissions at the Apollo and the Curzon were 275,000 and 572,000. By 1957, these figures had declined by 17.8 per cent to 226,000 and by 4.2 per cent to 548,000 respectively. Despite the acknowledgment of a clear drop in attendance, industry figures and the press believed that cinemas in Northern Ireland were in a healthier position than their British counterparts. Attendance was in decline, though fewer cinemas had closed and the drop in attendance was less severe. In February 1958, Belfast Telegraph journalist Gordon Duffield reported that cinema was ‘fighting a social revolution. It is one, however, that it is confident it can win’. Cinema owners believed that adults would continue to enjoy the sense of occasion and adolescents would always favour the cinema as ‘it provides an escape from parental authority and is a recognised phase in the conventional pattern of courtship’. Despite the programme of rationalisation that the Rank Organisation announced in 1958, Odeon (N.I.) stated ‘the circuit did not envisage the closing of any other cinemas in Northern Ireland’. To draw audiences back to the cinema, they renovated other inner-city and suburban cinemas such as the Regal and the Stadium. The Rank Organisation also purchased more city centre sites and, in October 1960, took control of the Grand Opera House and the Royal Hippodrome. In Great Britain, the introduction of commercial television, accompanied by the ability of working-class families to obtain television sets, signalled the end of cinema-going as the predominant commercial leisure activity. These developments occurred also in Northern Ireland, though later than in many parts of the United Kingdom. UTV, the ITV franchise in Northern Ireland, launched on 31 October 1959. Its programming emphasized entertainment and was more of a direct competitor to the cinema than the BBC, whose programming was often viewed as didactic and pedagogic. Sue Harper and Vincent Porter outline the generational differences in the decline of cinema attendance and observe that, as the 1950s progressed, the young working class stopped going to the cinema as regularly as they had, though they remained proportionately significant within the total audience. In Belfast, the oral history testimony suggests similar trends. Ann Gorman’s family, for instance, obtained their first television in 1958. She stated that this had a limited impact on her generation as ‘all we wanted to do was get out of the house’. Norman Campbell, furthermore, recalled that ‘courting couples still went at night times because, you know, you had to be quite far on in a friendship to be taking somebody home. But you could go to the cinema and be warm and dry’.The number of television licenses in Northern Ireland increased from 106,588 in 1959 to 142,780 in 1960, the greatest year-on-year increase during the period under review. While these figures suggest a direct correlation between the introduction of UTV and increased television ownership, they need to be treated with caution. Television was often a communal activity and license figures are likely to be inaccurate due to the high proportion of unlicensed sets reported in Northern Ireland. Regardless of the exact figures, it is clear that, from 1959, Belfast cinema exhibitors displayed a more pessimistic outlook. The 1959 arrival of UTV, increased television ownership and the refusal of Finance Minister Terence O’Neill to reduce cinema taxation on similar lines to Great Britain were all highlighted as points of concern. In October 1960, Belfast Telegraph reporter Martin Wallace highlighted that the decline in admissions impacted most upon smaller suburban cinemas as ‘too few films are being made to provide new “product”’. Wallace also foresaw the closure of the Apollo and observed that ‘[m]ost districts now have too many cinemas for the film-going population which remains’. He claimed that, as cinema attendances decline further, ‘it is quite possible that, in each district only the best cinema will survive — the one that is most comfortable, the one that has traditionally offered the best programmes’. In the early 1960s, the residents of the Holyland attended the cinema less frequently than they had done in the previous decade. There is evidence, however, that increasing wages and greater amounts of disposable income meant that they were prepared to spend more on individual cinema trips. The evidence here suggests that adolescents in the Holyland became more discerning in their film choices and Ann Gorman’s recollections show that the cinema was only one of the ever expanding leisure options available to teenagers: ‘You would have still gone out to the cinema, don't get me wrong… If a James Bond movie came along or something, you wouldn't have missed it. You have still made sure you went to the cinema to see it. There were still key movies you went to. But it wasn't your number one thing’.As one cinema-owner commented to the local press: ‘people don’t go to the pictures anymore… they go to see a particular film. The bread-and-butter programme doesn’t bring them in any more’. When the Apollo opened in 1933 it provided a new style of cinema for residents of the Holyland. Nevertheless, on 1 December 1962, following the screening of Its Trad, Dad (Dir. Richard Lester, 1962), it closed its doors for the final time. While the content of this youth-oriented musical comedy highlighted the changing nature of the cinema audience, the ‘sheer zest and invention’ of this ‘genuinely comic occasion’ was not enough to alter the fate of the Apollo. It was one of fourteen Belfast cinemas that closed between 1959 and 1962 as a result of increased television ownership, declining cinema admissions and wider social and economic developments. The managing director of Odeon (N.I.), R.V.C. Eveleigh, stated that ‘[t]he Apollo is a family theatre, but, as it stands at the moment, I do not consider it satisfactory for public use. The amenities in it are bad and, unfortunately, it is too small to lend itself to improvement’. The Belfast Telegraph reported that ‘the site was so confined that it would have required complete rebuilding to make it into the type of cinema Odeon operates’. ‘Appalled’ said the Northern Whig, ‘that is the reaction of Belfast people to the news that yet another cinemas, the Apollo, Ormeau Road is to join the list of closed cinemas in the city. When the curtain falls on Saturday night—without fuss or fanfare—the doors of the picture house that has served the public for a quarter of a century will shut for the last time’. Following the closure of the Apollo, no other Belfast cinemas closed until March 1966. Between March 1966 and January 1967, a further six cinemas closed down. Cinema closures continued after the start of the Troubles and seventeen cinemas closed between 1969 and 1977.CONCLUSIONThis article complements studies that highlight the place-specific nature of cinema attendance and emphasize the regional variation in leisure habits in the UK. The focus on a small community shows that many of the social practices of cinema-going were determined by local factors such as the range of cinema-going options available. By relating the experiences of this particular community to wider economic and social developments in the United Kingdom, this study contributes to a growing body of research that focuses on the localized nature of cinema-going in Britain and Ireland. The oral history testimony demonstrates that throughout the period under review, cinema-going remained a profoundly important social and cultural practice for residents of the Holyland. The young urban working-class were the most frequent cinema-goers and while they continued to attend the cinema throughout the period under review, the nature of their engagement with it changed considerably. While changes in cinema-going practices were related to the life-cycle, they also displayed a close connection to the geography of Belfast and the range of particular cinema-going options available in their local environment. Wider developments, such as the timing of the introduction of commercial television, meant that cinema-going declined later than in many other parts of the United Kingdom. The study of everyday leisure practices provides a means to uncover the social history of post-war Belfast before the outbreak of the Troubles and this evidence shows that the social lives of Belfast citizens altered significantly from the end of the Second World War to the early sixties. Kevin Bean has noted the tendency ‘to look at those times with the knowledge of what was to follow and frame our understanding of events since 1945 with the later conflict very much in mind’. This analysis of cinema-going in a working-class community offers a challenge to the dominant narratives of post-war Belfast and demonstrates that the period under review was not merely an antecedent to the Troubles. More studies of the social history of Northern Ireland before the outbreak of the Troubles will be needed to counter the prevailing narratives and to challenge existing stereotypes. This study reveals the important social function played by cinema in this locality and the benefits of utilising oral testimony to access the lived experience of this particular community in post-war Belfast. There is also scope to examine how the social memory of pre-Troubles Belfast is filtered through experiences of the Troubles as many of the participants explicitly compared the 1940s and 1950s to later events, even though the explicit focus of the interviews was on the period before the outbreak of the Troubles.NOTES ................
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