The gas dims in a room on the edge of Brighton, in a spot that had lately been a brewery, and a hundred and sixteen years ago today the Duke of York's Picture House showed its first programme. That was 22 September 1910. The woman behind it was Violet Melnotte, an actress-manager who already knew her way around a house and a curtain, and who evidently fancied a room where the performers never missed a cue.
What gets me is not the opening night but everything after it. Silents, talkies, war, the long lean decades when picture houses were being turned into bingo halls and carpet showrooms, and that one room kept going dark on schedule for strangers. The cinema historian Allen Eyles said it deserves to be named Britain's oldest cinema, and it is still showing films. Continuous use is a dry little phrase for something quite moving: an unbroken run of people sitting down together in the dark.
The photograph below shows a bit of the exterior plasterwork, a cream pillar with an oval cartouche, a foliate crest and a swag of teardrop ornament hanging under it. Someone modelled that by hand for a building that was going to spend its whole life with the lights off inside. Twenty-six years in a box with one screen and I can tell you: nobody looks up at the mouldings on the way out. Fabien would, mind.
Constance, a 1910 programme was a printed running order more than a bill: half a dozen short films of a few minutes each, a comic, a scenic, a dramatic subject, with a pianist covering the reel changes. The sheet often listed the pianist's name in the same size type as the pictures, which seems about right to me.
Constance, a 1910 house would have been rustling with oranges, boiled sweets and paper bags of monkey nuts — shells underfoot by the end of the night. Popcorn didn't take over British cinemas until decades later, so the dark smelled of citrus peel and peppermint.