User:Dartmouthbughunter/CinemasOfDartmouth

Cinemas of Dartmouth, Devon

Dartmouth is a town in Devon in South West England, set on the banks of the estuary of the River Dart, which is a long narrow tidal ria that runs inland as far as Totnes.

Long before The Flavel Arts Centre was built, the town had two small local theatres that showed films.

Palladium Electric Theatre
The Palladium Electric Theatre in Hanover Street, (Kelly's Directory of Devon,1914), the proprietors of which are listed as the Palladium Picture Co. (Dartmouth) Ltd. Hanover Street was renamed Anzac Street in 1917. By the 1923 publication of Kelly's Directory of Devon, the Palladium Electric Theatre is no longer listed.

Cinedrome Electric Theatre
The Cinedrome Electric Theatre, was located on the site of the current Dartmouth Clinic at Zion Place, Mayor's Avenue, and is first listed in Kelly's Directory of Devon in 1923; by 1939 it was listed simply as the Cinedrome. It had 600 seats, and occasional variety was performed on the 20 feet deep stage.

It is thought that the cinema retained the Cinedrome name until at least 1944.

By 1947 the name had been changed to The Maxime and the cinema is listed in the Kinematograph Year Book (1949-1959) as being operated by Cornell Cinemas (Port Talbot) Ltd.

Current research suggests that Cornell Cinemas may have been owned by Maxwell Corne who also owned or operated a number of other cinemas in Wales and the South West of England during the 1940s and 1950s, including the Maxime in Somerset, which is now known as The Curzon Community Cinema.

The White brothers (K.D. and R.G. White) of Newton Abbot took over the lease on the Dartmouth cinema in the mid-1960s after their lease on the 'The Romany' cinema in Totnes came to an end. The Romany Theatre was the last cinema to operate in Totnes, housed in the Temperance Hall from 25th June 1951 until October 1964; the hall was later converted into the town library.

The White brothers removed the Maxime name from the Dartmouth cinema and traded it simply as The Cinema (as listed in the 1968 Kine & TV Year Book).

They later sold what remained of the lease for the Dartmouth Cinema on to Mr C.C.W. 'Charles' Scott, of Scott Cinemas, in the early 1970s.

''Mr Scott also leased several other cinemas in Devon including the Savoy Cinema in Exmouth from 1962 until it closed in 1983 to became an amusement arcade. In 1987 East Devon District Council purchased the building and spent £200,000 on repairs before asking Peter Hoare of Scott Cinemas to re-open the cinema, opening on 24th July with 'The Living Daylights' and 'Superman IV'. The Grand in Exmouth was also leased by Scott Cinemas in 1962/3 and renamed the Royal, it closed in 1979 and was demolished in 1983.''

After taking over the lease on the Dartmouth cinema, Charles Scott asked for suggestions for a name for the cinema and the most popular suggestion was Royalty, although many people continued to refer to it just as "the cinema".

The cinema, after being closed for refurbishment, reopened in April 1973 as the Royalty and continued to be run by Scott Cinemas until it closed in the late 1980s.



[Photograph shows the ticket booth and concession stand of the Royalty, 1975]

In 1984 as the time neared when the lease was due for renewal the District Council, who wished to sell the land on which the cinema stood, informed Mr Scott of their intention to raise the cost of the new lease from the existing £700 p.a. to £7700. This huge increase, coupled with the fact that the building was also in dire need of further refurbishment and a new boiler, made it impossible for the cinema to be run as a going concern.

A large scale protest was raised by the people of Dartmouth, including a petition, and the Local Council even tried to buy the land in an effort to keep the cinema open. Sadly, after several years of protests and attempts at negotiation, the District Council still would not yield on the matter and the cinema closed sometime after the summer of 1986 [awaiting confirmation of exact date of closure] and was then demolished to make way for the new health clinic. When the cinema closed the Council promised to assist and do all they could to acquire and alter the redundant Methodist Church in the market square for conversion to a small cinema but sadly this came to nothing and the town was without a cinema for almost twenty years until one was housed in the newly built Flavel Arts Centre, which opened in January 2005.

Equipment and Interior
The projection room of the Dartmouth cinema was fitted with BTH (British Thompson-Houston) projection and sound equipment dating from the mid to late 1930s, which was adapted/upgraded to show CinemaScope films in the mid-1950s by a well know firm of cinema suppliers, a Rank subsidiary called G.B. Kalee Limited. This job was overseen by the late Mr Reg Evans, from Cowbridge in S.Wales, who covered Wales and the South-West of England for Kalee. Mr Evans also quoted for and got the job of supplying and fitting new seats and draperies when the cinema was next refurbished in the early 1970s; the projection and sound equipment was replaced with equipment from Kalee as part of this refurbishment.

After the cinema closed both the projectors and the screen and curtains were put into storage and ultimately used in the Savoy Cinema in Exmouth. The curtains remain in use to this day, but the screen and projectors were replaced in recent years.

Internal Links

 * Scott Cinemas
 * Dartmouth, Devon