Montague Pyke
King of Edwardian Cinema
On the section of Charing Cross road which leads from Cambridge Circus to Tottenham Court Road there’s a pub called the Montagu Pyke. In the 1980s it was, for a few years, the home of the legendary Marquee rock music venue. Artists and bands who played there include Kiss, who performed the opening concert when it relocated there in August 1988, Oasis, The Verve, PJ Harvey and heavy metal bands Pantera and Metallica.
But going back further in time, an entire century, to be precise, it was a cimema belonging to Montagu Pyke, the man who gives the pub its name, and who was known in the Edardian era as the King of Cinema.
Montagu Pyke
Born in June 1874 Pyke grew up in the St Pancras area of London. His family were relatively well off. His father and uncle ran a wholesale and retail jewelry business called Lionel & Alfred Pyke. The company was incredibly successful in Victorian London, and was best known for pioneering and manufacturing “Abyssinian Gold” jewelry - a trade name for high-quality imitation gold and faux-diamond that could pass for the real thing.
The family connections to the business of precious precious metals and gemstone brought about Pyke’s involvement in a South African Goldmine. When this failed to deliver the quick fortune he’d expected he returned to London. Working as a stockbroker’s clerk gave him an insight into the world of business and investment which would later hold him in good stead for his future as a pioneering cinema entrepanuer.
The Penny Slots
His first business venture came about in 1907 when his friend and associate Maurice Salis Schwabe, inherited £2,000 from the estate of his recenlty departed father, General George Salis-Schwabe.
Scwabe purchased a shop front property in Paris Street in the working class district of Waterloo, an area famed for its ale houses and music halls.
It was here they launched a penny slot arcade known as Gaiety Amusements Ltd, a colourful and brightly lit arcade where the locals could leave behind the daily grind of the factories and mills and exchange pennies for gaudy thrills.
Penny-in-the-slot machines, which included working models, strength testers, and fortune tellers were wildly pupular at the time. But it was the early moving image viewers (Mutoscopes or “What the Butler Saw” machines) which fired Pyke’s imagination and led him to a more ambitious enterprise.
The First Cinema
Around the time that he was involved in the slot machine business he visited ‘Hales Tours’ in Oxford Street, an early cinematic exhibition where short films of train journeys were shown to audiences seated inside a rocking railway carriage. Another cinematic excursion to the short lived ‘Fun Land’ on Edgware Road was enough to convince him that a foray into the slowly emerging world of cimema threatres was where his future lay.
With a loan of £100 pounds he established his company Recreations Ltd 1908 and opened his first Cimematograph Theatre the following year at 164 - 166 Edgeware Road, next door to where Funland had been.
Rivals
Although cinema was in its infancy Pyke’s new enterprise had it’s rivals, mainly from theatres which showed films as part of their regular programmes. Amongst these were the Alhambra and the Empire in Leceister Square, the Palace in Cambridge Circus, and the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly. Considered to be the first dedicated London Cinema the Daily Bioscope had opened in a shop front premisis at 27-28 Bishopsgate in 1906.
Pyke set out to compete with these rivals through a number of innovations. His theatres ran a continuous program from midday to midnight each day, targeting a predominently working class clientelle. He was one of the first to employ ushers dressed in crisp, military style uniforms. Managers would greet customers in the foyer. Standard tickets cost a penny, great value considering you could spend a whole day watching back to back short films. Reserved seating for the more well to do could purchased for thrupence and sixpence. In between reels Pyke’s ushers would spray a perfumed formula above the heads of the audience to keep the atmosphere pleasant.
Soon he had purchased the entrance area of an old horse drawn tram depot in Finsbury Park and opened his second location.
Cinematograph Act of 1909
When Pyke first began his cinema enterprise the fledgling industry was unregulated. However, the Cinematograph Act of 1909 brought with it legal requirements. Projectors had to be enclosed in a fire-resistant box or booth and any venue charging admission to show films had to be inspected and licensed by the local county council.
While these new requirements added costs to his business model, Pyke was intent on building an empire. Hot on the heels of Edgeware Road and Finsbury Park came Oxford Street and Shepherds Bush, followed by Ealing and Piccadilly. South of the Thames he opened High Street cinemas in Camberwell, Brixton, Balham, and Peckam.
With each venue registered as a stand alone business he had established London’s first cimema chain and sealed his reputation as the King of Edwardian Cinema.
Flicker Alley
Pyke’s empire was growing at the same time as the British film industry. Most fledgling film companies were located in Cecil Court just off Charing Cross Road, which became known as Flicke Alley. Projectors and screens could also be purchased here. There was even a shop which specialised in confectionary designed to be sold in cinema foyers.
Early horror films were frequently on the program at Pyke’s cinema’s.
The Duality of Man (1910), based on Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde was directed by Henry Irving’s son, Henry.
The Vampire (1913) was the first British vampire movie, with its female villain turning into a serpent when the heroes attempt to destroy her.
Cecil Hepworth, one of the film pioneers imortalised on the Flicker Alley memorial plaque, wrote and directed Doctor Trimball’s Verdict (1913) in which Doctor Trimball is haunted by the skeleton of his murdered rival. A year later he wrote and directed The Basalisk, an occult drama exploring hypnotism and mysticism.
Focussing the Universe
Despite the success of Pyke and others in bringing cinema into the public domain, “moving pictures” were still being widely dismissed as a cheap, vulgar gimmick for the working classes.
Pyke set out to challenge this in an acclaimed pamphlet which, to this day, is still used as a reference point by film historians. In Focussing the Universe Pyke mounted a passionate defense of the medium which was by then earning him a huge, by Edwardian standards, personal annual income of £10,000.
In he argued that cinema was a democratizing force that had the power to annihilate time and space, allowing working-class Londoners, who had never left their local area, to sit in comfort and take a grand tour of places they could never dream of visiting and events they had never witnessed
He said of this.
The visitor to the Picture Theatre can see the occurrence precisely as if he had been on the spot and witnessed it... visiting the five Continents, being, as it were, present at all the great occurrences therein.
He also argued that cinema was a powerful tool against prejudice, saying that by “focussing the universe” into a neighbourhood theatre cinema acted as an empathatic, revealing the shared humanity of people across the globe.
The Fall of an Empire
Pyke’s empire eventually came crashing down. In 1915- at the very flagship Cambridge Circus cinema that now bears his name as a pub—a ton of highly flammable nitrate waste film illegally stored in the basement caught fire. A young employee tragically died in the blaze. While Pyke was ultimately acquitted of manslaughter, the combination of the tragedy, legal battles, and financial mismanagement forced him into a spectacular bankruptcy from which he never truly recovered.
Grandsons
Montagu Pyke wrote an unpublished autobiography in the 1930s, chronicling his rise and fall. His grandson, Christopher Pyke, inherited and preserved this manusccript and did extensive research to verify his grandfather’s claims (for exampe his stock market gambling, the gold mining, and the exact timeline of his 16 cinemas).
His other grandson, Michael Crawford, became a huge star in his own right, appearing in the Hollywood adaptation of Hello, Dolly alongside Barbara Steisand, starring in the iconic 1970’s British sitcom Some Mother’s Do Have Them’ and taking the lead in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera.
History of Horror Guided Walk
If you’d like to find out more about early horror movies and their theatrical roots, including a stop in Flicker Alley my next History of Horror Guided Walk is scheduled for August 13th at 6pm. Other dates are available later in the year. Details on the link below.