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Robert Paul with his camera |
The man behind the birth of British film
A chance meeting turned Robert Paul into the pioneer of UK movies, writes Dan Carrier
WHEN two dodgy Victorian businessmen hatched a plan to rip off one of the world’s leading scientists, a young graduate from the City and Guilds Finsbury Technical College called Robert Paul was the man they turned to for help.
Thomas Edison, the man who gave the world the light bulb, had also invented a camera that took moving pictures and a projector that shone the footage on to a big screen. But he had forgotten to register a patent for his new gadget in Britain. So if our two unscrupulous entrepreneurs could only get one made for themselves, they would be quids in.
Robert Paul busy in his Hatton Garden store had the air of a madcap inventor and he was just the engineering expert to make a copy of Edison’s new device.
And the chance meeting with the entrepreneurs led to Paul, an electrical engineer, being credited as the man who brought cinema to Britain.
Birkbeck College’s Professor Ian Christie is writing Paul’s biography – a remarkable story of a man whose foresight and imagination nurtured the film industry in its infancy.
Paul, born in Highbury in 1869, was fascinated by Edison’s work. But it was pure chance he was present at the birth of an industry.
Professor Christie explains: “Paul set up an electrical shop and instrument makers in Hatton Garden in 1891, and he was brought Kinetoscopes – early cameras – by two businessmen who realised their inventor, Thomas Edison, had failed to register a patent in England and decided to take advantage of this.
“Paul was the first person in the country to make moving picture and projection equipment. He manufactured them for about a year and then realised he could not sell projectors unless he could provide films. So he started making them.”
He enlisted the help of a photographer Birt Acres and the pair shot their first footage February 1895, filming footage of a friend called Henry Short outside his home in Barnet.
It was the first film to be shot and shown in Britain.
“He was a real pioneer,” Prof Christie says.
He soon set his mind to designing other types of camera equipment, including ‘Animatagraph’ and the ‘Theatrograph’ – prized objects, on permanent display in the Science Museum.
Paul was at the front of a new wave of engineers who spearheaded a raft of technological advances.
“You can’t help be struck by the similarities with Silicon Valley in the 1970s and 1980s. He held lots of patents for his different projects he worked on,” says Prof Christie.
To make his projection business profitable, he had to combine a number of disciplines. Not only was he involved in making precise and delicate machinery – cameras, film and projectors – he was also involved in scripting the films, getting the actors and directing them before editing their attempts.
Then he had to distribute the film, act as a showman to whip up interest in this new form of entertainment. And to do so, he had to make a wide range of different films.
“He set out to make the widest possible variety of movies to show,” Prof Christie says.
The first films included such gems as footage of a boxing kangaroo, and shots of a dramatic storm off the south coast called Waves at Dover.
He also realised he could use his invention to make the first newsreels: he took his cameras to the celebrations of Queen Victoria’s Jubilee, recorded the Oxford-Cambridge boat race and then the event which was to make his name, his filming of 1896 Derby at Epsom – a race which he screened the following day at two different London Music Halls much to the astonishment of the audience. His equipment was even used to shoot footage of the Boer War.
Prof Christie has managed to find and restore around 70 of the 1,000 films Paul made. Among them are works of fiction. “He gathered a circle of accomplished actors and made films with titles such as Arrest of a Pickpocket and Footpads, about street robbery. It is well made and they a real action flicks.”
His films attracted the attention of sci-fi pioneer HG Wells.
Professor Christie said: “He decided to make a film called The Time Traveller – he had read HG Wells’s book the Time Machine. He contacted Wells, who was living in Hampstead, and asked him to visit him in Hatton Garden. Wells had seen his films very early on and that is why they became friends and discussed the use of special effects for the film.
“They were both bright men and keen to collaborate, but both were so busy it did not happen.”
For the historian, Paul’s footage provides a picture of London at the turn of the previous century.
“He shot a lot of his films in central London,” reveals Professor Christie.
“He once mounted a camera on a car and then drove it through Piccadilly – he speeded it up, and called it a Runaway Motor Vehicle.”
This allowed him to indulge in another passion – he was a keen motorist.
Prof Christie says: ”He lived in Holborn and he would drive around the city. He had a film studio from 1899 in Muswell Hill and he would drive to and fro. He was done for speeding in 1906, and was accused of going 30 miles per hour, but he fought the charge, saying it was impossible as his car wouldn’t go that fast.”
After 10 years in the industry, his one-man film studio decided it was time for a curtain call.
Professor Christie says: “He was heavily involved – he had set up a manufacturers’ association and he even ran training courses for projectionists.
“But when it got to 1907 he looked at how the industry was developing and realised he either had to move his business on to a another level to compete, or quit: he could not keep up with the big companies coming in, so he decided to leave the film industry.
“It was the right decision and saved his business from going bankrupt.”
After World War I, he became involved in medicine, designing and building an iron lung for people with respiratory illnesses. When he died in 1943, he left £100,000 in shares with the proviso they were used to “fund instruments of an unusual nature to aid physical research”.
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