Local history

A poster advertsising the Hippodrome

After a huge amount of research, much of which involved scouring old copies of the Selby Times for cinema-related adverts, reviews and reports, Bill published a book on the subject, The Cinemas of Selby.

In his book, Bill takes the reader through Selby’s cinema history, and in doing so covers the advent of both World Wars, the latter of which saw cinema attendance and provision at a peak, as this extract shows:

“From March 1939 there were three houses of entertainment in Selby. Each in competition for audiences… At two performances per day, six days a week a massive 26,028 seats were available per week to the cinema-goers of Selby”

The cement-plastered Hippodrome

The Cinemas of Selby also reveals where exactly the area’s cinemas were before their demolition, as well as what they were before they were cinemas. In one section of the book, for example, we learn that the Central cinema, which stood on James Street, was in fact a skating rink until that particular ‘craze’ passed, at which point it was converted to an entertainment hall.

Of course, a book on the history of cinema wouldn’t be complete without an explanation of the sort of entertainment cinemas provided. Bill duly informs us that this ranged from short films and live acts by individual artists, to pantomimes and what appear to have been early soap operas:

“…what really caught the audiences’ imagination in those days were the drama films designed to keep them ‘on the edge of their seats’. These were often shown in weekly episodes with each episode ending with the hero or heroine in mortal peril from the villains in a ‘cliff-hanger’ scene; the audience returning next week to see the next episode”