Granada Cinema Greenwich - Gracie Fields and what Iris saw.

 

I started off writing this with totally different idea of what it was going to be about.  I thought I would begin with asking who people thought was the most popular female singer of the 20^th century?  There are lots of lists on the net but all of them only list singers who were post 1960.  Come on, there has to be someone earlier than Dusty?

I then began to look at the crossroads at the bottom of what is now Vanburgh Hill and Blackwall Lane as they intersect the Woolwich Road. Both  of those roads have had several different names.  And I thought - ‘I’ll start there’.

The earliest map we have of Greenwich is Travers 1697 plan which shows the Woolwich Road with ‘Green Lane’ running north from it but there is nothing we could recognise as Vanburgh Hill.  However it does, most importantly, show ‘Conduit 9’ - north of Woolwich Road and West of the future Vanbrugh Hill.  I wrote quite a bit about this conduit head in an article a few weeks ago and I’m sorry if I’m repeating myself here but I think it’s an interesting subject and hopefully this has got a different spin on it from the previous article.

Vanburgh Hill‘s earliest name was ‘Conduit Lane’.  .Do the residents of 103- 127 Vanbrugh Hill have any record of their houses being called ‘Conduit Terrace’?   In 1851 they were advertised as having  “two good bedrooms, two parlours,  kitchen, small flower gardens in front, enclosed with ornamental iron palisading, and good garden in the rear”. 

The conduit itself is now forgotten.  Was it a source of fresh water to be used by local people or was it just a derelict structure?. When in the course was it removed and who by?  Did it remain as a heap of unidentified stones for many years?  Is it possible some of those stones remained in somebody’s back garden?

Travers explained that ‘Conduit 9’  was the remains of the Arundel Conduit which brought water down the hillside from Blackheath to Crown properties on Ballast Quay ‘in earthen pipes now destroyed’.

The conduit was on the south west corner of the crossroads  Diagonally opposite on the north east is the Ship and Billet pub, aka ‘Thai Tiger’. It stands on a plot where surrounding land was owned, as now, by the Hatcliffe charity. Although even in 1697 the pub site appears to be separate.

Perhaps we should look at this pub which has been on that corner site for over 150 years. For most of the time it was called The Ship and Billet’. There are press reports of it from the 1840s but I guess it is very much older than that - the date could be established from the Justices Minutes which will record its licencing,  but they are archive material, unavailable to me .   

The pub seems to have been a local entertainment centre and behind it was a big garden on the site now covered by the Greenwich Town Social Club. There are some jolly Victorian pictures of people socialising in the grounds. After that the pub survived as a destination on bus blinds and as a local landmark.  As pubs began to close in the 1980s it went into other ownership and into a silly names mode. It eventually closed following a visit from the Councils licencing staff which was dramatically described  by Mr. 853 blogger  about how it was being run by various drunken customers, the landlord having vanished.

On the opposite side of Woolwich Road – thr south east corner -  where the baths and library now stand, most people will remember Greenwich District Hospital?  It was built on the site of the Greenwich Union Workhouse of 1834. Which was on “a pull of upland lying on the south side of the highway  ... called by the name of Catts Brains’.    The building was extended in 1875 and its medical sections greatly increased.  The workhouse and its infirmary was in some ways a centre for East Greenwich with space for public and official meetings as well as providing an infirmary which treated members of the public as well as inmates

In 1818 Greenwich and Woolwich Lower Road Turnpike Trust was set up to manage the main road from the Arsenal gates to Greenwich.  As part of this legislation a toll gate was set up at the crossroads and called ’Greenwich Gate. This was on a site in the centre of the crossroads and marked on a slightly earlier map as ‘pound’ – that is a secure enclosure where stray animals could be held.  It doesn’t look to be over large and no doubt they weren’t expecting much more than a single stray sheep or pig.  In 1828 there was a toll house "on the west side of the southern extremity of Marsh Lane, and also near to the northern extremity of the lane bounding the west side of the Greenwich Union Workhouse, and commonly called Love Lane".  I am not aware of any pictures or indeed any information about this toll gate and toll house. There are smatterings of news stories about various disputes on access here which only show that it was staffed.

On the site adjacent to the conduit head things were changing.. Aas I mentioned in my earlier article a house was built there in 1830 - Conduit House – and ‘Vale cottage ‘or ‘Hyde vale cottage. The cottage was the home of Joshua Taylor Beale and later his son John Taylor Beale was in Conduit House before he moved to Westcombe Park.  I have written elsewhere about the Beales and hopefully I will one day do a 'proper' article. Joshua had an engineering works adjacent to the Enderby site on the Peninsula where he built steam cars and other items. Most important was his development of the ’exhauster’ as an adaption of his rotary steam engine design and which became a must have item in gas works. After his death his son John sold the exhauster patent to Donkin's in Bermondsey, later Chesterfield. Who were still producing equipment based on a modified version of it in the 1960s.

Conduit House later became a clinic for the Metropolitan Borough of Greenwich and ended its days as Conduit House Club for the Rechabite Order.

The final site to note has to be the cinema on this south west corner of he crossroads  was built on the footprint of Conduit House. I had intended initially to write this article about the cinema only but there is so much written already about it that there is very little I can add.  There are a number of websites including the ever reliable Cinema Treasures https://cinematreasures.org/theaters/3781. There is a particularly interesting writer of the site by Rob Powell.. https://www.greenwich.co.uk/magazine/05212-greenwich-granada-plaza-234-trafalgar/

THz Greenwich Granada  it is only too easily confused with the Woolwich Granada and many sources call the Woolwich buikding ‘Greenwich Granada’ because it’s in the borough of Greenwich. The Woolwich Granada is a very important cinema and I’m  afraid our Greenwich Granada was a lot less glamorous .

Rob explains that The Granada Theatre chain was ‘experiencing incredible growth in the 1930s' Our Geeenwich cinema dates from  1937. It could seat 1900 and was designed by C. Howard Crane, with the interior designed by Theodore Komisarjevsky although  it was not one of his trademark dramatic interiors.   In fact it was rather conventional.  I ought to admit that I never saw the inside of it when it was functioning as a cinema  but I understand  it was the “plainest of the purpose built Granada Theatre chain.”

There was of course a Mighty Wurlitzer organ, able to “command a world of music, from a full symphony orchestra to a Chinese tom-tom”. Web sites say that it was recovered when the building closed and was taken to Cornwall and then rescued again by enthusiasts  to be restored.  Does anyone know what has happened to it?.

Inevitably it became a bingo hall from 1963 until the 1980s and then became a bad news night club.- Stars  - locally known as ’Stabs’. .

In 1996 it was closed gutted and thirty-nine flats inside. Rob Powell's article includes some great pictures taken by Mr. 853 of the site when it was just a skeleton within four walls and no roof.  When I was a councillor for the area I remember being told about the building by one of our officers from the noise team who said that because it was built as a theatre there were all sorts of special structures within the walls which were to do with noise containment and  ventilation. These would only be understood by a specialist on the subject.

So the flats are still there and it is now basically an apartment block .  As part of my work as a councillor I sometimes went in  to meet residents. I’ve never seen a picture of the interior and I’m unable to even find a description of it on line but I remember it very vividly.  It consists of flats around an atrium which had in it four enormous sculptures of palm trees made entirely out of tin cans.  It was a very very dramatic interior – are they still there and is it still like that?

At the beginning of this article I asked about the most popular female singer of the 20^th century . I had looked at a lot of websites which all seemed to think there was no form of popular musical life before the 1960s.  But the Greenwich Granada was opened by a big star of the 1930s.

I’ve recently been reading Iris Bryce’s memories of her childhood in 1930s Greenwich.  Like many other local children Iris was all excitement to see the star who was to open the new cinema. Unfortunately she had an accident in the kitchen so her Mum would not allow her to go out and sent her to bed.   

So Iris tiptoed into the front bedroom and climbed on a chair to look out of the window “but all I could see were roof tops .... then soaring over them I heard Gracie start to sing ‘Sally’.  The words were clear and pure and to my astonishment I felt tears pouring down my face...  I hadn’t missed the opening after all”..  Outside were crowds of many hundreds – estimated at up to 10,000 - people who had  come and see ‘Our Gracie ‘.She was  piped into the cinema  by the Dagenham Girl Pipers and went straight up to a roof balcony to perform ‘Sing as we go’  and’ Sally’.

In the past few days I have asked everybody I have encountered what they know about Gracie Fields. No one under 60 had any idea who she was. The 10,000 people who turned out to see her in 1936 in Trafalgar Road were just a tiny fraction in the numbers of her fans nationally.

It was a great day for East Greenwich.