Middlesbrough Remembered
The Streets
The House
Cooper Common
Excuse me but where is Middlesbrough?
Walk from North Ormesby
Sources and Resources
Only a Short Time in History
Memories of Parliament Road
Welford Street
Football on the Roof
St Patrick's Church
The Tees (Newport) Bridge
Don't Mention the War?
Laws Street Block
Dorman Museum
Albert Park and 'Owld 'Enry
An Ayresome Childhood
Street Games
The Shops
St Paul's School
Victoria St/Greta St Now
Newport School
The 'New' Newport School
Archibald Schools
Newport Bombing 15 April 1942
Closing of St Paul's School
Ayresome School
More Memories of Parliament Rd.
Round and About King George Street
Cinemas
Tees Poem
Middlesbrough Welsh
Memories of Duncombe Street
Honeymans of Cannon Street
Marilyn's Memories
Sun Sea & Sand
Fox Heads Page 1
Why DOGGY Town??
Fox Heads Page 2
Memories of St Paul's
Links for Newport, Middlesbrough
Guestbook
Mail Form
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Foreword
These are my memories of the Middlesbrough cinemas I visited. The demolition of many of these took place in the 1960s when I was away in the Midlands so I’m a bit hazy about what happened to the sites..i.e. whether they were cleared, and a new building erected, or whether the existing cinema building was simply adapted to a new use. If you know please use the email form 1. to correct me 2. To contribute your memories of the cinemas. |
Newport Boys Club
| The first experience I remember of the ‘Pictures’ was Friday evening visits to the Newport Boys’ Club on the corner of Parliament Street and Newport Road. These were my only visits to the Club perhaps I was not old enough to be a member.( However I do remember one time when my classroom in St Paul’s was being repaired or decorated or something .we used a room in the club for a week).But..anyway on Friday evenings there was a moving picture show open to all ages for seven pence which included a penny raffle ticket. What the prizes were I cannot remember as I never won or ever remember any of my friends winning |  |
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The dark building immediately in the right foreground is the Boy's Club. This photo was taken decades before my time but nothing had changed other than the type of traffic on Newport Road. You can just make out two men talking at the end of Parliament St. On the other side of Newport Rd the big OXO advert is on the end of Unthank St.In the distance you can see the steeple of St Paul's Church. |
Black & White Magic
The films were black and white and silent mainly Laurel & Hardy and Charlie Chaplin. Mostly we sat on the bare planked floor. If we were lucky we might grab a seat on one of the few benches which were put out. To me it was just magic and instilled in me a love of Laurel and Hardy which I’ve never lost. We called them ‘Fatty and Skinny’
For some reason I always remember films in the Newport Boys Club when I hear the song ‘Walking My Baby Back Home’ It must have been current at the time because I can remember us singing it when walking back wondering at the line ‘that’s when I get her powder all over my vest’. . Did he take his shirt off?( It was only as an adult I found out in American a vest is a waistcoat not an undershirt.)
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ABC Minor
From the Friday evening sessions at the Boys' Club I ‘graduated’ to the Saturday morning ABC Minors in the Elite on the corner of Borough Rd and Linthorpe Rd. This was a proper cinema with proper seats. It was actually a penny cheaper than the Boys’ Club at sixpence. The atmosphere was fantastic, hundreds of kids cheering the heroes and booing the villains. The films I remember the best were the two ‘Rodgers’...Buck Rodgers and . Roy Rodgers . There was also ... Hop-a-long Cassidy . The cinema manager or someone used to introduce the session. I remember at one time there was a prize for anyone who found a paper clip under their seat. If there had been a paper clip under any of the seats of the group I was with we wouldn’t have found it because we had no idea what a paper clip was. We were all looking for something made out of paper! Many of the films were serials and each episode always finished with the hero in a precarious situation and you had to go the next week to see if he got out of it.
At was at the Elite, (during a normal session not the minors) that I saw the Wizard of Oz.. I was taken by an older cousin but, for some reason, had to walk back home on my own. The streets were dark and I had found the Wicked Witch of the West really frightening and those flying monkeys even more so and I imagined them swooping down over Union Street and carrying me off!
The Elite had been opened in 1923 on the site of a former Baptist Church. (Several of Middlesbrough's cinemas had taken over church sites in fact). Associated British Cinemas i.e. ABC acquired it in 1935 and I think, thereafter, its official name was the ABC but we always knew it as The Elite . It was one of the last Middlesbrough cinemas to survive not closing until 1983.
The building was re-opened as a bingo hall. In 1996 it became the Crown Public House which it still is now (2007). The facade of the building remains exactly as I remember it from its cinema days
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The Regent
Although the Regent on Parliament Rd was our nearest cinema I can only really remember going there once. My father, on one of his rare visits home from contract work, took my sisters and I to see Peter Pan which we loved. The Regent was quite a modern cinema having opened in 1937.
Bill Smart writing in More Memories of Parliament Rd on this website remembers that this cinema too was built on a former church site, namely St James Church where he was a choirboy and also a member of the Boys Brigade. This was a wooden building surrounded by corrugated sheeting.( On demolition a new church was built on Crescent Rd.)
Marguerite writing about Parliament Rd remembers the Regent being used for another purpose in the war.
"The Regent was on the next block to the Westminster pub, which was between Surrey St, and Essex St, It was in the Regent Cinema that an appeal was shown for women to join the ATS and thus release a soldier for active service, This fired my imagination and at the age of 15 forged my parents signature and was soon in the Forces."
The Regent was closed in 1961 and became a supermarket. I believe it has had several changes of ownership since then within the retail trade. Now (2007) it is a Tesco "convenience store".
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The Pav
I stated the Regent was my nearest cinema although all the local history sources state that the Pavilion (Pav) ,on Newport Rd. was a cinema until 1960. Perhaps it was still licensed as a cinema until its change of use to a nightclub in that year but I'm quite convinced it ceased to be an operating cinema long before that.
In September 1951 I moved up from the infant department of St Paul's school to the junior department which meant I then had to use the Greta St entrance. My daily route to Greta Street was along Annie Street which ran round the back of the Pav. I only remember it as a shuttered building. Indeed it was considered semi-derelict and in school we were given dire warnings about not going into it as it was dangerous."It was soon to be knocked down". (As I write on another page ironically it is still there and everything around it has been knocked down) |  |
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Memories of the Pav
My Mam and others older than me have fond memeories of the Pav. Everyone talks of the Penny Push This was the rush to get in once the doors were opened. My Mam reckons that being so small she was often carried in as if in a wave without her feet touching the ground.
Once in the cheap penny seats at the back kids would try to scramble to the better seats at the frontand then even sneak to the expensive seats upstairs. Keeping order, apparently, was the Commissionaire "Sergeant" Kettlewell..
One time when my Mam was taken to the more expensive seats 'on a date' she was greeted with a chorus from below "What are you doing up there? Have you been taking the bottles back?" . Her anger with the barracking youths wasn't at all assuaged when she saw it was her brother Edwin leading the chorus! |  |
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