Happy days spent at picture house

SOME of the happiest days of my youth were spent in “The Dog End” of a draughty cinema in the tiny pit village of Burnopfield, seven miles from the Tyne.

The Grand Picture House, to give it its full title, was a magnet for miners’ families between the war years – 1939 to 1945 – and although Adolf tried hard to blow the Tyne munitions factories sky high, the Grand, slightly removed, managed to survive Hitler’s deadly German bombing raids.

The Grand is gone now, along with the surrounding pits, but it was a terrific era while it lasted. All the box office hits of the war years – UK and US – made their way to the Grand; it was always packed.

It was a tanner in the Dog End – a row of tough wooden benches; 10p in the stalls – plusher seats – and an inflated one shilling and three pence in the Gods upstairs if you could afford it. A lot of my early education (although I didn’t know it at the time) came from watching those movies and the memories are still as fresh today as they were then.

Nearly 70 years ago there were queues on Burnopfield front street 600 yards long to see The Quiet Man, starring John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara and they stretched from the cinema entrance along past the Co-Op butchers into the next street. Casablanca, thanks to Bogart and Bergman, was a sell out.

It’s a Wonderful Life reminded miners how lucky they were to be alive. Brief Encounter and The Third Man had us on the edge of our seats; She Wore a Yellow Ribbon delighted the female audience and kids near the screen at the front were often riddled with flying bullets during a war propaganda movie.

There was no shortage of comedy with the Three Stooges knocking hell out of each other and The Bowery Boys’ accents almost as difficult to understand as local Geordie dialect. Disney cartoons wowed the kids.

The cinema was run on honest commercial lines by the Trotter family who made thousands with two daughters patrolling the aisles backwards selling crisps and ice creams. Oh, happy days.

Geordie Campbell Ex-Grand afficionado