‘Bert, The Picture Man’ – He Took The Silent Movies To West Norfolk – Looks Back On A Golden Age

A Memory of Hunstanton.

I found this cutting from the Lynn News & Advertiser, Friday, January 12, 1968 and thought it might be of interest to others.

IF ANYONE COULD BE CALLED A MAN OF MANY PARTS THEN SURELY MR. BERT WELLS, OF 20 SEAGATE ROAD, HUNSTANTON, IS SUCH A MAN

He has just retired at the age of 65, after 21 years as an electrician with Eastern Electricity.

He holds a certificate from the R.S.P.C.A. in appreciation of “his humane assistance and care given to animals in distress over 20 years in the Hunstanton auxiliary branch.”

He is also the proud possessor of a medal marking 22 years in the fire service, and during the summer season he can sometimes be seen helping out at the seafront shellfish stall run by his wife, May.

Mr Wells was born in a workhouse, his parents being master and matron of a workhouse in Northamptonshire at the time. As a lad of 13, he worked for a time in a Birmingham factory helping to make electrical appliances.

VARIED LIFE

But during a very varied life, there is a period of 15-years, from 1924 to 1929, when Bert Wells really was a name to conjure with. It was he who introduced the dashing Douglas Fairbanks, the romantic Rudolph Valentino, and “everybody’s sweetheart”, Mary Pickford to hundreds of people in the villages of West Norfolk.

“Bert, the Picture Man” was what they called him then, and even now, he is still remembered by those who made up his appreciative audiences at Snettisham (Mondays), Docking (Tuesdays), Dersingham (Wednesdays), Heacham (Fridays) and Hunstanton (Saturdays).

Thursday was a rest day, unless he was showing films at Holt, West Newton, Thornham, or anywhere else where his services were required, which was pretty often.

TRAINING

Bert – to keep on calling him Mr. Wells would spoil the story – had some early training as an electrician, and in 1921, when his parents gave up running workhouses and moved to Hunstanton to run a boarding house instead, he looked around for a job in which his electrical knowledge might come in handy.

It so happened that an Italian, whose name was something like Bernasconi, started showing silent films at a little wooden-built cinema called “The Mikado” which was on a site occupied by the shops and car-park adjoining the Refreshment Rooms on the Hunstanton seafront. This was in 1922.
In 1923, Mr Bernasconi left the town, and Bert Wells decided to rent the cinema on a short lease from the owner, a Mr. Scott. Bert had a whole season at the cinema – it held about 200 people when full – but the following year Mr. Scott leased the property to a Yorkshire man.

The new arrangement did not last long, for early that season 1924, fire broke out in a nearby building and swept through “The Mikado”, completely destroying it.

No one was hurt and no one ever discovered how the fire started.

CINEMA

It was about this time that Bert decided to take the cinema to the people instead of the other way around. His mother chipped in with £80 with which Bert bought a second-hand lorry – an essential piece of equipment for a mobile cinema in those days.

Not only did Bert have to provide all his own film equipment, he had to supply his own electricity as well, and that meant taking two electric generators with him wherever he went.

“None of the villages had electricity in those days,” he recalls. “Come to that, Hunstanton did not have any either.”

The admission prices – nearly all the shows were in the village halls – 6d., 9d. and 1s. for adults, children 3d. For that they got the news, an eight-reel feature film, a two-reel short comedy and - of course – the inevitable serial.

“No one ever missed the serial if they could help it,” said the man who, at that time, was only 22 years of age and one of the youngest exhibitors in the country. “I remember, particularly the serials ‘Hurricane Hutch’ and ‘The Red Rider’ but, of course, the greatest of them all, to my mind was ‘Dr Fu Manchu’.”

MORE ACTION

Bert has no doubts as to the entertainment value of the old silent films. He says “They had more action in 10 minutes than some of these modern films have in two or three hours.”

There was quite a bit of audience participation too, with the hero cheered and the villain booed. Says Bert: “I remember one occasion when I got into a bit of trouble. The kids at one show at Hunstanton not only booed the villain, but threw pomegranate seeds at him as well. I got a letter from the council later complaining about the state of the floor.”

It was not very long before Bert, and his team became something of an institution. On one occasion at West Newton, he had the Norwegian Royal Family in the audience.

“They were staying at Appleton House at the time,” Bert recalls: “It was a completely informal visit and they just left with the audience at the end of the show.”

VOLUNTEERS

Helping Bert was his wife, who acted as cashier, his brother-in-law, Bob Large, who worked the projector, and, of course, the pianist, someone like Bert Nelson or Harry Willoughby. But on one occasion there was no pianist and a member of the audience volunteered to stand in.

Part way through the show, Bert went to have a word with the pianist. “I am just going to play ‘In a Monastery Garden’,” said the stand-in. Says Bert: “I told him I would kill him if he did. He had already played it 19 times.”

Bert played football for Hunstanton, but he never got hurt. Opposing skippers always dished out the order: “Whatever you do do not kick Bert Wells or he may not be able to give us a show next week.”

THE ‘TALKIES’

Things went along pretty smoothly until the “talkies” came. Says Bert: “Things became a bit difficult then. You see, a silent film had been costing me between £2 and £4 per week to hire. The charge for “talkies” was £15 and more. This meant that I had to increase the charge of admission.

The cheaper seats went up from 6d. to 1s. and the dearer ones went up to 2s. Some people could not afford the increase and audiences decreased. Later on, the Capitol Cinema opened at Hunstanton, so Bert stopped showing at the town hall. Then came 1939 and the war.

Bert still remembers vividly some of the old films – films like “Beau Geste”, with Ronald Colman, “The Mark of Zorro”, featuring Douglas Fairbanks and Mark Pickford, “The Sheikh”, staring Rudolph Valentino, and “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”, with Lon Chaney.

One of the most popular was called “Dawn” and told the story of Nurse Edith Cavell.

Putting on a show in a different hall each night was a lot of hard work but Bert says: “When I think back now, I know that I gave a lot of enjoyment to a lot of people so it must have been worthwhile.

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