Part 39 in our series on William Hills
The lights were turned down and on a white screen a small picture about five feet by eight feet came into view, William Hills wrote of the birth of the bioscope in Pretoria in the late 1800s.
“At first sight, it looked like the picture from a child’s magic lantern which required focusing. But then the wonder occurred. A whirring was heard, and lo the picture commenced to move and a scene in actual motion was passing before the eyes.”
Hills was attending a performance by Ada Delroy, an Australian performer widely described as a Serpentine dancer and vaudevillian.
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After Ada came the somnomistic dream visions of fellow Australian performer Madame Bell, the White Mahatma, who “answered” unseen questions secretly penned by members of the audience.
“(She) certainly gave some surprising answers, but the queer thing was that she missed, as the audience also failed to realise, that much the most surprising thing of all was right under her nose.”
It was modestly described on the programme as cinematographe.
“Sometimes it was light, sometimes it was dark, sometimes it appeared to be passing through a heavy rainstorm, but always it jerked up and down to the great strain of one’s eyes,” Hills wrote of his first experience of the bioscope.
Apart from a few street and sea scenes and comics running for about three minutes each, the staple bill of fare at all exhibitions in 1898 was Queen Victoria’s jubilee procession, which was the first news event of any importance ever attempted.
“If film collecting ever becomes a hobby like stamp collecting, the jubilee film crude as it was in some respects, will occupy a place by itself for it blazed a trail for all the wonderful developments of the news reel.”
Forty years later, Hills was to see some of the first television pictures and, he said, to feature in one, although he did not go into any detail about this.
“I wonder whether television will have a similar story to tell once we get back to peace conditions,” Hills wrote in 1940.
“Whether the White Mahatma could have told me I don’t know because I did not ask her.” (Article: Carol Stier).
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