Charles Chilton: From 1900 onwards, rapidly expanding, there was the cinema and the cinema between 1900 and 1920 exploded, you know, like the radio did from 1920 onwards and once the cinema got going, of course the poor old music hall started to die because people didn't go to the music hall. So, there was that. And, I had a great connection with the cinema because my father, being killed in the first world war, as soon as the war was over my mother of course had to look for some means of supporting me and herself and she got herself a job in the Euston Cinema which was the second cinema in London to open.

Alan Dein: Is that so?

Charles: Yeah. The first one was the Regent Poly in Regent Street. The second one is the Euston in Euston Road where my mother worked and she used to issue tickets. Well they weren't tickets, she used to turn a handle and a metal disk fell out and if you said two seats, two in the sixpences, she would go clink, clink, clank, clank, and she'd give them two tickets which were actually square bits of metal designed in such a way that you could tell whether it is was, the money was for an expensive seat or a cheap seat so that when you got in the dark they could feel by the ticket how much you paid for your seat you see. And then you would be shown to your seat. Well, you could get into the cinema from the ticket office through a curtain and just behind that curtain I used to be put in a cot, or bag or something while my mother served the tickets and so my earliest memory, my very earliest memory, is of a lion on a cliff top with a man down on the bottom end of the screen, the lion up on the top right hand of the screen and a man, naked but for a loin cloth, on the left hand bottom side of the screen and the lion jumping on him and he pulling out a knife to grapple with the lion and that's my earliest memory. And I have looked it up and what it was it was the last scene of a weekly serial that was shown at that cinema called Elmo The Mighty, King of the Jungle which was based on the Tarzan stories. So that's the earliest memory I have, I must have been three years old I think and that was because my mother put me into the main body of the cinema on a seat in this, well it wouldn't be a carry cot but something I was laying in, and then every time I cried she would come out from serving the tickets and feed me or something and then go back to serve. So, that's my experience of the second cinema to be opened in London.

Alan Dein: That's wonderful.