Arthur Melbourne-Cooper
Encyclopedia
Arthur Melbourne-Cooper (1874–1961) was a British film maker who witnessed the birth of the movies as an assistant/cameraman of Birt Acres
(1854-1918) who, in 1895, developed the first British 35 mm moving picture camera.
Cooper, for the next 20 years, pioneered in making moving pictures.
as the son of a local photographer Thomas M. Cooper, who educated him from very early on in his profession. Aged 18, Arthur was fully trained in photography.
, another almost forgotten film pioneer. Acres specialized in photographic emulsions. In 1892, he became manager of Elliott & Sons, manufacturers of photographic plate
s in Barnet.
Acres experimented with movement during the projection of clouds and waves, which he took on successive series of glass plates. He could, therefore, use the assistance of young Cooper as experienced photographer.
On January 1, 1894, Cooper assisted Acres on a journey to film the commercial opening of the Manchester Ship Canal
on 70 mm film. This film size was introduced by Kodak for their snapshot cameras. Acres glued three or four of these films together into one roll and used this for his first film camera. Later that year, they filmed with the same camera at the Henley Regatta. A strip of this film is kept in the archives of the Museum of Modern Art
(Moma) in New York.
s appeared. These machines used 35 mm film. The German chocolate manufacturer, Ludwig Stollwerck, who had large interests in slot machine
shops in several countries, asked Acres to provide him regularly with 35 mm films for the Kinetoscopes which he acquired from Thomas Edison
's agents. Acres re-designed his camera and, in 1895, patented a 35 mm camera, the "Kineopticon", on the construction of which he was assisted by a young mechanical engineer, Robert W. Paul. In March 1895, Acres filmed with this camera Waves at Dover Pier, and later the Epsom Derby
and the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race.
In June 1895, Acres travelled to Germany to sign a contract with Stollwerck and to film the Opening of the Kiel Canal
and Kaiser Wilhelm
Reviewing his Troops. Acres was therefore the first who traveled abroad in order to make newsreels. Soon, his films were shown, not only in England and Germany, but also in Denmark and America, where Acres had sold his cameras and projectors.
During the next two years, young Cooper was cameraman for many of the short films which were produced for the Kinetoscopes, such as Arrest of a Pickpocket and Spilt Milk in which a farm hand unsuccessfully flirts with a maid who is milking a cow.
in London before the members, their wives and friends of the Royal Photographic Society
.
On February 20, 5 weeks later, the Lumière Cinématographe was shown, first at the London Polytechnic and two weeks later at the Empire Theatre of Varieties in Leicester Square
.
On March 25, 10 weeks later, Robert W. Paul started showing films at the Alhambra Theatre
in London for the next two years.
in which the contemporary Bird's poster comes to life. An old man, walking downstairs carrying a tray of eggs, trips over and smashes them. But no worry - he uses Bird's Custard Powder. Cooper also made a commercial for Keen's Mustard for which he animated the setting sun at Blackpool into a rising sun.
what is considered the earliest surviving stop-motion advertising film, Matches Appeal (also known as Matches: An Appeal).
The film contains an appeal to send money to Bryant and May who would then send matches to the British troops which were fighting in the Boer War
in South Africa. It was shown in December 1899 at The Empire Theatre in London. This film is the earliest known example of stop-motion animation. Little puppets, constructed of matchsticks, are writing the appeal on a black wall. Their movements are filmed frame by frame, movement by movement. With this film Britain was 6 or 7 years ahead of animation pioneers in France and the United States.
When he was needed, Cooper assisted Birt Acres who had established the Northern Photographic Works for the manufacture of 35 mm film stock. In his own time Cooper filmed many short comedies, newsreels, sports events and travelogues. He sold them to R.W. Paul, the Warwick Trading Company
, Charles Urban
, James Williamson
, William Jury, the Walturdaw Company, and many others, also abroad.
The close-ups represent what the boy sees through grandmother's magnifying glass and are much enlarged projected on the screen: a Bovril
advertisement in a newspaper, a cat's head, a canary in a cage, and grandmother's eye. The girl playing grandmother is Cooper's youngest sister Bertha. It clearly looks like the "grandmother" is actually a man.] the boy is Bert Massey, a young son from the neighbours, and the eye in the close-up is that of Cooper's mother Catherine Cooper.
Unfortunately, long before the film was rediscovered in Denmark in 1960, the French film historian Georges Sadoul
, in his "Histoire du Cinéma Mondial", credited it to a Brighton Film-maker, Georges Albert Smith (1864-1959) who, in 1903, had made his own version. It is a pity that Cooper's version is disputed and sometimes still credited to Smith.
Photo 2: Arthur Melbourne-Cooper's mother Catherine Cooper, née Dalley.
Photo 3: Close-up of the eye from George Albert Smith's version of Grandma's Reading Glass (1903) as it appears in the existing negative in the Graham Head Collection of the Cinema Museum, London.
In 1903, Cooper was commissioned by the Duke of Devonshire
to film a garden party at Chatsworth House
in honour of the King and Queen. He astonished the guests by filming them during the day and showing the developed film in the ballroom the same evening. He repeated this feat by filming the Lincoln Handicap
(1903) and later the Grand National
(1903), showing the films the same evening at The Empire Theatre, processing them in a railway coach on the way back to London. This was reported in the Daily Mail
as a record.
In 1904, he filmed a drama Rescued in Mid-Air in which a lady, after a traffic accident, finds herself floating in the air hanging onto an umbrella. She strands on a church spire, from which she is rescued by a professor in a helicopter-like flying machine. Cooper used tracking shots of the floating lady and applied parallel action scenes of the lady on the spire, cheering crowds in the street and the flying professor in the air.
Cooper played, as the Scotchman MacNab, the lead in the slapstick send-up of the game of golf, MacNab's Visit to London (1905). He made The Motor Pirate (1906), which is one of his masterpieces, in which bandits in an armoured car are making the roads unsafe several years before army tanks were constructed. Precursors of Mack Sennett
's Keystone Kops
are chasing the bandits.
These films are still in existence, just like the little gem A Dream of Toyland (1907), in which dolls and toys are wonderfully animated to play, in a dream of a young boy, their roles according to the one-frame, one-picture technique. "A stop-and-start film", as Cooper himself used to call it. No less than 76 copies were sold to the United States and many others to several countries abroad. This was followed by another animated film, Noah's Ark (1908) in which a young girl dreams that Noah and the animals of her toy ark come to life.
In order to protect his rights as maker and producer of these films which were too often copied or duped, Cooper, in 1906, became one of the founder-members of the British Kinematograph Manufacturers Association, KMA.
The Great Western Railway
commissioned him to make a documentary, London to Killarney (1907) which, at 3000 feet (914.4 m) in length (some 50 minutes in projection), is one of the longest films made at that time.
In 1905 he made a remarkable documentary, The Empire's Money Maker, or A Visit to the Royal Mint. It is one of the earliest surviving examples of available light documentaries, because Cooper was not allowed to use artificial light when filming inside the Royal Mint
.
In February 1909, he visited Paris where he had been once or twice before on business, but this time to represent his Alpha Trading Company at the first international film congres, the Congrès International des Éditeurs du Film, in order to secure the rights of film producers. In the same year, encouraged by the success of his new cinema in St Albans, he opened in Letchworth
a second Picture Palace. This was not a success in a town populated by church-going people who disliked the moving pictures. Two fires in the cinema got Cooper into serious financial difficulties.
With his assets of the Alpha Trading Company and capital of a semi-retired officer, Andrew Heron, Cooper established Heron Films Ltd., a company which set out to produce longer films, comedies and dramas, with the theatrical company of Mark Melford, a well-known actor in those days. Cooper also established Kinema Industries Ltd, for which he made several documentaries and newsreels, among which the notorious The Suffragette Derby of 1913 at Epsom
, in which suffragette Emily Davison
can be seen being trampled to death by the King's racing horse. It was filmed by Cooper with his camera at the finish and his brother Hubert at Tattenham Corner
.
Both companies were wound up at the outbreak of the First World War when Andrew Heron reported himself for active service. Cooper became munition inspector in Luton, while the family lived nearby in Dunstable
.
After the First World War, Cooper and his family moved to Blackpool where he became manager of Animads, a subdivision of Langford's Advertising Agency Ltd. He made a number of animated advertisements films. Among them: Cadbury's chocolates, Paddy Whiskey
, Swiss Roll
s, and Clean Milk Campaign.
Though he is almost forgotten today, he lived long enough to give testimony of those very first years of film history and of his own career in a number of interviews of which 15 were recorded on 17 reel-to-reel tapes.
In 1996, the city of St Albans with the British Film Institute, to celebrate 100 years of British films, erected a plaque on a flat building at the corner of Alma Road and London Road, commemorating that Cooper once had on this spot his Alpha Cinematograph Works.
The above information comes from sources, much of which was collected by Cooper's eldest daughter Audrey Wadowska (1909-1982) during a 25-year research about her father's career. The following lists are a selection of the most important sources and references. A complete list of sources, references and literature is published by Tjitte de Vries in Arthur Melbourne-Cooper, A Documentation of Sources, Frankfurt am Main 2004.
Birt Acres
Birt Acres was a photographer and film pioneer.Born in Richmond, Virginia to English parents, he invented the first British 35 mm moving picture camera, the first daylight loading home movie camera and projector, Birtac, was the first travelling newsreel reporter in international film history and...
(1854-1918) who, in 1895, developed the first British 35 mm moving picture camera.
Cooper, for the next 20 years, pioneered in making moving pictures.
Cooper's most important achievements
Although Cooper is almost forgotten today, he created several "firsts" in the film history:- animation movies since 1899
- the interpolated close-up in 1900
- parallel action shots in 1904
- cinemas with raked floor, expensive seats at the back, uniformed staff, and an isolated projection booth, in 1908 and 1909.
Start with Birt Acres
Arthur was born in St AlbansSt Albans
St Albans is a city in southern Hertfordshire, England, around north of central London, which forms the main urban area of the City and District of St Albans. It is a historic market town, and is now a sought-after dormitory town within the London commuter belt...
as the son of a local photographer Thomas M. Cooper, who educated him from very early on in his profession. Aged 18, Arthur was fully trained in photography.
First film camera
He applied for a job with Birt AcresBirt Acres
Birt Acres was a photographer and film pioneer.Born in Richmond, Virginia to English parents, he invented the first British 35 mm moving picture camera, the first daylight loading home movie camera and projector, Birtac, was the first travelling newsreel reporter in international film history and...
, another almost forgotten film pioneer. Acres specialized in photographic emulsions. In 1892, he became manager of Elliott & Sons, manufacturers of photographic plate
Photographic plate
Photographic plates preceded photographic film as a means of photography. A light-sensitive emulsion of silver salts was applied to a glass plate. This form of photographic material largely faded from the consumer market in the early years of the 20th century, as more convenient and less fragile...
s in Barnet.
Acres experimented with movement during the projection of clouds and waves, which he took on successive series of glass plates. He could, therefore, use the assistance of young Cooper as experienced photographer.
On January 1, 1894, Cooper assisted Acres on a journey to film the commercial opening of the Manchester Ship Canal
Manchester Ship Canal
The Manchester Ship Canal is a river navigation 36 miles long in the North West of England. Starting at the Mersey Estuary near Liverpool, it generally follows the original routes of the rivers Mersey and Irwell through the historic counties of Cheshire and Lancashire. Several sets of locks lift...
on 70 mm film. This film size was introduced by Kodak for their snapshot cameras. Acres glued three or four of these films together into one roll and used this for his first film camera. Later that year, they filmed with the same camera at the Henley Regatta. A strip of this film is kept in the archives of the Museum of Modern Art
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...
(Moma) in New York.
Kinetoscopes
In the same year, the first KinetoscopeKinetoscope
The Kinetoscope is an early motion picture exhibition device. Though not a movie projector—it was designed for films to be viewed individually through the window of a cabinet housing its components—the Kinetoscope introduced the basic approach that would become the standard for all cinematic...
s appeared. These machines used 35 mm film. The German chocolate manufacturer, Ludwig Stollwerck, who had large interests in slot machine
Slot machine
A slot machine , informally fruit machine , the slots , poker machine or "pokies" or simply slot is a casino gambling machine with three or more reels which spin when a button is pushed...
shops in several countries, asked Acres to provide him regularly with 35 mm films for the Kinetoscopes which he acquired from Thomas Edison
Thomas Edison
Thomas Alva Edison was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices that greatly influenced life around the world, including the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and a long-lasting, practical electric light bulb. In addition, he created the world’s first industrial...
's agents. Acres re-designed his camera and, in 1895, patented a 35 mm camera, the "Kineopticon", on the construction of which he was assisted by a young mechanical engineer, Robert W. Paul. In March 1895, Acres filmed with this camera Waves at Dover Pier, and later the Epsom Derby
Epsom Derby
The Derby Stakes, popularly known as The Derby, internationally as the Epsom Derby, and under its present sponsor as the Investec Derby, is a Group 1 flat horse race in Great Britain open to three-year-old thoroughbred colts and fillies...
and the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race.
In June 1895, Acres travelled to Germany to sign a contract with Stollwerck and to film the Opening of the Kiel Canal
Kiel Canal
The Kiel Canal , known as the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Kanal until 1948, is a long canal in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein.The canal links the North Sea at Brunsbüttel to the Baltic Sea at Kiel-Holtenau. An average of is saved by using the Kiel Canal instead of going around the Jutland Peninsula....
and Kaiser Wilhelm
Kaiser Wilhelm
Kaiser Wilhelm is a common reference to two German emperors:* Wilhelm I, German Emperor , King of Prussia; became the first Kaiser of a united Germany...
Reviewing his Troops. Acres was therefore the first who traveled abroad in order to make newsreels. Soon, his films were shown, not only in England and Germany, but also in Denmark and America, where Acres had sold his cameras and projectors.
During the next two years, young Cooper was cameraman for many of the short films which were produced for the Kinetoscopes, such as Arrest of a Pickpocket and Spilt Milk in which a farm hand unsuccessfully flirts with a maid who is milking a cow.
First British film show
On January 14, 1896, Cooper assisted Acres when he gave the first public film show in England in the Queen's HallQueen's Hall
The Queen's Hall was a concert hall in Langham Place, London, opened in 1893. Designed by the architect T.E. Knightley, it had room for an audience of about 2,500 people. It became London's principal concert venue. From 1895 until 1941, it was the home of the promenade concerts founded by Robert...
in London before the members, their wives and friends of the Royal Photographic Society
Royal Photographic Society
The Royal Photographic Society is the world's oldest national photographic society. It was founded in London, United Kingdom in 1853 as The Photographic Society of London with the objective of promoting the Art and Science of Photography...
.
On February 20, 5 weeks later, the Lumière Cinématographe was shown, first at the London Polytechnic and two weeks later at the Empire Theatre of Varieties in Leicester Square
Leicester Square
Leicester Square is a pedestrianised square in the West End of London, England. The Square lies within an area bound by Lisle Street, to the north; Charing Cross Road, to the east; Orange Street, to the south; and Whitcomb Street, to the west...
.
On March 25, 10 weeks later, Robert W. Paul started showing films at the Alhambra Theatre
Alhambra Theatre
The Alhambra was a popular theatre and music hall located on the east side of Leicester Square, in the West End of London. It was built originally as The Royal Panopticon of Science and Arts opening on 18 March 1854. It was closed after two years and reopened as the Alhambra. The building was...
in London for the next two years.
Animation
In 1897, Cooper made a trick film Bird's Custard PowderBird's Custard
Bird's Custard is the original version of what is known generically as custard powder. It is a cornflour -based powder which thickens to form a custard-like sauce when mixed with milk and heated to a sufficient temperature...
in which the contemporary Bird's poster comes to life. An old man, walking downstairs carrying a tray of eggs, trips over and smashes them. But no worry - he uses Bird's Custard Powder. Cooper also made a commercial for Keen's Mustard for which he animated the setting sun at Blackpool into a rising sun.
Stop motion
In 1899, Cooper made for Bryant and MayBryant and May
For the Bryant and May series of crime mystery books, see the author Christopher Fowler.Bryant and May was a United Kingdom company created in the mid-nineteenth century specifically to make matches. Their original Bryant and May Factory was located in Bow, London...
what is considered the earliest surviving stop-motion advertising film, Matches Appeal (also known as Matches: An Appeal).
The film contains an appeal to send money to Bryant and May who would then send matches to the British troops which were fighting in the Boer War
Second Boer War
The Second Boer War was fought from 11 October 1899 until 31 May 1902 between the British Empire and the Afrikaans-speaking Dutch settlers of two independent Boer republics, the South African Republic and the Orange Free State...
in South Africa. It was shown in December 1899 at The Empire Theatre in London. This film is the earliest known example of stop-motion animation. Little puppets, constructed of matchsticks, are writing the appeal on a black wall. Their movements are filmed frame by frame, movement by movement. With this film Britain was 6 or 7 years ahead of animation pioneers in France and the United States.
When he was needed, Cooper assisted Birt Acres who had established the Northern Photographic Works for the manufacture of 35 mm film stock. In his own time Cooper filmed many short comedies, newsreels, sports events and travelogues. He sold them to R.W. Paul, the Warwick Trading Company
Warwick Trading Company
The Warwick Trading Company was formed in 1898 out of the British branch of the American firm Maguire and Baucus. It was the leading film producer in Britain at the turn of the century, specialising in actuality, travel and reportage. The managing director was Charles Urban. He left the company in...
, Charles Urban
Charles Urban
Charles Urban was an Anglo-American film producer and distributor, and one of the most significant figures in British cinema before the First World War...
, James Williamson
James Williamson (film pioneer)
James Williamson was an early film developer and film director.-Biography:...
, William Jury, the Walturdaw Company, and many others, also abroad.
Close-up
In 1900, Cooper made another "first". He filmed in his father's photographic studio in St Albans a boy and a girl who are playing grandson and grandmother in Grandmother's Reading Glass, of which film historians generally agree it is the first instance where close-ups are deliberately cut into a medium shot. He sold this film to William Jury, Pathé and the Warwick Trading Company.The close-ups represent what the boy sees through grandmother's magnifying glass and are much enlarged projected on the screen: a Bovril
Bovril
Bovril is the trademarked name of a thick, salty meat extract, developed in the 1870s by John Lawson Johnston and sold in a distinctive, bulbous jar. It is made in Burton upon Trent, Staffordshire, owned and distributed by Unilever UK....
advertisement in a newspaper, a cat's head, a canary in a cage, and grandmother's eye. The girl playing grandmother is Cooper's youngest sister Bertha. It clearly looks like the "grandmother" is actually a man.] the boy is Bert Massey, a young son from the neighbours, and the eye in the close-up is that of Cooper's mother Catherine Cooper.
Unfortunately, long before the film was rediscovered in Denmark in 1960, the French film historian Georges Sadoul
Georges Sadoul
Georges Sadoul was a French journalist and cinema writer.Once a surrealist, he became a communist in 1932. He was a journalist of the Lettres Françaises....
, in his "Histoire du Cinéma Mondial", credited it to a Brighton Film-maker, Georges Albert Smith (1864-1959) who, in 1903, had made his own version. It is a pity that Cooper's version is disputed and sometimes still credited to Smith.
Visual evidence
Photo 1: The eye as it appears in close-up in the existing film Grandma's Reading Glass (1900) by Arthur Melbourne-Cooper.Alpha Trading Company
In 1901, Cooper established his own company, The Alpha Trading Company. He took the lease of a little park in St Albans, Bedford Park, where he established his Alpha Cinematograph Works.Parallel action
Edward Cavendish, 10th Duke of Devonshire
Edward William Spencer Cavendish, 10th Duke of Devonshire, KG, MBE, TD , known as Marquess of Hartington , was the head of the Devonshire branch of the Cavendish family...
to film a garden party at Chatsworth House
Chatsworth House
Chatsworth House is a stately home in North Derbyshire, England, northeast of Bakewell and west of Chesterfield . It is the seat of the Duke of Devonshire, and has been home to his family, the Cavendish family, since Bess of Hardwick settled at Chatsworth in 1549.Standing on the east bank of the...
in honour of the King and Queen. He astonished the guests by filming them during the day and showing the developed film in the ballroom the same evening. He repeated this feat by filming the Lincoln Handicap
Lincoln Handicap
The Lincoln Handicap is a flat horse race in Great Britain which is open to thoroughbreds aged four years or older. It is run at Doncaster over a distance of 1 mile , and it is scheduled to take place each year in late March or early April....
(1903) and later the Grand National
Grand National
The Grand National is a world-famous National Hunt horse race which is held annually at Aintree Racecourse, near Liverpool, England. It is a handicap chase run over a distance of four miles and 856 yards , with horses jumping thirty fences over two circuits of Aintree's National Course...
(1903), showing the films the same evening at The Empire Theatre, processing them in a railway coach on the way back to London. This was reported in the Daily Mail
Daily Mail
The Daily Mail is a British daily middle-market tabloid newspaper owned by the Daily Mail and General Trust. First published in 1896 by Lord Northcliffe, it is the United Kingdom's second biggest-selling daily newspaper after The Sun. Its sister paper The Mail on Sunday was launched in 1982...
as a record.
In 1904, he filmed a drama Rescued in Mid-Air in which a lady, after a traffic accident, finds herself floating in the air hanging onto an umbrella. She strands on a church spire, from which she is rescued by a professor in a helicopter-like flying machine. Cooper used tracking shots of the floating lady and applied parallel action scenes of the lady on the spire, cheering crowds in the street and the flying professor in the air.
Cooper played, as the Scotchman MacNab, the lead in the slapstick send-up of the game of golf, MacNab's Visit to London (1905). He made The Motor Pirate (1906), which is one of his masterpieces, in which bandits in an armoured car are making the roads unsafe several years before army tanks were constructed. Precursors of Mack Sennett
Mack Sennett
Mack Sennett was a Canadian-born American director and was known as the innovator of slapstick comedy in film. During his lifetime he was known at times as the "King of Comedy"...
's Keystone Kops
Keystone Kops
The Keystone Kops were incompetent fictional policemen, featured in silent film comedies in the early 20th century. The movies were produced by Mack Sennett for his Keystone Film Company between 1912 and 1917. The idea came from Hank Mann who also played police chief Tehiezel in the first film...
are chasing the bandits.
Film dramas
The demand for moving pictures was great in those early days, and during this time Cooper sometimes made almost a new film every day. Cooper's films were sought after because of his many outdoor locations. One of his popular dramas was The Blacksmith's Daughter (1904) about a young girl deceived by the local squire. Another one was For An Old Love's Sake (1908) about a rich man's suicide who, with his life insurance, rescues his warden from ruin.In order to protect his rights as maker and producer of these films which were too often copied or duped, Cooper, in 1906, became one of the founder-members of the British Kinematograph Manufacturers Association, KMA.
The Great Western Railway
Great Western Railway
The Great Western Railway was a British railway company that linked London with the south-west and west of England and most of Wales. It was founded in 1833, received its enabling Act of Parliament in 1835 and ran its first trains in 1838...
commissioned him to make a documentary, London to Killarney (1907) which, at 3000 feet (914.4 m) in length (some 50 minutes in projection), is one of the longest films made at that time.
In 1905 he made a remarkable documentary, The Empire's Money Maker, or A Visit to the Royal Mint. It is one of the earliest surviving examples of available light documentaries, because Cooper was not allowed to use artificial light when filming inside the Royal Mint
Royal Mint
The Royal Mint is the body permitted to manufacture, or mint, coins in the United Kingdom. The Mint originated over 1,100 years ago, but since 2009 it operates as Royal Mint Ltd, a company which has an exclusive contract with HM Treasury to supply all coinage for the UK...
.
St Albans Picture Palace
A palace for moving pictures: in 1908, Cooper, in order to lift going to the cinema from its low status, opened in St Albans what the Shell Book of Firsts considers to be one of the first cinemas as we know them today: the Alpha Picture Palace which had a sloping floor, a separate fire-proof projection booth, uniformed ushers and usherettes, free teas during the intervals, and the cheapest seats in front, not at the back. All these features got special attention in the press. The St Albans Picture Palace was a commercial success. In the same year, he married the young Kate Lacey. They had three children.In February 1909, he visited Paris where he had been once or twice before on business, but this time to represent his Alpha Trading Company at the first international film congres, the Congrès International des Éditeurs du Film, in order to secure the rights of film producers. In the same year, encouraged by the success of his new cinema in St Albans, he opened in Letchworth
Letchworth
Letchworth Garden City, commonly known as Letchworth, is a town and civil parish in Hertfordshire, England. The town's name is taken from one of the three villages it surrounded - all of which featured in the Domesday Book. The land used was first purchased by Quakers who had intended to farm the...
a second Picture Palace. This was not a success in a town populated by church-going people who disliked the moving pictures. Two fires in the cinema got Cooper into serious financial difficulties.
Kinema Industries Ltd
After twelve years, Cooper folded up his businesses in St Albans and, with his wife and young children, he moved to Manor Park, Lee. During the day he made here a series of surprising puppet animation pictures for Butcher's Empire Films, which had its studios at the back of his garden. One of his most beautiful animation films was Cinderella (1912), which was distributed in hand-coloured versions. In the evenings Cooper, for a while, became manager of a new cinema in Harrow, paying his debts in St Albans.With his assets of the Alpha Trading Company and capital of a semi-retired officer, Andrew Heron, Cooper established Heron Films Ltd., a company which set out to produce longer films, comedies and dramas, with the theatrical company of Mark Melford, a well-known actor in those days. Cooper also established Kinema Industries Ltd, for which he made several documentaries and newsreels, among which the notorious The Suffragette Derby of 1913 at Epsom
Epsom
Epsom is a town in the borough of Epsom and Ewell in Surrey, England. Small parts of Epsom are in the Borough of Reigate and Banstead. The town is located south-south-west of Charing Cross, within the Greater London Urban Area. The town lies on the chalk downland of Epsom Downs.-History:Epsom lies...
, in which suffragette Emily Davison
Emily Davison
Emily Wilding Davison was a militant women's suffrage activist who, on 4 June 1913, after a series of actions that were either self-destructive or violent, stepped in front of a horse running in the Epsom Derby, sustaining injuries that resulted in her death four days later.-Biography:Davison was...
can be seen being trampled to death by the King's racing horse. It was filmed by Cooper with his camera at the finish and his brother Hubert at Tattenham Corner
Tattenham Corner
Tattenham Corner is a small town in Surrey, UK, located inside the M25 motorway thus being part of the London commuter belt. It is home to the Epsom Downs Racecourse. The location is to the west of the A240, with the M25 approximately five miles to the south...
.
Both companies were wound up at the outbreak of the First World War when Andrew Heron reported himself for active service. Cooper became munition inspector in Luton, while the family lived nearby in Dunstable
Dunstable
Dunstable is a market town and civil parish located in Bedfordshire, England. It lies on the eastward tail spurs of the Chiltern Hills, 30 miles north of London. These geographical features form several steep chalk escarpments most noticeable when approaching Dunstable from the north.-Etymology:In...
.
After the First World War, Cooper and his family moved to Blackpool where he became manager of Animads, a subdivision of Langford's Advertising Agency Ltd. He made a number of animated advertisements films. Among them: Cadbury's chocolates, Paddy Whiskey
Paddy Whiskey
Paddy Whiskey is a brand of 80-proof blended Irish whiskey produced in Cork, Ireland, by the company Irish Distillers. The brand is Ireland's third best selling whiskey.-History:...
, Swiss Roll
Swiss roll
A Swiss roll or jelly roll is a type of sponge cake roll. The thin cake is made of eggs, flour and sugar and baked in a very shallow rectangular baking tray, called a sheet pan. The cake is removed from the pan and spread with jam or buttercream, rolled up, and served in circular slices.The...
s, and Clean Milk Campaign.
Audrey Wadowska
Arthur Melbourne-Cooper retired in 1940 and moved to Coton near Cambridge. Here, in 1961, he died. His wife died the next year. They are buried in the cemetery of St John's Church, Coton.Though he is almost forgotten today, he lived long enough to give testimony of those very first years of film history and of his own career in a number of interviews of which 15 were recorded on 17 reel-to-reel tapes.
In 1996, the city of St Albans with the British Film Institute, to celebrate 100 years of British films, erected a plaque on a flat building at the corner of Alma Road and London Road, commemorating that Cooper once had on this spot his Alpha Cinematograph Works.
The above information comes from sources, much of which was collected by Cooper's eldest daughter Audrey Wadowska (1909-1982) during a 25-year research about her father's career. The following lists are a selection of the most important sources and references. A complete list of sources, references and literature is published by Tjitte de Vries in Arthur Melbourne-Cooper, A Documentation of Sources, Frankfurt am Main 2004.
Sources
- The Alpha Trading Co Open New Works At St Albans, The Bioscope, September 18, 1908.
- How Bioscope Records Are Made, The Herts Advertiser & St Albans Times, March 13, 1909.
- First Film Cartoon, by E.G. Turner, Evening News, November 17, 1955.
- Advertising Was in At the Beginning, by W.J. Collins, World's Press News, May 11, 1956.
- The Observer Film Exhibition. The Animated Cartoon, by Richard Buckle, London, 1956.
- He Started the Newsreel, by Barnet Saidman, News Chronicle, July 15, 1956.
- Mr A. Melbourne-Cooper, Pioneer of the Film Industry, by Joe Curtiss, Hertfordshire Countryside, Summer 1960.
- A Portrait in Celluloid, by John Grisdale, ms. St Albans Museums, 1960.
- Coton is the Hom,e of One of the Pioneers of Film-making, Cambridge Daily News, August 8, 1961.
- Mr A. Melbourne-Cooper, A Pioneer in the Cinema, The Times obituary, December 7, 1961.
- The Unsung Pioneers of the World of Celluloid, by Bill Field, Barnet Press, September 24, 1965.
- A British Film Pioneer in Ireland, by Anthony Slide, Vision, Winter 1967.
- The Oldest Purpose-built Cinema, by Audrey Wadowska, Hertfordshire Countryside, July 1970.
- The Visionary, St Albans Gazette, September 20, 1973.
- Forgotten Film-maker Ahead of His Time, Herts Advertiser, October 19, 1973.
- The Forgotten Movie Pioneer, by Ronald Riggs, Herts Advertiser, June 18, 1974.
- Pioneers of the British Film. The Work of Birt Acres and Arthur Melbourne-Cooper, by Luke Dixon, ms. Eastern Arts Association/St Albans Museums, 1976.
- Film Pioneer is 'Recognised aAt Last, by Steve Payne, Herts Advertiser, August 12, 1977.
- Birth Place of the Movies, by Nicky Whinerah, Post-Echo, August 24, 1977.
- Arthur Melbourne-Cooper: Motion Picture Pioneer, Film Collecting, Fall 1977.
- Father Was Rather Flamboyant, Review, September 17, 1981.
- Chasing Dreams and Shadows, by Ronald Riggs, Herts Advertiser, April 10, 1991.
- Ludwig Stollwerck - Wie der Film nach Deutschland kam, Martin Loiperdinger, KINtop-1, Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, Frankfurt a/Main, 1992
- Arthur Melbourne-Cooper, Film Pioneer Wronged by Film History, by Tjitte de Vries, KINtop-4, Frankfurt a/Main, 1994.
- Arthur Melbourne-Cooper, A Documentation of Sources, by Tjitte de Vries, KINtop-13, Frankfurt a/Main, 2004.