Former Telegraph & Argus writer Mike Priestley shares his memories of the Glenroyal

Those who saw the former Glenroyal cinema in Shipley go up in flames might have noted, amid the smoke generated by the burning furniture and woodwork and old reels of film inexplicably left behind long ago, a strange aura pulsating out into the sky above the town.

That was the energy released by hundreds of thousands of memories entrusted to that much-loved old building by people to whom it had once been a very precious place.

Several people have already told the T&A how much it meant to them and their families, often through two or three generations, in its roles first as a local cinema and later as a bingo hall.

My family was no different. My mother-in-law played bingo there, and sometimes took home some winnings. My uncle Alec Todd was a cinema regular, often in the company of a current girlfriend and later with the young lady who was to become his wife, using a free pass to which he had access through his work as a reporter on the Shipley Times & Express (part of the advertising deal). And it’s primarily as a cinema that I remember it.

It was at the Glenroyal that, asking for my ticket in a deep voice and standing tall to look years older than I was, I saw my first X-certificate horror film, It Came From Beneath The Sea, a distinctly unscary yarn about a leviathan aroused from its Pacific slumbers by a US submarine.

For a while, in the late 1950s, that cinema was a second home. It was a relatively cheap night out for teenagers who had few places to go other than the church youth club once a week. The best (front-circle) seats at the Glenroyal cost all of two shillings (10p), with back circle at 1s.10d, back stalls 1s.6d and front stalls 1s.3d. Basically, no seat cost very much, even by pocket-money standards.

To reach the dress circle you climbed a staircase and passed beneath the watchful eye of a statue of a Buddha, sitting in an alcove on the landing. Usually, though, we sat in the front stalls from where we would stare up at the screen, the shaft of light from the projector slicing through the rising billows of cigarette smoke (for in those days, of course, almost everyone smoked – including daft 14-year-olds).

Occasionally, an usherette would stroll down one aisle and up the other adding a perfumed spray to the atmosphere – a disinfectant, it was rumoured, to keep the bugs down.

Bugs or no bugs, we would sometimes go to the Glenroyal three times a week and never see the same film twice. They ran a programme Monday to Wednesday, then another Thursday to Saturday, with a separate programme on a Sunday (usually of some old black-and-white B movie with an Edgar Wallace thriller as support).

Mind you, it was easy to see the same film twice if you wanted to, even three times, thanks to a programming device denoted on the cinema adverts in the T&A as “Cont. Perf.” This stood for Continuous Performance, and meant patrons could enter the cinema whenever they wanted.

It could lead to some strangely disjointed viewing if you arrived, say, halfway through the main feature. You would watch the second half, sit through the entire support film and the adverts, then watch the main feature up to where you came in, usually sticking with it through to the end again.

The big advantage to “Cont. Perf.”, though, was that it gave courting couples the best of both worlds – a chance to stay in the cinema long enough both to see the film and manage to fit in a bit of “courting” as well. In those times privacy was hard to come by in often overcrowded family homes. Young couples were stuck for somewhere to go for a cuddle. But some thoughtful soul had had the bright idea of designing the double cinema seat.

At the Glenroyal these were strategically placed on the back rows of the rear stalls and front and rear circles, with an additional double seat at either far end of the ordinary rows, against the walls.

Presently, cinema-going is enjoying something of a revival. But however much it may boom, it’s unlikely that it will ever again become the way of life it was back then, in the glory days of the much-mourned Glenroyal and the scores of other local cinemas that used to be dotted around Bradford’s suburbs.