Could you ever imagine walking to the bottom of Hosey Hill to go to the Cinema? Several older townsfolk remember doing just that in the 1950s and early 60s. Originally opened as the Swan Cinema in 1914 when there were only a handful of other cinemas in the country, entrepreneurship in Westerham at that time was progressive to say the least!
The cinema was closed for a few weeks in 1932 whilst the projection equipment was upgraded to cater for the ‘Talkies’ films then being released.
Older resident Mons Bell remembered the transition “…I used to go there twice a week and one chap working at our butchers’ shop was five years older than me, so I used to stand to one side and he would buy two tickets ‘cos I was under-age and they wouldn’t let you in on the ‘A’ films. We’d go right down the front where the long seats were and if the projector broke down we’d all start slow clapping and stamping our feet. Some of the films were still silent when I was a kid, and there was somebody behind a curtain down the front playing the piano and another one with a sheet of tin. If there was a thunderstorm in the film they would flap the tin and somebody would shout “a bit more thunder, a bit more thunder” – he laughs. If I went with my mother we’d get the one and fourpenny seats, the posh ones at the back…”
Bob Combley “...we used to go to the Saturday matinee for kids when it was still the Swan and some years later I would have gone to the cinema there as a teenager when they’d put the new face on it and called it the ‘Tudor’ - it was one of the few entertainment places that there were in Westerham apart from the pubs and dances at the local hall. I left Westerham in 1955 but up until that time I would have used it, although it was always considered as ‘the flea-pit’ or ‘bug-hutch’. If you wanted to splash out for something a bit more up-market you’d go to the Gaumont or Carlton in Sevenoaks.
A strange thing happened with the Tudor - it closed and they fitted it with new modern projection equipment, and then it burnt down. The story went round that it was arson, but to my mind it was a case of ‘did she fall or was she pushed?’ - I don’t think we’ll ever know the truth behind that one…” The Tudor Cinema was privately owned and managed by Mr and Mrs Feast from early 1956 when it had been given a make-over from its earlier incarnation as ‘The Swan Picture Hall’. The projectionist throughout the 1950s was Ken Osbourne. In its final years, the Tudor Cinema was run by Mr W. N. Biley and his son Clive. From the outset, the cinema seated some 200 people and typically had two changes of films every week. In 1959 Cinemascope projectors were installed but in 1963 the cinema closed its doors for the last time. Shortly after closure a fire, thought to be arson, gutted the entire building. The wrecked and empty structure was not demolished until 1970, when the site became a car park for a neighbouring industrial works, Vulcan Plastics.
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