FUN OF THE FAIR

My late father, discussing TV, once told me he saw his first moving image on a screen as a boy at a funfair. This would place it at around 1908/10 and put it in the same vague time slot as he saw his first aeroplane, which had landed in a field near Bloxham in Oxfordshire, and caused such a stir they closed the school and let the pupils go to see it. It must have been an exciting time for a youngster. Whatever would these flying machines and moving images lead to? Imaginations must have boggled.
Despite my promptings, however, he could not remember the name of the fair. The fairs of my youth invariably involved the names Fendick, Thurston and Gray, and they came to our town and set up on a field known as Cinder Ash, next to the football pitch. There weren't too many neighbours to complain at the noise there, for they were always a great attraction. Coloured lights were a magnet to folk emerging from the blackout years, when everything was dark and dull.
As to the moving image my father saw, had that funfair been in Norwich then it might well have been Thurston. It probably wasn't, but the Thurstons were on to the magic of the silver screen very early on. Charles Thurston opened at Norwich's Easter Fair in 1901 with an ornate facade of gilded carved-work decorating a tented auditorium, and dancing girls to entice patrons, all to witness a display of the 'cinematograph,' or 'living pictures.' It must have seemed so new and exciting, because the cinematograph had made its local fairground debut only five years' earlier, in 1896, when showman Randall Williams staged a demonstration at Lynn Mart.
Films soon began to appear on village greens and in town squares. Then music halls took them on, and the clips of film developed into filmed stories. In 1908 one of the first picture houses, known as The Gem, was opened at Great Yarmouth, and in 1912 Charles Thurston opened his own Cinema Palace in Norwich. This was followed by Wisbech estate agent Frederick H Cooper, who developed a chain of cinemas in East Anglia.
The Thurston story ran almost parallel. In 1868, and tiring of his work in a Cambridge brickyard, Henry Thurston obtained a hand-operated children's roundabout and launched himself on a new career. Ten years' later he had not only adapted the roundabout to pony power but had also purchased a set of 'four abreast galloping horses and ostriches' built by Tidman of Norwich and powered by a Hornsby traction engine.
By 1906 Henry had also acquired a Savage spinning top gondola and switchback, and a Gavioli organ. But it was his son, Charles, born 1870, who saw the potential of vaudeville and the bioscope and anticipated the arrival of the static cinema. 
I can recall in the 1950s a funfair gamely trying to help a football team, which wanted to rig up some lights to enable training on dark evenings. In teeming rain, a group of volunteers struggled to erect posts and cables around one end of the playing pitch, but the system produced only the merest glimmer of light. Then the funfair on nearby Cinder Ash came to their rescue. Their chaps relaid the cables, hooked them up to a trailer generator, and thrummed new life into the lamps. Better, but still not bright enough, alas.
In early 1974 I met Charles' son, Charles junior, who told me about the family background and talked about their preparations for Lynn Mart, traditionally the showman's seasonal opener. Not exactly life on the open road, but mobile enough.