On Monday, February 28, 1898, there was an exhibition in Mr Mack’s Assembly Rooms of a new device called the Cinematograph, which could show ‘living pictures’ or ‘moving pictures’ — movies as we would know them today,
In 1909, The Original Animated Picture Company brought their cinematography performance and variety entertainments to the Racquet Court, animated pictures showing a variety of films such as Boxing Champions, Logging in Sweden, The Pony Express, etc with no exasperating delays. "The [Town] Hall will be heated and we expect to see crowded houses". The Town Hall became Galway’s first real cinema. It was run by the Hardiman family from about 1895 until it closed in 1993, “Galway’s cosiest cinema”.
These were silent movies, so the theatres would have musical accompaniment. The Cinema Theatre, aka The Empire Theatre on William Street (seating accommodation 1,050 ), advertised not only the best and latest in pictures, but also ‘the best Provincial Orchestra of 7 musicians, and all the latest music’. Though the cinema was successful, it was forced to auction off all of the equipment because of World War I. It was sold as a going concern but reopened that same year (1915 ) as The Gaiety. A year later, it closed again, and then reopened again on August 3, 1919 as The Galway Empire Theatre. There was a bad fire there in 1921, and the name was changed to The Galway Cinema Company, later known as The Corrib Cinema Company.
The Victoria Cinema opened on Victoria Place in 1915, but after the Rising, not too many people attended.
New competition arrived with the opening of the Savoy Cinema on Eglinton Street on Christmas Eve, 1934, with a John McCormack concert. The first film shown there, Flying Down to Rio, played to a full house of 1,239 people. It was the biggest cinema in Connacht, had an Art Deco façade and a screen that was 21’ x 16’3”. There were four shops on the Eglinton Street façade, a spacious foyer on the ground floor, a staircase leading to the balcony and a tea lounge on the first floor. Prices ranged from 9 pence to 1/4d and two shillings for the balcony. There were three showings a day continuous from 4pm.
The Estoria (Galway’s Luxury Cinema ) opened on November 22, 1939. It had 776 seats, two showings a night at 6.45pm and 8.45pm. There were matinées on Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday and also on Holy Days. Among the most popular films aver shown there were Gone With the Wind, They Died with Their Boots On, and Phantom of the Opera. The first technicolour film shown there was Trail of the Lonesome Pine. John Wayne was by far the most popular actor.
After the war, cinemas had to include live shows to avoid tax, so Peg Folan used to play the Estoria, Johnny Cox the Savoy and Des Fretwell the Town Hall. Frankie Devlin used to paint all the large posters which were then put up around town by Ned Joyce, the billposter.
For many young Galwegians of that era, no Sunday afternoon was complete unless you got into the ’foars’, the fourpenny seats, to watch the ‘follier uppers’ the serials which featured the likes of Tom Mix, Pearl White, Roy Rogers, The Cisco Kid, Don Winston of the Coastguard, Hopalong Cassidy, The Man in the Iron Mask, Captain Marvel, The Perils of Pauline or Tarzan. These weekly episodes invariably ended with our hero/heroine hanging off a cliff, tied to the tracks as a railway train was approaching, or about to be killed by a buffalo stampede.
So you had to “Tune in again next week to see if our hero/heroine got the bad guys,” and you saved up your fourpence for the following Sunday. The excitement when the Lone Ranger was catching up with the crooks was unbearable. One never walked home after those episodes, one galloped. Trying to get in for nothing was a great Galway occupation.
Apart from dancing, there was no other popular form of entertainment at the time, and it was in the cinema that a lot of people did their courting.
So we have three illustrations for you this week, an architectural drawing of the proposed new Corrib Theatre, later the Savoy, on Eglinton Street, a similar drawing of the proposed Estoria and a photograph by Fr Browne of an advertisement for a film in the Town Hall, c1935. The billboard was at the corner of Lombard Street and Bridge Street, in front of what is now St Patrick’s National School.
