Eric Leaver on how a giant girder became a star during construction of movie theatre

OUR look back before Christmas at the old Rialto Cinema in Penny Street, Blackburn, brought back memories for 84-year-old reader Mr John Fowler of its blockbuster attraction that drew crowds of people six months before the building was finished . . . in the form of the biggest girder ever to come to town.

Measuring 75ft in length, more than 6ft deep, 2ft wide and weighing 28 tons, the massive steel girder was the main support for the new £65,000 super-cinema's 618-seat balcony.

But getting it there from the goods yard at Daisyfield Station, where there was a steam crane capable of lifting it from the rail wagon it came on from Preston where it was made, proved to be an epic enterprise.

It took two days - for a journey of only about a mile and a half.

"It was taken along Moss Street by two tractors, one leading and the other taking up the rear.

Owing to its length, turning the corner into Birley Street became a tricky business, but was finally managed without damaging surrounding property," remembers eye-witness Mr Fowler, of Nares Road, Witton, Blackburn.

In fact, that was the easy bit. For, it took a whole 12 hours just to move it only 20 yards across the station yard - and that job had to be abandoned at 3 o'clock in the morning the day after the girder arrived in June, 1931, because the axle of one of the bogies supporting it collapsed under its weight.

But for onlookers this hitch only meant the prolongation of an evidently fascinating spectacle.

For, said the Northern Daily Telegraph: "A large crowd gathered during the afternoon and evening to watch the men at work negotiating a difficult corner with the largest girder that has ever come to Blackburn."

On its eventual arrival at the Rialto site, the girder was jacked from its bogies and moved on rollers before being hoisted into position by two steel derricks. And there it stayed until the cinema - which became the Odeon in 1957 - was demolished almost 25 years ago.

Mr Fowler remembers going with his pals to the Rialto soon after its opening in December, 1931, to see the film Daddy Long Legs and, he adds: "To sample the luxury entertainment with the organ, ever-changing lighting sequences which took six months to complete a cycle and comfortable seat at 1s 3d in the rear balcony and 1s 6d in the front balcony." In fact, the Rialto's films, organ music and lights show could be enjoyed for less than half those prices, for the the tickets for cheapest of its 2,000 seats cost just 7d each.

The organ music stopped in 1950 when it was felt that picturegoers no longer wanted it or the singalongs that used to go with it as audiences audience belted out the songs whose lyrics were projected on the screen and kept up with the tune by following the "bouncing ball" over the words. It enjoyed a brief revival in the early 1960s at children's Saturday morning cinema shows and on Sunday evenings.

But the organ itself - a three manual Compton which in 1931 cost £5,000 and was capable of such effects as imitating the drone of an aeroplane or the sigh of surf - was removed altogether in 1964 when it was sold to a Manchester dealer for just £100 before ending up in the home of a Bolton organ enthusiast.

The lights which Mr Fowler remembers as a feature of the Rialto had 365 changes of combination and provided an effect which had the old Blackburn Times in raptures when it reviewed the cinema just before its opening.

"Hundreds of lamps burn, concealed from curious, wondering eyes. "This is not harsh, brilliant illumination but a magician's mixture of soft, glowing fire," it gushed. It was all killed off 43 years later by the decimation that television had begun to deliver from the mid-1950s onwards to swathes of cinemas across the country - but, interestingly, back in 1931 the advance of then-nascent television was something the state-of-the-art Rialto was supposed to be geared up for.

For, intriguingly, but without giving details, the Blackburn Times reported: "If television becomes a thing for the masses, the Rialto is ready for this development" - probably a reference to a view that emerged in its early days in the 1930s that, rather than being seen on small screens in the home, television would be something that people would watch projected on to large screens in cinemas.

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