Looking Back with Eric Leaver

WITH Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon pioneering the movie business in Blackburn more than a century ago and the short-lived Pennine Films turning a disused shuttle factory in the town into a sound-stage studio before the war, East Lancashire has its own Hollywood history.

But a chapter is missing - the full story of what happened to the venture 50 years ago that determined to make Clayton-le-Moors the scene of film production.

There is also the question ofwhether the Blackburn girl lined up as a star ever made it to the big screen.

The man behind the project was local councillor, printing works boss and former cinema owner Mr C.G. Kilby, who believed he had spied a gap in the post-war cinema market because of the restrictions that were then placed on proportion of American-made firms that could be shown in British cinemas.

It was a measure designed to aid the UK film industry but the "quickies" it churned out often owed more to the aim of filling the made-in-Britain quota than to quality. And back in 1948 Coun Kilby, boss of the Cambridge Press company in Clayton and former owner of one of the town's cinemas as well as the Palladium in Mill Hill, Blackburn, and another at Wigan, decided there would be call for the two-reelers he planned to make in two old aircraft hangars. That location suggests that it was part of the giant Bristol Aircraft works that shot up in wartime - nowadays the site of the Clayton Business Park - that he had earmarked for his studio.

And for it, by May that year as he sought planning permission, he had already recruited 14 staff, including cameramen, technicians, joiners and electricians, and acquired some "excellent" British and American equipment.

Coun Kilby told the Northern Daily Telegraph that, as a cinema owner, he had found there was a shortage of two-reel films to supplement picture-house programmes even before the quota was placed on American productions.

But he was evidently determined to keep costs down by steering clear of expensive film stars.

Instead, he planned to tap the talent of local amateur dramatic societies. "After all, he said, "all the top-line stars had to come from the bottom."

It was a notion that, incidentally, fitted his belief that there was plenty of scope for "Lancashire stories" on the screen.

Even so, he also talked of using as some of his actors stage professionals who were appearing in theatres in the district.

This was something which, coincidentally, Mitchell and Kenyon did as they made comedies and dramas and filmed fake Boer War incidents on the moors outside Blackburn at the beginning of the century.

In the pipeline was the Clayton studio's first film, then being scripted in London, and chosen to be its star was a Blackburn girl whose name Coun Kilby chose not to divulge, but who was said to have a beautiful voice and was being groomed in acting.

What became of it all?

Little is known, except that Coun Kilby did not become a movie mogul.

For, says his grandson Barry Kilby, boss of Blackburn media games company Europrint: "I am not really sure what happened but it all ended in tears and he lost a lot of money on the venture.

"They did make one film, apparently, but it's not certain whether it actually got shown or was only a test."

Can readers compete the tale?

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.