Cecil Hepworth (1874-1953) Film Pioneer

[julian_craster]

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Cecil Milton Hepworth [formerly Herbert Milton] (1874-1953), film-maker, was born Herbert Milton Hepworth on 19 March 1874 at 12 Beaufort Gardens, Lewisham, London, one of three children of Thomas Craddock Hepworth (1834-1905), hospital secretary, and his wife, Sarah Margaret Stevens. Thomas Hepworth provided his son with an ideal background as he was an eminent late Victorian magic lanternist, who published a number of popular and successful books on the subject. His publications included The Book of the Lantern (1888). As a boy, Cecil (as he was always known) accompanied his father on his lantern tours and learned how to operate the biunial lantern, a double-lensed projector designed to produce a 'dissolving view'. In 1896, at the age of twenty-two, Hepworth was very aware of the arrival of film for commercial use in theatres and music-halls but, as his articles in the Amateur Photographer reveal, he was sceptical of the new medium's ability to produce a flicker-free image that could rival the beauty and colour of the lantern image. Within a year these doubts were replaced by real enthusiasm for the moving image, a fact demonstrated by his first book, Animated photography: the ABC of the cinematograph, a simple and thorough guide to the projection of living photographs, with notes on the production of cinematograph negatives (1897). It was the first on the subject to be published in England. The rest of Hepworth's life would be involved with the moving image.

For the next two years, 1898 and 1899, Hepworth was employed as a film processor and camera operator by the Warwick Trading Company in London, then the largest film production company in the country. Here he designed and patented the first film processing machine (patent no. 13315, 1898). All future machines designed for this purpose would descend from Hepworth's invention. Dismissal from Warwick led Hepworth and his cousin Monty Wicks to acquire a house on Hurst Grove in Walton-on-Thames in 1899. For almost twenty-five years this site would be the home of the Hepworth Manufacturing Company. On 11 February 1902 Hepworth married Margaret Hope (b. 1873/4), daughter of Andrew McGuffie, a manufacturer.

At Walton films were first made out of doors and then processed within the detached house which served as the laboratory. By 1905 a purpose-built glass house studio with electric-arc lighting was erected. The 1903 Hepworth catalogue marked the company's rapid rise and expressed Hepworth's commercial understanding of the popular and the topical. It listed film subjects under such headings as 'Animated portraits' (the king, the queen, Lord Kitchener), 'Comics' (facial expressions, jokes on policemen, motor cars), 'Pageants', 'Processions', 'Railway scenes', 'Military subjects', and 'Street Scenes'. Hepworth was now a leader of this new entertainment industry.

In 1905, under the direction of Lewin Fitzhamon, the most famous Hepworth film was made, Rescued by Rover. It was Hepworth's first international success. He described it as:
a particularly family affair. My wife wrote the story, my baby-eight months old-was the heroine, my dog the hero, my wife the bereaved mother and myself the harassed father ... we had to make it all over again a second time and then even a third, because we wore out the negative in the making of the four hundred prints to satisfy the demand. (Hepworth, Came the Dawn, 66-7)
The total cost of the first production was £7 13s. 9d. The film moved fluently from studio shots to locations and was an important example of an effective early film rescue narrative. Over the next fifteen years the Hepworth Company's films evolved from short comedies and dramas of only a few minutes in length to multi-reel works of over one hour. The company chose a path that reflected a particularly English sense of pictorialism, theatricality, and the national literary heritage. It made Hamlet (1913) in Devon and Walton, with Forbes-Robertson as the prince, as well as adaptations of Oliver Twist (1912) and David Copperfield (1913). Underpinning this work was the Hepworth Stock Company, which operated along the lines of a traditional theatre company. Its leading players, including Alma Taylor, Chrissie White, and Henry Edwards, would become the first British movie stars.

Hepworth's sense of his company's direction after the First World War was very clear. 'I was to make English pictures, with all the English countryside for background and with English atmosphere and English idiom throughout' (HepworthCame the Dawn, 144). However, in a market now dominated by new American work this strategy was not successful. Hepworth's films began to lose their appeal. The collapse of his company in 1924, the direct result of an under-subscribed share issue, was devastating and made only the more painful by the necessary sale of the company's most important asset-its original film negatives. Tragically, this invaluable film heritage of over 2000 works of fiction and non-fiction was not preserved, but melted down for 'dope' for aeroplane wings (ibid., 196). Over the next twenty years Hepworth found some employment at the national screen service making film trailers. Official recognition of his significant place in British film history finally came with the fiftieth anniversary of cinema in 1946. Hepworth became an honorary fellow of the Royal Photographic Society, the British Kinematographic Society, and the British Film Academy, and was chairman of the British Film Institute's history committee. He wrote his second book, Came the Dawn: Memories of a Film Pioneer (1951), in these last years. Accompanied by his own illustrations, it is a charming anecdotal account. Hepworth died at his home at 211 Eastcote Road, Ruislip, on 9 February 1953, survived by his daughter Valerie.

Frank Gray



Sources
C. Hepworth, Animated photography: the ABC of the cinematograph (1897) + C. Hepworth, Came the dawn: memories of a film pioneer (1951) + T. C. Hepworth, The book of the lantern: being a practical guide to the working of the optical (or magic) lantern (1888) + J. Barnes, The rise of the cinema in Great Britain: Jubilee year, 1897 (1983), vol. 2 of The beginnings of the cinema in England, 1894-1901 + R. Low, The history of the British film, 7 vols. (1948-85) + CGPLA Eng. & Wales (1953) + b. cert. + d. cert. + m. cert.
Archives BFI + Elmbridge Museum, Weybridge, Surrey FILM BFI NFTVA, 'Came the dawn', 1985
Likenesses photograph, c.1900, Elmbridge Museum, Weybridge [see illus.] · photograph, repro. in Barnes, The rise of the cinema, 173 · photograph, repro. in C. Hepworth, Came the dawn [frontispiece]
Wealth at death £2397 4s. 10d.: probate, 7 Aug 1953, CGPLA Eng. & Wales

[CaptainWaggett]

One of his feature films is being shown at the Barbican next month. It's got lots of nice scenery.