To read this Life of the Day complete with a picture of the subject,
visit Oxford DNB: Lives of the week



George Albert Smith (1864-1959), film-maker, was born on 4 January 1864 at 93 Aldersgate Street, Cripplegate, east London, the child of Charles Smith, ticket writer, and his wife, Margaret Alice Davidson. After the death of his father, his mother moved the family to Brighton. It was there, in 1882, that Smith received public attention for the first time as a result of his activities as a popular hypnotist. This led to a partnership with Douglas Blackburn, a local journalist, within which they developed a 'second-sight act' (Blackburn hid an object in the theatre and then Smith, blindfolded, led him to it) and feats of 'muscle-reading' (Blackburn transmitted to the blindfolded 'medium' on the stage, played by Smith, the identity of objects selected by the audience). Smith claimed that genuine telepathy was practised and representatives of the Society for Psychical Research believed that he had the gift of true 'thought reading'. Blackburn would later admit, however, that the act was a hoax. Smith became part of the society's circle and was appointed private secretary to its honorary secretary, Edmund Gurney. In 1887 Gurney carried out a number of 'hypnotic experiments' in Brighton, with Smith as the 'hypnotizer'. Smith was the co-author of a paper titled 'Experiments in thought-transference' published in the society's journal in 1889.

In 1892, by which time he had left the employment of the Society for Psychical Research, Smith acquired the lease to St Ann's Well Gardens in Hove. This was only a short distance from Brighton and the seafront. He cultivated this site so that it became a popular pleasure garden and the home for his film-making activities. In 1896 Smith saw and appreciated the first Lumiere programme in London, and it is likely that he studied Robert Paul's films during their summer season in Brighton. At the end of that year he acquired his first camera. For Smith, the former hypnotist, film offered a new and very modern form of illusionism. He made only the studio shot of the train carriage in The Kiss in the Tunnel (1899), but when he inserted it into Cecil Hepworth's phantom ride View from an Engine Front: Train Leaving Tunnel, he created an edited film which demonstrated a new sense of continuity and simultaneity across three shots. His filmic imagination was very adventurous and it continued to develop in the next year. As Seen through the Telescope, Grandma's Reading Glass, The House that Jack Built, and Let me Dream Again, all of 1900, were remarkable for their interpolated close-ups, subjective and objective point-of-view shots, the creation of dream-time, and the use of 'reversing' (by which action appeared to happen backwards). Through these experimental films Smith was instrumental in the development of continuity editing. He taught his contemporaries how to create a filmed sequence. James Williamson (1855-1933) was especially influenced by him.

Smith's films in the years 1897-1903 were largely comedies and adaptations of popular fairy tales and stories. His work within these genres was influenced by his wife, Laura Eugenia (b. 1863/4), daughter of William Bullivant Bayley, a sadler. They had married in Ramsgate on 13 June 1888. Her life in popular theatre before 1897, particularly in pantomime and comic revues, provided Smith with an experienced actress who understood visual comedy and the interests of seaside audiences. Laura Bayley would star in many of Smith's most important films, including Let me Dream Again and Mary Jane's Mishap (1903). No other actress appears as frequently in British films of this period.

At St Ann's Well, in 1897, Smith adapted the pump house into a space for developing and printing films, and in the grounds, probably in 1901, he built a glasshouse film studio. By the late 1890s he had developed a successful commercial film production and processing business with the assistance of the Brighton engineer Alfred Darling. Smith's largest customer became the Warwick Trading Company. Through this relationship Smith became part of the company and developed a long partnership with its managing director, Charles Urban (1867-1942). The two-colour additive process known as Kinemacolor would dominate the rest of his career in film. This was developed from 1903 from his new home, Laboratory Lodge, Roman Crescent, Southwick. On 8 July 1908 Kinemacolor was presented in Paris to a gathering of scientists and the Lumiere brothers. The first demonstration in England followed at the Royal Society of Arts in London on 9 December 1908. For the system Smith was awarded a silver medal by the Royal Society of Arts. Urban turned Kinemacolor into a new enterprise, the Natural Colour Kinematograph Company. It enjoyed success in the period 1910-13, when it produced over 100 short features from its studios in Hove and Nice, but the system was not taken up by the industry. A patent suit brought against Kinemacolor by William Friese-Greene in 1914 would lead to its collapse and end Smith's life in the film business. The widespread use of true colour film would not begin in the cinema for almost twenty years.

In his later years Smith spent much time peering through his telescope from his Brighton seafront arch. He had long been a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society. In the late 1940s he was 'discovered' by the film community. He was commemorated by Michael Balcon as 'the father of the British Film Industry' and in 1955 was made a fellow of the British Film Academy. He died, aged ninety-five, in the Brighton General Hospital on 17 May 1959 and was cremated five days later at the Downs crematorium, Brighton. He was survived by his second wife, Edith Kate.

Frank Gray

Sources T. Hall, The strange case of Edmund Gurney (1980) + H. Sidgwick, E. M. Sidgwick, and G. A. Smith, 'Experiments in thought-transference', Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 6 (1889-90), 128-70 + F. Gray, 'Smith the showman: the early years of George Albert Smith', Film History, 10/1 (1998), 8-20 + 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 + J. Barnes, Pioneers of the British film (1983), vol. 3 of The beginnings of the cinema in England, 1894-1901 + J. Barnes, Filming the Boer War (1990), vol. 4 of The beginnings of the cinema in England, 1894-1901; repr. (1992) + J. Barnes, The beginnings of the cinema in England, 1894-1901, 5 (1997) + D. M. Thomas, The first colour motion pictures (1969) + b. cert. + m. cert. [marriage to Laura Bayley] + d. cert. + CGPLA Eng. & Wales (1959) + Evening Argus [Brighton] (20 May 1959), 10 + Brighton Herald (22 April 1893), 2
Archives BFI + Hove Museum, Barnes collection + Sci. Mus., Charles Urban collection FILM BFINA
Likenesses photograph, repro. in Barnes, Rise of the cinema, 84 · photograph, BFI [see illus.]
Wealth at death £9331 4s.