Notting Hill In Flux 1950-1969
AN EVENING AT THE BUGOLE
Author Alan Carter recalls wild nights at the Electric in the 50s.
In the late 1940s early 50s, when I was a young boy of 9 or 10 and living above what used to be a horse meat shop at number 121 Portobello Road the weekly treat for my brother Kenny and myself was an evening at the ‘bugole’ (no h’s in our vocabularies in those days).
The ‘bugole’ was the local name for the Electric Cinema, and for very good reason. It was a horrible run down building with a façade totally covered in posters advertising various pictures. No movies or films then, just ‘the pictures’. The interior was dark and dank and in a state of almost total disrepair. The seats were rows of cast iron frames with plywood seats and backs, many missing either the seat or the back, or if you were really unlucky both.
Kenny would get a couple of shillings from our dad, Minky, and off we’d go with a few friends for an exciting evening watching whatever was on. If it was a good show like The Lone Ranger followed by The Three Stooges then hundreds of children from all over the area would turn up to queue down the narrow alley at the side of the building. Queue jumping, pushing, shoving and shouting were the order of the day and Kenny would have his work cut out keeping us in our places and other boys out of them. Half an hour later and the bedlam would subside once the doors opened and hundreds of children rushed to be the first in, hoping to get a seat with an actual seat.
When the lights went down there would be a roar from the audience and the picture we’d all cheer for the goodies and boo for the baddies. Comedies were even noisier than westerns because everybody was trying to out-laugh everybody else and imitate the antics on the screen. Sometimes we’d get a serial like Flash Gordon when it was almost silent as all were mesmerised by the aliens and the spaceships. There were always a few cartoons, with Mighty Mouse being my favourite.
There was always fruit, lots and lots of fruit. All of it being thrown at random across, up and down the theatre in the hope of hitting somebody (anybody) on the head. Outside the ‘bugole’ was the Portobello Road fruit and veg market which held a never-ending supply of specky or soft fruit that the children found irresistible.
At the end of the show everybody would rush to be first out of the theatre and then we’d relive the best moments of the pictures on the way home, pretending to be cowboys, pirates, space travelers and the like. We’d ignore the flea bites, the squashed fruit on our jackets and the occasional black eye because it was the highlight of our lives, an evening at the ‘bugole’.
Alan Carter is 70 years old and living in Sydney Australia. His life began at 121 Portobello Road. Alan’s family are still active in Portobello, running the famous shop Alice’s at No. 86, they’ve been there for over 100 years.
While the Electric, still known as the Imperial, kept to its task of bringing cinema to the denizens of Notting Hill, the leafy London district was about to go through a period of upheaval. Youth culture, in all its abrasive forms, and large-scale immigration would radically transform the area, bringing violence, drugs and new forms of culture, particularly musical, to the cinema’s famous doorsteps.
A flyer for the re-run of White Zombie
In the late ‘50s, fuelled by racial tensions, the area was tormented by rioting gangs, often defined by their musical tastes and haircuts. Colin MacInnes set his famous novel Absolute Beginners against the backdrop of this clash of cultures, and was later filmed by Julian Temple. As windows were smashed along Lancaster Road and Oxford Gardens, milk bottles a familiar missile, there remains a famous shot of teddy boys posing for TV cameras right outside the Imperial.
As the 60s began, Notting Hill was perhaps more notorious as one of London’s chief hash-dealing neighbourhoods, than famed as a Mecca for cinema-lovers. Then manager of the Imperial Peter Brown, talked of hash dealers openly walking Portobello Road. The whole district was going downhill: it was “the pits, it really was sleazebag” reported local magazine Friends.
The district was going downhill: “It really was sleazebag” reported a local magazine.
Unsurprisingly the “bug hole”, as the Imperial was dubbed, fell into disrepair. But as the outside mood began to soften into a more bohemian vibe, the cinema happily joined in, boasting its own “Electric Cinema hippy doctor” in Sam Hutt, a genuine medical practitioner, who went onto transform himself into successful country and western performer Hang Wangford. Exactly how he served the patrons of the cinema is sadly lost to posterity.
By now, at the tail end of the 60s, Notting Hill had found its cultural feet again, drawing on the positive aspects of a more settled multicultural scene to offer an alternative form of cinemagoing. The Imperial was rechristened the Electric, with new manager Peter Howden famously installing Winston Churchill’s old projectors; cult movies were to follow.
PORTRAITS
Stephen Frears
Film director
“It was watching films at the fleapit Imperial Playhouse in the 60s that I remember most clearly”.
Robina Rose
Film maker & lecturer
Robina’s life-long love affiar with film began when she was about five years-old and her father took her to the Imperial to see a film, the first could have been Rashomon, she thinks. Although living abroad at times throughout her life, Robina’s home has always been around the corner from the Electric.