At the Projector in the Home Theatrette

The Howson home theatrette, built in 1955 before the era of television, seated around 20 people and included motorised curtains, coloured proscenium lighting and facilities to screen 9.5mm films. At the time Denzil was working at Home Cinemas (a film-hire business), so had access to a wide range of commercial films released on the French film gauge. In addition, he had made a number of travel films during his overseas trip with Dot in 1952, and these were often shown to invited audiences of family and friends.

In this publicity photo circa 1960, Denzil attends to his Pathé 9.5mm projector, modified to play both optical and magnetic sound. The sound was fed into the separate recording/mixing console and thence into control room and theatrette speakers.

Under the projector is a home-made lighting console, with resistance dimmers made from heater elements (this was well before the invention of compact solid-state dimmers).

The curtains were remotely operated by a set of motors driving a gearing system built out of Meccano.

All of this is a far cry from the off-the-shelf home theatre systems of today, but at the time it was state-of-the-art.