SIFTING through our files the other day I came across a picture of a chap who was all over the pages of the national press last week. Looking happy and contented in his old age with his third wife Penny was Sir Rod Stewart at the Cheltenham National Hunt Festival.

It was a bit different from the photograph I had found, which was of him in a leopard print jacket and Seventies flares yelling his head off on stage at the Gaumont Cinema, Worcester in April, 1973. Exactly a year later the place closed down. Or rather it was closed down by the Rank Organisation, which also owned the Odeon cinema virtually opposite in Foregate Street and which had just completed a £50,000 conversion into a three screen complex.

To lose the Gaumont in Worcester was a real shame, because it was the only place in town with a large enough stage to accommodate the wide range of music and variety acts which toured the UK in the decades after the Second World War. We’ve published the list many times before, but it included everyone from Buddy Holly and the Crickets on their only British tour in 1958, the Beatles, who came twice in 1963, The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Cliff Richard, David Bowie and on to Rod the Mod, who came both when fronting The Faces and later as a solo artist. There were many, many more and the total is virtually a catalogue of the pop music industry.

The closure of the Gaumont in April, 1974 left the Odeon as the city’s only cinema. Fifteen years earlier, before the post war boom began to fade, there had been five. But St John’s closed in 1958, the Northwick in 1966 and the Scala in 1973. Before them there had been several smaller cinemas in Worcester.

Marquees on Pitchcroft and the Public Hall in the late 1800s were the city’s first “cinemas” showing pioneering Bioscopic films. In fact Worcester was one of the first places in the country to screen actual Boer War films as part of travelling exhibitions of the new wonder of Bioscope.

But the first permanent cinema in Worcester was the Empire, immediately to the north of Foregate Street railway bridge. It opened around 1900 with seats priced at 2d. It was taken over in 1915 by Sir Arthur Carlton, who also ran the city’s Theatre Royal, and had a revamp and name change to the Silver Cinema. The Silver was later taken over by Rank, closed during the war years, and re-opened afterwards as the Odeon..

The Apollo in Park Lane, small with only 150 seats, opened in 1910 and eventually closed in 1933. While another with a similar life-span was the 500-seat Arcade in St Swithin’s Street. It stood on an extensive site on the south side of the road, which went right back to Church Street.

Today the fashion is for multi-screen complexes and as well as the Odeon, Worcester has Vue at the Friar Street/Sidbury junction. Sadly at neither of them will Sir Rod be appearing any time soon.

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