Cinema Memory and the Digital Archive

Helen Gilmour (born in 1922 in Ayr in the west of Scotland) contacted CCINTB in 1992 in response to an item about the project that she had heard on her local radio station. This began a correspondence that continued over eight years, in the course of which Ms Gilmour sent three essays on aspects of her lifetime involvement with cinema, both as a keen cinemagoer and as the daughter of the manager of a number of cinemas in and around the town of Ayr. A covering letter suggests that the essays were produced in a writers’ group and that they might have been intended for publication. ‘Nostalgia’, dated March 1987 [HG-92-025PW001], celebrates two unnamed cinemas in her neighbourhood: “How nice it is to recall these happy days when the Cinema was a place of escape from the realities of the workaday world.” ‘”Q” Here’, written in March 1992 [HG-92-025PW002], names a number of local cinemas and adds little stories about each of them. The author notes that by 1938 Ayr boasted as many as six cinemas. Her father was Managing Director of one of them, the Ritz. ‘Movie Memories’ [HG-95-025PW003], sent to CCINTB in 1996, recounts Ms Gilmour’s earliest memories of enjoying silent films in one of the earliest purpose-built picture houses in her neighbourhood: ‘The whole atmosphere of the cinema might be described as “magical”’, she says.

---