Mrs Elsie Collimore remembers Liverpool's outdoor cinema in the early 20th century, interviewed in 1986

Mrs Elsie Collimore was born in 1906 and was interviewed in 1986 for the 'Looking Back at Liverpool: An Oral History of the Liverpool Region 1900 to 1960' project. Here she remembers Liverpool's outdoor cinema.
Transcript

ELSIE: I went to the open air pictures at Liverpool. There was no top on it and if it rained you got very wet. And there were old hard seats and the weeds used to grow up about this high in between the seats and you always took a cushion or a rug with you because your legs got very cold. It was open air and there was just a small section for reserved seats, they had a roof over them, they were lucky. And they had one man, Mr Fred Locke, used to play the music and if you were going past you knew what kind of movie it was by the sound of the music he was playing. If it was sad you knew it was Mary Pickford or something. Well my brother and I used to clean my uncle's boots and we'd get threepence each for cleaning to go to the pictures and threepence for a bag of peanuts. That was a big deal.