A Wetherspoon named after a cinema mogul who faced the Old Bailey, the bankruptcy court, and the divorce court all on one terrible morning
The Montagu Pyke on Charing Cross Road is a Wetherspoon holding a 4.1 from eight thousand four hundred and fifty-two people – an enormous sample – and it is named after a cinema pioneer whose story is one of the most spectacular rises and falls in this entire survey.
The cinema pioneer
Montagu Pyke was one of the great pioneers of the early British cinema. In the years before the First World War, when moving pictures were a thrilling new novelty, Pyke built a circuit of cinemas across London – purpose-built picture theatres to show the new films to an amazed public. This building, fronting Charing Cross Road, was his sixteenth and final cinema, opened in 1911, at the very summit of his success.
He was, for a moment, a genuine mogul – a self-made man riding the wave of an entirely new industry, building palaces of light across the capital. And then it all came apart, with a speed and completeness that is almost operatic.
The worst morning
Here is the detail that makes the story unforgettable. In 1915, Pyke was storing a ton of waste film in the basement of this very building when an employee accidentally set it alight. Early film stock was made of nitrate – violently, explosively flammable – and the fire killed the employee. Pyke was prosecuted for manslaughter.
And his troubles arrived all at once. On one single terrible morning in 1915, Montagu Pyke was due to appear at the Old Bailey on the manslaughter charge, to apply for discharge at the Bankruptcy Court, and to appear before a judge in the Divorce Court – three courts, three catastrophes, one morning. His business, his liberty, and his marriage were all collapsing simultaneously.
The Prat’s history desk notes that this is perhaps the single most concentrated disaster in this survey – a man who built sixteen cinemas and reached the summit of a new industry, brought down to face manslaughter, bankruptcy, and divorce on the same day, in the same building that now bears his name and serves cheap pints.
The Marquee Club
The building’s later life was extraordinary in a different way. From 1988 to 1996 it housed the Marquee Club – one of the most important venues in the history of British music, which across its various homes had presented the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, David Bowie, the Who, the Sex Pistols, and the Clash. So this single building was a pioneering cinema, the site of a fatal fire and a triple catastrophe, and then a temple of rock music, before becoming a Wetherspoon.
The Wetherspoon
A 4.1 across eight and a half thousand people is a typical Wetherspoon score – the chain’s cheap, reliable, high-volume formula earning a solid-but-unspectacular rating from an enormous crowd. Wetherspoon, to its credit, researches and displays the genuine history of its buildings, which is how the astonishing story of Montagu Pyke is kept alive on the wall of a pub named after him.
Verdict
An enormous, cheap Wetherspoon named after a cinema pioneer who built sixteen picture palaces and then faced manslaughter, bankruptcy, and divorce on a single morning, in a building that was later a temple of rock and roll.
Go, have a cheap pint, read the history on the wall, and raise it to Montagu Pyke, who reached the summit of a new industry and lost everything in one catastrophic day.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
