Soon after I arrived in Napier Barracks WO1 Pete Woolford, who was ASM of M&G Platoon, mentioned that there was a vacancy at the Globe Cinema, which was run by the Army Kinema Corporation, and no takers. As it happened I had worked as a part-time projectionist in England during my last two years at school, so I applied for the job and got it.
Jack Ashton, the manager, always dressed in a black dinner suit and red bow tie.
The pay was 5.00 DM per worknight, three nights a week unless called for guard duty.
Two other projectionists worked there, all of us part-time employees. The other two were a
Lance-Bombadier from 3 Bty and a Gunner from 4 or HQ Bty. The L/Bdr lived in one of the married quarters on camp, not far from the mess hall.
The two projectors were exactly the same British-Thompson-Houston models that I had been used to in U.K. but hadn't been serviced very well. At the beginning of each night's performance we had to run a clip of a military band playing the national anthem, but the only stock clip had been used so many times it couldn't be glued to the front of the main movie any more, so we developed a practice of running it through the projector without a reel. The problem with that is that the tension in the 'gate' (where the light shines through the frame onto the screen) is all wrong and the clip would frequently split or jam, or both. The only thing then was switch to the other projector, which your partner should have got running by now, and if the timing was right the main feature would start and nobody would notice.
During the summer it was so warm in the projection room (This was long before air-conditioning was available) we usually had all the windows open and refreshed ourselves with copious quantities of Heineken with a dash of lime from the NAAFI bar across the street.
My gratefull thanks to Mike Powell for supplying the following copies of a program.
