JUDITH Bowers, in Glasgow’s Lost Theatre, her book about the Britannia Music Hall, tells a story about the great showman A.E. Pickard and his White Elephant cinema, in Shawlands, which he opened in 1927. He advertised dinner and a fur coat, free with admission, to the first 2,000 patrons. Eager for such a bargain, women stood in a forbiddingly lengthy queue. And what did they see when they got to the front? Pickard and his cinema manager, handing out rabbits. A contemporary report said the White Elephant was the first cinema in the world to have, in its balcony seating, layers of fine rubber atop shock absorbers, rather than springs, underneath the velvet.
Pickard, of course, was the man who, in 1906, had taken over the Britannia, re-named it the Panopticon, and made it a cult success.
The White Elephant had long since passed into other hands, and been known simply as the Elephant, by the time it was closed, and sold to builders, in 1960. “When I announced I was calling it the White Elephant,” Pickard, then 85, told the Evening Times, “I was told it would be a white elephant. But I built it for £25,000 and sold it some years ago for £40,000. Some people just won’t give me credit for being able to see through a brick wall.” He even said he might build another White Elephant cinema in the city centre’s Renfrew Street, where he had two sites.
Pickard died in 1964.
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