2

Cousin de Cecil M. Hepworth, Monty Wicks devient son associé en 1897 :

Investment was decided upon and my young cousin, Monty Wicks, agreed to come in with me for a small wage and the lark of the thing. Early in 1897, we took a shop in Cecil Court, Charing Cross Road, and set up there to work an agency we secured for the sale of cameras and dry-plates. We enjoyed the lark and waited for custom-which never came.

---

HEPWORTH, 1951: 30.

The new period begins with the coming to Cecil Court of the great Charles Urban to see what I had done to his 'flickerless Bioscope' projector. He was sufficiently impressed to commission me to alter several of his mechanisms as I had altered mine, and after a little while he offered me five pounds a week to go over to his place and work for him there. I promptly accepted on condition that he found a position for cousin Monty Wicks, too, and we shut up and went. And so the trap closed upon me and never again was there a chance to escape. p. 38.

I have no regrets about Warwick Court. On the whole I had a very happy time. I was with nice people and doing the sort of work I have always liked; doing it fairly successfully and being fairly paid. True, I had no other actual film to my credit but the one of the boat-race but I had the handling and printing of Joe Rosenthal's work and I picked up a lot of knowledge of the film business. I was the most surprised person you can possibly imagine when, one Monday morning, I found on my desk a short note enclosing a week's wages in lieu of notice and saying that my services were no longer required. Monty Wicks had a similar note. p. 41.

Sources

HEPWORTH Cecil M., Came the Dawn: Memories of a Film Pioneer, London, Phoenix House, 1951, 208 p.

3

4