The Everyman, the UK’s first repertory cinema, opened on Boxing Day with René Clair’s Le Million (1931) supported by a Mack Sennett comedy Turbulent Timber, a Disney cartoon and Paramount News.
Originally a Victorian drill hall the building had been transformed in the 1920s into the famous Everyman Theatre. The mission of the new cinema owners, solicitor James Fairfax Jones and his artist wife Tess, was to show good films, mostly revivals, from around the world. Despite the odds against the venture, they made a success of this small 285 seat cinema.