Colin Crosby Heritage Tours

Working in Chelmsford

One of the towns where I worked many years ago is Chelmsford, the county town of Essex.

In my early days in the cinema business, before I was appointed Manager of my first cinema so was still an Assistant Manager, I had to go out on relief quite a lot. This would have been around 1964.

This meant that I had to be in temporary charge of another cinema, usually for a couple of days but sometimes for longer, while the Manager was on his days off, or ill, or on holiday.

The first cinema where I had to take over for a two week period was the Odeon at Chelmsford. My friend Jim Burleigh had been appointed Manager there only weeks before, but had a holiday booked.

He asked me to do what I could to improve the efficiency of the cinema, and I was happy to comply. One of the things I did was to set up an extra retail sales point to take overflow business at busy times. This was to sell some of the high profit lines, such as soft drinks, nuts and popcorn. I called it the "Pop Corner".

If anybody reading this has any conections with Chelmsford (Born? Lived? Worked? Relatives? Ancestors?), I will be very pleased to hear from them.

Posted by colin on Saturday 6th June, 2009 at 9:06am