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1899: Hepworth Gets the Sack
1899 was to prove to be a pivotal year for Cecil Hepworth - it was the year in which he lost his job with the Warwick Trading Company, and embarked on a career as an independent producer that would outlast the careers of all other pioneer British movie-makers. Hepworth never discovered the reason for the termination of his employment with Warwick; Charles Urban, when confronted by Hepworth was unable to give one - but agreed to increase Hepworth's pay-off from one weeks wages to two. While in Warwick's employ, Hepworth had built a machine for developing negatives and had patented it as co-inventor (with Urban). Urban agreed that Hepworth could have the machine and the patent if he reimbursed the company for the patent fees incurred up to that date. This Hepworth duly did. He then rented a house in Walton-on-Thames for £36 per year in which he installed the machine and, with his cousin Monty Wicks (who had also been sacked by Warwick), began business as a film processing operation.
However, the business floundered as soon as it began, and so, to alleviate the cost of paying their staff of two women, Hepworth and Wicks decided to start making their own short actualities. The first made by Hepworth was Express Trains in a Railway Cutting. While the processing business remained inert, Hepworth continued to churn out a number of fifty-foot films: Ladies' Tortoise Race, Donkey Race, Procession of Prize Cattle, Drive Past of Four-in Hands. They were all filmed locally, at no cost other than that of the film stock, and Hepworth, in his autobiography, described them as 'of very little interest to anybody' - and yet they sold. Hepworth's chief buyers were the itinerant fairground proprietors, who paid the budding entrepreneur in 'threepenny bits culled from the roundabouts and swings.' At first, the films merely kept the business - called Hepwix - running, but in a very short time the films would become the business. [ADD]
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