The Amazing Mr Jeffs: Birmingham's Premier Film Exhibitor - A talk by Professor Vanessa Toulmin

Waller Jeffs, showman extraordinaire, popularised the moving image and brought the cinematograph on a large scale to the people of Birmingham through his shows at the Curzon Hall. Working with a series of travelling exhibition companies and...

Waller Jeffs, showman extraordinaire, popularised the moving image and brought the cinematograph on a large scale to the people of Birmingham through his shows at the Curzon Hall.  Working with a series of travelling exhibition companies and Mitchell & Kenyon he commissioned the earliest surviving films of Birmingham and made the city’s everyday people the stars of his shows.

Today's talk will feature rare and unseen footage from the Mitchell & Kenyon Collection and will be a pictoral and filmic tour through early Edwardian popular entertainment culture. Professor Vanessa Toulmin is Research Director at Sheffield’s National Fairground Archive and led the research into the Mitchell and Kenyon Collection. She is from a Lancashire showland family, and was recently an artistic advisor to Blackpool’s Showzam festival.

The Mitchell and Kenyon Collection