This movie-loving minister brought Hollywood to Fortune Bay in the '50s — and his projector still works
CBC
In a faded coat of red velveteen, an unassuming bit of Newfoundland history sits on a work table at The Rooms in St. John's.
Underneath the fabric is a Victor 16 millimetre movie projector at least 70 years old. But its seven decades also hold another story: of two men who spread cinematic magic in the early 1950s, when many of the province's outports had neither roads nor electricity.
Beside the table, at the tail end of 2021, stand those men's children, reliving memories of film reels gone by as they dust the projector off to fire it up.
"When the movie was playing, if you looked away from the screen and looked at the beam of light, it was filled with dust particles. And to me, that was magical — that was fairy dust," said Liz Batstone.
The beam — and the projector it came from — belonged to her father, Sydney Bradbrook. He left England in 1931 for St. John's, where he studied to become a minister in the Church of England. But alongside his calling, came an addiction, said his daughter.
"He only had one, and that was the movies," said Batstone.
His diaries show he watched 70 movies amid his studies. "I would go so far as to say is that the times that he didn't do well at college, it was because he spent his time in a movie theatre," she said.
When Bradbrook became a full-fledged minister and set out from the big city, his movie addiction met the reality of his vocation.
He served only in isolated outports, using a boat to get from road-less community to road-less community for masses, weddings, baptisms and funerals. There was no electricity, let alone a local cinema.
By the early 1950s, settled in Belleoram with his wife and three daughters, Bradbrook took steps to end his movie drought. Batstone estimates it was either the summer of 1951 or '52 that her father returned from an annual meeting of Anglican ministers in St. John's with two mysterious crates in tow.
"He would not tell us what was in the crates. He made it clear it was not for us," she said.
After her father tucked her in that night, however, Batstone crept to the air register for an earful of her parents' conversation in the kitchen below.
"I heard her say with a tone of disbelief, 'You bought what, Sydney?'" said Batstone. The "what" was the Victor projector.
Batstone heard the gasp her mother made after asking about the cost, but not the price tag itself — although her investigations much later in life peg it at perhaps as much as $250, an astronomical sum at the time.