03/09/2026
In our thirteenth instalment on Skipton's cinema history, we continue the story of the Plaza through the life of its current owner, Charles Morris MBE. Charles is only the third proprietor in the Plaza's 114-year history. As we've seen, the first was Mark Morris (no relation), who ran the Gem Picture Palace from the former Temperance Hall until the Hartley family took over in 1928. Renaming it the Plaza, they operated the cinema for the next 70 years. Charles took over in 1998 and, over the past quarter-century, the Plaza has gone from strength to strength.
Charles has kindly shared his memoirs, originally published in Picture House, the Cinema Theatre Association's annual journal, in 2013. Along with contemporary press interviews, they form the main sources for this series of posts. This week, we look at Charles's early life and the experiences that sparked a lifelong passion for cinema.
Born on 28 July 1950 in Hoylake on the Wirral, Charles was the youngest child of Maxen Morris, a solicitor, and Nancy (née Shackleton). His family were keen cinemagoers but, largely visiting local picture houses: the Winter Gardens and Kingsway in Hoylake, and the Tudor, a mile away in West Kirby.
It was at the Winter Gardens that Charles made his first trip to the cinema with his mother to see Disney's Lady and the Tramp. He was instantly captivated, recalling that "the film absorbed my concentration totally and I was oblivious to my surroundings." Later that year, while watching another Disney film, Perri, he became just as fascinated by the projection process as by the film itself. Recalling the experience to Cumbrian Life magazine, he said:
"You could see this shaft of light coming through the smoke. People could smoke in the cinema in those days. It hit the screen, and I observed the source of this light changing from one position to another every 20 minutes as the film rolled on one projector and then another. I was fascinated to know more about what went on behind that wall at the back."
The Winter Gardens closed soon after these early visits, followed by the Kingsway, leaving Hoylake without a cinema for a time. Fortunately for Charles, and ultimately for us, the Winter Gardens reopened 16 months later. Planning a visit on the first Saturday after reopening, the nine-year-old checked the screening times and spotted the projectionist, burning old film and other rubbish outside. Charles struck up a conversation and managed to persuade him to show him the projection box.
Six months later, the Winter Gardens was again facing closure. By then, Charles, aged ten, was campaigning to save it, painting posters advertising the cinema's programme and pinning them to trees near his home. His efforts caught the manager's eye and earned him a permanent, if unofficial, free pass. "So, simultaneously, I was able to see the films free of charge and also visit the projectionist."
Charles threw himself into whatever needed doing, purely for the love of the place. Each week he helped put up posters, replace bulbs in the footlights, clean reflectors and patch the ageing colour filters, mend chairs, light the gas secondary lights before each performance using a taper, and even shovel coke into the boiler on Christmas Day to warm the theatre in time for the Boxing Day screenings.
In the projection room, Charles learned to operate the lights, rewind films and, before long, thread the projector himself. He was soon trusted to experiment during the Saturday afternoon children's matinees and, on Christmas Eve 1963, aged just 13, projected the Peter Sellers and Terry-Thomas film Tom Thumb single-handedly to an audience of three. Although the projectionist was somewhere in the building, Charles recalled that "he never came in and just let me get on with it!"
Charles continued with his informal apprenticeship at the Winter Gardens throughout his teenage years, even when he was a boarder at Denstone College in Staffordshire, and later while studying electrical engineering at University College London. At Denstone, he soon took over running the film club and later chaired the film societies at UCL and the University of London. Despite now being a paid projectionist with a wealth of experience, a career in cinema did not immediately follow. Instead, he worked first for the Ministry of Defence in Melton Mowbray and later at the Royal Ordnance Factory in Blackburn, managing the production of tools for manufacturing lines. The itch still needed scratching, however, and he kept a foot in the cinema world, working part-time as a projectionist wherever his day job took him. By the mid-1980s, he had worked in 16 cinemas, mainly across the North West...
Next week, we'll look at Charles's first foray into running a cinema, in a venue much closer to Skipton than you might think...
Pictured: The Plaza, and the Winter Gardens in Hoylake where Charles first fell in love with the silver screen.
