Monthly Archives: January 2026

The Royal Tuschinski Theatre

**Royal Tuschinski Theatre**, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Abraham Icek Tuschinski (1886-1942) was the founder and creator of one of the world’s finest cinemas, the Royal Tuschinski Theatre [Koninklijk Theater Tuschinski] in Amsterdam.

Tuschinski was born to Polish parents in 1886, and after he married in his late teens he decided to take his new wife, Mariem Ehrlich, to a new life away from the antisemitism of their native country.

He settled in Rotterdam and over a period of thirteen years established four cinemas in the city, each more elaborate than its predecessor.

At the end of the First World War he made a partnership with two brothers-in-law, Hermann Gerschtanowitz and Hermann Ehrlich, and bought land on Amsterdam’s Reguliersbreestraat near the Rembrandtplein square.

Construction began in June 1919 and the cinema opened on October 28th 1921. The initial designer was Hijman Louis de Jong (1882-1944), who was dismissed before the building was completed: the interiors were finished by Pieter den Besten (1894-1972) and Jaap Gidding (1887-1955)

Art historians variously describe the styles employed as Jugendstil (otherwise Art Nouveau) and Art Deco (though the term didn’t become current until after the 1925 exhibition Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes). A useful umbrella term is the Amsterdam School. A practical adjective would be “exotic”.

Tuschinski wanted his patrons, when they stepped into the foyer, to feel they’d entered an illusion. The auditorium resembled an opera house, with two balconies above the stalls. Private spaces included a cabaret named La Gaité, a Japanese tearoom and a Moorish suite. A modern heating and ventilation system guaranteed comfort at all seasons, and after a refurbishment in 1936 the new carpet had two-inch pile. The building boasted the first organ in a Dutch cinema: Wurltizer couldn’t deliver in time, and Tuschinski grabbed a second-hand alternative from a cinema in Brussels.

There is a magnificent collection of archive photographs of the theatre’s early days together with modern images by Isabel Bronts at Cinema of Dreams: The Inspiring Story of Amsterdam’s Tuschinski Theate – Cabana Magazine.

The Tuschinski Theatre cost four million guilders and quickly became celebrated. Abraham Tuschinski was awarded Dutch citizenship in 1926, but the splendour went sour as war approached.

When the Nazi troops invaded the Netherlands in May 1940, four of Tuschinski’s cinemas in Rotterdam were destroyed. On Queen Wilhelmina’s birthday in August that year, British and Dutch flags appeared at a window at the Tuschniski. Abraham Tuschinksi declined an opportunity to escape to Britain, saying that he “grew up in this country in good times [and didn’t] want to be a deserter in bad times,” he said.

The three brothers-in-law were deprived of their business, and its Jewish name was changed to Tivoli by the Nazi-supported replacement owners, Tobis Film. Its programmes went over entirely to German films and performances by German artistes. A fire in the summer of 1941 destroyed some of the exquisite decoration.

Abraham Tuschinski was arrested on July 1st 1942 and sent first to Westerbork and then to Auschwitz where he was murdered on September 17th 1942. Only three members of the Tuschinski, Ehrlich and Gerschtanowitz families were still alive at the end of the war.

This was far from the end of the story, however. Max Gerschtanowitz took the business on after the war, and the cinema subsequently passed through successive owners until the French Pathé company acquired it as part of the MGM combine in 1995.

Pathé carried out painstaking restorations in 1998-2002 and again in 2019-20. Technical details of these restorations and much historical background can be found at Abraham Icek Tuschinski – Jewish Amsterdam and Pathé Tuschinski Cinema in Amsterdam | Amsterdam.info.

In 2021 King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands granted the complex the accolade “Royal” [Koninklijk]. Two grandsons of Hermann Gerschtanowitz and his great-grandson, the actor and TV personality Winston Gerschtanowitz, and a grandson of Hermann Ehrlich attended the ceremony.

Osgathorpe

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National Tramway Museum, Crich, Derbyshire: Sheffield 74

‘Hidden in Open Sight with Calvin Payne’ is an informative Substack by one of Sheffield’s most popular local historians.

Some time ago Calvin posted an image of a tram at the Batley Street terminus, noting that the street is now named Crabtree Close, and picked up on a refreshingly precise and helpful history-forum thread, in which a contributor ‘Waterside Echo’ pinpointed the date of the photo to late 1902. The Batley Street siding off the Barnsley Road opened in August 1902, and the tram was fitted with an enclosed top deck in 1903.

There’s a different photograph of a similar tram on Batley Street, taken from a different angle at around the same time, in Kenneth Gandy’s Sheffield Corporation Tramways (Sheffield City Libraries 1985), p 120.

Calvin was intrigued that the street had had three names – Brook Lane until 1886, then Batley Street and more recently Crabtree Close – and that the doyen of Sheffield street-names, Peter Harvey, listed it twice in his alphabetical survey, Street Names of Sheffield (Sheaf Publishing 2001), once in its own right and also as part of the collection of roads named Crabtree after the location.

I came to know about the short-lived Batley Street terminus by a different route. Once when I visited the National Tramway Museum at Crich, the Sheffield tram 74 was running with the destination ‘OSGATHORPE’.

The place-name isn’t much used nowadays, except for a little-known public park which “offers a tranquil escape from the bustling city”. Osgathorpe Road lies directly opposite Batley Street/Crabtree Close, and the 1905 Ordnance Survey 25-inch map shows the locations of now-demolished residences named Osgathorpe House, Osgathorpe Cottage and Osgathorpe Hills.

‘Waterside Echo’ refers to Charles Hall’s Sheffield Transport (Transport Publishing Company 1977) to piece together the origins of the tram route from town, along Barnsley Road and Firth Park Road to Page Hall, which the tramways department obstinately described as Pitsmoor, though it’s over a mile beyond the actual Pitsmoor.

Electric trams began operating to Page Hall within a month of the first electrified route from Tinsley to Nether Edge beginning in September 1899.

The end-to-end service was operated by single-deckers because of doubts about the braking power of double-deckers on the steepest gradient beyond Osgathorpe. The Batley Street siding was brought into use in August 1902 so that short-working double-deckers could reverse at the furthest safe point out of town. By January 1905 the double-deck cars were considered safe to run down to Page Hall, whether by an easing of the gradient or a strengthening of the brakes, and the siding was closed.

That fits with a hypothesis I’ve nursed for decades sitting on the top decks of buses travelling from town along Barnsley Road. There’s something odd about the road formation from the toll house where the nineteenth-century Burngreave Road joins Pitsmoor Road, the Wakefield & Sheffield Turnpike, which dates from 1757.

It’s possible to explore this virtually by googling ‘Pitsmoor Toll House’ on Google Earth and heading away from Sheffield: Barnsley Rd – Google Maps.

On the left, from the Church of God Seventh Day, there’s a stretch of road behind a retaining wall higher than the modern Barnsley Road. The retaining wall continues as far as Abbeyfield Primary School where the gradient dips downhill.

Then, at Crabtree Close (formerly Batley Street), on the opposite, right-hand side of the road, there is a separate elevated footpath at a higher level, which eventually drops steeply to meet the main road at the former Sheffield Companions Club, now a mosque with a couple of shops, at Fir Vale.

Presumably the present carriageway was regraded at some time for safety, but the tramway histories are silent about whether it was connected with the introduction of electric trams at the start of the twentieth century.

I often think of the novelist George Eliot’s remark in Middlemarch that “the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity”.

I’ve so often sat on a bus observing these features and never turned up an answer. And if Calvin hadn’t posted the 1902 photograph of the tram I’d never have found out about the Osgathorpe grand houses, and I’d have been less well-informed about the area where I’ve lived since the mid-1970s.

Well-kept station

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Great Malvern railway station, Worcestershire

Great Malvern railway station was built as the arrival and departure point for the elite visitors who flocked to the district to take water cures in the mid-Victorian period.

The spa resort thrived from the arrival of the Worcester & Hereford Railway in 1860, and the station at Great Malvern, opened in 1862, was the major hub for visitors, local inhabitants and freight. There were two other less important stations, Malvern Link to the north and Malvern Wells (closed in 1965) to the south.

The character of the station, like the rest of the town, was heavily influenced by Lady Emily Foley (1805-1900), the widowed Lady of the Manor, whose late husband’s will gave her independence and considerable influence. She disliked travelling through the two tunnels on the line, at Ledbury and Colwall, so she habitually travelled by road between her country seat at Stoke Edith and her private waiting room at Great Malvern.

The Gothic buildings at Great Malvern station were built in local Malvern Rag stone and designed by a local architect, Edmund Wallace Elmslie. He was responsible for the road bridge at the north end of the platforms and the remarkable iron columns which support the canopies on both platforms. The beautifully restored and brightly painted capitals are in twelve different designs, hand-forged in wrought iron, and serve to direct rainwater down the interior of each column.

Edmund Wallace Elmslie at the same time designed the Imperial Hotel across Avenue Road from the station. It was the largest hotel in Malvern, owned by the Great Malvern Hotel Company, chaired by the hydrotherapy pioneer Dr James Manby Gully (1808-1883).

Its elaborate Gothic architecture is enlivened by carvings by the Worcester sculptor William Forsyth (c1834-1915), whose brother James created, among much else, the huge Perseus Fountain at Witley Court, Worcestershire.

In 1919 the hotel was bought for £32,500 by Miss Greenslade and Miss Poulton, the two founders of Malvern Girls’ College which dated from small beginnings in 1893 elsewhere in Malvern. A complex succession of amalgamations with Lawnside, The Abbey and St James’s School (all of which were founded by women) eventually created Malvern St James in 2006.

The hotel was directly connected with the station platform by a gently sloping covered passageway of brick, wood and corrugated iron which is known as The Worm, for reasons which are obvious when looking at it from the overbridge. It enabled guests with limited mobility to reach the hotel from the railway. There is a shorter underground goods tunnel north of passenger walkway.

There’s a regular train service to Great Malvern from Worcester and Hereford, and a bus-service up the hill to the town centre.

Lady Foley’s former private waiting room operated as Lady Foley’s Tea Room until it closed in October 2023.

Though there was a project in 2017 to restore The Worm, it’s currently inaccessible for safety reasons.

The water cure

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The Yorkshire town of Ilkley had a modest reputation as a spa from the early eighteenth century [No additives | Mike Higginbottom Interesting Times] on the remarkable attribute that its mineral water was practically devoid of minerals.

Vinzenz Priessnitz (1799-1851), a Silesian peasant farmer, developed and patented hydrotherapy treatment, a system of baths, compresses and treatments involving wrapping patients in wet sheets, at Gräfenburg in Silesia in 1829. His procedures were satisfyingly uncomfortable, yet less life-threatening than other medical practices.

Captain Richard Tappin Claridge’s publication Hydropathy; or The Cold Water Cure, as practised by Vincent Priessnitz… (1842) encouraged the development of the first British hydropathic establishment at Malvern where the water had long been “famous for containing just nothing at all”.

Ilkley was quick to follow, when a consortium of Leeds businessmen opened a magnificent Scottish Baronial hydro named Ben Rhydding in 1844.

Ben Rhydding Hydropathic Establishment from “Ilkley, Ancient and Modern … Eighty illustrations” – PICRYL – Public Domain Media Search Engine Public Domain Search

The first resident physician, a Silesian, Dr Anthony Rischanek, left under some kind of a cloud, about which he harboured resentment for the rest of his life. He was succeeded by a leading proponent of the water-cure, Dr William Macleod, who established at Ben Rhydding the rigorous, wholesome lifestyle which initially characterised hydropathy.

The success of Ben Rhydding inevitably encouraged competitors. Wells House was established in 1853, at a cost of £30,000 in competition to Ben Rhydding, offering many of the same facilities at comparable prices.

The four-square turreted building, opened in 1856, was designed by Cuthbert Brodrick, who was at that time engaged in building Leeds Town Hall and would later create the Grand Hotel, Scarborough.

Smaller, less expensive hydros followed. Craiglands, which opened in 1859, boasted Dr Macleod’s services as “consulting physician”. Charging around £2 12s 0d per week, about a pound less than the Ben Rhydding and Wells House, Craiglands was repeatedly enlarged, until the original plain classical structure sprouted a dour and domineering Scottish Baronial extension.

The Troutbeck was financed by the then resident physician from Wells House, Dr Edmund Smith, and opened about a year before his death in 1864. Its medical practitioners were brought in from Wells House, including a Dr Harrison who combined hydropathic treatments with galvanism.

Other Ilkley hydros included the Grove (c1870, later the Spa), supervised by Dr Scott from Wells House, Sunset View (by 1871), Rockwood (1871), Marlborough House (1878), Stoney Lea (1883), run by a former bathman from Ben Rhydding, Mr Emmott, and Moorlands (1897).

Steadily towards the end of the nineteenth century the hydros’ therapeutic purpose was diluted by increasing demand from guests for leisure facilities. Chambers’ Encyclopaedia of 1906 commented that “most [so-called hydros] originally started with [the] full equipment for treatment, including a resident physician…but many now are merely high-class country boarding-houses”.

In the twentieth century every one of the Ilkley establishments declined and closed. Ben Rhydding closed permanently at the start of the Second World War and was demolished in 1955. After wartime requisition Wells House became a college of further education and is now luxury apartments; Craiglands is now a hotel and Troutbeck was until recently a care home. The Spa and Rockwood were converted into flats, and Marlborough House and Stoney Lea have been demolished.

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