In 1919 Peterborough’s downtown had four theatres showing motion pictures: the Grand Opera House, Royal, Strand, and Empire. By the 1930s all of those houses had vanished like abandoned love interests in countless romantic movies.

In the second half of the 1910s the Turners had a mind to sell the Grand Opera House; their true business interests most likely rested elsewhere, in their own factory. They advertised a sale as early as October 1916. Seemingly with no such sale on the horizon, in December 1917 they announced a reorganization, changing their official name and announcing an even great emphasis on motion pictures, “on a large scale.”

In August 1918 the owners shifted ground, closing down and renovating the opera house – as reported in Exhibitors Herald, “with the idea of presenting moving pictures almost continuously throughout the coming season.” They planned to book only “occasional” road attractions. “The theatre is being altered, decorated and refitted in various ways, making it practically a new house.” To oversee the work the Turners hired a new manager, William Dineen, described as “a prominent Canadian exhibitor and a former resident of Toronto.” (He had previously managed the Strand Theatre in Toronto.) Besides being responsible for the “artistic effects” – including “floral decorations, new curtains and lighting fixtures and other additions” – Dineen would manage the bookings, as he had apparently done in a number of other theatres in the country.

Unlike the actual movie theatres, the Grand reserved seats for all evening performances. When it was reopened to a crowded house on Labour Day 1918, with “pictures and vaudeville,” it had “everything new” – “new decorations, new cooling system, new ventilation, new music, new [cheaper] prices.” Supervision of projection was in the hands of E. Graham, brought in from Toronto; in 1916 he had overseen projection at the Strand Theatre, Camp Borden, Ont. The theatre also had, for the first time, “lady ushers,” provided by the Peter Robinson Chapter of the Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire, with a portion of the proceeds going to a Prisoners of War Fund. “While there will be no uniform proper the young ladies will be dressed alike in white dresses.” In this regard the house was following a trend taken up in recent years by Toronto theatres. The ushers and a six-piece orchestra conducted by Rupert Gliddon (long-time director of the Peterborough Conservatory of Music) proved worthy of a comment in The Motion Picture World: “This is going some for a town the size of Peterboro.”

As Dineen announced, “In opening up this theatre permanently in pictures and vaudeville, we are doing so feeling that the demand for refined amusement at popular prices will find favour.” He was certain that the audiences would appreciate being able to reserve seats. “Just let us say that we are going to try and make this a popular amusement place, where you can bring your family, mother, sister, sweetheart, and feel that you are going to enjoy every bit of the programme.” The opening pictures included A Bachelor’s Children (Vitagraph, 1918), with Harry T. Morey, and a live act by the Angers, a husband and wife singing/dancing/roller-skating act.

Finally, though, the sale that the Turners were longing for, and probably negotiating for quite some time, came through – and the buyer was no less than Ambrose J. Small, the Toronto entrepreneur who had long wiggled his tricky and sticky fingers into the Peterborough amusement pie. As it turned out, he would hold onto Peterborough’s Grand Opera House for only a very short while – and it would fall into other corporate hands, with its future shaped by outside decisions and pressures.

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Post-World War I, increasing corporatization in general invaded the city. The once-plentiful family-run groceries had to compete with the arrival of the Loblaws and Dominion chain stores (both founded in 1919, and arriving in Peterborough in the 1920s). Local clothing or department stores such as J.T. Braund, Richard Hall & Son, Cressman Co., and J.C. Turnbull’s found themselves facing off with F.W. Woolworth, & Co. (arriving by 1913), the Metropolitan Stores (1929), and Kresge’s (1930).

Postwar Peterborough, like the country in general, saw a period of unrest amidst a rise in the cost of living. It was also a period of intense labour activism (including the famous Winnipeg Strike of 1919), with workers demanding better conditions; in 1918 the nine-hour-day had been established in at least three Peterborough factories (though the work week continued to be six days). In 1919 voters elected a slate of four Labour Council men to city council, although their success was short-lived when they were defeated in the following year. Even church organists were on the move. “In Peterboro during the past year,” the Examiner noted in September 1919, “practically every church has either lost or narrowly escaped losing an organist.” The reason? The possibilities of gaining higher wages elsewhere; poorly paid organists were having no problem finding better positions in other cities. The motion picture show was cited as a cause of the scarcity: “The movies . . . are installing expensive organs and are offering tempting salaries to qualified men.”

In Toronto, moving picture operators were asking for a raise to 90 cents an hour and other benefits. They wanted guaranteed hours, something they’d never had before. Several “leading” Toronto movie theatres increased their prices for regular seats to thirty-five cents. Meanwhile, during a period of lingering post-war depression, which reached its peak in 1922, wages in Peterborough remained relatively low.

A glimpse of the prevailing labour strife appeared on screen for the Easter Holiday in April 1920, when the Grand Opera House offered a rare made-in-Canada feature (produced at Trenton, Ont.), The Great Shadow (U.S., Adanac Producing Co., March 1920), starring the famous stage actor Tyrone Power Sr. as the foreman of a shipbuilding plant who defends his union from the unsavoury incursion of nasty radical Bolsheviks. “The play, which is an education in itself, may profitably be seen by employers and employees of the city,” noted the Examiner, adding:

In the play the audience is brought into close touch with the Russian Reds, agents of Lenin and Trotsky, working in labour unions, and some surprising revelations are made of the machinations of the Bolshevists, which have actually been going on in all European countries.

The U.S. entertainment paper Variety also offered its take on the film: “No effort is spared to drive home the insidious methods of Russian aliens disseminating the gospel of Bolshevism among labor organizations in this country. The filthy, repulsive appearance of the Russian alien characters as depicted in the picture cause one to shrink and shudder.” The movie was one of a cycle of “Red Scare” pictures in the years 1919–20. The Empire featured Bolshevism on Trial in April 1920 (declared to be “The Timeliest Picture Ever Made” and “Not a propaganda picture but a thrilling drama . . . the story of the ruthlessness and treachery of the demon Bolshevism with all the scenes laid on this side of the Atlantic Ocean”) – and its message, in the end, was that “the interests of labour and capital could be harmoniously reconciled.” The militant unionists of town, at the CGE plant, for instance, may not have been quite so convinced or even seen the film as the “education” suggested by their local paper. 

In February 1917 Ontario women had gained the right to vote. Most women could vote in federal elections by 1918, although Asian men and women were excluded – as were Indigenous men and women living on reserves (and most other places as well). It would still be over ten years before women (again excluding Indigenous women) were legally recognized as “persons.”

In a time of labour shortage, just before the war ended, the street railway company had decided it would hire women as conductors and drivers, at the same wages as men, although it would be “only girls who have a strict sense of honour in business dealings,” and “only girls with a splendid nerve will be eligible for the motor service.” (They were issued with navy uniforms.) Theatres in general, like the Strand, were beginning to employ “lady ushers.” The newspaper reported that women in Peterborough could now be seen smoking, though not in public. An ad in the 1920 Wids yearbook, published by a New York-based film distributor, asked exhibitors, including, those in Peterborough, “Why be Offensive to Women? To Please Men? Nothing could be a greater mistake. Women are 65% of your audiences; and men enjoy clean fun as well as women do.”

Now with a population of well over 20,000, Peterborough advertised itself in the 1921 city directory not just as “The Electric City” but as the “Centre of Specialized Industries” with its “AMUSEMENTS – Opera House, four moving picture theatres and Conservatory of Music; bathing beaches on Otonabee River; two enclosed and six open rinks; organized amateur sports, and the best Annual Exhibition Between Ottawa and Toronto.” In 1918 the dynamic Yeotes brothers, who had come to town in 1904 with Mike Pappas, had set up a bowling alley, with four lanes, over their store at 339 George. In September 1919 the Western Clock Company (Wesclox) announced it was planning to open a factory in town. That year Peterborough was apparently afflicted with “an epidemic of dancing” – to the extent that, a newspaper headline said, “Dignified Grampas Are Learning All the Latest Steps.” The city now had 532 cars; the county had 1,138, and the parliamentary member for East Peterborough was raising the question of improving the road system as “The Great Need of the Present Day.” The Hunter Street Bridge went under construction – providing lots of employment amidst ongoing worries about its exorbitant cost.