BIRCH, CARROLL & COYLE – DIGITAL STORY
A QUEENSLAND CONSORTIUM DATING BCK TO 1910
Dennis: Birch Carroll & Coyle represent the different regions of the state. So the Carrolls were born in Ipswich and had an interest in Brisbane theatres … Birch was a publican who bought the Earls Court in Rockhampton and began showing pictures rather early, probably 1910, and Coyle was a businessman from Townsville whose family came from business and also ran theatres in Charters Towers. So getting those three together took some time.
Dennis: Initially it was a partnership – Birch Carroll it was called, and Coyle didn’t come in until 1923. But Birch Carroll had already developed the idea of a circuit in southern Queensland, and they intended launching that circuit in Bundaberg and taking it up to Rockhampton, probably to Mt Morgan and other places as well. So they were interested in entertainment, not just films. It was a combination, sometimes with local entrepreneurs of live entertainment, vaudeville, even ice skating, whatever they could do and then running Carroll’s Continental Short Films.
GREATER UNION INVESTS IN BIRCH CARROLL & COYLE IN 1927
Alan: I think Greater Union brought to Birch, Carroll and Coyle stability, equity and to some degree capital raising… It had partnerships in Western Australia… in Adelaide and also Victoria. The way forward in Queensland was a little bit more difficult, because… Queensland was also a very protected environment and it was not going to be possible for somebody to ride into Queensland and replicate what BC&C had created, so it made a lot of sense to grow through the growth of that company.
BIRCH CARROLL & COYLE RUN AS A DISTINCTIVELY QUEENSLAND COMPANY
Dennis: …they always treated Birch, Carroll & Coyle as a distinctly Queensland company, because of the regional background.
Terry: We ran as a Queensland company… we had a southern company owning 75% but we were allowed to by them, and we insisted that we run as a Queensland company.
In my 20 years at Birch, Carroll and Coyle, including five years running it, there was never any question of them being a head office.
IMPACT OF WORLD WAR II
Dennis: Of course World War two was a gift to them in the sense that both Australian and American troops were stationed in and around the regional cities where a lot of the big theatres were located… Their profits doubled pretty abruptly… So they increased screenings from two a day to three a day for example, so they could put more people through the theatres… also, this is the time when they began Sunday screenings, so they had special screenings for the troops…
LOCAL THEATRE MANAGERS CREATE SOCIAL HUBS
Dennis: The local managers were significant figures in their local communities and they turned the theatres into… community halls, community events. So the main thing was to make those theatres a social hub for the city…
50s AND 60s AIR-CONDITIONED THEATRES CHANGED ENTERTAINMENT IN REGIONAL QUEENSLAND
Terry: When we first built them in places like Townsville and Darwin, we had people lining up in the street the next morning. I couldn’t work out what they were all doing there. They wanted to go somewhere that was air conditioned. They weren’t particularly concerned what movie was on.
ARRIVAL OF TELEVISION – BIGGEST DISRUPTER OF CINEMAS
Terry: It just closed a lot of theaters and it put companies like Birch Carroll and Greater Union into a very tough trading time.
Alan: I remember… the tough years of BC&C where in one year, one particular year, the Mount Isa drive in, provided the entire profit of the company for that year. Because Mount Isa didn’t have TV.
CINEMAS BOUNCE BACK AFTER TV – DRIVE-INS AND MULTI-THEATRES
Alan: I think drive ins, from a national viewpoint were certainly the answer, in a great part… Contemporaneous with that, of course, we changed from the single auditorium, to the twins and the triples, as opposed to what we know as multiplexes today. That was giving multiplicity of choice, with the one destination. They’re the key challenges I think, or the key initiatives that were undertaken to face the challenge of TV.
Dennis: Their drive-ins were probably the most profitable in Australia, even though they took a while to come into that.
GREATER UNION HELPED BRING THE LATEST TECHNOLOGY
Terry: We were in a position, probably the only provincials in a position where everything new that was coming out… we were in a position to adopt it. People in Rockhampton or Townsville were seeing the cinema scope and whatever, at the same time as Sydney and Melbourne. They knew it and felt it. That’s why we were doing so well throughout Australia… That even included the likes of Newcastle and Ballarat… We were outgracing them all the time. That was the advantage of Birch, Carroll and Coyle.
MAJOR CONTRIBUTION OF TERRY JACKMAN AM
Terry: They made me general manager when I was 30, which in those days was the youngest in Queensland.
Alan: Terry’s contribution really was that passion, was that willingness to challenge and I think through that, BC&C benefited enormously because Terry maintained his independence from Greater Union… BC&C was very fortunate because he was right more often than he was wrong.
Terry: …So in seven years, maybe even eight years it was, from my late 20s, we doubled the size of the company….
RYDGE FAMILY’S CONTINUING INFLUENCE THROUGH GREATER UNION EXTENDS BEYOND 90 YEARS
Alan: My father got involved in Union theaters back in 1927…
…he was one of those financial people who brought that aspect to it… he was a touch entrepreneurial, and he saw the need for growth. He saw the need for the partnerships in the west, in South Australia and Victoria, and saw the real benefit of significant growth by going in with BC&C, because of the strength that BC&C had in Queensland.
THE QUEENSLAND CHARACTER OF BC&C
Alan: … there is a spirit of Queensland… that’s got a degree of rebel in it, a degree of individualism, a degree of aloofness from the rest of Australia. I think it’s fair to say that those spirits and those sentiments were reflected in Birch, Carroll and Coyle, BC&C. The way it was run, the way BC&C developed and of course, the fact that it survived today to be the strongest exhibitor in Queensland… It would be the preeminent and dominant exhibition business in Australia of a country nature.
SELLING AN EXPERIENCE TODAY – NOT JUST A MOVIE
Alan: …The response has been innovative cinemas, the concept of event cinemas… You go in, you have a choice of your gold class, your Vmax, your super experience. You have food offerings now. Cinema industry at that level really has to provide a very good reason beyond just the movie, to go out.
A true experience, or if you’d like to say, a true event…
STREAMING – THE MODERN COMPETITOR
Terry: …I suppose when you think, we’ve now got a new competitor, which I… in Netflix or in streaming… The facts of life are in any business… new ideas are coming at a thousand miles an hour. It used to take time once…
THE LEGACY OF BC&C
Terry: …It’s built provincial Queensland entertainment into what it is today. I think that its legacy… Its job was to take good cinema going, air conditioned cinema going into the subtropics of Queensland, which nobody else had done…
Dennis: I think it’s the brand itself. The fact that, they were usually ahead of the pack…both technologically and in terms of cinema design… I don’t think anyone really could have competed with them in those regional cities, because they held a very powerful role.
Birch Carroll & Coyle has led the film, exhibition and entertainment industry in Queensland for over 100 years.
It transformed entertainment throughout the state, especially in regional and rural Queensland.
And it is the only film theatre business of its kind in Australia.