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The Danilo Cinema, Quinton/Warley

ChrisM

Super Moderator
Staff member
Between June and August 1940 the local Home Guard unit built a substantial, fortified HQ building on the car park at the Danilo. To help fund this project and to celebrate its inauguration a special film show was put on. The local Home Guards provided a Guard of Honour. A couple of images show this event. (More can be seen here).

This structure is said to have survived for a long period after the war. Does anyone have memories of it - and, better, still any image from the 1940s, 1950s or even later, which shows it?

Chris
 

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I was born at Quinton and have many happy memories of the Danilo (no TV) which I went to often as a child. I saw Gone with the Wind the first time there and once we were coming back from our holiday on the No. 9 bus and it went past I saw they were showing Calamity Jane - i made a bit of a fuss anout missing it so was allowed to go leaving the family to carry cases and bags home (selfish I think now). I don't have a photo. Oppisite the Danilo was an open space and a black and white cafe , perhaps lorries could park there? This cafe had a juke box and when I was about 14 my friend and I used to go and jig about in this cafe no-one else there - that juke box was where I first heard Elvis Presley and B ill Haley.
The No 9 bus terminus was just round the corner from the Danilo (as far as it went then) and there was a home for old men (don't know the name of the home)and a bomb dropped into the grounds and all the old men were taken to the Danilo while the bomb was defused - so my parents told me.
Sheri
 
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