Duration 3.01
Despite the serious attempts to amalgamate them into one person, there have in fact been three Cissie Colpitts in Goole since 1931. Propine Fallax is chronologically the third. The accident of a marriage licence has brought her into the present survey, which is fitting, for she was after all president of the Goole Water-Tower Film Vault, home of the VUE Commission's film-archive.
Cissie Propine Colpitts grew up in the streets around the water-tower, and she certainly as a child must have known many of the Yorkshire cameramen who made up the Goole Experimental Film Society. The original brick water-tower, The Pepper, built in the 1900s, became inadequate for the needs of Goole's growing population, and in 1933 a new and larger concrete tower, The Salt, was erected by the Humber Authority on allotment-land leased from Propine's grandmother. The new tower filled the space between the railway line and an abattoir.
The tower and the land it stood on was bequeathed to Propine on her fifth birthday on the understanding that the accruing rents were paid into an account whereby half the interest was available for raw stock for the Goole and District Camera Society, and the other half paid for dancing lessons.
The second Goole Cissie Colpitts married a bicycle manufacturer and went to live in York, and she bequeathed her large collection of local film material to her namesake, and it was stored for a time in hen coops, in the abattoir and in the base of the old brick tower.
Propine, worried about the likely deterioration of the collection, felt it imperative to find it a permanent home. In 1951, due to another demand for more water, the tower became obsolete, and after a two-year conversion, Propine, on her eighteenth birthday, reopened it as a film vault.
On the night of the VUE, along with Arturo Fallax, the owner of the abattoir, Cissie Colpitts was on top of the tower with a party of friends watching the fires at Hull, when she fainted and began to bleed from the mouth.
She now suffers from anaemia, splayed thumbs and vertigo, and to underline her new aversion to the darkness of cinemas, she has made a clean break from her past reputation, changing her Christian name by deed poll and her surname by marriage.
The Falls Biographies
