[8] In 1911 he appeared in several provincial touring productions, attracting comment on his “clever study” of character and his “histrionic power”,[9] and in 1912 he was rewarded with the role of Sherlock Holmes in The Speckled Band at the London Palladium.
[10] He began 1914 in Ernest C. Rolls’s revue Full Inside at the Oxford Music Hall,[11] and in May had the leading role in Hubert Henry Davies’s Mrs Gorringe’s Necklace at Croydon.
[12] Later that year he made his first silent film appearance playing Colonel Earl in Maurice Elvey’s production of a dramatisation of John Strange Winter’s 1891 novel Beautiful Jim.
Although Bramble was essentially a character actor,[14] he played the lead role opposite Elisabeth Risdon in some of these productions and, when the pair co-starred in The Sound of Her Voice, the advertisements celebrated their “intense and powerful acting”.
[15] However, when Picturegoer magazine invited its readers to select “the Greatest British Film Player”, while Risdon polled the highest number of votes for a female, Bramble did not feature among the favoured males.
[16] Nevertheless his cinematic career moved forward, and in early 1916 he both acted in and directed, jointly with Eliot Stannard, British and Colonial’s Jimmy, an adaptation of another John Strange Winter novel.
Described in Kinematograph Weekly as “a credit to the kinema industry of this country”,[23] its success was declared in The Bioscope to be “almost wholly due” to Bramble “who shows that he possesses a quality that is very near genius.
In this endeavour, again working to a Stannard scenario, he was judged to have captured the intensity of the novel, and praise for his achievement and his “unusual perception of scenic values”[28] was not confined to the trade press.
[32] In 1923 he joined with Harry Bruce Woolfe to produce, for British Instructional Films, a dramatic reconstruction of Viscount Allenby’s campaign in Palestine, released under the title Armageddon.
[37] In 1925 he resumed stage appearances, acting in a revival of Edward Knoblock’s Kismet at the New Oxford and in Barbara Cartland’s first play Blood Money (which had previously been banned by the Lord Chamberlain) at the Q Theatre.