my three wheeler is blue with some yellow too
by Angus Strachan
i pedal for miles and miles
looking for other children
my head hurts so much and cement is grey
and i must find some children to play with
or become that cement
somehow my older sister is hiding
in a shoe box inside a cupboard
in the bottom of a wishing well
all crunched up below the sea but not me
why my mother never thought
of looking for her there is a mystery i think
my sister is tops but she doesn’t talk much
but i can’t think about this now
as i wake up and jump out of bed
it’s time for kings of the road
first i have to yawn
mother’s struggle with their daughters
more than their sons
nanna said to aunty pat
who we never see anymore
because there’d been a war
which means no more cousin becky for me
mother is good at that
on a hair trigger says mrs. albert from next door
none of this matters right now
i finish my yawn and i’m raring to
get out on the track
with my yellow and blue hellcat
holy cow i’m breaking
the donald campbell land speed record
screaming out our side gate rat-a-tat
that poor man sure has met his match
when i step on the gas at twilight
before anyone else is awake
it’s dark and the stars are just starting to say
goodbye and the shadows whisper to the moon
i might climb every tree for ten city blocks
the leaves never sleep they just shake and say
how are you then sigh as i ride away
maybe every road and lane once then twice and this morn
i’m racing my trike down the middle of st kilda road
even now there are early birds like me
and they swerve holy-jimminy
they’ve never seen a monster three wheeler before
in the middle of their busy road not at 4am
until a police car sees me and goes flashing red
and the race is on for the quick and the dead
i rev her up with a wheelie or two
like zorro with his horse except on my bike
it’s easy for me to get away
i know every hole in every fence
every narrow alleyway
and now i’m home
puffing rocks and boulders again
when i should be playing tag
or war or countries & kings
with other children just like me
i must have done something really bad
and i’m about to fall down the well
where my sister has set up home
when suddenly
an older boy comes from lickety-split nowhere
pops out a crack from the midnight breeze
he has a bit of a moustache
he’s big and maybe a little bit sad
all he does is stare at the wind
i’m sure i’ve seen him before
i think he was the one at aunt daisy’s foster care
who had the big log and chased them all
when they did things to me
but like my sister living under the sea
i think he is a little bit fog-lost and dreamy
but he’s not nearly as strange
as the twins who step right through a wall
they are joined at the waist and not very tall
and they never stop yakking but not to me
holy jimminy-hellcats those two can talk
says mister moustache staring through the breakfast sky
and suddenly i realize
i was begging the air and the cement for friends
and here they are
so it’s either cement
or them
Angus Strachan
May 2020
Image by Cinzia Fabrizio
Lemniscatory Diversions
March 14
by Anne Warrington
A Critique by Quentin Weiver
Infinity: now there’s a big thing. This thing called infinity has troubled philosophers and mathematicians since at least classical times.
Anaximander, in the sixth century BC was pondering the idea of ἄπειρον, an endless space without bounds that existed before the world began and will last for ever. Two centuries later Aristotle was having a field day with the concept of infinity, arguing effectively that whatever number one can imagine, there is always a bigger one. It was part of the staple diet of mediaeval philosophers, and Wittgenstein was arguing the complexities of the subject even to his death in 1951.
Early Greek mathematicians’ treatment of infinity was a little circumspect, preferring to regard it as a philosophical notion. They did, however, rigorously study infinite processes, which laid the foundations for those giants of 18th century mathematics, Newton and Leibnitz, to develop the calculus, which in turn relies on the convergence of infinite series.
Artists, Giotto in the 14th century to Escher 20th century being good examples, love to try to depict infinity, and naturally poets adore such an ineffable and transcendent concept. William Blake in his Auguries of Innocence ponders an ultimate truth in seeking to “Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand/ And Eternity in an hour”.
Now, of course, the infinite infinity is God. The three attributes of God, omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence imply infinity. Christian tradition, the well-rehearsed Ontological Argument forms the basis of its theology. In 1078 St Anselm, later to become Archbishop of Canterbury, defined God as “a being than which no greater can be conceived”.
So we come to Anne Warrington’s piece March 14. It’s theme of infinity brings together theology and mathematics, through the medium of poetry. If that sounds daunting and dry, then STOP: it is not! March 14 brings these approaches together, with a very light touch and a huge dollop of humour.
We are taken right back to the third book Genesis. We are in the Garden of Eden. God has made man and woman from, and to become, one flesh. So far so good. Then God has given them the option of free will: whoops! They have eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. A life of everlasting perfect bliss has been swopped for one of toil and pain. Sinful, yes, but exciting, yes and here we enter the poem.
God is mightily angry. Alliteratively He comes “Whooshing out great gusts of wind”, while “Adam and Eve shivered and shook”. Oh, dear!
What do Adam and Eve do? Typical of couples hither hereafter, they bicker. I told you so. It was all your fault. Eventually they wear themselves out with arguing and fall asleep.
When they wake, all is still and pleasant again. They think they have been forgiven, but God is going to put them to the test. What could be more seductive than freshly cooking hot food? The “hot piecrust” holds delights, “Cinnamon! Nutmeg! Sugar! Apples!” My, this is sugar and spice and all things nice. Warrington’s imagery goes straight to the taste-buds.
BUT, God has a Tantalean punishment for them. Eve is “about to bite into the pie”, then comes God’s Big But, “You must first figure out the circumference of that pie / Calculating to the very last digit of pi.” Adam gets cocky: “Easy, peasy!” he whispers like a petulant schoolboy. Tantalus was chained in a shallow clear lake underneath a fruit tree, but the fruit was always just out of reach and the water always receded if he tried take a drink. Here Adam and Eve have goodness of God’s grace, but they cannot enjoy it.
Why? Squaring the circle, the problem of constructing a square with the same area as a given circle, using geometry, in effect moving compass and ruler, taxed the brains of the ancient Greek mathematicians. It was not until 1882 that the challenge was demonstrated to be impossible.
In his Paradisio Dante wrote:
“As the geometer his mind applies
To square the circle, nor for all his wit
Finds the right formula, howe’er he tries …”
Dante understood that squaring the circle was a task beyond human capability, just as he or any human mind lacked the ability to comprehend God’s Paradise.
Lewis Carroll of Alice fame was a polymath and apart from writing, he was not only an Oxford mathematics don, but was also a deacon in the Church of England. His view echoed Dante; he said that the book was most keen to write was Plain Facts for Circle-Squarers, to debunk quack circle-squaring theorists.
Mathematicians will explain that the impossibility of squaring the circle is because pi is an irrational number and a complex number. It cannot be written as a fraction. When we were told in school that it was 22/7, that was only an approximation. Pi is an infinite series of such fractions and in decimal form never comes to an end and never recurs. Pi in this respect tends to infinity.
Both Leibnitz and Newton in the 1660’s each discovered a formula to calculate pi. It involves continually adding and subtracting smaller and smaller fractions, but you have to do this to infinity. Pull out earlier and you only have an approximation. But in March 14 God wants the figure “to the very last digit”. And Adam did not have access to the formulae.
True to the Bible, Adam blames Eve, Eve blames the snake and God blames them all. God though is merciful and does not finish with them all there and then. They are given life, but at a price. The snake (a rattlesnake in the land of Cush?) must crawl on its belly and forever be reproachful to the world, so that it can continue as the devil to cause sin that humans can contrast against the good, which they could have had in full in the Garden of Eden. Eve will give forth children so that humankind can continue, but giving birth and bringing up these children will not be easy. Adam is condemned to labour to sustain himself and his wife and his children for ever.
In March 14, Adam’s burdensome toil is subsumed into the impossible task of taking the calculation of pi to infinity. But he has the knowledge: it is a pie whose circle he needs to square, but it an apple pie and the apple implies knowledge bought at a price.
Theologically sound, mathematically sound, poetically teasing.
But what of the title, a date, in trans-Atlantic (or newspaper) format? A further clue might have been the, I assume, the year 1592. 3.14 1592 might have been a long time ago, but it is not forever.
Quentin Weiver
May 2020
Images by Raphael (public domain), M.C. Eschler and Germán Martínez
March 14
by Anne Warrington
God was so very angry.
He fumed, he seethed, and he raged
Whooshing out great gusts of wind.
Adam and Eve shivered and shook
Trapped by the knowledge that
The fury and wrath of a vengeful God
On them was about to descend.
“It’s all your fault,” Adam shouted at Eve.
“Why couldn’t you resist the lure of that slimy, slippery, rattlesnake.”
“Don’t you yell at me,” yelled back Eve
“From what I remember you weren’t so slow on the uptake
Biting into that red, rosy, juicy apple
Hanging from the branch, shining in the light.
You didn’t say that God would be upset!”
Adam and Eve quarrelled all day and they quarrelled all night
Exhausted they sank to the ground
God stopped his huffing and his puffing
The wind stilled and the air warmed
“We’ve been forgiven,” said Eve
“I guessed God wouldn’t be angry for long.”
“That’s not the way God works,” said Adam
“I’ll wager we’ll pay a price for doing wrong!”
As he spoke a mouth-watering smell wafted through the air
Adam and Eve sniffed in delight:
Cinnamon! Nutmeg! Sugar! Apples! Hot piecrust!
“I’ve sent you an apple pie,” boomed the voice of God.
“We’ve been forgiven,” said Eve
Adam stared at the pie: “This I don’t believe!”
“It’s a sign of God’s forgiveness,” said Eve, about to bite into the pie.
“Stop!” bellowed God. “Because of your defiance…..”
“I was right,” thought Adam, waiting now in silence.
“Before savouring that delight,” God continued
You must first figure out the circumference of that pie
Calculating to the very last digit of pi.”
“Easy, peasy!” whispered Adam in reply.
And so Adam set about his task:
3.141592265358979323……
And so Adam learned something of God’s infinite mercy
and so Adam and Eve never got to eat that pie!
Anne Warrington
May 2020
Programming Language
Programmed to Receive
(Part Two)
by Eleanor Lewis
Where was I? Reeling, I think, from discovering Sheila Sim and Richard Attenborough’s signatures on the front of a programme for The Mousetrap in 1952 on its pre-West End tour. Well OK, if these are the kind of people we’re collecting, I’m unsurprised to find a 1960 Cambridge Theatre programme for Billy Liar which tells me that Albert Finney has just completed his first starring role in the film version of Ala
n Sillitoe’s Saturday Night And Sunday Morning. I am also unfazed by a beautiful headshot of Eileen Atkins, aged 31, in a 1965 programme for The Killing of Sister George, in which she appeared with Beryl Reid and Lally Bowers (no autographs on this one unfortunately). The biography tells me that Ms Atkins has “appeared on television” and furthermore that she has “gone blonde” for her role as Childie.
Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, (deep breath) signed the front page of Manchester Opera House’s programme for Antony and Cleopatra. They were married to each other at the time (1951), and the production was a Festival of Britain production by arrangement with The Arts Council. The cast list inside the programme has numerous other autographs including the fabulous Wilfred Hyde White who was playing Lemprius Euphronius at the time.
In 1956 Vivien Leigh also appeared in South Sea Bubble, “a new, light comedy by Noël Coward”. Joyce Carey was in this too. Joyce Carey was the formidable Myrtle Bagot, manageress of the station café in Brief Encounter. Ms Carey also appeared in a few ‘70s sitcoms for those of us old enough to remember Father Dear Father etc. Her signature appears not on this programme but another in the collection.
A 1977 programme for Privates on Parade reminds me that it was the RSC that first produced this show and also of those weird little moments at the end of TV drama in the ‘70s when the announcer would tell you solemnly over the credits that such and such an actor was “a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company”. I was never sure what I was supposed to do with that information other than behave with due reverence for a moment. This programme also contains and interview with Terry Gilliam who was then about to direct his first film Jabberwocky.
I was enthralled by the adverts in these programmes too. The flimsy 1948 programme firmly autographed by Gertrude Lawrence when she was appearing in September Tide, “a new play by Daphne du Maurier”, at Manchester Opera House, has an advert for Kendals department store picturing an elegantly dressed woman on the front: “Evening Grace for the Small Woman”, it offers discretely, whilst leaving it unclear what an average-sized woman is supposed to do vis-à-vis evening grace.
Rachel Kempson and Peggy Ashcroft appeared in Hedda Gabler at the Lyric Hammersmith, probably in 1954 (the programme is undated). There is an advert for The Clarendon Restaurant on Hammersmith Broadway. The Clarendon had also featured in the programme for The Lyric Revue in 1951 autographed by Dora Bryan and others. You could dine on American oysters amongst other things and there was a large ballroom for use when required. When I was a student in the ‘80s, I remember going to The Clarendon with my heavy metal friend for it was a heavy metal venue then: rock music, plastic glasses, headbanging and a lot of ‘tired and emotional’ people. Quite a journey the Clarendon Restaurant has been on.
In 1952 Alec Guinness (clear underlined signature) was in Under the Sycamore Tree by Sam Spewack at the Opera House Manchester. Kendals had moved on to extolling the virtues of Furleen (a fake fur) – “No, of course it’s not real, it does not pretend or wish to be.” Later on that year in a programme for Bet Your Life (a musical comedy) signed by nearly everyone but its star, Arthur Askey, Kendals was promoting a fetching velvet suit which I am really quite keen on, leaving aside the fact that I do not have a nipped in waist and it’s nearly 70 years since the suit was available.
An advert in the 1959 programme for Look After Lulu starring Vivien Leigh depicts a woman in long gloves, adjusting her hat. “You never can tell …” the advert teases, “who she might be… career girl, housewife, a young modern with time on her hands. Who can say?” Turns out she’s an avid reader of the Daily Mirror and “nearly one in two under 35s” reads it every day.
Alongside reading the Daily Mirror, the back page of the previously mentioned 1965 programme for The Killing of Sister George urges readers to try a slice of “mixed fruit cake” during the interval. Yes indeed, if you’re at the London theatre you are clearly living in the fast lane in your fake fur, clutching your tabloid and slice of cake? And then, acceptable taste in fashion, cake and newspapers having been established, theatregoers might set their sights on more fundamental things. A programme for The Brass Butterfly by William Golding at the Strand Theatre 1958 starring my favourite, Alistair Sim, appearing with George Cole, quietly informs readers, about the Marriage Bureau in New Bond Street (all enquiries strictly confidential).
By the by, there is some lovely handwriting on show. Up to around about the mid-60s, you can read almost all the signatures. Irene Handle appeared with Richard Wattis and others in First Person Singular at the Grand Theatre, Blackpool. Richard Wattis was another personal favourite, he had cornered the comedy market in stressed civil servants and was a regular in St Trinian’s films. Mervyn Johns in The Mortimer Touch (Manchester Opera House, April 1952), Flora Robson in The Innocents (1952), Virginia McKenna and Paul Scofield in The River Line (1952), all of them had great handwriting! They taught handwriting in those days, though before we start a chorus of ‘in my day…’ the amount of time today’s children are going to spend on keyboards, the handwriting thing is at least arguable!
I’m now spoilt and resenting the absence of at least a couple of signatures. Kenneth Williams appeared in something called The Platinum Cat (Alexandra Theatre, Birmingham, November ’65) but there’s no autograph and I would love to have Alistair Sim’s signature. There are also two Beyond the Fringe programmes, one for the Fortune Theatre 1961 which I think might have been the first performance, and another for the Alexandra Theatre in Birmingham in 1964. Neither is autographed. Nor is the 1968 Apollo Theatre programme for 40 Years On with Alan Bennett, Dorothy Reynolds, Paul Eddington and Nora Nicholson, directed by Patrick Garland. But you can’t have everything, can you?
There is however, Donald Wolfit. Donald Wolfit was almost undoubtedly the inspiration for Sir, in Ronald Harwood’s play The Dresser, (he had a strong, clear signature too, unsurprisingly). In November 1950 Mr Wolfit (as he was then) was appearing with his wife Rosalind Iden in A New Way to Pay Old Debts by Philip Massinger, and according to the programme he would go on to appear in “Plays of Shakespeare” for a further two weeks. This was just two years before Ronald Harwood joined Wolfit’s company, becoming his assistant and eventually his dresser, which gave him the inspiration for his 1983 play, The Dresser about an actor-manager touring the country in Shakespearean rep. The play became a highly successful film which received several Oscar nominations and won a Golden Globe for Tom Courtney.
I could go on and on, this is quite a collection. In a 1952 Manchester Opera House programme for Gay’s The Word, (Ivor Novello), signed by three cast members with large, confident but unusually illegible autographs, someone has neatly written “This is an example” over the top of a Moss Bros advert inside featuring three men in tail coats. I wonder whether that was advice or an instruction.
More recently, a 1987 programme for Follies at the Shaftesbury Theatre with Leonard Sachs, Linda Baron, Pearl Carr, Julia McKenzie and Diana Rigg, to name but a few, contains a slip letting the audience know that Ms Dolores Gray is “injured” but has agreed to perform I’m Still Here in Act 2, which seems both appropriate and very decent of her, and I notice in passing that “Ms” is now being used and that merchandise is now advertised for sale in the front of the programme.
I haven’t got to the Broadway playbills for Follies “a new musical” in 1971 and Pippin at the Imperial in 1972, or “The Rank Organisation Presents Miss Judy Garland” at the Dominion Theatre in 1957, but I’m not worried about keeping programmes any more. Autographed or not, programmes are a great record of what you saw, when, with whom and what was going on at the time so I’ll stop now and occupy some lockdown time clearing more shelf space.
Eleanor Lewis
May 2020
Photography by Bateman Corbis, Peter Scarfe, and Frederick Prince
Today and Yesterday
Food, Toys and Mock-a-Chino
by Heather Moulson
a critique by Matthew Grierson
Heather Moulson’s three poems do what the best poems can, that is, using imagery and detail to talk about something broader and more abstract: in this case, memory.
In Food, for example, the care for detail – whether that’s the sensual recall of ‘greasy stock’ and thick gravy, or brands of yesteryear such as R. White’s and Happy Shopper – is the narrator’s way of showing the care inherited from Gran, who put her own care into making meals for her loved ones. There’s pathos in our not being told why Gran had to ‘h[o]ld the family/together’ – was there domestic strife? Was it the war? But there’s also well-observed bathos in ‘the first meal on wedding present plates’ being ‘curry from Bejam’, the narrator wistful that meals remembered from childhood cannot be reproduced.
Brands and Gran also figure in Toys, which uses a similar structure of nostalgia to compare the fads of today and yesterday. The narrator may well think of ‘Hot/Wheels’ as ‘a proper toy’, but as surely as those wheels turn so too will the choice of toy – just as the miserable summer of 1976 becomes fondly remembered in retrospect in Moulson’s The Summers of Hate, which was shortlisted in last year’s Roger McGough Poetry Competition. So what’s to say that, one day, the boy in the poem won’t be lamenting that his own children don’t have a ‘proper’ toy like a PlayStation? (I’m reminded that Stephen Sexton’s recent Forward Prize-winning collection If All the World and Love Were Young is based on a childhood spent on the Nintendo.)
In finding ‘full fat comfort’ in hot drinks, Mock-a-Chino savours memories in a similar way to Food. Here, though, each variety of coffee signifies different stages of the narrator’s life, at first youthfully ‘inoffensive’ but later ironically aspirational for ‘Nescafe Gold’, before acknowledging a love of whole milk again in contrast to the hipster ‘skinny cappuccino’ enjoyed by the could-have-been friend or lover.
Which all goes to show that nostalgia ain’t what it used to be: after all, the past is a country where lambs’ hearts are still beating as they are served and coffee is ‘sinister’: as much as they long for the past, Moulson’s narrators defamiliarise it, make it creepy … so it may be no wonder the children laugh at the memories of Food.
That PlayStation doesn’t look like such a bad option after all.
Matthew Grierson
May 2020
Photography by Dorothy Dunstan and Dreamstime
Yesterday Was Another World
Food, Toys and Mock-a-Chino
Three Poems
by Heather Moulson
Mock-a-Chino
Inoffensive hot drinks in the
college refectory
leaving half of it while I flirted with you
then CoffeeMate with Maxwell House
became our thing
Maxpax only to be sneered at
Nescafe Gold took us to a new level
we had truly arrived –
only we hadn’t
You betrayed me for decaffeinated
making my own coffee bitter
sinister and hollow
I spat it out at your departing
back
But when coffee became frothed with
milk on every high street
I embraced it again
sipping huge cups while thinking of
what might have been
You became the skinny cappuccino
The Soya milk
And I found full fat comfort
Elsewhere
Food
Dinnertime was rabbit stew – tiny bones
sticking out the greasy stock –
and thickness of gravy, covering
fried liver.
Lamb hearts still beating, next to
mash potatoes.
Chops and chips were a treat,
rare as blancmange, or a bottle
of R Whites.
Then, no more proper dinners at 12 o’clock –
lunch became a tin of Happy Shopper soup.
While tea diminished to Earl Grey and
currant bread, and dinner became supper.
Mince cooked after work, in a pan,
Or a slab of gammon steak next to broccoli.
Never had ‘afters’ anymore – no rice pudding
out the oven, nor tinned peaches and
custard.
A can of Pils lager and ten fags were the sweetest
of substitutes.
The first meal on wedding present plates,
was curry from Bejams.
My kid’s post school meals were sausages and
pasta.
Hand-made gnocchi a dismal failure.
Traipsing along supermarket
aisles, for life-changing recipes.
Only to be ditched for Birds Eye and chips.
No more standing over hot fat, or multiple
roasting pans.
Nor the daily visit to the butchers, where
rabbits hung upside down.
I tell the children about Gran’s meals –
that was how she held the family
together.
They look at me and laugh.
Toys
Sindy sits on her horse,
Action Man waits for her in bed.
Plastic zoo animals marry each other.
Dog-eared board games have missing
dice.
I keep the silver dog, from the Monopoly
set.
I dream of owning felt tip pens –
the real classroom currency.
Gran sends my Teddy Bear comic
through the post.
And I’m getting a Beezer annual
for Christmas.
Why don’t you play with your Hot
Wheels, a proper toy? I say.
But he doesn’t hear me –
sitting there, transfixed by
the Playstation.
The Beano book on the floor,
stays unread.
Heather Moulson
May 2020
Photography by Dritan Alsela, Jilly Church and Brendan Silver
Culture and Sophistication, Neatly Packaged
Programmed to Receive
(Part One)
by Eleanor Lewis
Theatre programmes, a variety of uses:
• Finding out who that actually is that you’ve been staring at on stage and wondering “who is that?”
• Letting you know that there is, at least, an interval (which occasionally is something to live for).
• Providing interesting rehearsal shots to divert your attention from the phone screen of the woman in front of you.
• Leaving casually around the house for guests, neighbours and the man from Ocado to see and conclude that you are cultured and sophisticated.
Then again. A few years ago I inherited a lot of programmes from a relative and, this being lockdown, I’ve just got around to looking through them. My relative was an academic, he loved the theatre and he loved travelling, particularly to America so he spent a lot of time at the theatre both in the West End and on (and off) Broadway.
The programme collection runs from 1948 until 2000-ish. When he first discovered the theatre he discovered autographs too and it was these that I noticed. I’d recently gritted my teeth and recycled some of our own collection of programmes but it hadn’t been easy. You would have to drag the 1999 Old Vic programme for Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell starring Peter O’Toole from my cold, dead hands. Several others – the 2004 National production of The History Boys springs to mind – will only be disposed of during the house clearance when we finally shuffle off to bingo in the care home. So the idea of taking on another 100 or so of someone else’s collection wasn’t immediately attractive until I caught a glimpse of Dora Bryan’s clear signature across the front of something called The Lyric Revue (1951). Then others, in ageing ink but still legible, sometimes on the front, sometimes on the cast list page: Sarah Churchill, Sybil Thorndike, Donald Sinden, Richard Wattis and many more. And this is before we get to Sylvia Sim, Richard Attenborough, Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier and Donald Wolfit but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Looking through the pile of brown-round-the-edges booklets, the autographs are just part of the whole experience, fifty years of theatregoing spills out of their pages. There are biographies of actors who went on to towering fame; programmes for first productions of plays that became major pieces of British Theatre; the advertising is fascinating and the Forthcoming Events are breathtaking. A 1953 production of Antony and Cleopatra at the Princes Theatre, Shaftesbury Ave, featured Michael Redgrave, Marius Goring, Donald Pleasance, Tony Britton, Peggy Ashcroft and Rachel Kempson. Forthcoming attractions then were: The Crazy Gang with Bud Flanagan; a “new musical” Paint Your Wagon, and London Laughs with Jimmy Edwards, Vera Lynn and Tommy Cooper.
Sarah Churchill
Sarah Churchill appeared in House on the Sand (Roland Pertwee) at The Grand Theatre Blackpool in 1949 when she signed the programme. Sarah was Winston Churchill’s second daughter, she worked on photo reconnaissance during the war and was apparently quite good at it. She went on to have a successful acting career before marrying into the aristocracy. The back of this this flimsy, one sheet programme advertises a “magnificent dramatization” of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca as a forthcoming attraction.
Frankie Howerd
Forthcoming attractions in the 1963 programme for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum at Manchester Opera House with Frankie Howerd, Jon Pertwee, Kenneth Connor, Linda Gray and Isla Blair were: Black Chiffon with Evelyn Laye, My Fair Lady, and the less well known but fabulously titled There’s a Yank Close Behind Me (about which Google knows nothing!) Yvonne Arnaud’s autograph appears on the programme for Dear Charles by Alan Melville at the New Theatre, St Martin’s Lane (now the Noël Coward). This programme also informs readers that the RADA annual reunion dance in aid of the theatre rebuilding fund will be held at the Lyceum, Strand. Tickets, including buffet, one guinea each.
A small, red, very straightforward programme provides information about a new play by Robert Bolt, A Man For All Seasons at the Globe Theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue (now the Gielgud). It is 1960 it stars Paul Scofield and Leo McKern and you must not miss West Side Story coming up at Her Majesty’s Theatre “with the New York cast”. Similarly there is a small orange and white programme for the English Stage Company’s production of The Entertainer at the Royal Court Theatre for the first time in 1957, starring Dorothy Tutin and Laurence Olivier, and directed by Tony Richardson. The programme contains a biography of John Osborne at the beginning of his career, “When he heard of the newly formed ESC in 1955 he sent the script of Look Back in Anger to them and within two weeks it was accepted. He joined the company as an actor in April 1956 and then appeared in Don Juan”.
Richmond’s Own Richard Attenborough
The signatures of Sheila Sim and Richard Attenborough appear on the front of the Manchester Opera House programme for The Mousetrap in October 1952, on its pre-West End tour.
My mind wanders off following Richard Attenborough’s career path: 10 Rillington Place, Oh! What a Lovely War, Ghandi to name but a few. And with Oh! What a Lovely War in mind, there is a 1963 Wyndhams Theatre programme for that very play including extracts from The Wipers Times (which Nick Newman and Ian Hislop recently turned into another play), and author’s notes from Charles Chilton.
Shortly after this I found Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier, and then Donald Wolfit. I am less than halfway through the pile, I think it’s time for an interval … …
Eleanor Lewis
May 2020
Photography by Peter Scarfe, Robert Vass and Frederick Prince
