Antique seller and puppeteer

After about a year of this my parents came to my aid and funded me to start a stall in Camden Passage Antiques Market. Well I didn’t sell antiques, any more than most of my fellow stall holders did, we sold junk of one sort or another.

This was fun, and I enjoyed it a lot. I became rather good at selling things for ludicrously marked up prices. My master stroke came when I discovered a company who made glassware for chemistry laboratories next door to the market, and bought a load of rather nice small glass bottles with ground glass stoppers... These I marked up by I think it was about 500%, and they sold like hot cakes, so I carried on selling a variety of those bottle for some months and made much money from them.

Such markets attract a very odd sort of person I discovered. One of my fellow stall holders was a pop singer called Chris Farllowe who specialized in selling Nazi and WW 11 German uniforms, and was very successful in that. But his customers were really curious folk... Mainly weedy introverted narrow chested white men about 30 years old. These sad creatures loved to buy SS uniforms and the like from Chris, and would then rush back home to their sad little bed-sitters, don the uniform and take photos of themselves in all that black finery, and then come back to the market and show Chris and I these photos.

Chris himself was a very pleasant and absolutely non-Nazi bloke, he was simply making a living with a product that was in demand...

But after a while my lack of a vehicle, and thus easy access to new stock told, and I found it harder and harder to find good stuff for my stall, and it began to go rapidly downhill...

I became anxious.

I am not sure how it happened, but at about this time I came into contact with an amazing man called John Wright, an elderly South African who ran the only full time professional Puppet Theatre in England at that time, The Little Angle Marionette Theatre, which was just near the market.

For some reason he took me under his wing,offered me work in his theatre and trained me in stage lighting and sound. I never really worked with the puppets, as he had a goodly group of expert puppeteers already for that. But I became very competent at building scenery, lighting it, arranging all the sound and lighting gear and basically he started me out on my life as a theatre technician....

John Wright

He also taught me how to saw a straight line with a hand saw, a useful skill I have used over the years.

So I gave up my market stall and became a member of his troupe, and loved it.... we performed regularly in our own theatre there in Islington, and went on extended tours of Scotland every winter and Germany every summer.. Which were fun too. Saw all manner of parts of Scotland that most folk never get to see in the course of our two and three month tours of the entire country... from the southern boarders literately to John O' Groats, taking in various Scottish island on the way.

Our arrival at John O Groats was strange. It is a very bleak place, nothing grows more than a couple of feet tall there, and apart from some sad looking sheep, there is only one thing there. A huge, gaunt and dark looking hotel just near the shore.

As we were driving there, we were followed by an old, very upright Rolls Royce with an ancient couple sitting in it. And on our arrival we were met by of all things, loud Hawaiian Guitar music blaring out from a huge PA system in the hotel....

Don't you love these incongruous things in life?

The Little Angel was an essentially family affair, he and his much younger wife, Lindie ran the whole thing as a family, with him as a sort of very firm, somewhat Victorian Paterfamilias. I am forever grateful to the two of them for picking me up and bringing me into their family as they did.. Pretty sure it saved me from all manner of sad problems, and gave me unexpectedly a career in theatre technology.

I never did work out why they took me up. I am a very different to most people who live and work with puppets, they tend to be somewhat precious and twee, not two things you could ever accuse me of being.... So that remains a mystery for me.. But pick me up and save me they did. And that is all that matters. Two amazingly good people.

In passing, Joe Wright the film director is his son, whom I knew as a mewling, puking baby.....

Strange to think of him as a successful film director now.

Whilst working with John Wright I was lucky enough to be part of a puppet version of The Soldier's Tale which was put on by John at the Purcell Rooms with Daniel Barenboim, the English Chamber Orchestra and Michael Swan (he of Flanders and Swan fame). I did the lighting design in close harmony with John for this, which was a system of lights shining more or less horizontally across the stage from both sides, into which light the rod puppets were held by the puppeteers who were all dressed in black, and thus invisible.

John Wright Lurking between a couple of Devil puppets

 A couple more Devil puppets.  Both these photos thanks to Ronnie le Drew who was also working with John at this time - And who is still very much involved in puppetry.

The stage was also covered in black felt and had steps on it, so the puppeteers could move back and upwards at the same time.

So all the puppets were actually apparently floating in the air, but it worked.

This was an amazing experience, and looked superb. The puppets were in various sizes, but as there were no points of reference, they all looked to be normal human size. Most of them were about 3 feet tall, so that at the end when the Devil appears with a musical crash, that puppet was about 12 feet tall, and looked enormous as he suddenly appeared in all his red glory in the light. I loved doing that show.

Daniel Barenboim was a delightful man to work with, highly professional, and funny too. And the best thing almost, was being able to watch as he, his then wife Jacqueline Du Pre, Isaac Perlman and Zubin Mehta rehearsing a concert in the Festival Hall at the same time..... They had such fun together as they rehearsed, and to my amazement they kept asking the women who were cleaning the hall what they thought of a passage they had just tried, and listened carefully to what those cleaning ladies had to say as well.

All in all, apart from Michael Swan who turned out to be a singularly unpleasant man, a good and enjoyable experience.

I also went for a walk in the organ in the Festival Hall. I mean that literally, most of its thousands of pipes are actually in a large space behind the stage I discovered, ranging from tiny high pitched ones to enormous (64 feet tall) deep ones. As I wandered around gazing in awe at this monstrous instrument, I suddenly realised if someone started to play the damn thing I would probably be killed by the sheer volume of it all... So I rather hurriedly left.

At about this time I first came into contact with Lotty, the main woman in my life and certainly the love of my life and absolutely my very best friend in the world. She was at the same school as the older of my two sisters. I am not sure how we got together, but get together we did, and we are still happily together now, some 40 something years later and still going strong... So obviously there is something we have in common it would seem.

Lotty and her big brother, James 

At some point in all of this Lotty and I came in contact with a rather extraordinary American, a Rhodes Scholar called Ed Burmann from New York, who looked like Frank Zappa and talked like Groucho Marx who had started something called Interaction. A sort of social thing to try and make as he put it “the arts relevant to society”. This work consisted of street and small scale theatre in cafes and working with street kids in and around Camden Town as well as a range of T-Sessions around the city.

So as what he and his friends were doing struck us as interesting, we joined in, and spent more and more time working for almost no money with them, and slowly I slid out of the Little Angle world and into a much tougher and hard headed world, that of street work and experimental theatre.

The theatre side was extremely low budget and largely consisted of doing strange things in the street to elicit reactions from passers by.. such as the radio controlled dog that lay on the ground, jerked and whimpered as one of the “actors” set about kicking and abusing to see what reactions could be got from passers by.. and they got them all right too!!!

This later developed into a moderately successful street theater group called the Dogg's Troupe.

As I mentioned, we also worked with street kids. In those days that didn't mean homeless kids, they came later, it meant kids who skipped school and passed their days on the streets in gangs doing small scale criminal things, and being a pain in the butt to the authorities generally. Actually pretty harmless bunch of kids, even though they were the first generation of skin heads with huge silly Doc Martins boots tight jeans and all of that stuff.

Lots of these kids came to a shop that Interaction had rented just opposite the Roundhouse Theatre and we got them involved in film making and all manner of strange activities..... We didn't tell them what to do, simply gave them materials, tools and space and let them do whatever they felt like for the most part. They came up with some wonderful ideas.. One of which I remember especially, which was to make a film which among other curious things, had them shaving the headlight of a Vespa Scooter they had found somewhere... Given a chance these kids were astonishingly creative.

For the main part we involved them in film making, theatre making and simply talked with them on a straight forward level. Seemed to work quite well too by and large.

While this “youth work” was going on we were also running what was perhaps the first lunch time theatre in London in the basement of a cafe in Queensway. We set up a tiny stage with about 4 stage lights and put on very short plays at lunchtime, which for a small charge patrons of the cafe could come down and watch while eating a simple lunch... This was a great success, and we had all manner of playwrights queuing up to give us one acters for our theatre and actors and directors as well.. A real success. My role in all of that was to ensure that the sound and very simple lighting and all the technical things all worked as they should.

We also worked in children's prisons, too, mainly a so called “model “ one near Swiss Cottage. This work consisted of going into the prison, and then playing all manner of theatrical and group session games with the kids to get them to tell stories, act out their worries and so on. All good stuff, but possibly the worst and most distressing work I have ever done in my life. Being in a kid's prison with 8 year olds who have spent almost their entire lives in one sort of institution or prison is about as depressing as it gets.

And finding myself with 10 year old murderers didn’t do my soul all that much good either.

And watching the corporal types who were the guards there treating those kids like dirt was awful can you imagine a 9 year old kid being shoved into 24 hours solitary confinement for being a bit cheeky to one of the guards? Well that is the sort of thing that happened in that place. And the cells the kids lived in were real prison cells, huge thick doors with a small spy hole in them, a bog in the corner, a simple bunk and a small window with bars..... A real adult prison inhabited by kids.. And this was described as “model”prison too..... God alone knows what the run of the mill kid's prisons were like then, and probably still now.

I only managed to do this for about a year and then had to stop as I found it too distressing to carry on with, even though for the kids it was a great escape from the daily indignities and miseries of their lives in prison... But it was driving me to despair so I stopped.

After some time with this sort of work I began to feel that as a youth Worker I left something to be desired and decided to go and train myself properly in Youth Work. Lotty having found a job as a trainee teacher in a special needs school in Northumberland, I enrolled as a student in the grandly named National College For The Training Of Youth Leaders in Leicester. A one year course for adults, which gave one a diploma and the right to work in the youth work field, particularly youth clubs.

In the following post I shall tell you about that very strange place and its denizens......