Putting a lost era back in the limelight
Yorkshire’s theatres have always provided an escape route from reality. David Behrens revisits some early performances.
EVEN WHEN the theatre was about to be pulled down, the show always went on – and this collection of rarely-seen pictures lifts the curtain on a veritable who’s who of the Yorkshire stage.
The old Theatre Royal on Hunslet Lane in Leeds was demolished in 1957 to make way for shops, but its last night was one for the ages. Taking their final bow we can see Wilfred and Mabel Pickles from radio’s Have A Go, producer Barney Colehan, the mastermind of The Good Old Days across the city, and the music hall star Margery Manners, sometimes thought of as the British Sophie Tucker.
Leeds was well used to stars, with the dapper actor Jack Hulbert and an unknown but promising actress called Julie Andrews among those passing through at this time.
The stage has always drawn photographers, and these early pictures – from the primitive Pierrot show on Scarborough beach in 1907 to the radical new interior of the Leeds Civic in the early 1950s – shows a constantly changing tableau.
It also demonstrates that there is no such thing as a new idea – the recent fashion for “street magic” having been alive and well in Scarborough in 1957, when the magician Gilly Davenport demonstrated the “levitating woman” trick on his daughter.
Other innovations were less enduring and perhaps would be welcomed today. The Western Talkie Theatre, a cinema off Manchester Road in Bradford,, installed a “cry room” to which mothers could retreat with their babies so as not to disturb the audience.