A very new start after the Queens Theatre, many years later I was to realise what I may have been promised, if I had taken the hint. In fact it was only a couple of days after having left the Queens that I was to wonder on my insistence of wanting to be Chief LX at the Royalty. Here I was, it was true with Colin as Master Carpenter, But I was suddenly to also realise that the Theatre was in a terrible state. There was no money, hardly any crew, the Deputy LX was an idiot, it was to become plain very quickly that we would never be able to work together. The first show on the first day  did not use the theatre’s lighting which was lucky as I did not know the Galaxy at all and I am pretty certain that the Deputy did not know much about it either. By stupidity or design he managed to break the cable going to the call system in the prompt corner! I did manage to make a quick repair during the lunch break, not that he stayed to help. The show was a two day affair for Compaq computers. The production manager was also the sound operator and Stage Manager on the show. He had not got a clue and was incapable of telling anyone in advance what he wanted. He communicated only with The deputy and his own lighting board operator. It had been decided to use the pit lift to revel the new line of Compaq laptops, sadly as this hadn’t been told to anyone or the fact that dry ice was to be used to the effect was more than useless. Told to pump dry ice into the orchestra pit is of little use if the water is not hot and the dry ice has yet to be unpacked! Looking back one suspects that the Deputy thought that he could get rid of me and have the job himself.I think we did another couple of conferences none of them very taxing and then we were due for several months to do Paul Mckenna the Hypnotist. Stage Miracles had been hired to do the lighting and again the sound was being done by the producer. Maybe it was the fashion at the time but he certainly knew little about the idea of calling a show. with no one on stage in charge it was an unusual way of doing things. One of the electricians had to sit on our lighting board all night just to work the house lights. On the second night I caught The deputy talking to the manager in the corridor during the show when he should have been on the lighting board. This was the second big mistake he had made in less than a week. I hit the roof and tore them both off a strip. The deputy said he was discussing time sheets and that there were no cues for ages. I threatened him with his  p45 there and then, told him to get back on the board and then went to talk to the manager in his office! Steve would turn out to be one of the best managers that I would ever work with. Different to Robert in many many ways but an excellent manager. He of course had had to deal with this deputy for several weeks and was unaware almost of my existence! We had a chat and would soon become good friends. The deputies’ days were definitely numbered.

The Deputy Chief electrician had no electrical skills at all, he was lazy and incompetent. He would tell silly stories in the pub trying to out do Colin and myself. He was often late and would avoid doing almost any work. We carried on for a few shows which were little more than concerts. We provided little more than the house lights and sometimes some front of house lighting. The lighting board itself was hardly ever used. We seemed to be little more than caretakers.

The deputy’s demise came very suddenly, after nearly three years as a chief electrician I had never had to deal with a situation quite like it. At the Queens theatre with a crew of three and a well kept building the workload of a chief electrician was quite considerably less, but here we were either working flat out, or working towards a better building. He would do neither. One morning arriving early I found him asleep in the crew room. Now I, as nearly every other west end technician, have  all used the hospitality of their theatre either as an occasional hotel from a late night working elsewhere or a late night in the town. This thought was different; he had not been working and it was looking back fairly evident that this had been going on for some time. The following day I again caught him by arriving even earlier. I had a meeting with the manager later that day and he was told the matter would be dealt with at a head office level. . There were no mitigating circumstances and it was decided that it was gross misconduct. No one spoke for him and in view of the fact that all the crew had to have keys to the building as there was normally no stage door manager or fireman this position of trust could no longer be extended to him. He was called into the manager’s office, the head office left it to us and he was dismissed, informed that should he be found in the building he would be arrested by the police and that was the end of the matter. On a subsequent occasion the box office did let him in but Colin and myself threw him straight out again. Before he left I had received a phone call from a guy called Mark Watkins that he was to be the new deputy. As the outgoing one was in the same room at the time this did make the conversation rather difficult! I had then to go outside the building and use a public call box to phone him back at the Apollo Victoria and reassure him that everything was OK! I even had to go down to Victoria and have a beer with him just to convince him that he wasn’t going to be working with a mad man. We met and got on well! He started the following Monday. His name was “Big” Mark (Watkins). He was very very tall. When I first showed him the building on a light up he could reach lights that I could only dream of! I was no shorty but he was like a human scaffold!

The four of us now settled down together. We all worked, drank, played and joked together. The removal of the rotten apple had fixed all my, and everyone else problems. I was to enjoy the next three years immensely. Colin now had a new deputy as well very soon after Mark joined us. Mark was rather thrown in at the deep end but there again so were we all. With such a small crew having to do everything including being stage door keeper and sometimes manager we all had to just get on with it and we loved it. I think Mark started on Monday and the first fit up was either that day or the following. We had to figure out the heating, lighting, plumbing and the stage. The first show I think was the hypnotist Paul McKenna. Lucky for us they had hired stage miracles to do the lighting, although we were treated rather like caretakers it did suit at the time as we could just get on with trying to get the Royalty into proper theatre ready to receive a full sized show. We cleaned it, and we built a workshop, crew room office. Collin moved into my office. It was best that we both knew what was going on at all times. I transferred his phone line into the same room and our desks faced one another. How we laughed, ” I will just transfer you Julian (Technical Manager). When he came down for a meeting how he also laughed when he found out.

Christmas came and went, I don’t think we did a show over Christmas that year. For once at long last I too could sit in my local pub on boxing day and watch the world go by and very nice it was too. I think I did only one Christmas and that I drove in with the Ford Granada which I had brought for £700, it was only the time and was convenient as my wife was only working a couple of streets away at the Fortune theatre. It still did not suit me as there were no drinks on a boxing day. We did have the advantage of having parking space or two on the ramp that led to the loading bay.

After a few conferences it became apparent that power was needed on the staircase leading down to the bars as these areas were often used for displays. This was the first example of how a little time spent doing something would greatly enhance the theatre and pay huge dividends in time and effort saving in the future. I had never worked in pro cable before and assumed that Mark being that much younger would have. It would turn out that it would be a case of the blind leading the blind. Still with a little advice we muddled our way through. We were lucky in some ways that the theatre was very well stocked in fittings and some equipment. One of our predecessors had been on several spreading sprees. They seemed to have had grand plans but little inclination to carry these plans out. This one week spent doing this work would save many hours in the future lashing up cables for each conference. This time could then be used to produce a better result and enhance both the crew and the theatre’s reputation. I was starting to put into practice all that I had learnt over the years. From wiring at the Victoria Palace and the installation and shows at the Queens I was now experienced enough to look after a large building and develop its potential. I had learnt a lot from both Alan and Julian and was left quite a lot of the time to just do my own thing.

The next step would now be back on stage before the lighting desk. Mark and I would start on the prompt corner but sadly this was not to be. Steve had now moved from the Queens to be Chief LX at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, just down the road from us. David Corbett had moved from the Queens to the Lyric theatre also on Shaftesbury avenue. He was doing Five Guys named Moe. He was very happy there but a drinking culture (not involving him) had developed to such an extent that the management had little choice but to change some of the crews around. This was not the first, and would not be the last time that this unhappy theatre would have this occur. This problem at this theatre would occur over and over again and it was due to only one man. For some reason the head office would not deal with him. Many electricians suffered because of him, including myself. Finally he would be moved to another theatre but that would be several years in the future after everyone else had been moved. And so Mark and David were swapped over. Mark was to finish at the Royalty on Friday, start on the Saturday and David was to start at the Royalty on the Monday.Mark just found out when he arrived that they were moving the battery room that weekend and he had had no prior notice.

And so after only a few months Dave and I were back together again. At the start he was very unhappy about it, he had liked working at the Lyric and also the show Five Guys. Why exactly the move happened I don’t know but he took a while to realise that he was just another victim of circumstance. He would come to love Royalty and the work I think far more than almost anywhere else.

I can’t remember the first few shows that we did together, the first that sticks in my mind was the international dance teachers association. Dave and I had developed a routine that he would be lighting designer on Rock and roll concerts and conferences, and I would light the more classical shows of opera and ballet. In truth he knew far more about lighting than I did. Although I had almost fallen into theatre the technical side of equipment and buildings interested me far more.

There were quite a few old lanterns including some CCT sill 30’s and 15’s. We also had about 40 old Rand Strand par 64’s. These were mostly 120 volts which were very popular in those days and the lamps were much cheaper than the 240 volt type. Buying lamps like most theatres was always difficult. The management saw them only as a cost and would try to hold onto any facility fee that had been earnt. We could only get the cheapest lamps and our main source came I am afraid to say by sending back any hired equipment with a few of our duff lamps in the hire kit. These par lanterns were the vital component in our list. They were heavy and unpleasant to use. David came up with the idea to mount them on short lengths of alloy scaff bars and use locking nyloc nuts to make them quicker and easier to focus. This was a brilliant idea. The first show we did with them had the production electrician that had previously been a chief LX at the Royalty. He had been responsible in previous years for buying so much of the unused equipment that the royalty now possessed. He and one of the previous Master carpenters and had been responsible for the Theatres reputation by refusing to do a show without a cash in hand payment for the get in of the show. It led to them being asked by the management to leave. We were to be asked a couple of times what the fee was now. We pointed out there was no payment due, but the damage had been done and took many a long year to claw back a good reputation again. This now production electrician was also accompanied by the Chief LX from HM’s I think. They were not happy about the now new 6 way par can bars but they had to lump it, after all if they did not contact us or share their lighting plan or even read our up to date kit list that was their look out. David also would remake all the 30 series splitters for these lanterns and a very fine job he would make of it. Each morning coffee break he would as the rest of us smoked make up one more. Neat and tidily made they were each one a masterpiece just like himself. I started on one but only once, they were his project and I was not to touch a single one, and quite right too.

We then gained a new Deputy Master Carpenter who would go on to work for many years at the Cambridge theatre, he was a very nice chap who was very willing and could put up with Colin’s odd little foibles. His first name I think was Neil, but everyone called Him Chippy Minton. I think he may have started before Mark left as I think it was Mark that gave him that alias. At the Royalty during a fit up we lost far too much time showing people to the dressing room that they required. The stage door was not manned during these periods, cast, and crew  would have to find their way through the front of house via the box-office, and then onto the stage. One of us often would have to stop what we were doing and show them to where they wanted to go! This took time we could not afford. There were no signs and worst of all the dressing rooms were on two identical corridors above one another both painted white. They were indistinguishable from one another. Also  the bottom of these two corridors leaked huge amounts of light onto the stage. I suggested that we paint the bottom one blue. Colin like the fine chap that he was, agreed, and got Chippy to do it. I got hold of a stencil set and put signs up. Fantastic, at last the job was done. Point the person through the doors and them  either ” Follow the signs along the blue or white corridor. No, the building’s manager was very unhappy, all the paint work should be Company magnolia, we must paint it back to the original colour. I for not the first and not the last time lost my temper and told him to F off. He had no understanding when I had tried to reason with him. The system worked and we were as I say very pleased with it. Chippies’ hard work for a week saved us those vital minutes at critical times when a show was being fitted up.

Not long after this, sadly Colin and Chippy had a falling out, it may have been over the corridor painting and a backlash from head office, I don’t know, I certainly hope it was not as the job had been devised and instigated by me. He was, as I say, a very nice, very pleasant, very competent guy, and we were sorry to see him take the long walk.

Chippy was replaced at Colin’s choosing by another very competent, very fun loving Irishman by the name of Owen O’moran. (I can only hope that I have spelt his name correctly.) We were to become very firm friends.

My dear friend Colin had been offered the job as Master carpenter at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane. I was devastated. He had been one of the reasons I had decided to take the Job in the first place. We had not always got on at the Royalty, it was true, I liked to get my hands dirty and he saw himself in a more managerial sort of role. He once had refused to go up to the fly floor to drop in a black on one of the shows for a get out and Myself and the sound man had had to do it. I think that may have been the night he then said he was going home and I let off a half empty CO2 fire extinguisher up his coat sleeve , filling it with cold dry ice. when he put his jacket on he did not see the funny side of it. He deserved it for making us do his job and then leaving before we had done ours! Colin pushed to get Owen the Job as Master and I agreed. The Now new Technical Manager, my old friend from the Victoria Palace David Leach who had been Chief LX at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane Also agreed. David had become Chief LX at the Victoria Palace and then Drury Lane and from there had made the leap into head office as Julian had now moved to the position of Development Manager, (always beware of the position that has been created, it can just as well be uncreated!) Steve McAndrew who had succeeded Matt Doddington as Chief LX at the Queens had now moved to replace David at TRDL (Theatre Royal Drury lane) Steve would remain Chief LX at TRDL and a very fine job he would do of it. He was a company man and would run that theatre in the fashion it needed until his retirement from theatre in 2014. He brought up a fine family, and then moved to Yorkshire. He never fell into the drinking culture trap that many technicians including myself did that theatres readily present.

Again and for the almost that last time the new crew of Owen Myself and David settled down with the addition of the previous Chief LX from the Dominion theatre who had lost his job in a reshuffle there. I nicknamed him sweaty Bollocks and the handle stuck. Wall as I say worked, played and enjoyed one another’s company. The day would start with tea about 8.45 and then we would if there was no show continue until about 2.45 when we would have “Lunch” in one of the local pubs until about 4.30. Back to the theatre to finish up and then a few beers before home and for me either a few more around the west end or home for a few in the Royal Hotel Tring where I was now living. A very nice life with a very enjoyable job with great people.

David and I happily rigged all the shows, mostly just the two of us, moving kit between front of house on a show that supplied the on stage rig, or using it to light all of a small show as required. I once had the compliment (I think) from Kevin Fitzsimons, that we were too flexible, meaning that the production company production electrician had to work just as hard as we did!

David nearly always plotted the shows and was very good at it on our house lighting board, a Galaxy MK2. He did once and only ever once, not back the desk up, which was inexcusable as it had an auto backup system to disk called auto dump! I got a call from him when I was in the workshop with a big quaver in his voice that the desk had crashed with no back up during a plotting session. I raced up to the back of the dress circle to where the lighting box was to find him shaking. I asked if the lighting designer knew and he replied he had just gone to the toilet. I knew the problem and just laughed. Cruel it was, then I just gave the lighting board power supply and data storage unit a bloody great kick with my boot. The board rebooted, the booting tone subsided and all the controls returned to normal. I then politely informed to just admit to blacking out the lighting session by pressing the wrong button, and “Back the fucking data up right now!” I don’t think poor Dave ever made that mistake ever again in a lifetime of theatre.

Sweaty and I a few weeks later pulled the oldest trick in the book on him as a board operator. Most people knew about the next story but of course he was still in trauma after the previous episode. We played this on poor Dave with dramatic effect.

Galaxy reset button.
If one opened the crate while the desk was on and pressed a magic red button on one of the cards, the board would restart! All indicators and monitors would go blank and the normal restart sequence including boot beeps would occur! But the lighting state remained on stage
I often wonder what kind of a mind devises such a marvellous thing!

The effect on Dave was magical, he leapt 4 feet in the air and then dived for the phone. Asking for me the person at the other end of the phone said he would try and find me! I left it just long enough before the boot sequence would finish and then in a god-like voice from behind his seat said ” Oh David don’t tell me you have broken it again” Sweaty and myself just could not stop laughing……

We had a few Sunday concerts, one of which was a benefit concert for the Tamale Tigers. We had been warned at the last minute that there might be trouble with this and there certainly was in the end. Many broke through the front of the house bypassing the Manager and the Box Office. We boarded up the lighting control window to the auditorium and got to the followspot box and lighting control via the roof from the fly floor via the roof. It got so hairy in front of the house that all the pass doors were locked and we just left the lights on with now one in front of the house including the board operator. The show finished early and the end result was insults to the  front of house staff and quite a lot of damage to the toilets and front of house seats. I think if I remember that the safety curtain was dropped at the interval and that was the end of the show.

The first of the new wave of touring shows was Israeli ballet. They sent a plan that included so many different types of locos all that had to be rigged in such a short period of time that I just ordered sil 30’s and had done with it. All went well and we got it rigged in the required two hours! They did not like the sil 30 ” Too many knobs!” I did not make a comment! They refused to do anything else but do a focus check. They never looked at any of the lighting states, or did any run through of the show at all before the first performance. We just plotted the board from a hard paper copy. Funny, the next day  all they wanted to do was light the show!

We had a few regular touring shows including Ballet Rambert and Northern Ballet which we had two years in a row for two weeks each at a time. It was interesting to see how they both operated, especially Ballet Rambert, that had devised an unusual system that I had never seen before. For their solution they did not use the usual 6 way bar system but instead a sort of externally wired bar, where by studding was used to connect 6 inch by two inch metal trunking with 15 inch socket mounted in the back and then with another bar fastened below. I had never seen this idea before or afterwards. It worked very well and gave them the flexibility that they needed and was very neat and tidy. All the cable tripes came in boxes on wheels that were placed at the end of the bars and then just coiled or uncoiled as the bar was flown in or out . I copied the idea at the Lyric but it was not popular with the production electricians and suggested it for the five guys tour but again the idea was not adopted which I believe if they had done would have made the tour much easier. The second year their kit was used for a french ballet tour but the two crews did not get along well. I had a health and safety problem with the french crew over a safety line and had to get a letter from them absolving us from any fire issues. The two English touring companies were run on different lines and yet they were both great fun to work for. Malcolm with his neat self devised system of total flexibility for Rambert, and Podge and Whippet From Northern ballet with their great camaraderie and humour.

I remember doing Iraqi Ballet one year. They were a very nice crew although at the start the language barrier did cause difficulties with us being told that they would be getting their luggage in on the Saturday morning. I wondered why it was not going to their hotel. It turned out to be the set for the show and we had to call in a lot of favours to assemble a crew for that at the last minute. Added to this that because of Ramadan and them flying with the sun they had not eaten for nearly 48 hours. When they dropped a bag of pink plaster that then broke all over Owen’s perfectly painted Matt black stage I wondered if it could get much worse. The answer was it could. They did not have a lighting designer and expected us to supply one. Their entire concept was a few coloured circles drawn on a bit of A4 paper. Dave kid rescued us by simply lighting the show as he thought it should be. They were very poor and had very few tools between them, a lot of their technicians were also dancers. On seeing a battery drill they seemed to think it was most magical. At the end of their religious festival they wanted to share their feast with us. In a way we had so much and yet they had so little sometimes now wonder what happened to them all. The war was coming for them all yet again.

One afternoon we all finished just at six PM. The box office had closed and shut the front of house doors at 5.30 as there was no show that week. Owen Dave, and sweaty all went out the back, closing the shutter door behind them. I went out via the control room in front of the house. One of the very nice things about the Royalty was that it was now very quick to close down. Turn off the mains in the dimmer room. Turn off the fuse boards on level one and two back stage.Into the control room turn off about 6 isolators and then out through the side door put the chain on and slam the door shut. Such a pity someone from head office was showing around some prospective clients. I guess it did not look good to be in the middle of the theatre when all the lights went out! total blackness! and then to find that the doors were locked and unless you knew where you were going no way out! Well serve the arrogant fool right. If you don’t tell anyone that you are there and keep everything hush hush, on top of that you never bother to learn much about the buildings you are trying to sell. I even once overheard him tell a prospective client that all the equipment belonged to the theatre when it obviously did not and was the property of the current show. so as they say what goes around.

We did a few conferences and an Indian Sunday concert. These two very different aspects of theatre were welded together in my memory because both had the sound supplied and operated by two very different people but both had the Christian name of Neil. Two different characters you could never imagine.

Smart Neil we first met on a conference he was very well dressed and his kit was immaculate but only consisted of a few very smart modern Bose speakers a couple of loose amplifiers a small sound desk and a couple of radio mics as well as two very neat mics for the lectern which he also provided. I think that was for a BT conference. Which we had rigged the day before as requested. It would turn out that the plan was back to front as the table and lectern were the wrong way around. Not we thought a big deal, but the lighting designer made us change it all over to save the head of BT having to walk an extra 30 feet! We would call on smart conference Neil a few more times.

Tat Neil named for his body art was a totally different kettle of fish. We first worked with him on an Indian Sunday concert. He  was used to pubs, clubs, and the odd village hall. He was such a nice chap. Long hair long bearded tattooed all over he was a perfect gentleman. He could not believe all he had to do was back his transit down the ramp and we would load his kit into the cages and lower it twenty feet onto the stage. We would help him carry it where he wanted it and help run his cables and lift his speakers onto their stands. All because he just said hello. His great worry was that someone might smash up his van! It had happened before and it was his whole livelihood. He had made, as he saw it, to the big time of the west-end. We let him park on the ramp and closed the outer shutter as it was a Sunday and the office building next door was closed. The concert went well and he departed a very happy man. We called upon his services sadly only once more for a children show. I remember hearing the sound of children in the background when I called him, I think they were his whole world. The fee we had got for him he was so pleased with. I think I told him on the phone to double whatever he usually charged and the company paid it happily. He brought every piece of kit that he owned, bless him. The sight of these tiny children and the stands will stay with me forever. He wanted to put fold back wedges along the front of the stage. I finally persuaded him out of it, I think he felt they should have the very very best he could give. Sadly as they would not have been seen behind the speakers by the proud parents I think it was the right decision. All went off splendidly, even my lighting looked good. We never saw him again, we had no more shows that we could call on him to do. Things were slowing down, we feared the cold winds of change might be coming. We had had to show a few no theatrical types around with not the sniff to do with any sort of production.

We did two conferences back to back oddly both using Barco projectors, rather like the two Neils this again showed the difference in two technicians. The first had two projectors (one as a spare) Two technicians remote controls and took all night to rig and set up. The other guy, a screwdriver and twenty minutes.

David was away on holiday and I think the two carpenters had been lent to another theatre for a few days. There was an up and coming small show that we were doing so I just had to get on with it beforehand. I rigged the front of house dropping in the advance bar and rigging lanterns on it and winching it out again. I set out lanterns in the stalls and then fished and hauled them up and rigged them pulling them up with a rope and the use of a hook clamp as a hook to get them up. Next came the flying of a couple of bars on stage dropping them in rigging them and then taking the brake off on the fly floor and then up to the loading gallery to load the weights until the system was almost in balance and then down to the fly floor haul then bar out and put the last of the weights in and then brake off. Next came a couple of down stage booms and finally two headers legs and two back cloths. I felt at that point having started at 10 am that at 4 pm I had earned an early night. The next day I focused the lot pulling myself along the bars at the top of the tallescope with the brakes off. There was no one else in the building, just me and the riggers control from the Galaxy at the top of the scope. I had by that time built the working light controls onto contactors and the riggers could not only turn the stage workers on and off but also the cleaners lights and house lights. A further quick alteration to the riggers and it could now also bring up memories from the desk as well. Three hours later and the show was rigged and the set what there was of it was lit and the whole lot plotted in the desk. Very satisfying. All I needed now was someone to have a beer with and it would be the end of a perfect couple of days. The day after Boxing day that year I had spent wiring up emergency lighting in the followspot box after the council had complained that day also I had spent alone, not I think that originally even the manager had believed until he popped his head in to pick something up and had found me drilling holes across the ceiling! Well he had insisted that I come in by myself and by myself I had come in! Anyway that person to have a beer with. And then in walked Owen, perfect he had money from the job he had been doing, and I had saved him a long afternoons work and so to the pub to put the worlds to rights.

Prompt corner refurbishment. We had now finished this. I had found some old three phase contactors in the basement and had used them two in one box backstage to control the six working light sockets and one front of house in the control room to control the three cleaners lights front of house. I then controlled these via low volt relays so both could be controlled from the stage and the lighting board. This again saved so much time with such a small crew. No more like the Northcott at Exeter having to send someone on a long time wasting journey just to turn one or the other on or off several times a day. It had taken me quite a long time to design the circuit, but eventually I got them to flip flop reliably. Remotes were placed both in the prompt corner desk and the lighting desk. Next came cue lights and headsets. The prompt corner was on casters which we had got from an old cake stand! I guess we had the only prompt corner desk that had sprung loaded suspension! We never had reason to put the prompt corner on the other side of the stage but it would with the addition of a cable long enough to reach. We then managed to get the House tabs (curtain) re electrified. It did slow them down a little if ever we did fly them manually but again it saved a lot of effort with such a small crew. The first show we did with Malcolm from Rambert was not keen but once we showed him how well they worked he was satisfied. They would work well as soon as the person operating them learnt to press the up button just before the curtains hit the deck you could get a reasonable bounce. So now from the prompt corner desk, the tabs, working lights, cleaners lights, and desk could all be controlled. The total cost as I recall was absolutely nothing.

We did a conference for the home office. Partly perhaps because the MOD had some offices in the block above the Royalty. The protection officers wanted us to guarantee that all the buildings would be safe but we would not play ball. They even tried to keep us out of certain areas of the building near the reception room. Again that one failed the home secretary was unaware of the Chief LX only feet away reading the meters while the protection officers were all looking in the wrong direction!

Gosh we did do some unusual shows, including the international body builders association final. I think we did it 3 years in a row. A full Sunday of loud music and each one of them was covered in baby oil and smelt of Ralgex. Last year we got our new wonderful housekeeper Barbra to do food and drinks for them. The company was not interested and we were glad that such a nice person should make a few quid for once. She would after the end go on to be Housekeeper at the Apollo on Shaftesbury Avenue and we would keep in touch until her retirement down to the south coast. She really thought she was jinxed until her appointment there, having had so many jobs fold on her in such a short period of time. She was a real Diamond, a genuine hard working good old east end girl.

We also did several student shows, I remember where the air con was not working well, in fact we had been told not to use it for the risk of legionnaires disease. Soon afterwards we would take over the responsibility from the heating company and it would not be a problem again until I should go to the Lyric. Why the head office employed such companies rather than letting the LX Dept do the work was a bit of a mystery to me. It’s less trouble to stick the stuff in the plant room, or change the filters than it is to keep chasing a contractor to do a job that only takes a few minutes in the first place. Any way with the plant not working to capacity that day the heat on stage reached easily above 40 degrees. One of the dancers, a very pretty young girl doing her turns was so hot you could see the sweat coming off her in a spiral. It would have made a great photo! It was curious to note that quite a few of the student shows, Hair, Sweet Charity, seemed to involve the students getting most of their clothes off! One of the directors told me that it was so the students would get used to performing like that. I was personally not so convinced and suspected it might have more to do with the enjoyment of the director who also got to choose and cast the shows.

On one student show the Students were also going to be doing the technical work. Unfortunately this led to a conflict between real west end technicians and the lecturers from the college. When I am up the top of a tallescope then I will decide on whether to have outriggers. On top of that I don’t expect the students to try and fit them while I am at the top! They were a great bunch, we enjoyed one guy that when a student with the LX dept badly rigged and focused a light, and  then when with the carpenters he managed to bash it and then with the stage management complained about it. I think he may have been the son of a well known lighting designer, but after all this time I am not certain on that one. One day I got called to the pit as a lamp had blown in one of the music stands. This was during the show and the band were playing. I put my hand into the cover to take out the old lamp. As my finger went straight into the bare socket where the bulb had been removed I just about managed not to make a noise next to the live microphone. I always usually on a long running show leave a few lamps in the orchestra pit. It’s less trouble than having to change the lamps, or replace missing ones, for whatever the reason! Next time a lamp blew we went to one of the students, this time of course it went wrong again. Sir had insisted that the Pyrotechnics safety key actually be removed from the control box! I don’t mean out of the key switch but the key cord was cut and the key removed! Yep you guessed it the student that then got caught at the back of the pit had the only key on him! It was tossed the length of the pit and caught by Dave and taken back to the prompt corner just in time for the cue. A lesson learnt perhaps by both the student and the tutor, not everything it says in the manual is correct.

On one occasion I was so enthusiastic for one of the student productions that I got fifty complimentary free tickets from the box office and took them over to the student bar of the London School of Economics and gave them to the bar man asking him to give them away to the students. We never saw a single one! He must have chucked the lot to keep his bar profits up. The student show lost money as it cost to produce the tickets.

The police once went around the student bar of the LSE offering to breathalyse people just as an experiment. We used to drink there at one time to drink there as it was cheap. I was never keen and once we lost the first Deputy Chief LX I dropped the practice but on this day 7 pints later I still passed! I have never drunk and driven but it did seem quite bizarre.

Sweaty Bollocks moved on down the road to be back as Chief LX at the Dominion theatre. We missed him, he was fun, hard working when needed and a great laugh. We had all got locked in a pub over in Covent garden one afternoon because of a bomb scare. What a shame. Three hours watching the cricket drinking young’s beer and being paid for it, and missing some dull meeting. Nicki now joined Owen as his number two, She was again very hard working and to start with, with red hair and a nose ring a little frightening. She painted all the floors back stage and kept us all tidy and spick and span. She was a good fly(man) . I can’t remember how many shows she did but every one benefited from her efforts.

One Christmas (1992) we did the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe. The set was so bad, it had been stored in a barn and most of it was soaking wet! They provided a lot of the lighting equipment I remember being at the top of the tower when one of the lights was turned on the advance bar. A spider jumped out one of the lanterns, down towards the stalls on his web he went, lucky him I thought. The lights were so bad the light did not hit the stage it just fell down to earth slower than the spider. Dave renamed the show the Cat the C..t and the cupboard. For the second time C.S Lewis and my path had crossed. I certainly hoped it would be the last!

We had now completed all our refurbishments of the Royalty. Even the lighting desk had had a makeover with a new nice comfortable surround for it to sit in along with a full sized platform It was now comfortable to sit at for hours on end. It had cost £20 for the Leatherette and foam underneath, I was told because the old support had cost £100’s which must as usual have been my fault. We now had a newly made production desk that could be in the stalls or the front of the dress circle. Low voltage multi core like the queens theatre took all the feeds for comms and lighting and we had added a feed to it for a monitor from the lighting desk for the lighting designer. Nick Richings who had been the LD for several shows liked it. Comfortable with black surge and big enough for him but no one else. It was not my job to supply desks for anyone else, after all everyone would want one.

The wiring in the building was appalling, I was nearly killed up in the main ceiling void leaning across a trunking with no lid on it was a perfect earth, then touching an exposed live wire I realised that if I didn’t throw myself off it would be the end of yours truly. In the front of house control room none of the isolators on the wall had their couplings fitted to the trunking. In the dimmer room the three phase cables passed separately through duckt work. It looked very pretty, all the blues, reds and yellows but of course they all hummed like mad and got as hot as hell! Eventually after several electrical inspections a company from the North of England was brought in to rectify these faults. They were a nice couple of lads and they spent a week solving the problems. They told us that it was their last job together, they were being made redundant after this job. We felt sorry for them, it seemed very unfair. The cold winds of unemployment were sweeping the country yet again. Little were we to know that this rewire and their loss was another sign that the good times were coming to an end.

The English Shakespeare company. This started out with a month-long set of rehearsals. The show they were rehearsing was a modern version of Macbeth ( Referred to as Mackers as it was always regarded as unlucky to use the proper name in the theatre.) The director many years ago had done this in a theatre using what equipment was available and now wanted to recreate this. Money seemed to be no object but he started out by wanting to use our tallescope as the throne in the play. This might have been acceptable if they had treated it well but they did not. A person’s life depends on the state of this access equipment and with ours we were very lucky that it was quite new and in very good condition. When I found out that they intended to bang it about the stage with actors hanging off it I refused and chained it to the back of the stage. Bearing in mind that it was only a temporary rehearsal prop and their own purpose built device was coming in only a few days I think my attitude was very reasonable. They hired one from another theatre by the time they had finished with it. I for one would never have climbed it. They were paying strictly for only 8 hours which caused another problem when they tried to get in before 9 am and stay after 6pm. The following week lighting and sound arrived, and we fitted up a complete show! Kevin Fitzsimmons was the production electrician. He had been on the show shadowlands at the Queens. He always seemed to get the tricky ones known of course as the “Best Ape” The madness continues week after week. More and more kit arrived, and this for the tour of a straight play. Then after having seen the cleaners lights snap on after a rehearsal they too started to be used. Luckily we had put a switch on the lighting board! I in the end accused the director of being mad and out of touch with reality! He just laughed and offered me a job! I think he just wanted the pleasure of sacking me, or perhaps I was the only one to ever stand up to him. The madness finally came to an end and we did the get out. It had to finish as we had another show booked the following day. Baring in mind that these were only rehearsals the amount of extra kit that had been delivered meant on the get out it would only just fit in the lorry. When the driver tried to drive back up the loading bay ramp he just could not, the weight was just to great! In the end about twenty of us got behind it and pushed it up to street level. Another truck would have to come the following day and have a lot of the kit loaded into it before it could be safely driven away.

We did a couple of other shows and then just after christmas we were to have the English Shakespear company back with Mackers and the Tempest in Repertoire. David had gone on holiday for six weeks, we were dark over christmas and he was well deserved to have this time away. We had been together for nearly three years and he was to go to Australia. The way the show was set up and in Rep I would set up Mackers and plot it and then leave instructions for Dave who would take it out, install the tempest leaving instructions for me to take it out. We would finally meet for the first time a week after he had returned as my holiday would run straight after his. The first thing I would have to do was separate the two shows that arrived on one disk and then renumber the cues so that they would both be stored on different disks and have the correct cue numbers. After 3 days of Mackers I had to even draw a cue light, headset and working light plan so that David could take the show out before he set up the tempest! He would then plot that leaving me the same plans so I could take it out, what a laugh and a reunion we eventually had. I had in the end even had to master the infamous Galaxy effects panel and how to renumber memory numbers on mass.

Nicki now left, a bright star had fallen, she had wanted so much to be the first Female master carpenter in the west end. She would have made it too, and even earlier than she had imagined. Owen was not to stay that much longer the writing was to start showing on the wall, but sadly she left to have a baby, what happened to her we never found out. Would she have been a good master? We now will never know. A guy called Rod Clay replaced her, he and Owen I don’t think really got along. Rod Knew where he was going. He knew a lot about sound and flying and was only really there to mark his CV. He drove and knew about driving. His girlfriend was a manager in one of the theatres, and yet I felt they did not really understand one another. They both were very clever and wanted to be going places and yet they seemed to not enjoy anything they did. Almost as if they felt that everything they did was easy and beneath them.

One of the bad signs was that what little money that was spent on the theatre seemed to be drying up. Head office would not send out the engineers to service the enormous sump pumps that took all the wastewater including from the toilets back up to street level. There were two of them, one in use and one as a backup. These sump pumps took all water, toilet, and otherwise back up to street and sewer level. Head office told John they would not pay for engineers to come and fix them, he would have to crane them out and unblock them himself.
Remember that story from the queens about swapping two wires over and the motor now turning the other way? Well it was either try that, or crane them out with the chain hoists, strip them down and find the blockage, or !
Well either it would free the pump, burn the motor out, or fill the dressing rooms with……
John and the deputy charged 4 hrs at T and 1/2 and were in the pub before 2 PM….

We had picked up a monthly conference for a bunch of bankers. They were in some insurance selling scam, their whole company was based on a bullying kind of aggressive campaign. Flashing lights and loud music hate the lossier love the winner. In the end a row erupted and they were told not to intimidate our staff. Not to try and sell their stuff to us. If that was the world of business, well thanks but no thanks. Every month with the top table and the lectern. Each year it got heavier as more logos were strapped to it. This group even went on to some of our other theatres. I ended up with them many times more. Their tech guy was not too bad, he had got himself quite a nice little earner, but he was of course desperate to keep it. One day far in the future they just were no longer there. Presumably they just sold up and went bust taking anyone who had invested in pensions insurance etc with them!

We were now well and truly used to the life of the Royalty. In the two and a bit years we had been there we had done upwards of over a hundred different shows of all different kinds. We knew how to think on our feet, and run a building on a shoestring. No show however small or big would ever worry us again. Conference, musical, play, rock, Sunday show or weekly rep would ever be a difficulty. Big crew, short time big show, or children show, rigged alone , Home office, high profile, it was all easy to all now, there was nothing that we could not handle, and could not do. And then the bomb went off!

And so after all our hard word, fate and other influences had decided that the Royalty Theatre was now going to be sold to the London School of Economics. It was a bitter blow. The theatre was now one of the best kitted out in the group. Brought on a whim perhaps many years ago, but with only a crew of four we had proved many times what we could do. David was in bits, he could not believe it had all come to an end.

He was the first to go, my fate was not quite certain. I promised him that, should the L.S.E . keep me, and there was an opening it would be his. Owen had gone a few weeks earlier leaving only Rod.

There were no ceremonies, no party, no gifts. One morning 3 years after David came through the door the day after Mark left, he just wasn’t there anymore. He took the long walk like the gentleman he was. Little was I to know, at the time, how difficult a road he was to travel at his new theatre Her Majesties.

We (I) staggered on for a couple of dismal weeks, looking forward to next show “Babes in Arms.” I was looking forward to one last show at the Royalty with David before moving on myself. It was sadly not to be, we were never to work together again. (apart from one overnighter at the Lyric). HM’s for whatever reason would not release him. A man called Tony Priestley was to be my Deputy for those two weeks. I had never met him before and within hours he was to earn my respect that was to last a lifetime.