1983. After a wonderful two weeks holiday on the canals with Les, Jane, and Sue. I returned to the Victoria Palace for the last time on a bright sunny Monday morning in the middle of May.
I thought that I was to be sent, or lent out to Lyric Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue. But It turned out that I was to report to the Queens theatre on the same famous street. Simon had been sent there the previous week because they were short staffed. This idea of moving staff between theatres was a novelty that would soon become a very unpleasant, and frequent reality for dark theatres in an ever increasingly uncertain future. A flagrant breach of the union rule book. This book would become more important but less and less powerful as years went by. The book stated that only a Chief Electrician or Master Carpenter could be moved on a temporary basis to cover the absence of another from a dark theatre to an open one. The management had now decided that the answer to this clause was, agree to be moved, or redundancy.
There was no party, no grand parade, or gold watch.
No handshake from the Manager he was not there. He was a man over the years, I was to look back on, and admire more and more from a distance. It would be Twenty years until I would see him again at the offices of ‘See Tickets’ on Shaftesbury Avenue.
Not sadly even a handshake and a goodbye from my friends and co-workers. After all, I was going to be coming back once a new show was found for the Victoria Palace. It was of course not to turn out that way.
I didn’t like the idea much. The Victoria Palace had been my home now for six years. I had grown up on its stage, from a nervous 17 year old teenager from “the sticks” I had proved myself, and become a competent, experienced first Dayman electrician . I had spent a third of my life there, and it was time to move on, I just didn’t want to.
I would lose my four hours at time and a half bonus, and be pitched into a world of what I regarded at the time of boring plays that required little or no skill to operate.
The two great rival companies of Moss Empires, that had owned nearly all the out of town theatres, until they were sold off, leaving effectively only the London Palladium and the Victoria Palace, and Stoll Theatres owning theatres in London, had finally merged completely. This merger had the result of the Stoll Chief Engineer taking control of the two remaining Moss London theatres. I and Simon were the first casualties of this. The Maintenance staff at the Victoria Palace of Arthur the painter, and John O’Connell, the plumber and carpenter, were to be moved into the Stoll works Dept at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane (TRDL). This would not be the last, of this idea of uprooting people on the great drive for centralisation that I would see over the years, it was just the first.
I left the V.P. after tea, they did not start at the Queens until Ten O’clock. I took the tube changing at oxford circus. From now on no more Wimbledon, change at Clapham Junction for Victoria, it would be all the way into Waterloo until I was to move to Tring in Hertfordshire. I would be able to be in bed until 9.30 am, wash and still be in work before 10.am. I liked living in Wimbledon, transport was quick and cheap and ran late, but even after that it was only about an hour’s walk home. The pubs were good and the rent was low.
I walked up from Piccadilly Circus tube station, it was odd but after six years at the VP I had only been into the “West End” a couple of times, why would I ?
(The Queens Theatre is the last of the four theatres in a row on Shaftesbury Avenue, The Taxi Drivers remember their order as “Little Apples Grow Quickly”. Or in those days Lyric, Apollo, Globe, Queens. The Globe in the future would be the first theatre in my time to be renamed. It changed to the Gielgud. At least the Taxi’s aide to memoire would remain the same. Before I left it had become quite the fashion this renaming of theatres, just a cheap publicity stunt in my opinion.) Later the Queens theatre would be named the Sondheim theatre. I guess now the Little apples grow slowly!
I found the stage door at the back of the theatre, and introduced myself to the Stage Door Keeper. His name was Malcolm, he appeared to have hurt his arm, he directed me to the staff room a couple of floors below.
Simon and the Dayman Ben were there. It would turn out that the LX dept had had some rather large shake ups. The theatre only had three Electricians and three carpenters. The previous Chief LX and deputy had left almost at the same time, leaving only their new Dayman, who had come from the St Martins via the Adelphi, and had then been promoted to Chief LX. He had been taken ill and was in hospital with a collapsed lung. So this was the reason why Simon and myself had been sent there. We of course knew nothing of the building and neither did the very new Dayman who had only just been employed. His name was Ben Miller.
So this is how the new system worked. Having come from a theatre that had supported shaftesbury avenue for years and made a good profit, and a stable crew, here we were with one electrician that had been there only a week or so!
I learnt the lighting board that night. It was a Rank Strand Compact.120 ways of dimming and no possibility of any more, it was a cut down version of the MMS the desk I was used to. There were only about nine cues, the desk had been dreadfully plotted. I came from a school, simple is beautiful, and meant less mistakes. The desk was not even in sequence. I can’t remember but I think I replotted it. The headphones did not work properly, nothing seemed to work properly. I had worked with Simon and David installing a new headset cue light and Tannoy system at the Victoria Palace. Here they only had two cue lights that worked! And about the same number of headsets. These and the Tannoy system were built by a company called Green Ginger. The headsets were awful, very uncomfortable and were hard wired to the belt pack. Cheap was not the word. It was rumoured that both the headset system, the Tannoy system, and the lighting rig were all supplied by companies connected to the Chief Engineer, under a rental agreement!
Ben was a pleasant happy go lucky kind of guy and we would get along well, he was interested in re-enactment of civil war battles, fire eating and his camper van, I hope he would not mind me saying he was a bit of a hippy, in a fun sort of way. I think this situation lasted another week or so before the resident Chief LX returned. As I say he had not been there as chief LX that long. His name was Julian Rees, we would become good friends for many years, right up to my, and then his retirement, over thirty years later.
We did not get off to a good start. I was the board operator for the second show on a Matinee day, so having put the tab warmers on, (the lights that illuminate the curtains in front of the audience .) I went off for one of my last visits to the VP. Returning about half an hour before the show, I got hauled into the Chief LX office and told off for leaving all the lights off in the auditorium. I protested and pointed out that I had left them on! Julian told me they were to be turned off between shows to save energy, and that is why they had been turned off. Different theatres have different ways of working. I was unaware the Queens had a different system. For the previous two weeks the Queen’s had been run by Simon like the VP. The Queen’s Chief had returned, changed the system back without telling anyone, the manager had chucked his toys out of his pram at Julian, who chucked them at me!
The following morning we were now having tea in the workshop not the crew room, there was some disagreement between the LX dept and stage department that I never got to the bottom of. One day it just disappeared but in the meantime this is what we did.
The show “Another Country” had been there about a year, it had a small revolve on a rake (sloping) stage. The three members of the stage dept had only the hand winch and the tabs (house curtain) to operate, they frequently missed the winch cues, and the DSM had to run up stage and operate the winch himself while telling the LX the lighting cues.
There was a funny story about this revolve. When it turned it revealed three different scenes. Because it was on a rake stage only the one facing the audience was level. One of the carpenters had made everyone laugh as each time he had fitted a shelf on the set when it was facing away from the audience and then put stuff on it. When the revolve turned everything had fallen off as the shelf started to slope.
Julian, I, and Ben were now getting along well, and so I went to see the Chief Engineer to apply for the Deputy Chief Electrician’s job. He agreed to think it over. It turned out Ben had been taken on with the intention of being given the job. Younger and less experienced than I, and having been with the company only a few weeks! It was now a competition between us, the company was saving a deputy’s wages, and Ben had originally been promised the job! We flipped a coin as to who would plot the next show. I won the toss, the prize being to show off the board plotting skills and get the deputies job, or not as the case maybe!
The Queens at the time had a very different sort of manager to which I was used to. He liked things just so, and no leeway. Once we were ordered to get a tea bag off the canopy at 5 minutes to one o’clock when our shift ended at at one! At the Queens theatre both foyer and auditorium had Chandlers with exposed golf ball lamps. As soon as more than two were out the whole lot had to be changed. The foyer need a 30ft extending wooden a frame ladder to be carried from the stage. And the auditorium has a 230 turn hand winch, with use of tyre lever and bits of wood etc, to keep pushing the suspension wire straight on the drum….. Make sure you do because if you don’t and the wire should climb and then jump, the result will jar and the chandler will bounce, if that happens even though you have tapped the lamps and run them for an hour, if one should blow then its winch it in and do it again! Even if its between shows on a matinee. It got better once we nicked a multi core and fitted it, before that the plugs were taped to the cable and if one slipped it was winch it in again!
The Queens theatre boiler house is on two levels with a boiler on each, and a door linking to the dressing rooms on the top, and a door to the street on the bottom. For many years they were oil fired, and the Electric’s dept had to maintain the pipework and valves. For some reason buried in the dim distant unfathomable past, they had to take the valves apart, clean various pointless bits of metal with a wire brush, paint and reassemble these very untheatrical unforgiving dull pieces of dreary metal. John personally thought it was because the group engineer at the time knew little about theatre, but a lot about the navy, which presumably meant pipes, boilers and other non-theatrical dreary rubbish. Anyway the story goes, long before John worked at the Queen’s, one of the long suffering Queens LX takes one of these valves apart but unfortunately does not quite reassemble it correctly. The result over the next 24 hours is, the valve decides that it doesn’t like having its internal mechanism interfered with, and decides to exact its revenge. This revenge takes the part in the only way a valve has to exact revenge, it leaks. Now the very conscientious electrician when walking past the street door to the boiler house notices that there appears to be a small trickle of water coming under this door. So after putting his coat away and having a cup of tea decides to have a look at the top boiler house. When he opens the top boiler house door he notices a quantity of water on the floor, or to be more accurate, the floor is flooded, and so is the entire of the lower boiler house. Now again showing how conscientious he is he tells the chief engineer about this problem. The engineer insisted on visiting the problem, marches down the street but does not heed the conscientious electrician’s advice to enter via the top boiler house!……. It was reported as a serious injury to the electrician who was in great pain… from laughing so much….. But the damage to the dignity of the chief Engineer was far worse, as several thousand gallons of water was finally allowed after nearly 24 hours to escape through a 8ft by 4ft hole, with now only one obstacle in its path. Suffice it to say he was helped up, eventually by the electrician several feet further down the street.
Get out of another country and the fit up of Hay fever with Penelope Keith. Both shows were little more than simple box sets. There was a lot riding on the next show, after the disaster of Windy City, the company had produced this show through a front man. Then the old pals’ act had gone wrong, the Lighting Designer had been taken ill, the Chief Engineer decided to act as lighting designer! He sat at the production desk in the stalls, chatted to his chums and then yelled at the headsets left on the side, he would not wear them because they were so uncomfortable! Yet he had supplied them through one of his companies! I could only catch about one word in three! You could not ask him to repeat what he had said because he would not Wear the headsets! All I could do was get up, go out into the auditorium and keep asking what he wanted!
Things unfortunately came to a head, and Julian had to take my place plotting the show. There was a lot riding on this from the company’s point of view.
Ben got the job as deputy Chief LX. He stayed less than six months. Mike Chapman and then Matt Doddington were the next two LX Dayman, I had finally been given the converted title of Deputy Chief Electrician at the age of 23.
Before this Ben had a disaster which looking back must have been very funny but at the time probably got him into a lot of trouble and may have contributed to his decision to leave. Which was unfortunate because as I have said we got along well and there was no animosity between us over the Deputies job.
The theatres on Shaftesbury Avenue at that time were all owned by the same company, the Queens boiler house also supplied heating to the Globe theatre next door, just as the Lyric theatre supplied heating oil to the Apollo theatre which is next door to it. Every week in the winter oil was delivered at 6am on a Tuesday Morning. The Lyric and Queens Theatre LX department took this job in turn, to accept the deliveries to both theatres. The result was that once every six weeks one was there at 6am finishing about seven with some very easy overtime in one’s pocket.
One morning Ben had met the delivery truck by the Lyrics delivery point. The Driver had coupled the pipes up which was unusual as normally the delivery pipe was just dropped into the receiving pipe. The amount ordered was read off the boiler house gauge in gallons and then has to be converted into litres. Somehow the Chief LX had made a mistake and ordered too much. This along with the coupling of the pipes meant that the pressure just built up until the pump just stopped! The delivery driver then decoupled the pipes! The resultant pressure blew oil out the delivery pipe! The force was so high it hit the canopy deluging the street with 100’s of gallons of oil! The picture of Ben trying to stem the flood with a couple of buckets of sand still stays with me. He had no way into the lyric and knew nothing of the fact that one of the tanks had split and was slowly filling the basement with hundreds of gallons of heating oil!
The shows followed quite quickly, the average length of a show was about 12 weeks. There were no more plotting problems, most of the shows were quite simple, I plotted most of them, Julian and I had become good friends and I was to enjoy his company very much over the next 30 years as we both climbed the greasy pole.
“The Seagull ”, “40 years on ”, “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Oui,” Interpreters”, “Wonderful Town”. We’re all to follow. David Horn lit Wonderful Town which was a big musical on a small stage. Diddy Dave Horn, little rig Horn we used to call him! He was brilliant, one of the very finest lighting designers I have ever worked with.
Dave Horn had lit the seagull. The second show I had plotted at the queen’s after 40 years on. The show was typical Chechov I guess you either liked it or you didn’t! It opens in a garden at night and it was brilliantly lit by Dave. The show is in three acts and the first is in a garden at night, the only lighting is three oil lamps. Dave lit it so perfectly with pattern 23’s (a small spot light) that when someone put their hand in front of the oil lamp their shadow would go across the stage. On the afternoon before the preview the producer came in and had the act relit! It was stupid, he said the actors’ faces could not be seen properly! Well it was a garden at night! Also people should not change things after the last show before the first night. It negates the purpose of the previous previews, and risks mistakes on the first night. Dave was in bits, after all his hard work, and ingenuity, to have it ruined by this, I offered to put it back to how it was, it would mean been big trouble, I would for only once in my life, have blamed the lighting board. Dave was very grateful but declined. Lucky for me, he needed to keep in with the producer. It was a great shame and the west end missed out on something very special.
Another story about the Sea Gull was that the moon slowly rose over the whole of the first act. The Flyman had been not looking forward to doing that every show, but in the end, this was achieved by a small motor attached to the counter weight system turning through a gearbox and pulling the “moon” light up over this time. The only problem being it took the same amount of time to drop it again! Between shows on a matinee day we would set it coming in again, and then go to the pub and then forget. The result was of course it would come all the way into the stage and then start going out again. By the time we had remembered there would only be time enough to lower it in again, so now up was down and down was up.
One of the great stories frequently told about the Queens now follows, I don’t claim that it is true, but its too good not to tell.
Richard Harris returns to London and is met by Richard Burton.
They both go off to lunch and have a few Drinks.
Richard H asks Richard B how it’s all going, saying he is going to be in a play soon in the west end too.
Richard B replies it’s all going fine. Would he like to go to the Matinee at the Queen’s that afternoon and get a few tips from him.
Richard H agrees.
After lunch Richard B takes Richard H to the foyer and gets a couple of tickets from the box office.
Sitting in the stalls after the show has gone up, Richard B turns to Richard H and says “Watch this, this is the best bit, this is where I come on”
We lost our master carpenter Nick Van Wick. I think the stage Dayman Andy Crimmin had left and been replaced by Andy Williams, he soon would go for yet another Andy Edwards and then Andy Bird, it was rumoured that you could not get the Job unless you were named Andy, the chief Engineer did not want to learn a new name.
The new Master carpenter caught one of the new Stage Dayman asleep in one of the dressing rooms that he was supposed to be painting early one morning. It was obvious that he had been there all night! He came out with one of the finest excuses. He just shook himself, picked up a brush and said, “God must have dropped off, where am I anyway?”
Back buried in the mists of time an idea was thought up in head office that a door could be placed between the prompt corners of the Globe and Queens theatres on shaftesbury Avenue. This door would allow the sharing of crews between the theatres during the show…. Also a door would be placed between the dressing room blocks to share dressing rooms. One could only imagine the consequences. Anyway subsequently a hole was drilled to find out how thick the wall was between the two theatres. Once the thickness was established the idea was abandoned, but the hole was left. Many an amused DSM enjoyed the facility of being able to pass messages on a pole during the show between the prompt corners, until on one occasion a DSM finding resistance while trying to pass a message pushed their end a little too hard with the result of pushing a flat over in the next door theatre.
The show Interpreters with Maggie Smith, followed, it was not a great show. She constantly complained about everything, with around 15 lighting cues it hardly warranted much concentration but if the lighting board operator sitting in the stage right box in the stalls was seen reading by her then she would complain about that as well! We solved the problem by blacking out the window, now we did not need to see her! If the lights went out I was sure someone might tell us eventually. The show then extended another six weeks! At the end of the very last show she was to be heard as the final curtain hit the deck to say in a loud voice “thank god that S*** is over! Well I always hear her say that every time I see Downton Abbey! Why if she hated it so much did she extend what was a disaster in the first place? She could have given it a mercy killing weeks earlier.
During the get out of Interpreters which was done over the day time the following week. An accident involving the flying system and one of the carpenters that taught me one very important lesson. The electrics had been derigging alone as the carpenters had been sent off to another theatre. When he returned, one of the carpenters just took over and told me to do something very stupid. I complied, but luckily heard the break coming off an unbalanced counter weight set. I got my arm out just in time. If I had not my right arm would have been cut straight off! The accident would have been caused by a misunderstanding, and was narrowly averted by my very quick thinking. The fault though lay with the carpenter not assessing the situation properly, and not making allowances for other departments working practises. I swore from that day on never to believe a word I was ever told or do anything that I was told without evaluating it first.
In years gone by before elevated titles Stoll Moss theatres technical departments were run by a Chief Engineer. His short temper was legendary. He occupied an office at the front of the Queens theatre looking over shaftesbury avenue. This window looked through the neon signs One day so the story goes he is on the phone to the neon signs company complaining about a fault and the fact that the access “boat” that was dropped over from the roof to service the signs was being left on the canopy rather than on the roof out of site.He was told that the manager would deal with the problem later. At this point a heavy gust of wind blew the boat and the two workmen straight through the plate glass window of the office and deposited them, their tools equipment and gallons of rain water on the carpet at his feet! The engineer said down the phone “don’t bother, I will do the bloody job myself.” Then he slammed the phone down, turned to the two workmen and said……. And another bloody thing…….
That weekend would prove to be my busiest and most productive. We (Julian and myself) had got a working relationship by that time with London Festival Ballet. We worked for them several times a year at the Coliseum and the London Festival Hall. Interpreters was finishing after Christmas at the end of January, as was The Nutcracker at the Festival Hall, as also was Jungle Book at the Adelphi, the last theatre I knew from covering My Fair Lady in my days at the VP. It was at the Adelphi to meet My future wife Michelle. The then Chief LX Paul O’Leary had also been on the same ABTT course as myself 7 years earlier. So on Friday night we did the show at the Queen’s, then the get out until 5am of The Nutcracker, finally loading the kit back into their stores at 6am. We then did two last shows of Interpreters, before the get out of Jungle book at the Adelphi it was snowing heavily that night and the Adelphi stage was well below street level. We kept warm from the work and finally finished again about 5 am. Back to the Queen’s for another kip in a dressing room before our own get out that Sunday. I think we finally rolled into our own beds about 7pm after a few beers in the Wellington (the pub opposite the Queens Stage Door).
The Queens theatre had a central vacuum plant, all around the theatre hoses could be attached to the pipe work and the floors Etc. could be vacuumed clean and all the Dirt sent back to a central place for disposal. One day the motor failed and it had to be sent away for repair. We had marked the wires so that we could reattach them to the controller when it returned. What we had not done was mark the rotation of the motor. When it came back it had new wires and no marks! We could only attach it and hope. A three-phase motor can spin in either direction, if it is turning the wrong way one just has to swap two of the wires over! Well we took a gamble after all we had a 50-50 chance. If it blew instead of sucked then every outlet in the building would open and blow the accumulated dust of years everywhere, in that case we had decided we would just go to the pub and not come back. Luckily our 50 50 bet paid off so we went to the pub and celebrated.
One Evening the phone in the crew room rang and the Deputy master carpenter answered it. The voice on the other end of the phone told him to get a bucket of water and go and clean his car that was parked at the back of the theatre. The Deputy told him to F off. The voice shouted “Do you know who I am?”The Deputy said “No do you know who I am?” “No” Replied the voice”. “Well F off again” said the Deputy.” And put the phone down!……
Added to this story was the fact that I had only just repaired the phone after I had been talking at length on it to the Group Engineer. I was half way through a long explanation when I got cut off. Julian had just come up behind me and said. “Sorry John just got to cut you off…..He did with a pair of wire cutters, I was left with the handset in one hand the wire in the other.
The stories about Julian are legendary from his desire to wind up the stage Dayman and ending up by Andy picking him up and then trying to see what Julian would look like with both feet facing backwards. To him being hung upside down from a pipe in the ceiling by his feet. In that escapade the company manager asked me on the phone if Julian was free. I managed to utter the famous lines without laughing that he was “A bit tied up but i was sure if the Company manager came down he was bound to see him!” The Company manager who was a little on the camp side came down and could hardly contain his glee when being presented with a Julian upside down and completely at his mercy!
Julian once persuaded every one to hang onto a bar while one of the carpenters was up in the Flys trying to winch it out. The result when he had finished half an hour later resulted in Julian again being tied up and left on a bar for quite some time.
Revenge was quite swift, when Ben, one of the assistants in the Julian Bar tying episode, stood on the hook attached to the pulley system that was used for lowering scenery from the street to the stage and asked to be lowered to the stage. We hauled him up about 20 feet in the air and left him there with all the lights turned out. It was a stupid and dangerous thing to do but great fun all the same. We did let him down, a pint or so later. He was quite quiet then for a while. Half an hour in the dark standing on a hook and holding on the rope above him had changed his attitude somewhat to life.
The stage door keeper Malcolm that I met and my first morning did sadly only have one arm. The other use of he had lost in a motorcycle accident some years previously. We again became good friends for a number of years. He also liked to joke and was very good at his job. One day having been locked in the down stairs toilet and been called over the Tannoy to get back to the stage door immediately (by one of us of course) climbed out of the toilet window into the light well in the hope of being able climb back in through the crew room window and back to the stage door. As soon as he did this we of course then locked that window leaving stuck in the light well outside of the crew room and unable to get back into the toilet. He could not shout for help as the next window up in the light well was the stars dressing room. I guess he did not want to risk his tip at the end of the week!
This backstage Crew toilet saw many amusing episodes including Julian setting off a maroon when the Electrics Dayman was washing his hair. The room had filled with smoke and he came out with a black face, his hair standing on end and unable to hear a thing! The black scar where the maroon had gone off was still evident on the toilet door four years later when I left the Queens!
Revenge is a dish that should be served cold, In the old days fire extinguishers had two chemicals in them, if you opened one and put one chemical in the toilet cistern, and the other in the bowel, when flushed the whole cubical would fill with foam….Julian came out covered from head to foot in stinking yellow foam!
The get out of one show unusually, for once was to have the same Company manager, He had decided to sleep overnight in the stars dressing room above the crew room. At four AM he could stand the noise no longer. The get out had finished an hour ago and we were consuming the last of the drinks given to us as leaving presents. Down he comes, bless him. Pink pyjamas with teddy bears on them, cotton wool in his ears and yells at us that if we don’t go to bed soon we would all be fucked in the morning. We all yelled back “That might be so, but not by you DUCKY!”
While the theatre was dark we were filling skips with rubbish and metal work each afternoon. One afternoon we were asked by a film crew to stop work, we refused, so they paid us £20 to stop for an hour! One hour later we restarted filling the skip only to be paid again. After that we didn’t feel like filling a skip, so the following day we had to get there early and finish loading it before the next arrived, still it was worth it!
Wonderful Town A musical at last. Again I was on the board and again it was Dave Horn.
During the fit up of Wonderful Town my girlfriend and I completed the purchase of a small two bedroomed house at Tring Station in Hertfordshire. We could not move in until after the first night, and I had thought the lighting board to the other two LX. I got an afternoon off so we could collect the keys and we lay on the floor of our new home and looked forward to living there. We would go up every week for an hour or so doing some decorating before moving in after the first night . That evening I sat on Tring Station knowing there was only one train an hour and the journey time was about an hour. This was rather a shock to think about, especially after having lived in Wimbledon with its 35 minute commute and a train every 10 minutes. There was no backup tube service out here! All went well and in all the time I lived out at Tring, I think the hourly service only let me down once and that was the night of the great storm when trees had been blown down all across the south east. There were two reasons why we moved to Tring Station. One was the price. To get a mortgage this was one of the first areas going out of London that we could afford, even though we would pay a heavy penalty in fares. The second was it was close to the Grand Union Canal. Dreams of owning a boat just down the road and travelling the waterways never happened sadly. The train fares were crippling and interest rates nearly caught us out. But soon big overtime, hard work and some luck paid the mortgage off in only a few years. The split shift was a killer though as it meant over four hours travelling a day on top of eight hours work. We were OK ticket price wise unless one of the platform attendants caught us! We would then have to pay a second fare for the evening shift. We had many happy years living there, in the countryside, with sheep and cows, horses went past our bedroom window waking us up in the summer, most odd to be in London only an hour or so later! We were one of the first to go north commuting that far, but not the last. Steve McAndrew and his wife would follow us a few years later. Alastair Grant lived at Leighton Buzzard, as I would in some years to come.
Wonderful Town at the Queens was always thought by me to have won hands down the following awards during its short run.
1 Award for most swear words by a production carpenter.
2 Award for quickest set truck dismantle.
3 Award for most truest statement by a DSM.
1) The downstage trucks were about 15/18 ft high and built on site from steel, wood, chicken wire, plaster and paint. Moved by friction drive motors they were on a rake stage held by skates in a less than 1/2 inch deep aluminium groove that had been routed out of the false ply stage at the cost of the burning out of two domestic routers!
The first time the truck went across the stage, it jumped it’s track and coasted towards the pit, and the production carpenter issued the following immortal statement. ” I am going to get this cock sucking mother fucking son of a bitch of a truck, across this bastard roller coaster of a fucked up stage if it the last thing I ever do!”
2) On the get out which was a fixed price cash get out, it was announced 5 minutes before the start that the producer wanted to keep the set……….
Remembering that the trucks over 18 ft high were made out of….
The MC from next door said” right lads, we are gonna walk these over right, but if I say run… Fucking kin RUN…
So the they got it 5 degrees of centre and Rambo said in a quiet gentlemanly way (which of course he always was)….” run”
Well after the dust had settled from 1/2 a ton of plaster of Paris and iron hitting the stage Rambo was heard to say “Well lads as that went rather well I think we will try that again, and then have a bit of a sweep up!”
3) The DSM was heard to say to the SM “Guess we won’t be keeping the set then”
If you were a member of the LX back in the 80’s you had to have your own key for oil deliveries. You could also tell if someone was on late night business as they would leave a torch on the boiler house steps.
This might be for early deliveries, early work, sleep over after a get out somewhere in the west end, or perhaps a sleepover of a different nature! Having spotted the torch on the steps John figured the chief LX was going to be doing the latter! Have you have any idea how difficult it is to get a green condom over a metal torch without breaking it! The chief LX never did find out who spoiled his evening assignation. Bet her face was a picture when seen by the romantic light of a green condom in an old boiler house!
Once when lighting up I noticed that one of the light fittings in the upper circle exit corridors was filling with water, a couple of days later it was almost full. No one else had emptied it! I lifted it off, emptied the water, and went out onto the roof! The main sloping part of the roof was full of water. You could have swam in it easily! I reported it to the maintenance Dept. They came out, waded out and pulled a coffee cup lid out from the drain. Just a humble coffee cup lid, that held back about 3000 gallons of water. We all learnt something that day. That water shot down the pipe one hundred feet to the intercepter in the front stalls of Gents toilet. At 130 MPH it blew the lid of the drain cover, flowed straight out the toilet door and then down the stalls and into the orchestra pit. That took some clearing up, we had to sweep it under the stage and into the drain before vacuuming up all the carpets in the stalls.
Julian was leaving to go into head office under the Chief engineer, He was to become the technical manager but first we would fit up our last show together. A Jeffery Archer play “Beyond Reasonable Doubt” It was a simple set with good lighting. We had had a fine time together. The opening night Etc. went off without a hitch. Matt had left to take up the position of Deputy Chief and then Chief Electrician at the Vaudeville Theatre on the Strand. David Corbett joined us as the new Dayman. I had put him forward after having met him through the previous ABTT student that we had had that summer. He said that he might not stay more than a few months as he was really interested in Rock concert lighting. He turned out to be one of the finest electricians I should ever have the pleasure of working with. He would become one of the Famous Five of my deputies in the years to come.
When Julian left we were given a new electrician from the Garrick Theatre ,that the group had purchased recently along with the Duchess, Cambridge and Royalty. Bring the total to 12 West End theatres. His name was Steve McAndrew. He again was to become one of my Famous Five Deputy Chief Electricians.
A couple of weeks after we opened we had a flood on stage during the morning and luckily right during the middle of the set change back ready for the evening performance. Someone had unwound one of the fire hydrants completely. David noticed it first. He touched the bung and it just blew off! Hundreds of gallons of water poured across the stage. I ran to help shut it off. I can remember screaming for help and with the help of Andy (4) we managed to shut the water off. The Chief Engineer and Julian were standing at the front of the Stalls at the time. I have never seen so much water in all my life. I ordered the electrical mains switched off while we assessed the situation. We dried out the electrical mains in the workshop below and then repowered up. Only an hour or so had been lost. I bet the sight when standing in the stalls will be remembered. I think I handled the situation well and perhaps the Chief Engineer thought so too.?
And finally, when I should return from my Honeymoon in November 1987, to then be promoted to Chief Electrician. At the age of 27, the crowning glory. It had taken me 11 years from the New Theatre Barnstaple, and 10 years from the beginning at the Victoria Palace.
I remember just before one Christmas the phone rang in my office while the other two LX were there. I answered it to be asked by a guy on the other end if David C was a certified electrician. Quick as a flash without thought, always wanting to show my huge wit I replied “Certified oh definitely he’s completely insane” The guy rang off and it was to turn out that Dave C was very upset he had wanted to work over Christmas in Oxford street putting up the lights. Sadly he had forgotten to mention that he had used me as a reference. And in my defence the guy on the phone had just launched straight into the question with no introduction or explanation for his request. Years later David found out how awful the job was and was grateful he had not got it.
“Beyond Reasonable Doubt” continued for 18 months. It was good that it would give us all time to get used to one another and learn our new jobs.
During this time we rewired all the dressing rooms, or to be more accurate actually wired the dressing rooms with power! apart from the first couple none of them had power at all! The cast had to walk up to wardrobe if they wanted to use a hair dryer. This situation had been going on for years. During one of the shows we had had to run temporary cables up the dressing room block supplied from sockets in the crew room! Drilling out square 4 inch by 4 inch holes through the concrete floors of the dressing room block one afternoon we left upside down traffic cone in the hole for safety. Next morning one of the cleaners complained about rats gnawing through the floor. (I wished they would introduce me to them as I would like to hire them! The joke was completely lost on them. But as they mopped the carpets and used the Hoovers without plugging them in I should have saved my breath) This long job that took us over a year to complete the 14 rooms that we had to do, including installing new fuse boards at the stage door, was a welcome diversion. We worked Tuesday Afternoons for overtime and Thursday Afternoons for an extra evening off. This meant that now we were no longer having to do a split shift at all, just two long days. This was much better, especially now I was living in Tring Hertfordshire. It would not be long before Steve would move to Berkhamsted and also enjoy this style of life. It was a system that I would introduce many years later at the Lyric theatre.
Next was Single Spies. My very first show as Chief Electrician. Myself and the Master Carpenter were sent to the National Theatre to watch the performance and see backstage. The problem having not been married that long and having watched the first act I decided to go home. After all, no one would know. The following day I was asked by the crew what it was all about. I just winged it. Little did I know until later that it was two totally different plays stuck together in two separate acts…. All went so well that we got a letter of commendation from the company manager, excelling our virtues and saying we had restored her faith in west end technicians! So all ended well.
Next up would be Shadowlands with Nigel Horthorn. We were to have a new lighting desk. We were not asked, we were just told. My Beloved Compact would be consigned to the scrap heap. The very first of the proper memory lighting desks were finished. We should have had a Rank Strand Galaxy which would be the very last of the great bespoke lighting desks. All desks following after that would just be Microsoft computers with knobs on. But it was not to be. Our Budget was spent at the Palladium. The palladiums desk would go to the Royalty and we would get an ex demonstration Gemini which was in my opinion a step backwards. Steve liked it! Dave tolerated it and it scared me to death. I never did learn the second act. I would soon catch up with the palladium’s desk at the Royalty Theatre and eventually get “our ” desk when at the Lyric Theatre.
Shadowlands was a good play with the unusual set of having Narnia revealed at the back of the stage when the little boy stepped through the wardrobe. Brian “Basher” Harris was the lighting designer. I would meet him again at the Royalty and at the Lyric. The big problem was that Narnia would only support the weight of the little boy. It could not support the weight of a fully grown adult, let alone a big hairy Techy. And on this fit up that is exactly what we had. His name was Kevin, and he was great. One of the few that I would really like. I would come across him again at the Royalty with the English Shakespeare company. But he was big! He had to borrow Steve’s harness so he could be flown into the focus of the lights over Narnia. Two hours later Kev flies back to earth like Biggles, but unlike Biggles when he lands back on earth or to be more accurate the mirror in the wardrobe he collapses, the tight harness has cut off the blood supply to his legs over the last two hours and it takes ages before he can walk again.
A funny story to this, on the first night, Steve and Dave are away during the daytime on a course to learn how to operate the new lighting board. Funny that this is after Steve has plotted the show. Anyway a lamp has blown in the now infamous Narnia. I of course have no harness or would ever want one. I think about this and solve the problem by having a ladder attached to a bar, then have it flown vertically until it is hanging just above the mirror, then I climb up the ladder and stick a leg through the ladder and with the shout, “up we go” Andy in the Flys hauls the ladder me and a lamp in my teeth up to do the lamp change. “Biggles two” returned to earth much faster than “Biggles One. Lamp Changed. When the others return they are quite disappointed not to be able to show off their harness skills.
Shadowlands ran from the 23rd of October 1989 until the 8th of September 1990. As a crew we get along well, but the world is changing, David and Steve are of a very similar age and theatre temperament. Gone are the good old drinking days of yesteryear. I am almost an outsider. I have done all that I can with the Queens. I hear that ITV will be doing a live TV show from the Royalty Theatre twice a week. My good Friend Colin is now a Master Carpenter there. I would also get more evenings off. Marriage is a great theatre leveller. To be home of an evening with “Normal people ” in the pub is a thing one was thinking of more and more. Theatre is a young man’s game. One will work days without any sleep or seeing home when one does not really have one. I had done nearly all I could with the Building. In the two years as Chief LX the three of us had completely wired the Dressing rooms to have power. There was none in most of them when I went there. We had helped fit and fix the problem with the new Air conditioning. (The sensor was on the incoming and not the outgoing air from the auditorium) We had decorated both boiler houses once they had been converted to gas. We had built upon a fine theatre that I had inherited from Julian.
It was time to move on, I had been there over seven years, enough was enough. It was time to leave the safe harbour for something new. I asked Julian and the now Technical Director. They were not keen, they said that something big might becoming my way in the future. Matt, who had been our Dayman had moved from the Vaudeville, to the Adelphi, and then to the Royalty, had just gone to the Palladium, leaving a slot at the Royalty. I could not see the problem. Looking back there was just about to be a big show coming into the Queens, and little did I also know but soon a job as Chief LX at The Theatre Royal Drury Lane. I, as usual, was adamant. If Matt could have the Palladium, why could I not have the Royalty? I got my wish, I don’t regret it, even if a choice had been directly placed in front of me I think I would still have chosen the Royalty. It sealed my fate perhaps on the “Big Theatre Chief LX ladder”. I think I would still have chosen the Royalty. I had now been in theatre for thirteen years. I wanted a change, a new theatre and home more in the evenings. I got what I wanted.
And so on the following Monday morning I walked away from the Queens Theatre for good. It was dark at the time and I don’t think I was missed. To tell the truth I don’t remember telling anyone I was going. The works van picked up my tools that afternoon, and delivered them to me, at the Royalty. My Queens days were done. Dayman to Chief LX. Single to married, Wimbledon to Tring, and from a bedsitter, to a house almost paid for.