Personal Memories of Hitchin Town Hall
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PERSONAL MEMORIES OF HITCHIN TOWN HALL Extracts from speech by Richard Whitmore at “The End of the Beginning,” a celebration held at Hitchin Town Hall on Saturday October 20th 2012 to mark the building’s closure prior to a two year redevelopment programme by the new-formed company of Hitchin Town Hall Ltd. The original building and its adjoining gymnasium are to be redesigned to include improved community facilities and a district museum which will replace those at Hitchin and Letchworth that have recently been closed by North Herts District Council. The exciting project that we are launching tonight is not the first occasion that private enterprise has been used to provide Hitchin with a public assembly hall. The first was in 1840, when a private company was formed to build the town’s original library and assembly rooms – now occupied by the Ivory night club – just across the street from here. When Urban District Councils were created at the end of the 19th century Hitchin’s first local authority actually rented that property for meetings. But despite its pleasing classical appearance the building proved too small for public gatherings and the local magistrates refused to grant a licence for public entertainment, mainly because of bad ventilation and inadequate exits. That was when Hitchin’s first council decided to provide a purpose-built assembly hall – the New Town Hall – as it became known, and whose history we are celebrating this evening. It will probably come as no surprise to learn that not all our ratepayers were pleased when they heard that the Council was proposing to spend £7,300 – no less – on the project. Francis Newton Esq, a candidate for the Town Council election of 1899 complained: “Why have a Town Hall thrust upon us?” while the pros and cons of the proposal were debated over many weeks in the letters column of the Hertfordshire Express. But thrust upon us it was – to the relief of most of the community. Although the opening ceremony, in March 1901, seems to have been a chaotic affair, coinciding as it did with a Meet of the local Hunt in the Market Place. According to the Express, once the hounds had left the noisy crowd transferred its attention to the Town Hall opening ceremony “causing a good deal of commotion while the hall was filling and during the speeches.” As a result the ceremonial speech of poor Mrs Hudson, wife of the Hitchin MP couldn’t be heard. “Which meant,” thundered the Express “That it was quite impossible to form any opinion as to the acoustic properties of the building.” 2 The New Town Hall came at just the right time for Hitchin Thespians Operatic Society, who were founded in 1902 and used the building for many of their main productions throughout much of the century. There was one problem in the early years however. Both the hall and the stage were lit by gas jets and when the footlights and battens were burning together, temperatures soared to unbearable levels. One evening following complaints from the performers, council officials placed a thermometer on the wall to monitor the temperature throughout the show. The mercury expanded with such force that it burst the glass. To hasten the conversion to electricity the Thespians offered to foot part of the bill. At their first all-electric production (The Pirates of Penzance in 1906) they invited councillors and staff to experience the improvements at first hand; the Chairman, Councillor Lawson Thompson, enjoying the show in the comfort of his throne-like official chair that had been brought over specially from the council chamber across the street. Forty years later the Bancroft Players Dramatic Society were going to similar lengths to ensure the comfort of their President Lady Hermione Cobbold and her husband. Whenever they came over from Knebworth House to see a show, two matching arm chairs were borrowed from Mr Crone’s furniture shop further down Brand Street and placed in the middle of the front row. Between 1945 and 1983, when the Bancroft Players opened The Queen Mother Theatre, they staged 110 major productions in the Town Hall. Wendy and I first met in the mid-1950s. By that time I was appearing regularly in Bancroft Players shows and I’m afraid I still blame her for causing me to commit my one and only faux pas of missing a stage entrance. Three months before our wedding I was in R.C. Sheriff’s drama Home at Seven, somewhat miscast as a middle-aged police inspector. At the climax to the first half, the inspector makes a dramatic entrance to arrest the hero. One evening he failed to appear. In a dressing room beneath the Town Hall stage, he and his fiancée had their minds on other things. Suddenly we were interrupted by the sound of the audience applauding as the interval curtain came down. 3 I shot upstairs to find out how on earth they had managed to end the first half without me. It turned out that another member of the cast (Peter Cherry, playing the family doctor) had spotted my absence and gone on in my place. In a brilliant piece of ad-libbing he had announced gravely, ‘David. Inspector Hemingway is outside and wants you to go down to the police station. I think he’s planning to arrest you so I’d better come along too, old boy.’ As the two men left the stage and the curtain fell no-one in the audience suspected a thing. And I’ve not missed an entrance since! In the story of theatre in this hall one cannot omit the amazing John Gardiner, who came to Hitchin Grammar School in the 1960s to teach rugby but went on to reveal a passion for and understanding of theatre that was second to none. His shows here, staged first in conjunction with the Local Yokels’ Hitchin Carnival and then with the Bancroft Players, raised standards to a whole new plane. For his first Carnival show in 1966 John put together a fast-moving revue called Watch This Spice. It was packed with satirical sketches and camp humour reminiscent of a Cambridge Footlights revue. For Hitchin audiences, still in the era of variety shows and old-time music halls, the production had a whiff of sophistication and anarchy that seemed quite daring at the time. An added attraction was that – instead of sitting in rows – the audience were at tables and able to enjoy drinks supplied by a team of attractive waitresses. Table Shows had arrived and audiences loved them; but when they flocked back for more the following summer, John’s choice of show meant they were in for a shock. At first, Oh What a Lovely War! duped many theatregoers into thinking they were in for a rollicking evening of nostalgic war–time songs and comedy sketches. They hadn’t realised Joan Littlewood’s play is a searing condemnation of the horrors and waste of the First World War. Despite John’s own performance as the Drill Sergeant (surely the funniest ten minutes ever witnessed on this stage) many were upset by the powerful anti-war theme. And when the British Tommies began singing their crude protest songs to the tunes of much-loved hymns some of the audience walked out. Those that remained rose at the end to deliver what was, I think, our first experience of a standing ovation. 4 On the subject of War, this building was probably never busier than during the real war years. Hitchin Entertainments Society was formed to provide morale- boosting shows, not only for the residents but for many servicemen stationed in the area. During the daytime it became a place for war work – Civil Defence and Air Raid Precaution instruction for civilians and then, during what Churchill called “our darkest hour” a reception centre for the evacuees that Hitchin took under its wing when they fled the terrible Luftwaffe bombing raids on London and the south coast. I am pleased to be able to introduce you now to one of those evacuees of 70 years ago. Richard then introduced Mr Ted May, who came to Hitchin with his mother and sister when he was six-years-old after their family lost their home in Stepney during the blitz. Ted recalled how the Town Hall became their home for several days while the authorities looked for a family that was prepared to take them in. Visibly moved by his return to the Town Hall after so many years, Ted pointed to a small area near some double doors and said “The whole place was packed with evacuees and for several days that little spot just there was our space, our home. My mother had a camp bed and my sister and I slept on a mattress on the floor.” The family were first given a single room at the home of the Kitchener family at High Dane in Walsworth. Later, they were found more spacious accommodation at a house in Cadwell Lane which they were eventually able to take over as a family when Ted’s father returned from the war. Ted, who was educated at Wilshere Dacre and Old Hale Way schools, now lives with his wife Marjorie in Stevenage. Richard also recalled other Town Hall events that he attended in his role as a reporter on the Hertfordshire Express in the 1950s. “I saw political careers made and lost at local and general elections; I reported on the colourful flower shows of Hitchin and District Chrysanthemum Society and collected results of winners at the annual shows of the cage bird society and rabbit breeders,” he said.