Two or Three Nights a Week

Extract from an article in the Summer 1951 issue of “The Countryman” on an Essex village:

“Miss A runs the village boy’s club. It is about 50 strong at the moment, though that figure is perhaps misleading. Its real membership runs into many hundreds, and it is on this shadow strength that the lady’s reputation rests. The club is held on two or three nights a week in the village hall, the usual pitch-pine-and-varnish building which elsewhere seems to produce an atmosphere of genteel apathy. We went to see it. During the day it was deserted, but hardly empty; for round the walls, with scarcely a break, hung the framed photographs which recorded the club’s annual beanfeasts. Instead of showing the year’s crop of thirteen and fourteen year olds, each picture was crammed full with young men and women, and older ones as well, ranged at the supper tables, row on row, until beyond the reach of the flashlight glare the faces faded into the background. The photographs went back year by year through both world wars and the period between them; and in place of honour there was a framed chart of the family trees of those club members whose sons, and today grandsons, had followed in their footsteps.”

A photo of Messing Village Hall, Essex, for illustrative purposes only. The article didn't specify which village it was about. I chose this one because I like the name.

Running an amateur theatre company at a village hall? Find out how Lilian Baylis raised money for the Old Vic by clicking here

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Woods Ware China at the Serving Hatch - The Book!

I have now put together a book to accompany this blog, featuring all the best bits and much more besides, about the development and use of village halls over the past century. It costs £1.29 for a Kindle download and £3.99 for a printed version. Here's the blurb: "Enter any village hall and look at the noticeboard. The range of activities taking place these days is enough to keep anyone entertained. Cinema evenings, keep fit classes, scouts, Women’s Institute, St John’s Ambulance, lunch clubs, support groups - all keeping the physical and spiritual on the straight and narrow. Where would we be without the village hall? What a marvellous innovation, and one that seems to grow in importance as we realise that we have lost sight of community somewhat, and need to nurse it back to life. You might, if you were in a particularly philosophical mood while hanging around the vestibule, wonder where and how it all began." English village halls have been a fixture of our lands...

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Village halls played a part in the early careers of many actors – some of them becoming world renowned. Who knows just how many household names first got a taste for the luvvie life at the local amateur dramatic society. Dirk Bogarde was certainly one of them, because he wrote about his experiences at Newick Village Hall, near Lewes. Dirk’s mother made the acquaintance of a Mrs Cox, whose husband was said to own the village hall. Dirk became good friends with the Coxs’ daughter and the family took to him, allowing him to indulge his teenage ambition of becoming a playwright. He wrote, and starred in “The Man on the Bench”, supported by Nerine Cox. It was performed around the time that Nazi Germany had marched into Austria – but a sparse audience with a lot on their minds nevertheless received it well. Mr Cox offered Dirk his first leading role shortly afterwards with the Newick Amateur Drama Society – Raleigh in R.C. Sherriff’s “Journey’s End”. “It was a tremendous ...

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Woods Ware China at the Serving Hatch

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