Category: cartoon

On Stage at Horbury School . . .

cartoon

Great celebrities who trod the boards at Horbury School:

  • David Munrow, early music historian
  • R. D. Woodall, local historian and head teacher
  • Jane McDonald, singer, who appeared as Snow White in a Pageant Players’ pantomime (she’s now starring in pantomimes at the London Palladium, so we taught her well!)
  • Sir Christopher Chataway, runner (one of the pacemakers for Roger Bannister when he ran the first 4-minute mile), who officially opened the school in 1963 when he served as Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Education in Harold Macmillan’s government
  • Allan Schiller, classical concert pianist

. . . and not forgetting:

  • My brother Bill who played a pirate on the Hispaniola in the Pageant Player’s performance of the Mermaid Theatre version of ‘Treasure Island’ (we used their scripts and Bill told me that one of them was dotted with odd doodles: we suspect it was the script Spike Milligan used when he played Ben Gunn)
  • My sister Linda, who played Lucy Lockit in the Ossett Grammar School production of ‘The Beggar’s Opera’ (a new assembly hall was under construction at Ossett so they used Horbury’s stage for several years)
  • And me. I never performed on stage but I painted scenery for the Pageants for 40 years and, as a young member of the Horbury Concert Society, I illustrated and designed posters, leaflets and programme covers, including those for David Munrow and Allan Schiller

Happy birthday to Zac, who may get tread the boards at Horbury Academy in the next few years.

Link

Jane MacDonald, singer and BAFTA award winning TV presenter

Allan Schiller, classical concert pianist

Horbury Pageant Players

Horbury Academy

Cultural DNA

Cartoon

Happy birthday to James. We’ve both done the Ancestry.com DNA test recently and, would you believe it, I’ve discovered that I have a close male relative in East Lothian.

cartoon

Wakefield on Screen

wakefield movies

The only one of these television dramas and movies that I spotted filming on location in Wakefield was Alan Plater’s ‘The Biederbecke Affair’ (1985) in a sequence where James Bolan and Barbara Flyn’s characters were driving their battered yellow Bedford van round and round County Hall.

Happy birthday last week to Sue.

Star Trek Tykes

Which one of these Star Trek characters was played by a Huddersfield Town supporter?

Clue: One of them was a Spurs fan 😮

Clue 2: The actor in question recently wrote an autobiography Making it So, which opens with a vividly written evocation of life, amateur dramatics and local journalism in Mirfield and Dewsbury in the late 1940s and 1950s.

Happy birthday John and hope that Huddersfield continue to boldly go where no team has gone before.

All Sorts of Walks

Liquorice lovers historical and legendary get walk-on partsintroducing my booklet ‘All Sorts of Walks in Liquorice Country’ (2010).

Drawn in Procreate Dreams on the iPad. Music: the folk song ‘Shepherd’s Hey’, transcribed using GarageBand.