Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  * * *

  I must now go back to 1969 to tell of another experiment of mine. I had come to know the Church of Scotland Minister of Easterhouse, Peter Youngson. He was tall, red-headed and athletic. He had studied singing with Gottlob Frick while in the British army in Germany and had intended to enter opera as a career, being much encouraged by his teacher. But on leaving the army, he had decided that he had a call from God and he entered the Church of Scotland. He had the worst parish in the country, because Easterhouse, a dormitory suburb where many of the old Gorbals tenement-dwellers had been rehoused, then had the highest rate of violent crime in Britain. On the surface it contained neat little bungalows, each with its garden and television aerial, but there was absolutely nothing for children or teenagers to do – no playgrounds or sports fields, no entertainment at all except for watching television with parents at home. There were only one or two shops and a public house called The Ali Baba, which had a sign outside: “NO GENTLEMEN ADMITTED WITHOUT A LADY”, which said it all: males alone or in groups meant trouble. Easterhouse was notorious all over Glasgow – indeed all over Scotland – for its gang violence. Having nothing else to do, the teenagers had gradually formed into street gangs that would fight each other, their weapons becoming ever more deadly. By the time Peter Youngson arrived to take over his church, there had already been several killings, mostly with knives. The younger children formed their own gangs in imitation of their elders, so while the parents stayed home in the evenings and looked at television, all around them was a culture of violence that affected all ages down to six or seven. And the girls, many of them, got involved in the street and gang loyalties as well as the boys.

  Peter Youngson tried to do something about all that. He had dances in his church on Friday and Saturday nights, brought in bands to play dance music, started classes and organized games. This initiative was not popular with many of his elders, who thought the church should be for religion and nothing else. He put on dramatic spectacles, often with music, so that he could use his fine bass voice. One Easter, he put on a passion play. In his congregation he found a genuine masochist, who was suspended by ropes from a cross in delicious agony for half an hour during the performance. I am not sure how we met, but I used Peter to understudy my principal bass singers, and on Members’ Nights gave him his own spot, when he loved to sing Mephistopheles’s arias from Gounod or Boito or Berlioz. On one occasion, I recommended him to speak on social deprivation and how it affected places like Easterhouse at the Scottish Liberal Conference, and he went down very well.

  I conceived the idea of doing Romeo and Juliet – a play about gang warfare as much as a love story – in Easterhouse. I knew that through his various activities Peter Youngson had brought many young people in their late teens out of the gang-war situation, and he was always looking for new ways to keep them busy and interested, and so much the better if such ways could also be educational. We finally agreed to mount the play with professional actors. I could easily get them from the Glasgow Citizens Theatre, which is less active in the summer, and use about twenty of his young followers; their role would be to act out the crowd scenes, to dance, to fight and to be the people of Verona. We would play for a week at Ledlanet, and a week in Easterhouse in his church, which could seat eight hundred.

  I approached the Arts Council for some extra funds, and was turned down flat. They were entirely opposed to the idea. There was a fairly new director called Sandy Dunbar in the job at this time, who had previously been with Northern Arts in Newcastle upon Tyne. He had his own circle of cronies, many of whom had followed him north, and he liked to support the arts in terms of what was most acceptable to the establishment and best for his own prestige. Mavericks and experimenters like myself did not appeal to him. I had no encouragement in Glasgow, either. The councillors were much in the mould of Teddy Taylor, who was or would be the quintessential working-class Tory MP (many Labour MPs were not dissimilar), always in favour of hanging, flogging, tougher prisons and the most restrictive family values. I was not even allowed to put up a poster at the Mitchell Library for a Shakespeare play, because it did not have official civic blessings. But Peter and I went ahead anyway.

  There were weeks of rehearsals, first in the church, later at Ledlanet. The actors had a little trouble accepting the Easterhousers at first, but they very soon began to get on well, and the amateurs were very anxious to learn as much as possible from the professionals, whom they found glamorous. They learnt to dance Renaissance dances and how to fence and fight with swords without hurting each other: they learnt how to swagger, how to gesture, how to express a whole range of emotions. The company began to bond together, and by the time we moved to Ledlanet for the last week of rehearsals on the stage, all Peter’s teenagers knew the play by heart and were hoping that illness or an accident would give them opportunities to move into a speaking part. It was a good company, with Maev Alexander as Juliet and Denis Lawson as Romeo, and directed by Euan Smith. Edith Ruddick played the Nurse.

  It was very hard work for me. We had a minibus at Ledlanet now, and every evening either I or Eddie Strachan would have to drive it to a pickup point to collect all the extras, many of whom had daytime jobs in Glasgow, and drive them to Ledlanet and back after rehearsals. Once we were performing, they had to be driven back late at night. But Romeo and Juliet was a great success with our audiences, and the Glasgow teenagers were very impressed by the atmosphere of Ledlanet, to them a grand house, but functioning like a factory.

  Then we had the week in Easterhouse. We brought what scenery we needed to the church, and I would spend the whole day putting leaflets through doorways, getting the ice-cream van to take them round, stopping people in the street and doing a little flyposting. Just before the first night, when the crowd was arriving, I suddenly realized that I had no recollection of anything that had happened since four in the afternoon. I had spoken to people and all the things I had to do, but my mind for those three hours was blank. When I spoke to my doctor, he said it was a “fugue” brought on no doubt by stress, but there was no explanation.

  The play worked in Easterhouse, and I think a large part of the town must have gone to it, because there were few empty spaces on the pews. But Peter Youngson was having his own problems just then. He had played a major part in organizing the early stages of the production, but after the first week had done less and less. After the first two nights in his church, he disappeared, and I was told that he had gone skin-diving up north. Everyone had been told to co-operate with me and to let me use the church hall as well as the church, including for a final party. The reason, as I later discovered, was that he had fallen in love with one of his parishioners, a married woman, and did not know what to do after she had confessed a similar desire for him. After his return when the play was over, he apparently had a breakdown and was sent to a special home for Church of Scotland ministers with mental health problems, and after that to a very conventional church in a very middle-class town in Fife.

  The play ran from Monday to Saturday, and I gave a last-night party in the church hall for the cast and everyone who had worked on the production. I told all the youngsters that they could bring one person, boyfriend or girlfriend. But they were apprehensive and told me that there was a rumour that the worst of the local gangs intended to break into the party. I locked the door that led to the outside, and when everyone was in, locked the door to the church as well. There was wine, beer and soft drinks with bits of food and sandwiches. The party had not been going for long when there came a loud banging on the outer door. “What do you want?” I called out. The room had gone deathly quiet. “We’re comin’ in,” said a voice outside.

  “No, you’re not,” I replied. “This is a private party.”

  “There’s drink in there and we’re comin’ in. Open the door or we’ll break it down.”

  “That’s Rick,” said one of the youngsters. I knew all about Rick. He had knifed two people and killed one
, but the police had never been able to pin anything on him, because everyone was too frightened to give testimony against him. “Stand right behind me and watch everything carefully,” I said to the crowd behind me. “I’ll try to talk him out of it.” I was as nervous as a cat, but felt that if I could not out-face a nineteen-year-old, I was not worth much. There was a spotlight in the hall, which I switched on and aimed at the door. Then I threw it open.

  I was facing a young thug, and he had a crowd of a dozen or so others behind him. “You’re Rick, aren’t you?” I said.

  He didn’t like that. “What if I am?”

  “Well, I’d like to be friends. I’ve heard a lot about you.” I took a step outside, and his hand flew to his pocket. I raised my hand. “Let me explain. All these people have been working hard for weeks. It’s only a small party to say thank you. Did you see the play?”

  “Aye.”

  “Did you like it?”

  “It’s aright.”

  “Good. We wanted you to like it. We’ll do another next year. Would you like to be part of it?”

  “I dunno. But we’re comin’ in.” He took a knife out of his pocket and put the point against my stomach. “So get oot o’ the way.”

  The crowd standing behind me could see all this quite clearly. I raised my voice. “Now Rick, don’t do anything foolish. There are too many witnesses. And I want to be friends. Let’s take a step outside.” He stepped back, but kept the knife pointed at me. I moved a little forward. “Now look, Rick. Let’s meet tomorrow and talk about things then. And about what we can do together next year.” I lowered my voice. “I don’t want to make things difficult for you, so put that knife away and shake hands. Show everyone that we’re friendly.” He slowly closed up the flick-knife and put it away. I put my arm around his shoulder; we were the same height. “OK, Rick, so that’s settled. We’ll meet tomorrow right here. And thank you for understanding me. We’ll be good friends.” Stepping back, I waved at his gang and closed the door. I have seldom been so frightened as when that knife point touched me, and it took me a few minutes before I could breathe properly again.

  I did go there the next morning: I had to in any case to clear up, remove lighting equipment and props and do other end-of-play chores. Rick never came.

  That is not quite the end of the story. Several of the actors, one in particular, tried to organize an ongoing drama group with the youngsters they had come to know so well and with others who joined in, and later on Frankie Vaughan, inspired by our example, did the same for a while, and received much press coverage for it. We had very little press ourselves. But it proved what can be done. What the world lacks are enough people with the time, energy and backing to do social work by introducing deprived youngsters to the arts and by involving them in it. Properly done it will work every time and give those for whom unimaginative authority has no use, interesting lives. Even the Ricks of this world can be changed into good citizens.

  * * *

  As Ledlanet continued through the early Seventies, I tried to give my audience not only as much variety as possible, but a chance to hear as many of the greatest works of the concert repertoire as I could. We did Bach’s Art of Fugue and Musical Offering, Mozart’s Requiem in a programme that included his Masonic Funeral Music and a Bach cantata, many of the great chamber works of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms and so on, down to the moderns – who, if not so well-liked, were tolerated better than elsewhere, because they were sandwiched in with better-known classics. Our atmosphere, moreover, with its long interval copied from Glyndebourne, made each evening so memorable that complaints were very rare. I could not understand why, when one booking brochure full of attractive events went out, it was the Mozart Requiem that sold out first, until the arriving public, more men than women that night, all began to give me the masonic handshake. It was the Masonic Funeral Music that was the draw. Dido and Aeneas, in spite of Lorna Brindley’s vocal problems – she was adequate and no more – went well enough, and was coupled with La serva padrona, sung of course in English, with Sheila McGrow at her most delightful as the soubrette.

  Many theatrical troupes did their performances for two or three nights, and Edward Beckett, Sam’s musician nephew, came with the Irish Chamber Orchestra in a programme that went from the light to the operatic with Veronica Dunne, Ireland’s most prominent opera singer, whom I had known for some years, and others. We paired a very clever production by George Mully of William Walton’s Façade with the Thorpe-Davie version of Burns’s Jolly Beggars and gave the Beethoven arrangements of Scottish Songs that George Thomson, that great figure of Edinburgh’s golden age, had commissioned from him. I had much resistance over this, both from Julian Dawson, who played the piano in the trio that accompanies the songs, and from the singers, who said the music did not fit the words. But I had bought the recording with Fischer-Dieskau and others that Deutsche Grammophon had issued in the bicentennial year, and I knew that properly done they were irresistible. Pat Hay and John Graham, who had been a couple for some years now, sang them with John Robertson, and the latter asked if he could extend the programme with Beethoven’s song cycle An die ferne Geliebte, which he sang very beautifully. The concert was a triumph, the applause bringing the singers and musicians back over and over. As he passed me going up the stairs to the back corridor for the last time, John Graham said to me, “You were right again, you bastard.”

  Gluck’s Alceste was our main offering in the autumn season in 1972, and the main role was sung by Anne Connolly, an Irish singer who indulged a little too much on the Members’ Night the day before the opening, and was a bit off-form at the first performance, but fine after that. Richard Angas, then at the start of his long career, looked just right as Hercules with his great height and enormous frame. In 1973 our summer season ran for three months, during which The Twa Brigs, the setting of Sydney Goodsir Smith’s poems which we had commissioned from William Wordsworth, was performed by Sheila McGrow (the New Bridge) and Paschal Allen (“Auld Stumpie”, the Old Bridge) at the beginning of a triple bill. The two were later to marry. It was followed by Lindsay Kemp’s production of Pierrot Lunaire (the third time we had done it), which he mimed and Josephine Nendick sang. The evening ended with John Dankworth’s setting of T.S. Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes, which I had seen and liked in London when it was given a single performance some years earlier at a memorial evening for the poet after his death. We cast it with local singers, John Graham singing Sweeney and Linda Brown and Phyllis Cannan doing wonderful cockney accents as the two good-time girls, amidst an all-round good cast. Jim Colclough sang Wauchope, produced it with great imagination, and designed an effective and sinister set, and Julian Dawson conducted the whole evening. Brian Mahoney produced The Twa Brigs and had intended to do the speaking part of Father Time in Sweeney Agonistes from behind a curtain. He had a sudden heart attack and was unable to perform, so I went up the hillside to be alone and memorized it. When the audience heard my voice, there was loud laughter from all over the hall.

  Johnny Dankworth came up to Glasgow during the late rehearsals for a day. We rented a rehearsal space, ran through the score with the orchestra in the morning and gave him a dress rehearsal in the afternoon. He was immensely impressed, made one or two corrections to the score and returned happily to London.

  I had had the idea for some time of performing on alternate nights Hamlet and Tom Stoppard’s clever play based on it, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Now we ran through the whole of July and early August in a production of the two, where the repertory company at Edinburgh’s Lyceum gave us great assistance. Stephanie Beacham played the Queen, John McEnery Hamlet. The beauty of doing the plays in alternance is that the big roles in one are the small ones in the other. We had trouble filling enough seats for so many performances, especially early in the week, but the season was undoubtedly successful. On one night, Richard Demarco, who was running some kind of summer school, brought a bus
load of American girls, many of whom refused to leave in his bus. “We’re staying with the actors,” they said.

  The autumn season followed hard on the summer one, only the Edinburgh Festival intervening. That year our big production was Mozart’s Idomeneo, which Ande Anderson returned to produce. We had a splendid black singer in Sandra Browne, in the role of Idamante. Her Afro haircut may have looked a little out of place, but the audience loved her. Although hers was not the most important role, Ande instructed that she take her curtain call last, because that was the way the public would want it. John Kingsley-Smith was our Idomeneo; Gwenneth Annear, Laureen Livingstone, Dennis O’Neill and John Graham completed the cast, which was conducted by Jonathan Hinden in Jim Colclough’s production decor. Dennis O’Neill in a short time would be one of the most important tenors in Britain. Sandy Dunbar of the Arts Council was contemptuous of our mounting such an opera, not having digested that we had years of experience behind us of similar productions of major works by Handel, Mozart, Gluck and other composers.

  By now we were working hard on getting a new building, and had architects’ plans for a theatre able to seat about six hundred to be built behind the house. It would be entered through Ledlanet’s first-floor level, and would have an adequate orchestra pit and all amenities. The house would still provide the dressing rooms and the catering. Jim Fraser was prepared to put in money, and I knew he could raise more from his friends. We had made an approach to the Gulbenkian Foundation for a sum equal to forty per cent of the cost and expected the Arts Council to come in with the same. The balance we would have to raise from our supporters. During that autumn of 1973, our plans were advanced, and we were talking about a new building within a year and a half.

  The previous Christmas I had had another idea, but it was turned down by the Arts Council, which felt it had done enough for us with the summer drama season. I was convinced, however, that it could pay its way without subsidy. This was to mount a Christmas production of Hansel and Gretel with piano. The six principals would all stay in the house: they would be paid only a modest fee, but everything would be found, all meals included. Jim Colclough would build the set, produce the show and sing the Witch. We would rehearse in the house for two weeks and open on Boxing Day, running into the New Year. That rehearsal period was more like a house party than anything else. Jill Johnson turned out wonderful meals. Both my daughters were there, and the younger, Anastasia (Stas for short), sat through all the rehearsals, a dog on each side of her, and knew the opera by heart. Sheila McGrow was a delightful Gretel. Linda Brown played her brother; Paschal Allen and Isobel Mann were the parents, while the Sandman and Dew Fairy were sung by Rhona Cowen. Gordon Mabbott, our chorus master, was musical director and conducted from the piano. We decided to give each of the children who came a gingerbread man on the way out, and during the performance week we were busy making gingerbread men in the morning, some of them in rather bizarre and suggestive shapes that the public never saw.