Mr Haywood 

Well it goes back a long way now, 1940 I was evacuated to Malvern and just after Dunkirk in fact, travel was absolutely awful.  And we arrived in Malvern and there was a puppet theatre there that I went to purely by chance, I knew nothing about puppets at all I was 12 years old, and I went to this puppet theatre and I so thoroughly got bitten by the bug I so thoroughly enjoyed it that I started making some – I started from a little kit that you could, that they sold at the theatre, a little Dutch doll with all the bits to make it into a puppet. And I started making them when I had any problems I went back to these puppeteers.  I didn’t realise at the time how good they were but of course realised later that they were the leading puppet company for thirty years at least, the Lanchester Marionettes, and they were so helpful whenever I went back with problems. They were so patient with a very enthusiastic little boy who must have been an absolute menace to them I think.  And I spent every week I went I spent my pocket money there and for 16 weeks I saw their show every Wednesday afternoon.  They had been grounded rather because they tended to tour most of the time, but they had this little theatre in Malvern, they used to do a seasonal tour year in, but their van had been commandeered for war work & so they were performing in their theatre as a regular thing and so I was rather lucky at the time that they were there for that summer that I was there. And from that I started making them, the first show I did in Malvern in 1940, May of 1940 in aid of cigarettes for the local services canteen.  And after that puppets have featured every time in my life, I’ve never been a professional puppeteer until we started the museum and I retired from my previous jobs.  But in my jobs in education, teaching and particularly in administration I’ve involved puppetry. And now its, this is wonderful the way that they’ve recreated the museum we had here is nostalgic every time I come here. It’s so like we had it in Abbots Bromley. 

The back cloth is the centre of the village and the seat that these two are sitting on is the, was scale model of the seat that was in the village, on the village green at that time. Its been replaced now by a hideous metal thing.  

Most of the figures here are mostly from when we had the theatre in Abbots Bromley about 20 years ago and we performed for 10 years on a one night a week basis.  For audiences from all over the place, most of them were from groups there were 50 seats in the theatre which is a convenient bus load and so on the whole groups booked the whole theatre and it was up to them to fill it and we usually found the extra seat for the bus driver and so on as well.  So it rather depended on the, it rather influenced the sort of shows we did because if you do plays you’ve got to aim them at a particular sort of audience whereas, and a particular age group, whereas we performed to a very wide age group and a very wide range of different audiences and so variety which is the sort of thing we did, short acts all to music no dialogue at all which meant that we could welcome many overseas groups as well as from this county. And in fact over the years we had visitors from 22 different countries. 
But on the whole it has great advantages too for the sort of shows that we did because if you do plays you’ve got to aim it at that particular audience, you’ve got to do the same thing every night and if you want to change it you’ve got to change the whole thing whereas with variety you can take an act out and put a new act in which is what we did on the whole.  We weren’t very good at rehearsing but we rehearsed just enough to get it into the show and then after that it was polished in performance, which is much the best way of doing it.  Not like television, I should hate to be in television where you just rehearse until you’ve got it to something like you want it and then it’s filmed and you can’t do anything else about it.  Whereas we could change things depending on the reaction of audiences we could add things in, timing could be different and so on and it meant that we could also change the programme for particular audiences as we wanted to.

The figures behind me are all from our shows, mostly during the time we were in Abbots Bromley. One or two of them the little scout for instance was very much older than that. He was actually made to greet the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth when they visited a school I was teaching at in 1948, and he’s the highlight of the display at the moment.  He’s got special carved hands so that he could salute the Queen.  The other ones mostly from variety a lot of them from the circus acts that we used to do.  Circus provides a lot of variety for shows of that sort.  You can do almost anything, which is jolly clever for human beings but not nearly so difficult for puppets.  And vice-a-versa of course in some cases.  But the figure of Mowgli that’s in there too he’s got a bit of a story to him because he was made for the 50th anniversary of Disney making films about, oh15-20 years ago now I suppose, and we were asked to do some shows in Birmingham and they wanted shows based on a Disney film.  And so we did ‘The Further Adventures of Mowgli’.  And Mowgli was of course a direct copy of the Disney character.  Which doesn’t always work because so many of the interests of the Disney characters and the way that they’re bodies change and move and are distorted, which of course you can’t do with puppets but Mowgli being a more human actor, character was fairly successful. And we kept him in the show afterwards in a slightly different act.  There’s an Indian gentleman on his left that used to come in on a magic carpet, he flew in on a magic carpet he had his snake in a basket and he played his flute.  The snake didn’t like that very much it just shook its head and went back again into its box and then Mowgli came along with his transistor radio, which he’s still got there, and played pop music and the snake thought that was very much better and went off with Mowgli instead of his Indian owner.

Most puppets, most Marionettes, particularly the sort of thing that we do with variety shows have to be designed and made to do something special.  Very few of them are standard figures.  If you are doing plays of course you could use standard figures and they would mostly be much the same construction, but with us the things like the skater hasn’t got any knee joints for instance so that her legs stay straight so she can skate properly.  And various other things about the construction and particularly the stringing of the marionettes are all special to the particular figure and the particular character.  There is a certain sort of amount of standard control of marionettes every puppeteer has their own speciality.  But if you’ve got one to do something special for instance the pianist needs extra strings on his forearms to get his hand movements.  At one time he used to have extra strings on his forehead as well so that he could lift his head up and hang his nose in the air when he could play a bit that he particularly knew well. But that wasn’t terribly successful so he’s dispensed with those now.  The things like the skeleton of course are in many cases traditional to some extent.  The skeleton act has been done in various forms oh since the, certainly the early 1800s.  Though the modern controls, the sort of control that I use, is a much more modern.  Previously it needed at least 3 people to operate the skeleton, now it can be operated single-handedly.  But many of the old time puppets were operated simply with all the strings attached to two sticks, and a very long, a great deal of practice and dexterity in operating.  Most of the operators in the hey day of British Marionettes, which was sort of in the second half of the 1800s, when even the foreign puppeteers were calling themselves Smith and Jones and so on so that they, to pretend that they were British in the same way that many circus performers call themselves by Italian names now because they think it sounds better in the profession.  But in the mid 1800s there were large companies of marionettes travelling around the country.  And the operators of them they called themselves the puppet players and they used to go round and mix from company to company and they’d be employed, not like those today where the figures are made by the puppeteer, the puppet master.  The, nowadays there are very few of the big companies operating, most of them tend to be small one, two man or a man and his wife type of production.  In the eastern European countries after the war there was a great surge of interest in puppetry and big State companies were formed which employed hundreds of people. The Moscow State Theatre was a quite fantastic, I think it had 200 employers at least, employees.  And it influenced many East European countries.  Most of the communist countries were influenced by the Moscow State Theatre and copied their rod puppets as a rule and their method of organisation of having big companies that were State sponsored and State funded.  With the collapse of communism of course that went right by the board and they found that in many cases because they used to be part of the big company they were very much specialists. There were people whose job was purely to carve faces, or to dress puppets, or to do technical jobs in the theatre, and on their own they had no idea of how to produce a complete puppet show in the way that most of the puppets in this country do develop.  Most of them from husband and wife teams that, or three or four perhaps as a maximum, group getting together and all of them doing most of the jobs.