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Note: The material for this page has been obtained from booklets in
Birmingham Reference Library
Although the theatre is in Acocks Green, not Hall Green, it has the name of
the neighbouring suburb because it arose out of an idea of some Air Raid
Wardens in Hall Green. In the beginning, plays were put on in local halls,
while scenery was built in a leaky and cold shed. Morale began to fall. The
idea of a proper theatre building was born, but before it came to fruition,
temporary premises were found in a dilapidated repair garage. This meant
that there was somewhere to meet, rehearse, and make costumes and scenery.
Morale improved, and plans for a permanent brick theatre were developed. An
architect drew up plans, and money was raised through jumble sales and the
like. When the princely sum of £400 had been saved, it was possible to
start. The site for the theatre was land on the Fox Hollies Hall site, which
included a static water tank, built in the War, which had become a rubbish
dump. The land was leased for 82 years on 24 June 1950.
Early productions
The building licence did not cover any paid labour, so only volunteers could
be used. Amazingly, the group had set itself the target of having a theatre
open within a year. A booklet on the history of the Theatre in its first ten
years describes what happened:
Saturday, April First,
1950, and a group of youthful drama enthusiasts take possession of a rubbish
dump in Pemberley Road, Acocks Green, Birmingham. Coats are soon off and,
that same afternoon, the site is cleared and digging begins…on the
foundations of a new theatre.
Throughout the
following summer, autumn, winter and spring, these dedicated men and women –
nine out of ten of whom had never before built so much as a rabbit hutch -
sweat and toil. They shift hundreds of barrow-loads of earth and sand, lay
65,000 bricks, mix ton after ton of mortar and concrete, erect a forest of
makeshift scaffolding, raise massive steel girders to to dizzy heights on
home-made lifting tackle, plaster and paint vast areas of brickwork…
To meet their target
of opening in a year, members had to work every night of the week, all day
Saturday and Sunday, often well into the night with car headlamps for
floodlights. Summer holidays were sacrificed, as were the ladies’ smooth
hands and elegant fingernails. Gumboots, overalls and old gloves were the
accepted fashion, blisters and bruises the standard accessories…
On April 6th,
1951 – a year and one week later – they open the doors to an astonished but
delighted audience. The play (“The Circle of Chalk”) is presented on a
temporary stage, built within the auditorium. It is tiny, has no wings and
there are no dressing rooms for the cast.
But no one minds. The
impossible has been done.
Women were laying bricks, and, according to Brian Hodges in 1971, could lay
3,000 bricks a day. Julia Roden recalled in 1991, on the fiftieth
anniversary of the first performance:
We were
working in twenty foot trenches, with no shoring and no hard hats -it's a
wonder no-one had an accident. (Birmingham Voice, 14th February 2001)
Birmingham City Council gave an interest-free loan of £1,500. In summer 1952
a side wing was finished, and the year after the major task of building the
stage-house was begun. Once again, the booklet gives the best description:
First, the cellar had
to be dug out by hand. No ordinary cellar this – a gigantic hole, 50 ft.
long, 30 ft. wide and 14 ft. deep; eight hundred tons of earth to be broken
up and dug out with pick and shovel.
Bad weather and
underground springs turned the site into a mudbath, trebled the weight of
every shovelful of earth. Torrential rain – and the lack of suitable timber
for shuttering – caused the side of the pit to cave in – again and again. On
each occasion, tons of earth crashed down on newly completed foundations,
burying them in a mountain of clay.
Up to their knees in
smelly mud, members had literally to smash their way through a two-foot
layer of re-inforced concrete, remnants of a static water tank built during
the war. And still the rain fell!
As the months
squelched by, enthusiasm gave way to depression, depression to grim
determination. By late autumn, when the play season began, less than half
the cellar had been dug out.
Twelve months later,
the battle of the stage-house cellar was over. Brickwork was up to ground
level on all sides (35,000 bricks) and, albeit under three feet of water,
there was a concrete floor. There remained the enormous job of building the
superstructure but, after the auditorium and cellar, laying another 60,000
bricks seemed child’s play! The final task of raising steel roof trusses
some forty feet on makeshift tackle gave rise to several “moments”, as did
the laying of the asbestos roof sheets. This involved perching astride the
roof trusses with a sheer drop of fifty feet to the cellar floor.
In 1955, the old
stage-house, which had been in a state of near-collapse since its
foundations were removed by the cellar excavations, was pulled down and, a
few weeks later, “The Ghost Train” was presented on the new stage.
Further building work,
made possible by a second £1,500 loan from the City Council, has added
another two-storey wing and a large foyer….
Julia Roden again:
Because we
were amateurs, we had to use a stronger than normal mix of mortar to make
the brickwork more solid and because we hit three springs in the basement,
the walls down there are extra thick. one health and safety expert who
visited us said that if the bomb ever dropped, our basement is where he
would like to be!
It is truly remarkable that after ten years a theatre had been built in
Acocks Green entirely by unskilled, unpaid labour. By 1971, there was a
wardrobe of 2,000 costumes, and eight plays a year were performed, produced
by different producers and using up to 30 different members from the pool of
130 each time. In the 1970s, a studio theatre and bar lounge were added.
Today, ten plays are produced, six in the main Veitch Theatre and four in
the Signature Theatre. Hall Green Little Theatre is a charitable
organisation, run by members and volunteers. Members can undertake all areas
of the work: directing, acting, scenery, props, lighting, wardrobe, front of
house or office work.
The theatre has had two presidents: Lord Olivier and Sir Derek Jacobi, who
keeps in touch and visits occasionally. According to Julia Roden:
He's rather
different from Sir Laurence Olivier, our only other patron, who agreed to do
it on the understanding that we never asked him to do anything else.
A play performed as part of the Yardley
Millennium Celebrations, May 1972 (New Compass newspaper, June 1972)
A
page on the BBC website gives some more information:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/birmingham/stage/2003/11/hall_green.shtml
For a list of recent productions go to:
http://www.littletheatreguild.org/cgi-bin/PHPTest/LTGTheatreShow.php?theatreid=60
and for current productions visit:
http://www.hglt.org.uk/
Fox
Hollies and the Walker family
The origins of Fox Hollies
The Walker era
Sale catalogue, Fox Hollies Hall
Housing between
the wars
Fox Hollies
since the war
Acocks Green Carnival
Hall Green Little Theatre
Fox Hollies Forum
Fox Hollies Special School
Ninestiles School
Childhood memories of Jean Mercer
The work of Dave
Swingle
The work of Elsie Carter
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