Recently, John , Pat and I attended a Garden city collection (http://www.gardencitycollection.com/home) explorers talk on drama and theatre in Letchworth. It was a fascinating talk and gave the opportunity to handle some rare and unusual theatre ephemera from Letchworth’s history.
This visit led to a decision by the Players to donate a some items from our own archive to the Garden City Collection. The items included Trophy’s, programmes, minute books and other ephemera from the 1938-1958 Letchworth drama festival.
The trophies are: Challenge Cup for the festival Winner (top left), Ponder Trophy for the runner up (Top right), Hertfordshire Cup for the best team from Herts (bottom left) and a view of the trophies together (bottom right)
The collection will be able to carefully store, catalogue and place images on their website to preserve the social history of Letchworth for future generations.
Social history, as well as publicity and information, was one of the reasons Jim and I almost exactly two years ago met with Stuart to take the website forward. As neither of use had much website experience, it was, and remains a constant learning curve.
Two years on, having extensively researched the players’ archive, the Garden City Collection and Hertfordshire libraries, we now have-
Over 500 pages including almost every production ever performed and more than 110 Players’ bios;
Over 900 pictures from 100 productions;
Over 900 images of newspaper cuttings, programmes and posters;
A website where you can find out about us, buy tickets, get information about auditions and monthly play readings;
And finally, a resource for theatrical productions going forward and a social history resource of our past.
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