May Fayre Memories Documentary

For 45 years Maggie Pinhorn and Alternative Arts have organised the Covent Garden May Fayre and Puppet Festival. In this video Punch and Judy professors, puppeteers, entertainers and puppet builders discuss what makes the day so magical, why people travel from across the globe to attend, and thank Maggie for her unparalleled contribution to British puppetry.

Pollock's Toy Museum Exhibition

gal·li·mau·fry 

/ˌɡaləˈmôfrē/ 

a confused jumble or medley of things.
"a glorious gallimaufry of childhood perceptions"

The 14 artists participating in A Pollock’s Gallimaufry have been offered unprecedented access to the Museum’s international array of toys, dolls, puppets, games, gadgets, and the paper theatres for which it is best known, as well as its archive of original engraved copper plates used in the production of those theatres. The resulting pieces, installed as stand-alone displays and interventions across the Museum, span a variety of approaches, processes and media.

A Pollock’s Gallimaufry will be a month long event showing works by contemporary artists working in a variety of crafts and media inspired by the unique, mostly Victorian, collection at the two historic buildings on the corner of Scala Street and Whitfield Street.

Jack Fawdry, whose great grandmother founded the museum, is curating the exhibition and has gathered the artists together to produce the works.

“It’s quite exciting because the toy theatre has had a turbulent past and it almost disappeared completely,” says Fawdry who is an accomplished artist and printmaker.

“Mr Pollock was the last great publisher of toy theatres, then he went out of business. After the Second World War Britain started to modernise and change and its Victorian past was slightly left behind.

“So that’s when Marguerite, my great grandma, comes in and starts the museum in homage to toy theatres,” he says.

- From Museum is keeping the drama of toy theatre alive with a new exhibition

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Pheew! What an unusual eve. Me and @chapseth first toy theater performance! Wonderfull way to open @apollocksgallimaufry. Thank you to all who took part and to all those who had part took apon them! Beautiful long live the Toy Theater! Hurrah hurrah hurrah!

A post shared by Jack Fawdry Tatham (@jackfawdrytatham) on Nov 8, 2019 at 12:56pm PST

A British Christmas Tradition: Pantomimes

Pages from printed programme for Robinson Crusoe pantomime performed at the Theatre  Royal, 
Drury Lane, December 1881, England.  (c) Victorian & Albert Museum, London

Pantomimes are a mainly British tradition, that has come to be performed almost exclusively in modern times around Christmas.

Being a type of theatre, pantomimes have of course, been adapted to the toy theatre.  The toy theatre versions originally came out during the Victorian age.  Victorian pantomime inspired today's versions, but were very much of their time.  The history of pantomimes goes back much further, however...

Featured: One Man Show

A recent article featured the amazing David Lewis Worobec
[Click to Enlarge & Read]

Benjamin Pollock's Grave

"...The popularity of the toy theatre declined and by 1937, when Mr. Pollock died, the shop and the Pollock family were struggling to pay their way.The Chingford Historical Society believes this is why he was buried in a common grave with no memorial stone." - The Chingford Guardian

When I read that this week, I thought, "This is a great shame and should be rectified..."

To that end, the Facebook toy theatre group has started a crowd-funding project to raise the necessary funds to buy a modest stone to mark Benjamin Pollock's grave.  Long overdue, Pollock¹ was one of the giants of toy theatre sheet creators and printers, and should rightly be recognized within a proper memorial.

Pollock's Toy Museum & Eddy Fawdry

Awhile back a profile was done of the museum, by none other than Professor Ronald Hutton, which is lovely indeed for those of us halfway around the world who may never get to visit there in person. It is, in a limited sense, a virtual tour. Enjoy this clip from the program that featured the Pollock's Toy Museum...



Reviews:

Eddy Fawdry (and his wee dog Haggis) preside over this strange secret world of vintage toys, which he inherited from his grandparents and they from the Hoxton-based Pollock family, which made famous toy theaters. In room after creaky room, history stares back at you with doll’s eyes: puppets, Gollywogs, the 1921 forerunner to G.I. Joe (Swiss Action Man), doll’s houses, mechanical cast-iron banks, 1950s rocket toys, a board game based on the Falkland Islands invasion that was banned for being in poor taste. Stories are everywhere and the kitsch factor is through the roof, which brings us to the quirky, spirited building, which has been left leaning and unrestored since its erection in the 1780s (but received a new roof after the Luftwaffe blew off the original one). The ground-floor shop stocks unusual, hard-to-find toys that don’t cost much, including handmade items and cardboard theaters—the original inspiration for this one-of-a-kind time warp.

- Jason Cochran (Frommer's)

Pollock's Toy Museum: A Magical Mystery Tour

Do not be fooled, this beautiful house and its neighbour have more to pose than this dancing jester. If you approach, do so with caution. The sheer unimaginable excellence of this rare collection of exhibited, ingenious and engaging articles, lost in time, is undoubtedly a worthy and untamed match for J.K.Rowling’s ‘Diagon Alley’.

Take a magical mystery tour with Eddy Fawdry, of Pollock's Toy Museum¹ - a place like no other, in the world...

¹ - Children lured by the colourful shop window of Pollocks Toy Museum to explore inside, whether at 44 Monmouth Street, in Covent Garden, central London, or, after 1969, at 1 Scala Street, were likely to meet the museum's founder, Marguerite Fawdry, and to be drawn by her, with a delicious sense of complicity, into the arcane world of Victorian melodramas performed with cardboard figures three inches high.

If they visited with any regularity they might find themselves put to work in the basement collating sets of plays from packets of printed sheets unopened since the 1890s, with a paper bag of special treasures to take home at the end of the day. This eccentric private museum with its associated shop selling model theatres and unusual toys has been an enduring feature of the West End since the 1950s. It was a pioneering venture in conservation, taste and way of life.

She was born Marguerite Desnieres in 1912, the daughter of a Breton father killed two years later in defence of his country and an English mother, and was educated at the Lycee in South Kensington, west London, and at the University of Lille. In 1935 she joined the theatre studio of Michel St Denis but worked in journalism before the Second World War took her into the French Section of the BBC and the Press Office of General de Gaulle.

In 1942 she married Kenneth Fawdry, a schoolmaster, whom she had first met on a train from Florence to Rome. They shared radical politics, unconventional attitudes and a strong sense of missionary purpose. Their son John was born during the war and in 1951 Marguerite left the BBC, which Kenneth had by then joined, to write scripts for language-teaching broadcasts. It was into this fertile seedbed of education, parenthood and the stage that the germ of toy theatre fell almost by accident in 1952.

Benjamin Pollock of Hoxton, whose name is commemorated in the museum, died in 1937. In 1944 his stock of copperplates and lithographic prints for traditional English toy theatre, dating back to the 1830s, was acquired from his daughters by Alan Keen, a bookseller who revived the business with more flair than the post-war austerity years could support.

Click above to see inside Pollock's Toy Museum...

The Fawdrys, enthusiasts for many kind of popular arts including the naive paintings of Mr Bucket of Battersea, had been among his customers, but Marguerite was dismayed to discover that the business had gone into receivership in 1954, when she wanted some of the wire slides (twopence each) for pushing the tiny figures on to the stage. The accountant whom she traced gave a provocative response, "I believe there are hundreds of thousands in the warehouse, madam, but there's no one who could look them out for you. Of course, you could, I suppose, buy the whole lot if you wanted them."

This is what she did, with help from Kenneth's father, and started business from the attic in Monmouth Street, encouraged by other visionaries such as George Speaight, author of Juvenile Drama (1946), and the photographer Edwin Smith, and enlisting the first generation of helpers for whom, down the years, shared enthusiasm substituted for earnings.

The museum began as a complementary attraction, gradually filling all floors of the house with a shop on the ground floor and the stock divided between the Dickensian basement and the Fawdrys' house at Wrotham, in Kent. Marguerite's friend Jacques Brunius, Surrealist and film-maker, lent and ultimately bequeathed his collection of optical toys. The museum displays were cunningly devised by the toymaker Yootha Rose and the display style was (and remains) a tightly packed cabinet of curiosities with strongly coloured backgrounds.

Marguerite Fawdry had an excellent eye and a lifelong curiosity about other cultures, reflected in the museum and the shop which was stocked with finds from the Fawdrys' long summer holidays in Italy, Yugoslavia and elsewhere.

Almost equal to the discovery of the Pollock stock was the chance find of a barn in the Dolomites full of wooden Dutch dolls packed in brown paper parcels for dispatch to a vanished pre-1914 toy market. Pollocks bought the lot and some of the dolls found themselves dressed in Pearly costume by a genuine Pearly Queen. There were toy-theatre sheets from Copenhagen, Epinal and Barcelona, American cast-iron automata banks and Japanese paper carp.

In the 1960s shopkeeping became a performing art and Marguerite Fawdry excelled in it. In George Speaight's words, "the shop became a mecca for parents in search of unusual toys and decorations; boutique owners in swinging Britain of the Sixties flocked to Monmouth Street in search of `with-it' stock for their shelves".

Fawdry's cosmopolitan outlook inspired her to produce brightly coloured reprints of simplified Victorian plays in multi-language European editions and in New York she and Kenneth, an equally compelling figure, did impromptu demonstrations for the buyers at Maceys and Bloomingdales. Pollocks catalogues were designed with witty graphics.

Having begun the fashionable revival of the Covent Garden area, Pollocks moved north to Fitzrovia. Marguerite was able to buy two adjacent houses on the corner of Whitfield Street and Scala Street for a larger museum, now a charitable trust, held exhibitions, including one on Chinese toys, on which she wrote one of her several entertaining and scholarly books. In 1980 Pollocks opened a shop in the newly refurbished Covent Garden Market, now devolved to its manager Peter Baldwin.

In his retirement, Kenneth Fawdry helped the business to flourish. His death in 1986 was a blow but Marguerite continued to run Scala Street with John Fawdry despite declining health, remarking recently, by way of explaining its business philosophy, that "no one in their right mind would have reprinted The Siege of Troy", the grandiose romantic play reissued in 1985.

Marguerite Desnieres, museum curator, writer, entrepreneur: born Bexleyheath, Kent 14 May 1912; married 1942 Kenneth Fawdry (died 1986; one son); died London 15 September 1995.

[Marguerite Fawdry Obituary, The Independent]

Pollocks West End Live!

2013 Paper Theatre Festival in Harderwijk

Held this past May, here are highlights showing some of the performers, theatres, and actual clips of performances...

Old Toy Theatre History Site: Revival?

Front page of old Toy Theatre History page...

I used to have my own domain, and on subdomain I hosted a website I inherited from a fellow in the UK that didn't want to handle it anymore. I used it as a template, and did some major changes to it to make it more logical and user-friendly. I look back on it now and laugh because it looks to primitive to what we can do today.

That said, I think I have enough pieces of the puzzle to be able to resurrect it - at least a good share of it - as 'pages' that link from the front page here.

I want to share some of the information from that old page, because although much of it is 'old news', it's important historically in the world of toy theatre, and to my knowledge, there not a lot of this online. It mostly concerns Benjamin Pollock.

In the Heart of the Beast

Christmas Retold

Heart of the Beast Puppet & Mask Theater artists bring alive the Nativity as an Immigrant Story...

In my own state of Minnesota here in America, an extraordinary production is underway right now of the age-old Nativity story.  But this version is told in an innovative style - using large-scale puppets and as an immigrant story.

Read, see, and hear more about this, here...


The video above, from a presentation of this same production in 2009, shows a bit of what you would see, as well as clips from behind the scenes...

The Devil and Mr. Punch

This is NOT your Grandfather's Punch!

A collaboration between UK and US individuals and groups, performances are happening now at the Barbican;  US productions were performed in two locations last year -  Minneapolis in May, and Philadelphia in September; the production evolved as it went along.

Read more about the wonderful people behind the show, including a lovely interview with the director where he talks about the history of Punch.  Also, the Barbican's 'behind the scene' article, "That's the Way to Do it!"

While Punch is normally not performed as a toy theatre production, I have a weakness for the old scroundrel!  I did find at least one play for the small stage for him, by Langdale, however...

1st Annual Online-Only Toy Theatre Festival?

An excellent example of computer-animated toy theatre is Nigel Peever's production of The Corsican Brothers
Recently on the Toy Theatre Yahoo Group, a member mentioned the following idea:

What does everyone think about holding an online TT festival?

It could include performances via YouTube or Vimeo, or even web cam if anyone would fancy trying something live.

We could post images, scripts, proposals etc

There are several sites where one can hold online conferences, for presentations, abstracts and papers.

It might be easier than a physical event to start with?

Any takers?

I think it's a marvelous idea.  An idea whose time has not only come, but is long overdue.

Overall  response so far has been modest but enthusiastic. There was some concern about it being 'only' an online festival, with recorded performance versus live performance (albeit by video, not in-person).  However, as it was further discussed in the online group - and the original poster suggested - why not both?

Another aspect of a virtual festival beside the the recorded vs live, is that there could be virtual (animated - handmade or computer) versus 'real' or physical performances.

It goes without saying that variety is the spice of life, yet tradition is something to preserve.  That said, both traditional theatres and/or plays would be presented, but innovative, avant-garde, or experimental theatre-of-the-small should be encouraged, also.

What say you, Dear Readers?  Anyone interested in taking part?  It's early days, but the world toy theatre community would love to hear from you if you'd like to participate in any capacity - design, performance, 'backstage', technical, etc.  If you don't know who to contact, let me know and I'll put you in touch...

Pollocks on iPad is Here!

New Toy Shop Opens!

Peter Baldwin shares his passion for toy theatre [Photo Credit:  BBC]

Benjamin Pollock's Toyshop has opened a new branch.

You read right.  The well-known toy shop, particularly known for toy theatres, is branching out.

Read more about it here...

Toy Theatre at Fishmarket News

The website for Toy Theatre at Fishmarket has been updated. The current newsletter has been published, and I highly recommend you check it out.

If you are not familiar with Toy Theatre at Fishmarket, it is a site run by Harry Oudekerk from the Netherlands.

Harry sponsors a wonderful bi-annual toy theatre festival.  The last one was in 2009.  The next one is scheduled for June 2011, and the newsletter tells you all you need to know.  I wish I could attend, because the last one sounded amazing (and it was dedicated to one of my toy theatre mentors, Gigi Sandberg, who I was privileged to know for only too short a time. I am hoping there are many photos and writings from people who attend.

NOTE:  If you're reading this and thinking you'll be there, I'd love to hear from you.  I'm looking for a 'reporter-at-large' for the fishmarket festival similar to the wonderful Tess who helped cover the 9th International Great Small Works Toy Theatre Festival...

Film Festival Feature Toy Theatre Documentary

Exciting news to share!

A friend of this blog - and to toy theatre in general - Steve Arnott, has entered his documentary "A Small History of Toy Theatre" in this year's Strabourg Film Festival.

You can see the film online, for a limited time, here.

Flannel Graphs & Sunday School

This video shows what a Flannelgraph is, including a bit of a performance...
I was recently reminded of a very specific art form to the religion of my youth - the flannelgraph. During many a Sunday School, I was riveted to the stories portrayed using this technique, often begging to be allowed to change the scenery and the characters between scenes.

I then watched the above video while reminiscing, and it began to dawn on me how familiar it was in another respect - it definitely has the feel of toy theatre!

Oh sure, it's not on a three-dimensional stage, but the characters are two-dimensional, small, and they are moved around manually. The performer moving the characters gives voice as narrator and character(s). Performances are done for small audiences, closeup. Get the comparison now?!

The seeds of my immediate attraction to toy theatre now makes perfect sense!

Toy Theatre, Life-Sized

I love it! A traveling show that plays against a life-sized toy theatre!