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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
Ronnie was at Cambridge with Eric Bessborough, as indeed I was … Eric and I had adjacent rooms in 16 Jesus Lane so we got to know each other and then Ronnie suggested I come into the English Stage Society, as it was then … a few days later I bumped into Eric and he said, ‘Oh, I hear we're going to join up company with the English Stage Society’. ‘Oh’, I said, ‘Have you been asked on it too?’ He said, ‘Yes’. So I said, ‘What fun’.
(Interview with Greville Poke, March 1994)The emergence of the English Stage Company came about by a combination of unpredictable and bizarre circumstances. As Devine regrouped, one strand of the combination was forming in Devon. The Times for 22 April 1953 reported the creation of the Taw and Torridge Festival of the Arts. The prime mover in this was Ronald Duncan, a playwright and librettist, together with Lord Harewood and Edward Blacksell, a Barnstaple schoolmaster, both Duncan's friends. The Festival offered in July E. Martin Browne's production of Duncan's Don Juan, Britten's Let's Make an Opera and his version of Gay's The Beggar's Opera, together with Eliot reading his own work and a ‘Soirée Musicale’ with Peter Pears and Britten himself. The Minutes of the first meeting of the Festival Council, held on 5 December 1953, saw Harewood appointed Chairman, Duncan and Blacksell Council members and a galaxy of prominent figures becoming Vice-Presidents, including Britten, T. S. Eliot, Jacob Epstein, Robert Helpmann, Henry Moore, Ezra Pound, Jeremy Thorpe and Henry Williamson.
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