College Plays and Performances

In her letter from 24^th March it is nearing the end of the spring term and Alice refers to end of term activities such as teaching her last lesson, receiving grades, sitting an anatomy test and fundraising for a conference trip by having a bob-a-job week. 

Among the things she mentions is a College Play ‘Christopher Columbus’ which was an adaptation of a play for radio by Louis MacNeice, first broadcast on the BBC in 1942. Alice was not in the play herself but these were clearly important occasions in the College calendar as Alice talks about inviting an external visitor along and waiting for critiques to appear in the local press. Tickets for this production were charged at 2s 6d and 1s 6d, which would be approx. £2.80 and £1.60 today. By Alice’s time at the College, posters and programmes for these performances were printed (as below) but in the earlier days they were all hand produced. The Archive holds some beautiful handwritten and illustrated programmes from earlier years, including some believed to have been illustrated by Cicely Read who was a student at the College from 1909-1911 and went on to become Principal for a short time before her sudden death in 1949.

Programme for the production 'Christopher Columbus'

November 1955

In November 1955 Bedford College of Physical Education featured in ‘I want to be....’ – a series of features about careers for boys and girls broadcast as part of Children’s Hour on BBC Radio Home Service.  The programme contained interviews with tutors and groups of students and was first broadcast on 12 November 1955.  In her letter of 10 November, Alice reminds her parents to listen to the programme.  We know from a subsequent letter that Alice and her fellow students “thought the broadcast very bitty especially compared with the tape we bought from the BBC of all the recordings they took here”.

We learn of some of the extra-curricular activities undertaken by Alice: playing lacrosse for the College, visiting a probation officer for a biology project, and attending a weekly evening lecture delivered by an outside speaker. 

Alice makes reference to rehearsals for an end-of-term play.  She is following a long tradition going back to the early years of the College of students putting on an entertainment at the end of the autumn term.  These were often pantomimes or revues containing topical references to the College and its ways.