Chronicle Summer 2024

ST EDWARD’S CHRONICLE 31

With war clouds gathering, the final play before hostilities broke out was King John , its second time on the School stage. It was a challenge because in the first staging in 1905 Cowell felt the cast had included ‘four of the best actors that have ever appeared on our stage (John Haughton, Theophilus Heale, Hugh Robinson and Geoffrey Hughes)’. Sadly, this challenge was not taken up and the 1913 version turned out to be ‘an unsatisfactory, nondescript affair and certainly not one of the Bard’s best!’. While Cowell as

In 1899, Hamlet was attempted, with Charles Maude, the Senior Prefect, taking the lead part, to great acclaim. He would later have an acting career in London and on Broadway until the Great War. In a smaller female part was 13-year-old Philip Merivale who would later become a star of the West End stage and then cross the Atlantic to act in the early silent pictures and the first ‘talkies’; he would be the fourth husband of Gladys Cooper, one of the superstars of that era. Cowell was on top form in 1911 with a fourth version of Julius Caesar , nine years after the last attempt. Due to the high demand for tickets, it was played over three nights and the packed houses made it difficult to hear all the cast at the back of the room. Cowell was now something of a legend and the Chronicle hailed him thus – ‘Were we the Prime Minister, we should see to it that the name of so successful a producer should, in accordance with our modern custom, figure in the next Birthday Honours!’

A receipt for the loan of wigs and beards

Debating Society and sometime gardener – he was known to tend the plot behind Big School in the 1900s. He was to continue producing Shakespearian spectacles right up to 1929. In 1920 Cowell staged The Tempest . The only previous iteration had been 31 years before, and the Chronicle was proud to inform readers that of that original cast, three were now Lieutenant Colonels in the Regular Army, one was a King’s Councillor, and another was the father of three St Edward's boys. The new cast was very young and untried and they seemed to struggle with what is one of Shakespeare’s most difficult plays. The critics were kind but felt that the cast could have better conveyed the impression ‘that they were actually enjoying being on stage’. For the remaining years of Cowell overseeing the annual play, there was a seemingly never-ending string of successful productions, all supported by the School carpenters, electricians, seamstresses, ‘special effects’ technicians, musicians, teams of under studies, prompters and now co-producers to help with the workload. Audiences continued to flock to Big School in very large numbers necessitating two or even three performances on different nights and even afternoons, which saved on electricity. The December 1923 offering was a milestone, with A Midsummer Night’s Dream being performed in the Dining Hall rather than Big School. Cowell wanted to experiment with the actors mingling with the audiences and using the doors to the Quad as their entry and exit points. The cast jumped on and off the Dining

always received the plaudits, it was felt he had been let down by a mediocre cast. For the next five years there was no School play performed at the School as Warden Ferguson felt it ‘inappropriate, while so many were serving and losing their lives’. He was later criticised for this decision by OSE, who felt it deprived the pupils of a bit of distraction from the drab life at the School during those dark years. After the war and the Spanish Flu epidemic which followed it, the School didn’t take to the stage again until the last night of the Christmas Term of 1918 in Big School. A cast of 32, mostly senior boys with Cowell and others in the background, put on A Christmas Carol by Dickens. The tickets raised about £800 in today’s money for the War Memorial Fund. It was a great success and the Chronicle reported that there were ‘Visitors arriving, ladies assiduously struggling into the wrong seats, OSE looking at the curtain appreciatively, hot and flustered programme sellers dispensing programmes to harassed parents buying them with buried sixpences for their offspring. The School riotously pouring into the back chairs. The Warden enters and sits in the worst seat in the house – the front row!’. After the war, Cowell was in his sixties and worn down by his numerous duties throughout the School. As well as being the producer of school plays he was now Senior Master, Second Master, Set Tutor, Chronicle Editor, Librarian, member of the Choir, setter of the General Paper each year, Editor of five School Rolls, Treasurer and Vice President of the School Society, Secretary of the Field Club and the

Walter Young, the School Carpenter, 1883-1920