Chronicle Summer 2024

33

ST EDWARD’S CHRONICLE

Left to right: G.A. Hughes as Hamlet in 1908; G.A. Hughes as Constance and S.G. Haughton as Arthur in King John in 1905; E.F. Burn as the ghost of Hamlet's father, 1908

In 1929 Cowell was 74 years old and celebrating 50 years at the School – he chose The Merchant of Venice as his final production. ‘Judiciously cut’, it was very sadly not a success. The acting was not up to scratch, and even Richard Warner was below his usual standard. A critic wrote in the Chronicle that the dreaded love scenes were ‘never more lugubrious – as time alone will teach them that it cannot be done that way!’. Cowell died in 1937, having directed, co-directed and produced 62 St Edward’s plays, 43 of them Shakespearean. John Millington Sing the fourth Warden and Cowell’s greatest friend, summed up Cowell’s time at the School in a 1930 edition of the Chronicle , ‘It would be easy to enlarge on particular services that Mr. Cowell has rendered – as a teacher, as librarian, as editor, as a producer of plays, as everybody’s friend: but over and above all this we shall be right if we reckon as of supreme value the constancy which has made him a rallying point for all generations, a steady point of light in a kaleidoscope, a rock amid shifting sands’.

T.E.E. Murray as Hermia in the 1923 production of A Midsummer Night's Dream