A Little About My Background
The Pilgrim Players of Canterbury
Acting, drama and theatre are in my blood. During the Second World War my mother and father were actors in a travelling theatre in the UK called "The Pilgrim Players of Canterbury", under the directorship of E. Martin Browne and his wife Henzie Raeburn. They performed in underground shelters, prisons, military bases, churches and schools, staging plays by T.S. Eliot and others.
My mother was in the first performance of "Murder in the Cathedral" — she was then a student at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama — written by T.S. Eliot and staged in Canterbury Cathedral. (My father had T.S. Eliot as a visiting teacher at his school.) In 1936 it opened in London at the Mercury Theatre to great reviews from The Times, and she performed Murder in the Cathedral at the Ritz Theater in New York on 16 February 1938 .
The "Signing the Minutes" photograph includes: Elna Graham (who later married Brian Carey), Brian Carey (actor), Norman Tyrell , Denis Carey , Sylvia Read, E. Martin Browne , Ronald Long , Eric Mitchell (my father — who later became a doctor and microbiologist, director of the Public Health Laboratory Service in Nottingham, and later Director of Public Health for the City of London), Nina Evans (my mother), and Henzie Raeburn .
Speaking to Peter Billingham in 1987, while living in Hampstead, London, for his book Theatres of Conscience, 1939–53 , my mother recalled her time as an actress in the Pilgrim Players:
"The most enduring quality and aspect of that time was the sense of community that we shared … I have never experienced anything quite like it since, neither do I expect to."