The Four Champions of Britain
For Christmas 1975, in search
of different styles of play, Chas Marshall
and John Burrell came across an Alex
Helm booklet in Leeds Library in which they found the Four Champions of Britain
play. It was decided that the four
saints of Britain
be portrayed by four members of the team, but the rest of the world be played
by one character, changing his identity after being beaten off, in a “Tommy
Cooper” type routine. The traditional
parts of the text were knitted together with some of Jim Mayer’s writings and
various team members’ contributions. This
was not entirely satisfactory and the following year, the play was further modified
with the addition of a simple sword dance (tricky for a team that did not
dance!) devised by Chas Marshall and
done with flexible wooden swords, culminating in the “lock”. The following black and white pictures were
taken at the Seige of Carlisle, Bitts Park, Carlisle
on Sunday 7th August, 1977
The first shows the four
saints assembled (l – r) St George: Graham Bickerdike, St. Patrick: Chas Marshall, St. Andrew: Arthur Jackson, St.
David: Stuart Rankin with Fool: John Burrell examining the corpse of The Rest of the
World: Jim Mayer. The second picture
shows St. Patrick: Chas Marshall assisting the drunken Doctor: Dave Dearlove, on to the stage.
Finally we see Chas Marshall
playing his concertina whilst the team perform a simple sword dance culminating
in the Lock.
After the absence of the play
for a couple of years, Stuart suggested some modifications to the script and
with the rest of the team’s contributions a further version was launched in
1979. This replaced the Fool with
Britannia and the Doctor became Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, performed
spectacularly by Henry Ayrton. The Rest of the World kept coming back as America, France,
Russia and Germany until
finally being defeated by Britannia’s trident.
The first picture shows (l –
r) Rest of the World (America
in this case): John Burrell, St.
Patrick: Graham Bickerdike, St. David: Stuart Rankin,
Britannia: Dave Dearlove, St.
Andrew: John Hutt, St George: Vince
Doemling. On the second picture, they
are joined by Dr. Jekyll: Henry Ayrton
who “didn’t have time to change….I’ll attend to it now!!!” Taken at the Bandstand, Whitby Folk Festival, Wednesday
25th August, 1982.
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