Raymond Mander (15 July 1911 – 27 December 1983) andJoe Mitchenson (4 October 1911 – 7 October 1992) were theatre historians and joint founders of a large collection of theatrical memorabilia.
Both began their careers as actors, but what began as a shared hobby turned into full-time work in running the Mander and Mitchenson Theatre Collection (MMTC) and writing books, reviews and articles on theatre, opera and ballet. The collection remained their private property until 1977, when they handed it over to a trust. After the deaths of the founders the collection was moved first to the Jerwood Library of the Performing Arts inGreenwich, and, in 2010, to theTheatre Collection of theUniversity of Bristol.
During the founders' lifetimes the collection contributed illustrations to more than four hundred books, and has remained one of the most important resources for authors writing about history of the British theatre.
Raymond Josiah Gale Mander was born inClapham, London, the only son of Albert Edwin Mander, an architect and surveyor, and his wife, Edith Christina,née Gale. He was educated atBattersea Grammar School and became an actor when he left school, making his debut atBedford in Harold Neilson's touring Shakespeare company.[1][2] In theWest End he appeared in a spectacular production ofHenry V atDrury Lane in 1938, the year before he first worked with Joe Mitchenson.[2]
Francis Joseph Blackett Mitchenson was born inSouthgate, London, the only son of Francis William Mitchenson, a general merchant, and his wife, Sarah,née Roddam.[1] Unlike Mander's family, which had no special association with the theatre, Mitchenson's had stage connexions on his mother's and his father's side. His father was a part-time drama critic, and his mother was a keen amateur actress. Their marriage broke up when Mitchenson was a boy, and he was brought up by his mother.[1] He was educated privately, and at the age of eight he enrolled at theFay Compton Studio of Dramatic Art. A fellow student there wasAlec Guinness, alongside whom he made his first West End stage appearance, walking on in a drama calledLibel! at thePlayhouse Theatre.[3]
Mander and Mitchenson met in February 1939, and later in that year they were both cast in a production ofThe Merry Wives of Windsor, Mander as Master Page and Mitchenson as Fenton. They toured with Neilson's company, playing small roles.[1] During theSecond World War Mander worked for the BBC, presenting radio programmes including a series calledActors Remember in which he interviewed veteran performers, such asWalter Passmore reminiscing aboutRichard D'Oyly Carte,Ada Reeve aboutGeorge Edwardes, andLeslie Henson aboutGeorge Grossmith Jr. He also wrote material for other presenters, usually in collaboration with Mitchenson.[4] Mitchenson served in the army, until being invalided out in 1943. He resumed his stage career for a few years, before giving up regular acting in 1948.[3]
As well as being partners in their private lives, and sometimes appearing in productions together, Mander and Mitchenson shared a passion for collecting theatrical memorabilia. They began their joint collection in 1939,[5] and when on tour in the 1940s they would take every opportunity to add to it. Mitchenson's obituarist inThe Times wrote, "[They] would raid antique shops and second-hand bookshops in search of anything which carried a morsel of theatrical history. It could be a postcard, or a playbill, a painting or a figurine representing some past performance, or, better still, a discarded costume or prop."[3]
Their consuming interest gradually overtook their acting careers. They presented small exhibitions of theatre memorabilia around Britain and collaborated on a series of books, the first of which,Hamlet Through the Ages, was published in 1952. It set the pattern for a further eighteen books, published between then and 1980: brief notes accompanying lavish illustrations (this first book contained 257 plates ranging from the frontispiece to a 1709 edition of the play to Guinness's Hamlet in 1951).[6]
The ever-expanding collection was housed in Mitchenson's family house inSydenham. Their biographer Rupert Rhymes writes:
Over the years this tall Victorian terraced house … overflowed with an amazing treasure trove of playbills and books from seventeenth-century folios onwards, programmes, periodicals, gramophone records, playwrights' prompt scripts, drawings, designs, and china figurines of great actors and actresses in their most famous roles. ... Anything which narrated theatre history was avidly acquired, magpie fashion.[1]
John Gielgud commented in 1968, "Mander and Mitchenson are a strange freakish pair – no taste but enormous diligence, and they have a remarkable collection of materials of all kinds and are really dedicated collectors – middle aged, one rather dandified, the other with a broken nose, looking like a Shaw burglar".[7]Noël Coward, who referred to them as "Gog and Magog",[8][n 1] and dubbed them "the truffle hounds of the theatre",[9] so trusted their theatrical judgment that he left instructions in his will that after his death his estate should take advice from them, together withSheridan Morley, on the continuing use of his literary and dramatic works.[10]Sybil Thorndike, who referred to Mander and Mitchenson as "my dear detectives", gave them gifts and financial donations, calling their collection "the profession's passport to posterity".[11] Rhymes writes of Mander and Mitchenson's place in the theatrical scene in London, "In the 1960s and 1970s 'Ray and Joe' became a theatrical institution and, dressed in style, invariably held court at first nights, reflecting on previous productions and associated gossip."[1]
By the end of the 1970s it was clear that the collection required larger premises, and the eighteenth-centuryBeckenham Place Park was selected, with the aid of the local authority. The move had scarcely begun when Mander died atHither Green Hospital, London, on 20 December 1983, aged 72, ofbronchopneumonia andemphysema. Mitchenson moved to Beckenham with the collection and lived there until his death inOrpington Hospital, London, on 7 October 1992, aged 81, fromrenal failure andprostatic hypertrophy.[1]
In later years Mander and Mitchenson wrote that the collection was founded in 1939 "with the aim of covering all aspects of the theatre, opera, and ballet", although in its early years it grew haphazardly rather than systematically.[3][12] Even once it was established and widely-known it remained the private property of Mander and Mitchenson until 1977, when they handed it over to a trust, chaired byLaurence Olivier.[1] Over the years it was expanded by the acquisition of the theatrical portion of the Randall H. New Collection and the library and personal theatre records of John Parker, the long-serving editor ofWho's Who in the Theatre. Parker's successor, Freda Gaye, described the MMTC as "a veritable museum [which] contains engravings, paintings, souvenirs, photographs, china figures, files of programmes of the London and provincial theatres, and a library of several thousand books." She added that it was used extensively by authors, designers, publishers, the BBC and other television producers.[12]
From as early as 1944 Mander and Mitchenson felt that their collection might eventually be bequeathed to the nation. At one point they hoped it would be housed at the newNational Theatre on theSouth Bank in London when it opened in the 1970s, but the collection was too large to be accommodated there. The Beckenham site proved financially unsustainable, and in 2001, after a brief period in temporary accommodation – a disused cricket pavilion in south London – the collection was moved to a new home as part of the Jerwood Library of the Performing Arts inGreenwich.[1] In 2010 it was announced that the trustees had agreed to house the entire collection permanently at theUniversity of Bristol, as part of its extensivetheatre archive.[13]
There was some controversy about the move from London to Bristol. Rhymes, who was a former chairman of the MMTC Trust, said he was "appalled at the prospect of the collection moving out of London away from Theatreland which was Ray and Joe’s life".[13] But the move was backed, and part-funded, by the Noël Coward Foundation and theCameron Mackintosh Foundation.[13] Bristol University already had an important theatre archive focusing strongly on provincial and 20th-century British drama; the preponderance of London-centred material from the 18th and 19th centuries in the MMTC was seen as an ideal match, creating the second-biggest collection of British theatre memorabilia.[13][n 2] The university made it clear that the collection would be available to everyone: "We run ourselves as a public museum, as well as a university archive, so anyone can make an appointment to come and study something from the collection".[16]
Mander and Mitchenson contributed introductions to four volumes ofNoël Coward's collected plays, and numerous articles and reviews to theEncyclopædia Britannica,Theatre Notebook andBooks and Bookmen.[5] They contributed illustrations from their collection to more than four hundred publications.[1]
Their own books were:
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Books by Mander and Mitchenson at theInternet Archive:
