GIVE me a box of old photographs and I promise to stay quiet for hours.
Though a trio of officials from the Huddersfield Light Opera Company might disagree.
I’d been invited to join them on a stroll down Memory Lane. And what a journey it was.
Next year is the society’s centenary so watch out for lots of fizz and excitement as the company celebrates by doing what it does best, putting on shows.
Behind the scenes, society secretary Wendy Taylor has been bringing the society’s archives up to date in preparation for that big anniversary.
She’s spent hours assembling cuttings, photographs and programmes and anyone who has spotted her cutting and pasting has been unable to resist taking a peek at those faces from the past.
That same bug bit me. A couple of hours whizzed by in an instant.
After the initial smiles and gasps (on my part) over inventive costumes and long, long reviews we got down to the serious business of looking into other people’s pasts.
With general manager Sylvia Collins and stage director Chris Brearley on hand with a tablet to apply modern technology to all our queries, we began delving into an anniversary story.
What is it about old photographs that is so fascinating? Why should they grip our imaginations so tightly.
Flipping through pages it didn’t take long to pick up on all kinds of social history and despite the work already done, we soon found all kinds of questions bouncing around.
We all spotted names that seemed familiar. Textile and engineering companies on whose industry the town depended, local professionals from the town’s solicitors to their newspaper owners, many of them names that have lived on, all signs of the support amateur societies then enjoyed.
That sense of community that politicians are currently trying to instil in us all over again today has long been at the heart of amateur organisations of all kinds and remains there today.
There are many stories in the Light Opera Company’s now beautifully ordered archive and over the next year we’ll be telling some of them.
Like how Cinderella had to call off her date when one of the Ugly Sisters got stuck in snow and how no less an officer than the Chief Constable was brought in to stand up for actors wrongly accused of spending time in the pub with a warm fire at their backs and an even warmer drink on the bar when they should have been in rehearsal.
In those books, temporarily back in their boxes, there are many more memories to be shared but better still, there are even more to be created by a society which is fighting fit at almost 100! We’ll be back for more.
