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Drama around the founder of socialist newspaper The Clarion, conductor Robert Blatchford and Sheffield and Clarion activist GHB Ward

There you go Ramblers

at the old fire station, Oxford

Saturday, May 4

By JON LEWIS

TOWNSEND Productions tour small scale productions nationally with stories of people improving working conditions and the lives of ordinary people.

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Writer and actor Neil Gore’s latest play, Behold Ye Ramblers, directed by Louise Townsend, tells the stories of two campaigners for socialism in the late Victorian and early Edwardian period.

A solo exhibition, Gore structures the narrative as a music hall event, with much of the story told in songs either written and composed by Gore or period songs.

The first of the characters is the founder of the socialist newspaper The Clarion, Robert Blatchford, who wrote under the pen name Nunquam.

As Gore takes on the characters, there are projections of Clarion as well as playbills, posters, and photographs.

Gore continually breaks the fourth wall to encourage us to respond to the reference books as if we were the original theatergoers in the music hall and then, as in a folk concert, teaches everyone to sing along to the choruses of the songs.

The most poignant scene in the first half takes place in St Helens, which Blatchford calls “an ugly, horrible town” of stinking factories producing glass and chemicals.

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He visits one such chemical factory, where workers only work if they are fit and under 40 years old.

They wear cloth masks (Gore dons one in a demonstration) to provide protection, albeit minimal, against the suffocating effect of chlorine gas.

Blatchford describes the disastrous effect on stake-paid workers and their families, but finds it too unsafe to even walk into the workplace.

There you go Ramblers

After the interval, the focus shifts to Sheffield conductor and Clarion activist GHB Ward, who encouraged his choirs to compete in competitions.

Gore creates a community choir from the packed Old Fire Station audience, singing along with O! We will turn things upside down, a political speech by John Bruce Glasier.

Ward urges the choir members to join his traveling society, The Sheffield Clarion Ramblers, leading them from Sheffield Midland Railway Station to Hope in the Peak District, where their treks around Edale foreshadow larger mass transgressions in the same place 30 years later.

An educational and entertaining production.

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