Here’s a thing: I was tidying in my garage the other day, and came across this tee-shirt. Ten years old today, just about, a vaguely remember getting it printed in Croydon, and gently rear-ending the car in front in my 2cv when the driver didn’t pull out of a merge lane as quickly as I expected her to. My car was more damaged than her’s (which was not-at-all), but she gave me a hard time about it none-the-less.
But that’s not the memory that this tee-shirt first awakened. What it actually reminded me of was the first time I got paid for heritage interpretation. I’d been doing it voluntarily for three years by then, at Kentwell Hall in Suffolk. Kentwell’s Tudor Re-Creations lasted for three weeks every summer. And in 1988 we were celebrating 1588 and the defeat of the Spanish Armada.
About three hundred volunteers would participate in these annual re-creations, many of them displaying craft skills, weaving, candlemaking, potting, charcoal burning and the like. I could do none of those, being a junior bank-clerk, so when I joined in I took the option that generations of young men with no vocation have taken: I became a soldier. The soldiers of Kentwell Hall were a pretty rag-tag bunch of mercenaries most years, and the only enemies they ever had were the Players, a bunch of jugglers, musicians and other ne’er-do-wells of a generally more hippyish bent.
But in 1588 we got more organised. We agreed to join forces in making our Tudor clothes, resulting in a far more uniform livery, complete with thigh-high riding boots. And though suitably equiped with Tudor weapons during the day, we switched to replica Uzi waterpistols in the evening, all the better to soak the Players with. Tired of being called “the Soldiers,” we re-branded ourselves the Avant Guard.
All this effort galvanized us as a team, and our ring-leader, Jane (who was camp-follower during the day, but Dominatrix after hours) stuck a deal with a big Armada celebration taking place at Tilbury Fort, Essex. Kate O’Mara was playing Elizabeth, and we were each to get fifty quid to put on an archery display. Our first paid gig!
Before then, organizations like the Seal’ed Knot, the English Civil War Society, or the White Company, would turn up at any event for the cost of some grub and enough gunpowder to have a bit of fun. But that Tilbury gig gave Jane the crazy idea that people could actually make a living doing that stuff. And a few years later, I became the first P.A.Y.E employee of Past Pleasures, and possibly the first P.A.Y.E employee in the whole costumed interpretation industry.
Nothing to do with the National Trust of course, except that after work with two live interpretation companies, I got a job here. And I’m not the only one, the brother of the bloke wrapped round Jane’s thigh on the tee-shirt was one of those damn’d Players. And now he too works for the NT, as Communications and Marketing Manager in our East of England region.
