With the front row of our audience only a few feet from the stage apron (and only some fourteen feet from the backcloth) the quality of the shows had to be of a very high standard whether it be in acting, costume, makeup, scenery, lighting or – perhaps of most importance – sound. Of the two effects, lighting “only” had to arrive on cue or provide background clues as to mood etc. Sound, on the other hand, has to rely on the aural quality (speakers, playback equipment, realism and location) to transport and completely immerse the audience member into that elusive quality of believability.
In the very early days of the rehearsals for the first show (Memory of Spring in June 1971) we possessed no sound equipment: local businessman Geoffrey Benfield, who owned a hi-fi and electrical shop in nearby Chipping Norton, came to our rescue by very kindly donating an electric turntable with a separate amplifier, both positioned at the very crowded Stage Manager’s corner (stage right) and a speaker located immediately above the number-one bar lights on-stage and the main curtain tracks, a position nearest to the audience. It quickly became apparent though, that the SM’s restricted view onto the stage, combined with his other duties, plus often actors waiting for their entrance cues meant the equipment would have to find somewhere else from which to be operated.

As the location of the lighting board was still in process of finding a home, and with the first night of the show rapidly approaching, it was hurriedly decided to build a separate room (a long narrow wooden shed actually) in which sound & lights could be housed and, by happy coincidence, two small windows at the back of the auditorium would be the perfect location for it to be added to the exterior of the end wall. This ‘temporary’ little building was erected and like most temporary things, it would last – with several improvements (it was later enlarged into a more permanent structure) – for the entire existence of the theatre as indeed did Geoffrey’s “temporarily” donated equipment! Becoming known as “the box” due to its small size, it provided the operators with an unobstructed view of the stage, but the fact that the back row of the audience sat just two feet from those windows meant that we had to double-glaze them. That, in turn, meant we couldn’t hear anything and neither could we hear Val who, during rehearsals, would sit in the front row of the auditorium and call instructions to us!
Cueing systems

Once again Geoffrey came to the rescue with an amplifier installed with us in the box and a microphone suspended beneath the front-of-house lights which was capable of feeding the box and – oh luxury – returning a switched sound feed back to that number-one bar speaker above it via a mic in the box. Suddenly we had also gained the capability of relaying sound effects from the record deck into the auditorium!
Jumping forward a few years, Graham Rousell designed a much higher quality set-up to to replace the original. The microphone he got for the auditorium was an AKG D190, which was a high quality balanced mic to give directional pick-up from the stage and also suppress hum and buzz. That revised equipment did sterling service right through to the end of the theatre. The red crosses on the plan indicate backstage sockets for connecting temporary speakers, while the red boxes indicate permanently wired speakers.


A simple ‘stand-by’ and ‘go’ communication system was installed between the stage manage and the box. Red and green trace lamps would alert the recipient along with a tiny buzzer if all else failed! During a show plain speech couldn’t obviously be used and, once again courtesy of BT, three sets of telephonists’ headsets connected SM to sound and lights. Slowly, slowly we were beginning to lay the foundations of quite a sophisticated contact system and this was during the early days when we really didn’t know whether our tiny theatre would actually survive.
Early Sound effects
For simplicity sake, those early shows had very few recorded effects (FXs) and in any case we were entirely dependent on commercially available speciality long-play records turning at 33.3 revolutions per minute (and which were usually compiled and sold by the BBC or a limited number may be obtainable from a local library). You might appreciate the difficulty of dropping the stylus precisely in the correct groove on the record’s surface exactly at the point indicated by the script and exactly at the correct moment, which was a good reason for avoiding complicated sound cues . . . For that first show, though, Val wanted the sound of a rural stream in a forest glade to be heard throughout Act 1. Easy peasy; we positioned our microphone above a washing-up bowl of water in the box, I removed a shoe and sock, wriggling my foot in the water and hoped for no electrical short-circuit as I operated the lights. Ironically, without sound equipment capable of producing a continuously running cue, that foot-driven effect was the first and only time it was ever used. Later that year (with the theatre seemingly on course for success) we presented The Boy Friend by Sandy Wilson and some music was required for audience walk-in and interval music. Back then, it was also the practice of theatres to play a shortened copy of the National Anthem at the end of each performance, and we were no exception.
Magnetic Tape

To facilitate that, I lent my Plustron (Model C20) portable monaural cassette tape machine, and our mic in the box was carefully positioned to pick up its pitifully weak speaker output. It was good enough but we quickly discovered that although it was capable of recording sound effects for us, the quality wasn’t great and its little microphone very limited, plus the mechanically-driven tape counter seemed never to be entirely trustworthy when it came to accuracy of cueing specific tracks. We realised that if a production came along requiring more sophisticated sound reproduction, we’d need ‘proper’ equipment. Double-sided tape cassettes were very popular (and cheap!) and so we gained a more powerful twin-tape machine with considerably better sound output than my little portable recorder. But still there were issues with cueing them and, to make matters worse, if there were several tapes in use, one only had to be hurriedly put to one side in order to insert the next one. It could then be so easy to re-mount that first one upside down, for an entirely unconnected track to unexpectedly burst forth. We quickly learned from that pitfall . . .

We moved on to seven-inch reels and used them initially on my very heavy (it had a handle, so the manufacturers amusingly called it “portable”) Akai 1700, a 4-track reel-to-reel stereophonic machine which transformed our ability to record FXs. Cueing-up was now simplicity itself; with the tape positioned almost at the point where the FX was to start, the reels could be turned by hand and the exact point on the tape marked with white chinagraph or white leader tape. It was then remarkably easy to run the tape up to almost the cue (not precisely on the mark – allowance had to be made for the drive motors to run up to speed, a matter of a second or two – engage the tape brake, adjust the volumes to the required levels, turn the play lever on and, at the cue, release the brake. For the first time, we had the choice of two tape speeds; 3.75 inches per second “medium wave quality” and 7.5 ips “fm quality” – the higher the speed passing through the heads, the higher the sound reproduction quality. Consequently, for realism, 7.5 ips was more often than not used. There was of course an inherent danger in that multiple choice of speed. A case in point being that our little dedicated reel holding our copy of the National Anthem had been recorded from the Plustron at 3.75 ips speed and at the end of one particularly busy show, we hurriedly loaded “The Queen” onto the Akai but forgot to reduce the playback speed to match the tape. In consequence, the speeded-up output resembled that of a Benny Hill comedy sequence! You might have thought that would have served as a lesson? No chance! Some years later one of a number of British Telecom employees to inhabit the box over the years was Graham and he made the same mistake and with the same tape, but this time he understandably panicked and changed speed during playing, with the consequent embarrassment of a gradual octave downward-pitch change! As well as some domestic speakers to increase the sound output, by now Graham was using his own, more portable Phillips reel-to-reel tape deck in place of my cumbersome Akai (He bought it from another BT colleague, Brian Green, who himself would come to inhabit the box for future shows). A year or two later Fred, who was concerned at our expensive private equipment being loaned for theatre use, acquired a Phillips reel-to-reel machine from Martin Blinkhorn’s business in Banbury; it was still going strong when the theatre closed.
The later shows saw the arrival of computerisation for sound effects – Ian Bushrod introduced a laptop containing the necessary software to run, and cue, the required sounds for “spot” FXs although continuous ambient effects would still have been on cassette, or CDs (Which were also relatively easy to create given the use of personal computing.
As the theatre developed on a technical level it never occurred to us to photograph the stage “hardware” during its life. In the following sections almost all were taken during the dismantling of the theatre and the general state of degradation from the elements . . .
Loudspeakers
An American serviceman stationed locally, Gordon Bowen with his wife Dorae, had become part of our team on sound in the early 70s and fretted at the small volume output of our existing speakers. Somehow he “liberated” a pair of much larger ones from his Officers’ Mess and these we hoisted into the auditorium roof flanking the proscenium arch and capable for the first time of treating the audiences with full-blooded stereo sound. When his tour of duty ended and he was obliged to return to the USA, Gordon donated two huge cabinet speakers to complement the couple in the auditorium; one was positioned at the stage manager’s corner and its top surface became a very handy table for scripts, the emergency torch and, of course, bottles of beer. The second speaker went into the little vestibule leading from the back of the auditorium to the toilets across the yard and along with the others, would provide the key to true surround sound.

Being a knowledgeable sound ‘buff’ himself, Graham decided to improve the speaker side of things after he joined the team and at his suggestion, Fred purchased specialised speaker kits (Kefkit2) and these were mounted onto a flat baffle using the rafters in place of speaker cabinet sides and positioned at the front of the auditorium either side of the proscenium arch.

Lesser spec. custom speaker enclosures containing single full range drivers were placed in the roof rafters at the rear of the audience. Now we were capable of producing an immersive sound. And it was about then that we realised what a chore laying dedicated cabling to the increasing number of speakers around the theatre had become, so we embarked on a permanent installation of wires reaching spider’s-web like out from our box to the various speakers (see plan).

Initially the cables terminated on a patch panel and connections were physically patched from the relevant amplifier in use (I think Fred had one amp and Graham brought another from home). A matrix/patcher for the speakers came a little later, and comprised retired (legally!) BT stock switches.
In the plan the permanent speaker positions are shown in red, the powerful speaker cabinets are solid red boxes and the red crosses indicate jack points into which additional speakers could be plugged if a current show required them. The dedicated mic/speaker/relay system is shown connected by a green line.
Amplification
As the sound developed into requiring stereo on the Front of House speakers and spot location, or ambient, effects on stage we found that the four channels provided by two stereo amplifiers seemed to meet all requirements (Fred had one amp and Graham brought another from home). Both amps were about 30 Watts RMS per channel, which was quite sufficient for that compact venue. Later development included a custom build four channel power amp taking the audio from the Distribution Mixer..
Audio Distribution Mixer
As the audio requirements of shows developed, more often than not there would be the need to use a cassette deck for background ambience and interval music and Reel-to-Reel for the spot effects (e.g. car door, thunder, dog bark etc). In some cases the ambient sound on cassette may be split into discrete channels (e.g. Stream on stage left, birdsong over the stage). This needed to be planned out and the relevant patches made in the amplifier sources and speakers used.
With no commercial system available supporting this requirement that could have been a) afforded and b) installed into the box, this brought about the need to design our own. With Graham’s audio electronics experience and Fred’s access to control panel fabrication materials and tools, a compact distribution mixer took shape over a few months.



The mixer could take in three stereo inputs (two normally used, three on rare occasions), which could then be individually controlled across four groups… Each input arriving into Groups 1 and 2 could be set mono (so the same L&R appeared on each at their own required level), or split L&R so that L appeared on GP.1 and R appeared on GP.2. This would solve the stream and bird issue mentioned above. Groups 3 and 4 were a stereo-only pair set to feed the L&R of the FoH speakers, or coupled up with the rear speakers. The four output channels would then go to the Amplifier inputs. The returns from the amplifiers (i.e. loudspeaker signal levels), were fed back into the distribution switching of the mixer, where small red push buttons could select which of the sixteen possible speakers might be used for the on-stage sounds from groups 1 and 2. A matrix arrangement on the switches meant that if a sound was playing from group 1 into speaker 4, a sound could be cued up on group 2 and then when speaker 4 was pressed on group 2 it would switch off group 1 feed and activate group 2 feed. Now if you’ve managed to stay with me this far I offer my sincere congratulations, and probably you should try and get out more. Suffice to say it worked well for many years apart from the occasional dry joint which was soon resolved.
Rehearsals
When we rehearsed shows it was found to be much easier to follow scripts and Val’s spoken instruction from within the auditorium. It was also easier to mark the required audio levels for each effect. To achieve this the tape decks and mixer would be relocated, and a number of white patch leads would go from the mixer, though the little square hole on the left beneath “sound’s” window (please refer to above patch panel), to the patch panel and amplifier . That little square hole had two plates which bolted together with foam in between for sound isolation during the actual shows. During shows this access would be closed off with that piece of green sponge (I still remember vividly one young operator spotting an opened box of chocolates resting on the window ledge of the back row just a foot behind the audience member’s head. Stealthily squeezing his hand through, he was able to lift a couple of the contents and carefully withdraw his ill-gotten gains into our box!).
Shows, and that Immersive sound
Towards the end of the theatre’s life we put on some shows requiring multiple FXs not only in quick succession but sometimes simultaneously, as in How Green Was My Valley, where the sounds of a mine collapsing was overlaid by screaming miners and – at the climax – those FXs slightly lessened as a Welsh hymn faded up; almost certainly the most difficult FX we’d attempted and quite impossible without Graham’s specialised equipment). In a couple of shows he was involved with, we also used his huge 4-channel TEAC R-R monster on the left of the mixer desk. One show he recalls was Othello. Here we had a ‘storm’ rolling around the theatre, but also out in the back stage-left audience entrance door that large cabinet speaker was playing the stormy sea every time the door was opened as an actor entered or left. The Grange’s Phillips machine was located on a shelf on the right side and the Cassette Deck was below that. That busy show was full-on!
Over the years the sound became more sophisticated. The sound engineer would endeavour to only introduce sufficient and subtle background noises to complement the scene but nothing should stand out. The effect should really be perceived subconsciously. Nothing gives the audience a better sense of wet and chilly weather than, quietly in the background, hearing the sound of steady rain and a dripping gutter (sadly a very easy FX to source around the Grange, with many blocked gutters) and on one summer show the suitably chilled audience was astonished to emerge from this cold, wet mental environment into the balmy sunny evening of the interval!) If a wood stove was involved (yes, Fred built two very believable stoves and a whole cooking range entirely out of wood with a internal red bulbs for effect), the background sound of the crackling fire within added another level of realism, enhanced by two red-filtered floods flickering out of sync to light the room with warm shadows. A seemingly simple FX was to give the illusion of someone playing a piano. However, the next scene needed the blessed instrument to be rapidly struck from the set during a very short interval. Fred therefore built a lightweight half-size “boudoir” piano painted white which had no metal frame or internal works and into which was inserted a carefully positioned and suitably-sized speaker; the actress had to simulate playing the keys and, to make matter worse, the piano was located downstage right, only some four feet from the audience front row. Considerable rehearsals produced an impeccable result, so much so that during one interval, a member of the audience was so intrigued that he crept back from the bar, mounted the stage and sat at the piano!
Last but not least… the ringing phone! Many of the Grange’s shows required an on-stage phone that the actor would answer on cue. Typically a larger theatre might use a recorded ring played through a loudspeaker. That just wouldn’t work for the closeness of the audience in the Grange auditorium, who would recognise the tonal characteristics straight away and as a result lose their being “in the zone” of the show. We obtained an old British Post Office unit that could generate the ringing current, by turning a handle rapidly, to drive the bell in exactly the same way as in those early phone days. For more realism this current was passed through a relay controlled timer circuit to generate the UK cadence of ring-ring….. ring-ring. (The actor would then ‘answer’ it and hold an entirely imaginary conversation. The wicked thought did pass through our minds on one show to actually connect the instrument with one in the box – imagine the on-stage consternation if the hapless actor discovered someone on the other end!).
BBC Outside Broadcast recordings
(At the first BBC recording in 1979 – they returned on several occasions – when our tiny theatre was used for Pam Ayres and Martin Jarvis in a performance of Radio Four’s long-running series With Great Pleasure, the visiting technicians were fascinated to explore our rats’ nest of temporary cabling, ex-Post Office equipment and home-made electronics and were very impressed. Us fledgling amateurs were delighted to see that from the large BBC Outside Broadcast lorry parked on the drive, came a similar assemblage of such a familiar rats’ nest of equipment and cabling!)
A nod to the humble Sound Engineer
During the theatre’s lifetime we only had seventeen sound operators and because they were a close part of the family, the list below appears informally, with Christian names sorted alphabetically. I salute them all, and was pleased to work alongside them in the box: Alexander Saroka, Brian Green*, Daniel Nightingale, Derek Edwards, Gordon Bowen & Dorae Whittenburg, Geoffery Benfield, Graham Rousell*, Hamish Young, Ian Bushrod*, Jill Cullyer, Keith Bennett, Peter Wroe*, Phil Morris, Roger Moon, Stephen Jakeman, Ted Shears. The chaps identified by an asterisk were working or retired British Telecom employees who between them had a huge range of electronic expertise and without which the development of our theatre’s sound capability would have been considerably the poorer.
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