My Mother.

Esther Sullivan

(Essie of the Alex; my mother)

I have had a few people ask me what my mother did at the Alex; the Alexandra Theatre, Birmingham, which I wrote recently about concerning Marlene Dietrich's appearance there in 1973.

Well she made the tea and bacon and eggs for the stars and backstage workers. She asked them all for autographs and her collection of autographs must have been worth a small fortune when the boss of the 'Alex' asked her for it, which she freely gave; where is it now, I wonder?

But I have no idea how she came to work there (but I'll guess, later on) – and we all worked there at one time or another; the family, I mean.

When we were growing up, she was a company director at a firm in Birmingham called The Lawden Manufacturing Company in the city centre. She would arrive home in the evenings at around 7:30 – 8:00 and tell my dad about her whole day. He would hear about the ups and downs at the board meetings, the welfare of the staff and employees, the office politics and a lot of gossip.

I would sit there listening to this too and I would love it. I knew what Tom Pierce was like at work when we went around and met his family, I knew a lot about the managing director, Mr W.W. Kirk and knew he liked a drop of whisky.

When he would come to our house, with his wife, for dinner the whisky bottle would take quite a beating.

He was a dynamic little Scotsman with the gift of the gab; he was brought to my mind when I first heard the J.M. Barrie phrase 'There are few more impressive sights than a Scotsman on the make,' as he certainly was on the make. He had a great knack for publicity and we were quite used to seeing him, and our mother, in the newspapers.

One time a whole supplement was devoted to the Lawden Manufacturing Company in the local paper and she was heavily featured.

Another time, when I was 16, a photographer came to the house and took photographs of the whole family.

And why did they profile us?

Because my mother was a company director and she was a woman!!! 
Unheard of in those days.

Who would look after us?

Who would do the cooking and cleaning?

My dad didn't really like being photographed as he knew the men at work would take the piss and jeer that he was doing housework; he was right. Many a time when I went in to work (at the post office) people in their offices would ask me if I'd done the washing up – but that was then; this is now.

It never occurred to me in those days that you shouldn't drink and drive and many a night Bill Kirk would drive home from our house in his posh Jaguar with a good few drams inside him; but he got away with it and survived; I presume.

Barely a week went by without him being interviewed on TV about this that and the other and, many years later, when I was working at a TV station in Birmingham I saw him waiting to go on to be interviewed.

There he was; all five feet six of him strutting about like a Scottish James Cagney spouting controversial sound bites which would get picked up by other news sources.

One day he was discussing 'prisoner's rights' and he was complaining that they had too many already and used the phrase 'they get a bunk up at the weekend.'

People sitting around the studio burst into laughter and the next day the phrase was headlines in the newspapers.

Bunk up, by the way, was – sexual intercourse; still is!

It all ended when my mother came home one day and told us she'd resigned. Kirk kind of kept in touch but not much.

I saw him at the railway station in Wolverhampton when I was a drama student and he invited me into the first class compartment. I didn't really want to go in there but he assured me all would be okay and we sat and discussed my mother; he was surrounded by a lot of other men in suits on their way to London.

I think one day a friend of a friend of my mother's asked her if she could help out at the Alex; she (the f of f) had a job backstage making tea and snacks and she wanted my mother to relieve her for a week or two and this is what she did – but I have no idea how she became a permanent fixture there. The little canteen was about nine feet by about twelve with a hole in the wall which was the counter.

She wasn't a great cook at home but she could sure do bacon and eggs so I got used to seeing the most unlikely of people sitting down on one of the stools, eating this from the shelf (which is about all it was) which surrounded the room.

People like Laurence Olivier, Richard Todd, Margaret Lockwood, Leslie Phillips – all these people well known in Britain at the time - and when they did a pantomime I saw Des O'Conner and a host of other so called stars.

To Essie, thanks for the bacon and eggs read most of the dedications on the signed autographs.

When touring in a play at various theatres and venues, stars would come up to me and wonder where they had met me and I would tell them.

My mother was mentioned in the artistic director's autobiography – she was referred to as Essie of the Alex; I had a copy once which was by Derek Salberg.

My brother eventually went to work there part time as a backstage electrician – moving the lights etc. That's where he met his wife who was the stage manager.

I did the electrics too, for a time, when I was at drama school and I also did the sound a few times. My dad would help my mother and burnt the toast one night and the whole audience could smell it; I would also help her once in a while with the dishes.

Sometimes we would do 'get ins' and/or 'get outs' – I hated those but they were well paid; it involved clearing all the scenery from a touring production, flats, scenery, props and costumes, etc, from the theatre before the next tour came in.

We worked for the world famous Sadlers Welles Opera, London Festival Ballet and the Gilbert & Sullivan Company, D'oyle Carte.

Even now if I hear snatches from their operas or The Sleeping Beauty ballet I remember the times we had cues.

Derek Salberg was a cricket enthusiast and would cast his plays depending on how good a cricketer you were; but he never cast me – I was Essie's son.