Cockermouth has never gone short of people willing to put on a play. The earliest trace runs back to December 1867, when the Carlisle Journal reported a Cockermouth Amateur Dramatic Society performance for the inmates of the Union Workhouse. The church choir and the volunteer rifle band shared the bill. The evening closed with a comic turn, Bachelor Housekeeping. That single notice sets amateur drama in the town more than 150 years ago.
By the early 1900s the society stood on firm ground. In December 1904 the West Cumberland Times covered the "recently formed" company staging Our Boys for the Cockermouth Nursing Home. Garrick followed at the Public Hall in 1905, then a mixed programme of farce and song at the William Fletcher Institute in Brigham. Good causes and full halls set the pattern early.
A second strand appeared in 1927. The Workers' Educational Association formed a company that became the Cockermouth Players. Through the 1930s, 40s and 50s they entered the British Drama League's one-act festival year after year and held their own against the best in the North. Much of that strength came from a local playwright, Gwenyth Jones. Her comedy There's No Problem reached the final of the British Drama League Festival in 1927 and still drew praise thirty years on. Her later plays kept the Players reaching finals, among them a divisional final at Keswick in 1951.
For years it could be that the two companies ran side by side, the papers used their names loosely, sometimes as one. Could it be that Cockermouth supported more than one amateur dramatic group at once?
The name endured. Newcastle Journal listings from 1989 to 1995 show the Cockermouth Amateur Dramatic Society still at work, with Habeas Corpus and Dario Fo's Trumpets and Raspberries among the productions. The same name, the same purpose it had held a century before.
That thread runs straight to CADS today. The Kirkgate's first ever performance was a CADS production, Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, directed by Bob Pritchard. The company has never shied from a challenge: one Ayckbourn play called for a real car, so audiences climbed to the upstairs hall and found a full-size Mini on the floor. At Christmas it favours comedies such as the Farndale Avenue series in which a hapless society takes on a great title and gets everything wrong, from A Christmas Carol to a Macbeth billed as "A right Comedy of Errors."
CADS still works from borrowed rooms - the Kirkgate Centre, a church hall, the Friends Meeting House - much as it always has. It reads plays in the local pubs and the Victoria and joins forces with neighbours on projects like Tommy's Story. Over more than a century and a half the names have shifted and the venues have changed, but the town's appetite for putting on a show has never let up.
By the early 1900s the society stood on firm ground. In December 1904 the West Cumberland Times covered the "recently formed" company staging Our Boys for the Cockermouth Nursing Home. Garrick followed at the Public Hall in 1905, then a mixed programme of farce and song at the William Fletcher Institute in Brigham. Good causes and full halls set the pattern early.
A second strand appeared in 1927. The Workers' Educational Association formed a company that became the Cockermouth Players. Through the 1930s, 40s and 50s they entered the British Drama League's one-act festival year after year and held their own against the best in the North. Much of that strength came from a local playwright, Gwenyth Jones. Her comedy There's No Problem reached the final of the British Drama League Festival in 1927 and still drew praise thirty years on. Her later plays kept the Players reaching finals, among them a divisional final at Keswick in 1951.
For years it could be that the two companies ran side by side, the papers used their names loosely, sometimes as one. Could it be that Cockermouth supported more than one amateur dramatic group at once?
The name endured. Newcastle Journal listings from 1989 to 1995 show the Cockermouth Amateur Dramatic Society still at work, with Habeas Corpus and Dario Fo's Trumpets and Raspberries among the productions. The same name, the same purpose it had held a century before.
That thread runs straight to CADS today. The Kirkgate's first ever performance was a CADS production, Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, directed by Bob Pritchard. The company has never shied from a challenge: one Ayckbourn play called for a real car, so audiences climbed to the upstairs hall and found a full-size Mini on the floor. At Christmas it favours comedies such as the Farndale Avenue series in which a hapless society takes on a great title and gets everything wrong, from A Christmas Carol to a Macbeth billed as "A right Comedy of Errors."
CADS still works from borrowed rooms - the Kirkgate Centre, a church hall, the Friends Meeting House - much as it always has. It reads plays in the local pubs and the Victoria and joins forces with neighbours on projects like Tommy's Story. Over more than a century and a half the names have shifted and the venues have changed, but the town's appetite for putting on a show has never let up.