By Ellie Jones, Cathedral Archivist
December is an interesting time at the Cathedral. Life gets busier and busier in the Cathedral with Advent and Christmas events, and there’s a change of pace in the Cathedral Libraru and Archives too. The season for teaching and group visits is largely over, and gradually the number of visiting researchers in the Reading Room reduces, as people focus their attention towards holidays, work parties, family and friends. So, in the Archives, it becomes a prime time to focus more on behind the scenes tasks like cataloguing.
One of the most delightful sets of records which came to the fore during this week’s cataloguing activities were the scripts, reel-to-reel master recordings, news cuttings and other ephemera generated by the Son et Lumière show of 1969. We still have visitors, 55 years later, who remember this sound and light extravaganza. It was a technical feat to stage – with projected lights, music and sound effects – and featured a history of the Cathedral in eleven scenes, beginning with construction of the medieval Cathedral, and ending with the restoration after the Second World War. The story was told in dramatic fashion through the voices of various bishops, deans, queens and stonemasons like Master Roger who, in a “deep Devon voice”, at one point muses “Aye, that Purbeck marble will answer well for the piers. Hard, that is, and deep in the bed: some of the blocks comes blue-grey, like the back of a mackerel”.
The script was by the journalist and broadcaster Jack White, who had written similar shows for other cathedrals. He declared that Exeter was so rich in sources of local history that it was hard to choose the best stories, and he hoped that he had “used dramatic licence without distorting historical truth”. The narrator was Andrew Cruickshank, a well-known actor from film, radio and theatre, best known at the time for playing Dr Cameron in the BBC TV series Doctor Finlay’s Casebook.
The show lasted an hour and ran nightly (except Sundays) from 28 June to 20 September 1969, as part of the Bishop Grandisson festival year. Tickets were priced at 6 shillings unreserved, or 21 shillings for front row seats, and it raised around £10,000 towards the Exeter Cathedral Campaign.
The next of the enormously popular sound and light experiences produced by Luxmuralis, this time on the theme of Time, is coming to the Cathedral from the 7-11 January. The 1969 show is still remembered by those who came, and the beautiful shows by Luxmuralis show every sign of being just as memorable.