Odee Harris after Maisie Gay:     Theatre after WW2
Andrew Oliver,  Photos and newspaper extracts (unknown attribution) courtesy Andrew Oliver,  May 2020
Oscar Drewe Harris (sometimes called OD and sometimes Odee Harris) was a theatre manager who ran the Northey Arms with his partner Maisie Gay between 1932 and 1935. Maisie was a former star of the stage in London and New York and no doubt much of the money came from her. Maisie was in poor health and they built a property Whirligig in Kingsdown where they lived as man and wife for the next decade although never married. Maisie died in 1945 and Odee tried to resume his theatrical career.

I recently found some cuttings from the Wiltshire Chronicle and Herald relating to a 1948 production by Mr Odee Harris of Box that included my father Bert Oliver and my uncle Ted Oliver. In October of that year they performed in a show called Harlequinade.
The revue appears to be rather old-fashioned, without chorus dancers because of cost, and music by Bob Busby at the piano.[1] The first performance was at Newton St Loe, Bath, in the open air and to St Martin’s Hospital staff and patients.[2] My father and uncle performed as comperes in the show as well as in numerous character sketches playing the parts of railway employees, a policeman, and young scooter rider.

​In October 1948 the famous stage and film star Jessie Matthews was added to the revue cast of Harlequinade. She had been a famous singing and acting star of stage and screen in the mid-1930s but whose reputation had declined since. Nonetheless, it was a considerable upgrade of the show and the management anticipated a much larger audience, booking the Pavilion rather than the Pump Room in Bath.[3]

​The publicity launch of her appearance featured an Olympic runner and the official torch, fresh from the London Olympics in August.[4]
Jessie Matthews was popular in the city of Bath where her film Ever Green had been selected as the first show to open the Forum cinema in 1934. She had connections with Charles Cochrane and Noel Coward, both of whom were devoted to Maisie Gay, Odee’s partner, and through them she felt indebted to Odee Harris. Her reputation declined after the Second World War and she took several small parts whenever offered. Jessie obviously liked to come to Bath and agreed to open the Holy Trinity June Fayre in 1950 when she was appearing in Pygmalion at the Theatre Royal.[5] Later that year she was in Castle in the Air at the theatre.
​In the 1960s she was well-known for playing Mrs Dale in the radio soap Mrs Dale's Diary.

​My Family
My father had been born in Bath but stayed in London after the war. He hoped to carve out a career in comedy writing. He mixed with the Crazy Gang and Max Miller whose reputation for being mean was true, he claimed. He also went to watch Chelsea FC with Richard Attenborough whose film career had already taken off. My father went on to write sketches for Frankie Howard who said he would pay for any sketches he used but didn’t, even when my father saw Howard on stage using some of his material. Disillusioned, my father returned to Bath in 1948 and worked for the Ministry of Defence. This is when he tried a short period of amateur dramatics, including the Harlequinade show. ​

The Shoemaker’s Wife with my father and Valerie Harding
My father did star in an amateur production of the comedy The Shoemaker’s Wife with Valerie Harding in the early 1950s. The Stage newspaper described the play as A charming, unsophisticated trifle .. hardly any plot. It featured a young, fiery-spirited wife of a middle-aged, patient shoemaker.[6] A review of a production by the Glenthorn School of Drama and Elocution, Bath, was more complimentary: A two-act farce and an attractive, colourful spectacle but I don’t believe Albert or Edward Oliver had a long acting career. Theatrical taste altered quickly after the war. Rattigan became hugely successful with upper middle-class anguish until that genre was totally superseded by Osbourne’s kitchen sink realism. Neither had time for revue sketches or two-act farces.

​The only other photo I have is a Christmas Card from the Roaming Revellers in 1950 which included his brother Ted Oliver and brother-in-law Ken Bryant. I don’t believe either are in this photo and I doubt that any of the other signatories lived in Box. He decided that running a pub gave him an outlet for his humour and he became a licensee of the Crystal Palace, Bath, from 1950 until he retired in 1978.
  
My father later joined me during my two and a half years as sub-postmaster at Box Post Office but he sadly died about
​2 months after I took over the business. Regrettably, he rarely spoke about his early life.
Odee Harris stayed in the local area and died in Bathford in 1975, when it was asserted that he left a widow Audrey Mary, although some dispute the relationship was married. The world that he and Maisie Gay had known was only a distant
​memory by then.
​References
[1] Wiltshire Times and Trowbridge Advertiser, 25 September 1948
[2] Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette, 10 July 1948
[3] Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette, 25 September 1948
[4] Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette, 2 October 1948
[5] Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette, 17 June 1950 and 4 November 1950
[6] The Stage, 10 July 1952