SW3822 : Minack Theatre, Porthcurno, 1949
taken 75 years ago, near to St Levan, Cornwall, England
An open air theatre set into a gully in the cliffs above Minack Point, near Porthcurno. It was created over the winter of 1931-2 by Rowena Cade, who lived in nearby Minack House, her gardener, Billy Rawlings, and his assistant, Charles Angove, moving granite boulders and profiling the earth slopes to create terraces for seating. The first performance there was of The Tempest, taking place on 16 August 1932.
Over the years Rowena Cade and her gardeners developed the site further, with the stage built, further terraces added and the surrounds landscaped. Most of the construction was of concrete, built using sand from Porthcurno Beach, and sculpted by Rowena Cade with her own designs.
It was commandeered during the Second World War and fortified to provide protection from a potential invasion using the nearby beaches. After the war it was rebuilt, re-opening in 1951, with a former pillbox serving as the box office until replaced by the current shop and café in 1998.
It now puts on around 20 productions a year, with a seating capacity of around 750.
My father David was an enthusiastic and competent amateur photographer and owned a prewar Leica camera. These photos were taken by him in the course of family holidays principally in Cornwall, Somerset and Pembrokeshire, in the 1940s and 1950s when I was a small boy.
My parents kept holiday diaries into which the prints were pasted, so it has been possible to locate and date images with reasonable accuracy. A large proportion of the pictures in the diaries are of family members and not suitable for Geograph, although people do appear in some of the pictures where the scenic value makes them worthwhile for the historical value.
The photos are scanned from small commercial prints (about 3 x 2 inches which was the normal size in those days) rather than from original negatives (long since jettisoned!). Even so, I have been surprised how much detail is captured by using a large dpi scan setting; they are still equivalent to a 10-12 megapixel digital image, although reduced size images have been submitted for this series.