The Village Hall – the drama group’s theatre
This history of the Village Hall was written by the original SBADS archivist in the early 1990s.
The Village Hall was the last of three halls provided for public in South Brent, the first having been the Vicar’s Hall [now Coulton clocks], built in 1861, and the second the Millswood Hall, created by Mr W Hawke from part of his premises at Millswood Mill in 1904. These two halls served the village’s needs until around the beginning of 1910 when so many dances, entertainments and other functions were going on that it was felt that another and larger hall was needed, and plans for this were put into motion.
After several delays, mainly caused by a problem with the water supply, the hall began to rise on a plot of church land adjacent to the cemetary and, ironically, over an old well which is said to lie beneath the floor just inside the entrance. The hall was completed ready for use in December 1911, and that being the Coronation year of King George V it was decided to call it the Coronation Church Hall, a name, however, that soon got shortened to just the Church Hall.
The building consisted of a short entrance lobby, the Committee Room, the main hall, the stage and wings, the two dressing rooms, and the stairs leading down to the back door and to the three-roomed basement, which could also be reached by the short flight of steps leading from the main hall. There were also ladies’ and gents’ cloakrooms but these have not survived.
The small basement room contained a sink (still there into the 1990s) and one cold tap (long gone dry) and ·here until 1975 all the refreshments were prepared and carried up to the main hall on trays. The building was lit by gas lamps affixed to the walls and a gas boiler in the basement provided hot water to heat the main hall, though whether it ran into radiators or pipes is not known. The seating capacity was put at 500 (these being the days before Fire Regulations) and the seating took the form of small wooden chairs and long wooden benches.
The pride of the hall was its superbly-sprung dance floor, reckoned to be among the best in Devon – one senior Brentonian has described dancing on it as ‘just like dancing on air’. It is said that during the first World War when the hall was scheduled to house German prisoners it was feared that their marching would destroy the floor’s ‘spring’ so all the boards were blocked. When the blocks were eventually removed, however, it was found that the floorboards had all gone rigid and as another senior villager put it ‘They never sprang again!’ Another story says that it was the GIs who ruined.the floor in World War Two by ‘jitterbugging on it in their hob-nail boots’; but this story can be discounted if only because no American soldier ever wore hob-nail boots!
No one knows when the hall changed over from gas to electricity. It is thought that the gas was piped to the hall from the railway station over the road and it’s possible that the gas was cut off when the road was metalled in 1927, though of course the hall could have had electricity long before that. In the 1950s (and most probably the 1940s too) the hall was heated by coal-burning stoves which continually belched out clouds of smoke so that doors and windows had to keep being opened to clear the smoky air. The coal was kept in a basement room and its dust, we are told, ‘got everywhere’, which doesn’t say much for the state of the food prepared in the vicinity.
In the late 1960s plans were afoot for selling the hall to the village and many fund-raising events were mounted to help towards the cost. The hall was eventually bought for £1000 in 1970 and re-named the Village Hall. Five years later, again with help of fund-raising events, an extension containing a kitchen, side hall and cloakrooms was built onto the northern side of the hall, and oil-fired central heating was installed.
About the same time the question arose of what to do with the dance floor which by then had become so badly worn that it was considered to be dangerous. Some were all for refurbishing it, some for replacing it, but others said that both would be too costly and that the answer was to cover it over. In the end the last view won the day and the once-lovely floor disappeared beneath a layer of industrial hardboard.
One day in the late 1970s the hall itself came close to disappearing. On that day half the people in the village were attending a Fete in a nearby field when suddenly a voice came over the loudspeakers yelling ‘Don’t panic, don’t panic – but the Village Hall’s on fire! All the men get down there quick and help to put it out!’ One mad rush! But by the time they got there the fire engines had arrived. Fortunately the flames were confined to the roof and very little damage was done.
In 1988 a store room, a Youth Club room, a passage with a lavatory off it, and another set of steps leading down to the basement were built on the kitchen side of the hall. Never again would entertainers in their often extremely flimsy costumes have to run the gauntlet of rain and gale to reach the loo from backstage! [But we still have to run the gauntlet to get to the modern dressing rooms! Ed.] At the same time radiators were installed in the dressing rooms which added another bit of comfort.
Meanwhile the old part of the hall was steadily deteriorating, so in 1989 a massive repair and redecorating programme was undertaken by committee members and other helpers, who spick-and-spanned the whole hall both inside and out and even made new stage and window curtains. Two years later, with the aid of grants the old pitched roof was re-tiled (by ex-SBADS member Francis Sparkes), and any day now the badly-leaking flat roof will be replaced. Next on the list is the complete refurbishing of the kitchen in accordance with Health Safety regulations, and after that it’s – well, a lot of things, for the Village Hall is continually being improved in one way or another.
It is all a far cry from how things were on that long ago day of 26th December 1911, when none other than the drama group’s founder, Mr Arthur Manning, became the first person to use the hall by staging one of his very popular Boxing Day concerts in it. Since then the hall has been used for almost every kind of function from whist drives to wedding receptions, and by almost every kind of group from the local Women’s Institute to visiting Brownie packs. The temporary ‘home’ of German prisoners during the first World War, it was a temporary school for 671 evacuees and their teachers who arrived in Brent from London and Plymouth during the second World War. And every Friday throughout the whole of the 1950s the hall became a cinema (the outline of the screen is still in situ over the main hall doors), which was all very well for the movie-goers but a pain for the drama group during productions, for it meant that sets had to be dismantled last thing on Thursday nights and re-rected on Saturday mornings ready for the last performance.
The numbers of entertainments staged in the hall are too numerous to count, let alone list. but mention must be made of the Village Hall’s own fund-raising shows, which have been put on every year since the early 1970s. And we really must mention one other show for it was probably the most successful production that the hall as ever witnessed. It was the drama group’s Grand Victory Concert, staged to celebrate the end of the war in July 1945, and so popular was it that its three-night run had to be extended to five, and more than 1,500 people saw it.
Like many another old hall and theatre the Village Hall is said to have a ghost. Stories have been told of how on perfectly calm and windless days the main hall doors have opened and closed as if admitting someone. On other occasions persistent tapping has been heard coming from backstage when no one else has been in the building but the person who heard the tapping. Then there was the time when an actress doing a solo spot in a certain production glimpsed out of the corner of her eye a vague figure walking on stage and out of sight behind behind her. Thinking that something had gone wrong with the back-cloth and that a member of the stage crew had come on to fix it, she afterwards inquired who it had been – and was assured by all who had watched her act that no one had gone on stage.
It has been claimed too that now and again the ghost bursts into song, though no one has yet been able to determine what song the ghost was singing. A pity, that, for if we knew the song we might just be able to identify the singer. Oh well, at least it seems to be happy ghost!
[In 2023 the editor of this website found himself searching the hall for a non-existent visitor after hearing a hand-dryer turn on in an empty ladies’ lavatory, so at least it seems to be a hygienic ghost as well.]
Since the ’90s
In the last 30 years much has remained the same at the Village Hall, which is still a much-loved and well-used part of South Brent’s life. It has been joined by a new village facility: the Old School Centre, purchased by the village in 1997, which provides even more community space; but the capacious village hall still provides the main centre for large-scale activities.
Much, however has changed, not least in the addition of a whole new floor above the 1988 side extensions, which have provided not only a new meeting room and a dedicated stage lighting control room, but – at last! – permanent, dry storage for most of SBADS’s extensive collection of costumes. This was built after a long-held ambition to build a dedicated centre for SBADS came to nought in the ‘nineties, so SBADS was able to turn its fund-raising to helping the Village Hall expand upwards.
There have been many refurbishments along the way: the original sprung floor may be gone, but a fancy sprung maple floor has been reinstated in the main hall that is just as suitable for badminton as it is for dancing; the kitchen has been brought up to modern catering standards and the side room equipped with a moveable bar; solar panels generate power during the day and low-wattage LED lighting now shines brightly from an insulated ceiling in the evenings; benches have been replaced with well-padded chairs (a blessing for our long-suffering audiences); there’s even a small lift if you look carefully.
Who knows what the ghost thinks of all the changes. But the time-traveller from 1911 would spot many things that were familiar: the basic form of the main hall, committee room and stage are just as they always were, and the backstage (former) dressing rooms are little changed, complete with traces of the gas lighting.