Out & About Autumn 2019

Arts legacy

Five years ago, former actor Dorothy Rose Gribble bequeathed the Westridge Studio – a converted congregational chapel – to the Highclere community for people of all ages to use for ‘creative and performance arts activities’. A project is now under way to renovate the building and launch it once more in accordance with her wishes as ‘a centre for the arts in all its forms’. NWN Arts Editor TRISH LEE remembers DR, as she was known, and the heydays of her much-loved Westridge Drawing Room recitals.

M y first encounter – yes, that is the right word – with doughty patron of the arts Dorothy Rose Gribble was in the 80s. As director of Newbury’s Arts Workshop, I became aware of a low humming coming from the foyer outside my office and discovered DR tunefully rearranging all the events brochures to place her own Westridge flyers to the fore. Eschewing the ease of desktop publishing, she produced these A5 leaflets by hand, assembling tiny letterpress blocks to form the words that ran higgledy-piggledy across the page, invariably with an error or two corrected in ballpoint –– but they did the job and reflected the charm and eccentricity of DR herself. The Westridge Drawing Room recitals in DR’s Highclere home, a 19th-century former coaching inn in Star Lane, were genteel affairs, reminiscent of a bygone era. For a small membership fee, guests would attend monthly soirées of music, poetry or dramatic entertainment served with afternoon tea – quaint and quintessentially English. As well as going a little way to offset costs, the membership requirement was necessary to circumvent public entertainment licensing restrictions, which were not then applicable to private ‘clubs’. There was an underlying philosophy of wellbeing to the events, too, long before that became a thing.

It was Dorothy Rose’s mother Mrs Layton-Bennett – who claimed lineage to the family of poet John Milton and also the gift of healing – who began to welcome people to the Westridge House drawing room in the 1950s to listen to musicians, singers and actors that her own actor- daughter had met through her appearances at Edinburgh, ‘somewhere between the Fringe and the Festival’. The Westridge Healing Centre and Studio was set up in 1960. Six years after her mother’s death in 1978, DR returned to run the centre, calling on contacts from her Fringe days, as well as encouraging young musicians she’d met along the way. Audiences made themselves comfortable on the sofas and chairs, combined with a multitude of plump cushions, to be entertained by the professional performers and raconteurs – often internationally known – who in turn loved the intimate, friendly atmosphere that Westridge had to offer. At its peak, in the 1980s and 90s, some 30 members subscribed to the recital club. When in early 2000s, the 87-something DR – who dismissed enquiries as to her age with a ‘My dear, I’m an actor and I’m whatever age the part demands’ – found the running of Westridge House too much and decided to downsize. She sold the family home and events continued

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