My first professional appearance as an actor was at the age of 15, in the winter of 1952-53, when I played Baby Bear and Gnome in a rather grisly children’s Christmas entertainment calledy Buckie’s Bears at the Leatherhead theatre, Surrey. Hazel Vincent Wallace was the commanding Mummy Bear, ever anxious that her mischievous son wasn’t getting into trouble.
The author of this strange piece, which had been hugely popular in the West End in the 1930s, was Henry Stopes-Roe, who had dictated it to his mother, the renowned pioneer of contraception, Marie Stopes, when he was a precocious child. Both Henry and his mother came to see the show and Hazel, no longer wearing her bear costume, introduced them to the company after the performance.
