Jot do! Jot is blogger site to “A place to record information. Facts, Data,Trivia, Ephemera, Knowledge from any source – Letters, Diaries, Manuscripts, Journals, Notebooks, Recipes, Anecdotes, Reports, Art, Files, Snapshots, Documents, Formulas, Catalogues, Press cuttings, Memoirs, Tales, Eyewitness accounts (‘I was there’), ‘I once met…’, Quotations, Found Objects & Total Trivia” and can be found here http://www.jot101.com/2014/07/the-umbrella-club.html with this link going specifically to their post on the Umbrella Club.
‘an independent, non-political, non profitmaking organisation for encouraging interest in art music, music, literature, the theatre and kindred subjects. It arranges lectures, recitals, dramatic performances and many related activities’
The Umbrella Club
Let no-one accuse Jot 101 of being Londoncentric. We at Jot HQ welcome quirky Jots on provincial goings-on and just to prove it here is one issue of the quarterly house journal of a Coventry-based arts organisation called The Umbrella Club.
The club, which was opened by The Goons in 1956 operated first from humble premises in Little Park Street, bang in the city centre, a three minute walk from the controversial new cathedral. In 1960 it described itself as:
‘an independent, non-political, non profitmaking organisation for encouraging interest in art music, music, literature, the theatre and kindred subjects. It arranges lectures, recitals, dramatic performances and many related activities’
Its house journal was a well produced quarterly anthology of poetry, short stories, reviews and art work entitled, rather imaginatively, Umbrella, which by 1960 was already into its second volume. In the Spring issue, editor T.C.Watson, a local English teacher, urges potential contributors to submit material that paints a portrait of life in the Midlands, and which reflect or interpret:
‘such problems as labour relations, race relations, the world of the teenager, the changing patterns of family life in a mobile society and the attitudes of the citizen of today to the established institutions of the past’
An earnest ambition this, at the start of a decade which saw sociology take over from English as the coolest degree option. However, it seems that many of the contributors to Umbrella were English graduates, with a strong bias towards that coolest of all English Universities in the sixties, Keele. Of the wannabe Amises, Drabbles and Larkins who contributed to two of the 1960 issues, only two names stands out—local wunderkind novelist Susan Hill, then just 18, and Keele graduate Zulfikar Ghose, who handled the magazine’s poetry review pages. Hill, now 72, went on to become a sort of heir to Daphne du Maurier, while Ghose, a little older, is an acclaimed poet now based in the United States.
We should add that Hill, whose first scandalous novel had a theatrical background, was also a budding playwright, and must have attended many a production at the Umbrella Club while a sixth former at Coventry’s Barr’s Hill School, while Philip Larkin who, after all was born in Coventry, had at least one poem published in Umbrella. As a jazz nut he may also have heard some pretty cool notes in Little Park Street.[RH]
After about 65yrs, I'm back in contact with Jean Gough (now Jennings). She and her sister Jill were stalwarts way back at the beginning. I played the younger brother in "The White Devil" and was subscriptions manager of the Magazine until I left Cov and went off to RADA.
Thank you Roger. All the information pre 1969 (when I joined) is second hand, so happy to receive any memories or material that you have, for the site. While I have a couple of photos of the Umbrella at Little Park Street, I don't have one of the Umbrella at Queen Victoria Road. There are a few in the Umbrella archives in the Coventry History Centre at the Herbert but I live up north now.