page_title: George Speaight
section_title: Later life
hierarchical_section_title: George Speaight / Later life
caption_attribution_description: English: Pollock's Toy Museum, Scala Street W1
context_page_description: George Victor Speaight was a theatre historian, author and performer and the leading authority on 19th-century toy theatre.
context_section_description: At the end of World War II Speaight and Gerald Morice were contacted by a family who had found a collection of marionettes in a barn. Speaight and Morice examined these and found them to be rare Victorian puppets thought to have been lost or destroyed years before. The two restored the puppets and Speaight, initially with Morice and later other partners, performed with them as the Old Time Marionettes and the Tiller Clowes Puppets at the Battersea Pleasure Gardens for the Festival of Britain in 1951, and later for the Museum of London and for the Theatre Museum.
  His book Juvenile Drama: The History of the English Toy Theatre appeared in December 1946. In the same year he became manager of Benjamin Pollock's Toy Shop. Its owner modernised the stock to appeal to a contemporary audience with, among other innovations, a toy theatre version of the 1948 Laurence Olivier film of Hamlet devised by Speaight. However, the shop was a financial failure and it closed in 1951.
  His next book History of the English Puppet Theatre appeared in 1955. He then worked as an editor of children’s encyclopaedias and reference books, initially at Odhams Press. He later joined George Rainbird's firm where he edited the Catholic Encyclopaedia, before becoming editorial director of Rainbird Reference.
  In 1962 he campaigned for an inscribed plaque commemorating Samuel Pepys to be placed was on the wall of St. Paul's Church in Covent Garden. In his diary in 1662 Pepys made the first mention of a Punch and Judy show in England at Covent Garden. In 1987 at the 325th anniversary of Pepys’ sighting Speaight dressed as Pepys and took part in the grand procession around Covent Garden complete with quill and diary in his hand.
  He retained an interest in the theatre, being a co-founder the London Munich Puppet Players; a founding member of the Society for Theatre Research, editing its journal Theatre Notebook from 1969 to 1976; and producing a catalogue of 19th century plays. He held prominent roles at the Union Internationale de la Marionnette, at the British Puppet and Model Theatre Guild, and as a jury member at the International Festival of Puppet Theatre at Bucharest. He founded or co-founded several other theatrical enterprises. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
  In 1968 Speaight became a trustee of Pollock's Toy Museum after its then owner Marguerite Fawdry turned her private museum into an educational charitable trust. He retired as a trustee in 2003 and in his honour Pollock's held the exhibition - 'George Speaight, a Life in Toy Theatre'.
  Speaight left reference publishing in 1974, but continued with theatrical activities during a long retirement. In 1980 he published The Book of Clowns and A History of the Circus. The George Speaight Collection of theatrical ephemera and archive material is held by the Department of Theatre and Performance at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
  In 1946 he married Mary Olive Mudd, a wood engraver. He was much affected by her death, five weeks before his own in December 2005, aged 91.  Together they had a son, Antony Speaight, QC, and a daughter, Margaret Hebblethwaite, the journalist.
caption: Pollock's Toy Museum - Speaight was to be associated with it for most of his life
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