Dad and Doctor Marigold

Dad

During my recent adventures at the Rochester Dickens Festival my thoughts turned, as they annually do during the three days, to my father.

My dad had always studied the works of Dickens with the fascination of a family member and with the intensity of a scholar. He knew his stuff without a doubt and loved to share his knowledge. Unfortunately for him, none of his children showed the slightest interest in the life and works of our great great grandfather.

But Dad didn’t mind. He wrote articles, gave speeches and told us that ‘one day you will discover Dickens. It may be when you are 20, it may be when you are 70 but one day it will happen. In the meantime just do what you want to do, but do it well. Be the best as you can at whatever your chosen field is.’

He put no pressure on us, we weren’t sat down with a bowl of gruel to read 5 chapters of Hard Times before bedtime. He supported us. He advised us. He encouraged us.

My chosen career was not a traditional, or a safe one but dad had loved performing in his youth and was always taking me to rehearsals and giving me advice and feedback after a show. I used to talk far too quickly until he gave me the best piece of advice that any actor could wish for: ‘Always finish one word before starting the next.’ It is brilliant in its simplicity.

Dad

In 1993 when I was approached and asked to recreate one of Charles Dickens’s readings of A Christmas Carol I tentatively asked him if he knew of any books that I could read on the subject and this was when I realised how much he had restrained himself over the years. He burst like a balloon, and all of the knowledge, research, contacts and opinion came pouring out of him. He was like an excited child who had been keeping a secret until Christmas morning.

He told me which books to read, which scholars to speak to, where to find the version that Dickens himself had performed. However he advised me not to try and do it AS Charles Dickens, I should do it as myself. And of course there was the old mantra: ‘Do it well. Be the best you can’

Whenever I performed in Rochester Dad would be there, as anonymous as a man who looked just like Charles Dickens could be in the Medway Towns at festival time. He stood outside the room I was to perform in, marshalling the audience to their seats.

He, however, never sat. He was too nervous for me and would stand at the back of the room, his hand deep in his pocket, jangling his change. From my vantage point on stage I could always tell how nervous he was getting by the sound of the bullion shifting. He would get furious looks from audience members but he would never stop jangling. I really don’t think he knew he was doing it.

After a show in Rochester

Doctor Marigold
Over the years I performed a number of Charles’s own readings, with Nickleby always being a favourite, as well as shows that I created myself: ‘Sketches by Boz by Dickens’, ‘A Tale of Two Speeches’, ‘Mr Dickens is Coming!’ and others.

And then one year I realised that I didn’t have any new material to perform at the festival. Dad, of course, had advice: ‘You should try Doctor Marigold; it would suit your style with the fast sales patter. People will love it.’

You would have thought that by now I might have realised that Dad knew what he was talking about but on this occasion I became an opinionated know-it-all son and completely disregarded his advice. Instead I put together an awful programme of short readings from various novels that had no theme, no coherence, no style and by the end practically no audience either. I was so depressed at the end of the festival that I was on the point of giving it all up.

Fortunately I didn’t and bounced back the following year with some other show – but Marigold lay buried deep at the back of my mind, irrationally associated with my failure of the previous year.

The years passed and I loved being a performer, which is all I’d ever really dreamed of. New shows came, some stayed, some went but Doctor Marigold remained stubbornly unperformed.

Canterbury 2005
In 2005 I received a great honour when I was invited to become President of The Dickens Fellowship, as my father had been before me. Dad was so proud and once again gave me plenty of advice.

The Presidency is officially bestowed at the Fellowship’s annual conference which in 2005 was in Canterbury, a city with strong Dickens connections, thanks mainly to David Copperfield.

On the Saturday night banquet I gave a speech, and in it paid huge tribute to the influence of my father and, as requested by him, sent his best wishes to his many friends in the room. The applause for him was warm, affectionate and genuine.

As I left the dinner I switched on my mobile phone to receive the dreadful news that, almost as I had been speaking, Dad had suffered a heart attack and died.

I rushed straight to the family home, in costume, to be with Mum. It is silly the things that you remember, but I’d promised Dad that I’d prune the massive wisteria climbing over the front of the house so on Sunday morning, wearing the Victorian garb from the night before (I had nothing else with me), I climbed the ladder and did the pruning in waistcoat and cravat. He would have enjoyed that!

Dad left me many memories and many things, but above all else he gave me my career, he inspired and supported me throughout. He let me make mistakes and helped me to understand them and, of course, he suggested that I should perform Doctor Marigold.

I don’t recall which year it was, maybe the following summer, but once more I arrived at Rochester with nothing left in my repertoire and for the first time in years I began to think about Doctor Marigold.

If truth be told I’d never actually read the piece and knew nothing about it. Dad had mentioned the fast paced sales patter and I couldn’t quite understand why a Doctor would be doing that. It all seemed a bit silly to me.

Oh, how I should have listened to my father. Oh, I should have trusted him. Doctor Marigold is such a beautiful tale. It is moving, tragic, uplifting and such fun to perform.

The central character is a market trader, a cheap jack, and was christened Doctor in honour of the doctor who was called to assist at his birth.

The story had first appeared in the 1864 Christmas edition of Charles’s magazine ‘All the Year Round’ and in the following year Charles included it in his now prolific public reading tours where it became an instant success.

Charles had two categories of readings, the long major performance, which usually came from one of the main novels (Nicholas Nickleby, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield and of course A Christmas Carol), and the shorter, often comic pieces to finish the evening off. The fact that he, as a great showman, decided to include Doctor Marigold as one of his major pieces, suggests to me that he wrote it purely with a view to performing it.

The style of the reading is certainly different to his other major pieces in that the performer becomes the character and addresses the audience directly, rather than acting as a narrator. This was brave of Dickens, for much of his success was built on his ability to swap between characters quickly, giving each a different voice and personality. In Doctor Marigold there would be no opportunity to show such flair; he was chained to a single persona.

Marigold himself is a gentle, positive and resilient man, bouncing back from a series of tragedies that life has imposed on him.

A piece like Marigold you can rehearse as often as you like but it won’t be until an audience is present that you can discover how the reading really works. As soon as I began to read in Eastgate House on the Friday afternoon of the festival the show came alive.

I experienced a phenomenon which is astounding for an actor and that is to discover a complete empathy with the character you are playing. No, even that doesn’t capture the experience I had. Having an empathy suggests that I, Gerald Dickens, fully understood he, Doctor Marigold and that doesn’t come close to what I experienced. I WAS Doctor Marigold, I was feeling his feelings, suffering his pain and rejoicing in his successes.

I have had these experiences before but, due to the nature of my shows, if I have identified with a character so completely, it is only for a portion of my performance. With Marigold I got to be him for the entire show.

The reading was well received and the praise was fulsome, much of the audience’s delight coming from the fact that they did not know the piece and so had no idea where the plot was taking them.

After the Festival was over I thought to myself ‘why have I never performed this before?’ Sorry Dad!

And now, whenever I could, I performed Doctor Marigold. I wanted as many people as possible to see this unknown reading, and I relished any opportunity to inhabit his persona.

One such performance was for the Rochester and Chatham Branch of The Dickens Fellowship who meet at the Dickens World visitor attraction, located near the Chatham Dockyard where Charles’s father had worked in the pay office.

The performance was still a reading but I was moving closer and closer to memorising it completely and therefore having no script in my hand to hamper the characterisation.

During the show I found that I was hardly referring to the page at all and it was then that I made my decision: the next time it would truly be an unencumbered Doctor Marigold talking directly to his friends.

Off The Book
It so happened that I was off on a cruise ship soon after and decided to use that opportunity to try the new format out.

Before leaving I spent a great deal of time finding pieces of costume that would work together. It was another interesting insight into Doctor’s character: he lives in a cart on the road, but is neat, clean and tidy. The costume could not be ragged and torn but must adequately represent his itinerant lifestyle.

Cruise ships are great places to blood new shows as there is so much opportunity to rehearse. I usually find a piece of deck and go up to it early in the morning and pace and mutter and mutter and pace until the words are second nature.

On that cruise I started out with two of my usual shows, to build up a following among the passengers before announcing that the next programme would be Doctor Marigold, bigging it up as much as I could.
The promotion worked and there was a good audience in the theatre. I stepped out onto the huge stage, completely empty with the exception of a little wooden stool. I made a few remarks of introduction and finished them with the words that Dickens used when he performed it: ‘And now, it’s time to let Doctor Marigold speak for himself’

“I am a cheap jack. My own father’s name was Willum Marigold…..”

I went through the whole story, all of the humour and the despair. All of the tragedy of his marriage and the huge emotional highs with his adopted daughter. The audience were spellbound and rapt with attention. They laughed and cried and clapped and cheered. At the end I was exhausted but knew that the show had changed completely and it would never, it could never, be a reading again.

Later in the Summer I was performing at a Dickens conference in California, ‘The Dickens Universe’ based at the University of Santa Cruz. It is a majorly scholarly affair with lectures of great depth and insight. If I struggled to understand the lectures themselves, they were nothing compared to the questions afterwards.

The group started discussing Dickens at 8.00am and continued all day until 10.00 pm. During the coffee, lunch and tea breaks the individuals broke off into little huddles and relaxed by discussing Dickens.
Each day there were three main lectures and the rest of the time was taken up in smaller discussion groups, led by young, intense undergraduates.

And there was I, in the middle of this vortex of knowledge and opinion, called upon to perform Doctor Marigold. Among the scholars there was one who had edited a recent edition of Marigold and knew every nuance, every comma, every interpretation. Gulp.

I rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed some more. I am sure that I have been more nervous in the past but I can’t quite call to mind when that might have been. I had to get this right; there was nowhere to hide as I would be living with all of these people for the next few days.

The night of the show arrived and the delegates arrived, in their droves. The hall was full and noisy and excited. Miriam Margoyles was there in the front row. Miriam is a Dickens lover and has performed her brilliant one-woman show ‘Dickens’ Women’ for many years. She was attending the conference not as a celebrity but as a passionate fan.

“I am a cheap jack. My own father’s name was Willum Marigold……”

God bless him! He did it again. The hall loved it. They cheered and whooped and stood. Miriam was clapping her hands in delight.

The next morning everyone wanted to talk about the show and how much it had affected them. Those that knew Doctor Marigold well, including the scholar who had worked with it for so long, said that they had seen it in a completely new light and that previously unnoticed depths of the man’s character became clear when he laid himself bare in front of his audience.

The fact that the story seems to work better in the flesh than it does in print certainly convinces me that Charles Dickens had a live performance in mind when he sat down to start writing.

I have spent a little time detailing a few of my experiences of Marigold to try and demonstrate what an extraordinary power the show has over many different types of audience.

A New Era
And now, a new chapter has opened in the story. When I performed for the Rochester and Chatham branch of the Fellowship there was a special guest in the audience, Patrick James, who has a background in television as a producer of documentaries. After the show Patrick approached me and asked if I would like to film Marigold for DVD distribution. I agreed, with the feeling that, like so many promises in this business, it would probably come to nothing. I had, however, not appreciated how dedicated Patrick was to the project and how that, when he gets his teeth into an idea, he doesn’t let go, like a terrier with a stick.

Suddenly we had a date for filming, we had 2 cameras, we had costumed characters from the Fellowship branch who would be Marigold’s crowd, we had a venue: the magnificent central square at Dickens World.
The day of recording was a fascinating one for me, being essentially a stage actor, as there is much to be learned about the process of filming. Once more, however, Doctor Marigold weaved his spell over the assembled ‘audience’. The people there had all seen me perform it before but as the story unfolded they were hanging on to every word as if they were hearing him tell his tale for the very first time. There were sobs and tears once more.

The setting was marvellous, dressed and prepared by my old friend David Hawes, a theatrical costumier, with superb attention to detail. He even found me a cap to wear as apparently the top of my head was causing trouble from a lighting point of view….

Doctor Marigold

Months passed and editors pored over the video output from the two cameras, and sound engineers mixed the audio. Designers came up with the DVD box design, an old leather book with a photograph of me in character, under the heading: The Charles Dickens Performance Collection. Patrick sent me copies to review and comment on, and eventually we were all happy with the end product.

It is extraordinary to think that Doctor Marigold now lives in the electronic world and people all over the globe can discover this ‘unknown’ Dickens and share the emotions of those who have seen it on stage and those who have read it on the page.

Already the first copies have been sent out and it has become clear that the magic translates to the more modern format:

“I watched it last night and was absolutely captivated by it.”

“I laughed at the comic moments and fought back tears at the heartbreaking revelation of the child’s death “

“Charles Dickens would have been very proud of his great, great grandson Gerald Dickens, as his performance of the story was superb.”

It would be remiss of me to not use this forum as a marketing tool, and I sincerely hope that you will take the opportunity to make friends with Doctor Marigold yourselves. The DVDs are being sold at every one of my shows and online; I have given the contact details at the end of this post.
But before I end, let me return to where I started.

My father never saw me perform Doctor Marigold and that is a huge source of regret to me. I know how much he would have enjoyed it and I know the sense of pride he would have felt.

Whenever I begin:”I am a cheap jack. My own father’s name was Willum Marigold”, I think of Dad and know that he is watching with a smile, jangling his celestial loose change. I think of his support, his advice. I know that I am an actor because of him and I love the fact that I am performing the piece that he wanted me to perform.

I try to imagine what he’d be saying and whatever it is I know that it would never be: ‘I told you so!’

So let me finish with 2 very important thank yous:

Thank you to Doctor Marigold.
And
Thank you to David Kenneth Charles Dickens: My Dad.

To order copies of the Doctor Marigold DVD contact either:

butterflywingsproductionsltd@gmail.com
or
geralddickens@hotmail.com

The Rochester Dickens Festival

Every year I attend the Rochester Summer Dickens Festival. Throughout my performing career this has been a staple part of my calendar. As the poppies start appearing in the hedgerows and fields so my stomach has traditionally gone into knots as I recognise the fast approach of the end of May.

It was at Rochester that I first performed many of my current shows. Sometimes things have been a triumph and sometimes a disaster, but it has always been fun, friendly and ever so slightly political!

In 2014 the Summer Dickens, as it is known, runs from Friday May 30 – Sunday June 1. Let me bring you along and introduce you to many old friends as I make my way through the crowds.

Arrival
My hotel for the duration is in nearby Gillingham, it is not plush, 5 star or luxurious. The Premier Inn, Gillingham Business Park is a very standard motel, with a corporate style pub attached but I have been staying here for the last few years and it is perfect. The staff here are always friendly and the fact that I can enjoy good pub fare next door makes it very easy.

I arrive on Thursday evening and am soon in ‘The Honourable Pilot’ looking at the menu. I rather fancy Fish and Chips and I find two possibilities: ‘Hand Battered Fish and Chips, served with Tartar Sauce and Garden or Mushy Peas’ or ‘Hand Battered Cod and Chips, served with Tartar Sauce and Garden or Mushy Peas’. A conundrum! I ask at the bar and am told the difference between the two is that the Cod and Chips is made with cod. OK, I’ll have that one then.

The fish comes wrapped in paper, as is traditional, with a good serving of thick fluffy chips (translation, for American readers: fries) and the garden peas are fresh and tasty. Having finished it I decide to revert to childhood and order a Banana Split for desert. It is ridiculously decadent, with vanilla, strawberry and chocolate ice cream melting beneath the banana and cream. It is so rich but so good.

Preparation
I sleep well and wake at around 7am ready to approach a major job for the day. For the past few weeks I have been performing Great Expectations and my golf show, Top Hole, both of which require a more, shall we say, shaggy look with the result that my beard has been allowed to grow wild. At Rochester I am not only performing but am also very much on show on behalf of the Medway Council so Grizzly Adams is not a good look. The beard must be trimmed, there is nothing else for it.

Poor Premiere Inn staff, I think I do this to them every year. I line the sink with tissue paper to catch as many of the clippings as possible, peer at the tangled morass attached to my chin and start to snip. It is a delicate yet somewhat ruthless operation. I have to be careful that I don’t take too much from one side, thereby forcing me to match it on the other. If that happens the danger is that I over compensate thereby meaning that I have to go back to the first side and trim that further. Taken to extreme my face would end up looking like a sheet of sand paper, so concentration is vital.

I finally reach a point where I am happy. The bathroom is a mess. Do the little bits of hair just fall softly into the sink like a winter’s snowfall? No, they do not. Freed from the shackles of my skin they take off, fly, spread themselves around, leap, frolic, gambol and eventually attach themselves to every surface in the bathroom. There is a good reason that I only do this in hotel rooms.

Having showered (thereby attaching more hairs to the inside of the shower curtain), I climb into costume and get ready to leave for Rochester. As I walk along the corridor I try not to make eye contact with the girl who is cleaning the rooms on my floor: guilt waves through me.

The ladies at the front desk are very excited as they realise that I am related to Charles Dickens and we spend a little time talking about the Festival etc. before I get to my car and head towards the ancient City of Rochester.

Rochester is recognised as the home of Dickens, in the same way that Stratford upon Avon is the home of Shakespeare. The odd thing is that Charles never actually lived in the city. He spent his childhood in the neighbouring town of Chatham and towards the end of his life he lived at Gad’s Hill Place, just outside Rochester, but technically in Gravesend. However, Rochester and its surroundings loom large in many of his novels.

The members of the Pickwick Club make their first journey from London to Rochester and stay at The Bull Inn (still here). The opening scenes of Great Expectations take place out on the Cooling Marshes nearby. Miss Havisham lives in Satis House, based on Restoration House in the City. Uncle Pumblechook lives on the High Street and Pip is indentured to Joe Gargery in the Guildhall. Edwin Drood is set in and around the Cathedral precincts and John Jasper’s home, above the ancient gatehouse, still guards the approach to the house of God. All of these buildings are real and were ancient even when Dickens walked these streets. It all makes for a very atmospheric weekend.

Rochester Cathedral

The Festival
Each morning, as I drive in to the City, other participants are also arriving, mostly in Victorian costume. Here is an elegant lady sat on the tailgate of her 4×4 car hoisting her skirts over a massive set of hoops and bloomers (the hoops are massive, I would never be so rude to suggest that the bloomers are). There is a suited gentleman incongruously pulling a modern shopping bag on wheels behind him, presumably filled with props for a show, or display. Everywhere folk are meeting up, laughing, chatting. We are all friends and have been for many years.

I park my car on the Esplanade, the muddy, tidal River Medway swirling with eddies and currents around the pylons of Rochester Bridge. High above me rears the ancient walls of Rochester Castle, a Norman structure, still standing proud above the river.

Castle Gardens

As I walk towards the High Street I am greeted by stewards and council staff as if it were only yesterday that we were talking last.

I have an hour in hand before the first parade of the day takes place so I walk slowly along the High Street, looking in shops, meeting old friends, nodding and tipping my top hat to other respectable folk and sharing banter with Fagin, Pickwick and other assorted characters.

Towards the bottom end of the High Street is Eastgate House, an Elizabethan structure that features in both Pickwick and Edwin Drood. Eastgate is about to undergo restoration and sympathetic development, thanks to the efforts of many volunteers who rightly see it as one of the gems in Rochester’s crown. It used to house a Dickens museum, filled with marvellous scenes from the books along with animatronics and holographic figures, bringing the world of my great great grandfather to life. Many years ago the museum was closed and I was furious, I stamped my foot and refused to attend the festival again. And, I didn’t. For a year.

Opposite Eastgate is Rochester Library, which is a modern building, but the venue for the Rochester Dickens Fellowship’s stand. Manned by branch members, the table sells books, CDs, DVDs, postcards etc and in the midst of all of the hoopla and celebrations, is actually about the only genuine Dickens stall at the festival. This year it has been called the Dickens Hub, hopefully to act as a resource and information centre too.

I am the President of the Rochester Branch of the Dickens Fellowship and very proud to be so.

I have arrived just in time to listen to one of the members give a reading from David Copperfield. The audience is sadly small but Colin Benson has done a wonderful job editing 3 different scenes from the novel into one reading. He reads very well, capturing the humour, pathos and hopelessness from the passage.

There is a strange moment during his reading when something outside the window catches my eye. A 20 ft high Charles Dickens puppet passes the window, briefly casting a shadow and then moving on. It is as if the great man himself is checking to see all is being done well and then, satisfied, goes off to check something else.

The reading finished all of us in costume start to make our way to the end of the High Street to form up in the first parade of the festival.

I get to walk at the front with the Mayor and his wife, just behind the Rochester bagpipe band. I love bagpipes, it must be my Scottish blood.

Minute by minute the serpent’s tail to the bagpipes head, gets longer and longer. It is a magnificent sight: everyone in costume, rich mingling with poor, respectable with debauched, young with old. Charles would have loved it.

Preparing to Parade

The whole thing is orchestrated by Carl Madjitey, a big, solid, deep voiced man, always smiling with a huge bark of a laugh who has been doing the same thing as long as I can remember. Carl’s position is The Events Manager at Medway Council so, in effect, is my boss for the weekend. He greets me with a bone crushing handshake, my hand disappearing into his huge one. A bear hug follows and then he announces to anyone who’s near: ‘LOOK: HERE IS THE GREAT GREAT GREAT GREAT GREAT GREAT GRANDSON OF CHARLES DICKENS!!!!!’ It’s a long running joke.

With Carl

Precisely at 12.00 the pipes in the band wheeze and then burst into tune. The snare drums start their ratttatatatt and we are off.

These parades follow a well trodden path, quite literally: a path that runs the length of the High Street. The crowds wave and we wave back. I always try to include as many people as I can, including those residents who live in the upper stories of the buildings, way above the road. Many lean out of their windows to view the proceedings and it is great to include them with a big wave.

And then there are the children.

Let me share an anecdote with you. The scene is Brands Hatch Motor Racing Circuit in 1970 or 71, I don’t quite recall which. I am a shy,spindly, little 6 or 7 year old standing behind a wire fence watching the Grand Prix heroes of the day bringing their cars back to the paddock area. I am having a glimpse into a world that I can never be a part of, it is glamorous and exciting. As I watch, Graham Hill drives past. His helmet is off and his long hair (too long for a man of his age if truth be told) is blowing in the breeze. He is past his best and struggling in an uncompetitive car, probably he should have retired from the sport already, bowed out while still at the top. Graham Hill however was a hero with his David Niven style moustache. He had survived an era of racing that had claimed the lives of many of his contemporaries and won 2 World Championships into the bargain. Oh, yes, he was a hero.

And then he waved at me. Me! He looked across, saw the shy boy gazing at him, he made eye contact and waved to me. I waved back feeling suddenly as if I now was part of that glamorous exciting world.

Many years later I read Hill’s autobiography and in it he said that when he was signing autographs he would always make sure that he looked to the back of the crowd, for the shy children who had been pushed back by the more confident, bigger lads and that is how I felt on that day, as if he really cared about me, no one else, just me.

You will have gathered that Graham Hill’s attitude made a lasting impression on me and now, as I walk along Rochester High Street I try to look out for every child in the crowd and wave to them.
The reaction of the children is fascinating. There are the kids who will NOT wave on any account and with no amount of cajoling from their parents. They scowl and stand with their arms firmly crossed.
Then there are the enthusiastic ones , waving at everyone, grinning, laughing and dancing to the music, usually with faces painted.

And then there are the shy ones, often being held, or clinging to a parent’s leg. The noise of the band, the sheer scale of the parade is intimidating and they are not sure. When I wave at those children their parents try to encourage them to join in. Some do, some don’t. Occasionally they catch sight of a bearded man in a top hat looking at them and waving to them, and their faces break into a smile and they wave back. Never is there a better moment in the parade!

We walk slowly on through the lined streets. The character of Fagin walks alongside the band master using an old broom like the official mace, the crowd love it. The Mayor and his wife come next, with me tagging along. Behind us are the members of The Pickwick Club and the Dickens Fellowship and all of the other costumed characters.

At various points along the route we stop and Carl encourages the crowd to give three loud cheers for the Mayor and they join in lustily.

There is one point on the route where I always take my hat off. Opposite the Princes Hall is a drain grating in the pavement. When my parents attended the festival it became a standing joke that they always stood near that grating to watch the parade go past. Each year they would meet another couple on this spot and together they would cheer and wave and laugh as all of their friends went by.

My father died before my mother and for a few years she didn’t come to the festival but one year her live- in carer brought her to Rochester and she watched us parade by, standing near to that drain grating and all of the characters in the parade doffed their hats and made a huge fuss of her. She died the following year and now I always remove my hat to the memory of my smiling, laughing, cheering parents. Never has a humble grating held so much emotion.

The parade now makes its way to the far end of the street, the crowds peter out here and the waves are now for shopkeepers and drinkers lounging outside various pubs, but still the band plays and still we smile and banter before turning left alongside the Medway.

Up a long final slope and into the Castle Gardens where the crowds are waiting for us in the arena. Under a tented canopy there is s small stage and the Mayor’s party, myself included, make our way onto it. The rest of the parade gather in a roped off area in front of the stage and it strikes me once again how many people love getting into costume, assuming a character and entertaining the crowds, simply for the sheer enjoyment of doing it.

Carl acts as the master of ceremonies and whips up the crowd as he introduces the Mayor to say a few words. The Mayor of Medway is installed at the end of May so this is always his or her first official engagement. Some are wracked with nerves and stutter into the microphone, some treat it as an opportunity to make a political speech, others fancy themselves as stand-up comics and try to do a routine (always cringe worthy).

This year’s incumbent is Councillor Barry Kemp and he is none of the above. He speaks clearly and with brevity, welcoming the crowds on a beautiful weekend to Rochester.

With the formalities completed the characters disperse around the city. All of them will be stopped in the street and will pose for photographs. Many will sit and try to eat a hotdog or ice cream and the cameras will fire. A surreptitious Victorian mobile phone call will be captured.

As far as I am concerned, after a bite of lunch, I need to get ready for my show. This year I am performing one of the readings that Charles prepared for his own tours: the Trial from Pickwick.
In the novel of The Pickwick Papers, Mr Pickwick gets himself into trouble trying to explain to his landlady, Mrs Bardell that he is going to take on a manservant. She gets completely the wrong end of the stick and assumes that he is proposing marriage. She faints into his arms, just as his friends come into the room.

Things go from bad to worse and the legal double act of Dodson and Fogg come onto the scene. They are the equivalent of a modern day ‘No Win, No Fee’ legal firm. They immediately serve notice on Mr Pickwick that he must appear in court as defendant in the action of breach of promise of marriage.

The entire episode was an immensely popular part of the book and culminates in The Trial itself and it was this scene that Dickens edited for his reading.

My performance uses the script as he prepared it. The Trial was one of his shorter readings, so to bring it up to time I have prepared a short ‘lecture’ to prove how much Dickens liked it. Of all the readings in his repertoire he performed the Trial more than any other.

The venue is the amazing chamber in the Guildhall, which itself stars in Great Expectations. The room is ornate with ancient portraits looking down into it, a beautiful plaster ceiling above, and a high bench behind an ornate wooden rail. It is a perfect setting for a court room drama.

The Guildhall Chamber

At each of my performances throughout the weekend the room is full, with standing room only and the performance is well received by everyone who came. It becomes apparent that the pre amble, the lecture, is too long, with too many numbers so I gradually pare that part back every day.

The reading itself is great fun. The main part is Sergeant Buzfuzz addressing his jury. My Buzfuzz is positively Churchillian, his first never: ‘Never…’ could take us into the reading or into the Battle of Britain ‘Never in the field of human conflict’ speech.

All of Dickens’s experience and knowledge of the law is utilised in the reading with clever lawyers twisting the witnesses’ words until they are babbling incoherently. It is great fun to perform.

Outside the windows the Festival continues, laughter, sounds of a far away band, the noises of the huge funfair as the galloping horses rise and fall at the bidding of their barley sugar poles. A folk duo start to sing on a nearby outdoor stage. Throughout the ancient city people are partying and celebrating in the name of my great great grandfather.

The performance finished, the bows taken and the audience drift away and I have a little time to calm down, to cool down, to wind down. Ice cream!

This year the council have hired a fleet of vintage (meaning from the 1960s and 70s), ice cream vans so I avail myself of a ‘99’ and resign myself to the fact that people will love the opportunity of a photographing a Victorian gent with ice cream on his moustache.

Vintage Ice Cream Van

The day ends with a final parade, quieter than the first. Some of the older costumed characters have called it a day and many of the visitors have returned to their coaches or their homes. But the Pipes and drums are there, the Mayor is there, the Dickens Fellowship are there, The Pickwick Club are there. And we wave and they cheer and I remove my hat at the grating and so the day winds to its close.

These scenes are repeated for three days every year and the sense of fun and energy and vitality shroud the castle, the cathedral and the buildings. An energy and vitality that so capture the personality of Charles Dickens.

Perhaps he’s standing watching us all, standing in a crowd, he turns to those next to him and says ‘What Fun!’ and the couple smile back at him, ‘yes, what fun!’ as they all 3 stand on a drain grating.