Dorothy on YouTube
In 1971 BBC producer Ron Smedley made an Omnibus programme about using drama with young people. He called the film Three Looms Waiting and it featured the work of Dorothy Heathcote and her student Tom Stabler. What Smedley caught on film was remarkable and made Heathcote’s work famous around the world.
You can view Three Looms Waiting on YouTube, click here.
The following extract, taken from Gavin Bolton’s, Dorothy Heathcote’s Story, describes how Smedley first heard of Dorothy Heathcote and saw how her approach had transformed a group of children in a school from a deprived area of Hartlepool.
Dorothy’s first experience before the cameras
There was a curious overlap in the timing of her baby daughter’s entry into the world and Dorothy’s first appearance before professional cameras. Dorothy emerged from hospital soon to enter a classroom all set up for filming. It was June, 1966.
Several months earlier I had received a visit from Joe Reid, BBC’s Education Officer for the South West who, along with Ron Smedley, made school programmes for the BBC and was currently looking for quality school drama work. Joe had explained to me that lie was conducting a film series related to the use of improvisation in schools, and, although he had worked with some people who were highly recommended as drama teachers, he had found the quality of the work disappointing. He had been building his hopes on this Mrs. Heathcote of Newcastle, but now he had heard that she was expecting a baby in May, just the time allocated to his filming schedule! When he began to sound me out about my taking Dorothy’s place, 1 said: ‘Hang on, don’t give up so quickly on Dorothy Heathcote – you obviously don’t know her! And if you have no luck there, the man to contact is Tom Stabler, a recent student of Dorothy’s whose approach reflects hers.’
Ron Smedley phoned Dorothy from London the day before she went into hospital, to ask if she would be willing to view the film he had prepared, based on what he had seen so far in other parts of the country. He would like her opinion. An hour later he was flying up to meet Dorothy in the tiny, darkened film theatre of Newcastle University’s Medical School, a venue with which Dorothy was to become very familiar. And he listened to her comments in the dark. About the Head of Drama at Bretton Hall her remarks were not complimentary – ‘he was a person thinking clever; his questions were those of an English teacher using a novel; his technique was a sort of watered down producer who loves his play; and of course. he’s afraid of the class’.
Ron asked if she could suggest where he might see some better work, and when once more he heard Tom Stabler’s name – alongside Dorothy’s suggestion of Sister Bridget and Maurice Gilmore, two more of her students – he opted for a visit to Hartlepool. Ron had written to me as follows about their disappointment so far:
He [Joe Reld] and I set out to be thrilled. To say the least we weren’t. Now, let me emphasise that this was 35 years ago, much of the work was new and experimental and we may have been unlucky … but nonetheless! The work we were recommended to see seemed shapeless, boring and sometimes unintentionally funny. No one seemed to be going anywhere. The Emperor was naked!
Thus Ron, somewhat dispiritedly, found himself visiting this former student who had taken the Newcastle Primary Diploma course, not Dorothy’s drama course, although Dorothy was currently working with him in his Hartlepool primary school. Ron goes on:
I still remember exactly what happened. I sat down with a notebook and a pencil in the awful, gloomy hall and waited to make notes – notes like ‘Another wasted journey’; ‘There really is no series here.’ My notebook was full of them. Tom informed me that he had previously told the class a Bible story, they had talked about the story and they were -going to show me the play they had developed out of their discussion
I made no notes.
These little scruffy, pale, deprived children (‘You almost expected them to have no boots’, said Dorothy later) in one of the poorest parts of a poor town began to act out, at some length, a real play, a real and complicated argument, in what was obviously their own words, while Tom said nothing. His work, for the time being, was done.
I don’t think in forty years of programme making, mostly with and for young people, I’ve ever had an experience like it. Tom, learning from Dorothy, believed that children were surrounded with language that they were never called upon to use. By telling a strong tale, telling it well and discussing its meanings and its implications with the class, he gave the children the chance to use this locked up language.
If this had been a Hollywood film there would be a close-up of a moist-eyed producer writing in his note-book ‘There is a series, after all’. Well I didn’t write it but I felt it.
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