This year is Cuddington Players' 50th anniversary and we are planning some special celebrations to which we would like to invite all former members.

So if you have ever belonged to Cuddington Players, please email your contact details to us at cuddingtonplayers@hotmail.com so we can send you your invitation. Or if you know someone who used to belong to our group, please draw their attention to this posting.

More details on the diary page of our website at http://www.angelfire.com/musicals/cudd/diary.html

Congrats! Any group that gets that far deserves every praise. We celebrated our 50th last year with a big bash (dinner dance) in October. Our guest of honour was one lady who had been in the very first production!

We, like you, went to a lot of trouble to try and track down past members as both present and past members were invited to the dinner dance. We still have all our programmes so we went through for lists of names and then asked all our members to dib in with names and addresses or phone numbers of all those they knew. Sadly, we just couldn't track some people down but we had a super turnout and now have lots of new old friends (if you get what I mean) to add on to our mailing lists for future productions.

We did also manage to get the press involved and got a pic and a bit more publicity in the local press.

It's definitely worth doing, Cuddington, and I wish you all the best with your researches.

well - we've only been going for 40 years but had a very successful bash last year.
similarly we had to spend ages tracking down past (and in a couple of cases passed) members but the whole thing was really good. we had champagne glasses with a crest engraved to give out as souvenirs.
also our founder member who is still active was awarded life membership. she was soooo pleased.

The life membership thing is great. We hand these out to members who've been around since the Ark. A nice thank you which sounds much grander than it really is. All it means is that they don't have to pay their subs any more. But we only charge a fiver anyway!

[The life membership thing is great. We hand these out to members who've been around since the Ark. A nice thank you which sounds much grander than it really is. All it means is that they don't have to pay their subs any more. ]

Oh don't know - she got a "nice" rose bowl too.

We celebrated our 80th Anniversary in 2002, and managed to track down some elderly ladies in local old people's homes who appeared with us as children.

In 1954 we did an outdoor production based on a century of our village, and it involved an enormous amount of people, so a lot of older people remember it. The lady who directed it is still a member of our group, and appeared on stage in our panto last week, aged 91, as the "Dowager Queen Mother" in Cinderella! Quite a feat. She is involved in every show we do, on or off stage.

We hold an archive of posters and programmes, going back to 1988 (still looking for earlier ones) and photos going back to about 1946. In keeping with this, we ensure a selection of photos from each and every show are added to the archives in book form, and the whole lot is occasionally loaned out to the village church or WI for reference and social gatherings. That's how we tracked some of these people down!

Many of the people from our early youth group, which was very successful, are now retired folk in the village who remember their plays fondly - one writes our pantos!

Although we now use the state of the art theatre in the town centre for our main productions, panto is still performed in the same village hall as our first show in 1922, and our first panto in 1960. (incidentally, they haven't updated any of the facilities, including kitchen or loos, but that's another story...)

Just a memory from the old archives but thought you might find it interesting.