George Speaight

Aged four years old his first role was as the Page in a family production of Romeo and Juliet, and in 1921 he won an elocution prize for the Ghost's speech in Hamlet.

He became known for his puppet show performances at the Bumpus bookstore in Oxford Street where he worked from 1932, when his father's bankruptcy denied him a university place.

His shows here were appreciated by, among others, T. E. Lawrence, George Bernard Shaw and Peter Brook, the latter claiming that Speaight inspired him to pursue a theatrical career.

[2] In 1934 he was received into the Catholic Church and after leaving Bumpus' in 1938 he spent six months as a farm labourer at the sculptor Eric Gill's rural community, Piggotts, in Sussex, where he came upon the idea of writing his book about Punch and Judy while digging potatoes.

[1][2] 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.

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.

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.

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.