Gervase Farjeon

He was the third child and only son of Herbert Farjeon (1887-1945), a presenter of revues, a lyricist, playwright and theatre manager, whose own father had been a novelist and playwright and a friend of Charles Dickens and whose mother was descended from the Jefferson acting dynasty of the United States.

Farjeon's mother was Joan Farjeon (1888–1989), née Thornycroft, the daughter of the sculptor Sir Hamo Thornycroft RA and first cousin of the poet Siegfried Sassoon.

Farjeon's wider family was almost exclusively artistic: an uncle, Harry Farjeon, was a composer, another uncle, Joseph Jefferson Farjeon, was a novelist and playwright, and his aunt, Eleanor Farjeon, was an author of children's stories and plays, poetry, biography, history and satire.

Gervase Laurence Farjeon (23 October 1920 - 6 August 2001) was an English theatre producer, director, manager and designer.

Farjeon was born in Bucklebury, Berkshire, England on 23 October 1920.

In his autobiography, I Could Be Happy, Wilson recalls that at the first meeting with Farjeon and Woolley, when he suggested doing a musical in the period of the 1920s, Farjeon quickly replied: "That would be fine".

Wilson was commissioned to write a one-hour show, called The Boy Friend, to be staged in a three-week run at the Players'.

The outbreak of World War II in 1939 brought Farjeon's studies to an abrupt end.

Like his father, he had been a pacifist from childhood, and when called up under the National Service (Armed Forces) Act 1939 he declared himself to be a conscientious objector.

Expecting a prison sentence, he faced a tribunal chaired by a judge, but being able to prove a lifelong pacifism he was granted exemption and took up work on the home front with evacuees.

Farjeon's father, being the son of a Jew and a prominent figure in Britain, was at risk of detention and possible deportation should Nazi forces invade the United Kingdom.

When invasion seemed likely in June 1940 his father sought reassurance from his cousin Harry, who lived in the United States, that the family, including his children, would be able to find safety with him in New York.

In the event, the Farjeons did not need to leave Britain.

Released from his architectural studies and exempted from service, Farjeon was able to pursue his passion for the theatre, starting as a stage manager, and playing small parts in the many shows touring wartime Britain.

Several productions in which he appeared were toured under the auspices of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, the forerunner of the Arts Council of Great Britain, where Farjeon was spotted by Sybil Thorndike and Lewis Casson and invited to work for the Council in the theatrical field as part of its duties to promote and maintain British culture.

In 1946, Farjeon was invited by Leonard Sachs, its director, to become stage director at the Players' Theatre in London's West End.

In this role he took over the control of the nightly Victorian-type music hall productions staged by the company, with the programme changing every two weeks.

Under his direction were many performers who in the post-war years were to achieve fame.

Among them were Ian Carmichael, Maria Charles, Clive Dunn, Patricia Hayes, Robin Hunter, Hattie Jacques, James Robertson Justice, John Le Mesurier, Bernard Miles, Maggie Smith, Eleanor Summerfield, and Peter Ustinov.

Sachs left the Players' in 1947 and Farjeon, now Director of Productions, was joined by the stage designer Reginald Woolley and his partner, actor-producer Don Gemmell, to form the new board of directors.

Born into a theatrical and artistic family he became director of productions at the Players' Theatre in London and co-commissioned and produced The Boy Friend, a British musical of the 1950s.

By the early 1950s the Players' Theatre Club had over 3000 members and had achieved "world-wide fame".

In 1952 Farjeon and his colleagues decided to commission their own musical to take the stage at the Players' as a filler for part of the variety programme and it was Farjeon who telephoned an actor and writer of revues, Sandy Wilson, to invite him to discuss writing a musical.

It opened to good reviews in the spring of 1953.

In the autumn of that year it was lengthened and opened for a season at the Embassy Theatre in Swiss Cottage, London.

Following that success, as Director of Productions Farjeon was instrumental through family theatrical connections in opening The Boy Friend at Wyndham's Theatre in the West End on 14 January 1954.

With Farjeon remaining at the production helm it ran for a then record-breaking five years and 2,048 performances, taking £650,000 at the box office and playing to 1,250,000 people.

With the money-spinning success of The Boy Friend, Farjeon and his fellow directors of the Players' Theatre nursed ambitions to produce more shows that might succeed in the West End.

He nursed it through its record-breaking five-year run in London's West End and in the 1960s produced further shows in London and elsewhere in the United Kingdom.

Later he was in demand as a producer and set designer for pioneering companies who used theatrical techniques for corporate conferences, product launches, and cabarets.

An animal lover, in later life he worked voluntarily with the Born Free Foundation inspecting zoos around Europe for the European Community.

From 1965 he was the literary executor of his aunt, the English author and poet Eleanor Farjeon and allowed her hymn Morning Has Broken to be recorded by the pop singer Cat Stevens.

It became an international hit.

Farjeon inevitably grew up surrounded by musicians, actors, artists and writers and listened to stories and gossip about many of the leading artistic figures of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

He was entranced by the theatre.

His father often took him to first nights and encouraged him from an early age to critique shows and their performances and staging.

Farjeon longed to be an actor.

Outside the artistic milieu of his family, in early childhood he also developed a lifelong love of animals.

After unhappy experiences at an English preparatory school, he was educated at the small and progressively liberal Bedales School at Petersfield in Hampshire, England where after a time he was put in charge of the school's theatre.

From Bedales, even though he still harboured ambitions to be an actor and had an intensifying interest in the theatre, he started training as an architect at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in Bedford Square, London.