You are here: Home > Music > Royal Holloway College Savoy Opera Society

Royal Holloway College Savoy Opera Society

The Royal Holloway College Savoy Opera Society, or "SOS" (pronounced "soz") as it was more affectionately called in my days at Royal Holloway, was founded in 1965.

Thanks to Michael Baylis, the Society's first Chairman, I now know that the Society's origins lie in the opening of College's doors to men in the mid-1960s:

The whole thing started off with the three of us doing a skit on Princess Ida for the Rag Ents show in the autumn of 1965. The joke was that we had just arrived as the first intake of men undergraduates at RHC, and we could not in these circumstances ignore such lines as "A woman's college! Maddest folly going..." etc, etc.

Far from being offended, a bevy of young ladies came up to us after the show and said why did we not do more G&S - and so SOS was born shortly afterwards, in February 1966 to be exact. We even found some men to join (not easy in that first year, when the female to male ratio was about 10:1)

Here is a list of the productions up to 1978. If you can add subsequent years, I'd be delighted to hear from you.

1966/67	Trial by Jury
1967/68	H.M.S. Pinafore
1968/69	The Mikado
1969/70	The Pirates of Penzance
1970/71	Iolanthe
1971/72	The Sorcerer
1972/73	Patience
1973/74	The Mikado
1974/75	The Grand Duke
1975/76	The Gondoliers

Two major divas in the making appeared with SOS: the 1969 Mikado starred the young Felicity Lott in the role of Yum-Yum and the 1978 Ruddygore starred Susan Bullock as Rose Maybud.

The three works which were performed during my three years at RHC and of which I have recordings and/or photos were:

A Needle's Eye (Autumn 1976)

H.M.S. Pinafore (Spring 1977)

Ruddygore (Spring 1978)

The performances all took place in Royal Holloway's Victorian Picture Gallery. A temporary - and noisy - stage was erected at one end of the gallery, with the doors opening under the College's North Tower being used as stage doors. The dressing rooms were music practise rooms in the North Tower itself.

Interesting, for the period, was the relay of the performances to a room in the North Tower, and videotaping of them. This allowed the cast to watch the stage while they were waiting for their scenes. The equipment was supplied through a link with Brunel University.