A Night At The Palace Theatre

By Teresa Hannaby

I’ll tell you about different things from me childhood, me youth, and one of them was the night dad came in from work and he had three tickets, complimentary tickets to go to the Palace Theatre in Percy Street. Now and again he brought these in because he was a drayman and they got this chance of complimentary tickets, the only thing was you had to go that night because it was for that night’s performance. And mam really wanted to go so we decided, me brother and I, yes we’ll go with her, we’ll accompany her to the theatre. I don’t know if you remember but the Palace was the fleapit really of Newcastle theatres, it wasn’t like the Theatre Royal or the Empire. So anyway we got ourselves there and settled down and sat there and watched all the different acts and me brother got the giggles and I was quietly sort of saying, “what’s the matter?” “It’s Harry Pearson” and I said, “who? where?” he says “the man changing the things“ So we both got the giggles because we were watching Harry, then mam got a bit annoyed and said, “sit down” which we did. Anyway the acts went on and on and on and this Harry kept coming on and changing the different props then the compere came in and calmed everybody down and said, “the act, this is the final act of the night and you’re going to love this young man and I can promise you, you’re going to see him in the future. He’s a singer and this is his debut so please give him a BIG round of applause for Gerry Dorsey, so everybody started clapping and this fellow came on and a bit pathetic really, his hair, he had longish hair, very curly and black, sort of not quite down to his shoulders. He had his shirt open and tied at the waist and he had a big cross on his chest, he looked very gipsyish. We watched him you know and applauded him and that, and that was it. But we didn’t know that Gerry Dorsey actually became Englebert Humperdinck, I don’t know if it was months or years later and became world famous.