Born to perform, Greta Sanderson tells Will Roberts about her involvement with Darlington Operatic Society

AMONG the many photographs and paintings scattered around the walls and shelves of Greta Sanderson’s living room in Neasham, near Darlington, there is one in particular which stands out.

The oil portrait of an attractive, middle-aged, grand-looking lady in a white and green dress and shining pearl necklace, beams down at you with authority.

Sitting down, having been on tea duty, Greta immediately points up to the painting, before she has even begun to talk about herself.

“That,” she says, “is my mentor – her name is Joy Beadell.”

Greta talks for ten minutes about Joy, who arrived in Darlington with her husband John Bishop back in 1946. She tells how Joy joined the Darlington Operatic Society as an amateur actor but soon started up a dance school and went on to serve the society, and the town for many, many years before she moved to New Zealand in 1988.

After her death in 2007, hundreds of her former dance pupils paid tribute to her at a memorial service in Hurworth.

As with all mentors, what they achieved in their life is important to those who look up to them. So it’s perhaps not surprising that there is a certain symmetry between the long service both Greta and her mentor paid to Darlington Operatic Society.

THIS year marks the 65th anniversary of her involvement with the group. Given the chance, she would have joined earlier.

Her brothers, father and uncle were all members of the operatic society, but she couldn’t join until she was 16.

She was born to perform, and had singing, dancing, piano and elocution lessons from a young age.

Greta’s first performance was as a dancer in Goodnight Vienna at the Civic Theatre, then known as the Hippodrome, in 1947 – a show which, according to reports in The Northern Echo attracted a sell-out crowd and glowing reviews on its opening night.

She has a picture of herself from the show – a bright, athletic and good-looking young woman in a Germanic- themed costume.

After the war, says Greta, was a good time to be in the society. “There had been so much austerity during the war, so as actors we just loved dressing up,” she says, a Darlington accent peeping out from behind a curtain of decades of speech training. “We would all take our costumes to Taylors the photographers and have our pictures taken – it was very exciting.”

The theatre was to play a large part in her love life too. Then known as Greta Murray, she met Bernard Sanderson during rehearsals for The Vagabond King in 1951.

“He was a vagabond and things went on backstage,” she smiles. We would kiss and cuddle in the corner.”

The pair were married soon after and in 1952, during the performance of The Mikado, she was so heavily pregnant with their first son Stephen that she jokes he shared the stage with her.

The couple had two other sons, Peter and Nicholas and eventually settled in the home she still lives in now.

Working as a secretary for her family’s bakery business, Greta spread her time between the operatic society, her family and her job.

“The operatic society took up a tremendous amount of time and it is the same now. Thankfully, I had my mother and Bernard’s mother who could babysit.

“We would appear in alternate shows and, sometimes, we would pick and choose which ones we wanted to be involved in.”

The organisation skills she acquired in her day job soon became an asset to the operatic society and Greta was soon heavily involved in the administration of the group, which operates as a charity and has handed out tens of thousands of pounds to good causes since the end of the Second World War.

She still has meticulously organised records of each show, who appeared in it and how much money was spent and made. In fact, one of the upstairs rooms in her house has now been christened “the holy of holys” – it is full of records, programmes and news cuttings going back decades.

On the stage, she had 23 named parts in 59 shows. When she wasn’t performing, she was working backstage as a dresser, a prompter or a matron looking after the child actors.

She has also been front-of-house, assistant ballet mistress and dance teacher. “I stopped dancing when I was 40, because nobody wants to see an old dancer,” she says.

“We had one girl who kept going on and on and people would say ‘I wish she would just pack in’. Nobody was ever going to tell me to pack in.”

In 1984 Greta joined the committee of the Darlington Operatic Society as assistant secretary and she has been a vital part of the administration of the group ever since. She was the president of the group up until March this year and younger members still turn to her for help.

The group has always gone through peaks and troughs, she says, from those fun-filled post-war productions to the time in the mid-fifties when the Civic Theatre came close to demolition, only for the society to save it with a hefty donation.

But today presents its own set of problems.

“People have to think about whether they can afford to go to the theatre now and we have had some really good shows in the past years that haven’t broken even,” she says.

“We don’t struggle for committed members, but we are really having to think about what productions will put bums on seats.”

AT 82, Greta has now taken a step back from the day-to-day running of the group, which has origins as far back as 1912.

“I still sell tickets for the shows and normally raise more than £1,000 in sales,” she says. “People buy them off me because they daren’t say no.”

Greta will remain involved with Darlington Operatic Society as long as she is physically able, and judging by the way she moves around her house with all the grace and energy of a seasoned dancer, that will be for some time yet.