The Hardy Players: The Evans Years

Abstract

Of the various social and cultural organizations with which the Dorchester middle classes instructed and entertained themselves in the years before the First World War, by far the most enduring was the Dorchester Debating Society, known after 1906 as the Dorchester Debating, Literary and Dramatic Society. The expanded name acknowledged the new life breathed into the society by the amateur theatricals that had become over the years an adjunct to the primary activity of weekly debates. The Debating Society had been sporadically active throughout the 1890s, although by the turn of the century apathy was threatening its existence. But its 1900–1 season, with a new president in Dr O’Loughlin, the Catholic priest at the Church of Our Lady of Martyrs, and a new meeting place in the magistrates’ room at the Guildhall, began promisingly, and by the time of O’Loughlin’s departure from Dorchester three years later the Dorset County Chronicle was able to report a decided improvement in the society’s health: ‘during his presidency he has, by dint of elocutionary talent, energy, and organising ability, done much to restore the waning fortunes of that body and to make it really useful as one of the few intellectual stimulants of the town’.¹