PUPILS at Salesian College, Oxford, staged a series of ambitious stage productions as well as enjoying trips abroad.

Their performances impressed not only families and friends in the audience, but critics from the Oxford Mail and our sister paper, The Oxford Times.

A reader, who saw our story of the college trip to Greece in an eight-year-old ambulance in 1961 (Memory Lane, July 9), has sent in a copy of the programme for the 1960 presentation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, listing the 22 scenes, the cast and the back-up team.

The Oxford Mail critic, identified only by the initials, JS, praised the work of the two main characters.

Under the headline, Strong principals in college Macbeth, he or she wrote: “As Macbeth, Stephen Dearlove, whose future possibly lies on the professional stage, is superb and Timothy O’Mara, as Lady Macbeth, is also memorable.

“The acting of these principals is so good that the rest of the cast is overshadowed.

“Stephen Dearlove, who is in the second-year sixth form, has the kind of voice for which Shakespeare’s verse was intended, and he uses it to full advantage. For a schoolboy actor, his Macbeth is astonishingly mature.

“Timothy O’Mara’s sombre, smouldering characterisation of Lady Macbeth, with its undertones of evil, is in key with the whole atmosphere of the production.

“The production itself is fast-moving and imaginative. There are some excellent costumes, and the sound and lighting effects are all good.”

There were similar accolades in the newspapers for two further Shakespeare productions at the college, Julius Caesar in 1959 and The Tempest in 1961.

The critic who saw Julius Caesar praised its “good pace and acting”, while a colleague described The Tempest as “enterprising and well-balanced.”

As we recalled, the college, in Crescent Road, Cowley, was one of a number of Salesian colleges established by a religious order, the Salesians of John Bosco, an Italian priest, who dedicated his life to improving children’s education.

The first in Britain opened at Battersea, London, in 1895. The Oxford college opened in 1945.

Its closure in 1970 came after it was found impossible to fit it into the scheme for reorganising Catholic education within the new comprehensive system.

The buildings became a target for vandals and squatters after years of delay in deciding what to do with them. Finally, in 1991, work started on turning them into flats.

p Memory Mailbag: Page 26