Archive Assistant Desmond Crone describes his selection for this year’s Christmas Curiosity Cabinet – the 1923 Little Baddow Nativity Play, The Guiding Star, by Jesse Berridge.
All over the country parents and families have been enjoying end of term school productions of the story of the Nativity. For many, their school nativity play is their first experience of drama on a stage.
In the UK, the start of the modern tradition – successor to the medieval mystery plays – has been attributed to Laurence Housman. A younger brother of the poet A. E. Housman, the playwright and illustrator wrote a nativity play Bethlehem based on a Coventry mystery play which was first performed in 1902 at the University of London. It was subsequently published by Macmillan and by the 1920s a London production was touring the country and inspiring local productions of the story.
In our display you can see a copy of the text of a nativity play from 1923, performed in Little Baddow Church. It can usually be found in the local studies pamphlet box collection in the searchroom.
It was written by Jesse Berridge, Rector of Little Baddow from 1916 until 1947. Berridge was a close friend of Edward Thomas, the writer and poet who died on the Western Front in 1917. They met in 1901, when Jesse was a clerk in a bank in the City of London and Edward (who had recently graduated from Oxford University) was a book reviewer and author. Both had married young and both were writers.
Jesse was born in Warwickshire in 1874, the son of master mariner Captain Henry Berridge. As the family fortunes took a precipitous dive on the captain’s retirement from the sea, Jesse had to leave school before he had turned 16 and joined a bank as a clerk. He was dismissed in 1895 when the bank discovered he had married (junior staff not being permitted to marry), and then spent ten years working for the London agency of the Deutsche Bank. He and his wife had most likely met at the art school which he attended for a time. By 1904, he was running a Christian mission in the Royal Albert Docks and had enrolled as an evening student at King’s College, London to study for the Anglican priesthood. He left the City in 1905 and in 1906 was ordained as a deacon in the diocese of St Albans (the Diocese of Chelmsford was created in 1914). He was curate in Harrow Green, Colchester, Witham, Leyton and Wanstead. In 1915 he was chaplain at the Essex County Asylum in Warley, and in 1916 he became rector of Little Baddow, where he remained until 1947.
At Little Baddow Jesse introduced the monthly parish magazine, the sharing of Remembrance Day, carol services with the local Congregational church and the annual Nativity play. In the church he uncovered the 14th century wall painting of St Christopher, the Norman north door and the medieval beams in the nave roof. Beyond the parish, he was a member of the council of the Essex Archaeological Society and helped with setting up the Essex Record Office as well as being Cathedral Librarian.
You can find his five historical novels – all set in Essex – in the searchroom.
Grateful acknowledgement: the notes on Jesse Berridge and Edward Thomas come from a volume in the local studies library, The letters of Edward Thomas to Jesse Berridge edited and introduced by Anthony Berridge, London: Enitharmon Press, 1983 (LIB/B/BERR).