Pat Johnson - a personal memory from Ray Hopper

I joined the Young Wick Players, as we were then called, in early 1957, halfway through rehearsals for an unexceptional thriller called Murder Party.  Pat was appearing in this, although I now cannot remember much about it.  The thriller may have been unexceptional, but I was thrilled by my new-found hobby and friends, and became totally hooked.  I remember being impressed by Pat’s total ease on the stage, and we became fast friends following the after the show party, where I remember him falling about with laughter at my schoolboy humour.  Anyone who found my jokes funny had to be a man of immense taste!

As I found out later, Pat was always surrounded by laughter.

A week or so later found us both in rehearsal for The Happiest Days of Your Life, which I still think of as one of the funniest plays I have ever been involved in.  I was making my Wick debut in the tiny part of the schoolboy Hopcroft Mi.  Pat was just brilliant as the much-stressed headmaster, Mr Pond, displaying that gift of comic timing given to few, and perhaps not used by us enough.  How nice to see the play being given a revival at the National. (NB. Wick play-reading committee ?).

The next few years saw us busily involved, usually separately, in all sorts of projects, many cooked up by our forever-challenging president Molly Penney.  However, I was privileged to be stage manager for Captain Carvallo, in which Pat both gave a wonderful performance as the eponymous hero and introduced me to the delights of classical music - especially by explaining to me the construction of the theme music we chose for Carvallo - ‘O, Silver Moon’ from Rosalka - still a great favourite of mine.  And so I was introduced to another of Pat’s wonderful gifts - as an inspired teacher and encourager - particularly in one-to-one situations.

We also appeared together in one of our Southwick Festival entries - Wolf Mankowicz’s The Bespoke Overcoat - in which he gave a most touching performance as the old Jewish tailor.

Meanwhile I was meeting and falling in love with my future wife, Pam, then a nurse at the Royal Alex children’s hospital, but who unfortunately had decided, before we met, to go off to St George's Hospital in London to do her general nursing training.  Panic on my part!  Pat to the rescue.  He lived and worked Monday to Friday in Surbiton, where he had a flat.  Since this was unused at weekends, he generously allowed me to use it then as the base for what we used to call in those days ‘courting’.  (There seems to be no modern equivalent!).  I also had the more dubious privilege of occasionally being escorted up and down to Surbiton on special occasions in Pat’s unique form of transport - a Messerschmidt bubble car.  (I’ve never regained my boyhood enthusiasm for WW2 aeroplanes!).

Of course, come the wedding in September 1965, there was only one possible choice for our best man, where once again he exceeded the call of duty by insisting that I stayed with him from the stag party round to ‘getting to the church on time’.

At about the same time, he was giving one of the great performances of his career as Sir Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons.

There followed a series of summer holidays cruising on the Thames with Pat and Marion, where one remembers continuous laughter and gargantuan meals (where did he put it all?) and also some occasional musical evenings together, which I hope to remember further at ‘An Evening with Pat’ in February.

Our last joint venture for the Wick was in Hugh Leonard’s The Poker Session in 1968, in which I, as Billy, and Pat, as Teddy, were meeting for the first time after being released from mental hospital.  I can do no better than to quote from the review of our old friend ‘Thespis’ - aka Walter Hix - writing in the B&H Gazette.

“Teddy is played by Patrick Johnson with such keenness and insight, and with a quaint twisted sympathy that is by turns alarming and amusing.  Delving in my memory this is a performance the like of which I cannot recall; it is technically brilliant, strangely credible and perfectly timed.”

After the play Pat said to me, “Well, that’s it.  There’s nothing else I want to do on the stage”. And although he did appear in several other productions, most notably as Fagin in Oliver in 1982, it was 1968 that seemed to me to be his theatrical performing zenith.  My caption to my scrapbook photo of Pat in The Poker Session reads - ‘Johnson in his pomp’.

Sadly, the arrival of my family and his increasing concentration on his music meant that we saw less of each other over the years than I now would have wished, but he kept his involvement with Wick by his mentoring of our younger members, and frequent help with the musical productions, and I was delighted when my elder daughter Joanna was able to experience his teaching and encouragement.

Pat is sadly missed in our household, but shines brightly in our memories.

Ray Hopper