Oliver Bayldon FRSA, FCSD (12 September 1938 – 23 December 2019) was a London-based, award-winning British production designer who worked with the Northampton Repertory Theatre, the BBC, and the Royal Academy of Music. Between 1966 and 1997, he designed over 220 TV drama episodes and films.
He is best known for designing sets for TV shows such as: Meet the Wife (1966), Till Death Us Do Part (1968), The Railway Children (1968), Dad's Army (1968), Z-Cars (1970–1971), The Onedin Line (1971–1972), Poldark (1975–1976), When the Boat Comes In (1976–1977), Happy Ever After (1978), Shakespeare's first tetralogy (the Henry VI plays and Richard III) directed by Jane Howell (1983), Strangers and Brothers (1984), On the Up (1990), Memento Mori (1992), and Wokenwell (1997). For the Royal Academy of Music, he created costumes or sets for four operas: Belisario (1972), The Fairy Queen Act IV: The Masque of the Seasons, Tobermory, and Trial by Jury (all 1977). His design work was the subject of five exhibitions held between 1959 and 1996.
Bayldon also wrote poetry, essays and fiction published in newspapers and books, and some of his poems and short stories were broadcast on radio. He is a cousin of the actor Geoffrey Bayldon.
Early life and education Oliver Bayldon was born in Leicester and brought up in Rutland where, aged five, he decided he wanted to be a theatre designer after attending his first pantomime and being more impressed by the sets than by the acting.
In August 1943, Bayldon took part in a Child Artists' competition organised at the Leicester Museum, where painting and plasticine modelling competitions had been arranged during a holiday-at-home programme. Prizes were presented by the Leicester Lord Mayor, and Bayldon was one of the winners.
1946–1957: Stamford School In 1946, Bayldon joined Stamford School for eleven years, where he began to develop his design and production skills. In December 1953, aged 15, he participated in the presentation of Shakespeare's Coriolanus by the school's Dramatic Society, for which he also designed and stencilled the soldiers' and crowd's costumes. A few weeks later, he organised a variety show called To-night's the Night with ballet, sketches and songs, in aid of one of his witty schemes: the "Morcott Dustbin Society". Morcott is a village near Barrowden—his family home—and was devoid of dustbins at the time. During an interview with the Stamford Mercury on 15 January 1954, Bayldon explained: "I was about to put on a show anyway, so I thought it would be a good idea to do one for a litter basket". The show was a success and raised £2 8s. towards a dustbin. Prior to the show, Bayldon had paid a visit to the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, and secured a batch of costumes which were no longer used.
At the end of 1954, the school produced Nikolai Gogol's The Government Inspector, for which Bayldon designed and painted the Victorian décor, as well as acting in the leading female part "with fine control of voice and features." In the spring of 1955, Bayldon designed the costumes for the school's production of Christopher Fry's The Boy with a Cart, a story of St Cuthman, written as a legend of miracles and faith in the style of the mystery plays. In December 1955, the boys presented the first part of Shakespeare's Henry IV to a limited number of parents and friends; in addition to designing and painting the scenery, Bayldon played the role of the Archbishop of York.
In November 1956, a group of masters from the school, aided by wives and friends, produced an amusing version of Brandon Thomas's Charley's Aunt to raise money for new stage equipment; Bayldon was responsible for designing the scenery. For their end-of-term play in December 1957, the boys gave a public performance—the first to use Dudley Fitts's new translation—of Aristophanes's The Frogs, a Greek comedy produced at Athens in 405 B.C.. The play, for which Bayldon had painted the gateway, was produced under the scholarly guidance of Mr. Chapman, senior classics master.
1958–1961: Leicester College of Art In 1958, Bayldon enrolled on a course of studies in Fine Arts and Textile Design at Leicester College of Art and Technology. He soon discovered that no amateur drama society existed, despite there being a fine stage. The Leicester Evening Mail would later quote him saying: "Attempts have often been made to get one going, but one or two people have been left to do all the work. So many students are committed to evening study that it is hard to organise a group." In July, he was awarded the Sir Jonathan North Endowment Scheme gold medal for his designs of costumes and set for the musical My Fair Lady, which he created specially for this art competition. At the time, the production had not yet come to Britain, and he had never even seen a photograph of it. So he set to work in his spare time to study the Edwardian era and relied extensively on his knowledge of the play. Upon receiving the prize, he told the Leicester Mercury: "I had to imagine what Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion would be like as a musical. But I enjoyed the whole thing tremendously. I hope to take up stage or television design as a career." The Vice-Chancellor of the University, Dr. C. H. Wilson, who had been on the awards committee for six years, said: "In presenting Mr. Richard O. M. Bayldon, of the Leicester College of Art, with the gold medal, we found he had remarkable sympathy with the Edwardian era".
In August 1959, he launched his first exhibition, entitled Paintings and Stage Designs, at the Bookshop in King Street, Leicester. In December, he organised the college's Arts Ball at Leicester Palais on a "Medieval" theme, and led the ball—attended by 800—in a knight's mailed armour, with plumed helmet. In March 1960, he was 'Commended' in the "Stage and Television Settings" section of a design contest organised by the Royal Society of Arts industrial art bursaries, for which 653 young designers had entered. In May, St Anthony Press, a private book publisher in Leicester, published one of Bayldon's poems, entitled "Morning", illustrated by Chris Shorten. The reviewer from the Leicester Evening Mail, stated that: "Mr. Bayldon is a young Leicester student who has had poems broadcast on the BBC Third Programme, and who is likely to have a successful career as a stage designer." In August, he wrote an article in the first issue of Crescent, one of Leicester's two privately published magazines. The Leicester Evening Mail reviewer wrote: "Oliver Bayldon, an articulate and perceptive writer, whose work has found favour with the BBC, tries to define art and says society must come to terms with it." At the end of September 1960, the Malvern Drama Club presented Norman Ginsbury's English language version of Ibsen's Peer Gynt, with sets designed by Bayldon.
Later in 1960, Bayldon was invited by a local furniture store to attend the Furniture Exhibition in Manchester. The store manager was so impressed with Bayldon's comments that he commissioned him to assemble and decorate a living room and bedroom to his individual taste, a project he completed in November. The same month, Bayldon was among the students who plotted a hoax to publicise their year-end Arts Ball, as they began digging trenches in a bogus search for antiquities from an Egyptian mercenary camp site on the demolition plot where the new college was going to be built. After unearthing a medieval wall, bones, and pieces of ancient pottery, they alerted officials of Leicester Museum who became interested, and Bayldon decided to call off the hoax and continue with serious excavations.
In March 1961, he was awarded £150 in another design contest organised by the Royal Society of Arts industrial art bursaries, again in the "Stage and Television" section. On the strength of this RSA design award, he won an Arts Council New Designers trainee scheme, which would lead to his appointment as an assistant designer at the Northampton Repertory Theatre. In June, he was elected Fellow of the RSA. In August, Bayldon was one of the college's 39 students graduating with a National Diploma in Design. From August to November, he spent his RSA bursary undertaking a 14-weeks study tour to the United States, travelling through 13 states to study arts and design. On his return, he relayed his experiences in four articles published in the Stamford Mercury on successive Fridays, from 15 December 1961.
Career 1961–1963: Northampton Repertory Theatre Shortly after returning from his US study tour in November 1961, 22-year-old Bayldon began a one-year apprenticeship on an Arts Council Scholarship at the Northampton Repertory Theatre, as an assistant to the long-serving regular designer Thomas Osborne Robinson. The design team included John Page, also 22, who had joined Robinson in 1959. In early 1962, Bayldon designed and produced banners for St Mary's Church, in Glenfield, a village to the west of Leicester.
In September 1962, Page and Bayldon—who was about to start his second year at the Repertory, now as a designer—stood in for Robinson when he took a sabbatical to teach at Vanderbilt University until late 1963. They maintained Robinson's high design standards, and Bayldon was credited, for costumes or settings, on the playbills of: Guilty Party and Murder at Quay Cottage (both 1962), Babes in the Wood (1962–1963), The Shiny Surface, Write Me a Murder, and Go Back For Murder (all 1963). Bayldon would also act for the Repertory Theatre; he played one of the "Gentlemen, Dancers and Guests" in the 1961 Christmas season pantomime of Cinderella, and "Ranjit, Fielding's servant" during the run of A Passage to India (17–29 September 1962) which included Ken Loach as "Mr Burton-Fletcher, a Civil Servant". It was Loach—on a trainee director's course backed by an ITV company at the time—who turned Bayldon's attention towards television.
On 23 February 1963, Bayldon launched a month-long exhibition, entitled Costume and Theatre Designs, at the Museum and Art Gallery, Northampton.
1963–1995: BBC Television and Royal Academy of Music When Bayldon's second year at the Northampton Repertory Theatre was coming to an end, he received an advertisement from BBC Television to apply for a design assistant post for the forthcoming opening of a second BBC channel, BBC Two, a post he secured. By early December 1963, he had already worked on programmes such as Compact, Dr. Finlay's Casebook, and other drama presentations. On 4 December, one of his poems, "A man in a crowd", was broadcast on BBC radio (Midland Region) in the programme Midland Poets. During an interview with the Stamford Mercury on 6 December, Bayldon commented on his appointment at the BBC: "Looking back, I think I was very fortunate in getting the right sort of grounding from Mr. Walter Douglas at Stamford School."
On 20 March 1964, another of his poems was read in the BBC Home Service's Midland Poets, at 9 pm. In December of that year, The Stage announced that Durwell Productions Ltd. were planning a March or April 1965 presentation of a new musical, Cupid & Psyche, with book and lyrics by Glyn Idris Jones and music by Kenny Clayton, and that Bayldon was scheduled to be the designer. He drew up sets and costumes for this show, which was never staged. In March 1965, Bayldon released his first book of verse, The Paper Makers Craft, published by Twelve by Eight Paper Mill & Private Press in Leicester, the only place in England where paper was still made by hand. The collection included his own free translation of a 17th-century Latin poem, "Papyrus", by Father Imberdis S.J. of Ambert, the papermaking district of the Auvergne in France.
1966–1973 In 1966, Bayldon stage designed four episodes in the BBC television series Quick Before They Catch Us, which aired in September. He also designed episodes 99 and 100 of The Newcomers, and seven episodes of Meet the Wife. The following year, he designed