Pembrokeshire has had its fair share of celebrity visits over the years, but one which was talked of and savoured for decades afterwards was the visit of the American singer Paul Robeson to Haverfordwest’s County Theatre in 1938.
The County Theatre had been a proud acquisition for the county town since its opening in 1935. It fed the town’s cinema goers their regular diet of the time’s Hollywood stars: Greta Garbo, Charles Boyer, Katherine Hepburn, Shirley Temple, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers and the rest. The County mingled these films with occasional live performances, but the live performer due on Sunday, 1st May 1938, was an exceptionally distinguished one. Paul Robeson, the black bass, was a Hollywood star of the very first rank and the singer of numerous popular favourites like ‘Shenandoah’, ‘Go Down Moses’ and ‘Ol’ Man River’.
His visit clearly aroused a huge stir among a Pembrokeshire population who would have been, in the 1930s, so very, very far from meetings with Hollywood’s great and good and who probably, in most cases, had never even seen a black person. Robeson arrived in Fishguard initially, to rapturous greetings, with crowds out in the streets to welcome him. He immediately enchanted his hosts by walking among them, talking to small children and signing autographs. Later, as his car came through Prendergast on its way into the county town, he received another wildly enthusiastic welcome. Then, once again, outside the County Theatre, he was surrounded by autograph hunters and well-wishers and, again, delighted the crowds with his warmth and charm.
The supporting artistes in that night’s programme were Isobel Baillie, who sang a selection of Handel airs, and a Milford schoolboy called Wally Walters, later to be music master at Milford Haven Grammar School and conductor of the Liverpool Philharmonic. And yet of course, centre stage that evening, in every sense, was the famous Robeson, singing all of his familiar range of spirituals and ballads, and concluding with ‘Ol’ Man River’.
There is just the one extraordinary twist to the story. The theatre was half-full. The organisers, Haverfordwest Football Club, had over-priced the event badly, in days of very low wages, and tickets just had not sold. Whereupon Robeson, who would certainly have been a very wealthy man, now showed himself to be a very generous man also. He wrote the organisers his cheque for seventy-five pounds, a quite massive sum in 1938.
It’s a wonderfully touching story, this happy meeting of two quite different cultures, at a time when the world was about to be rent by one of the worst racial and nationalist conflicts of all time. Here, in Pembrokeshire, a black American, a Hollywood star and yet the descendant of an enslaved people, was prized and loved for an evening by the people of a remote, internationally unheard-of market town.
by Robert Nisbet