[Regia-NA] Gloucester Docks report

[Kim Siddorn]

I was sitting down to do this when I received the following from our client 
for this event who ran it on behalf of Gloucester City Council. I find there 
is little more for me to say so I copy the whole of his posting to me.

However, I do want to thank all those - there were 56 of us at dinner in 
Minsterworth on Saturday evening - that decided to support this unusual 
venture and who threw themselves into the spirit of the event with such 
wholehearted enthusiasm. Personally, a special thank you to Andy, Steve, 
Sonnie & William who turned up on Thursday afternoon & were just enough to 
get the ships down to the Dock.

Regards,



J. Kim Siddorn,

Hi all

Just a quick note to thank you for making the Pirates! event such a 
resounding success...I thought it a wonderful example of people working 
together (in many cases for the first time) to create a show that so many 
people clearly enjoyed. Audience reaction was incredibly positive and 
Gloucester City Council very happy. Its hard to accurately count visitors as 
they were moving around a lot, but we are estimating anything between 10,000 
and 15,000 over the weekend - quite possibly the latter figure - based on 
previous events, full car parks and the numbers present for the battles. All 
very pleasing.

There were many highlights, but the sea battles definitely stood out for me, 
especially Sunday's pirate battle with The Matthew firing away in Main 
Basin. Superb.  As most of you are only too aware, I can be fairly obsessed 
with historical authenticity, but I found this deliberately 
entertainment-based battle extremely liberating, mixing as we did a C17th 
ship, early C18th pirates, late C18th redcoats and Nelsonian Royal Navy, the 
Mayor and Miss Gloucester amongst others - so quite a mix, but it worked 
very well indeed!

David McLoughlin as the "pirate MC" was just excellent. And not 
surprisingly, our Jack Sparrow and Will Turner stunt lookalikes also proved 
extremely popular with the audience (although it was surreal seeing three 
different Jack Sparrows all conversing together at one point!), and the 
exciting sword fights much enjoyed. The children's activities all went down 
very well, as did the living history (which seemed to be mobbed most of the 
time) and indeed all timed displays including at the arena and historical 
marquee. Likewise the storytelling in the antiques centre. So gratifying to 
see so many visitors, wasn't it? As usual I thought a few minor things could 
be tweaked/improved if we did this again, but that's usual for a "1st time 
event" of course.

Additional thanks are due to the Sea Thieves for kidnapping the Mayor on 
Saturday afternoon. For those of you who haven't head about this, as the 
Major was dragged of the pitch of the local rugby ground crying for the 
audience to pay the ransom and save his life, the rugby fans were shouting 
"kill the Major"...lets hope that they were joking!!!

We were glad to hear that the ships and HMS' launch were all craned out okay 
at the end, and we hope that you all had easy journeys home.

So, well done all!

I've suggested to the council that they really should stage this again 
although I expect it would be more likely in 2010 - but one never knows. 
Naturally I'll keep you posted. In the meantime I've passed on your many 
comments and thanks to them for their hospitality (the spread of sandwiches 
etc that they laid on, together with the warm Green Room, was I gather much 
appreciated. Wouldn't it be nice if other clients were this thoughtful?).

Red Zebra have posted up a load of photos from Saturday's show at 
www.redzebraphoto.co.uk, and Sean of The Mathew took about 1000, including 
some great ones of Sunday's battles...hopefully these will be available to 
see soon.

See a report and two videos from Saturday (inc. the Mayor's abduction), at:

http://www.thisisgloucestershire.co.uk/latestnews/Pirates-invade-docks/article-428093-detail/article.html

Thanks again folks, I do hope that you all enjoyed it as much as we did.

Regards

Howard