Early years

Raymond Josiah Gale Mander was born in Clapham, London, the only son of Albert Edwin Mander, an architect and surveyor, and his wife, Edith Christina, née Gale. He was educated at Battersea Grammar School and became an actor when he left school, making his debut at Bedford in Harold Neilson's touring Shakespeare company.^[1][2] In the West End he appeared in a spectacular production of Henry V at Drury Lane in 1938, the year before he first worked with Joe Mitchenson.^[2]

Francis Joseph Blackett Mitchenson was born in Southgate, London, the only son of Francis William Mitchenson, a general merchant, and his wife, Sarah, née Roddam.^[1] Unlike Mander's family, which had no special association with the theatre, Mitchenson's had stage connexions on his mother's and his father's side. His father was a part-time drama critic, and his mother was a keen amateur actress. Their marriage broke up when Mitchenson was a boy, and he was brought up by his mother.^[1] He was educated privately, and at the age of eight he enrolled at the Fay Compton Studio of Dramatic Art. A fellow student there was Alec Guinness, alongside whom he made his first West End stage appearance, walking on in a drama called Libel! at the Playhouse Theatre.^[3]

Mander and Mitchenson met in February 1939, and later in that year they were both cast in a production of The Merry Wives of Windsor, Mander as Master Page and Mitchenson as Fenton. They toured with Neilson's company, playing small roles.^[1] During the Second World War Mander worked for the BBC, presenting radio programmes including a series called Actors Remember in which he interviewed veteran performers, such as Walter Passmore reminiscing about Richard D'Oyly Carte, Ada Reeve about George Edwardes, and Leslie Henson about George Grossmith Jr. He also wrote material for other presenters, usually in collaboration with Mitchenson.^[4] Mitchenson served in the army, until being invalided out in 1943. He resumed his stage career for a few years, before giving up regular acting in 1948.^[3]

Collecting

As well as being partners in their private lives, and sometimes appearing in productions together, Mander and Mitchenson shared a passion for collecting theatrical memorabilia. They began their joint collection in 1939,^[5] and when on tour in the 1940s they would take every opportunity to add to it. Mitchenson's obituarist in The Times wrote, "[They] would raid antique shops and second-hand bookshops in search of anything which carried a morsel of theatrical history. It could be a postcard, or a playbill, a painting or a figurine representing some past performance, or, better still, a discarded costume or prop."^[3]

Their consuming interest gradually overtook their acting careers. They presented small exhibitions of theatre memorabilia around Britain and collaborated on a series of books, the first of which, Hamlet Through the Ages, was published in 1952. It set the pattern for a further eighteen books, published between then and 1980: brief notes accompanying lavish illustrations (this first book contained 257 plates ranging from the frontispiece to a 1709 edition of the play to Guinness's Hamlet in 1951).^[6]

The ever-expanding collection was housed in Mitchenson's family house in Sydenham. Their biographer Rupert Rhymes writes:

Over the years this tall Victorian terraced house … overflowed with an amazing treasure trove of playbills and books from seventeenth-century folios onwards, programmes, periodicals, gramophone records, playwrights' prompt scripts, drawings, designs, and china figurines of great actors and actresses in their most famous roles. ... Anything which narrated theatre history was avidly acquired, magpie fashion.^[1]

John Gielgud commented in 1968, "Mander and Mitchenson are a strange freakish pair – no taste but enormous diligence, and they have a remarkable collection of materials of all kinds and are really dedicated collectors – middle aged, one rather dandified, the other with a broken nose, looking like a Shaw burglar".^[7] Noël Coward, who referred to them as "Gog and Magog",^{[8][n 1]} and dubbed them "the truffle hounds of the theatre",^[9] so trusted their theatrical judgment that he left instructions in his will that after his death his estate should take advice from them, together with Sheridan Morley, on the continuing use of his literary and dramatic works.^[10] Sybil Thorndike, who referred to Mander and Mitchenson as "my dear detectives", gave them gifts and financial donations, calling their collection "the profession's passport to posterity".^[11] Rhymes writes of Mander and Mitchenson's place in the theatrical scene in London, "In the 1960s and 1970s 'Ray and Joe' became a theatrical institution and, dressed in style, invariably held court at first nights, reflecting on previous productions and associated gossip."^[1]

By the end of the 1970s it was clear that the collection required larger premises, and the eighteenth-century Beckenham Place Park was selected, with the aid of the local authority. The move had scarcely begun when Mander died at Hither Green Hospital, London, on 20 December 1983, aged 72, of bronchopneumonia and emphysema. Mitchenson moved to Beckenham with the collection and lived there until his death in Orpington Hospital, London, on 7 October 1992, aged 81, from renal failure and prostatic hypertrophy.^[1]