‘Syncopating Sandy’

One of the great stories that relate to the Hippodrome Theatre in Keighley is that of ‘Syncopating Sandy’. Many people will have heard the tale of how Sandy played piano on the stage of the theatre, non-stop, for 133 hours back in 1956 – some people reading this might even have witnessed the feat! Thousands of people bought tickets to see stages of his performance, and some simply gathered outside the theatre in order to be part of the event.

We were delighted, therefore, that in the latest batch of photographs by John Tobin that we have processed, there were half-a-dozen that captured the last moments of the performance and captured Sandy pretty much exhausted after his ordeal. We will be writing up more about Sandy in a future newsletter, but for now we are very excited to share some of the pictures with you. Our continued thanks to Kathleen Procter who donated the negatives and to Billy Stride for scanning and processing them.

The last show at the Hippodrome

We’ve just uploaded to the History Society’s Flickr site all the scans from the programme for “Oklahoma!”, produced by Keighley Amateurs in 1956. This production was significant because it was the last show of any kind performed in the Hippodrome Theatre in town. In fact, the theatre had officially closed a few months earlier but reopened especially for this show. After that the theatre closed for good and was demolished in 1961 as part of the town centre redevelopment.

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The programme is part of the Joy Rundle Collection, donated to the society by Jane Eaman and Mark Rundle in 2023. It contains details of the show plus dozens of adverts for local businesses from the time.