During the more than four decades that I have been a regular visitor to the Oxford Playhouse, it had never once occurred to me that I might have known the theatre's founder. But such, indeed, turns out to be the case. And even if I cannot be sure that I knew Jane Ellis, then it can hardly be doubted, I think, that she knew of me.

Let me explain. I spent the early part of last Thursday evening amid a convivial hubbub gathered in the Playhouse's top-floor reception room to celebrate the publication of a comprehensive new history of the theatre. Its author is my old friend and long-time colleague Don Chapman (pictured), who has devoted 15 years since retirement to this meticulously researched book (earning himself a doctorate from the University of Leicester as a prize for his work). At least one year was spent tracking down information on Jane Ellis, the obscure one-time actress whose desire to play decent parts led to the theatre's establishment in 1923. This was not in its present home, which is even now celebrating its 70th anniversary, but in the former big game museum at the south end of Woodstock Road, now the university's language centre.

As Thursday's party neared its close, I found myself in a brief conversation with my colleague Peter Cann who told me he had discovered that Jane had a connection with my home city of Peterborough. He had learned this from her grandson, who was then pointed out to me at the other side the room. I crossed and introduced myself to Jamie Hartzell. He was there with his daughter Rachel (a 17-year-old pupil of Cherwell School who, it seems, also nurses an ambition for the stage). When I told Jamie of my interest in Peterborough, he explained that his grandmother (her acting days over) had lived there for many years as the wife of the vicar of Peterborough's Parish Church of St John the Baptist.

I said I had known one of its vicars during my first year at the local grammar school 46 years ago; Canon L. E. W. Bosley had been the chairman of the governors. This was the very man!

But why — to go back to my opening paragraph — should the wife of an eminent chairman of governors have known of a pipsqueak of a first-former such as I? The answer to this question is not entirely unflattering to me.

In my first few months at Deacon's School I had become (I am not too modest to state) a creature not dissimilar, sex apart, to the Infant Phenomenon of Charles Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby. Not content with playing (to great acclaim) the title role in Terence Rattigan's The Winslow Boy, the school play for 1962, I had also won both the junior singing and recitation sections of the annual inter-house competitions. Since you ask, my piping treble had been heard on a plangent setting of James Hogg's A Boy's Song (“That's the way for Billy and me . . .") and my declamatory technique on W. B. Yeats's An Irish Airman Foresees His Death. My reward for these successes was a double starring role at that Christmas's Service of Nine Lessons and Carols — at St John's Church. Having sung the traditional first-verse solo to Once in Royal David's City, I was back in the limelight ten minutes later giving the first reading, concerning the serpent's temptation of Adam and Eve. And did I know the nature of that temptation? Precocious brat that I was, very probably.

In view of her own interest in the theatre, Jane — who had by then reverted to her given name of Helen — can hardly have been unaware of at least the first of these achievements. That is the opinion of her grandson. Very probably she also witnessed some of my later stage appearances, which included the parts of Möbius in Friedrich Dürrenmatt's The Physicists and Sergius Saranoff in George Bernard Shaw's Arms and the Man. (This play was among the first to be seen at the Oxford Playhouse, incidentally. The huge popularity of GBS in the early to middle period of the last century is made abundantly clear in Don's book, which details many of the useful box offices successes he supplied over the years.) Canon Bosley had been sufficiently impressed with my singing of Once in Royal David's City to offer me a place in the St John's choir. Had this been accepted — which it wasn't — I would have found myself in weekly competition with Helen Bosley who from a place in the front row of the stalls held forth every Sunday morning at impressive volume. This was the result of a worsening deafness that made her oblivious to the racket she was making, her grandson says. It also put an end to her part-time work directing plays, Shakespeare's mainly, for local theatrical groups.

Returning to (or rather first arriving at) the subject of her setting up the Playhouse, it was in fact her husband-to-be Leonard, a former Rhodes Scholar at New College, who actually found the venue. Jane/Helen wrote of its genesis in a letter sent late in her life to Richard Burton (yes, that one) whose own involvement in the Playhouse is well known. This, says Don, is the only surviving account of its beginnings By then in her late twenties, and with experience of the London stage, she had wanted to follow in the footsteps of women such as Lilian Baylis, in firm control at the Old Vic, who were making their way as theatre bosses.

"I happened to read about the French theatre and the Comedie [Francaise] and was entranced. Why hadn't we such a theatre? Something must be done. London was too ambitious but what about Oxford, which I knew a bit? Culture should flourish there. So looking back I am amazed that I a penniless enthusiast should dare, but I did." She went on to explain how she had asked Leonard Bosley (“now a parson and my husband") to find a hall and J. B. Fagan (“the only manager I knew") to run it.

The rest is history — all of which can be read with delight in Don's book, which is packed with incident and anecdotes. It is dedicated, very properly, to the memory of Jane Ellis.