Marian is the Strand Electric system CD/TH100 that was installed at the new Nottingham Playhouse in 1963. She was eventually replaced by a Rank Strand memory system circa 1976 but rather than go to scrap, Marian was rescued by an Amateur Theatre called Nottingham Arts and reinstalled by a team of technicians and telephone engineers overseen by David Clarke. Marian was in use at the Arts until circa 1985 when an M24 was installed with Thyristor dimmers.
When hearing about the forthcoming restoration of Betty (Palace Cambridge Circus) by the HSLC, David contacted us advising he still had some documentation that would hopefully prove useful. He passed the folder to Mike Hall when the TTPG were completing the move of the EnLighten/Shane Guy/NTU collection from Rocket Scenery in Nottingham up to Scotland. The documents have all now been scanned and passed on to the HSLC. We are grateful to Jon at Theatrecrafts who was able to do an A0 size scan of the original surviving schematic which was rather worse for wear after more than sixty years of being a working document. It was scanned in both TIF and JPG formats but it is only practical to include the jpeg in WordPress due to file size limitations.
