Last Wednesday I had to attend a meeting of the Prison Service’s Chaplaincy Council and Regional Chaplains at a very nice Christian conference and retreat centre called St Katherine’s near the famous dock of the same name in the East End of London. Being not far from the Isle of Dogs, afterwards it took only a few minutes to nip through the tunnel and arrive at the big electronically operated gates that bar the entrance to a huge block of well appointed flats on the north bank of the river just along from Canary Wharf and close to where Brunel’s SS Great Western was built. Never having worked out how to operate these gates I did as I always do and slipped through behind someone who did and then made my way up to the seventh floor where my old friend and mentor from far-off student days was waiting to greet me.

Christopher Fettes was one of an extraordinary group of teachers who I found myself being taught and inspired by when at the tender age of seventeen I entered the Central School of Speech and Drama at Swiss Cottage to train as an actor. The head of my course was John Blatchley and when he had been forming his team and sought to recruit the maverick Stanislavsky teacher Harold Lang, Harold had made his acceptance conditional on Yat Malmgren being included, and with Yat came Christopher Fettes. Central at that time ran various courses and the whole place was presided over by a tall, elderly, ram-rod straight woman called Gwyneth Thurburn, who eventually, jealous of our devotion to Yat, dismissed him. John, Harold and Christopher then all resigned. By that time I was just ending my second year. When we heard the news we were devastated and resolved to try and persuade John, Yat, Harold and Christopher to somehow give us our final year. They agreed and less than three months later Drama Centre, London opened its doors in the halls of an old Methodist church at Chalk Farm.

Yat was unquestionably a great artist and a wonderful teacher and it was he and his work on the psychology of movement that made that place special. He died in 2002 at the age of 86 and there is very little on record, especially on the web, about him and his work. Fortunately Christopher has recently completed a book on Yat’s work and has agreed to my putting something on the web, so I hope this brief account and these photographs of Yat that Christopher gave me on Wednesday will be the beginning of a more complete and suitable tribute to a very remarkable man to whom I shall forever be indebted. These photos are of Yat towards the end of his life and as a young man.

I had better add that Yat’s work and example profoundly influenced me in the direction that I follow today. I remember in the flat at 1, Belsize Avenue forty-five years ago finding and looking at a book on Buddhism. Then in a letter that he wrote to me shortly after Yat’s death, Christopher said, “As I’m sure you recollect, Buddhism had affected him (Yat) profoundly at various stages in his career; never more so than towards the close of his life, when he had lost the school and with it an active career as a teacher. … Our school was about craftsmanship and its relation to art on the one hand, to life on the other; about the possible meaning and purpose of art itself. All that, it may well be said, has little or nothing to do with the world of ‘show business’. But practically everyone in the crematorium that afternoon was to some degree exercised by such ultimate questions. That they owe to Yat, who was one of those rare beings who clearly exemplify what they teach. You could put out your hand and touch goodness and integrity.”