AN ABSENT sitcom star had Swindon theatre bosses threatening to unleash their lawyers this week in 1976.

As what would become a notoriously hot summer continued, temperatures rose in a dispute between the Wyvern Theatre and Hylda Baker.

Thanks to a brace of high-profile TV shows, Nearest and Dearest and Not On Your Nellie, actress and variety star Baker was a guaranteed box office draw wherever she appeared.

That week 42 years ago, she had been due to appear as a gossip-prone office cleaner in a comedy murder mystery called Busybody.

We said: “Miss Baker has been ill during the past fortnight, but was expected to return to the cast when the play opened last night.

“But it was not until the last minute that it became clear Miss Baker would not be appearing.”

Wyvern artistic director Tony Clayton said he was disgusted by the turn of events, and been in touch with Thamesdown Borough Council’s legal department.

Baker’s role was taken by an understudy called Justine Elliott, and an Adver reviewer said she did “...a grand job and is funny in her own right, but the part is so dominant that it needs charisma as well as comic ability.

“Miss Elliott was warmly and deservedly applauded by the first-nighters, but the whole production, which is now drawing to the end of a tour of over three months, has a tired air.”

Hylda Baker, who suffered from Alzheimer’s disease in the latter years of her life, died in 1986, aged 81.

Her non-appearance in Swindon was one of several arts-related stories during that sweltering week, but the rest were much cheerier and involved talents with local pedigrees.

The Adver ran an interview with Mrs Betty Davies, who lived in Swindon and ran a hair salon in Regent Circus.

The previous month, she had been invited to California for the wedding of a member of Supertramp, a rock band who were already very famous and would become even more so over the next few years.

Betty’s invitation was hardly surprising, as she was the bridegroom’s proud mum.

Rick Davies had nurtured an ambition to work in music from childhood through his early working life as a welder with engineering firm Square D, and had once been in a band with another Swindon star of the future, Gilbert O’Sullivan.

Betty told us she was she was so overwhelmed with pride that she cried when she heard a Supertramp track played in a department store.

A veteran of every British Supertramp concert, she recalled one at the Royal Albert Hall: “There was complete darkness, then a spotlight lit up the piano on the stage and Rick was sitting there with a red rose in the buttonhole of his white suit.

“He started playing and again I just cried when a man near me said, ‘That’s the guy I came to hear. He’s the best musician in London.’”

Another reminder of Swindon’s tendency to punch above its weight in the arts came courtesy of a 15-year-old ballet dancer called Clare French, who was photographed leaping gracefully in the garden of her home in Braemar Close, Lawns.

The former Lawn Junior School and Churchfields Comprehensive School pupil, who had begun dance classes at four with enormously influential teacher Mollie Tanner, was already a pupil of the prestigious Royal Ballet Lower School and had just been accepted by the Upper School.

In February of 1980, she would join Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet, where she would be promoted to soloist in 1985.

Four years later, Clare French became principal dancer with the Scottish Ballet.

When a Swindon man called Edward Beard appeared in the Adver in those days, it tended to be because he had founded one of Swindon’s best known building firms, EW Beard Ltd - and because he still liked to put in a daily stint at the office even though he was nearing his century.

As a young man he had enjoyed painting, but put down his brushes for 70 years to concentrate on business.

In 1976, at the age of 97, he began painting once more, using oil paints given by one of his many great grandchildren the previous Christmas.

To his loved ones’ delight, the old man proved himself as adept at creating beautiful paintings of buildings as he was at putting buildings up.

Mr Beard recalled his earliest experience of painting in about 1888, when Regent Street was still surrounded by fields, and his father sent him to take art lessons.

“I went into the room,” he said, “and it was full of young ladies. I didn’t go again.

“I had done my painting, a lock on the Avon, and the teacher improved it where the sunlight lit the barge.

“That’s the only drawing lesson I’ve had in my life.”

Mr Beard died in 1982 at the age of 104.