ALL LIT UP
John was born in Hull, which was in East Yorkshire at the time and is now in Humberside.
His father, Horatio, was a sea captain and his mother, Lucy Hasnip, was a teacher.
John went to Hymer’s College where he started doing puppet shows by putting ink onto his fingers to create characters.
At school, aged fifteen, John met Sue Gill, who was to become hiss lifetime partner. She would cycle her bike home, and he would catch her up and ride alongside her.
They had their first proper date at Hull Fair.
After National Service in Ghana, John studied PPE (Politics, Philosophy and Economics) at Oxford University. Simultaneously, he enrolled at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Arts, costing him £3 a term.
In his leisure time, John got involved in experimental theatre projects.
In 1967. John became tutor/librarian at Bradford School of Art and his wife, Sue, became the Headteacher of Hornby Village Primary School.
After two years, John was appointed lecturer in Fine Art at Leeds Polytechnic (now Leeds Beckett University). The couple lived in a large Victorian house in the city.
Many of John’s students at Leeds were to join him in later projects.
Sue and John founded a street theatre company in 1968 known as ‘Welfare State’. John said, “Free art is as important as free spectacles and free dentures.”
It was based in the Lancashire town of Burnley. The Fox family moved to a caravan on a rubbish tip. Their children, Dan and Hannah, were home educated.
The mission of Welfare State was, “Art as entertainment, an alternative, and a way of life.”
Their first performance was ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’ – a tribute to the poet William Blake. The performance involved stilt walkers, fire eaters, performing bears, a Punch and Judy show and Trade Union banners.
They did not perform in any theatres but in streets and parks. John said he wanted, “Eyes on stalks not bums on seats.”
John was still working as a lecturer but the Welfare State project began to take over his life. Sue and John were joined by students, single people, couples and even children. It was communal living.
Welfare State were described as anarchic and political, who stole from music hall, mystery plays and the circus – “carnivalesque art.”
By the 1970s, John had resigned from his teaching job and invested more time and money into Welfare State.
John hated bureaucracy. He once had an argument with Bradford Council over the safety of the circus seats he had set up for a performance in the city’s Wool Exchange. He won the argument.
However, during the show, the seats collapsed. Luckily, no-one was hurt.
Their most popular show was ‘Parliament in Flames’, which ran between 1973 and 1981. It was a modern twist on the Guy Fawkes story. There was a massive puppet of Guy, a big replica of the Houses of Parliament and a giant dragonfly with the face of Margaret Thatcher. The music played (at top volume) was the Sex Pistols’ ‘Anarchy in the UK’.
The show ended with everything going up in flames. It was regarded as a pyrotechnic masterpiece.
They toured worldwide – from Tokyo to Toronto. There were shows specifically adapted to their host cities. At this point John changed the company’s name to ‘Welfare State International’ (WSI).
John and Sue even lived in Australia for a year before returning to the UK to live in Cumbria.
The 1983 show in London, ‘Raising the Titanic’, required a massive team of artists and makers, who all had to live in the abandoned Limehouse Docks.
It involved the creation of a 100-foot metal ship, hung from a crane – with animated puppets surrounding the ‘Titanic’, supposedly in the water – and lots of added pyrotechnics. There were many sideshows and bands.
That same year, John and Sue moved to Ulverston in Cumbria and changed from big city productions to community projects.
The reason for this was they wanted their children, now aged eight and ten, to have a formal education – they felt being home educated meant they were missing out on large parts of the curriculum as well as not socialising with children of their own age.
They bought the former National School in the town and transformed it into their new home.
John and Sue played at village festivals (e.g. harvest, yuletide) and fetes throughout Cumbria and Lancashire.
John and Sue also visited Japan where they witnessed a Shinto-Buddhist lantern festival and when they returned to England, they created their own. They made lanterns from willow stocks, tissue paper and candlesticks.
Their lantern shows began on a very small scale but grew in popularity, culminating in ‘All Lit Up’ to celebrate Glasgow being the European City of Culture in 1990. At the time, it was the biggest ever lantern festival held in Europe.
That same year, they set up ‘Lanternhouse’, an arts centre in Ulverston. It was residential and they taught their visitors prop making and street art. They also did projects in other places places in the Morecambe Bay area.
They organised many festivals in Ulverston including a Flag Fortnight, a Matisse meets the Beano show, a Dickensian festival and even a celebration of breast feeding.
They were awarded a £1.7 million lottery grant to turn the Lanternhouse into a National Centre for Celebratory Arts, which they ran for many years.
Their final performance took them three years to prepare. It was called ‘Longline: The Carnival Opera’.
It was performed in a circus tent during a heavy snowstorm. Nevertheless, 200 people attended the show.
During this period, John wrote an autobiography called ‘Eyes on Stalks’.
Following this, John and Sue wound up Welfare State International and shut the Lanternhouse.
They bought some land in Baycliff, a village south of Ulverston, and built their own home. It was called the ‘Beach House’, as it was on the shore of Morecambe Bay.
It was timber framed, built on stilts with a grass roof.
Sue said, “In all my born days, The Beach House is not a house, it’s an ark into which I have loaded everything. Everything I love.”
They continued to work together in an artistic company named ‘Dead Good Guides’. They hosted courses, held exhibitions and created ecological sculpture trails.
They owned a small area of coastline, so they turned it into the ‘Wildernest Project’, a sanctuary garden along the Cumbrian Coastal Path.
Wildernest included weathervanes, whirlygigs, poems and an observation pool.
John continued writing poetry but also wrote songs, became a printmaker and played the saxophone and accordion in local bands including ‘Blast Furness’ and the family group ‘Fox-Gill Ceilidh Band’.
The ceilidh band involved John on accordion, daughter Hannah on the fiddle, son Dan on trombone and eight-year-old grandson, Luca, on percussion. Sue called the dances.
Dan became an installation artist and Hannah is an artist, animator and musician, who was heavily involved in the ‘Saturnalia’ project on Hadrian’s Wall’ in 2022.
John was awarded the MBE for, ‘An unstinting contribution as an inventor of forms of creating participation and celebration”.
John with Sue was credited with regenerating the town. Ulverston is now regarded as an important hub for the arts, nicknamed ‘The Festivals Town’. The lantern festivals continue, even though the Fox family are no longer involved.
In 2024, John was diagnosed with cancer. This led him to write a book of five poems and an essay on death, entitled ‘Rehearsing a Future’. He had one hundred copies printed which he sent to friends.
John was regarded as a trailblazer and pioneer of modern street theatre and the involvement of the community in his arts projects.
Sue survives him.
RIP – Radical Inventive Pyrotechnics
