Our Story

I'm Carl, the founder of Debbicot Press and the son of the late playwright, Bridgette C White.

My writing journey started when I was just 2 years old, telling stories about the adventures of my Teddy Bear. At the same time, I was always perplexed when adults would exclaim at my use of BIG words, such as "Psychology", in conversations with them, at such a young age.

Having grown up with my younger sister and with my mother, a relentless playwright, I often felt more like an extra in one of her plays, rather than her son.

Mum's plays were everything. She always told us they were: "Our meal ticket to a better life. A house next door to Cliff Richard. No more money worries."

I know she truly believed this but the odds were against her. Writing is a tough business, even today. But the challenges of being a playwright add an element of unpredictability to the equation of success:

Reliance on other people such as Actors, Producers, Set Designers, Marketers, a whole production team.

The only escape route as a playwright is to be "discovered" by a Producer, Impresario or Angel Investor, who takes on the financial risks, allowing the playwright to focus on the writing.

My mother wasn't fortunate enough to have any of those. It was just her, her two children, her plays and trusty typewriter, to take on the glitzy world of showbiz.

Here, I tell the story of Debbicot, a family legacy of storytelling, that dates back to the 19th Century.

My mother, Bridgette C White, was born a writer. From a very early age she would write stories about her imaginary friends and the adventures they got up to. Those stories would take her to faraway places, but never further from the place she dreamed about most, the birthplace of her mother, Debbicot.

Although she never visited Debbicot in her lifetime, she continued to write those stories at school, receiving a commendation for the quality of her writing, at such a young age.

As an adult, Bridgette grew fond of writing plays. As a playwright, she found she could really express herself in ways that she felt limited when writing stories.

Although, it wasn't as easy as that. The downside for her was, unlike books, plays required actors. Actors needed to be paid. Not to mention all of the production costs associated with putting on a play.

Undeterred, she went all in, and became a one-person production company, later known as Debbicot Theatre Productions.

Ultimately, that was her professional downfall as a playwright.

Because unlike the numerous online marketing opportunities available to us today, Bridgette had limited resources to make her productions known, apart from a well-used manual Olivetti typewriter, carbon paper, typewriter correction fluid, and borrowed access to an ancient Gestetner machine for running off copies of scripts and handmade publicity leaflets.

Nevertheless, she threw herself into everything, trying her best to launch every play she wrote.

But getting reliable actors was her greatest problem. She was a good playwright, but had little to no available funds to invest in her plays. She tried everything from offering actors a box office split, to giving them shares in her production company. Alas, without a guaranteed monetary incentive up front, those equally poor actors had no skin in the game and often didn't show up for rehearsals, despite her having paid in advance for the hire of the hall.

From my earliest childhood memories, the constant clacking of that Olivetti typewriter became an annoyance. The noise, sometimes deafening, meant that I would try to be in another room or in the garden, often with my fingers in my ears, hoping for it to end. It rarely did.

Night and day, she would sit on the sofa, surrounded by freshly screwed up paper that she had angrily ripped from the typewriter and tossed aside, whilst muttering words I shall not repeat here.

Her writing was relentless. By the end of her life, she had written dozens of plays and produced only a handful, to be performed in front of a live audience.

At the age of 14, I was press-ganged by my mother into being a leading actor in one of her plays. My reward? My character, Norman, got to eat 6 French Fancy cakes in the Kitchen and Vicar Scene. A part I liked to rehearse often!

Sadly, none of those plays made the breakthrough that she had always longed for. Yet she kept writing until a few days before she died.

My sister and I have very little to show for mother's dedication to her work as a writer. There are only a handful of partial manuscripts left.

As the curtain fell at the end of Act 2 of Bridgette's lifetime career as a playwright, it never rose again for Act 3. Her performance was cancelled, together with the applause.

There was no finale, no encore, just silence as the lights went down!

Despite this, I give thanks for my mother's writing because without it, I would not be here. She met my father when he auditioned as an actor for a part in one of her plays.

I am the living encore of that production!

The father of a family of 15 children, including Margaret Doolan (Dowling), Christopher Doolan lived at Debbicot. He was a proud man, a manual labourer. His claim to fame was his story: "The Leprechaun and The Cabbage".

Whilst walking home one night from the local pub, Christopher noticed something strange happening on his prized vegetable plot. As he got closer, he squinted his eyes for them to adjust to the darkness, and there it was in plain sight. Sure enough, a poacher was doing his dirty deed. But this was no normal poacher. It was a leprechaun. More importantly, it was stealing one of Christopher's prized cabbages.

Times were hard. Food was scarce. Christopher was outraged. As he began to run towards the said cabbage, red mist ensued and Christopher shouted, "Put that down, you bugger!"

In that moment, the leprechaun looked over his shoulder, made eye contact with Christopher, and cheekily winked at him. Of course, this enraged Christopher all the more, as he charged at the leprechaun, shaking his fist and waving his shillelagh.

Unsurprisingly, the leprechaun ran off at speed, but not without taking Christopher's prized cabbage with him.

When Christopher arrived home at Debbicot, he told his family what had happened. Naturally, they didn't believe him, they knew he had been drinking.

But Christopher angrily defended that story for years. The irony is, he remained angry that his prize cabbage had been stolen. Not that it had been stolen by a leprechaun!