Linda Lewis – Obituary 

July 2025 

Linda Lewis founded the Tunbridge Wells Puppetry Festival at her kitchen table with a laptop, a second-hand mobile phone, an address book and without any funding. It was a post-retirement project. 

Linda was never a puppeteer. She was always an administrator, producer, promoter, theatre director, funder, organiser, teacher who never took no for an answer. 

Linda had been much influenced when in the early 1990’s she had gone to Charleyville Meziers in northern France courtesy of the Arts Council. During the festival the whole town was taken over by puppets of all kinds, every shop had puppets in the window, every street corner had a performer, every possible venue had a show. The only accommodation was in people’s homes or tents. Linda did not do camping so stayed with a local postman. Linda was amazed at how the economy of what was a very depressed town with high unemployment was being regenerated by puppets. Linda who was theatre officer – Southeast – at the time for the Arts Council increased her brief to include being the officer responsible for puppetry and street theatre. At the Arts Council Linda regularly took UK puppeteers to festivals elsewhere in Europe to see the quality of the modern work that was being performed outside the UK. 

In early 2000 Tunbridge Wells was going through a quiet phase economically and culturally (a significant proportion of the shops on the Pantiles were empty) and Linda thought that a festival would cheer people up and help with the regeneration of the town; she had, after all, a very big address book! 

At the time most people in Tunbridge Wells associated puppetry as Punch and Judy except for the older members of the community who remembered Muffin the Mule which was on children’s TV until 1955; puppetry was ‘for children’. It was a hard sell initially to get people interested and yet elsewhere in Europe, especially in Eastern Europe, puppetry was a dynamic artform with university courses, young performers, and adult audiences. The Little Angel in London was regarded by many as the recognised centre of puppetry in England but their influence did not spread to thirty miles south of Charing Cross.  

Linda bought to Tunbridge Wells the first Tunbridge Wells Puppetry Festival with entertainment for adults and children. She doorstepped possible funders, worked her address book, pulled in favours, appointed all her friends as volunteers, wrote lengthy risk assessments for unusual venues, responded to Arts Council diversity questions, got local drama teachers involved, told (she never asked!) people to put up posters, be front of house managers, give free advertising spaces and give money. There were only two things she insisted on, namely that she would not book an artist until she was certain they could be paid and nothing was booked that she had not previously seen, even if this meant a trip to Magdeburg, Budapest, villages in Italy or festivals in Spain, Germany or Hungary, normally at her own expense, although she was brilliant at extracting ‘go see’ money from the Arts Council. She was also expert at playing the political game, persuading the equivalent of the Spanish, Italian and German and even Indian Arts Council how wonderful it would be if they paid for their puppeteers to come to England where they would be noticed. 

The Festivals under Linda’s directorship took over Tunbridge Wells in particular when Joey the National Theatre’s War Horse came to visit - the first time he had been out of London. 

Linda studied in Glasgow at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama and after graduating taught drama in Glasgow and Edinburgh. She acted in children’s touring theatre throughout the UK and earned an extra 2 shillings and six pence a week for driving the van. 

She moved to Tunbridge Wells in 1974 and worked as a drama teacher at several schools in Tunbridge Wells, and at Bush Davies and Doreen Bird, top drama schools at the time. She worked from between 1975 and 1989 as a drama teacher in her home and had hundreds of pupils who always did well at the various local drama festivals. She discouraged her students from going to drama school until they at least at learned about life – the theatre being a perilous profession. 

Linda’s family have been very moved by the letters after her death by many ex-students who, now in a variety of senior positions, wrote that the communication skills they learned at her drama lessons had been hugely useful in their careers. 

At the Celebration of her Life many in attendance were surprised at the number of her activities over the years. In addition of course to the Tunbridge Wells puppetry festival and teaching drama in Tunbridge Wells she had been an actress in children’s theatre, drama teacher in schools in Glasgow, Edinburgh, and at the Mead and Tunbridge Wells Girls Grammar School. She was the first education officer at Trinity, theatre officer for the Arts Council, manager of the De La Warr Pavilion, Director of the Visions International Festival of Brighton, and Producer of Ballroom which toured nationally during which she coped with a lead actress being taken to hospital with an appendicitis six hours before curtain up on the day the Guardian critic was coming… and with no understudy! She was also Director of plays at Tonbridge School and Director of the Puppet Centre Trust at Battersea. She also managed to bring up two children who are highly successful in their chosen fields. 

Linda was able to pass on the directorship of the Tunbridge Wells Puppetry festival and was incredibly pleased to see it continue to prosper under the new directors, Ailsa, Alison and Hayley. 

Linda died on 21 May 2025 from Parkinson’s, an incurable disease from which she had suffered for many years, but this disease did not define her.