My friend Robert Stredder, who has died aged 82, was a street theatre performer and the founder in 1976 of the London-to-Brighton bike ride. The event was conceived initially as a fun annual happening, but is now a major fundraiser for a number of charities.
During the early 1980s Robert co-founded European Theatre of War, a group that toured Europe with a brand of anti-nuclear street theatre, travelling, as they put it, “from Glastonbury to the Milky Way”. He also performed almost up to the end of his life in the Theatre Des Bicyclettes troupe at festivals and events around Britain.
Robert was born in Shipston-on Stour, Warwickshire, the son of Henry, an accountant, and Doreen, who had been a primary school teacher before her marriage. Robert was a boarder at Malvern college in Worcestershire, where in the naval cadet force marching band he learned drumming skills. He took a law degree at Birmingham University, then studied English and drama at Brighton University.
Initially, from 1966, he made his living as an English teacher in Tottenham, north London, while pursuing artistic interests in his spare time. Attending the Isle of Wight festival in 1970, he was captured kissing a girlfriend in a newspaper photograph that was featured in the Guardian’s That’s Me In The Picture. He recalled that he had met the band Hawkwind in Brighton, and that they had “invited me to join them backstage at the Isle of Wight festival … as a sort of extra.” However, he missed out on the opportunity because he fell asleep waiting to hear Jimi Hendrix.
In later years he made enthusiastic musical contributions to live performances by the Incredible String Band and the Fallout Marching Band, mainly playing the congas and snare drum.
In 1971 Robert resigned from teaching and began to work for various arts companies, surviving on performance fees and small grants. With his long-term partner, the Irish performer and dancer Jackie Bardwell, he became a driving force in a commune at Groundwell Farm in Blunsdon, on the outskirts of Swindon, which became a hub for community arts in the 80s and 90s. I first met Robert and Jackie when we were members of the early radical arts group Action Space in the mid-70s. It was with Jackie and, among others, the Time Bandits actor David Rappaport, that Robert also established European Theatre of War.
From 1992 onwards, as it became more difficult to earn a living through his theatrical activities, Robert ran a small gardening business, Paxton Landscapes, and continued with that until his 70s.
But he kept up his performing, and late in life made the tabloids with a headline in 2015 in the Daily Mirror that read: “Fire-juggling OAP banned from performing at Christmas lights switch-on amid safety fears.” Prohibited from fire-juggling at Swindon Old Town’s Christmas lights, he ignored the order and went ahead anyway. He had a subversive and idiosyncratic open-heartedness in performance, as in life, and a gentle, anarchistic and hedonistic nature.
Robert’s final public performance was in 2023 at the Cropredy folk festival, where he entertained the audience with his stories and percussive infusions.
He is survived by Jackie and their sons, Erin and Lorien.
