Since early in the days of the GSPS we’ve been aware that there was the Goonist Movement, a Goon Show fan club in the 1950s. However, apart from getting a glimpse of one newsletter years ago, no one had ever tracked down any information. And yes, we did try using Google….
In a last ditch effort, a GSPS investigation team placed notices in the GSPS newsletter and this website last year, asking if anyone had information. The response was very slow to begin with, but eventually tip-offs flooded in at a rate of one.
Fortunately, that one turned out to be a good one. A gentleman named Ian Gilbert said he thought there might be some material buried in family keepsakes which he’d inherited from older relatives. That material turned out to be a full set of the Movement’s newsletters. Ian was good enough to allow our chief investigator, Chris Smith, to make scanned copies of them.
It turns out that this fan club was formed in January 1956 by a lady called Rayna Allen and friends. They had some success and were in contact with the Goons. Monthly newsletters were distributed and there was some access to tickets for show recordings. Sadly, running the club through the communications technology of the 1950s appears to have become too much, and it came to an end by the end of that year.
Scanned copies of the Goonist Movement newsletters are being added to the GSPS Digital Archive and the full story will appear in the next issue of Goon Show News. We’re greatly obliged to Ian Gilbert for his help in filling this blank in the history of The Goon Show.
The Goon Show Preservation Society 