TRIBUTES were paid this week to radical theatre director Joan Littlewood, who has died aged 87.

But among references to the "left wing visionary" credited with "blowing a great gust of fresh air" into the conventional West End theatre of the 1950s, the sharp-eyed reader may have discovered a surprising fact.

The breath of 'fresh air' may well have started in Kendal ...

Joan Littlewood founded her Theatre Workshop, a touring collective aimed at working-class audiences, in 1945.

The Daily Telegraph this week recorded that this took place in Kendal - a fact confirmed in historian Roger Bingham's Kendal, A Social History.

With London's West End suffering from the blitz, Kendal enjoyed an "Indian summer" of theatrical performance during the Second World War, states Mr Bingham in his book.

The Old Vic came three times and "through the good offices of the Westmorland Director of Education, C.P.

Trevelyan, Kendal High School provided the setting for the first performance of Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop in 1945.

Bang up to date Theatre Workshop staged a play about the atom bomb at St George's in 1946," writes Mr Bingham.

The workshop, which had its own writers, director, designers and philosophy, went on to produce several famous shows, which were eventually put on in the West End.

Some, such as Oh What a Lovely War, were made into films.