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One of Felix Barker's most important jobs as a reporter for the Evening News came with the 1936 Crystal Palace fire; and only a few months later, still only 19, he was appointed the paper's drama critic for amateur productions, writes Adam Benedick. Did that make him the youngest ever Fleet Street theatre critic?
Until the Evening News folded in 1980, Barker was one of the busiest stage and film critics of his generation, phoning in his theatre notices between press shows and still "catching" up on any stately home that happened in his path.
Even before the Second World War, when Barker was the Evening News's deputy reviewer on films and plays, the ninth Earl of Bessborough, himself a theatre addict, would fondly recall the breezy arrival one day at Stansted Park, Bessborough's historic pile in Hampshire, of young Barker at the wheel of an open-top car with Charles Morgan, the novelist and...