EXHIBITION TEXT

Ralph Cade’s Story

Ralph and his partner Robin Green ran a shop at Merton Abbey Mills, south west London, which held a car boot sale every Saturday morning.One of the stalls was operated by some lads who used to buy their stock from a storage warehouse that would sell, unseen, rental unit contents whose tenants had defaulted on their rent for whatever reason.On a quick tour of the sale one Saturday morning, Ralph noticed that their stall had some amazing fancy dress and theatrical costumes that were somewhow familiar, but he couldn’t be quite sure from where.

Intrigued, but unable to confirm by images – mobile phones being unequipped with cameras at that time – he described the costumes to his friend Sue Smallwood who said that they sounded like costumes from Michael Clark’s shows. She went round to his house and confirmed this.The following Saturday Ralph returned there and asked the same stallholders if there were any more of the costumes, upon which four bin liners were brought from the van.

Ralph bought them there and then, unseen. 

Both Ralph and Sue returned to ask the stallholders about a box from the same storage lot, which they had heard contained Clark’s choreographic notes. They were told that the stallholders felt the contents to be of no value, so they had destroyed them.