GIVEN this programme for the performances of the Gilbert and Sullivan opera Princess Ida at the town's long-gone Prince's Theatre in 1892, G and S aficionado Anne Rigby asks Looking Back just who were the Blackburn Meistersingers who put them on.

Their names Anne knows -- as, inside, are listed those who played the opera's 15 principal roles, together with the 65 members of the chorus and officials of the society who included such eminent figures of the day as Blackburn MP and mill owner William Coddington as president and fellow MP and cotton baron WH Hornby among the clutch of business magnates and magistrates who were vice-presidents.

But of the Meistersingers' origins Anne wanted to know more. For, as archivist of the Blackburn Gilbert and Sullivan society, she intends to place the programme -- given by long-standing fellow-member Miss Connie Kaye before her recent departure from the area -- among the society's records.

Evidently the group, like many others worldwide, named themselves after the German minstrel tradesmen Meistersingers of the 14th - 16th Century who were immortalised by composer Richard Wagner in his 1868 musical drama Die Meistersinger von Nrnberg. But if names in the 1892 programme are ones that tally with those and their owners' addresses and occupations in directories of the period then, unlike their German forebears, the Meistersingers of late 19th-century Blackburn seem to have been drawn from the middle classes rather than the town's artisans.

But, as performers, they were rated as first class -- in the newspaper clipping also kept by Miss Kaye of a review of the first night of Princess Ida. It was, raved the press critic, an "unqualified success" and "went without a hitch from start to finish."

The old Northern Daily Telegraph, however, was not so charitable about the Meistersingers' production the previous year when, newly-formed and making their public debut -- with the fund for the town's Nurses' Home and other local charities being the beneficiaries of their efforts -- they put on Gilbert and Sullivan's nautical opera HMS Pinafore at the Prince's, preceded by the operetta Four by Honours.

They were rewarded, said the NDT, by a crowded house. But it added: "Taking the work of the players as a whole, the acting was above the average for amateurs, but the singing was slightly rough in places."

It went on: "The ladies were not always equal to their parts; a fact attributable, we think, to nervousness. Miss Thornborough sang excellently, but was a trifle stiff and Miss Wrighton was palpably lacking in confidence."

The society soldiered on, however, until 1930 when it collapsed following a production of The Vagabond King at the Theatre Royal. An attempt to revive it was made in 1939 with mayoral support and efforts being made to gauge the level of public support, but the outbreak of the Second World War later that year appears to have thwarted the move. But it seems to have inspired the launch four years later of the Blackburn Amateur Light Operatic Society -- not to be confused with the Blackburn Amateur Dramatic and Musical Society which was formed in 1912.

The Prince's Theatre in Jubilee Street, Blackburn, became the Grand Theatre in 1928. It closed in 1956 and was demolished two years later.