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Thursday 27 November 2014

Once Upon A Time – The Fan Club!


    I was wondering the other day, purely out of curiosity, what became of ‘Once Upon A Time’ formally ‘the Sussex Group’ based in Britain, who called themselves friends of ‘the Prisoner,’ which was a breakaway group from Six of One: The Prisoner Appreciation Society in the early 1980’s, and as I understand it, gradually evolved into ‘Once Upon A Time’ an American based fan club for ‘the Prisoner.’ I came across a link to ‘Once Upon A Time,’ but the link wouldn’t work. Neither could I find a site for ‘the Prisoner related ‘Once Upon A time’ fan club, to which I was once a member. I can only imagine that the fan club no longer exists. Perhaps someone reading this has knowledge of what became of ‘Once Upon A Time,’ and was he or she a member at one time or another, and knows what happened to the fan club.
    Regular readers of my blog will possibly recall the above article. Now as it happens I recently received news of what happened to Once Upon A time, from an old friend of mine, Rick Davy. Rick kindly wrote the following in an email.
    “One last thing to chat about is I was interested to see on your blog recently a mention of the "Once Upon a Time" fan club. You're correct that this club was borne out of the "Sussex Friends of the Prisoner" and was headed by a lovely chap called David Lawrence. He subsequently moved to America (hence why the club then seemed to shift to a USA-stance) and he married a lady called Marsha McCurley. She went on to create and run a website called "Virtual Portmeirion" whilst at the same time (late 1990s) the Once Upon a Time club became online only. Sadly, Marsha died in around 2004 (somewhere on the Unmutual site in the news archive there is a news piece about it as she has had a plaque put up in her memory in the woods) and the news hit David very badly and he closed down all his "Prisoner" interests as he didn't want to carry on with any of it without his wife. Very sad.”

   My thanks to Rick for supplying this information, although I did feel at first feel it was very personal information to David Lawrence, and perhaps it was impersonal for me to publish it on my blog. However more recently I received an email from Rick, who had received an email/notification from a rarely used "Yahoo e-group" called "Number Six" which is run by an American former Six of One member called Kipp Teague. This was informing the group members/subscribers that David Lawrence had sadly passed away a couple of years ago. As such I felt more comfortable about posting this up-date regarding ‘Once Upon A time.’ All round it is very sad news.
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