Thanks to Reading Borough Council , WOMAD was able to make Rivermead in Reading its permanent home until 2007 . After 16 years of Reading shows , the event was moved to Charlton Park in Wiltshire , and Smith took over as festival director .
Before taking on the role , Smith had worked with the festival ’ s team while being head of culture at Reading Borough Council .
“ WOMAD was one of the events that I was responsible for . I was also the licensee . It took three years before WOMAD site manager Steve Haddrell told me about all the bars that I was the licensee for because no one had told me about the hidden ones ,” he laughs . founders Harold and Barbara Pendleton , the second outdoor WOMAD festival achieved a muchimproved bottom line .
Out of it was born the not-for-profit WOMAD Foundation , the aim being to bring the spirit of the WOMAD festival into schools and communities by enabling them to engage with artists from different parts of the world .
A key figure behind the foundation since the early days has been Mandy Adams , who is the festival ’ s World of Children education and workshop manager . Trained as a primary school teacher and with a passion for travel , Adams enthusiastically joined the WOMAD team in 1990 .
“ You have these amazing performances at the festival , but the educational side provides longlasting experience and connection , either through talks with the artist or practical workshops , so you get a real understanding of the culture , skills and traditions of the artists ,” she says . With money still tight in the early years , the WOMAD team realised one annual festival per year would not be enough to keep the project afloat . Over the coming years , WOMAD festivals were presented at sites across the country including Carlyon Bay in Cornwall , Morecambe , Reading and Mersea Island in Essex .
WOMAD was also rolled out overseas . The first international WOMAD festival took place in 1988 at Roskilde in Denmark . Over the years since , WOMAD festivals have been staged in more than 30 countries , as far and wide as New Zealand , Chile , Gran Canaria , Finland , and Mexico . Thomas Brooman oversaw the expansion of WOMAD ’ s global activities until 2008 , when the responsibility was passed to Chris Smith .
Adams says that while the international events proved successful , having multiple events in the UK became unsustainable : “ There were three or four happening a year but people began to realise we were competing against ourselves by having so many UK festivals .”
Water works Haddrell is one of the longest-serving members of the WOMAD team , having first worked on the event in 1986 .
“ I met Thomas Brooman and Peter Gabriel in 1984 , they were looking for someone to do the nuts and bolts of WOMAD , and I ’ ve been working on it ever since ,” he says . “ I was full-time for 20 years as a production director and now I ’ m freelance , but I still sitemanage at Charlton Park and look after the trickier new overseas festivals .
“ When I started at WOMAD I managed the traders , site management , security and production – back then the roles were not as demarcated as they are these days .”
Haddrell ’ s first WOMAD was at Mersea Island in 1986 with 6,000 people in attendance . It proved to be a baptism of fire .
“ The site , provided by Essex County Council , was next to the sea . It had a sewage treatment works on it which we were told would be capable of handling the waste produced by 6,000 people , but within a few hours of opening the festival we had no water on site . We had these really posh flushing toilet units from the Liverpool Garden Exhibition but no water , so
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