But it was his native West of England that was to give him his big break.  Charles Hay, manager of Foulston’s beautifully designed and newly opened Theatre Royal, Plymouth, as well as the Theatre Royal in Exeter, took him on as ‘leading business’ (star role) in 1836 when the Plymouth Journal reported him as rivalling the great contemporary actor Kean, while in Exeter he played to ‘crowded and enraptured houses’.  Plymouth received especially favourably his Richard 111 and Iago, which were to become favourite roles through his long career, as well as his ‘Sir Giles Overreach’. The Plymouth press was more critical of his King Lear (‘a distorted skeleton’) and his Hamlet (‘Too original’) ‘They did not think too much of me’, bemoaned Phelps with due comment on a prophet being unrecognised in his own land. However a tour of Totnes, Brixham and Torquay was reported as ‘doing wonderfully well’ after which in 1837 he returned to Devonport to play leading role in the Dock Theatre where he had begun as filler-in, no doubt a proud moment for the local boy made good.  Samuel Phelps, actor, it seemed, had arrived.

Indeed proof of this came soon since by the time that he moved on to Southampton his fame had spread to London where managers were vying to offer him contracts.  The great and renowned Macready was the first to succeed and gave Phelps his first chance to tread the boards on the London stage, his first role being Shylock in the Haymarket.

This was a time of change in the theatre, the centuries old ‘patent monopolies’ of Covent Garden and Drury Lane were broken giving other theatres the chance to build their repertoires.  Phelps took a gamble and decided to take over his own theatre at Sadler’s Wells.  This was a time when drunken theatre audiences in less reputable theatres regularly pelted the cast with rotten fruit and abuse and Sadler’s Wells was especially notorious.  Dickens had described its habituees as ‘as ruffianly an audience as London could shake together’. But Devonport born Phelps had plans including ‘to eventually rendering it what a theatre should be – a place for justly representing the words of our great dramatic poets’.  In this he succeeded.  From when he took over Sadler’s Wells in 1844 and for the next eighteen years he devoted himself to producing what was described as ‘the most highly satisfactory educational experiment of the nineteenth century’. Four performances out of six nights each week were devoted to Shakespeare of which one tenth was his favourite, ‘Hamlet’. His portrait in this role was painted by Nicholas Crowley and hangs in Plymouth Art Gallery.

As an all-round actor himself he preferred to play the tragic roles of Othello, Macbeth and Lear, though he was also renowned for the comic parts of Bottom, Justice Shallow and Sir Pertinax Macsycophant.  Aiming to produce all of Shakespeare’s plays during his career, he managed thirty-one and made a profit from this, this in itself being an achievement, no arts council grants, being then available.

He also edited his own edition of Shakespeare’s works and was several times summoned, with his company, by royal Command to play for Queen Victoria and family at Windsor Castle.

Although Phelps gave up Sadler’s Wells in 1862 he continued, addicted to the stage, performing until 1878.  In that year, while playing Cardinal Wolsey, he spoke the words, ‘Farewell, a long farewell to all my greatness!’, and collapsed on the stage.  He died a few months later.

Samuel Phelps had brought the magic of Shakespeare to generations of audiences.  He had also inspired generations of young actors who proudly boasted in later life to have ‘played the Wells with Phelps’.  One young man inspired by him was John Henry Broadribb, a Cornishman by adoption, born in Somerset but brought up at Halsetown near St. Ives.  It was while he was aged twelve that Broadribb watched Phelps play Hamlet at Sadler’s Wells and was fired to become an actor himself.  This he duly did but so as to not embarrass his Methodist and anti-theatrical family he adopted the stage name, after his hero Washington Irving, of Henry, later to be Sir Henry Irving – a name still renowned as one of the greatest actors of all time. So Samuel Phelps helped to inspire yet further generations with a love of drama and one of England’s greatest dramatists.

Not bad for a Saltash schoolboy.