Welcome!

This Website is dedicated to the persons, lives and films of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. 

It is also the website of the Beau Chumps Tent of Sunderland, one of the many worldwide chapters, or ‘tents’, of the ‘Sons of the Desert’ – the International Laurel and Hardy Appreciation Society. We meet on the second Wednesday of every month at 730pm at the Ashbrooke Sports Club in Sunderland. Please visit the meetings page for more details.

The site has new items added on an ongoing basis and the News/Blog page is updated regularly with blogs from a number of contributors as well as a weekly ‘Image of the Week‘. Well, it would be weekly, wouldn’t it… .

We also have a Facebook page ‘Beau Chumps Sunderland‘. Our ‘story’ changes every day and at least one update per day is posted, usually more, and quite often this would include a classic clip.

Stan and Ollie played full week engagements at the Sunderland Empire in both March 1952 and February 1954, and Stan of course has many connections with the North-East of England. Please see the ‘Features’ page here or via the menu above for more details.

Please feel free to leave any thoughts or comments you might have at the bottom of the page, we’d love to hear from you.

Throughout the site, I have tried to refer to the boys as individuals as ‘Stan’ and ‘Babe’, to the team as ‘Laurel and Hardy’ and the characters as ‘Stan’ and ‘Ollie’. Very simple where Stan is concerned, but with Babe, not so much…

The original Beau Chumps Tent were very active in the 80’s and early 90’s and it has long been my intention to re-establish the tent. As I am now essentially retired, I am able to put my shoulder to the wheel, grab the bull by the horns, put my best foot forward and get the tent into the digital age with DVDs, websites, emails and other tools of convenience. No humping a projector and screen around these days, he says…