offered a generous ten-year lease to the new Citizens Company, who took it up and moved from the Athenaeum Theatre in Buchanan Street. In 1946 Harry McKelvie died, his funeral being held in the theatre. Ar the end of the lease in 1955 Glasgow Corporation bought the theatre and leased it to the Citizens company. The Citizens Theatre Company was formed in 1943 by a group of theatre-minded men led by Dr Tom Honeyman and James Bridie, one of Britain's leading playwrights. The name of the new company was taken from the manifesto of 1909 of Alfred Wareing's newly formed Scottish Playgoers Co Ltd for their repertory company, which was to provide live theatre for the citizens of Glasgow, staging new Scottish and international drama, opening at the Royalty Theatre. The 1909 manifesto of the Glasgow Repertory Theatre expressed these tenets: "The Repertory Theatre is Glasgow's own theatre. It is a citizens' theatre in the fullest sense of the term. Established to make Glasgow independent from London for its dramatic supplies, it produces plays which the Glasgow playgoers would otherwise not have the opportunity of seeing." Originally based at the Athenaeum Theatre in Buchanan Street, Bridie's Citizens Company relocated to the Royal Princess's Theatre in the Gorbals in 1945 at the invitation of Harry McKelvie, "The Pantomime King". Bridie renamed it the Citizens Theatre and the Citizens Company opened there on 11 September 1945. James Bridie James Bridie, the main pseudonym used by Dr Osborne Henry Mavor, was a leading British playwright of international status, screenwriter and physician. During his medical career, his first play was produced in 1928 in Glasgow. He is a founding father of modern Scottish theatre, reflecting his creation of the Citizens Theatre, appointment as the first chairman of the Scottish committee of the Arts Council, and inaugurator of Scotland's first College of Drama in 1950, now part of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in Glasgow. He was instrumental in establishing the Edinburgh Festival. He studied medicine at the University of Glasgow, then served as a medical officer during World War I in France and Mesopotamia. He became a senior consulting physician at the Victoria Infirmary and Professor of Medicine at Anderson's College. With the success of his comedies in London, Bridie became a full-time writer in 1938. The Bridie Library in Glasgow University Union, an organisation of which he was president, is named after him.