Guild founding member Gerald Morice was a strong advocate for building international connections between British puppeteers and companies abroad. He played a central role in this work, establishing the British branch of UNIMA and organising a series of influential European study tours for Guild members. The first tour, in 1936, took seventeen participants to visit puppet theatres in Cologne, Stuttgart, Munich and Salzburg. A second tour followed in 1937, covering Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig, Cologne and Dortmund.
In 1938, Morice led an especially ambitious itinerary across Germany and Czechoslovakia. During this tour, members visited the city of Plzeň, where they met Professor Josef Skupa at Czechoslovakia’s first professional puppet theatre, an institution that later relocated to Prague in 1943. These tours played a significant role in strengthening international ties and exposing British puppeteers to the most innovative European practices of the period.
