Victorian vocalists: the traces they left behind (part two)

Prompted by this sheet music cover, I pulled out this  article from my old files:

BLEADEN, Julia [Emily] (b St Margaret Lothbury, London, 28 December 1822; d 26a Albert Bridge Road, Battersea, 15 November 1905)

 

The ‘cradle’ of the Bleaden family was the village of Calne, near Salisbury, in Wiltshire, and it was there that a large proportion of the Bleadens of Great Britain who saw the daylight in the later part of the eighteenth century opened their eyes.

 

However, Calne was evidently too provincial for some more energetic members of the family, and the not very widespread name of Bleaden became decidedly prominent, in the last years of the eighteenth and all of the early nineteenth centuries, in the city of London itself. The firm of Bleaden and company, led in the 1790s by John Bleaden and later by his eldest son Charles (1770-1851), were caterers and licensed victuallers, and the flagship of their increasing fleet of hostelries – which included at various times the Royal Hotel, Deal, the Plough Tavern, Blackwall with its whitebait speciality, and the King’s Head, Poultry, which went in for fresh turtle -- was none less than the celebrated and recently rebuilt London Tavern at number 120 Bishopsgate Within. The London Tavern boasted a dining room which could take over 350 people, and that room swiftly became the centre for more than just dining. In the more than half a century that Bleaden and co ran their magnificent hostelry, it became a favourite centre for city dinners, society meetings, annual general meetings, political beanfeasts, company directors’ beanfeasts and, consequently, a huge commercial and political centre where business of all kinds was transacted. (‘Mr Bleaden’s committee sits daily at the London Tavern’). The Bleadens transacted with the best of them, and John and, especially, Charles Bleaden’s name appeared on prospectuses ranging from the Royal Humane Society  to the Alliance Granite and China Clay Company, as director of the Liverpool & Derby Railway, Secretary of the Printers’ Pension Society, chairman of the General Mining Company, chairman of the Licensed Victuallers Insurance Soc, director of the Direct Western Railways, chairman of the Hotel and Tavernkeepers Provident Institution and many others.

‘The group of directors have floated so many companies that they are referred to as ‘the Lothbury Gang’’ commented the Times in the 1820s, with reference to the part of London from whence the family operated. And operated with a certain success for Charles, who was at various times a councilman for Cheap, and an alderman, boasted several addresses -- ‘of Colesden/Couldson Court Surrey & Adelaide Place, London bridge – and was also at one stage the owner of a private steamboat. 

By this time, Charles was doing much of his wheeler-dealing alongside another Bleaden – another John. John Bleaden of 47 Lothbury. A brother? A cousin I think, as it seems Charles had only one brother, Henry, and anyway this John had been born back in Calne in 1783. However, by 1816, he is up in London and operating from the Lothbury address, which would be his for very many years, as a stationer. A ‘stationer’ of 1816 did very much more than sell notepaper. A stationer’s shop was another wheeling-and-dealing centre of activity, commercial and personal, and John was not slow in following Charles into some of the multiplicity of activities in which his (?) cousin was involved. In 1823 I spot him canvassing for election as a director of the Eagle Insurance Company and a few years later he becomes, and for many years remains, secretary of the Commercial Steamship Company. He turns up (with Charles and a list of fashionable gents) as a steward of the Royal Asylum of St Ann’s Benevolvent Society, and so forth, and in 1851 when Charles Bleaden died it was (?) cousin John who was named as executor of his will.

John Bleaden actually came to London well before 1816, for in 1806 he was married at St Olave, Old Jewry, London to Miss Fidelity Mead, who spent the next twenty years regularly swelling the Bleaden population of Lothbury. George (1807-1879), John William (1809-1841), Fidelity Jane (1810-1890), Charles (1812), Martha (1813), Edith (1819-1891), Henry (1822-1823), Julia Emily (1822), Charles Edward (1825), Mary (1827-1903) …

George would follow his father into the world of City of London finance, as secretary to this and that Fund and so forth, Edith ended up as a boarding house landlady, Mary became an artist (‘Miss Bleaden’s classes for the study of the living costume model and elementary drawing for ladies are held at 74 Newman Street Oxford Street’), and Julia became the best-known of them all. As a vocalist.

 

Julia Bleaden was just fifteen years old when she made her first appearance as a singer. Evidently, she had been, since a rather early age, a pupil of William Howard Glover, a fact which thoroughly surprised me when it surfaced, as I wasn’t aware that that seriously semi-successful gentleman – composer, performer, teacher, critic – had had genuinely successful pupils before the days of David Miranda and Emily Soldene. But he did. And Julia was probably the most successful of them all. Until Soldene, of course.

 

Mr Glover put his pupils on display, for the first time, at a concert at his rooms in Soho Square (15 May 1848), and a number of them gained the approval of the press, notably Miss Julia Bleaden who was ‘highly successful in Meyerbeer’s trying aria ‘Idole de ma vie’’. Her master hurried her name before the public: His Lays of Many Lands was published soon after and alongside several ‘sung by Mr Sims Reeves’ was 'I list for the oar of his gondola’ ‘sung by Miss Bleaden’.

 

In September 1848, Howard Glover mounted a brief opera season at Manchester’s Theatre Royal. It was undoubtedly an attempt to make money – something else Glover was seriously and always unsuccessful at – for he hired Miss Rainforth and the tenor and baritone of the moment – Reeves and Whitworth – as his stars. Others of the principal parts were used to allow him to launch his pupils: Miss [Ellen] Rowland, Mr Delevanti, the Misses Macnamara, Teresa Brook, Isabella Taylor and Miss J Bleaden.

 

Julia made her debut alongside the Big Three as Lisa in La Sonnambula. The Musical World was less than impressed: ‘The Lisa—a debutante, Miss Bleaden—has a thin soprano voice, of some sweetness, but very feeble; her timidity, too, prevented her making the most of it.’ Mr Glover, being in this expensive venture to try to launch his pupils, riposted by taking an advertisement in the same paper quoting a rather kinder notice from the Manchester Times: ‘Lisa introduced to us Miss Julia Bleadon, a pupil of Mr. Glover. Her timidity interfered considerably on the first night with a voice that possesses much sweetness, and that bell-like quality so desired, but so rarely met.  Let her only have a little more confidence, and we augur well for her future. She has many qualities that only want faith to become valuable.’

The Manchester Times was right.

 

Back in town, Glover worked tirelessly to promote his pupils (he also married one) and, in December, he mounted a showpiece concert for seventeen of them at the Hanover Square Rooms. A large selection from Iphigenia in Tauris, a smaller one from a couple of unproduced operatic manuscripts of his own, and a miscellaneous selection made up the programme. Julia was chorus in the Gluck, but got to sing one of Glover’s songs and take part with the Misses Rowland and Taylor in ‘My lady the countess’, and the Musical World summed up ‘We should select Miss Ellen Rowland and Miss Julia Bleaden among the ladies and Mr Delevanti among the gentlemen as the most promising’. The Musical World got two out of three right -- there was a young sleeper amongst the gentlemen and Ellen Rowland rose only for a short while – but they were right about Julia.

 

Glover took his team to Scotland in the new year, and Julia appeared as Lady Allcash in Fra Diavolo, teamed with a certain Sam Cowell as her Lord, and was given her chance in the star role of The Night Dancers. ‘Miss Bleaden scarcely came up to our idea in the part of Giselle, but it must be confessed that the part is a heavy one’ reported the Glasgow Herald recording that Miss Isabelle Taylor had played the tenor role, because Mr Payne was indisposed.

 

Thereafter, I spot her at Liverpool, at Easter 1849, giving her Lisa alongside Annie Romer, in June at Dublin with Teresa Brooke, Gregg and E L Hime, singing at Miss Ward’s concert (Glover’s ‘Sing on, sweet bird’) and, then, engaged at the Princess’s Theatre where she teamed her Lisa now with Louisa Pyne. She also played The Queen of the Naiads in the pantomime King Jamie or Harlequin and the Magic Fiddle and appeared in the comedy My Wife Sha’n’t Act. Next season, she rose to playing fairy in the Drury Lane pantomime, Harlequin and Humpty Dumpty.

 

James Anderson, the lessee of Drury Lane, had got hold of Auber’s vast operatic spectacle L’Enfant prodigue, but his style ran more to the spectacular than the operatic, and he had the opera de-operaticised and its libretto turned into a piece of spectacular drama under the title Azael, the prodigal (19 February 1851). He himself played the title-role, alongside two other non-singers, Vandenhoff and Miss Vining. However, some of Auber’s music was kept, rearranged, as dance music for principal ballerina Victorine Legrain, and as incidental music. The incidental music included some vocals, and they were delivered by the experienced lead tenor, John Rafter and Eliza Nelson, who had been on the theatre’s preceding bill playing a little operetta, and by Julia Bleaden. 

Azael was a spectacular success, and during its run it went through a number of supporting comedies. Thus it was, that Julia found herself promoted from backing singer to appearing as Bianca to the Petruchio of Anderson and the Katharine of Mrs Nisbett in what had once been Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. But though Azael did well, Mr Anderson didn’t stay too long at the Lane.

 

Julia next surfaces in rather different surroundings: at the Southwark Literary Institute (2 February 1852) providing the vocal illustrations to a lecture on Modern Parody and Burlesque, delivered by a gentleman named P Henry Hatch. P Henry had over the past few years tried his hands at playwriting (Sunshine and Shade, Dearest Anna Maria, The Mantrap), song-writing (the vastly successful ‘O charming May’ ‘O cheerful spring’), and now he was having a shot at lecturing. It seemed to go all right. And Julia was described as ‘a young lady of considerable vocal ability’.

 

Three days later Miss Julia Bleaden mounted her own concert. Daddy had no trouble finding her a venue: the concert was held at the London Tavern. And he didn’t splash out on an orchestra. But the line up of singers was remarkable: Misses Louisa and Susan Pyne, Miss Poole, Mr Swift, George Perren, Henri Corri et al. F Osborne Williams conducted from the piano in the place of Glover. In spite of the ‘merciless pelting of a pitiless storm’, there was a good audience (‘mostly ladies’). Julia herself sang ‘O luce di quest’ anima’, Lee’s ‘Listen to the nightingale’, ‘La ci darem’ with Corri as her Don Giovanni, and joined Miss Poole in the favourite duet ‘The Fairies’ Dance’ which was ‘so remarkably well sung as to require repetition’. ‘The lady possesses a clear and flexible soprano of great promise’ reported The Musical World.

 

Opera, spectacle, comedy, lecture, concert – Julia Bleaden had begun her career in eclectic fashion, and it would continue that way. Her next engagement was for Sadler’s Wells. Priscilla Horton had turned impresario to mount a season of opera, with that popular pair of vocalists Louisa Pyne and William Harrison as its stars. Rebecca Isaacs, Henry Whitworth, Manvers and Oliver Summers supported, along with the young Julia Bleaden. The repertoire included Fra Diavolo, The Beggar’s Opera, Lucia di Lammermoor, The Daughter of the Regiment, La Sonnambula, The Crown Diamonds, The Mountain Sylph, Maritana, The Enchantress, Der Freischütz and such afterpieces as Midas, and Miss Horton starred in a version of Le Duc de Letorières (The Chameleon). Julia would play parts in many of these operas in the coming years, but lacking playbills I know only, in this season, that she was Lady Allcash in Fra Diavolo and Lazarillo in Maritana.

 

In 1853 (23 July) she made another appearance at Sadler’s Wells, on a benefit programme, and she kept up the eclectic manner of her performances: she sang in the concert part of the programme, and then performed a petite comedietta entitled Popping the question by W Harries Tilbury from the Haymarket Theatre. In 1853 (15 September), too, she returned to the lecture hall. The Williams family, Thomas (lecturer), Bessie (vocals) and Frederick Osborne Williams (piano) had been touring an entertainment on English Music and Musicians, in which Thomas revealed his Notes of a musical tour with Mdlle Jenny Lind. This time he was just doing Vocal music, and Julia was brought in to help Miss Williams out with the ‘numerous vocal illustrations’, as they travelled from the Camberwell Institution to Oxford, Brighton, Deptford, Poplar, Islington, Dalston, Wellingborough, and dates beyond. By which time it had become a lecture on The Music of Germany. However, before, even, her engagement with the Williamses was done, Julia had been engaged for another like piece. 

P Henry Hatch Esq (sic), a gentleman who had indulged in Entertainments and playwriting (Rebecca Isaacs’ musical The Man Trap) for some half-dozen years, had got himself together a diorama of Ireland: ‘14 panoramic views of Dublin, Wicklow, Cork and Kilkenny with twelve comic portfolio sketches and new ballads composed especially by Samuel Lover and J G Callcott’ which he called The Irish Tourist’s Ticket. Dioramas of Ireland had not yet flooded the market, and when this one was produced at the Hanover Square Rooms (24 October), it was much appreciated. In some quarters, The Morning Post (whose critic was surely Howard Glover!) Mr Hatch was found tiresome, and only the views and ‘Miss Bleaden’s songs assist materially in preventing the half-suffocated audience from rushing incontinently into the square for more of atmosphere and less of apoplexy’. The Times groaned that ‘this was the age of Illustration’ – ie of one-man shows and ‘entertainments’ on Charles Mathews and Henry Russell lines, rather than theatrical productions – but granted that this was ‘one of the most agreeable and instructive entertainments of the day’.  ‘Mr Hatch’s manner is remarkably good and the whole effect is much enhanced by the singing of Miss Julia Bleaden and the pleasant little songs with which it is interspersed’. The pleasant little songs, indeed, went to those thousands of pianos to which Lover’s vast output always went and Julia was able to boast that pieces such ‘The Jaunting Car’, ‘The Ship is parting from the shore or, Why did you leave me’, ‘How to ask and have’, ‘The Favourable Answer’ and the cavatina ‘The Sprites of the wind’ had indeed being written ‘especially for’ her.

Alas, when the sheet music was published it was Mr Hatch who got the billing: ‘composed especially for Mr Hatch’s entertainment’. P Henry’s show, however, was so well appreciated that he decided not to take it to the villages of the home provinces, and instead he moved it into the Salle Robin in Piccadilly (on the site of what is now left of the London Pavilion). The show did not remain static. New songs were introduced, and when the eastern question became the burning issue of the minute, Hatch had some scenes on the Golden Horn and Constantinople painted and his tour of Ireland took a sally forth to Turkey! 

Bandwagon-jumping started instantly. E L Hime came up with an entire entertainment on The Songs and Sayings of Samuel Lover, C H Kenney set up a whole diorama of Constantinople (and then got sick and couldn’t do it). But Hatch and Julia (‘Samuel Lover’s ballads are rendered with judicious taste and much feeling by Miss Julia Bleaden’) ran serenely on and, on 21 January 1854, they celebrated their 100th performance. But Dr Kahn had a contract to bring his ‘Museum of anatomy’ to the Salle Robin, so The Irish Tourist’s Ticket had to go. It zoomed off down to the Royal Pavilion in Brighton (‘Miss Julia Bleaden has assisted … rendering the entertainment one of unusual interest’), as Hatch went on to announce lectures on Brother Jonathan, A Night with Dickens, The Philosophy of ‘Punch’. Alas, he didn’t turn up for a date at Chelmsford, and I never hear of him ever again. Oh, yes I do. Philip Henry Hatch, woollen warehouseman, dealer and chapman, 95 Wood-Street, City, was declared bankrupt the following week. Philip Henry Hatch, Melbourne 1864 …

 

Julia, however, was quickly back in business. She appeared at the Brighton Theatre, alongside Henry Manley, as Georgette in the old musical comedy ‘Twas I – originated by Vestris and a particular favourite of the star of the Brighton season, Rebecca Isaacs. During the week Miss Isaacs also played The Barber of Seville and The Daughter of the Regiment (one night she did both and the mad scene from Lucia in between them) with manager Henry Farren, and I imagine again Julia took some supporting roles. She also came back down to appear, that season, along with the Weisses and Herbert Bond as one of the vocalists in Nye Chart’s Benefit.

 

Back in town, she fulfilled a number of concert engagements (Perren’s, Howard Glover’s, Misses Mascall’s &c) and saw her name appear on the covers of a number of songs by Langton Williams, the prolific composer of ballads and parlour music (‘A Song to the Flowers’, ‘Music on the Sea’, ‘You’ll Soon Forget Kathleen’ ‘Dermot’s Farewell’  ‘I Love a May morning’ ‘Sunny Memories’ ‘The Music of my native land’ &c), before joining another opera company. This one was again at Drury Lane. It was announced for 18 nights and opened with Maritana with Hermine Rudersdorff in the title-role and Galer and Dussek heading the support. Of which Julia may have been one. But not for long. The season collapsed after three under-prepared nights and the singers went off to Swansea and Plymouth where they apparently did Sonnambula, Lucia and The Bohemian Girl as well. Julia’s name is listed, behind Julia Harland as prima donna. Did she play Lisa, Alice and the Gipsy Queen?

Back in London, after this fairly hapless venture, Julia moved into one of the few areas of vocal entertainment that she had yet to tackle. She appeared for Hullah, at St Martin’s Hall, alongside the Sims Reeveses, in oratorio. As second soprano, of course, for Mrs Reeves was the star of the affair. And she was adjudged by the Athenaeum ‘a neat and well-prepared second soprano’. They did Judas Maccabaeus (15 November with Augustus Braham, Weiss) and a memorable performance of The Messiah (20 December) which saw the debuts of Bessie Palmer and Lewis Thomas, two of the coming greats of British oratorio singing. She was labelled – behind the large notices reserved, as ever, for the Reeveses, and not surprisingly for the two, brilliant new performers -- ‘a competent and agreeable second soprano’. On 17 January she was second soprano to Marian Enderssohn in the St Martin’s Hall premiere performance of Mrs Mouncey Bartholomew’s The Nativity.

 

In 1855, amid the usual run of concerts, Julia took up several more substantial jobs. She visited the chief London home of the illustrated lecture, the Royal Polytechnic Institute (1 March) to do the illustrations to a lecture on astronomy. These ‘illustrations’ took the form of large chunks of The Creation of which Julia delivered the soprano music alongside Montem Smith (tenor) and Henry Buckland (bass.) In May she got back on to the stage, at the Strand Theatre, where the manager, for the nonce, was Rebecca Isaacs. ‘Her first appearance here’ took place on 7 May and she got to play Polly Peachum to the Macheath of Brookhouse Bowler in The Beggar’s Opera. But she didn’t stay. One week later she opened at the Lyceum Theatre.

Anna Thillon was saying one of her ‘Farewells’ with a season of her inevitable The Crown Diamonds. The advertisements bill Leffler, Bowler, Mr T Williams, Miranda, Drayton and Julia Bleaden. Which, if it were so, means that she played the appreciable second role of Diana to the memorable Caterina of Thillon. Alas, Anna ‘sprained her ankle’ after eight performances, so it was back to the concert engagements, including a visit to Bradford, a return to St Martin’s Hall (19 December 1855) for another Messiah, doing second this time to Clara Novello, and an Elijah at Leicester with the Weisses. 

 

The Leicester connection had actually been announced a few weeks earlier, the brothers Nicholson – Henry (flute) and Alfred (oboe) – Leicester-men both and also two of the outstanding wind players of the era -- had joined with Henry Lazarus, the star clarinettist, top trumpeter Thomas Harper, and several other movable players to create a wind ensemble called the Anemoic Union. The vocalist for the Union’s tour of concerts was to be Julia Bleaden. And on a date which curiously seems unrecorded, Julia Bleaden would become the second Mrs Alfred Nicholson. Presumably after Alfred had ceased being married to Mrs Ellen Nicholson.

 

Once the Anemoic Union’s first little tour was done, she carried on with the mixture as before. A visit to Cambridge with harpist Chatterton, appearances at the vast concerts of George Case (‘The Cuckoo’) and Howard Glover, another Creation, on home ground at the City of London Singing Association (as first soprano this time), Langton Williams’s concert of the year, and another opera season. This one was mounted by Howard Glover at Sadler’s Wells (19 May 1856) and the Reeveses were the stars, with Rebecca Isaacs as second. Once again, the two-week season billed and reviewed little more than the stars. We know that Julia did her Polly Peachum again, and that’s all. 

 

Much of the rest of the year was spent in the provinces, notably as featured vocalist in a tour by Alfred Mellon’s Orchestral Union and ‘the blind Sardinian minstrel, Picco’. I have spotted her guesting at Louth, Gloucester, Boston and several times in Birmingham before, in February 1857 she returned to town for an engagement at the Royal Colosseum, Regents Park. The Colosseum was offering something of the same mixture of entertainment as the Polytechnic, and they had picked up the Polytech’s old lecturer, Dr Bachhoffner. Julia, Montem Smith and Buckland came back to illustrate his astronomy lecture with some more Creation, and Julia stayed on to do the vocals in some of the Colosseum’s concerts alongside two other sopranos. Susanna Cole selected vast operatic scenas as her contribution, Clari Fraser RAM selected slightly less vast. Julia stuck mostly to her Lover and Langton Williams. For the meanwhile. For the Colosseum engagement turned into seven months’ stint. The astronomical doctor was replaced by George Buckland with his The Halls and Mansions of the English Nobility (matinees) andOld English Patriotic Songs (evenings) and Julia delivered ‘The Minstrel Boy’, Henrion’s ‘Sweet Love Arise’, ‘Bid me discourse’, ‘Tell me my heart’, Williams’s ‘The Falconer’s Son’, ‘I’ll be no submissive wife’, Handel’s ‘Caro vieni’ and the like. And then, almost as if to prove that she could, she suddenly came out with ‘O luce di quest’anima’ and the grand scena from Der Freischütz. In between times, she also appeared in other concerts, and I notice her at St Martin’s Hall in Howard Glovers so-called Educational Concerts for the People delivering ‘Deh vieni’, and Spohr’s ‘The Bird and the Maiden’ with oboe obbligato by Alfred Nicholson.

 

Julia Bleaden had been part of a variety of Entertainments since her first experience with P Henry Hatch, half a dozen years earlier, but now she found the one that would last her for as long as she cared to stay in the business. It was called Operatic Sketches, it was advertised as a ‘musical, pictorial, anecdotic lecture-entertainment’, and it had just one lecturer-performer-singer: Julia Bleaden. But it was, nevertheless, a three-handed entertainment. Julia went on the road with Alfred Nicholson (‘principal oboe of the London Philharmonic Society and member of the Italian Opera and Sacred Harmonic Society orchestras’) and Henry Nicholson (‘solo flautist to the Duke of Rutland’). And, presumably, an accompanist. Operatic Sketches seems to have had its first performance at Leicester on 30 November 1857, before setting off to Market Harborough, Claybrook, Welford, Burton on Trent and a long series of dots on the map, of larger or smaller proportions. On October 5 1858, I notice they visited Calne, Wiltshire.

I’ve been hard put to find out exactly of what the entertainment was composed. Julia spoke, presumably in character, changed costume, sang extracts from The Bohemian Girland La Fille du régiment, Henry did a flute fantasia on Scotch songs and Alfred ‘fully maintained his reputation as one of the best oboe players of the day’.

Julia kept on performing until 1867, and a part of every year – sometimes larger sometimes smaller – was devoted to touring the family entertainment. Latterly it was varied a bit, and when I finally see it out at Southampton’s Polytechnic Institute (2 October 1867), in the company of Henry and Charles Salaman, it is ‘a ballad entertainment’. And 1,700 people came to hear her. 

 

During those years, she continued to sing in London and provincial concerts. In 1861 Alfred Mellon hired her yet again for his Covent Garden promenade concert series and she appeared on the Covent Garden stage in Mendelssohn’s Lobgesang with Georgina Weiss and Mr Swift, and in concert with Swift and Carlotta Patti. She was regularly seen at the concerts given by Langton Williams (Macfarren’s ‘Ah why do we love?’, ‘The Falconer’s Son’ etc), and by Howard Glover, at whose 1864 festival she performed a Mercadante piece to which Alfred supplied the oboe obbligato. I have spotted her at the Hackney Manor Rooms delivering Macfarren’s ‘Ah, why do we love?’ and her old favourite, Müller’s ‘The Cuckoo’, in 1865-6 she is at Newcastle, Oxford, Leeds, Halifax etc with Henry in Mackney’s Entertainment. And I see that, on 13 April 1866, she took her entertainment to the London Tavern. 

 

The Bleadens were gone, now, from the Tavern and from Lothbury. Father John, widowed and remarried, had retired to Eagle Cottage in Epsom, where he died on 18 August 1865 at the age of 82 leaving ‘less than 1,500L’ to his young(er) widow and the two children of his seventies, one of whom, William Henry Bleaden (1855-1909) would go on to be the famously obstreperous vicar of St Mary’s, Paddington.

 . 

Julia and Alfred had moved back to Leicester, to 34 Pocklington’s Walk. And then, in 1868, Alfred suffered a stroke. He died two years later, in Leicester, on 29 August 1870 at the age of 49. The widowed Julia apparently returned to London and to the house at 34 Alfred Place, Finsbury, which had long been Edith’s boarding house and the home of such of the Bleaden girls as were not married. In the 1871 census, Edith, Mary and Julia are there. She did not, as far as I know, work any more, either as a singer or even as a singing teacher, which she had done in the 1860s. If she did, she didn’t advertise. 

 

She went back on the stage, though, one more time. On 19 June 1872. The occasion was a Benefit at the Vaudeville Theatre for the house’s musical director: Arthur Wellborn Nicholson (1842-1882), her brother-in-law. For the occasion a little operetta with music by the beneficiary was mounted. It was called Love Birds and, at age fifty, Julia played the ingénue, Cicely Sweetapple, alongside tenor Henry Nordblom and comic George Honey.

 

Edith Bleaden died in 1891. Julia seemingly would be the last survivor among the Bleadens of Lothbury. In the 1901 census she can be seen living in Albert Bridge Road, Battersea with Mary. She died there four years later.

She had had interesting career as a performer. Never a star, but a fine, competent all-round performer capable of playing comedy, drama, musical comedy or opera at the best theatres, of singing Langton Williams and Samuel Lover ballads to great effect, The Creation to equally good purpose and a Der Freischütz scena or a piece of Mercadante when the occasion demanded. She had played many second roles in the busy part of her multicoloured career, but she had played them to and alongside Louisa Pyne, Carlotta Patti, Clara Novello, Charlotte Reeves and Anna Thillon, and when she had finally become the centre of affairs, as the soloist in her own family show, she had proven worthy of it. 1,700 spectators in the Southampton Polytechnic for a singer and two wind players? Not bad. Especially at knocking fifty.

 

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Victorian Vocalists: the traces they left behind ... part one

 

Photos, programmes, sheet music ... these folk are long since gone, but traces of their time in the sun still exist today, and I enjoy 'preserving' them on this page.

Here's one ... a promising tenor 

WILSON, Leigh [COCKRAM, William Edward] (b Lower Arcade, St James, Bristol 26 January 1836, d Marylebone 13 February 1870)

 

On Thursday 16 November 1865, Mr George W Martin and his National Choral Society gave one of their regular performances of Mendelssohn’s oratorio Elijah at Exeter Hall. Hermine Rudersdorff was the chief soprano soloist for the occasion, with Fanny Armytage in support, while Bessie Palmer took the contralto music and Theodore Distin and Henry Regaldi assisted in the ensembles. But the billing went, noblesse oblige, to Charles Santley in the role of the prophet, and – perhaps surprisingly -- to ‘the new tenor, Mr Leigh Wilson’.

Yet another ‘new tenor’. Most of the previous ones had ended up in touring choruses.

The evening started with a huge disappointment for the gathered audience. Santley was off. His two year-old son had died on the previous Tuesday, and George Renwick had been called in to deputise for the grieving baritone. But the evening that had begun on such a low point was to end in a sensation. Not because of Mr Renwick’s all-of-a-sudden Elijah, although the deputy acquitted himself more than creditably, but thanks to that newest ‘new tenor’. Mr Leigh Wilson.  ‘Mr Leigh Wilson who comes we understand from Bristol, and has recently been studying under Mr Martin, possesses that most important of requisites – a fine voice. His upper tones are especially good, and of this he is evidently conscious. Upon what he may become as an artist, it would be premature to speculate; nor would it be fair to criticise him at this early stage of his career. Enough that he created a sensible impression and was unanimously called upon to repeat ‘If with all your hearts ye truly love me’ and ‘Then shall the righteous shine forth’. A more frank success has rarely been won and it must now be the endeavour of Mr Wilson to show that such spontaneous marks of sympathy as he elicited from the densely crowded audience have not been thrown away. Meanwhile, his progress will be watched with anxiety ...’ (Times) ‘We may confidently say a more promising first appearance has never been made ...’ (Era), ‘The most promising tenor that has appeared for many years…’ (Weekly Times), ‘Such a first appearance is a phenomenon in Exeter Hall if not in musical history generally...’ (Illustrated Christian Times), ‘He secured one of the heartiest re-demands ever heard within the walls of Exeter Hall..’ (Advertiser)

Opinion seems to have been unanimous. This was the best new tenor to have come along since ... why, probably since Sims Reeves.

 

So who was he? Yes, he was indeed, as the Times confided, from Bristol. And, yes, up to a point he was a pupil of Mr Martin. Definitely he was a tenor. But new? Well, perhaps not quite as new as all that. Apart from anything else, he was nearly thirty years old. And ‘Leigh Wilson’? That was a comparatively new nomenclature. ‘Wilson’ had been born William Edward Cockram, the eldest son of John Cockram, a Bristol music-seller ‘of 34 College Green, Music-seller to the Queen’, and his first wife, Mary, he was christened in 1836 at Broad Mead Baptist Church, and he spent his youth and young adulthood in Bristol. In the 1861 census, 25 year-old William can be seen living at number 4 Park Street, St Augustine, Bristol, with his father, recovering in new premises from a recent bankruptcy, his father’s second wife Mary Ann (36 b Salop, Cleobury), his sisters Mary Elizabeth (b 1838) and Elizabeth (b 1840), both, like himself, listed as ‘professor of music’, brother John (b 1842, ironmonger’s assistant) and a non-musical sister, ?Fanny (b 1844, hosier) plus two half-brothers, Edward Purcell Cockram (1853-1932) and Arthur Francis Cockram (b 1856).

My first sighting of W E Cockram being a tenor in Bristol is in the late 1850s, specifically 28 March 1857 at the Pump Room in Bath. He is said to have ‘recently made such a successful debut in Bristol’, and his contribution to this particular evening is ‘Ah! che la morte’ and ‘Rocked in the cradle of the deep’. I see him again in August 1858, when his father promoted evenings at the Victoria Rooms and at Clevedon, with the Brousil family topping the bills. Mr W E Cockram and Miss Megson supported. In November, I spot him teaming with Swanton, Wm Merrick and J K Pyne in dinner music at Colston. In 1859 he is at the Bristol People’s Town Hall Concerts singing ‘Rose of the morn’ and ‘Phoebe, dearest’, alongside Miss Clowes and Mr P M Toogood, and at Cardiff People’s Concerts where the verdict ran ‘evidently a man of some musical skill, [he] executed his songs prettily but was quite unequal to the size of the hall’. He repeated at the Anchor Society of Colston in November (‘Come if you dare’). I see him performing at Newport (‘Ah che la morte’), with the Bath City Choral Society at the Guildhall (1 May 1860 ‘the new tenor’), and back at the Victoria Rooms 26 September 1860, with the Brousils and Rosalia Lanza, when he sang ‘Fra poco’ ‘in a manner which quite surprised us and drew forth the heartiest plaudits’, ‘My Pretty Jane’ and 'The Knight’s Dream’ and joined the lady in ‘Si la stanchezza’. On 18 December, he sang Saul in Bath, with Emily Spiller and Henry Phillips, and 30 April 1861 he was Acis to the Galatea of Miss Banks for the same society. ‘Mr Cockram sings chastely, feelingly and without pretension. He has much to learn but acquits himself pleasingly’ nodded the local critic.

 

In 1862 Mr W E Cockram is billed at the Birmingham Monday Concerts (6 January) where he is now listed as ‘pupil of Frank Mori’ and in April the local press reported ‘the young tenor from Bristol is progressing. The tenor air from Lucia in which he was encored was given with nice voice and feeling and his execution of ‘My Pretty Jane’ was even more satisfactory’.

I spot him at the Mayoress’s Conversazione , singing ‘My own my guiding star’ and ‘M’appari’ and duetting ‘Mira la Bianca luna’ with another talented local, Ada Jackson, and ‘Mr Cockram of Bristol’ appears at Exeter on 3 July 1863 in a concert given ‘mainly for exhibiting a new organ built by Mr Dicker of Exeter’.

 

However, I have found earlier evidence of his being a ‘professor of music’, for young Mr Cockram was not just a singer but a songwriter. The archives of the British libraries hold copies of his ‘Onward brothers’ (1855). ‘The Policeman’, a comic song, words L M Thornton (1857), The Sunshine Polka (1857), ‘You’ll not forget’ words by Rev J R Wreford (1857), ‘The Curfew’ and ‘It is not always May’ (1857, words  Longfellow), ‘Flowers of pleasure seldom bloom’, ‘Jamie’s coming’ words and music by W  E Cockram, and still, in 1862, under the same name ‘Home of childhood’. ‘The Light of yon bright star’, ‘England’s Polka’ and ‘For ever and ever’ to Tennyson’s words, don’t seem to have survived, in spite of being published by Hopwood and Crew and Joseph Williams respectively.

 

So it seems as if Bill Cockram didn’t become ‘Leigh Wilson’ until 1863. Because the tenor who was supposed to be ‘new’ at the age of 29, in 1865, actually got up on the London concert platform at least as early as that, and in such decidedly prominent circumstances as to make that later ‘debut’ a bit of a fraud. And since this 1863 appearance is not surrounded with the sort of brouhaha given to the later one, although he is mentioned vaguely as ‘a debutant’, I imagine that – under one name or another – Leigh Wilson had possiblybly even been seen out in the metropolis before. 

Anyway, my first London sighting of him is on 12 December 1863, when he turns up on the bill at August Manns’s Crystal Palace Saturday Concerts. Anna Caradori and Julia Elton sang an aria and a named song apiece, Arabella Goddard and the orchestra played, and in the middle of it all Mr Leigh Wilson was billed, baldly for ‘song’. The Era noticed ‘a pleasing tenor voice which, under so good a master, he will no doubt sooner or later learn to use to advantage’ but didn’t tell us what the song was. (It was ‘In native worth’). What it did tell us, though, was that Mr Wilson was still ‘a pupil of Frank Mori’. The undeniably ‘so good a master’.

 

I don’t see ‘Leigh Wilson’ out again for fifteen months. When I do, it is 1 March 1865 and  – guess what? –  he’s ‘the new English tenor’ and its ‘his first appearance in London’. Again.  Once again, he’s buried away in the middle of a programme which includes the ‘new French tenor’ Mons Hilaire, from the Italian opera at Covent Garden, plus several not so new English tenors: William Harrison, George Perren, David Miranda, and forty or fifty other artists, for the occasion is one of Howard Glover’s monster concerts at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. For the occasion, the neophyte chose to sing the serenade ‘The Message’ by Jacques Blumenthal. If it seemed a sensibly modest choice, alongside Hilaire’s ‘Cuius animum’, Miranda’s ‘In native worth’ and Harrison’s Rose of Castille aria, it actually wasn’t. For ‘The Message’ had been, since its publication the previous year, one of the preferred songs of Mr Sims Reeves. Mr Leigh Wilson was evidently not afraid of comparisons. Anyway, as far as I can see, none were made. Yet.

Leigh Wilson made a number of other appearances in concert during the 1865 season, amongst which Richard Blagrove’s concerts at the Beethoven Rooms (24 April, 22 May), the series given by pianist Dr S Austen Pearce at Store Street, the Misses Lachenal’s concertina concert at Myddelton Hall (14 June), and the concert of Dr Wylde’s New Philharmonic Society at St James’s Hall (27 June) on a bill with Mathilda Enequist, Agnesi and a Miss Abbott from Wylde’s Academy. I also spot him at Norwich’s St Andrew’s Hall in concert with Giulia Grisi, Fanny Huddart and J G Patey, and at Cardiff singing ‘The Message’ and another Reeves favourite ‘My Pretty Jane’ alongside Megan Watts. Finally, on 8 July, he turns up at a concert to raise funds for a school for the sons of deceased Freemasons, in good company (none tenorious) and under the aegis of Wilhelm Ganz. Then all goes quiet. Until 16 November when he makes his next and most memorable ‘first appearance’ of all.

So what had happened between July and November to turn this thrice-born, thirtyish, Bristolian vocalist into the most exciting tenorial prospect since Sims Reeves?

The only thing that we know had happened is that he had, in one way or another, come under the aegis of Mr George William Martin, ‘composer, conductor and educationalist’, founder and conductor of the National Choral Society. G W Martin (b Portland Place, London 8 March 1828; d Wandsworh Common, 16 April 1881) had been a part of the British musical world since his childhood. He had begun life as a choirboy (‘deputy alto at St Paul’s’, ‘sung at Queen Victoria’s coronation’) and gone on to be a Deputy and later a Gentleman in Ordinary of Her Majesty’s Chapel Royal, Organist of Christ Church, Resident Music Master of the Training College, Battersea, and a music teacher at Stamford Hill Ladies College as well as a prolific composer of glees and other part songs. In 1857 he put together a choir to give a concert of his glees, and thereafter his name was connected with a series of choral groups (City of London Choral Society, Metropolitan Schools Choral Society, Royal Surrey Gardens Choral Society, St Paul’s Special Sunday Services Choir, Volunteers Choir ‘for the practice of singing choral marches while on the march’ etc) of mostly limited life, of which the point in common seemed to be their size. All Martin’s advertisements emphasised ‘large’ ‘larger’ ‘largest’, whether it was a group of 100, like his original, of or 5,000 such as he on occasion conducted at the Crystal Palace. The choir put together to perform Martin’s own glees and madrigals metamorphosed into the National Choral Union, and on 6 February 1861 it gave its first full-scale performance. The occasion was a benefit for the Coventry weavers, the choir was announced as 800 strong (‘the largest’), the soloists were Helen Lemmens-Sherrington, Martha Lockey, George Perren and Lewis Thomas, and the performance was not glees and madrigals, but the Messiah.  Its success confirmed the way the National Choral Society would go, and thereafter, although it annually gave a concert or even two of Martin’s glees, it became first and foremost an oratorio group (‘the largest…’). In the choir’s earliest years, Martin engaged top, proven singers as soloists, artists such as those with which he had launched the choir. But from 1865 he put prominently forward several of his own ‘pupils’ or protégé(e)s,  promising artists with everything to prove and to win. All were successful, but the first, and most explosively welcomed of them, was Mr Leigh Wilson.

Mr Martin’s protégés were, as we have seen, not beginners. ‘Leigh Wilson’ was nearly thirty and ‘a pupil of Mori’, and the other two most prominent, contralto Lucy Franklein and bass Joseph Lander, had come respectively from the stables of T A Wallworth and the Westminster Abbey choir. It seems that Mr Martin – who alongside his choral and composing activities, also operated as a vocal teacher – put these rising performers under one of the ‘apprenticeship’ contracts current at the time. He would use his experience and influence to train them, launch them, promote them, in return for a percentage of their earnings. Such ‘apprenticeships’ could last anything from two to, more usually, four years, and during that time the performer’s career was effectively managed by the ‘teacher’.

Whatever Mr Martin’s abilities as a solo vocal teacher (and it seems unlikely that he could have improved upon the coaching of such as Frank Mori, nor even the conscientious Wallworth), he certainly fulfilled the part of the bargain which required him to promote his singers. Wilson, Miss Franklein and Lander were all used as featured soloists with the National Choral Union, repeatedly and almost to the exclusion of all others, over the years during which Mr Martin controlled their destinies, and they repaid him by helping to make the oratorio performances given by his choir in the years between 1865 and 1869 the high point of his career.

None of which explains, of course, the sudden and miraculous evolution of Mr Leigh Wilson, in a course of months, from an agreeable ballad singer at Store Street and Myddelton Hall, to a star on the hallowed platform at Exeter Hall. How did it happen. I can only imagine that Martin had ‘placed’ him correctly. That oratorio in the vastness of Exeter Hall -- where he could ‘chuck’ what was evidently a large voice with a showy top register – was much more suited to his talents than ‘My pretty Jane’ at the Beethoven Rooms.

The excitement created over Wilson’s latest debut did not subside when Martin rolled ‘the new tenor whose success on his first appearance in Elijah last week has caused so much stir in the musical world’ quickly into a series of oratorio performances: The Creation (29 November 1865) with Louisa Pyne and Santley (‘His natural qualifications are far above the average, his voice being of delightful quality devoid of the slightest harshness and of uncommon power’), followed by a Messiah at Croydon (15 December) and two more (20 December, 3 January 1866) at Exeter Hall with Misses Pyne and Franklein and Martin’s not-so-successful find, an American basso by name J R Thomas. On 17 January he brought out Elijah again (‘Mr Leigh Wilson was encored in ‘Then shall the righteous’ which he sang with excellent taste and more than ordinary power’), and on 31 January Judas Maccabaeus. ‘Mr Leigh Wilson was encored in ‘Then shall the righteous’ which he sang with excellent taste and more than ordinary power’ reported The Era, while the Times rang a slightly different note: ‘The young tenor, Mr Leigh Wilson, as had been anticipated threw all his vigour and all the strength of his voice into the declamatory air ‘Sound an alarm’, winning as had also been anticipated an obstreperous encore. This air at present lies more readily within his means than ‘How vain is man’ which demands vocal flexibility as well as physical force.’

The Musical World, too, was now hedging a touch. Having written of The Messiah: ’The new tenor, Mr. Leigh Wilson, fully justified what has already been said of him.  He won a well-merited encore for his vigorous delivery of “Thou shalt break them.’, its critic now wrote ‘My opinion of ‘the new tenor’ remains unchanged.  His voice is perhaps to be envied, but it must be used with care, and lacking as it does the high cultivation necessary for a perfect artist and which can only be the result of time, it is to be feared, unless Mr. Wilson possesses a strength of mind and firmness of purpose altogether exceptional, that the vigorous applause which greets his every effort may be ultimately productive of more harm than good.’

Events, however, only added to the spreading fame of ‘the new tenor’. The next evening, Mr Wilson went to a concert given by Henry Leslie’s choir. Sims Reeves was to sing but, as so often, scratched, allegedly at the last moment. In spite of the fact that Wilbye Cooper, so often a stand-in for Reeves under similar circumstances, was to hand, Mr Leigh Wilson came out of the audience and on to the stage and gave Reeves’s celebrated ‘Come as you dare’ and ‘The Message’. The encores flowed, and the press didn’t challenge the circumstances, but reported ‘Such a voice as he possesses deserves good husbanding, and he is already master of a commendable quality that of articulate enunciation of the words set down for him’ (Times) ‘Mr Leigh Wilson certainly made by legitimate means an impression which will result most favourably for him’ (Era).

Mr Wilson had become a personage in just a short couple of months. When he visited Gloucester the local critic reported ‘the concert was rendered peculiarly attractive by the engagement of Mr Leigh Wilson and the room was filled by a brilliant and fashionable audience anxious to hear the new tenor in whose praise the London critics have written so highly’, and when he ‘did a Reeves’ and scratched from one of Howard Glover’s concerts the audience almost howled the house down.

The National Choral Society concerts continued – Lobgesang/Stabat Mater (21 February 1866) with Parepa, Franklein and Weiss, the Passion week Elijah and Creation (although Wilbye Cooper did The Messiah), and on 23 May the Prize Glees concert (‘the new tenor on whom Mr Martin and his patrons set such store’). Wilson sang ‘The Message’ and ‘My Pretty Jane’, to his own piano accompaniment, and for the first time in a while found himself not the sensation of the show. Martin had engaged Maria Vilda from the Italian opera for the occasion, and Vilda could out-chuck any tenor on earth. The National Choral Society ended its season with a concert performance of Acis and Galatea (4 July) in which Wilson sang Acis to the Galatea of Parepa and the Polyphemus of Santley.

But in between his bread-and-butter Exeter Hall performances, Mr Leigh Wilson was in demand. He did further concerts with Henry Leslie, in the place of the originally booked Reeves, singing the pieces originally set down for the famous but fragile tenor (‘But thou didst not leave his soul’, ‘Waft her angels’, ‘Ti prego’ with Sherrington and Whytock), he touted the J R Thomas ballad ‘Ah never deem my love can change’ around the town and country concerts, he appeared at Jullien’s Benefit at St James’s Hall billed as ‘the new tenor who has created such a sensation’ and singing ‘Come if you dare’, and on Mayday he went with Martin to the Crystal Palace and sang the solos in the Luther Hymn with his master’s choir of 5,000 London schoolchildren and teachers.

During the autumn, Wilson took part in Alfred Mellon’s Covent Garden promenade concert series (‘a very successful debut’), alongside Carlotta Patti, Caravoglia and others. Billed as ‘the popular tenor’, he delivered the classic Braham-cum-Reeves tenor repertoire -- ‘Come if you dare’ ‘The Death of Nelson’, ‘The Message’, ‘My Pretty Jane’, ‘The Pilgrim of Love’ ‘The Bay of Biscay’, ‘In native worth’ ‘O tis a glorious sight to see’ – and a Charles Salaman ditty entitled ‘Celia’. At Mellon’s Benefit on the last night of the season he repeated the Salaman song and joined Frau Liebhart, Mlle Georgi and Henri Drayton in the Spinning Wheel quartet from Martha.

The 1866-7 season of the National Choral Society got under way with an Elijah on 20 November, but Leigh Wilson was not there. Both he and Mme Lemmens-Sherrington scratched, and Martin’s newest tenor, J Kerr Gedge, had to take over. He was back for the season’s first The Messiah on 12 December, however (‘he raised a considerable amount of enthusiasm with his rendition of ‘Thou shallt break them’ and sang throughout with care and intelligence’) and, after leaving the second to Gedge,while he visited Bath for a performance of the same work with Mme Lemmens, Janet Patey and Weiss, he returned to his place for The Creation (3 January 1867), Judas Maccabaeus (17 January), Acis and Galatea (13 February as Acis to the Galatea of Louisa Pyne), Stabat Mater/Lobgesang (27 February), Elijah (15 April) and the Prize Glees (29 May). The Times still referred to him as ‘perhaps the most successful protegé of Mr G W Martin’ but The Musical World was harping: ‘Mr. Leigh Wilson was also encored in ‘Sound an alarm,’ which he sang with vigour.  In the other two no less trying airs, ‘Call forth thy powers’ and ‘How vain is man,’ Mr. Wilson certainly left much to be desired.  It is a matter of regret that this gentleman, for whom nature has done so much (in the way of voice), should have done so little to turn his fine natural gift to the best advantage.  Without study,-- downright hard work,-- the finest voice in the world is ‘but as naught.’’

His ‘outside’ work during the season included his first performance of the role of the Christian Guard in the Walpurgisnacht with the Musical Society of London, and the regulation number of concerts, topping up his standby performances of such as the self-accompanied ‘My pretty Jane’ and ‘My own, my guiding star’ with at least one new piece, Edwin Matthew Lott’s ‘That other shore (‘composed expressly for…’) and his rather frillied-up version of ‘Rocked in the cradle of the deep’. But when he visited Glasgow to sing St Paul he gave out after the first pages of the performance and Hermine Rudersdorff ended up singing the tenor part as well as her own.

 

Martin launched his new season, in November 1867, as usual, with Elijah. But this year it was Kerr Gedge who sang it. Leigh Wilson went instead to Oxford for a Messiah and Norwich for a Judas Maccabaeus and to the Lecture Hall, Tottenham Court Rd for a concert with the Brousil family. He was back in his place at Exeter Hall on Christmas Eve with Ann Banks, Bessie Palmer and Santley for the Christmas Messiah but when he returned to sing Acis and Galatea in May, he was again taken ill and this time Madame Rudersdorff, his Galatea, really couldn’t fill in!

On 3 July 1868 Mr Leigh Wilson gave a concert of his own at the Queen’s Rooms. The guest list included sufficient stars – Luise Liebhart, Edith Wynne, the Pateys, Bessie Palmer, Caravoglia – plus Miss Mina Mellis and Mlle Corolina Felice, but it was scarcely one of the season’s most fashionable gatherings.  It had all, it seems, gone wrong.  That dazzling beginning… So Mr Leigh Wilson did the fashionable tenorious thing. He packed his bag and set off to Italy. Presumably, hopefully, in search of the kind of teaching that George Martin was obviously unable to give him. Or that he was unable or unwilling to take. 

 

So, where did Mr Wilson go, and how many years did he study with whom? I can answer most of that. He went to Florence. And he was back in London in less than three months, and advertising ‘Mr Leigh Wilson announces his return from Italy and, having concluded his engagement with Mr G W Martin, requests all communications respecting oratorios concerts be addressed to his residence 91 Wimpole Street…’ I don’t think there were very many communications. I’ve spotted him doing a Creation  at Canterbury on 29 December 1868, and a Messiah in Liverpool on new year’s day 1869. Martin had him back for Judas Maccabaeus on 3 February, but this time it was the newest ‘discovery’, bass Joseph Lander, who was in big letters above the title and Mr Leigh Wilson, Arabella Smythe and Bessie Palmer got the leftovers. He sang The Creation at Preston in February 1869 (‘not in good voice’), and in May he gave a concert in Bristol, with Mlle Liebhart as his companion, ‘Recently returned from studying in Italy’ he advertised. Not that recently, and, as we know, not for long. The reviewer noticed that he had a cold. Again.

On 15 June 1869 Leigh Wilson sang at a concert at number 40 Welbeck Street, put on by the Misses Evans. I don’t know. Maybe he sang somewhere else in the next six or seven months, but if he did I haven’t tracked it down. And six or seven months was all he had. On Sunday 9 February 1870, William Edward Cockram ‘was confined to his room’ at 91 Wimpole Street, suffering from ‘brain fever’. One week later he died. His body was taken home to Bristol for burial. A sad end to a sad story. His life had been short, but his career – his fame – had been much, much shorter. For one season, he had been the sensation of the day, and then… the road to obscurity.

‘Brain fever’. I wonder what they meant. Meningitis? Hum. I keep thinking of all those colds. All those times he was off. I know Sims Reeves did it too, to an infamous degree, and Reeves lived to a great old age. But…? I suppose I’ll never know.

 

During the years in which he was ‘Leigh Wilson’, William Cockram had continued to write songs, only now he signed them with his new name. Oddly enough, I’ve never seen a record of him actually singing any of them himself, but the archives record the following titles under his name: ‘Brighter Days Will Come’, ‘Could a distrustful thought arise ‘, ‘Fear Not’, ‘Good Night and good morrow’, ‘Heaven’, ‘Love me little, love me long’, ‘The murmuring river’, ‘Sunshine through the clouds’, ‘Sweet Linnet’, ‘The Tap at the Door’, ‘Wayside flowers’ and ‘Why should we repine’.

None of them, obviously, was any kind of a hit. But a hit there would be in the Cockram family. Young half-brother Edward Purcell Cockram, a music teacher in Bristol all of his life, and sixty years organist at Clifton Down Congregational Church, set Herrick’s poem ‘Passing By’ to music and the resultant song has lived to this day.

 

Coda: George William Martin’s days in the sun lasted little longer than those of his first protégé. The National Choral Society, latterly rehoused at the Albert Hall, wilted away in 1871. The sister with whom he had shared his bachelor life, in their home at 68 Glo[u]cester Crescent, Regents Park, died, and somehow his considerable fortune – reported to have been as much as L16,000 – wilted away, too. Martin began to suffer from nervous troubles. He attempted to launch new concerts of his glee and part music, without success, he attempted to start another Choral Society, with even less success. Without funds or family, he was even reduced to advertising for work not as a conductor but as a singer. In April 1881 he ended up in Bolingbroke House Hospital, on Wandsworth Common, and he died there on 17th of the month aged 53. 

 

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Hoho! Hoho! The true story of Edwin Ransford

Here's another article from my Victorian Vocalists Files.

This one is, I feel, an object lesson. A reaffirmation of my dislike of the so-called 'academic' system of historical writing as practised in University theses and publications and on a more 'popular' level by such as Wikipedia. Sewing together chosen portions of second- or tenth-hand sources is simple a way of perpetuating other folks' errors or, indeed, pretences. All you need is a couple of rotten apples in the barrel and 'history' becomes distorted 'fake history' for ever.  I have quoted before the Greek and Persian 'versions' of the Battle of Marathon. And I can say that, in my opinion, theatre history is fuller of lies and fabrications than even Herodotos and co.

I've spent some thirty or forty years in this minefield, trying to winnow the wheat from the chaff, and this piece is one which provided a good example. Not Wikipedia's fault, though I wonder why this gent appears there. The Wikipedia article is lifted bodily from The Dictionary of National Biography. Which is itself lifted from a hagiographic obituary in The Era ... and it is not truthful.

Here's my version. As written a decade and more ago ...

RANSFORD, Edwin (b Bourton-on-the-Water, Glos 13 March 1805; d 59 Welbeck Street, Cavendish Square, London 11 July 1876)

 

I know I’ve said it before. Rather a lot. But, over the years, the makers of the world’s musical, theatrical and biographical reference books –large and small --  really have made some highly idiosyncratic choices over whom to include, or not, in their pages. Successful, and once celebrated, people have been curiously omitted, whilst comparative nonentities, or professionally minor performers have, for one reason or another, been included in preference. And since the invention of the ravenous World Wide Web, the unquestioning Wikipedia at its prow, and hundreds of useless copycat sites following, have now gobbled up the contents of these often very inaccurate works, all sorts of distortions have set in.

 

This little prelude leads me to Edwin Ransford. I presume he has found his place in the www archives because his biography was at some stage, goodness knows why, included (via Boase and his obituary in The Era) in the British Dictionary of National Biography. I have long scratched my head over the ‘why?’, and I have come up with only two possible answers. He was apparently a very likeable man, and he was around for a long time. Over forty years in fact. Long enough to become a ‘grand old man’ performing ‘grand old’ material, in spite of the fact that he had never been particularly grand or notable in his earlier professional life.

Reading between the lines of the DNB article, the paucity can be seen – it is spotted with names of the famous with whom Ransford was ‘connected’ – but also with some pure misstatements. Preserved, of course, by the cut-and-pasters of the 21st century.

 

There is no misstatement possible in a description of Edwin Ransford’s background. His family was well documented in his lifetime. Edwin was one of the ten children of Joseph Ransford, a grocer in Bourton-on-the-Water, Gloucestershire and his wife Mary, née Beal. His parents lived to celebrate their golden wedding anniversary, before Joseph died in 1851. His wife, subsequently, extended the business to drapery and to the hops business of one of her sons-in-law.

 

Edwin himself made his way to London as a teenager. We know this, for on 23 March 1825, he married Hannah Newberry at Lewisham.  According to the biographies, he at first worked as an extra and a bass chorister at the King’s Theatre and Covent Garden. Actually, he first worked as a butcher, as the birth records of his children show. 

 

His first performance as a principal on the London stage is given precisely as 27 May 1829, at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, playing the role of Don Cesar (with Shield’s famous song, ‘The Wolf’) in The Castle of Andalusia alongside Vestris, Misses Forde and Cawse, Keeley, Reeve and Blanchard. The fact is, in itself, correct. However, it needs to be qualified. The performance was not part of the regular Covent Garden season, but a one-off Benefit for the Printers’ Pension Society (with which he seems to have had some connection), and the debut of ‘a gentleman, his first appearance on any stage’ (he was not named) was part of the novelty of the performance. I can find no review of the performance, but the piece was repeated on 23 June at Blanchard’s Benefit, and it seems Ransford again took part, although his obituary says, only, that he gave a song from The Freebooters.

 

‘[he] was engaged soon afterwards by Arnold for the English Opera House (later the Lyceum). During the autumn seasons of 1829 and 1830 he was at Covent Garden, and in 1831 he played leading characters under R W Elliston at the Surrey Theatre, where he won great acclaim’, continues the biography.

 

Well, yes and no. Mr Ransford went, within days, to open in the new season at the English Opera House. But he did not go to play roles such as Don Cesar. The season opened with operas – Tit for Tat, The Freebooters – in which I am sure he took part, but not in any way such as to get his name on the programme. I spot him first playing ‘a Smuggler’ in The Sister of Charity. And Little John in The Maid of Judah. He did, however, during the season, get the odd chance to step from anonymity. When Ries’s The Robber’s Bride was produced, the role of the Robber Chief was cast with the non-singing Perkins. As ‘Antonio’, Ransford provided the music. ‘A Mr Ransford enacted the part of a somewhat rich bass voice to Mr Perkins. It was not always in tune but it seems to have some capabilities and promise’ remarked the Morning Post. He apparently did less well in the little part of Marco in The Vampire: ‘the felicitous perfection with which he contrived to sustain a discordant yell would ensure him a Peerage in [the stock exchange]’. I also notice him taking part in the glee which was a feature of the perennial Gordon the Gypsy.

 

From the English Opera House, he indeed progressed back to Covent Garden, but there his employ was little better than it had been before. In the 1829-30 season I spot him only in the bit part of Villar in The Night Before the Wedding and the Wedding Night and as ‘a cyclops’ in the Christmas pantomime.

 

He went to the Surrey Theatre in 1830 and certainly played there (off and on) until the beginning of 1832. However, he equally certainly did not play ‘leading characters’ – I have found only more bits, walk-ons, and singing moments in pieces such as Cinderella (Zelidor), The Vesper Bell, The Rover’s Bride, Eugene Aram (Summers) and Zarga of the Sea. When the theatre celebrated the ‘accession of King William’, in July 1830, Mr Ransford was put up to sing a new song by Mr T Williams, ‘Our King a true British sailor’. The Times commented that it was ‘loudly cheered and encored, but it owed this to the sentiment it contained rather than to the merits of the singer’. Great acclaim, indeed.

 

The biography continues: ‘Later that same year [1831] he appeared at Sadler's Wells as Captain Cannonade in John Barnett's opera The Convent, or, The Pet of the Petticoats and on 3 November he played Giacomo in the first English production of Auber's Fra Diavolo at Drury Lane. In 1832 he was with Joe Grimaldi at Sadler's Wells, playing Tom Tuck in Andrew V Campbell's nautical drama The Battle of Trafalgar, in which he made a great hit with Barry Cornwall and Sigismund Neukomm's song ‘The Sea’.’ What a mess.

 First, let us dispose of the Fra Diavolo story, undoubtedly sprung from the same hagiographic Era obituary. The role of Giacomo was ‘created’ by Thomas Reynoldson, and Ransford was not at Covent Garden in November 1831 (The Era says 1832) when what was, in theory, the second production (but the first of Rophino Lacy’s to-be-standard version), of Fra Diavolo was given.

 

Edwin Ransford opened as a member of the company at Sadler’s Wells Theatre on 23 July 1832. Not 1831. The manager indeed was in theory the ageing, ill and incompetent Grimaldi, the piece was indeed the ‘new nautical drama’ The Battle of Trafalgar, and Ransford’s role – alongside the George Allheart of star Mr Hunt and the Emily of Mrs Selby -- was as a sailor named Tom Truck. And it would seem that he probably did interpolate the popular ‘The Sea’. ‘The Sea’, however, was far from a new song. It had been written for, and introduced by, Henry Phillips some twelve months earlier and had been sung by basses all round Britain since. Maybe it just hadn’t reached the Wells before. The Wells season was a disaster. Prices dropped immediately, and the nautical drama was soon dropped in favour of the Adelphi drama The Haunted Hulk (with Ransford as Oakum), the operatic drama Meg Merrilees, or the Witch of Ellangowan, The Honeymoon, Eugene Aram, et al, in quick succession. Mr Ransford’s ‘The Sea’ was rescued from the wreckage and sung some nights between the pieces. But not for long. The company fell to pieces after about six weeks, and a new management – Mrs Fitzwilliam and W H Williams – moved in. 

Most of the company were dismissed, but Ransford held his place, to sing ‘The Sea’ between Eugenia, The Cabinet Secret, The Magician of the Ruby Mines, May and December et al, with which the new managers held the stage as they prepared their ‘new opera’ by John Barnett. The ‘new opera’ was a version of the French vaudeville Vert-Vert, produced under the title The Pet of the Petticoats, with Mrs Fitzwilliam starred, and Mr Ransford, the singer, was cast as the military Captain Cannonade with a Bacchanalian song and duet to give. It was to be the opportunity and the high-point of his career. He gave his ‘Bacchus in Tuscany’ song (‘Away with all water, whenever I come’) with vigour and the Athenaeum wrote ‘Mr Ransford as the senior captain of the regiment, with his grey head, grey moustaches, and ramrod back, forms a prominent figure in this military picture; and he sings a clever bass song of Mr Barnett’s with great spirit and correctness’. The Pet of the Petticoat was played nearly sixty times at Sadler’s Wells before (1 October) Mrs Fitzwilliam transferred it to the Adelphi, with its original cast (including Ransford) almost intact.

Ransford would return to his original role again, for a Benefit performance for Mrs Fitzwilliam at Drury Lane in 1834 (19 June), but the now established piece, and role, were quickly taken up by other players, as Ransford returned to Covent Garden and his position as a supporting player. In the 1832-3 season I spot him as ‘a Grand Templar’ in The Vision of the Bard, as ‘a bacchant’ in Comus, as Ozrides in The Israelites in Egypt, Dorval in The Invincibles and as Moreno in The Coiners, as well as playing bits in plays such as The Wife (Hugo).

 

In the closed season, he went with others of the company to the Victoria Theatre (The King’s Fool, Major Galbraith in Rob Roy, the Doge in Venice Preserved, Master Heartwell in The Hunchback, Earl of Lindsay in Mary Queen of Scots, singing ‘The Water Drinker’ A Bacchanalian Song, composed by Aaron Fry, in The Heiress of Bruges et al), before a seasonal return to Covent Garden. Amongst his roles in the 1833-4 season, he took over as Count de Horn in Gustavus III (but was, in turn, replaced by Seguin), played a small part in The Challenge and, in the absence of Phillips, gave some performances as Hecate in Macbeth.

 

After a further season at the Victoria (Cedric of Rotherwood in The Maid of Judah, Caught Courting, Zameo or the White Warrior, Hecate, ad lib performances of ‘The Sea’), he appeared episodically round London – most frequently at city dinners and charity festivals – before, on 27 October, he took a Benefit at the English Opera House, once more in The Castle of Andalusia, prior to announcing his departure for Dublin and a contract at the local Theatre Royal. I see he played Jerry in Tom and Jerry with Hudson as Tom.

 

The following year, he resurfaced at Covent Garden, in a further run of supporting roles in plays and operas – Sir Harry in School for Scandal (when it wasn’t Mr Collins), Thalaba the Destroyer, Julius Caesar, Hecate, Clopin in Quasimodo, Blue Peter in Black-Eyed Susan (when it wasn’t Mr Collins), Clover in Petticoat Government, Bardes in False Colours, Maxwell in Strafford, Shamp in The Woodman’s Hut, the Duke of Suffolk in Henry VIII, Norfolk in Richard III) whilst giving ‘The Sea’, ‘The Outlaw’, or his new song, Sydney Nelson’s ‘The Gipsy King’, as required, to fill a gap in the programme (‘To fill up the blank till the afterpiece of  The Country Squire could be got ready, Mr Ransford, the baritone vocalist, who was cast for a small part in the tragedy, came on in private dress to sing ..’).

 

He visited the English Opera House in the autumn, and returned to Covent Garden for the 1837-8 season, playing Beppo in Fra Diavolo, Dandie Dinmont in Guy Mannering, First Apparition in Macbeth (for Phillips was there to play Hecate), William in No Song, No Supper and other bits and pieces. When The Marriage of Figaro (English re-make) was done, he played what was left of the part of ‘Basil’. There were rumours afloat that Mr Ransford had suffered some kind of a stroke, but he was there on the Covent Garden stage 16 May 1838, to play Don Diego in The Padlock for his own Benefit. But, in fact, it was to be the end. Mr Ransford played out his stage career, seemingly in the role of Beppo, and, come the end of the Covent Garden season, he definitively left the stage. A decade of small parts, understudies and ‘The Sea’, enlivened in a notable fashion only by the creation of Captain Cannonade. Which others soon took from him. A career barely worth recording, even in as broad a collection as this one.

 

But if Edwin Ransford’s career on the stage was ended, his career as a vocalist, and in the world of music, still had more than three decades left to it. Three decades more of songs like ‘The Sea’ and ‘The Gipsy King’, published by Charles Jefferys with a portrait of the Covent Garden bit-part player on its cover. Three decades more in which Mr Ransford would be seen and heard on the concert platforms and at the city dinners and festivals of London, as he developed into the ‘good old boy’ of what John Boosey would later, aptly, call the ‘Old King Cole school of convivial English music’. ‘I’m a merry gipsy King, ha-ha!, ha-ha!!, ha-ha!!!’.

For a half-dozen years following his withdrawal from the stage, Ransford was principally seen and heard singing at the multitude of city dinners and festivals, where he became a fixer and organiser of the musical entertainments, for everything from the Licensed Victuallers Association to the Buckinghamshire Conservative Association to the Butchers' Charitable Institute (haha!!!!), the Amicable Society of Waiters, the East London Pension Society and others of the ilk, where his style of singing and music, leavened with part-songs, and sometimes with items from his talented daughter, Mary Elizabeth, and his son William Edwin, was popular. He also turned up regularly on the bills of the Benefits for the various theatrical charities, at the various Literary Institutes, and in concerts from Store Street to Fleet Street to Beulah Spa, and occasionally at one of the London theatres, with Bishop’s ‘Fast into the waves’, ‘Oak and Ivy’, Clement White’s ‘The Days that are near’, Stephen Glover’s ‘The Monks of Old’ (‘ha-ha!, ha-ha!!, ha-ha!!!’ ‘written especially for Mr Ransford', Blewitt’s ‘The Captain of the Age’, ‘The Jolly Friar’, and numbers of his own such as ‘The Laurel Tree’, each and all examples of the kind of music with which he was now firmly associated.

When he gave his own concert at Store Street in 1843 (12 December) – an event which the Morning Post reviewed unsympathetically as ‘an odd mixture of styles and schools’ lasting through 37 piano-accompanied numbers -- he made a rare venture into the classical, giving ‘Suoni la tromba’ with Seguin. In contrast, he gave Cooke’s ‘The Army and the Navy’ … with Braham!  The bill elsewhere included Miss Rainforth, Miss Poole, Miss Dolby, John Parry and Giubilei. Mr Ransford’s conviviality already had him in good company. He would follow up with many another ‘grand concert’, often in equally celebrated company.

 

In the early 1840s, Ransford also launched himself as a music publisher, and – latterly with partners, notably his son William (b Kingsland Road, 8 August 1886; d 48 Carlton Hill 21 September 1890) – his enterprise carried on until the 1890s and William’s death. Amongst his publications was a song, ‘A Gent is not a gentleman’, which he advertised as written by his father, composed by himself, dedicated to his mother and published by himself.

 

In 1845, Ransford branched out in one further direction: as a lecturer and Entertainer. Over the years, and notably through Sidney Nelson’s song of the Gipsy King, Ransford had associated himself with the popular idea of the gipsy. Now he put together a programme, based around what was allegedly an history of the romany race, but liberally laced with ‘stage gipsy’ songs – ‘The Gipsy’s Tent’, ‘The Dark-Eyed Gypsy Maid’, ‘A Gipsy’s Life for Me’, ‘The Gipsy Poacher’, ‘The Gipsy’s Laughing Song’, ‘The Gipsy Boy’, ‘The Gipsy Monarch’, ‘The Merry Gipsy Band’, ‘The Gipsy’s Lament’, ‘The Gipsy Miller’.  He introduced the programme – with Ellen Lyon (soprano) and Ransford-published pianist, Louis Emmanuel or Mr R J Edwards, in support – at the Store Street Music Hall in January and subsequently took it round the country, under the title The Wandering Gipsy Tribe,  ‘the Gipsies Entertainment’ -- latterly with daughter Mary Elizabeth as his soprano co-adjutator. 

 

The later 1840s saw the rise of Miss Ransford as a successful concert vocalist, and she and her father appeared together in concert, on frequent occasions – Ransford’s speciality now becoming – after the surfeit of gipsies – the utterly English ‘Simon the Cellarer’.

 

In 1854 (27 February) Ransford gave a Benefit at Drury Lane in which Macbeth was given with Gustavus Brooke in the title-role. Ransford – for the one night (‘his first appearance on the stage these sixteen years’) took up, again, the role Hecate.

 

At not yet fifty years of age, Edwin Ransford was thoroughly established as the prime example of the olde Englishe vocalist and, as such, he found himself in demand for some of the fashionable concerts to which he had never had access as a young singer. During the mid-1850s, he appeared on a number of occasions at Exeter Hall, at the E T Smith promenade concerts at Drury Lane, in George Case’s spectacular, at the Royal Society of Musicians, at the Royal Surrey Gardens … and when he gave his 1855 Benefit at the Haymarket Theatre, Clara Novello topped the bill, with Anna Thillon and Karl Formes.

 

In 1859 (6 December) – over a decade after the first -- he launched a second Entertainment. This one was ‘a new nautical entertainment’ entitled Tales of the Sea and the musical part was made up of the songs of Dibdin and his kind (‘When First I went to Sea’, ‘The Token’, ‘The Sea is England’s Glory’ ‘The Sailors Journal’ ‘Tom Bowling’, ‘True Courage’, ‘One Morn in May’, ‘I Left the Shore’, ‘Blow High blow Low’, ‘The King of the Sea’, ‘Tom Tough’, ‘The White Cliffs of England’, ‘The Nancy’). Soon after its launch, however, he met with an accident in Brighton, dislocated an ankle, and was out for several months. However, he brought the entertainment back, and toured it periodically over the following years. The press spoke of him as ‘the veteran Ransford’ and as ‘one of the most frank and homely singers of frank and homely English melody’. 

As such, he had his following, a strong following, as he delivered ‘Tom Tough’ ('which he delivers with wonderful gusto and meaning and in a style that may veritably denominated ‘saline’ and which moreover he is expected at sing at every concert he gives. It is common property, yet he has so individualised it that few singers would [attempt] it after him’),  ‘Sunny days will come again’, his own ‘A Winter’s Night’, ‘True Courage’ and ‘Honest John Blunt’ to his own particular audiences, and just occasionally to something that quaintly resembled the fashionable.

 Mr Ransford’s concerts continued through into the 1870s, and he mounted one in 1875 (23 March) on the occasion of his golden wedding. That of 1875 (14 April) was, however, the last. The Era’s obituary – surely the source of many of the exaggerations about Ransford – seems to have been reasonably on the ball when it reported ‘Within a few months of his decease he was capable of singing ‘My name d’ye see’s Tom Tough’ with a force of expression and depth of pathos that would make the words sink deep into the hearts of a sympathetic audience’.

‘A sympathetic audience’ was what The Era was, and what, as a result, those that – without ever having seen or heard Ransford – folk took for gospel. All thanks to the lyrical, loving column that its journalist wrote.

If I beg to find the valuation of the vocalist – as opposed to that of the man – more than a little overcooked, maybe I am just going by the record, rather than the feel, of his history.