Sunday, May 3, 2020

Cartesians from Birmingham, Leeds, Whitechapel, Dublin, Liverpool, Eastbourne, Bombay ...

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That's where David Lovell's list has taken me ....

Let's start with Birmingham. It's a bit of a fizzer, but I've got the beginning, even if not the end ..

Nora[h] EVEYLNE [WORMS, Nora Eveline] (b Leeds 1871) was the daughter of commercial traveller Henry Worms (d 15 February 1896) and his wife, Louise née Danziger. She began singing at local concerts circa 1891 -- the Sunderland Jewish Society, the York Popular Concerts, for her teacher Amy Brooks at Ilkley, at Manchester and Scarborough for Edgar Haddock, and seems to have joined Carte in 1894 for the American trip with Utopia (Ltd). She played through 1895-6 in Utopia (Ltd) and The Grand Duke on tour in England, but seems thereafter to have renounced. She married one Henry Davis 'manager, fancy goods trade', and apparently (before or after the marriage) gambolled off to Ceylon, where a first child, Ivy, was born (1903). In the 1911 census, she is described as a hotel secretary, and they have added a second child, Joan Ruth (1910). Father, mother, and daughters can be seen together in Hampstead in 1933 ... and then ...

Leeds. Madge INGLIS [ENGLISH, Margaret Orpah] (b Liverpool 19 August 1846; d 38 Hogarth Rd, Kensington, November 1898). Father, Charles John English, had worked all his life in the shipping business, rising to be a shipowner and broker in Liverpool. He married Margaret née Abraham and fathered half a dozen children who weren't required to do anything. So 'Madge' sang. Contralto. She began appearing in public after her 30th year, in both London I spot her in 1879) and in Liverpool (1880) under her born name. But Margaret English metamorphosed into Madge Inglis when she was hired by D'Oyly Carte to play the contralto roles with his touring company. She fulfilled that engagement between 1883-5, without giving up her ambitions as a concert singer. Between 1884 and 1890 she staged an annual concert in London, at which some well respected singers (and a lot who weren't) appeared. She sang on occasion at minor concerts, appeared in one pantomime (Herne the Hunter in Bath), did a small tour with a concert party titled 'the Balfe Opera Company' (1886, Rosa Hyde, Henry Nordblom, Conrad King) and as late as 1898 provided the vocals for one of Florence Marryat's recitals. Along the way she married a Frank E W von Zastrow (1884) and also, apparently, an Edward Frederick Joachim Selchow (1892). The Orpah makes it certain. But she died as Mrs von Zastrow ...

Good heavens! Look! On ebay, Madge's mum!



Bombay. [Henry Robert] Blake JOHNSTON (b Bombay 1862; d Birmingham 1933) was the son of  a William Blake Johnston. I don't know who he was, or what he was doing in Bombay. There aren't many WBJ's around ... maybe he is the Irish one, or the civil engineer of 76 Clapham Road with a wife Rosetta Ann and a daughter Laura Mary Blake ... ah yes! When Henry marries his father is civil engineer (decd). And he is a printer's reader. In 1881 he was an accountant's clerk. By 1889
he is a Cartesian. And long he would remain one: more than twenty years, with just one break. In that break I see him touring in a piece called On the Briny.



Johnston married (1) Harriet Mintern and (2) Marie Louisa Freake, and by his first wife had two daughters, Norah Stella Blake Johnston )Mrs William Pollock Emmett) and Eveline Marguerite (Mrs George Ernest Cunningham).

Birmingham. Marie [Ernestine] ALEXANDER (b Birmingham 5 April 1873; d Lewisham 1946) was born in Birmingham to tobacconist Edward Barnard Alexander and his wife Esther née Beck, but the family was pretty mobile over the following years and they turn up, first, in Marylebone and then in Hastings, where Marie and her siblings, Maud and Maurice (violin) took their first steps as public musicians. I spot them in local concerts in 1888-1891, and in 1889 Marie took part in a production of Alfred Moulton's opera Lelamine ('written in Australia'). Around this time, Marie came into the hands of a certain Mrs M A Carlisle Carr of Old Bond Street, and under her aegis made her first London appearance, in the lady's pupils' shows (24 June 1891 &c). Maurice played too, and among the society guests was Mrs Ronalds. The critical verdict was 'weak but she may develop..'. Twenty years later, when she was powering out Wagnerian strains, the critic could congratulate himself.
In 1892 she joined the Carte companies, and toured in the contralto roles of The Vicar of Bray and Haddon Hall, in 1894 she appeared at the Guildhall in the title-role of Carmen and was employed as understudy to Alice Barnett in His Excellency, playing in the forepiece A Knight Errant. Her next job was a little atypical: she took over the title role in Dandy Dick Whittington, created for the deep-voiced May Yohe ...
Around this time a small problem surfaced. There were two Marie Alexanders in musical comedy. The other one was equally kosher: she was one of the long-touring Alexander family of entertainers, now moving into theatre. Our Marie advertised that she was NOT the lady appearing at the Avenue Theatre in The New Barmaid. And well she might: when Lottie Collins was off, the other Marie stepped into her role! I imagine  that it was Marie II who played the negro nurse in The Ballet Girl, too, for our Marie was headed in a different direction. She joined the shoestring Nielsen Opera Company, and got to play the popular contralto repertoire to the boondocks.
At Christmas 1897, she played the Princess in Aladdin at Hull, followed up in the short-lived At Zero with Broughton Black, and then joined the consequent opera troupe of Miss Moody and Mr Manners, as principal contralto. Over the next five years she played everything from Siebel and Lazarillo to Carmen, Azucena and Brangaene. She also married one Albert Eugene Wilson (b Greenwich 16 December 1872; d Kent 1941). Who was he? And then I spotted a bundle of the Moody Manners company in digs on census night 1901. Marie was one, another was 'Eugene Bertram', the company's business manager. Got him!
Continuing her operatic rise, Marie next joined the Carl Rosa company for five years (1905-10) of contralto-mezzo roles including Ortrud, Brangaene, Fricka and, her showpiece, Santuzza, before -- now the mother of a little Marie Esther Bertram Wilson (30 October 1905, Mrs Sidney T Phillips) -- she left the touring scene. The family settled at Lewisham's Medusa Road, and at some stage Eugene reconverted into a grocer. In 1939, they are at Whitstable, and wife and daughter are helping in the business. Lewisham still seems to be 'home' though, for their house is called 'Medusa'. And they are still 'Bertram'.
From grand opera to groceries ...

Whitechapel. Ada ROSE (b Whitechapel 5 October 1863; d Bromley 16 April 1905) was one of the six children of pubkeeper George Edward Rose and hiswife Ellen Stenson née Reeve. We are told that she studied at the Royal Academy 'for five years' and sang at Holborn's City Temple, before -- just 21 years of age, she joined the Carte companies, rising to be an excessively young Katisha, Dame Carruthers, Dame Hannah et al, from 1895 to 1890.


At the end of her time as an 'elderly lady', she retired from the theatre and devoted herself to evangelical works. She married (6 September 1898) William James Gibbs 'at one time superintendant of the Methodist Hall, Bromley' but more prosaically 'merchant tailor' and gave birth to Mary Grace (1899) and William Douglas (1900). Mrs W J Gibbs made herself something of a name in her chosen calling, and is remembered today rather for her evangelical work and writings than for her Katisha.


Eastbourne. George [James] DE PLEDGE (b Eastbourne 1862; d presumed Sydney). I 'did' Mr de Pledge some time ago. But I've changed him a bit, so ..

DE PLEDGE, George [James] (b Eastbourne 1862; d Goulburn Australia 1902) is somewhat of a continuing puzzle. Not only to me, but to the lawyers and detectives of two continents. His birth is registered, son of Wakefield-born stonemason Thomas de Pledge and his wife Martha Rebecca, formerly of Coulsdon, Surrey, but I don't see him in action till 1885, singing in a concert at Battersea's Albert Palace. He seems to have taken to the stage in March 1887. The occasion in the production at Johnny Toole’s Theatre of a burlesque of Ruddigore, in which the deep-voice Mr de Pledge played a parody Arthur Sullivan. Apparently the Savoy took no offence, because within a few months the young man was playing Go-To in the Mikado, on tour. He remained with the Carte organisation, in town and country, for some four years, deputising in principal roles in The Yeomen of the Guard and The Gondoliers (he was Giorgio in the original cast) and playing Barnabas Bellows-to-Mend in Haddon Hall, before joining such other Savoyards as W H Denny and Jessie Bond in the cast of Poor Jonathan at the Prince of Wales. He moved on to roles in King Kodak and in the disastrous Eastward Ho! in which, however, he scored a personal hit singing ‘I am the Great I am’ in the roles of Muley Mustapha. As a result, he went on the halls featured in the basso scena Dr Jameson’s Last Stand and was cast as King Rat, alongside Maud Holland, in Brighton’s Dick Whittington, before, in 1897, launching a successful double-act with a lady named ‘Ruby Neilson’. The Devil in Love, with George as Mephisto was their best sketch, which they varied with The Red Cross Nurse, with time out for pantomime heavies.
Who was ‘Ruby’? I don’t know. George had married, in Savoy Theatre days (3 August 1891), Miss Maggie Letitia Smith of Stepney. Was she a performer? The 1891 census says she was a ‘draper’s assistant’, her father a retired cheesemonger. 26 November 1893, a daughter, Elsie Marguerite, was born. She too would go on the stage. Was Maggie ‘Ruby’? Then what? George is still around. In the 1901 census, he, Maggie and Elsie are living with her family in London. Anyhow, the story would come to an abrupt end. In June 1900, George and Ruby were performing at Nottingham, in June 1901 in Wales. Then they vanish from theatrical annals. But then 16 August, George sets sail, alone, for Sydney, Australia. And he never returned. And his fate is still unlearned. Maggie remarried, Elsie didn’t, and, when she died 11 November 1951, a search for a blood relative was launched. Failing to find one, Officialdom finally concluded that George had died in 1902 in Australia. And they were right.
But can someone tell me why there is a George de Pledge singing 'The Bedouin Love Song' in Sydney in 1896?

James WILBRAHAM [COTTINGHAM, St John James] (b Sandymount, Dublin 14 November 1853; d Bath 9 April 1921) was born in Ireland, the son of Christopher John Cottingham ('public writer and lawyer') and his wife Margaret Clare née Welch, and brought up in London. He became an assistant schoolmaster, at first in Bedfordshire, then in London, and began singing. I first see him out in public in 1879, in a free concert at the Crystal Palace with one Mme Morris Horantz, and then in 1880 in Northampton (Judas Maccabeus) and Ampthill ...  The Archive says he joined the Carte company in December 1883: I think it may have been slightly earlier. For in May 1883 he married singer Jessica Elizabeth Webb. Jessica and her sister Nellie were both labelled 'singer', in the 1881 census and their mother was one Caroline Rosa née Felton. There's a 50-50 chance that this was the lady, Caroline Felton (b 13 June 1820), who between 1846 and 1861 was a contralto singer on London's concert platforms. I wonder if Jessie and Nellie were little Cartesians...  Anyhow, Jessie didn't have much time to be anything but a mother thereafter. In the next fifteen years St John laid nine children on her.


Most of that time, he was a member of one Carte company or another, as listed in the Archive, but he occasionally pops up elsewhere, such as a charity matinee of The Bohemian Girl (1888) as Florestein to the Devilshoof of Richard Temple, or at the Crystal Palace ('Refrain thy voice from weeping'). I don't sight him in the Carte lists after 1894 (Repertoire company), and soon after child nine he did the macho midlife thing, and walked out on his wife and family. I see him in 1900 musical-directing a Cloches de Corneville company, and in the 1901 census, while Jessie is woking as a cook in Peckham Rye, shacked up with a 23 year old 'Rae' (Rachel Abrahams) who claims to be Mrs Wilbraham. Habits die hard: he produced two more children by her. Rae must have seen she was on a losing wicket, because  in 1909 she hoofed it, with her babies and her brother, to Christchurch, New Zealand, married a carpenter and lived half a century ...
Now the twist in the tale. Her son by St John, Sidney [Leonard], maintained the surname 'Wilbraham' and duly wed and fathered. Now, as soon as I saw the word 'Christchurch' my brain clicked back half a century. My first television producer was called Wilbraham. Phil Wilbraham . Delve, and ... I was directed by James Wilbraham's grandson! And I never knew he was Jewish ...
I can't find St John James or Jessie in 1911. They have to be there: James Wilbraham is credited with the music for a Manchester pantomime in 1913 ...
I find just their deaths. He in 1921, she in 1939 ...

I can smell Wendy's wonderful chicken casserole ... end of session! 

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