The history of Madame Rivers and Little Emmie

 

Publishers don't work on weekends, so there was no heap of proofs on my desk top this sunny Sunday morning. I always work weekends, so I copyread someone else's proofs, and took a stroll down ebay lane to see if anything caught my eye ... This did:

Madame Rivers and Little Emmie. On the back, we are told that Madame is Madame Pauline Rivers. So, what are they? A music-hall act of some sort? And why is the younger lady 'Little' Emmie. She don't look very 'Little' to me. Curiosity piqued, I dug a little, and found all sorts of bits and pieces, mostly to do with the 1910s and 1920s ... Madame was a producer and choreographer during those years (and more), Emmie was her 'daughter' and star pupil, and their principal playground was the Blackpool Tower and Winter Gardens ... Fine, but who were they? I contacted old friend Barry J Barnes, as I do whenever I need to know something about Blackpool, and he came back with this ...

And I was off and away ...

'Pauline Rivers' was not born as such. Neither was she a Madame, nor a Mumsie. She was born at 12 Mount Pleasant, Bath, at the turn of 1867-8, the daughter of Henry Edmund Adams (1846-1904), a journeyman tailor, and his wife Annie, and baptised 5 January 1868 as Annie Caroline Adams. Some time in the 1870s, the Adams family left Bath, and removed to Newington, and Caroline became a pupil of Paul Valentine's Dancing School ('256 Westminster Bridge Rd, opposite the Amphitheatre'). Mr Valentine was a prolific ballet-master, teacher and supplier of troupes of dancing girls -- juvenile, adult and barely-adult -- to the spectacles, pantomimes and music-halls of London, and I'm am sure that little Caroline appeared with various of these troupes before, at age fifteen, she became featured and principal danseuses. As 'Pauline Rivers'. Well, she could hardly be 'Annie Adams': that name had already topped many a bill in the music hall thanks to the popular Wightish serio-comic of that name.

My first sightings of Pauline are in 1883. She is dancing at the Oxford Music Hall in Valentine's troupe in the ballet Dollytoyiana..

Come Christmas, she was engaged for Mrs Lane's Britannia Theatre pantomime. The well-known dancer, Lily Wilford, late of the Alhambra and the Philharmonic, was principal girl, so Pauline got to dance Columbine.

Quickly promoted to featured, then solo, then principal dancer, Pauline remained a solo dancer with Valentine's troupes for several years, dancing for an extended period in the Oxford ballets, appearing in his spectacular Britannia and Jubilee and, come Christmas, in pantomime --Daddy Long-Legs at the Britannia, Cinderella at the Brighton Aquarium, Robin Hood at Plymouth (with a certain J A E Malone as the Baron!), The Yellow Dwarf at the Liverpool Shakespeare. In 1889, aged all of 21, she was engaged to choreograph the Glasgow pantomime.

Pauline's career as a performer was almost entirely under the aegis of Mr Valentine. In 1891, his agency placed her, for the only time in her life, in a musical comedy when she toured in the dancing role of Margery in a revival of Randolph the Reckless. Census time came during the tour, and we see Pauline in Leeds with her colleagues -- Hetty Benson, Lilian Totherington, Charlotte Westfield, Florence Cambridge, Evelyn Margaret, Florence Vincent ... but she was swiftly back in her natural habitat, dancing the jockey hornpipe at the Canterbury, featuring in a grand ballet at Liverpool and the Paragon Music Hall, in the Manchester pantomime, in a Valentine tarentella at Blackpool's Winter Gardens and in his Carnival electrique, at Cardiff ('in a diaphonous robe of lustrous sheen, she dances with exquisite skill a serpentine dance'), in Valentine's El Dorado at the Canterbury, in his flying ballet in Leicester's Robinson Crusoe ... all the while continuing to stage dances at Glasgow, Blackpool, Exeter ...

It was Blackpool which proved the stayer. Pauline moved in to the area which she had got to know so well with Valentine; putting together, training and choreographing troupes of little and not so dreadfully little girls for spectaculars and pantomimes. 'The Pauline Rivers Sextette' Pauline Rivers's Twelve Little Sunshines, Pauline Rivers's Twelve Amethysts, the Twelve Tower Girls. In the 1911 census Pauline and her youngest sister, Lottie Beryl, can be seen in digs at Salford with Bessie Howarth, Nellie Langley, Viva Lynn, Mary Mellor, Gertie Dawson, Nellie Wilkinson, Nellie Hawley and Emmie Tweedale, aged 14 ...

Emmie Tweedale (1896-1994), otherwise Little Emmie 'the most wonderful child toe dancer' was born in Manchester, the daughter of hackney cab-drive Edwin Tweedale and his wife, Elizabeth née Davenport. The family moved to Blackpool and Emmie became Pauline's star pupil, the leading lassie of her troupes, and her unofficially adopted daughter. She was still billed as 'Little Emmie' in the 1930s, still Blackpool's leading lady ...

Pauline and Emmie featured at the Blackpool Tower up to Pauline's death, in 1938. Emmie inherited her 'mother's' L2739 18s 2d, and erected a fine monument over her tomb 

The funeral (with a little bit of mythology attached) made the papers as far away as Australia ..

Emmie married music-hall tenor Lewis F Coates in 1939 and live to a great age. At her death, she was buried alongside her beloved Mumsie.