Set on a track today by a photo .. only to discover that I'd been 'there', years ago, for another member of the family!
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| Rose Temple |
TEMPLE, Mrs [MAJOR, Harriett née DAVIS] (b Worcester x 19 May 1822; d London August 1879)
‘Mrs Temple of Exeter Hall’, ‘Madame Temple of the Italian Opera’, ‘Mrs Temple of the East End concerts’ ... yes, in spite of what I feared, for many years, they actually are all the same person. A person who, truthfully, in spite of a comfortable career, didn’t impinge greatly on the heights of the musical world, and therefore whose life story was all the more difficult to investigate. Mrs Temple didn’t seem to have a beginning or an end: just a middle. I’m used to artists like that, and I was resigned to, probably, not discovering the truth of her. For, naturally, her name wasn’t Temple. But then a piece of paper from two generations down the line surfaced ... a bell rang somewhere in my memory ... and bingo!
Harriett ‘Temple’ was born in Worcester, the daughter of a ‘much respected professional’, John Davis and his wife Catherine née Clark, and she started singing at an early age. I see little Miss Davis stepping in to sing the solos in an anthem with the Worcester Choral Society at St Helen’s Church at fourteen years of age. The next year she is sharing a concert platform with Mrs and Mrs Edmunds (ex-Mary Cawse), and the next promoting her own concert (17 April 1838) in Easter week. ‘A very promising and deserving young vocalist’ quoth the press, nodding towards the recent demise of her father.
Over the next few years, Miss Davis became Worcestershire’s star vocalist, singing oratorio with the Worcester Harmonic Society, at the D’Egville family’s concerts, the Worcester Philharmonic Concerts, with the Worcester Quadrille Band, at charity concerts and church occasions, at the Theatre Royal Worcester, and visiting Kidderminster, Gloucester, Cheltenham (‘With verdure clad’, ‘Do not mingle’, Knight’s ‘The Grecian Daughter’, ‘Where the bee sucks’, ‘Bid me discourse’, Barker’s ‘Thy vows are all broken’, ‘Languir per una bella’, ‘L’amor suo’, ‘Wake gentle Mary’, Let the bright seraphim, ‘, ‘O magnify the Lord’, ‘The Mermaid’) to he accompaniment of encores and ‘thunderous applause’.
In 1842, she was included with Miss Birch, Mrs Loder, Misses Marshall and Hawes as one of the soloists for the Worcester Festival. She gave ‘If God be with us’ in The Messiah, ‘Come, ever smiling liberty’ and ‘established her reputation as a highly promising vocalist’ in such a way that the local critic avowed ‘more gratification from hearing her than’ any soprano except Miss Birch.
Underneath the top-billed Miss Davis, the local concerts frequently included a male quartet taken from the area’s best-known musicians: the Rogers brothers, John Rickhuss, Mr Sefton and, occasionally, a young Mr Major.
Schoolmaster’s son, Richard Wer(e) Major (b Frome, 27 February 1817; d London 1871) hailed from Somerset, but by 1841 he was installed in Diglis, boarding with a sailor’s family, working at something illegible in the census returns, and giving ‘The Outlaw’ and such like at local concerts. In 1844, Miss Davis and Mr Major were wed, and they emigrated from Worcestershire to London. They also changed their name. Professionally, that is, for the couple were embarked on a career as vocalists. And also on parenthood. Over the next decade and a half they would give birth to Kate, Bessie, [Harriet] Rose, Florence and Emma, all of whom became singers and actresses.
I don’t know what it is about the not uncommon name of ‘Temple’ which makes it attractive to baritones, but Richard Major – like the more famous Richard Barker Cobb later – chose to become ‘Mr Temple’. Harriet, thus, was now ‘Mrs Temple’ and the girls … well, we’ll get to them later.
Mr Temple had a modest career. He was several years a minor principal in Tully’s National Opera Company, I spot him 1866 at the Theatre Royal Bath in pantomime and as Hecate in Macbeth but he seems to have been mostly a chorus singer.
Mrs Temple, however, did rather better. After a couple of years being seen intermittently in concert with her husband (billed as ‘of the Theatres Royal’!) noticeably at the Grecian Saloon with a group of nigger burlesquers (‘Long time ago’ ‘in excellent style’), she suddenly turns up at the Covent Garden Italian Opera (2 May 1848), no less, playing Clorinda to the Thisbe of Mme Bellini and the Cenerentola of Marietta Alboni. And in La Favorita with Grisi and Mario.
The operatic interlude seems to have been brief, and Mrs Temple is seen on the platform at Drury Lane for the Distins’ concert, at the Horns Tavern, the National Hall in Holborn (‘My beautiful Rhine’, ‘Giorno d’orrore’ with Caroline Felton, ‘The Grecian daughter’, ‘The heart is giving’) and at Brighton with the local Sacred Harmonic Society singing the Dettingen Te Deum, selections from The Messiah and ‘The Infant’s Prayer’ with Messrs Genge and Lawler.
In 1850 (31 May) she was engaged to sing second soprano to Catherine Hayes in the London Sacred Harmonic Society’s Creation, and she succeeded well (‘a debutante here …gave the cavatina ‘The marvellous work’ with such gusto and effect as to nearly obtain an encore’). After a season of further Holborn concerts, a couple of tours round Dorsetshire – usually in the company of Genge and billed as ‘Mrs Temple of the Royal Italian Opera’, -- she returned to Surman’s Society and seconded Louisa Pyne in The Messiah (28 February 1851), Charlott Ann Birch in Jephtha (28 March ‘‘Young Happy Iphis’ with precision and brilliancy’), and Susan Sunderland again in The Messiah. She was also engaged for the original Sacred Harmonic Society where she made a first appearance seconding Clara Novello in Elijah (26 September 1851), followed by The Seasons with Mrs Sunderland. Over the next decade she was seen at Exeter Hall with both societies, seconding Miss Birch in Elijah, Solomon and The Creation with Surman, and Novello and Parepa in Elijah and in Deborah. Her final performance seems to have been in the last work in 1862 (31 January).
The Italian Opera? It went on till 1852. There, as the ladies of the Queen of the Night we see Mesdames Temple, Chierici and Brennan… And if she is the ‘Madame Temple’ of the Beale opera company, playing Flora in Traviata with Madame Gassier in 1857, it seems she had not abandoned the stage.
She visited Portsmouth frequently (on one occasion she and her husband are referred to as ‘locals’), sang the principal music in The Messiah, St Paul, Judas Maccabeus, Samsonand The Creation in the provinces, with Grimsby latterly replacing Portsmouth as a centre of operations. In 1856, she again took part in the Three Choirs Festival.
However, each of the C19th censi show them and their crocodile of daughters firmly ensconced in Tavistock Street, Covent Garden. The 1871 census has husband, wife and daughter Kate all described as ‘chorister’.
In that same year, Richard Major died, and ‘Mrs Temple’ disappears from my view. I think she must be the Harriett Major who died aged 57, in London, in 1879.
The daughters remained to carry on the Temple name, but only two chose to use it. Kate seems to have quit the stage, but the other four girls all started a career in musical theatre as Bessie Major, Rose Temple, Florence Trevallyan and Emma Temple. And Rose (twice) and Florence married within the profession.
Florence (b London 4 November 1856; d Cronulla, NSW 7 January 1932) had a successful career as a singing actress, and married a scion of the Brough family. [Lionel Barnabas] Robert Brough became an important producer of plays in Australia, his wife a leading actress, and Bessie and Emma (who had begun in burlesque and opéra-bouffe) both became successful actresses in the company as well. All three girls spent a good number of years Down Under, but Bessie seems finally to have come home. She died, unmarried, in St George’s Hospital 14 December 1934. Emma 14 March 1936, in Rose Bay, Sydney 14 March 1936.
[Harriet] Rose dit TEMPLE (b Tavistock Street, 13 March 1855) took a different route. A very pleasing ingénue in comic opera, she toured with the Gaiety company, as Praline in Nemesis, with Joseph Eldred in La Princesse de Trébizonde (Zanetta), Lurline, Military Billee Taylor, The Water Nymph and featured in Rob Roy and Guy Mannering in Scotland before she travelled to America with the Julia Mathews company (1875). When that company folded, she joined the Alice Oates Co, Stetson's Evangeline, Adah Richmond's troupe, and the stock company at the Boston Museum (Ralph Rackstraw in HMS Pinafore). She also married actor James H Jones and bore two children before divorcing (1880).
At the Museum she was seen as Niobe Marsh in Cinderella at School, Nancy Malone to Boucicault's Shaughraun, as Mrs Lillian Allison (Rosalind) in The Lark (Die Fledermaus), Phoebe in Billee Taylor, Patience in Patience, Dr Puff in Babes in the Wood, and briefly in a new piece named The Lightkeeper's Daughter. In 1883 she was seen in Fortunio and in Alice May's showcase of Satanella, and then ... she married a frightful scoundrel called Harry Froom, formerly the husband of another singer, ‘Rose Stella’, and retired to Ninji Novgorod, where his family was in business, to more motherhood and a quick widowhood. She died at 30 North Side Clapham Common, 11 May 1939, leaving her £117 12s 9d to her son Charles Froom (1885-1959).
This generation of the ‘Temple’ family doesn’t seem to have kept up the musical connection, but Kate married (1879) a gentleman named Edward Leahy, and gave birth to a Daisy Mary and a Frederick. Daisy, in her turn, married the well-known musical comedy actor, Frederick Pope Stamper. For a while. Before they divorced, they produced Lionel Henry Stamper (1906-1985), a small time actor, whose grandson, comedian Jack Dee, has added one more chapter to the Temple-Major family history in the theatre.
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