One British bass of the period leads to another ... Morley, Weiss, Gregg, Brough ... and nearly every one of these was exported over the oceans ..
This one wasn't. And he may have been one of the best of them all.
HINCHCLIFFE, Thomas (b Stainland-within-Lindley, Yorks 21 March 1820; d Dombey Street, Halifax 12 May 1880).
William Hinchcliffe of Stainland was a tailor. He wed one Mary Taylor on 26 December 1819, and, thereafter, they produced at least ten children to fill their home in Priestley Alley. Father William is said to have been musical and, in good Yorkshire fashion, his sons followed in his musical ways. One of them, the eldest, Tom, would even make a profession of it.
Tom began his life following in his father’s footsteps as an apprentice tailor – the other boys worked as woolcombers etc – but, in 1848, he got a job as a bass singer at the Leeds Parish Church (25 guineas per annum), and he and his wife, Emily or Emelia née Holroyd, and their two young daughters moved to Leeds.
I first spot Tom in 1850, featured as bass soloist with the Leeds Choral Society, singing with Miss Mountain, Amelia Atkinson, and a Mr Turton, in their performance of The Mount of Olives and performing Spohr’s ‘The Hunter’. By June 1851, the local press could report ‘he has now become a great favourite’, and he continued on to perform as a vocalist (and occasionally a clarinettist), outside his church duties, in Leeds, Barnsley ('we have not had so fine a bass singer for some time') Huddersfield, Sheffield, Bradford, Lancaster, Preston, Ossett, Dewsbury, Settle, Bramley, Bingley and other local towns, both in concert and in works such as The Messiah, Elijah (14 April 1852), The Creation or Acis and Galatea alongside Mrs Sunderland, Mary Whitham, Emma Thomas, George Inkersall and other Yorkshire stars.
He resigned his post at the Parish Church in May 1852, in 1854 his two daughters died, and, soon after, Hinchcliffe left Leeds to return to his native Halifax area, taking up positions at the local Parish Church, the Beverley Minster, with the West Yorkshire Militia Band and the Stainland Brass Band, while pursuing, as ever, his 'day job' as a pub landlord. In the 1861 census he can be seen presiding at the Halifax Woolshops Talbot Inn, and in 1871 at the Mason’s Arms, Gauxholme.
I see him last on the platform in 1872. In 1878 'one of the best bass vocalists that Yorkshire has produced' suffered a stroke and he died two years later.
His little obituary notes say that he sang in London, and before Queen Victoria. I haven’t found a reference to this occasion, but if it were so, I imagine that it was on one of the occasions when the Yorkshire choirs visited London. After all, who would look after the pub...?
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Here's another, from the other end of England .. ...
LANSMERE, Richard [HUGGETT, Richard] (b Strood, Kent x 9 July 1837; d 745 Classon Avenue, Brooklyn 3 January 1919)
Richard Huggett was born near Rochester, the second son of a painter and decorator of the same name and his wife Susannah, and he trained as a musician. Pianist, organist and conductor. He can be seen in the 1861 census, living in Great Berkhampstead, and listed as ‘professor of music’.
However, Mr Huggett also sported a fine bass-baritone singing voice, and in the early 1860s he decided on a change of direction. And a change of name. Mr Huggett took upon himself the surname of ‘Lansmere’.
Mr Lansmere was seen, from 1862, often in first-class company, at Collard’s Rooms, the Beaumont Institution ('Il Balen', 'Sulla poppa'), for Mr Filby at the Victoria Hall ('Farewell, if ever fondest prayer'), at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in Howard Glover’s concerts ('Farewell, I did not know your worth'), at the Hanover Square Rooms ('The Norse King's Wooing'), St James's Hall ('Chrystabel') with the Vocal Association, at the concerts of Aptommas, Miss Chipperfield, Clinton Fynes (‘Autumn Song’), Frederick Archer, Harriet Tennant et al, as well as in the suburbs and near counties, including, of course, often the Chatham and Rochester area ('Arm, arm ye brave, 'With Pious Hearts', 'Rejoice O Judah', 'If doughty deeds'' 'A pearl I boast is mine'). In 1868 he travelled to Dublin as part of a Brousil Family concert party tour with Mr and Mrs Frederic Archer and Wallace Wells (‘Eri tu’, Angelina’s ‘Sir Marmaduke’).
In early 1870, as the baritone of Stanley Betjemann’s little touring opera company, he took part in the operatic performances briefly mounted at St George’s Hall. His Valentine in Faust won fine reviews, and it was recorded that he was encored in ‘Even Bravest Heart’. When he played in Maritana with Betjemann at the same venue the press commented ‘He has only recently taken to the stage … He sings with care and always with appropriate rendering. In all probability he has a future before him.’
I spot him in concert in Dublin, in a concert Sonnambula with Pauline Rita and Perren (‘full-toned bass voice’) and then back in small-time touring opera, managing a virtual co-operative troupe with conductor Isidore de Solla and tenor Francis Gaynar (Maritana, La Sonnambula, Il Trovatore, Faust, Martha, Fra Diavolo).
About this time he settled in the Birmingham area, and during the 1870s he can be seen in concerts there (‘The Vagabond’, ‘Ruddier than the cherry’, ‘The King’s Highway', ‘Sulla poppa’, ‘Sir Marmaduke’, ‘Jack’s Yarn, ‘The Village Blacksmith’), but in 1881 he was back on the operatic road with William Parkinson, and with the Walshams, in a company carrying much the same repertoire as before.
In 1883, he appeared at the Crystal Palace as Mephistopheles in Faust, in Maritana, in Benedict’s Graziella for Temple and Faulkener Leigh, before joining up with the Offord family operetta troupe. His connection with the Offord-Cole-Gilbert families would endure: In 1887 he created the role of Luis Pasha in Parry Cole’s operetta The Romance of the Harem at Kilburn, and the following month, Albert Gilbert’s cantata Abdallah at St George’s Hall.
He continued to tour in small opera companies, and won paragraphs in the papers when, as Devilshoof in The Bohemian Girl, he fell from a bridge bearing the baby. Several years later, he was still introducing the ‘accident’ into his performance, now with Valentine Smith’s opera, and at London’s Olympic Theatre, and still fooling press and public.
In 1890 (6 May), Lansmere left England, and emigrated to America. The shipping lists for the Lydian Monarch show Mr Lansmere, aged 50 ,accompanied by a 29 (?!) -year-old Mrs Lansmere, with a Louis aged 15 and a Maud aged 11. Something doesn’t add up familywise (he was single in the 1881 census) but I daresay there is an explanation. Of course there is an explanation. Mr Huggett had finally married.
And he had married (March 1889) a curious lady. The ‘widowed’ Marie Elizabeth Hasslacher. Marie said on her wedding banns that she was 39 years old, and the daughter of Colonel Frederick Foster Burlock. So the children were undoubtedly little Hasslachers. But Colonel F F Burlock was a Yale man, so his facts are well recorded, and he was born in 1837. And said to be childless. How then was he Marie’s father? And if her age is wrongly recorded, how would she have a 15 year-old son? Curious?
But she did indeed have such a son. Because when 'Mary Haslacher' sued Louis C Hasslacher for alimony, in 1877, the court report noted ‘a 14 month-old child’ on her lap in the box! The evidence during this suit, on her life and history, was colourful, to say the least. And she didn’t get her alimony. She was said to be 29 (she had admitted to 34 on her ship's manifest, shortly before) and her children were said to be born 20 June 1874 ('Louis von Hasslacher') and 2 August 1876, but Hasslacher, though admitting fatherhood of at least one child, denied marriage. She said all sorts of things. And gave all sorts of names. Of which Burlock was not one. He was, it appears, but a previous lover, and allegedly the father of a first (dead?) child. Amazingly, she won her ‘married or not married’ suit.
Anyway, Mary/Marie was also a performer, under the name of ‘Marie Gurney’. Which may or may not have been her actual name. And variants. A large performer, as she weighed in at some 200lbs. She had, so it was said, gone to Italy in 1867 to study, allegedly at some time married the Rev Dale of London, afterwards sang in the chorus with Strakosh, played Little Buttercup in several small American Pinafore companies, and acted in melodrama. She seemed to have a connection with Britain however (where F F latterly lived and died) and she is obviously the ‘Miss Gurney’ travelling to Britain on The City of London which was also taken by the Lydia Thompson troupe and by a Mr Hasslacher in 1873. Which is when Marie said, improbably, that she got married. A ‘May Gurney’ is seen on the British provincial stage (Hans the Boatman) in the 1880s. In 1878 'Marie Gurney' can be seen in minor operetta in America, with soprano Charles Heywood, claiming to be 'of Her Majesty's Theatre, London', in 1879 in HMS Pinafore at the Standard Theatre (as 'Kate Gurney' ?) with the downmarket Laurent/Corelli team, Clorinda to the Cinderella of Eva Mills in Brooklyn (1880) ...
The Lansmeres and children arrived in America and set up as singing teachers with ‘St George’s School’ in Brooklyn, Marie claiming to be ‘of the symphonic conservatoire, Milan’ and to have sung with Nilsson. Apparently they made a droll couple, the tubby ‘Madame Marie Ernst (sic) Lansmere’ and her husband ‘Professor Lansmere’ with his long hair, moustachios and imperial.
Marie’s ambitions, however, went further. She wanted to start her own comic opera company. And she did. The Marie Gurney Opera Company, with Richard Lansmere, late of the Olympic Theatre, London, playing Buttercup and Corcoran in Pinafore (Elaine Gryce being Josephine!), La Mascotte, a rewritten The Bohemian Girl as The Gypsy Queen (played by Marie), a potted Les Cloches de Corneville and The Mikado were played in venues in Brooklyn, New Jersey and in variety houses for a couple of seasons. The 'assistant business manager' and an occasional performer was Mr Louis Gurney. Lansmere was conductor.
Alas, Mrs Lansmere-Hasslacher-Hoggett (sic) ended up in the Supreme Court of New York, charged with not paying her bills and loans. Which definitively knolled the knell of the company. Their costumes and scenery were auctioned off. The school seems already to have vanished. Richard, however, had steady work as a church singer at various Roman Catholic churches and, as late as 1901, I see him at singing regularly St Charles Borromeo’s Church, alongside British tenor Francis Gaynar. Marie gave occasional entertainments.
My last sighting of the pair – Richard and Mary (sic) -- is in the 1910 census, still in Brooklyn’s East 35th Street, with 32 year-old Maud G Haslocher (sic), born England of a German father and a Connecticut mother. The child both its parents had abandoned at the age of seven. Mary has a Connecticut father and an English mother. She admits to having borne five children, two of whom are living, he to being a teacher...
Well, there are obviously ins and outs to this family that we needn’t follow. Maud is alone in Lynbrook, NY, by 1920, a stenographer for a typist company. Richard Lansmere had died -- of heart disease and senility -- in Brooklyn. on 3 January 1919 'retired musician, aged 81, widower'. Maud had signed his death certificate: 'daughter'. Marie had died 1 August 1913 at Mineola NY. Allegedly 62.
The music press didn't notice the passing of one who had led such a persistently small-time, but thoroughly full, life as Victorian vocalist.
PS One knows not to trust Wikipedia, but far worse is this AI thing that Google is attempting to promote. Quoting me - me! - they aver that Lansmere was hired to play Ralph in Pinafore. Goodness! A bass Rackstraw. Why do they do this?
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