Cartesians: Leonard (I beg your pardon) et al

A rather wobbly week. So I decided it was a good time to disappear back into the 19th century and revel in the remnants of the G&S Archive treasure hunt.  One by one, I'm picking out the facts on the players of the D'Oyly Carte company who, till now, have been mere names on programmes, and in the archive. Who were they and what if anything did they do in the theatre ... ?

My first efforts produced rather thin results.  

I pinned down Leo[pold Albert Ravene] KLOSS. Born Birmingham, the son of a smalltime musician and pianist in 1861. He started life as a lawyer's clerk, until the greasepaint called. It seems to have called in a minor way most of his life. He married Emma Catherine and, after her death (1905), Ellen Catherine Hill. A son was killed in the Great War. He died in Chelsea in 1929.

Then there was Sebastian KING (b Soho 30 June 1859; d Lambeth 16 January 1927) [KING, Samuel Hooke]. He had a much more substantial career as a bass singer and ended up playing small parts at Daly's Theatre. He married Louise Adele Augarde, sister to the better-known Amy Augarde, and raised a family ..

I dumped them in an old blog, but I've repeated their bones here ...

I had another go at the curious 'Evelyn Kingsbury' (d Bournemouth 5 April 1936, Mrs George William Keatson) who seems to have been born Elizabeth Louise *** . Her cellophane husband or 'husband' seems to have been a doctor from Boston. By 1891 she was a widow with a daughter Georgie Leora (Mrs George Bayard Hynes). After her time with the Carte she didn't do much except pantomime and teaching, although she still calls herself singer in the 1911 census. Anyway, I didn't succeed with her, this time, any better than I had last. So I abandoned the Ks.

I noticed that the cheery Katie JAMES has suffered from birthdate-itis. Catherine Ellen JAMES was, as the records show, born in Lambeth in 1857, the daughter of merchant's clerk and horsebreaker Alfred James and his wife Martha Jane née Scott. He career was principally made in the music halls, but her exploits at the Gaiety and the Savoy got her into prominence.  She claimed to have been wed in 1880, and had a daughter Win[n]ifred in 1881 (25 July). The husband/father was the comedian Frank Wood who altered his name, in 1887, to Frank Motley Wood. Frank (d 1919) outlived his wife, who died in Camden Town in November 1913. 

Katie James

No luck with Loui[s]e Verdoni, whoever she may have been, who surfaces in 1872 playing with the Lela amdrams, and singing in Islington, seemingly spent time in the company at the Royalty Theatre where she took part in Carte's Happy Hampstead as well as Kate Santley's Orpheus in the Underworld, played in touring burlesque and in pantomime in Wales and at the Alexandra Palace, before vanishing from my ken.

However, Miss Verdoni got me into the "Vs" and there, finally, I did find something new. A chap called Leonard VINCENT who seemed to have been a fairish baritone. In 1880, he was touring as Charles Favart in Madame Favart for Charles Bernard. In 1881, he joined the Carte establishment, playing in the forepieces, and sometime as the Colonel and Grosvenor in Patience. He also makes an appearance in the 1881 census, 'aged 26, born Islington' with a wife named Blanche.

First red herring. He wasn't 'Vincent' and his 'wife', if indeed she were so, was actually Mary Ann née Roe. But she apparently called herself, professionally, Blanch[e] Vincent. Anyway, Blanche was already the mother of two, of whom the second, at least, was Leonard's. When, in 1887 the son, Leonard Vincent Kew, was christened, the mother's name was omitted. The 'marriage' had disintegrated. 

So, who was Mr 'Vincent'. His veritable name was Leonard KEW, son of Leonard Alfred Kew (stockbroker's clerk) and his (but not then) eventual wife Caroline M C A Vanderpant. His birth, in 1854, maybe from causes of modesty, wasn't registered, but he turns up in the censi of 1861, with his parents and four sisters, and 1871 at school at Hurstpierpoint. 

After his Cartesian days, at Christmas 1884, he played Father Time in panto at Plymouth, and then he was gone. Mr Vincent announced he was becoming Leonard VIDAL.  

During the next three years, he was seen in the provinces in La Mascotte, Les Cloches de Corneville and in the new Gipsy Gabriel (Black Ralph/Simon Grimstone) for Shiel Barry and William Hogarth, and in 1888 he directed an amateur Patience in Preston. He continued performing, appearing as Marvejol in Olivette for Hogarth, and he returned to Carte to play in and stage-manage The Yeomen of the Guard, The Nautch Girl et al, all the while, in between times, directing amateur productions of the Savoy pieces.

I spot him in 1893 playing the Wolf in Little Red Riding Hood ... and so it continued, playing and directing, until he became lessee of the theatre at Ilkeston, and when he was taken on as manager of Oswald Stoll's Leicester Palace Theatre (1904). In the meantime, he had ?married one Amelia (dit Millicent) Adams, a Pembrokeshire postmaster's daughter, and produced a son Lenny Austin (11 February 1892) and a daughter, Gerty (1902). Blanche, alas, was in an insane asylum workhouse in London, in the care of her sister, Kezia Eliza Temple. Still calling herself 'Mrs Kew'. So maybe she was. And Millie wasn't. She died in the Westminster Workhouse in June 1896.

Leonard suffered a heart attack in April 1906, and died in its wake. Someone reported that he was 45. He was 51 or 2.

So, three Leonards rolled into one. And with very lightfingered documentation ... but I think I've got most of the facts, if not all the figures.