You can get a girl with a gun: Louise Henschel

 

I'm supposed to have closed the Cartesian department down for the season, to return to C19th France ... but my co-author has taken a few days holiday, so I thought ... just one more ..

I don't know why I hadn't investigated Miss Henschel before this. I mean, she was a successful young leading lady and I've been digging up momentary chorus singers.

Received knowledge says that she started her career playing Josephine and Mabel with the Carte touring company in 1881. 'A member of a clever family which has long ago won a name in art and literary worlds' quoth the press. Clearly, we are supposed to think of Georg Henschel and family. But neither of these statements are true. 'Miss Henschel' was the daughter of a general and gun merchant, by name Henry Henkel, and his wife, the widowed Theodosia Rapp (née Cole) of Tarrington. She had been christened, in 1861, by the name of  Kathleen Louise Jeanette Henkel, and she was some twenty years of age when she joined the Pinafore and Pirates company.

But she had previously been employed, under her real name, by G W Traverner, for his Olivette tour, and one night the leading lady was taken ill, as leading ladies are wont to do, and little Miss Henkel went on and saved the show and got grand notices ..

She got grand notices for a decade of leading roles in comic and light opera thereafter --- J Parry Cole's operetta troupe, La Vie Parisienne, Falka (all three ladies' roles at various times between 1883 and 1887), Lilies, Indiana, Brother Pelican, The Old Guard, Marjorie, Paul Jones -- often for the fine no1 touring firm of Lingard and van Biene. And then came a man.  A Brummy. He was by name George William Bonehill, he was three years younger than she, and he was in business of guns and exploding things. The first thing he exploded was his wife's fine career. She accepted the role of the Princess in the year's Birmingham pantomime, seemingly without asking hubby. And hubby was mighty wrath. He took one of his guns (history does not tell whether it was loaded), climbed into the dress circle, and when the Emperor of Morocco went to kiss his daughter ... he leaped to his feet ...

Louise's career was done. The couple stayed in Birmingham. I see them there, childless, in 1901. But not in 1911. Louise seems to have died in 1912 (22 October) ... in Edinburgh. I wonder how and why. The family historians say she died in 1918 in Birmingham. 'Louisa Bonehill aged 64' ?  Bonehill remarried ...