Bessie Sudlow: the happiest British Blonde.

 

A few years ago, when I was a lot younger and healthier, I began (for the second time in my life) to pen a monster work on the history of burlesque. The remnants of the unfinished work are doubtless somewhere in my computer's brain ... On another occasion, I began a work on Lydia Thompson's famous 'British Blondes'. I didn't complete that one either. And I gutted my half-finished text for a large scholarly article in a Continental compendium. The left-overs are lying in the same brain. 

So, when I come -- as this morning -- upon a nice picture ... and to research .. a little voice says 'hey, I've done this before!'. A little fishing in the files that microsoft has not rendered useless, and ... here we are!

SUDLOW, Bessie [JOHNSTON[E], Barbara Elizabeth] (b Liverpool 22 July 1849; d Hove, 28 January 1928)

 

‘Bessie’ was born in Liverpool in 1849. Her father, George Johnston, was a seagoing man, the son of an army man cum ship’s captain and himself, at the time of marriage (1 July 1846), mate on a Liverpool ship. Her mother was Eliza née Lee, daughter of another seagoing man, John Lee, of Toxteth Park, who had converted into a ‘clerk and salt merchant’, and his wife, Eliza (d Gate Avenue, Brooklyn 20 January 1869).

George and Eliza had a son, and then Bessie, before George either sank or disappeared. In the 1851 census Eliza, listed as widowed, is living with her parents at Liverpool’s 3 Bittern Street, with her two children.

 

At some stage in the next years, Eliza remarried. And she also emigrated to America. In which order, I can not discover. But her 1857 son claimed he was 'born ast sea'. The rest, allegedly, in America. But I have tracked back her new husband: Thomas Richard Sudlow (x Liverpool 8 October 1824), eldest son of Thomas and Emma Sudlow (née Haygarth), from Walton on the Hill, Everton. Thomas sr (d 3 December 1847) was listed variously as a clerk, a cashier, an accountant and Thomas jr followed his lead as a book-keeper. Not, it seems, very successfully. I thought he might have been the TS convicted of forgery, but that one fled to Australia. However, he was the TS who, having lost his father in 1847, went bankrupt in 1848. 

From 1851, I lose the family until 1857, when Thomas (‘cashier’) turns up at 81 West 48th Street, NYC, then at Nassau Street, corner of Pine, then 74 Gold, Brooklyn, then Madison and Classon (‘accountant’). 

And in October 1868, Bessie, now ‘of Brooklyn’, makes her first appearance on the American stage. The Brooklyn press wrote that she ‘has attained some local celebrity by her musical talents’ so it seems this may have been a first stage appearance. Apparently it was in the title-role of the spectacular Undine at Niblo’s Garden. The ‘title-role’ is not quite as grand as it sounds, for the stars of the Black-Crookish Undine were its dancers, billed largely on the advertisements in which the singers and actors, lord forbid the plot, were rarely mentioned. And anyway the Brooklyn Eagle complained that when she was billed, she was spelled wrongly.

She stayed at Niblo’s into the new year – I see her playing Kitty Wobbler in Blow for Blow and then in April 1869 taking over in Lydia’s troupe in the second edition of The Forty Thieves. She played at the Boston Theatre Comique, and dates beyond, as Morgiana in a version of the same piece starring the ambitious Ada Harland (‘the best singer in the troupe’), repeated with Lydia at Philadelphia (28 August 1869), and made a less happy sally into burlesque when she featured in the attempt to get a Robinson Crusoe, starring the Lauri family, off the ground at the ill-fated Tammany Theatre. The Tammany versions of Ixion and Bad Dickey did no better, and in February Bessie withdrew from the company.

For the next four years she worked largely at Niblo’s Theatre, in a whole array of pieces: as the Player Queen and then Osric in Hamlet, as Phoebe in As You Like It, as Terpischore Slopperton in the musicalised Paul Clifford, alongside Emma Howson, as Augusta in My American Cousin, Lucy in The Streets of London, in travesty in Black Friday, in Robert Macaire, Fidelio in Leo and Lotos, as Columbia and Queen Mab in The Children in the Wood, and even alongside fellow ex-blondes Pauline Markham and Lizzie Kelsey in an attempt to breathe some life back into the poor old Black Crook.

Bessie kept busy. In between Niblo’s shows, I spot her appearing with Lisa Weber’s burlesque outfit, at Baltimore as The Queen of the Abruzzi, with Olivia Rand in pantomime, at the Globe Theatre in the skating show The Skating Pond by Midnight or as Laura in the melodrama After the War, at Albany as Idex, now, in Undine, alongside Pauline Markham, and at Philadelphia in Jenny Lind at Last …

My last sighting of Bessie on American shores is in June, in Boston. For then she again crossed the Atlantic, in the opposite direction. Lydia Thompson was launching a season at London’s little Charing Cross Theatre in September. Her announced supporting cast contained very few familiar Blonde names, but amongst them was that of Bessie Sudlow. I’m curious as to whether Bessie was included because she was heading for Britain, or whether she headed for Britain in order to play the season. Because she didn’t. And because she didn’t, she scored the success of her life.

Bessie Sudlow made her ‘first appearance in Europe’ on Christmas Eve 1874, at John and Michael Gunn’s Theatre Royal, Dublin, as principal boy, alongside E W Royce, in the pantomime The Yellow Dwarf as one of a cast glittering with unknown names. She was decidedly successful. Her acting, appearance and singing were all found charming, and the Gunn ‘family’ took her into their bosom. She was taken up by Gunn’s associate, Richard d’Oyly Carte, as an agency client and she was hired by Gunn’s cousin, George Edwardes of London’s Gaiety Theatre to tour with that theatre’s star, Nellie Farren, playing leading lassie Gabrielle in The Island of Bachelors. 

She took up another leading role in another saucy Lecoq opéra-comique under unusual circumstances. Emily Soldene recounted the tale of Bessie’s ‘jump-in’ to the Criterion Theatre (October 1876) production of Fleur de thé in her memoirs. She exaggerated the situation more than a little, and I dissected it in my biography of la Soldene, but alas without finding the nitty gritty to the mystery. Suffice it that the Lord Chamberlain apparently forbade the casting of the original star (one longs to know who and why!) during rehearsals, and Bessie was hurried into the role. She opened after very limited preparation, was successful, and established herself as a comic opera leading lady in the West End. But, by December, she was back in Dublin (‘shouts of acclamation and welcome’) starring as principal boy in Dick Whittington.

In 1876, she went on tour as principal boy to Selina Dolaro’s ‘girl’ in Carte’s production of probably the most ‘indecent’ French musical of all, La Timbale d’argent (The Duke’s Daughter) and in another pants part as Prince Paul to Dolly’s La Grande-Duchesse. But Dolly threw one of her walk-out tricks, and Bessie found herself going on as Lange in La Fille de Madame Angot in her stead.

 

But all ended well. Soon after the end of the tour, Bessie went to St Marylebone Church and, in the presence of the whole Gunn-Edward(e)s-Carte clan, wed Mr Michael Gunn of the Dublin Theatre Royal, and lived happily and comfortably ever after.

Mrs Gunn appeared occasionally thereafter on her home stage (Plaintiff in Trial by Jury, Galatea in Pygmalion and Galatea, Cinderella 1877-8, Miss Hardcastle to the Lumpkin of Li Brough, Ariel in The Tempest, Lady Teazle 1880, Azucena 1887), and in 1878 she also played opposite Toole in his visiting entertainment. The other lady participant was Miss Eliza Johnston[e]. Now, there was/had been a lady of that name on the British stage, but I’m guessing that this was … mother.

 

Eliza née Lee had, in 1877, hit the headlines when, after twenty years of marriage and four children, she served her husband with divorce papers, claiming ill-treatment. Thomas, who was at that stage a treasury official (although the papers described him as ‘doorkeeper at Niblo’s!) and sometime President of the Greenwood Quoit Club, promptly got drunk, rushed home, pounded on his wife’s bedroom door, punched his elder daughter, who tried to intervene and … well, I guess Eliza got her divorce. Two years later, she was describing herself as a widow. Which she may have been. Eliza returned to Britain and, of course, Ireland and Bessie. She would die there at Coolbawn, Ailesbury Road on 1 July 1906 aged 87.

 

Sister Frances (‘an actress as Frances Lee’) also followed to Britain, promptly married a Dublin silk merchant named Alfred Ernest Manning, in 1878, churned out three children in quick time, soon started cheating on her husband, he sued her for divorce … I see father and two in Dublin in the 1911 census. They seem to have got on well enough without her …

 

Brother Thomas Mercer Sudlow became a sea-captain in Washington, married and bred and died in Seattle 28 November 1917 … I don’t know about Eda-Ida-Ada Mary and Charley [Edward Freeman] but the family historians say she was 1860-1940 (Mrs Jacob P van Horne) and he 1864-1889.

But Bessie, she had a fine and happy married life. Being a Blonde, albeit briefly, hadn’t done her any harm.