If you spend hours combing the darkest recesses of ebay, the most amazing things turn up ...
I have found that the most difficult ephemerides to discover are Victorian concert programmes. Probably because the are one-night-only affairs, rather than from the run of a theatre piece.
But today I found this one ...
The Haymarket Theatre, no less. And with that theatre's leading players taking part. Buckstone and Keeley as Cox and Box. One presumes their services were paid for by the Post Office Orphans, why would all those folk donate their services? And a new play by Mark Lemon. With 25 characters!
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| Mark Lemon |
Of course, it is the musical part of the programme which interests me. An Auber overture .. hardly a novelty. Some waltzes by Alfred Mellon which publisher Jullien wants heard ('as played at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket') and a polka by conductor Dan Spillane ... a pianist, a fiddler and a flautist of rank .. and five vocalists.
John Sinclair, a proven tenor and leading man was given top billing. He was, however, now over sixty years old and his choice of ballads on this programme was, shall we say, 'careful'.
The name of Mrs Alexander Newton (née Emily Ward) permeates the popular concert world and its programmes during the bright years of her middle career: the popular concert world, but rather less that part of the ‘fashionable’ concert scene where she would probably have had to have been Signora Alessandro Nutoni to gain an entrée. As a vocalist, it is clear, she had little or nothing to render to the best British sopranos of her era and she goes down to history as one of such. 'Qui la voce' and 'Lo, Here the Gentle Lark' were her staple diet.
The Brougham sisters were actually sisters, by the name of Broom. In the 1850s and 1860s, when the Victorian passion for part-music was at its height, and composers of the celebrity of Mendelssohn turned out sets of duets written especially for two female voices, the Misses Brougham were amongst the most popular of the ‘singing sisters’ teams who appeared regularly in the best of London’s concerts. Nowadays, if they are mentioned it is usually in connection with their descendants: from Violet Cameron to Arthur Lloyd.
And then there was Rose Braham. No 'Qui la voce' here. Rose was a genuine ballad singer. A 'pupil of Mrs Newton'. And her facts have had me stymied for decades.
BRAHAM, Rose [BRAHAM, Rosina] (b Upper Gloucester Place, Hyde Park c1831; d Sunbury 1922)
Pretty little Rose Braham arrived from apparently nowhere, to win a decided success on the London concert stage in the early 1850s. There has surely to be a reason for her subsequent eclipse, but, if there were, I haven’t succeeded in winkling it out. Nor have I succeeded in provably pinning Rose down factually, although I have my theories, and she is there, unashamedly, in the British census returns for 1841, 1851, 1871, 1881, 1891, 1901 and 1911 …
According to the 1891 census, Rose was born in Upper Seymour Street, Portland Square. That was, indeed, where she lived for many years, but, by the time of the 1841 census, she and her family hadn’t yet got there. Elizabeth Braham (b Aldgate), independent, married, aged 35, and her two daughters, aged 11 and 16, are to be found at Upper Gloucester Place. Rose is the eleven-year-old, the 16 year-old is her sister Rebecca. There is no father. It seems that Elizabeth Braham brought up her two daughters alone, although Rebecca married, in 1842 (11 May), a monstrous and much-incarcerated swell named George Miles Weston, at which time she, at least, was domiciled at 48 Upper Baker Street, and let us know that her father was ‘Joseph Braham Esq’. Not THAT Joseph Braham, surely? Esquire? Grosvenor Place? Was Elizabeth the Elizabeth Ann Mary who … well, were Rose and Rebecca sisters to America’s famous songsmith, David Braham …? It seems not. That’s another Joseph and Elizabeth, and they are in the 1851 census too. And in the Old Bailey reports for 1835 … more searching to be done ..
In 1851, at 22 Upper Seymour Street, our Elizabeth is an engraver, still married and still with no visible husband, but two servants. Rebecca is married and likewise husbandless, and Rosina (sic) is 20. There is also a lodger, a naval gentleman named William Cole. By 1851, however, Rose had already begun to make a name for herself as a vocalist, and she made a professional debut (‘pupil of Mrs Alexander Newton’) singing ‘O charming May’ and ‘The Cavalier’ at the seventh London Wednesday Concert at Exeter Hall on 10 April 1850, alongside Sims Reeves, Charlotte Lucombe, Rosalia Lanza and Henri Drayton. She was wholly liked: ‘during the winter, she has been frequently spoken of in amateur circles … she has a good-toned and flexible voice … in personal appearance Miss Braham is favoured beyond the usual average’ … ‘decidedly pretty’… ‘a success’.
She appeared in others of the concert series (1 May, 22 May, ‘Where the bee sucks’), however, when the Wednesday Concert series came to its end, I lose Rose, and she does not appear to my eye again until 21 October, when she is announced in concert for Stammers’s Benefit at the Haymarket Theatre. She shows up at the Misses Alexander’s concert at Crosby Hall in November, and the following April at the Marylebone Theatre, at Mr Jarrett’s concerts, and then acting with amateurs at the Soho Theatre (‘a very superior voice of fine soprano quality’). In December of 1851 the press confided: ‘Miss Rose Braham of London Wednesday Concert fame has returned to London after a continental tour of 4 months’. What?
In February 1852, when the new series of Wednesday Concerts started up, Rose was back at her post, and strongly featured in a series of which the great attraction was the return of the aged John Braham to the concert platform. She was ‘highly successful in a new Spanish serenade ‘Sweet love arise’ by Paul Henrion’ and, when a selection from Howard Glover’s Aminta was given, she sang ‘What a thing is love’, popularised at the Haymarket Theatre by Louisa Caulfield. During the Exeter Hall season, she also sang at outside concerts (Esther Jacobs Concert, City of London Institute, at the Haymarket Theatre with Mrs Newton &c) and at the end of the series, on 7 July, she promoted her own concert at Exeter Hall with many of the favourite performers from the concert series included on the bill.
In December 1852, Rose Braham made a first attempt on the stage, playing Daphne to the Apollo of Rebecca Isaacs in Midas, at the Strand Theatre. The experience was evidently not a success, as it was not repeated. Rose returned to her natural habitat, the concert room, and to ballads. During 1853, I spot her at Hackney, Woolwich, Reading, Ramsgate, at Dalston and at Canterbury, where she was acclaimed ‘one of the best ballad singers we have heard for some time’. She sang at the Olympic Theatre in Passion Week, and at a number of Benefits (‘Where the bee sucks’), but the promise of her debut at Exeter Hall seemed to be fading away.
Over the next few years, I notice her name on concert bills only a handful of times per season, occasionally at concerts given by George Case or by old colleagues, Esther Jacobs and George Tedder. When Joseph Stammers started up his Saturday Concerts at St Martin’s Hall (21 January 1857), Rose was amongst the ‘veterans’ of the London Wednesdays who returned to take part. In September 1857 she can be seen singing at the Surrey Gardens, after which, nothing.
Nothing for eight years.
There has to be a reason. Discouragement? Marriage? Illness? Family duties? Or just well-off and not amused? The mystery is complicated by the fact that, come the 1861 census, down at Upper Seymour Place, we find mother Elizabeth (now a lodging house keeper), still listed as married, and another seafaring friend, Mr Benjamin Barnet of the navy … but no Rose. Where was she? Touring the Continent again? She was ‘in London’ in October 1861, when she scratched from a concert in Birmingham. Because she did come back. To music, I mean.
In 1864, she turns up at Mackney’s Concert Room, Norwich ... but she seems to have relocated to Bristol. I spy her singing at Bristol’s Thiodon’s Palace of Amusement, with Edwin Haigh and his wife, in January 1865, and in music hall in Aberdare, and she even advertised for work from 2 Ashton Street, Clifton. Later in the year, she is seen appearing ‘for some time’, in tandem, at Avonmouth Gardens, with comic singer, Mr Frank Howard. ‘The well-known London vocalist will sing several of the most popular songs of the day’. They are there again in 1866. And in 1867.
By later 1867, however, she is back in London, living with mother, and off on tour with a music hall concert party headed by Jolly John Nash and Mrs George Ware. In 1869, she can be seen touring an entertainment called Something New and featuring ‘The Phantascope’. From Hereford, a critic reported that she sang ‘some beautiful ballads’. She is still advertising ‘concerts, theatres or entertainments’ from 51 Ordnance Road, St John’s Wood, in 1870.
My last sighting of Rose as a singer is in November 1871, singing in a concert in Finchley. Then she seems finally to have called it a day.
I don’t know what became of her thereafter. In 1881 she is boarding at Cole’s Cottages, Aylesford, describing herself as a 49 year-old single ‘actress’, in 1891 she’s still ‘unmarried’ and living ‘on her own means’ in Wraysbury. In 1901 and 1911 it’s Sunbury. Barnes Villas, Vicarage Road. Boarding in a humble household. And admitting to a birthplace of Gloucester Place, Hyde Park. And there, in Sunbury, she appears to have died in 1922.
I'd love to finally fill in the gaps ....
PS Here's another Haymarket Benefit. Some of the same players. And not only a 'unrivalled young prima donna' (no bullshit!) singing that warhorsical coloratura vehicle known as Rode's Air and Variations: the splendid Louisa Pyne! Then there is England's favourite bass (well,back him for a place) Willoughby Weiss .. OK the tenor is the competent Donald King .. but ouch. That 'pupil of' thing again. Katherine or Kate Hickson pupil of Signor Garcia, overreaching herself with 'In questo semplice' ... AND playing Jessica in The Merchant of Venice. Oh well, that's Benefit performances. Miss Hickson had been being plugged since mid-1851, and headlined a concert at the Hanover Square Rooms 'in aid of the funds of the Hungarian Committe and of the Literary Association of the Friends of Poland'. She gave 'Nobil donna' and 'Il segreto'. The next year she gave another at the rather less prestigious Beethoven Rooms ... and then came this affair in July 1852. Then was advertised her 'first appearance in public' at the Lyceum! Er .... wot? Same Kate, different Kate? In 1853 she was still being called in by the Haymarket ... and apppeared as Katherine in Henry V! She turns up next at the St James's Theatre, now as an actress ... but then, sometime, married a Mr Cameron
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