WILLMORE ? Don't you believe it!

 

Theatrical torture ... theatrical triumph!

 

No, I'm only talking about my pet subject of C19th theatre research. I go to places where others have not dared or cared (or have the time and interest) to venture. And sometimes, rather a lot of times, I get results. Results to questions -- mostly of identity -- which have been unasked for or unknown about for a century and a half. Why?  'My name is Lalage Potts and I WANT TO KNOW' as Sadie Jerome sang ..

 

So. As so often, I was set off on to today's one of the myriad mysterious paths by a photo on ebay. Lizzie Willmore, a delightfully decorative presence on the comedy and burlesque stages of the 1860s and 1870s on both sides of the Atlantic.

 It is parroted from website to book and website that she and her briefly more famous sister, Jenny or Jennie or Jane, were the  'daughters of actor William Willmore'. 

 

Yes, there's Jane getting married in 1857. Willmore. And there's poor William's tomb ... knocked down by a freight train while crossing the tracks .. 

Alas, pretty Lizzie would join him there a year or so later.

But, as I've learned in half a century of playing this game: trust not in wedcerts, nor in gravestones ... and certainly not in family historians!

But ten minutes ago, I cracked the 'qui sunt' of the seemingly impossible nut.

Poor Mr Willmore was, in real life, William MOORE. Geddit? Will Moore. From Liverpool. I'm so sweaty from finally discovering that much, that I hav'n't tried to track wife Jane from Cumberland.  But the children?  Well, in 1841, in Wigan, they have just one: Susannah, aged 3. Oyoy. In 1851 Susannah is 13, Elizabeth Mary is 8 and there is a son aged 3: John Lancelot.  Pardi!!!!!

So. Elizabeth Mary Moore = Lizzie WILLMORE.  Susannah Moore = ?Jenny WILLMORE ...

Don't think it gets any easier.

Lizzie first. She said she went on the stage as a child. But that she married or 'married' the low comedian of the Dublin Theatre 22 June 1863. William Ellerton. I suspect rather older. And it's probably a pseudonym. Anyway, they went off to America: she returned, he didn't, and he died in poverty in San Francisco ('Australian actor' ?????) ...    Facts and figures? Well, Lizzie seems to have been born in 1843. And she remarried after Ellerton's death. Mr Courtenay Ware ... I think they may have known each other a while. And she died thereafter (Edinburgh 25 May 1877). She said on her wedcert that she was the widow FORSYTH. You see what I mean ..?

Jenny. Hummm. Is she Susannah or not. She must be. Well, anyway whoever she was, she shacked up with/married the comic actor 'Felix Rogers' (ROGERS, John) and produced a Henrietta (1858), a Felix (1860) and a Katy (1862) ... triumphed alongside him in the pro-am Ixion at the Royalty Theatre, and ... well I've writ this before .. 

https://kurtofgerolstein.blogspot.com/2019/09/ixion-musical-hit-of-1863.html

But I've cracked the Who Was nut ....   goodness, official records are SO full of lies ....

I've deserved my nice NZ gin this evening ...

ELIZABETH MARY MOORE ... 1843-1877 

Oh there are still folks in there to unmask ...  what happened to 'Felix Rogers' after he left Wrexham in 1894, who was William Ellerton ... the girls' subsequent husbands or 'husbands' ... their brother .. their mother .. etc etc etc