White or Black? : Miss Nancy Renshaw.

 

I'd never heard of Nancy Renshaw until yesterday. But I know a theatrical photo when I see one ..

Wonnder what and who she was. Not quite the looks or figure for a leading lady. An ephemeral chorine?  

Oh, no, very much not so. Nancy was a "spesh". And she trod the British boards for thirty years, at first as a 'vocalist and bone soloist', then as a 'negress and speciality' and a 'laughing negro comedienne and bone soloist' and finally a 'coon comedienne'.'

Who was she? Where did she come from? How did a young girl get to play the bones? Was she from a minstrel family? And was Renshaw her birth name?  Well, I have tried, and the only hint I have found is the 1901 census, where she is in digs in Manchester with her colleagues. It says she was born in London and is 30 years old. Sounds like a landlady's guess to me. And then, later, when The Stage started saying 'happy birthday' to folk, she was greeted for 4 March. But they didn't say which year.

She appears on my radar first in August 1895, as part of the company with Hamilton's excursions publicity diorama. Ah ... no, back a bit, 'the musical Renshaws' are with the company the previous January. Then Mr J Renshaw gets ill, and Nancy goes out as a single. She got an engagement for the Ernest Carpenter pantomime Little Red Riding Hood at Barrow-on-Furness, and another as Pekoe in Aladdin for Hardie and von Leer, she played one or Tom E Murray's daughters in Our Irish Visitors, in which she performed her blackface act, which she also performed with the Riano combination.

In the decade to come, Nancy played many white-faced touring pantomime boys (Dandini at Darwen, Prince Rudolph in Humpty Dumpty for the Ivies, Prince in Beauty and the Beast, Captain Ebert in The Belle of Madrid)and black-faced ladies (Queen  at the Blackpool Tower, Queen Inkyblacko at Glasgow), some white-faced ladies (Princess Piccallili in Robinson Crusoe at Glasgow) and she even ventured into musical comedy, notably in blackfaced roles in The White Blackbird for Tom Murray and The Girl from New York with Constance Bellamy.  I imagine many of these engagements included her 'Spesh', and for the last two decades of her career she returned to the variety stage.

I leave her in 1922, theoretically about 50 years old ... and I know no more about her end than I do her beginning.  But now this is all here, and one day somebody just might find out the answers.

This is Australian coon singer May Robson. Black and white ...