Edith Blande: actress and good time girl

 

I delivered the text for a new article to the publisher this week, and during our correspondence she asked me for some information on Victorian actress, Edith Blande. Of course I could help. Edith was a sometime mistress of (among others) composer Teddy Solomon, and a member of the Lydia Thompson Blondes ... I'd written quite a chunky piece about her, to include in both books ... neither of which I had completed. A slice of the stillborn Blondes book had appeared in Germany but ... not the bit about Edith. Shame. Was it still lurking somewhere in my computer's damaged brain?  So I looked. And there it was, in a file which was listed as containing zero bytes. In quadruplicate. Why? And Why? I clicked hopefully and Bingo! Number three regurgitated a version of the article!  So, here it is ... so that I can't lose it again.

BLANDE, Edith [Crosby] (b 2 Frederick Place, Lambeth, 16 March 1851; d Charing Cross Hospital, 15 May 1923)

 

Edith Blande may have only been a member of Lydia Thompson’s American troupe for a couple of months, but her career spanned several decades, it included all sorts of … shall we say ‘adventures’, and it left us with a swathe of newspaper stories and interviews, which have often been erroneously taken for fact, plus a fairly major mystery about her origins … and … well … I’ve spent a lot of time delving in Edith, and I haven’t really come up with a dotted ‘i’ and a crossed ‘t’, but I’m going to pour upon you all that I have found …

 

In her mature leading actress years – for that is what she became – Edith visited Australia. Australia treated her as a star, rather than just a tall, statuesque, blonde beauty of good all-round talents (and a colourful track record of gentlemen partners) and published a number of ‘in depth’ interviews – which didn’t dwell on the gentlemen partners, for Edith was now legally married – in which the lady gave her version of her life story for the edification or bamboozlement of the kangaroos. Well, her professional life story.

 

She begins by revealing her date of birth. 16 March 1860. Odd, then, that she appears in the April 1861 census of Britain ‘scholar’ (not child star!) aged nine. She says she was born ‘in Kensington’. So is Kensington part of Lambeth? Kennington maybe.

She gives her father’s name as ‘David Blande’ and says he died when she was four months old. The vital records of Great Britain contain no such name. In fact, Blande-wise they contain only one entry in the 1840s-50s. The birth of Edith Crosby Blande in the second quarter of 1851. But March is in the first quarter … And how and why 'Crosby'?

 

And there is the small matter of her elder brothers. Alfred (b Lambeth 1846; d Pancras 1931) and Arthur (b Blackheath,1849; d Edmonton 1925). Nowhere to be seen. Births? 1851 census? None of them. Invisible. Why are they nor in Frederick Street, where Edith has just been born?

Everyone becomes visible in 1861. Mama, Sarah Ann ‘31, schoolmistress’ 'married', Arthur 12 solicitor’s clerk (!) and Edith 9 are in Water Lane, Blackfriars. But they take some finding. Because they are calling themselves what looks like ‘Brooks’. Arthur has Bland (sic) as a middle name. And Alfred? Well he is frankly listed as Bland, but he’s over at 2 Alderman’s Walk, Bishopsgate, living with Mr Benjamin Lawrence, 62 (1798-1870), to whom he is listed as … grandson! So is Sarah Ann ‘Blande’ or 'Brooks’ really Sarah Ann Lawrence? Was she ever actually married ‘at 15, to a man 24 years her senior’ as Edith claimed. Well, later mama would list herself as ‘born Bishopsgate’. And there is this Benjamin giving birth, at no 11 Tiverton Street, with the aid of his wife, Hannah Maria née Wotton, to a Sarah 13 June 1825, and the witness (marked with an illiterate x) is Hannah’s maiden sister, Sarah Ann Wotton. Who just happens to be there, in 1861, with Alfred …

That part is looking good. Yes. More evidence. Sarah [Ann] Lawrence (d 1901) confirmed. But where do the Brooks and the Blande come in? Wait a mo! Sarah [Ann] Lawrence (spinster) married George Frederick Brooks, bricklayer, 27 February 1853 ...  so is she not biologically 'mama'?

Anyway, you see the problems. Only increased by the two boys giving their father’s name variously as ‘David’ and ‘John’ on their wedding certificates…  Suffice it, I feel, to say that there was a chunk of irregularity somewhere along the line, and that Edith, on top of that, in her efforts to chop a decade off her age, if for no other reason, muddled her life story considerably. 

 

Well, my friend Andrew Lamb, who is an impeccable scholar where facts are concerned, decided to take the only way out. He purchased the birth certificate for Miss E C Blande. And it contained the answer, but also a surprise. Oh, it’s our girl all right. Born 16 March 1851 in Kennington Lane, Vauxhall. Just registered in the following quarter. Parents? No David. No John. No Sarah Ann. Edith was born of ‘unknown father’ and a lass by name ‘Clara Blande’. Who in heaven was she? I suspect, a fiction.

 

Just to clear them out of the way, both the boys, whoever they were, took the name Blande, both had respectable lives, with respectable wives, and respectable children, as respectable clerical workers, and outlived their sister. Well, I presume she was. Relation, anyhow.

 

My first sighting of ‘Miss Edith Blande’ on the stage is at Christmas 1867.

 

However, Edith’s Australian ‘life history’ has it otherwise. Rightly or wrongly. I’ve chased all her claims and found nothing but rebuttals of her stories, but…

 

According to Edith, she made her debut at 3 years and 8 months as a kiddie in the Drury Lane panto. You know, one of those stories of I-was-going-to-the-chemist-for-mama-and-walked-past-Drury-Lane-stage-door-on-kiddie-call-day …  Yeah. OK. 3 years and 8 months with a March birthdate.  Which would make it the 1854 panto … Jack and Jill. Of course, the infants weren't listed ... There was a Miss Bland in the 1861 Lane panto, but she doesn't seem to have been a child. There was, also, one active in Dublin. No 'Blande' though.

So, she went to study dancing with Chappino (who?), and at eight she was Columbine at Greenwich Theatre ..   ummmm … revisionist, ageist stuff at work here? I suppose the kangaroos didn't know that the Greenwich Theatre only opened in 1864. Its first two Columbines were Olivia Sharp (1864) and Jenny Talbot (1866). And Miss E Blande was engaged in 1867, not for Columbine (Miss Stanley), but for the role of the Queen of the Fairybirds in which she was voted ‘most fascinating’. Aged something like 16. Not 8. She also played in Camilla’s Husband (a title which should earn it a revival in these post-Elizabethan days) and shared the stage with George Beckett (brother to the more famous Harry of the Thompson troupe) and the memorable Harriet Everard.

 

Next, we are told, little Edith ‘supporting her family after her father’s death’ (oyoy what about 'Mama’s' schoolteaching? And a brother clerking from age twelve?) played important kiddie roles with Phelps (Puck, Fleance and Ariel?!) and Charles Dillon (Belphegor, Richelieu). Well, I’ve searched. I mean, Dillon left England for a number of years in 1861 … But she quotes, verisimilitudinously, the young teenage role of Amy in A Hard Struggle (1858) which was introduced by Amelie Conquest … but later played, uncredited, in the suburbs and provinces ..  OK. In Dublin, post-London, Dillon gave A Hard Struggle, with Miss A Parker as Amy. A ‘Miss [E] Bland’ (sic) had a tiny part in the accompanying play.   Understudy? Or is this the Dublin 'Miss Bland'?

 

Next, ‘aged 10, she went to ‘[Clifton W] Tayleure at the Grand Opera House’ in New York. Well, that’s clear enough. The many tentacled Mr T was only in charge at the so-called (not very) Grand Opera House for a short while. In, it seems, 1868-9. He was 'late manager' by July 1869. So, that doesn’t fit her say-so. And she stayed in America for seven years … that doesn’t fit either.

 

Do we just forget Edith’s say-so career as a juvenile (under whatever name), and start at 1867? At age 16. Because that’s what I’m going to do …

 

So. Greenwich Theatre, Christmas 1867. Camilla’s Husband and the Queen of the Fairybirds. Then Daisy in The Village Blacksmith. Next sighting: Dundee with an ephemeral ‘London Burlesque and Comedy Co’ and the dancing Morgan sisters, as another Fairy Queen in the Byron burlesque Cinderella. In September of 1868 she joined F B Chatterton’s stock company at Hull, along with another young beauty who would also go on to become a Thompson blonde: Miss Emma Grattan. Edith played Titania to Emma’s Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and played Urgandula when Emma took Lydia’s famous role in Magic Toys. Hull liked them a lot: ‘a most promising young actress of varied and considerable abilities’ ‘actress vocalist and dancer .. preposessing and perfectly unassuming’, ‘Miss Edith Bland is warmly and deservedly applauded for a skipping rope dance’ ‘Miss Edith Bland, a young and accomplished actress, and an invaluable acquisition to the present, or, in fact, any company’. She played Oliver to the Dodger of Toole, Lucifer in Under the Gaslight, principal girl to the boy of Cicely Nott in the panto of Robinson Crusoe, and guess what! In November Mr Charles Dillon came to guest and played Belphegor, Macbeth … What’s the betting that teenaged Miss Blande played Fleance and those other roles that she would have had us believe she played with the fading star as a baby. And who is Macduff?: why, John Ryder. The same dramatic coach who, Edith told Australia, had advised her to be a Actress rather than a dancer. And there she is playing in Richelieu (‘the remaining parts were played by Misses O’Berne and Bland’).

In the new year, I see her at the Royal Alexandra in Glasgow playing in Extremes and performing Louise Keeley’s five-character role (also favoured by Miss Thompson) in the adaptation of Une fille terrible as The Little Rebel …  and somewhere Wang in the Ivanhoe burlesque ..

The next part of the story goes (or did, when it came to court) that, at this stage, Alexander Henderson saw her, and hired her to join the Lydia troupe in America. I wonder when and where he was supposed to have done that. Because, since August 1868, Mr Henderson had been on the other side of the Atlantic. But on 16 September Miss Edith Blande, actress, aged 20 and Mrs Mary Blande (!), aged 40, boarded the City of Paris destination Philadelphia. 

 

The company had been somewhat rearranged during its Pennsylvanian stay. The Pitt sisters and Bessie Sudlow had been and gone, Pauline Markham had returned, Lizzie Weathersby had confirmed herself as a worthy replacement for La Weber, and Edith looked scheduled to be an improvement on Ada Harland. But it didn’t turn out that way.

 

 Edith opened in Baltimore and appeared as Jupiter in Ixion, as Selim in Sinbad, as Lisa in La Sonnambula et al to much approval:

‘Miss Edith Blande does the skipping rope dance excellently, and displays qualities which place her in the front rank as a danseuse’. The company moved on to Washington, Cincinnati, Louisville and to Chicago .. ‘pretty, graceful and her face has considerable expression. She acts with life and adds greatly to the life of the burlesque’. And Henderson sacked her. He must have, because she sued him for the four months’ unexpired wages – one paper said $1000 another $2000 -- and he settled out of court.

 

There is clearly a story behind all this. Edith was an ideal recruit for the company. She had been well received. She was not taking the limelight (or, I imagine, anything else) from Lydia and Pauline. Did she go or was she pushed? She would advertise herself thereafter as ‘of the Lydia Thompson troupe’. Unless the testerone-bulging Mr Henderson found her propinquity too troublesome … but in other cases he’d simply unbuttoned. Did Edith, unlike most others, find him resistable? It’s all theory. But there must have been something.

 

Anyway, by Christmas 1869 the Blonde weeks of Edith’s career were over. And there was still half a century of career to go!

 

It started in a curious way. Within weeks, Edith (and mother came too) was installed as leading soubrette lady ‘from the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane’, at CP deGroot's National Theatre in Fort Scott, Kansas. She played Asmodeus and The Little Rebel, she played Caste, Peter White and All that Glitters, and then moved on to Topeka and to Omaha … 

Omaha is the source of a bit more mis-history on Edith’s account. The local paper, looking backwards a decade later, has her based in the area for five years ‘she worked hard and used all the money she could earn to improve her acting and her wardrobe, for she was aiming to be a star’. Hardly. Although she did return to Omaha. 

On 22 March 1871 she joined Lisa Weber’s burlesque company on the road, the following year she was based in Chicago, playing everything from The Ticket of Leave Man and Across the Continent to The Black Crook and appearing in variety programmes (‘Miss Edith Blande, sensational burlesque actress’), before joining Milton Nobles and Susan Denin in a ‘New York Combination’. In 1873 she was part of Mlle Sappho’s Comic Opera and Burlesque company, trouping in the drama The New World, then touring The Little Rebel and the protean playlets A Day in Paris and Grandfather’s Child around the variety houses. She joined up with Emma Grattan again in minstrel-man Dan Shelby’s Buffalo company, visited New York’s Metropolitan and Tony Pastor’s …

And then she went home. To England. She seems to have been booked for the Edinburgh pantomime, but instead she made her ‘first appearance in London’ (true) and her ‘first performance in burlesque’ (manifestly not true) at the Opera Comique with Pattie Oliver. Miss Oliver had scored a hit in 1866 with a Burnand burlesque of Black-Eyed Susan and now she revived the piece, with herself, Dewar and Danvers from the original cast. The original William had been Rosina Ranoe (Mrs Burnand), this time it was Edith Blande. And she scored a fine success: ‘her hornpipe is capitally danced, her songs are well sung, and she speaks her lines with point and intelligence’ as the revival ran on through Christmas and into the new year.

Edith as William

But Edith didn’t hang around to capitalise on her newest and biggest success to date. After a brief appearance with Kate Vaughan and Johnnie Rouse in an eastertide Turko the Terrible at the Alexandra Palace, she (and 'mother' came too) took the MS Chester back (25 May 1876)  across the Atlantic.

 

This time, it was not Omaha and Topeka, however, Edith was hired as a Actress (‘from the Gaiety and Criterion Theatres, London’!) at New York’s Fifth Avenue Theatre. Ah Sin, the Heathen Chinee (31 July 1877) by Bret Harte and Mark Twain starred C T Parsloe in a tour de force in the title role, Dora Goldthwaite and old friend Mary Wells led the women, and Edith was cast as Anastasia Plunkett, ‘a masculine kind of woman’ in which role she attracted some grudging attention (‘has acted in this country before, principally on the variety stage’). ‘If she would enrol herself as a member of a stock company in some first-class theatre, and legitimately pursue her profession, she would be likely to attain an excellent position’ nodded The Clipper. Which is what she had, theoretically, been doing in Omaha.

 

When Parsloe took his play on the road, the Fifth Avenue company stayed behind and appeared in Our City, but 8 December Edith and mother headed back to England. Edith’s success in Black-Eyed Susan made her obvious casting for the sailorboy lad (Harry Halyard) in the next Burnand burlesque, of the old My Poll and Partner Joe (10 June). Producer Edward Righton, at the Globe Theatre, had put together a fine cast: Mrs John Wood as Poll, himself as the villain, Harry Paulton as the dame and Edith as the nautical hero. She sang ‘I Love Her', danced her inevitable hornpipe (nowadays without the skipping rope), all went well, but My Poll didn’t catch on as Susan had, and by July, Edith was at the Olympic Theatre playing Rose Maylie to Rose Eytinge’s Nancy Sikes. And by September she was at the Folly Theatre. Manager Alexander Henderson. Star: Lydia Thompson.

 

It wasn’t quite like being a Blonde again. Things had moved on. This was a slightly more sophisticated programme. All from the French. A play by Meilhac and Halévy (La Veuve), and a tricky opéra-comique (L’Étoile) metamorphosed into an English burlesque extravaganza. Lydia played only the extravaganza: Edith played the prominent role of Mrs Jekyll in the play, and the Head of Police ‘with a curious costume ornamented with padlocks’ in the musical. Which failed utterly. Man is not Perfect and Retiring were given a try, and a Carmen burlesque in which Edith featured as Lillias Pasta then Morales. Carmen did much better, and the season ran through till mid-March. 

 

In June, she took up another London role, this time at the Globe Theatre in an extravaganza entitled Venus, complementing the hit comedy Crutch and Toothpick on the programme. Nelly Bromley of Trial by Jury renown was Venus, and Edith ‘a magnificent Proserpine’. It wasn’t the best part Edith had ever had, but it turned out to be one of the most influential. The music of Venus was the work of the young conductor ‘Teddy’ Solomon, sometime md from the Folly, and for the next few years Edith was to be, very openly, Mrs Solomon. She couldn’t actually be Mrs Solomon, because there was one who had legal claim to that name, and although the story doesn’t belong here, its been so falsely reported on the wwweb that I’ll just pop in the basic facts.

Teddy’s legal wife (1873) was Jane Isaacs, known in the music halls as Lily Grey (1 daughter) whom he soon abandoned for the charms of Minna Cecilia Reynolds (1857-1906), another young dancer and singer known as ‘Minnie Venn’ (1 son, 2 daughters). The second daughter was as yet unborn when Teddy moved out from Minnie, and in with Edith. The new couple can be seen in the 1881 census at 31 Burghley Road, and Edith has, of course, chopped half a dozen years off her age.

At the Globe, Venus was replaced by Balloonacy (music: Solomon) with Edith playing the Princess in the affair, before she was engaged for the Alhambra’s production of La Fille du Tambour-Major, in the second female role of the vivandière, Claudine (‘Miss Edith Blande makes a stalwart vivandiére, Amazonian enough to personate Penthesilea’).

In December 1880 she wrote to the Era from the Alhambra claiming that someone had been forging letters in her name making dates ‘with gentlemen’, and offering 20£ reward for the arrest of the offender. I fear no one was arrested.

 

When Teddy’s new musical, Claude Duval, was produced (24 August 1881) by Michael Gunn, there was a role for Edith, when its companion forepiece Quite an Adventure was mounted she was again cast, and when his The Vicar of Bray was produced in New York, the composer went to supervise and Edith went too, to play the role of Nellie Bly ‘the leader of the ballet’. She was well cast. ‘This lady is phenomenally tall, towering above everyone else on the stage, and wore a startling dress as the leader of the ballet by which means she created a sensation which reached a climax in her dance in the last act. Such an exhibition of fine underwear has never been seen before on the New York stage’. 

The Clipper reported: ‘Theatrically, the present week is mainly eventful because of the reappearance in this country of a favourite of all of us when we were younger and better looking. It was not enough that Miss Edith Blande stayed away from all of us for several years. She must needs blandly harrow our feelings further by coming back to all of us married; and too a mere musician too! However, the chance for all of us to revenge ourselves is presented in the fact that the more or less alleged opera in which Miss B returns to this country is of her husband’s handiwork. Holy Solomon!’

 

Husband. They knew perfectly well…  Anyway, she went home without him, it seems. Teddy moved on to Lillian Russell, Edith’s name was linked with the ‘between-wives’ Henry Abbey, with ‘an American manager in London’ (maybe the same, he was lessee of the Lyceum, and there in 1885 et al), with ‘a dramatic author’… and there were also hints that she’d had Solomon’s child … but I think not …

 

Back in London, she went touring for Gus Harris as the heroine, Florence Templeton, in the first tour of the Drury Lane drama Pluck (1883) but then seems to have lain low (maybe ‘lain’ is the right word) until later 1885 when she appears at the Crystal Palace and then as principal boy with Edward Righton in the Manchester Prince’s panto. In 1886 she played King Charles in George Dance’s burlesque Oliver Grumble in town and country, then went out in Kate Santley’s company playing the ‘ambitious and jealous’ Princess Zamine with ‘marked ability’ in her new musical, Vetah.

And during the tour, she got married (11 October). Yes, really and legally married to a previously and currently unmarried man. Who just might have done better to have remained unmarried. I feel there may have been a reason was ‘Austin Brereton’ theatre critic and journalist, was a bachelor. But I’m only guessing. The Australian interviews make it sound as if a Greek God walked into her dressing room … and ‘boom!’. Well, we all know about those Greeks.

 

Edith played Abdallah in The Forty Thieves for Gus Harris at Drury Lane into the new year, and then … made the papers again when she had a 60 year-old carman dragged into court for allegedly grabbing her boob in the street. It was a silly thing to do. Because Brereton had just issued a libel suit against a newspaper editor who had cast aspersions on his wife’s (former) virtue, and that editor briefed counsel to support the cabman. And, in spite of the Brereton’s refusal to respond to the questions on Mrs B’s morals (which of course, had nothing to do with the case), newspaper paragraphs proliferated. And the carman was acquitted.

 

A few months later, Brereton launched his wife, starred in the role of Princess Claudia Morakoff, in a national tour of The Red Lamp. He ended up bankrupt. Two months later, the couple left for Australia for Williamson, Garner and Musgrove. Edith played emotional dramatic leads, comedy stars, the odd panto .. and was accepted as a top of the bill star. 

 

But things weren’t – surprise – as good in her private life. Aussie scuttlebut spoke of a forthcoming divorce from Brereton, caused by her ‘excessive jealousy’. They don’t seem to have cohabited after their return to England. But I can’t find them in the 1901 census.

 

On her return to Britain Edith continued to work, in leading roles and then in character roles. She seems to have worked up till her last months of life, ‘age 70’.  Brereton had died the year before down in Hertfordshire. But she still billed herself as ‘Mrs Austin Brereton’. I think perhaps her life in the theatre may have been more fulfilled than her romantic life. It sometimes doesn’t pay to be too striking …

 

But, gee, not many sometime Blondes had a half century of work in the theatre!

 

PS she is not the Miss E Bland who advertised 'sixteen years old, three feet high. eighteen stone' in the mid 1870s!