Fanny Jervis aka Mme Rubini Scalisi ... a forgotten musician

 

 

‘Former Great Tenor Dead’ trumpeted the New York Times on 8 May 1905. The New York Herald, not to be outdone, trumpeted too. And papers round the world, as papers did and do, picked up the story …

And almost every word of it was the most egregious poppycock. 

Edoardo Rubini Swynfen Jervis, they claimed, had been first tenor at St Petersburg and Paris, he had taught music to the English princesses, and to a long line of star vocalists from Lucca, Marimon, Volpini, Cotgoni and Campanini to Joseph Maas and ... who? Scalisi? He had taught at the London Academy of Music … and he had come, at last, to New York where he died, destitute, at number 115 West 106th Street.

Was any of it true? Well, just a little. He did teach, briefly, at the London Academy of Music. It was probably the best teaching job he ever had. And Scalisi? Madame Scalisi was his sister, who achieved much, much more in music than he ever did and it is for her, certainly not him, that the Jervis family got this little piece in my Victorian Vocalists collection.

 

RUBINI, Fanny [Jervis] [JERVIS, Fanny] (b Lucca, Italy c1847; d 8 Church Street, Shoreham by Sea 13 December 1915)

 

However, ‘Edoardo’ is responsible for much of the mythology surrounding the family, so a quick glance at his pretensions won’t hurt. ‘Rubini’? ‘Swynfen’? The suggestion here is that there is some connection, on the one hand, with the famous tenor G-B Rubini, and on the other with the aristocratic family of Lord St Vincent, rightly named Jervis, and with whom ‘Swynfen’ was a much-used additional name. True or false? My automatic reaction was to say ‘false’, but there just may be a smidginette of truth in there. So I went a-searching.

 

The father of this family was a portrait painter from Sheerness, by name John Jervis. The 1861 census says ‘Jarvis’ which, if true, would ruin the whole story, but other documents all say Jervis, so I allow him the benefit of that doubt. Mr Jervis obviously practised his painting outside England, for at some stage, probably in the late 1830s, he married an ‘Italian’ singer, and their children, born in the 1840s and 1850s, were all born in Italy. I say ‘Italian’, for Mrs Adele Eugénie Jervis was actually German, born in the city of Laibach (ie Ljubljana) around 1813, although she apparently worked under the name of ‘Signorina Rubini’. If she had no right to it (and it was, later, insisted that she was ‘of Italian parentage’) it was, given the propinquity of the great tenor Rubini and his French wife née Adelaide Chaumet (Mme Rubini-Comelli), a rather tacky thing to do. It has been related that a certain singing Mlle [surely not Sophie!] Méquillet of the 1830s took her master’s name in ‘homage’: If this is true, I suppose it could have been she. But it sounds rather fishy.

 

Since the four children of this marriage were all born in Italy: Edward allegedly in Rome in March 1841, William about 1843, Fanny at Lucca in 1846 or 7, and Adele in Florence in 1857, I cannot know precisely how and when they were christened, but the 1861 census entry for 12 Elm Terrace, Kensington, shows the three younger children listed with just one simple Christian name apiece. Jervis. No Rubini, no Swynfen.

 

My first sighting of the Jervis children as performers is in 1855. A little squib in the English press mentions that ‘a Master Jervis and his sister Mdlle Fanny have been giving concerts in Florence with great success’. Yes, there they are, 5 May 1855, at the Sala d’Arte ‘il giovanetto Odoardo Jervis e la di lui sorellina Fanny’. They are playing, not singing: the vocals are supplied by the Irish soprano Elena Corani (née Conran).

 

The Jervis family must have returned to Britain soon after Adele’s birth, for, on 11 July 1859, The Times announced: ‘The little pianiste, Fanny Rubini, pupil of her mother, Signora Rubini, has the honour to announce that she will give a grand morning concert this day (by kind permission) at the residence of Mrs Elliott Macnaughton, 46 Eaton Square. To commence at 3 o’clock. Artists: Mme Rieder Schlumberger, Signora Alba, Signori Marras, Crivelli, Corsi, Ciabatta, Giulio Regondi and Mr Blagrove. Director: Signor Campana.’ The next week ‘the young Italian pianist’ appeared at Giacinto Marras’s concert.

‘Fanny Jervis Rubini’ followed up this debut with another concert the following year (27 June 1860) in which brother, Edoardo Jervis Rubini, also played and conducted, and at which Catherine Hayes sang, and again in 1862 (21 June) and 1863 (2 July). By 1865, I notice, cartes de visite of ‘Miss Rubini’ were being published for sale, and, by 1866, she was well enough considered to be engaged, as replacement for Marie Krebs, from 1 October, as pianist at Alfred Mellon’s series of Covent Garden proms ('She played Thalberg's fantasia on L'Elisir d'amore and was rapturously encored', 'A young pianist of most refined taste and with the specialty of a delightfully liquid touch' 'fait fanatisme .. un talent sérieux' ) . In January 1867, I spot her playing both at the Popular Concerts at Her Majesty’s Theatre ('a pianist of no ordinary stamp') and as guest with the London Glee and Madrigal Union. Although she had sung in private homes since 1867, it is only in 1869, that I spy Fanny out for the first time as a vocalist, when, in a Dublin concert, having given her keyboard items, she also delivered the Faust Jewel Song.

Things seem to have moved briskly from there, but the family moved out of England, and on to the Continent, and my sightings of Mlle Rubini become episodic. In 1870 I spot her singing in concert in Paris. She is, the Paris press say, on her way to an engagement at the Pergola Theatre in Florence. ‘Vingt ans, expressive et charmante personne, jolie voix, du style, un vrai talent de musicienne, voilà certes de quoi se frayer une première place sur nos scènes lyriques’. Later, the report is that she is ‘studying in Florence’. And that ‘Miss Fanny Jervis who had previously made a favourable impression by her singing in the fashionable reunions of Florence, appeared at the Pergola Theatre some nights since in La Sonnambula and made a very successful début’ (‘haben wir für Fräulein Fanny Jervis Rubini die besten Hoffnung’ ‘Frln Fanny Jervis trat im Pergola-Theater mehrere Mal in der Sonnambula mit grossen Beifall auf’.) She is, in any case, doing well enough that ‘Edoardo’ and ‘Guglielmo’ Rubini, music teachers in London, see it worthwhile to advertise themselves, a bit superfluously, as her brothers. She also took part, at the Pergola, in a comic melodrama with music (22 March 1871) Il Califfo by Ettore Dechamps playing the slave, Amina, to the Haroun al Raschid of Pietro Silenzi.

In August 1871, she was back in England, singing at Rivière’s proms and in Manchester, for de Jong (‘a recall after each song’), before whisking back to Aix-la-Chapelle (‘Prima donna of the Covent Garden concerts’), Bordeaux, Lille, Baden (‘avalanche de bouquets’) under the management of Ullman, amid rumours of great things to come. And come they did. Mlle Fanny Rubini -- in demand for the Parisian concerts (Cherubini 'Ave Maria', 'O luce di', duets with Trebelli, Tagliafico)-- was engaged as a principal soprano at Paris’s Théâtre des Italiens. 

 

She made her debut there singing Gilda in Rigoletto alongside delle Sedie, and was wholly successful: ‘[Elle] n'a qu'à se louer de l'accueil du public. Ses deux duos, l'un avec le ténor, l'autre avec le baryton, lui ont acquis les sympathies de l'auditoire. Sa voix de soprano est d'un beau timbre, surtout dans les cordes hautes, et sa méthode est excellente. Mais il ne faut pas qu'elle se lasse de travailler, ne fût-ce que pour donner plus de souplesse à son organe et pour mieux soigner ses attaques, qui parfois n'ont pas été très-exactes. Somme toute, elle peut être satisfaite de l'épreuve, et le succès doit l'encourager. On peut même dire que c'est à elle plus particulièrement que s'adressaient les applaudissements qui ont éclaté après le quatuor.’

 

It was rumoured that she would follow up in La Sonnambula (‘in which she played at the Pergola in Florence’) but she seems, later during her engagement, to have appeared only with Marietta Alboni, Gardoni and Penco, in the part of Elisetta in a few performances of Il matrimonio segreto where her singing pleased more than her acting  (‘Mlle Rubini a lancé une pluie de perles de la plus belle eau et du plus beau son’, ‘Mlle Rubini fait ce qu’elle peut, mais son jeu laisse encore beaucoup à désirer’).

 

From Paris she headed back to London, where she and one of her brothers mounted a concert at the Hanover Square Rooms ('L'Estasi'), then to Baden for the concert season, singing alongside Csillag, delle Sedie and Campanini ('O luce di'), and to Italy or was it Warsaw where, it was said, she had been signed to appear in Mignon. ‘She is engaged for the season as prima donna assoluta at the Apollo Theatre, Rome’ reported the Paris music press. 

 

Thereafter, she turns up Valletta in Malta (Dinorah), at the Fondo (Dinorah) and Mercadante (Rosa in La Campana dell'eremittegio, Principessa di Tesca in Golisciani's Wallerstein) in Naples, and for the summer of 1875, alongside Tamagno and Justine Macvitz, at the Liceu, Barcelona – now equipped with a new name. She has become Madame Rubini-Scalisi, the wife of conductor Carlo Scalisi. 

 

In 1876 she visited South America, and in 1876-7, she can be seen sharing the billing with Erminia Borghi-Mamo and Elena Sanz at the Teatro Real, Madrid, performing La Sonnambula, Rigoletto, Linda di Chamonix, L'Étoile du Nord, Fra Diavolo and Dinorah, with Gayarre as her tenor and Mariano Padilla as baritone. With the last named, she scored ‘un trionfo’ as Linda: ‘la artista de las afligranadas fiorature, a que se presta se voz de siempre grate timbre, y con cuyos magnificos recursos tanto ha brilliado en Rigoletto, Sonnambula y Dinorah. In 1878 (27 November) she took the soprano role in Auteri Manzocchi’s Il Negriero (27 November 1878) alongside Stagno and Moriami. In June 1880, in Paris, she played in the Marquis Filiasi’s private production of Il Menestrello, and she also took part in several pieces composed by Bottesini, notably his Ero e Leandro and Cedar, programmed in 1880, at Naples, where she and her husband were engaged.

 

The Scalisis remained a considerable time at Naples and its San Carlo Theatre, where Carlo Scalisi, for a number of years in the 1880s, actually took over the management. Fanny, there, sang everything from Amelia in Simone Boccanegra to Elsa in Lohengrin,the title-role in Dinorah, Catherine in L’Etoile du nord, Gilda in Rigoletto, Sita in Le Roi de Lahore and Santuzza in Cavalleria rusticana.

 

Elsewhere, in the 1880s, I see Fanny singing Traviata at the Rome Apollo, Aida at Florence and at Nice, at the Carlo Fenice, Genoa in Les pêcheurs des perles, I see mention of her at Brescia, at Seville, Malaga, Granada, Turin and Brindisi, and in 1888, Scalisi having bankrupted at Naples the previous season, she spent several months back in London, once again teaming with Bottesini (‘applauded for the dramatic power she displayed in an aria from Nenia’), with Helen D’Alton and Isidore de Lara, in a series of concerts.

 

After London, however, I find little sign of Madame Scalisi -- although she seems to have tackled Santuzza in Foggia -- until, in 1893, it is announced that she and her husband will take up positions at the head of the singing department at the Naples Conservatoire. If Fanny did this, it was not for long. For, in 1894, I find her – with no sign of him – back in London, and back on the concert stage. The first occasion is a matinee musicale (‘nineteenth season’) given by one Signor Bonetti, and Madame Fanny Scalisi ‘from La Scala, Milan and the San Carlo, Naples’ is top-billed. La Scala? But the surprise comes further down the bill. ‘Madame Adelaide Rubini’. Fanny’s mother would have been over eighty years of age. Surely this cannot be she. Is it perhaps sister Adele taking up the family stage name?  25 July she has her own concert at Collard’s Rooms. The same Madame Adelaide appears again on 2 July 1895, when Fanny mounts her own concert at the Queen’s Hall. The previous week, she had appeared at the Music Trades prize-giving at the Agricultural Hall, as winner of the the piano section! The soprano award was won by … Miss Annie Rosa Swinfen. Oh no!

 

The Queen’s Hall concert is my last sighting of Fanny as a performer. Maybe she went back to Italy where, I think, I have seen her husband conducting in the early days of the new century. Ultimately, however, she did return to Britain, for the British records reveal the death of ‘Frances J Scalisi’, at the age of 68, in the district of Steyning (presumably at Hove) in 1915. She lies in Mill Lane Cemetery, in a sadly neglected grave ...

Mother Adele, who had spent her later life living with daughter Adele (Mrs Inderwick) and her family, in England, died in Brighton in 1903, at the age of 90.

 

As for the music-teacher brothers, Edward – as we know -- ended up in America, and he was never so famous as in death. In the 1870s he began teaching music in Exeter, where in 1883 he married a local girl, Mary Smith (d Surrey, 29 June 1918). From Exeter, Torquay, Tiverton, Taunton and Teignmouth, he moved to Malvern and tried teaching in Birmingham, before throwing it in and emigrating, in about 1890, to Ontario, and finally, in 1897, to America.

 

William made altogether more of a success in life, largely as a composer of light piano music which he published voluminously under the name G[uglielmo] Jervis Rubini. He, too, married and I spot him the 1891 census ‘aged 44’ with wife and baby boy, mother and sister, Adele Inderwick (d 1934) and child, before losing him. Apparently he died in 1895.

Fanny Scalisi did, herself, have at least one child.  In 1927, the Grands Cercles of Paris include amongst their listings one ‘Jervis Arthur Scalisi’. This is presumably the Arthur George Jervis Scalisi, composer of ‘Najah’ (three Hindoo dances for piano) and ‘The Opium Dream’, the George Scalisi seen playing piano at Wigmore Hall, and above all the Arturo Domenico F G Scalisi born in Valetta, Malta, in 1874, and married in London in 1897. 'Captain Arthur George Scalisi-Jervis' of Bedford Chambers ... 'medical officer' ...

 

And here’s the rub. This Arthur Scalisi married, in what seems to have been a double wedding, a Miss Emily Mary Bowden. The other groom was one Luigi d’Antonio and the other bride was Miss Alice Edith Jervis, of Shenstone, Staffordshire, the daughter of the Hon Edward Swynfen Jervis of Little Aston Hall, and the legitimate descendant of that Lord St Vincent to whom, I was so sure, our Jervis family was only pretending to be related.  Do I have now to infer otherwise?

 

Emily Mary Scalisi of the Palazzo Schioppa Riviera de Chiesa, Naples, wife of Arthur Scalisi, died 26 July 1897. Probate to Arthur Scalisi and ... Alice Edith d'Antonio, wife of Luigi d'Antonio ...  effects: a whopping 29,000 pounds! After his momentary marriage, Arthur remarried and he died in Vancouver, Canada 10 February 1942.

 

Well, if there is a connection, the music in the family goes much further back than I had counted upon. To the famously colourful Mary Ann Jervis, pupil of Pasta, composer of the opera Siroe (1831), a selection from which was sung at Oury’s concert on 29 July of that year, the extravagant enchantress of the Duke of Wellington, sometime wife of the ‘mad’ Dyce Sombre, and later Lady Forester.

 

Guglielmo/William (not ‘George’ as the web would have it) published a piece of dance music in 1877. It is entitled ‘L’Étoile du chant’ and its title page bears a colour lithograph of Fanny as Zerlina in Fra Diavolo. Alas, search as I may, I can find no surviving copy. However, the National Portrait Gallery hold this photo of a 'Miss Rubini' which seems as if it might be the young Fanny ...

 

PS I discover that the singing Miss Swinfen (1863-1922), later Mrs Charles Burrell, was the daughter of a city missionary from Brixton … could that name really be a coincidence? 

 

 

Harry Clifton: 150 years on, or a Distorted Story

 

Writing this article wasn't in the top hundred of the jobs on my to-do list. Harry Clifton (comic vocalist and writer) has really come into my orbit, in the past, largely through his last de facto 'wife', the splendid comic opera contralto Fanny Edwards. 

However. Yesterday I came upon one of his songs, and I remembered that I'd been squirreling such items away in a Dropbox folder for years ..  So, I thought I'd pop into Google and see if he'd been already 'done' by some worthwhile source.  'Worthwhile' was the key word. Yes, Wikiplegia has a small piece on him. A few familiar facts and a whole lot of fuzzy stuff. And, what? Not even a birthdate! 

That's easily fixed. Henry Robert CLIFTON was born in Hoddesdon, Broxbourne, Hertfordshire on 20 April 1832. His father, Henry Clifton was a builder and carpenter, his mother was Harriet or Harriot née Hollingsworth. They had been married 29 April 1828 in Southwark.

Henry sr died in 1838, and Harriet and her 9 year-old son can be seen in a lodging house in Hoddesdon High Street in the 1841 census. She is listed as 30 and independent. Really? So she would have been 17 at her marriage? Not impossible, but such a fact is usually recorded on the banns. And Harry was actually 8.

So, what next. Wiki tells us Harry was orphaned. A very peculiar bunch of Family Historians (Harry had no surviving issue), can't agree as to whether Harriet died in 1843(ish) in ?Battersea, or in 1864 in Watford. An entry for Harry in the 1851 census would be helpful (with, or probably without mother), but I can't find one. Wiki squirms out by saying 'little is known of his early adulthood'. I'm still searching, but by 1851, aged 18, he was probably already an entertainer. In 1853 he advertised his 'third annual Benefit'. 

My first sighting of the boy is at Herbert Hudson's Concert Room, pendant to the King's Head public house in Digbeth, Birmingham. 'Vocal and dramatic entertainment every evening, free admission'. So, I imagine, no or liquid pay! Mr Hudson, also a comic singer, went on to run the Spread Eagle Concert Hall in Spiceal Street, and the Midland Counties Concert Hall in the Bull Ring before his death, 7 April 1858. But Harry was on his way. He took the Railway Saloon in Chatham High Street for a couple of months...

OK. Late of the Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool concerts. I have to search some more! 28 October he took himself a Benefit, and then ...

My next sighting is in Bristol at Easter 1854. Entry Free again. Pendant to a pub? Did this happen? We know he was in Bristol ...

Anyway, by August he was appearing in Cheltenham and Birmingham in variety programmes. Not very high-class ones (I only know of Charley Buckingham's dogs and a Mlle Cerito), but there were fireworks

And there was something else. Miss Annie Charlton. Hannah Eliza Charlton. Mrs Harry Clifton. The couple had been married during that time in Bristol (1 March 1854). 

This is the only evidence I have of Annie being a performer. Alas, she would not be for long. The young Mrs Clifton died on a date on which the Family Historians cannot agree. It was, however, surely before 1857, when Harry embarked on a disastrous second marriage. 

In 1855, I spot him at Mr John Balmbra's Music Saloon, at the Wheatsheaf Inn, in Newcastle, but, more importantly in his first visit to Ireland. He appeared at the Shakspere (sic) Concert Hall in Belfast and, for the first of what would be many, many appearances at Jude's Concert Hall, pendant to Mr Jude's 'Royal Hotel, Tavern and Coffee Rooms', at Dublin's 12/13 Grafton Street. 'Mr H R Clifton from the principal London Concerts'. He is reported to have sung 'Russo-Turkish songs' (the countries were at war).

Nota Bene: at this time a Mr H Clifton, wife and daughter little Blanche put in an appearance in the London halls doing comic songs, duets et al. Latterly father billed himself as J H Clifton. Blanche, it seems, went to Australia, became Mrs Frank Hussey, and got out of our hair. This Mt Clifton seems to have been, some years previously, manager of Wolverhampton's Staffordshire Knot Music Hall.

In 1856, our man is at Blackheath, Rendall's Concert Hall, Portsea, Woolwich ('an old favourite'!), before he and his 'clever songs on passing events' again returned to Dublin. There he shared a bill, notably, with Mary Ann Lawrence, the future 'Millie Cavendish' of New York's Black Crook. 1857 sees him -- when not in Dublin -- at the London Supper Rooms in Manchester's Bridge Street. And it appears that it was now that he took employ at Evans's Supper Rooms. And committed the folly of his life. The new wife was 19 year-old Mary Ann Terry from Birmingham (b 18 March 1838).

And here we meet a piece of fake history. The Family Historians have mistaken their Mary Ann and chosen to ally themselves and their ancestors to a lass from Leeds who was someone else altogether! Perhaps this is where the extraneous children come from. This terrible Mary Ann who was to be the bane of Harry's life, was one of the children of Birmingham coach-harness plater and wire worker John Terry and his wife Louisa. They can be seen in the 1851 census: parents, John, Mary Ann, Alfred, Walter, Andrew, Daniel, Rosannah, Rhoda. 

Anyway, when Harry sued for judicial separation after 7 years of married non-bliss, he listed the details of his wife's perpetual drunkenness, her physical attacks on him ... and his list included no children. I assume he got his judicial separation, they subsequently 'lived apart', but he was not yet rid of Mary Ann. When he died, leaving his fortune of some £6,000 to his current partner, she rose up like Frumah Sarah to challenge the will. I hope she didn't succeed.

I see him at the Birmingham Concert Hall, at Wilton's Music Hall, at the Glasgow Whitebait Rooms ('old favourite'), Sheffield's Surrey Music Hall, Westbar, the Belfast Imperial Colosseum, and more and more at Jude's in Dublin. And now, songtitles begin to be mentioned more freely: 'Jack Jenkins', 'The School Boy', the topical 'Galway/Lever Line', 'Out for the Night', Ambrose Maynard's new song on the Elections, Harry Sydney's 'The Old Frieze Coat', 'Pat of Mullingar', 'Dublin Rhymes', 'Meandering Mulligan', 'Reform', 'The Drogheda Trip', his Shakespearian burlesque songs ... 'he has a new song nearly every night' commented the Dublin press, as he passed 200, 250, 300 nights on the bill at Jude's.

1860 included further dates at Holder's in Birmingham, the Canterbury Hall in Salford, the Knightsbridge Music Hall, and in Scotland where his extempore and impromptu songs went down a treat ('Local Events') and he appeared regularly in the Temperance Society Saturday Nights in Glasgow alongside prima donna Pauline Vaneri and local balladeer, Helen Kirk. 

In 1861, he was engaged at the Queen's Theatre in Dublin, where he made an unusual appearance as an actor (Jacob Twig in Black-Eyed Susan) and gave his 'new entertainment', before moving to Jude's for a season, then back to Glasgow .. and, after '20 months in Ireland and Scotland', came to London and engagements at the Knightbridge, the Marylebone. 'The Dark Girl dressed in Blue' proved his song of the season

At Christmas he was back in Scotland with his hit song, plus 'Uncle Joe', 'Obadiah Oh!', and a 'new, quaint and original' song titled 'Paddington Green'. As 'Polly Perkins of Paddington Green' it would give him another durable success.

Harry had by now formed a profitable alliance with the music publishers Hopwood and Crew, as a result of which high-class editions of his flood of new songs were published, and over the years a vast list emerged. 

In the same month of June 1863 in which 'Paddington Green' was published, Harry supplied another winner in 'Isabella, the Barber's Daughter', followed by 'Poor Old Mike', 'Water Cresses' ... and still they kept coming. Hundreds and hundreds, of which a regular quota became favourites for a shorter or longer time.

Harry's regular London dates, at this time, may not have been at the classiest music-halls -- the Knightsbridge, the Marylebone, Wilton's, the Middlesex were not top houses -- but back in Scotland he was the number one. And to Scotland he duly went with his homemade songs, the best of other folks' songs, and plenty of local references, and the topical lyrics which went down so well. The Prince of Wales got wed, Harry brought out 'The Prince of Wales's Wedding', when the Pepper's Ghost Illusion became the rage, Harry advertised his own Ghost ('Have you seen the Ghost?'), at Christmas time he sang of 'The Past Year' while never neglecting his Oirishisms ('Ireland's Gem', 'Paddy's Wedding') or his tales of bad luck in love ('Blighted Affection', 'The Milkman'), not to forget his ration of extempore songs, and society pictures ('The Concert Room') and, above all, the 'motto songs' -- comical homilies or cautionary tales ... it was endless!

In 1864, he was seen at the Pavilion, the Regent, Sam Collins's ('The Commercial Man or Sold Again', The Weeping Willer' etc) and even gave a concert back in his native Herfordshire (Hertford Corn Exchange 25 October 1864), but the event of 1864 was undoubtedly his liberation from Mary Ann. 

Now his private life could take the same upward elan as his public one. With a little help from Hopwood and Crew. And their promotion not only of his new songs ('The Mail Train', 'The Calico Printer's Clerk', 'Darby Maguire', 'The Good Tempered Man') but of a new venture. 25 April 1865 marked the appearance of Harry's Hopwood and Crew-backed 'Star Concert Party'. A manna for Harry, who had recently lost his savings in a Birmingham bank failure.

The 'Star Concert Party' comprised Harry, three vocalists -- Frank Sadlier (tenor), Bessie Aitken (soprano) and Fanny Edwards (contralto) -- and a pianist, Mr David Williams. Nothing very novel. All three vocalists were well-enough known in Scotland. Mr Sadlier (or Sadleir) from Leeds was an adequate baritenor who spent a dozen years on the northern music-hall circuits, Miss Aitken (Mrs Billing) was a fine and experienced young singer, dubbed 'the Queen of Scottish Ballad Vocalists' through a quarter of a century of career, and Fanny too had, at this stage, been on the Scottish circuits for several years. The composition of the party would soon change, but Harry and Fanny were its backbone -- and a couple -- from now until his death.

During that time, Fanny's younger sister, Hannah Edwards (ka Annie KINNAIRD) became the soprano of the group, and married the party's latest tenor [Jacob] Redfern HOLLINS ... whose history is worthy a whole article to itself (yes, I've written it!) ...

Hollins, of course, became celebrated as the original tenor of George Edwardes's production of Dorothy.

Fanny went on to become a top comic opera contralto and the exploits of her later career, and those of her family, largely in America, I've covered elsewhere.

The last seven years of Harry's life were visibly the most successful and the happiest. Alas, they years were only seven. At the age of just forty, he succumbed to dropsy, at Shepherds Bush' amid the Edwards family on 15 July 1872. 

I hav'n't attempted to follow him through those last seven years chronologically.  His popularity well and truly established, the concert party dates followed one upon the other, the new songs followed ten upon the other, and they remain as his monument, some even dubbed in modern times as 'folk songs', and played as such, a century and a half on.  Here's a bill from 1868. And, see ... Apart from the established 'Fifty Years Ago', and his duet with Fanny, Harry doesn't let on what he's going to sing ...

I am not going to try to list our man's published songs. Though someone ought to. I am not going to try to precisely date all of them. Although it may be possible. At various times (see above) there were put out lists of those in print ...

         So these all pre-date August 1866.

Just a few more, which I happen to have to hand ...

Enough. There must be loads of Harryphemera around in England, Scotland and Ireland ...  but I am in New Zealand. Anyone who can add, please do. But at least some of the facts have been put right.

PS Wiki, I have found no reference in the thousand press reports on Harry to his being known as 'Handsome Harry'. The references to his married life are already debunked.

PPS Family historians? Start over with the right wife.

PPPS me. I reckon I deserve a whisky or three. 

Victorian vocalists: the traces they left behind (part two)

Prompted by this sheet music cover, I pulled out this  article from my old files:

BLEADEN, Julia [Emily] (b St Margaret Lothbury, London, 28 December 1822; d 26a Albert Bridge Road, Battersea, 15 November 1905)

 

The ‘cradle’ of the Bleaden family was the village of Calne, near Salisbury, in Wiltshire, and it was there that a large proportion of the Bleadens of Great Britain who saw the daylight in the later part of the eighteenth century opened their eyes.

 

However, Calne was evidently too provincial for some more energetic members of the family, and the not very widespread name of Bleaden became decidedly prominent, in the last years of the eighteenth and all of the early nineteenth centuries, in the city of London itself. The firm of Bleaden and company, led in the 1790s by John Bleaden and later by his eldest son Charles (1770-1851), were caterers and licensed victuallers, and the flagship of their increasing fleet of hostelries – which included at various times the Royal Hotel, Deal, the Plough Tavern, Blackwall with its whitebait speciality, and the King’s Head, Poultry, which went in for fresh turtle -- was none less than the celebrated and recently rebuilt London Tavern at number 120 Bishopsgate Within. The London Tavern boasted a dining room which could take over 350 people, and that room swiftly became the centre for more than just dining. In the more than half a century that Bleaden and co ran their magnificent hostelry, it became a favourite centre for city dinners, society meetings, annual general meetings, political beanfeasts, company directors’ beanfeasts and, consequently, a huge commercial and political centre where business of all kinds was transacted. (‘Mr Bleaden’s committee sits daily at the London Tavern’). The Bleadens transacted with the best of them, and John and, especially, Charles Bleaden’s name appeared on prospectuses ranging from the Royal Humane Society  to the Alliance Granite and China Clay Company, as director of the Liverpool & Derby Railway, Secretary of the Printers’ Pension Society, chairman of the General Mining Company, chairman of the Licensed Victuallers Insurance Soc, director of the Direct Western Railways, chairman of the Hotel and Tavernkeepers Provident Institution and many others.

‘The group of directors have floated so many companies that they are referred to as ‘the Lothbury Gang’’ commented the Times in the 1820s, with reference to the part of London from whence the family operated. And operated with a certain success for Charles, who was at various times a councilman for Cheap, and an alderman, boasted several addresses -- ‘of Colesden/Couldson Court Surrey & Adelaide Place, London bridge – and was also at one stage the owner of a private steamboat. 

By this time, Charles was doing much of his wheeler-dealing alongside another Bleaden – another John. John Bleaden of 47 Lothbury. A brother? A cousin I think, as it seems Charles had only one brother, Henry, and anyway this John had been born back in Calne in 1783. However, by 1816, he is up in London and operating from the Lothbury address, which would be his for very many years, as a stationer. A ‘stationer’ of 1816 did very much more than sell notepaper. A stationer’s shop was another wheeling-and-dealing centre of activity, commercial and personal, and John was not slow in following Charles into some of the multiplicity of activities in which his (?) cousin was involved. In 1823 I spot him canvassing for election as a director of the Eagle Insurance Company and a few years later he becomes, and for many years remains, secretary of the Commercial Steamship Company. He turns up (with Charles and a list of fashionable gents) as a steward of the Royal Asylum of St Ann’s Benevolvent Society, and so forth, and in 1851 when Charles Bleaden died it was (?) cousin John who was named as executor of his will.

John Bleaden actually came to London well before 1816, for in 1806 he was married at St Olave, Old Jewry, London to Miss Fidelity Mead, who spent the next twenty years regularly swelling the Bleaden population of Lothbury. George (1807-1879), John William (1809-1841), Fidelity Jane (1810-1890), Charles (1812), Martha (1813), Edith (1819-1891), Henry (1822-1823), Julia Emily (1822), Charles Edward (1825), Mary (1827-1903) …

George would follow his father into the world of City of London finance, as secretary to this and that Fund and so forth, Edith ended up as a boarding house landlady, Mary became an artist (‘Miss Bleaden’s classes for the study of the living costume model and elementary drawing for ladies are held at 74 Newman Street Oxford Street’), and Julia became the best-known of them all. As a vocalist.

 

Julia Bleaden was just fifteen years old when she made her first appearance as a singer. Evidently, she had been, since a rather early age, a pupil of William Howard Glover, a fact which thoroughly surprised me when it surfaced, as I wasn’t aware that that seriously semi-successful gentleman – composer, performer, teacher, critic – had had genuinely successful pupils before the days of David Miranda and Emily Soldene. But he did. And Julia was probably the most successful of them all. Until Soldene, of course.

 

Mr Glover put his pupils on display, for the first time, at a concert at his rooms in Soho Square (15 May 1848), and a number of them gained the approval of the press, notably Miss Julia Bleaden who was ‘highly successful in Meyerbeer’s trying aria ‘Idole de ma vie’’. Her master hurried her name before the public: His Lays of Many Lands was published soon after and alongside several ‘sung by Mr Sims Reeves’ was 'I list for the oar of his gondola’ ‘sung by Miss Bleaden’.

 

In September 1848, Howard Glover mounted a brief opera season at Manchester’s Theatre Royal. It was undoubtedly an attempt to make money – something else Glover was seriously and always unsuccessful at – for he hired Miss Rainforth and the tenor and baritone of the moment – Reeves and Whitworth – as his stars. Others of the principal parts were used to allow him to launch his pupils: Miss [Ellen] Rowland, Mr Delevanti, the Misses Macnamara, Teresa Brook, Isabella Taylor and Miss J Bleaden.

 

Julia made her debut alongside the Big Three as Lisa in La Sonnambula. The Musical World was less than impressed: ‘The Lisa—a debutante, Miss Bleaden—has a thin soprano voice, of some sweetness, but very feeble; her timidity, too, prevented her making the most of it.’ Mr Glover, being in this expensive venture to try to launch his pupils, riposted by taking an advertisement in the same paper quoting a rather kinder notice from the Manchester Times: ‘Lisa introduced to us Miss Julia Bleadon, a pupil of Mr. Glover. Her timidity interfered considerably on the first night with a voice that possesses much sweetness, and that bell-like quality so desired, but so rarely met.  Let her only have a little more confidence, and we augur well for her future. She has many qualities that only want faith to become valuable.’

The Manchester Times was right.

 

Back in town, Glover worked tirelessly to promote his pupils (he also married one) and, in December, he mounted a showpiece concert for seventeen of them at the Hanover Square Rooms. A large selection from Iphigenia in Tauris, a smaller one from a couple of unproduced operatic manuscripts of his own, and a miscellaneous selection made up the programme. Julia was chorus in the Gluck, but got to sing one of Glover’s songs and take part with the Misses Rowland and Taylor in ‘My lady the countess’, and the Musical World summed up ‘We should select Miss Ellen Rowland and Miss Julia Bleaden among the ladies and Mr Delevanti among the gentlemen as the most promising’. The Musical World got two out of three right -- there was a young sleeper amongst the gentlemen and Ellen Rowland rose only for a short while – but they were right about Julia.

 

Glover took his team to Scotland in the new year, and Julia appeared as Lady Allcash in Fra Diavolo, teamed with a certain Sam Cowell as her Lord, and was given her chance in the star role of The Night Dancers. ‘Miss Bleaden scarcely came up to our idea in the part of Giselle, but it must be confessed that the part is a heavy one’ reported the Glasgow Herald recording that Miss Isabelle Taylor had played the tenor role, because Mr Payne was indisposed.

 

Thereafter, I spot her at Liverpool, at Easter 1849, giving her Lisa alongside Annie Romer, in June at Dublin with Teresa Brooke, Gregg and E L Hime, singing at Miss Ward’s concert (Glover’s ‘Sing on, sweet bird’) and, then, engaged at the Princess’s Theatre where she teamed her Lisa now with Louisa Pyne. She also played The Queen of the Naiads in the pantomime King Jamie or Harlequin and the Magic Fiddle and appeared in the comedy My Wife Sha’n’t Act. Next season, she rose to playing fairy in the Drury Lane pantomime, Harlequin and Humpty Dumpty.

 

James Anderson, the lessee of Drury Lane, had got hold of Auber’s vast operatic spectacle L’Enfant prodigue, but his style ran more to the spectacular than the operatic, and he had the opera de-operaticised and its libretto turned into a piece of spectacular drama under the title Azael, the prodigal (19 February 1851). He himself played the title-role, alongside two other non-singers, Vandenhoff and Miss Vining. However, some of Auber’s music was kept, rearranged, as dance music for principal ballerina Victorine Legrain, and as incidental music. The incidental music included some vocals, and they were delivered by the experienced lead tenor, John Rafter and Eliza Nelson, who had been on the theatre’s preceding bill playing a little operetta, and by Julia Bleaden. 

Azael was a spectacular success, and during its run it went through a number of supporting comedies. Thus it was, that Julia found herself promoted from backing singer to appearing as Bianca to the Petruchio of Anderson and the Katharine of Mrs Nisbett in what had once been Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. But though Azael did well, Mr Anderson didn’t stay too long at the Lane.

 

Julia next surfaces in rather different surroundings: at the Southwark Literary Institute (2 February 1852) providing the vocal illustrations to a lecture on Modern Parody and Burlesque, delivered by a gentleman named P Henry Hatch. P Henry had over the past few years tried his hands at playwriting (Sunshine and Shade, Dearest Anna Maria, The Mantrap), song-writing (the vastly successful ‘O charming May’ ‘O cheerful spring’), and now he was having a shot at lecturing. It seemed to go all right. And Julia was described as ‘a young lady of considerable vocal ability’.

 

Three days later Miss Julia Bleaden mounted her own concert. Daddy had no trouble finding her a venue: the concert was held at the London Tavern. And he didn’t splash out on an orchestra. But the line up of singers was remarkable: Misses Louisa and Susan Pyne, Miss Poole, Mr Swift, George Perren, Henri Corri et al. F Osborne Williams conducted from the piano in the place of Glover. In spite of the ‘merciless pelting of a pitiless storm’, there was a good audience (‘mostly ladies’). Julia herself sang ‘O luce di quest’ anima’, Lee’s ‘Listen to the nightingale’, ‘La ci darem’ with Corri as her Don Giovanni, and joined Miss Poole in the favourite duet ‘The Fairies’ Dance’ which was ‘so remarkably well sung as to require repetition’. ‘The lady possesses a clear and flexible soprano of great promise’ reported The Musical World.

 

Opera, spectacle, comedy, lecture, concert – Julia Bleaden had begun her career in eclectic fashion, and it would continue that way. Her next engagement was for Sadler’s Wells. Priscilla Horton had turned impresario to mount a season of opera, with that popular pair of vocalists Louisa Pyne and William Harrison as its stars. Rebecca Isaacs, Henry Whitworth, Manvers and Oliver Summers supported, along with the young Julia Bleaden. The repertoire included Fra Diavolo, The Beggar’s Opera, Lucia di Lammermoor, The Daughter of the Regiment, La Sonnambula, The Crown Diamonds, The Mountain Sylph, Maritana, The Enchantress, Der Freischütz and such afterpieces as Midas, and Miss Horton starred in a version of Le Duc de Letorières (The Chameleon). Julia would play parts in many of these operas in the coming years, but lacking playbills I know only, in this season, that she was Lady Allcash in Fra Diavolo and Lazarillo in Maritana.

 

In 1853 (23 July) she made another appearance at Sadler’s Wells, on a benefit programme, and she kept up the eclectic manner of her performances: she sang in the concert part of the programme, and then performed a petite comedietta entitled Popping the question by W Harries Tilbury from the Haymarket Theatre. In 1853 (15 September), too, she returned to the lecture hall. The Williams family, Thomas (lecturer), Bessie (vocals) and Frederick Osborne Williams (piano) had been touring an entertainment on English Music and Musicians, in which Thomas revealed his Notes of a musical tour with Mdlle Jenny Lind. This time he was just doing Vocal music, and Julia was brought in to help Miss Williams out with the ‘numerous vocal illustrations’, as they travelled from the Camberwell Institution to Oxford, Brighton, Deptford, Poplar, Islington, Dalston, Wellingborough, and dates beyond. By which time it had become a lecture on The Music of Germany. However, before, even, her engagement with the Williamses was done, Julia had been engaged for another like piece. 

P Henry Hatch Esq (sic), a gentleman who had indulged in Entertainments and playwriting (Rebecca Isaacs’ musical The Man Trap) for some half-dozen years, had got himself together a diorama of Ireland: ‘14 panoramic views of Dublin, Wicklow, Cork and Kilkenny with twelve comic portfolio sketches and new ballads composed especially by Samuel Lover and J G Callcott’ which he called The Irish Tourist’s Ticket. Dioramas of Ireland had not yet flooded the market, and when this one was produced at the Hanover Square Rooms (24 October), it was much appreciated. In some quarters, The Morning Post (whose critic was surely Howard Glover!) Mr Hatch was found tiresome, and only the views and ‘Miss Bleaden’s songs assist materially in preventing the half-suffocated audience from rushing incontinently into the square for more of atmosphere and less of apoplexy’. The Times groaned that ‘this was the age of Illustration’ – ie of one-man shows and ‘entertainments’ on Charles Mathews and Henry Russell lines, rather than theatrical productions – but granted that this was ‘one of the most agreeable and instructive entertainments of the day’.  ‘Mr Hatch’s manner is remarkably good and the whole effect is much enhanced by the singing of Miss Julia Bleaden and the pleasant little songs with which it is interspersed’. The pleasant little songs, indeed, went to those thousands of pianos to which Lover’s vast output always went and Julia was able to boast that pieces such ‘The Jaunting Car’, ‘The Ship is parting from the shore or, Why did you leave me’, ‘How to ask and have’, ‘The Favourable Answer’ and the cavatina ‘The Sprites of the wind’ had indeed being written ‘especially for’ her.

Alas, when the sheet music was published it was Mr Hatch who got the billing: ‘composed especially for Mr Hatch’s entertainment’. P Henry’s show, however, was so well appreciated that he decided not to take it to the villages of the home provinces, and instead he moved it into the Salle Robin in Piccadilly (on the site of what is now left of the London Pavilion). The show did not remain static. New songs were introduced, and when the eastern question became the burning issue of the minute, Hatch had some scenes on the Golden Horn and Constantinople painted and his tour of Ireland took a sally forth to Turkey! 

Bandwagon-jumping started instantly. E L Hime came up with an entire entertainment on The Songs and Sayings of Samuel Lover, C H Kenney set up a whole diorama of Constantinople (and then got sick and couldn’t do it). But Hatch and Julia (‘Samuel Lover’s ballads are rendered with judicious taste and much feeling by Miss Julia Bleaden’) ran serenely on and, on 21 January 1854, they celebrated their 100th performance. But Dr Kahn had a contract to bring his ‘Museum of anatomy’ to the Salle Robin, so The Irish Tourist’s Ticket had to go. It zoomed off down to the Royal Pavilion in Brighton (‘Miss Julia Bleaden has assisted … rendering the entertainment one of unusual interest’), as Hatch went on to announce lectures on Brother Jonathan, A Night with Dickens, The Philosophy of ‘Punch’. Alas, he didn’t turn up for a date at Chelmsford, and I never hear of him ever again. Oh, yes I do. Philip Henry Hatch, woollen warehouseman, dealer and chapman, 95 Wood-Street, City, was declared bankrupt the following week. Philip Henry Hatch, Melbourne 1864 …

 

Julia, however, was quickly back in business. She appeared at the Brighton Theatre, alongside Henry Manley, as Georgette in the old musical comedy ‘Twas I – originated by Vestris and a particular favourite of the star of the Brighton season, Rebecca Isaacs. During the week Miss Isaacs also played The Barber of Seville and The Daughter of the Regiment (one night she did both and the mad scene from Lucia in between them) with manager Henry Farren, and I imagine again Julia took some supporting roles. She also came back down to appear, that season, along with the Weisses and Herbert Bond as one of the vocalists in Nye Chart’s Benefit.

 

Back in town, she fulfilled a number of concert engagements (Perren’s, Howard Glover’s, Misses Mascall’s &c) and saw her name appear on the covers of a number of songs by Langton Williams, the prolific composer of ballads and parlour music (‘A Song to the Flowers’, ‘Music on the Sea’, ‘You’ll Soon Forget Kathleen’ ‘Dermot’s Farewell’  ‘I Love a May morning’ ‘Sunny Memories’ ‘The Music of my native land’ &c), before joining another opera company. This one was again at Drury Lane. It was announced for 18 nights and opened with Maritana with Hermine Rudersdorff in the title-role and Galer and Dussek heading the support. Of which Julia may have been one. But not for long. The season collapsed after three under-prepared nights and the singers went off to Swansea and Plymouth where they apparently did Sonnambula, Lucia and The Bohemian Girl as well. Julia’s name is listed, behind Julia Harland as prima donna. Did she play Lisa, Alice and the Gipsy Queen?

Back in London, after this fairly hapless venture, Julia moved into one of the few areas of vocal entertainment that she had yet to tackle. She appeared for Hullah, at St Martin’s Hall, alongside the Sims Reeveses, in oratorio. As second soprano, of course, for Mrs Reeves was the star of the affair. And she was adjudged by the Athenaeum ‘a neat and well-prepared second soprano’. They did Judas Maccabaeus (15 November with Augustus Braham, Weiss) and a memorable performance of The Messiah (20 December) which saw the debuts of Bessie Palmer and Lewis Thomas, two of the coming greats of British oratorio singing. She was labelled – behind the large notices reserved, as ever, for the Reeveses, and not surprisingly for the two, brilliant new performers -- ‘a competent and agreeable second soprano’. On 17 January she was second soprano to Marian Enderssohn in the St Martin’s Hall premiere performance of Mrs Mouncey Bartholomew’s The Nativity.

 

In 1855, amid the usual run of concerts, Julia took up several more substantial jobs. She visited the chief London home of the illustrated lecture, the Royal Polytechnic Institute (1 March) to do the illustrations to a lecture on astronomy. These ‘illustrations’ took the form of large chunks of The Creation of which Julia delivered the soprano music alongside Montem Smith (tenor) and Henry Buckland (bass.) In May she got back on to the stage, at the Strand Theatre, where the manager, for the nonce, was Rebecca Isaacs. ‘Her first appearance here’ took place on 7 May and she got to play Polly Peachum to the Macheath of Brookhouse Bowler in The Beggar’s Opera. But she didn’t stay. One week later she opened at the Lyceum Theatre.

Anna Thillon was saying one of her ‘Farewells’ with a season of her inevitable The Crown Diamonds. The advertisements bill Leffler, Bowler, Mr T Williams, Miranda, Drayton and Julia Bleaden. Which, if it were so, means that she played the appreciable second role of Diana to the memorable Caterina of Thillon. Alas, Anna ‘sprained her ankle’ after eight performances, so it was back to the concert engagements, including a visit to Bradford, a return to St Martin’s Hall (19 December 1855) for another Messiah, doing second this time to Clara Novello, and an Elijah at Leicester with the Weisses. 

 

The Leicester connection had actually been announced a few weeks earlier, the brothers Nicholson – Henry (flute) and Alfred (oboe) – Leicester-men both and also two of the outstanding wind players of the era -- had joined with Henry Lazarus, the star clarinettist, top trumpeter Thomas Harper, and several other movable players to create a wind ensemble called the Anemoic Union. The vocalist for the Union’s tour of concerts was to be Julia Bleaden. And on a date which curiously seems unrecorded, Julia Bleaden would become the second Mrs Alfred Nicholson. Presumably after Alfred had ceased being married to Mrs Ellen Nicholson.

 

Once the Anemoic Union’s first little tour was done, she carried on with the mixture as before. A visit to Cambridge with harpist Chatterton, appearances at the vast concerts of George Case (‘The Cuckoo’) and Howard Glover, another Creation, on home ground at the City of London Singing Association (as first soprano this time), Langton Williams’s concert of the year, and another opera season. This one was mounted by Howard Glover at Sadler’s Wells (19 May 1856) and the Reeveses were the stars, with Rebecca Isaacs as second. Once again, the two-week season billed and reviewed little more than the stars. We know that Julia did her Polly Peachum again, and that’s all. 

 

Much of the rest of the year was spent in the provinces, notably as featured vocalist in a tour by Alfred Mellon’s Orchestral Union and ‘the blind Sardinian minstrel, Picco’. I have spotted her guesting at Louth, Gloucester, Boston and several times in Birmingham before, in February 1857 she returned to town for an engagement at the Royal Colosseum, Regents Park. The Colosseum was offering something of the same mixture of entertainment as the Polytechnic, and they had picked up the Polytech’s old lecturer, Dr Bachhoffner. Julia, Montem Smith and Buckland came back to illustrate his astronomy lecture with some more Creation, and Julia stayed on to do the vocals in some of the Colosseum’s concerts alongside two other sopranos. Susanna Cole selected vast operatic scenas as her contribution, Clari Fraser RAM selected slightly less vast. Julia stuck mostly to her Lover and Langton Williams. For the meanwhile. For the Colosseum engagement turned into seven months’ stint. The astronomical doctor was replaced by George Buckland with his The Halls and Mansions of the English Nobility (matinees) andOld English Patriotic Songs (evenings) and Julia delivered ‘The Minstrel Boy’, Henrion’s ‘Sweet Love Arise’, ‘Bid me discourse’, ‘Tell me my heart’, Williams’s ‘The Falconer’s Son’, ‘I’ll be no submissive wife’, Handel’s ‘Caro vieni’ and the like. And then, almost as if to prove that she could, she suddenly came out with ‘O luce di quest’anima’ and the grand scena from Der Freischütz. In between times, she also appeared in other concerts, and I notice her at St Martin’s Hall in Howard Glovers so-called Educational Concerts for the People delivering ‘Deh vieni’, and Spohr’s ‘The Bird and the Maiden’ with oboe obbligato by Alfred Nicholson.

 

Julia Bleaden had been part of a variety of Entertainments since her first experience with P Henry Hatch, half a dozen years earlier, but now she found the one that would last her for as long as she cared to stay in the business. It was called Operatic Sketches, it was advertised as a ‘musical, pictorial, anecdotic lecture-entertainment’, and it had just one lecturer-performer-singer: Julia Bleaden. But it was, nevertheless, a three-handed entertainment. Julia went on the road with Alfred Nicholson (‘principal oboe of the London Philharmonic Society and member of the Italian Opera and Sacred Harmonic Society orchestras’) and Henry Nicholson (‘solo flautist to the Duke of Rutland’). And, presumably, an accompanist. Operatic Sketches seems to have had its first performance at Leicester on 30 November 1857, before setting off to Market Harborough, Claybrook, Welford, Burton on Trent and a long series of dots on the map, of larger or smaller proportions. On October 5 1858, I notice they visited Calne, Wiltshire.

I’ve been hard put to find out exactly of what the entertainment was composed. Julia spoke, presumably in character, changed costume, sang extracts from The Bohemian Girland La Fille du régiment, Henry did a flute fantasia on Scotch songs and Alfred ‘fully maintained his reputation as one of the best oboe players of the day’.

Julia kept on performing until 1867, and a part of every year – sometimes larger sometimes smaller – was devoted to touring the family entertainment. Latterly it was varied a bit, and when I finally see it out at Southampton’s Polytechnic Institute (2 October 1867), in the company of Henry and Charles Salaman, it is ‘a ballad entertainment’. And 1,700 people came to hear her. 

 

During those years, she continued to sing in London and provincial concerts. In 1861 Alfred Mellon hired her yet again for his Covent Garden promenade concert series and she appeared on the Covent Garden stage in Mendelssohn’s Lobgesang with Georgina Weiss and Mr Swift, and in concert with Swift and Carlotta Patti. She was regularly seen at the concerts given by Langton Williams (Macfarren’s ‘Ah why do we love?’, ‘The Falconer’s Son’ etc), and by Howard Glover, at whose 1864 festival she performed a Mercadante piece to which Alfred supplied the oboe obbligato. I have spotted her at the Hackney Manor Rooms delivering Macfarren’s ‘Ah, why do we love?’ and her old favourite, Müller’s ‘The Cuckoo’, in 1865-6 she is at Newcastle, Oxford, Leeds, Halifax etc with Henry in Mackney’s Entertainment. And I see that, on 13 April 1866, she took her entertainment to the London Tavern. 

 

The Bleadens were gone, now, from the Tavern and from Lothbury. Father John, widowed and remarried, had retired to Eagle Cottage in Epsom, where he died on 18 August 1865 at the age of 82 leaving ‘less than 1,500L’ to his young(er) widow and the two children of his seventies, one of whom, William Henry Bleaden (1855-1909) would go on to be the famously obstreperous vicar of St Mary’s, Paddington.

 . 

Julia and Alfred had moved back to Leicester, to 34 Pocklington’s Walk. And then, in 1868, Alfred suffered a stroke. He died two years later, in Leicester, on 29 August 1870 at the age of 49. The widowed Julia apparently returned to London and to the house at 34 Alfred Place, Finsbury, which had long been Edith’s boarding house and the home of such of the Bleaden girls as were not married. In the 1871 census, Edith, Mary and Julia are there. She did not, as far as I know, work any more, either as a singer or even as a singing teacher, which she had done in the 1860s. If she did, she didn’t advertise. 

 

She went back on the stage, though, one more time. On 19 June 1872. The occasion was a Benefit at the Vaudeville Theatre for the house’s musical director: Arthur Wellborn Nicholson (1842-1882), her brother-in-law. For the occasion a little operetta with music by the beneficiary was mounted. It was called Love Birds and, at age fifty, Julia played the ingénue, Cicely Sweetapple, alongside tenor Henry Nordblom and comic George Honey.

 

Edith Bleaden died in 1891. Julia seemingly would be the last survivor among the Bleadens of Lothbury. In the 1901 census she can be seen living in Albert Bridge Road, Battersea with Mary. She died there four years later.

She had had interesting career as a performer. Never a star, but a fine, competent all-round performer capable of playing comedy, drama, musical comedy or opera at the best theatres, of singing Langton Williams and Samuel Lover ballads to great effect, The Creation to equally good purpose and a Der Freischütz scena or a piece of Mercadante when the occasion demanded. She had played many second roles in the busy part of her multicoloured career, but she had played them to and alongside Louisa Pyne, Carlotta Patti, Clara Novello, Charlotte Reeves and Anna Thillon, and when she had finally become the centre of affairs, as the soloist in her own family show, she had proven worthy of it. 1,700 spectators in the Southampton Polytechnic for a singer and two wind players? Not bad. Especially at knocking fifty.

 

.