Emily Soldene: LAUNCH THE LIFEBOAT!

 

Awwwwwww ....

You publish -- after twenty years research -- your huge, excruciatingly detailed biography of a Victorian theatrical megastar .. dripping with illustrations and photographs and programmes ...

And then, another twenty years on, you find a wonderful piece of her sheet-music which would have been worth a double-page spread ...

Before Emily Soldene was Emily Soldene (her father was Lambert, her mother was Swain, her bigmaous stepfather was Solden ..) she was 'Miss Fitzwilliam', star of the top London music halls. As 'Miss Fitzwilliam' she introduced two songs, in particular, of the 'heroic' kind which were splendid hits. One was Captain Collomb's Crimean War song 'Up the Alma's Heights' the other, the equally vigorous and dramatic 'Launch the Lifeboat'. Neither subject was particularly new -- Alma's heights had been scaled years earlier, and Henry Russell had memorably manned his lifeboat back in the 1840s.

But, twenty years later, a J Beaumont Fletcher Esq., M.A. 'respectfully dedicated to the National Lifeboat Institution' his version of the theme ... The full lyric is in my book. The lines were set to music by Alfred Plumpton, the house pianist at the Oxford Music Hall, and Emily 'milked its maritime melodrama' up to her ringing Azucena top f-natural, at the end of each verse, until the sailors were rescued ...

'Launch the Lifeboat' was a huge hit. Alas, when I wrote my book, I simply could not find a copy of the published music. Now I have. Now that I have crippled hands, and cannot play it ...

Mr James Bealey Fletcher MA (b Stepney 22 August 1826; d Ainger Rd London 26 Aptil 1870), 'son of the Rev Joseph Fletcher DD' was, of course, a clergyman, educated at the University of London, who took up, in preference, supervising the education of the sons of the gentlefolk of Clifton. His occasional ventures into lyricism included 'The Outcast' (mus: Bennett Gilbert). 

Alfred Plumpton (b 4 Eagle St, Shepherd's Walk, Hoxton 3 March 1840; d Islington 27 March 1902) was the son of music-hall tenor Josiah Plumpton, and had begun as harmonium player at the Canterbury Hall in 1858. He worked for Charles Morton for a goodly number of years, and turned out regular songs ('I Like to be a Swell', ''The Railway Guard' &c) and operettas (Married by Compulsion, Sly and Shy, Who Is She?). He married pianist Charlotte Tasca (TASKER), and the couple toured the Indies and spent considerable time in Australia where Alfred was, for a time, choir director of Melbourne's Catholic Cathedral (soprano, the future Mme Melba). In 1887, his opera I Due Studenti was produced by the Simonsen company (Alexandra Theatre, Melbourne 24 December). He returned to Britain as musical director for Abud and Greet's Blue-Eyed Susan, featuring Australian, Nellie Stewart, and again in 1897 for a second attempt by that lady in Musgrove's production of the The Scarlet Feather. Latterly, he became director of the music at the Palace Theatre, and was yet in harness when he died aged 62. 

Of Emily SOLDENE (Mrs Powell) nothing remains to be said or written. She is the subject of perhaps the vastest theatrical biography ever written!