One by one they fall before the ruthless (or is that Frederic-less) onslaught of the mightily nosy Kurt Gänzl!
Emilie Petrelli, Lillian La Rue, even Millie Vere ... and the news has reached me that the indomitable Jeff Clarke has breached the granny of them all: 'Geraldine St Maur'! Arggghhhh. He has promised to write up his research and discovery for this blog.
How could I equal that? I had to try! No sneaking out, chasing momentary minnows ... I had to get a Significant Fish ... one that no one else has ever got near to identifying. Like Geraldine St bloody Maur! And -- tee hee -- I've done it!
I don't know how Mr Carte found his cast for his first all-children Pinafore. A good number seem to have come from theatre-attached families. The Pickerings and the Grattans and the Presanos we all know about. But the reviews went, very often, for the 'Little Buttercup' of the company: Miss Effie Mason.
My memories of 'Miss Mason' told me that she had been a cute child with a good contralto voice, who didn't do much thereafter. I know now that that was not wholly true. She soldiered on in the adult theatre in her twenties. She was clearly competent, but once the 'cute' was gone, she was just one of many girls traipsing My Sweetheart and its ilk around Britain in 1890s.
But. Who was 'Effie Mason'? That was my job for yesterday: to find out. Starting point: the 1881 census, and there she is, aged 11, with her mother, Jenny, in Scotland with the children's troupe. As Mason. Which was, I soon realised, a stage name. Sigh.
Many performers tried to gather a glimmer of glory through claiming a relationship to a well-known actor or actress. Sometime it was even true, or sort-of-true. Effie claimed, in sob-story letter to The Era, to be 'a grand niece of the late Charles Mathews'. Yes, husband of the great Eliza Vestris née Bartolozzi. Well, it had to be checked out, but how?
I plugged on. And then a tiny press squiblet in January 1889 told me that Effie had married. No names were given, but her husband was 'son of the vicar of Sykehouse, Selby'. So off I set to Sykehouse where I had no trouble in locating the Rev J W M Milman. High-tail to the marriage records where I find - yay - Ernest Southey McKinley Milman getting wed to Effie Simpson Elizabeth Watkins. 5 January at Tooting. Gotcha girl. And oh! a witness to the wedding is Jane Bartolozzi Watkins ... Bartolozzi! it was true!
The degree of relationship was fair. Jane was the daughter of Joshua Rose Anderson, whose wife was Josephine Bartolozzi, sister to Madame Vestris. So Effie was blood-related to Vestris rather than to Mathews. Jane married one Octavius Charles Watkins of Brunswick Square, Bristol, who seems to have worked in various official jobs before moving to London where in the 1871 census he has beome a photographer. Jane was 'vocalist and confectioner'. Effie was one. Born 4 March 1870.
Effie stayed in the theatre for twenty years. But she never topped her Little Buttercup. She sang at the Aquarium in the spectacle Nelson, she played a child's role in Alex Henderson's successful Rip van Winkle, sang aged 13 at the Trocadero, the South London, in Manchester, in Glasgow. Pantomime became an annual event -- Sanger's, Leeds, Birmingham, Hanley, Newcastle -- and she returned to D'Oyly Carte to play Pitti Sing on tour between 1885-7. In her twenties, she went out in minor companies, topbilled in The Swiss Girl and My Sweetheart ... and that seems to have been it.
Ernest, who in spite of his vicarage heritage, was an actor, and Effie had a son, who died as an infant, and a daughter Eugenie Effie McKinley (29 October 1894) who sometimes called herself 'Vestris' and was, of course, an actress. And, to tie things up, Jane died in 1909, Ernest in 1936, Effie in 1940. In the 1939 census Effie can be seen 'widow, incapacitated' in Sunbury on Thames with Eugenie. Eugenie didn't marry and died in 1960.
So, there we are.
MASON, Effie (WATKINS, Effie Simpson Elizabeth) (b London 4 March 1870;
One more intransigent Cartesian outed. Who next ...?
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