Geraldine St Maur: or The Blogger bloggered ...

 

Blogger tells me I have posted 1639 articles. And have had over a million viewers. Maybe, but Blogger's statistics have always been rather iffy.

However, every single one of those articles -- whether diary, travelogue, theatre review or good old plain research has one thing in common: they are each and every one 'all my own work'.

Number 1640 is, therefore to be marked with a white stone.

I don't know how and why I got into delving into the Who Was Who of C19th members of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company. Anyway, I did. And for a goodly while there, I daily divested the once well-known and less well-known Cartesians of their stage name, and opened up their real lives a little. Some, of course, were less than obliging: a few positively infuriating, and these were confined to a dungeon known after its most opaque occupants as the 'Too Hard Box, or the Millie Vere-Geraldine St Maur Box'.

But I do not give up easily. The years went by, and like Pandora's box, this box -- one-by-one -- let various of its prisoners escape. On 13 July 2021 I nabbed 'Millie Vere'

https://kurtofgerolstein.blogspot.com/2021/07/lord-love-you-millie-vere-or-out-of.html

So the 'Too Hard Box' had to be re-named. It became the Geraldine StMaur Box. Until today.

Now, there are a number of learned folk who profess to be with me in this (useless?) search for the truth about these -- and all sorts of other -- old-time singers. But easily the most diligent is Jeff Clarke of Engalnd's Opera della Luna. So when Jeff writes with a query, I know it's not just idle chatter of an inconsequential matter ...

So here, I let him take up the story. No 1640 is all yours, Jeff!

"It all started with Rose Berend. 

Who?   One of the original cast of Thespis at the Gaiety. For some time I have been pursuing some research into Hollingshead’s Gaiety, a very different place than George Edwardes later more celebrated establishment.  In looking into the original cast of Thespis I saw that little or nothing was known of Rose Berend who played Pretteia.  For anyone who’s interested, she was born Sarah Rose Brunt (soon to become Brent) in 1847. She worked a number of years as Rose de Brent before becoming Berend.  She died in 1930, her death recorded under her married name: Rose Williams. Aged 83.

Rose Berend

With some pride at my digging success, I forwarded my discoveries to the master himself (KG) who replied “Wow!  Well done. Another one bites the dust! Now have a go at Geraldine St Maur”.  

What a dastardly thing to do to an unsuspecting amateur sleuth like yours truly.   Geraldine St Maur was a much travelled member of D’Oyly Carte’s company and the first Peep-Bo in New York. She therefore figures in many advertisements and illustrations, yet nothing hitherto was known of who she was.  I didn’t hold out much hope.

'Geraldine St Maur'

The first thing to discover was that there was a genuine aristocratic lady of that name: the daughter of the Duke of Somerset who made the papers in 1864. There were many references to her in 1864, but only in that year, from then on she was referred to as Lady Geraldine Somerset. But the name must have made an impression on someone wanting a classier identity.

I discovered that the name St Maur is a corruption of Seymour (or is it the other way round?) and that the Somerset St Maurs are descendants and relatives of the ill-fated third wife of Henry VIII.   

I therefore began searches into Seymours who might fit the bill.  None, alas, appeared.  In a last ditch attempt to find the elusive Geraldine I abandoned the Sey and searched just on Moore.  There was a very successful actress Louisa Moore working in the late 1860s and 1870s who turned up in searches frequently, making looking for another lady of the stage with that surname even more tricky. And I almost missed her.  There she was, lurking “disguised” in the 1871 census:  

Yes, Find My Past says she was a medical student, but look more closely at the actual form…  She is a 16 year old musical student living in lodgings with her mother Sarah Ann Moore who made hats for a living. 

10 years earlier she appears on the census as plain Louisa Moore – with her mother Sarah and father James, in a house which they shared with two other families, one a musician.   

 Once again the AI of Find My Past has misread the handwritten form. Louisa was 6 not 4, and born in 1855.  Did their housemate George, a professional musician, have an early influence on the young Louisa? And did she assume a fantasy identity as the aristocratic Lady St Maur?

By 1871 the young musical student had acquired some additional names: Geraldine Louisa Rose Moore. 

I did wonder briefly whether this made her too old as a likely candidate, but not at all. She was two years younger than Leonora Braham and Jessie Bond who were both born in 1853. 

Although the renown of the successful actress, Louisa Moore, would deter our young singer from working under the same name, I believe an advertisement for a charity concert -- in support of the Tichborne Claimant -- at the very minor little King's Cross Theatre in 1872 shows our young Louisa making her debut as an alumna of the Royal Academy of Music, sharing the bill with Mr Lorenzo and his Performing Dogs.  

The question then arises, what was she doing in between this concert and the first appearance of Geraldine St Maur for D’Oyly Carte? 

There was a rather enigmatic young actress called simply Miss Geraldine who appears from time to time throughout the 1870s playing small roles in touring shows. This may or may not be her.

I think the most likely explanation is that she was working as a chorister, if not for D’Oyly Carte, then for Carl Rosa or one of the many other companies that were on the road, whose choristers, as with D’Oyly Carte, were not acknowledged in programmes and certainly not in the press.

We know that she first appears in records as Geraldine St Maur in 1883 when she played a named role in Matrimony, the curtain raiser to Patience on tour, and presumably was one of twenty love-sick maidens in the main opera.  Might she not have been in the chorus for Pinafore and Pirates and worked for Carte for a few years by then, but not had cause so far to be identified by name?  She seems to have played in the 1883 Plymouth pantomime, and ('of Mr D'Oyly Carte's company') as the singing Fairy Queen in The Forty Thieves at Bristol at Christmas 1884 ...

Her D’Oyly Carte career from this point on is well documented elsewhere. After her final appearance with the company, I can find her in just two roles.  

Firstly in August 1912 she joined the cast of a show called A Girl’s Temptation, by the moralising reformer Mrs Morton Powell, which had been on the road since 1910.  It apparently taught its audience “a great moral lesson”, and was largely played in towns where such a lesson was badly needed.  And then finally I find her in 1913 working with Rutland Barrington in Ways and Means. 

Barrington was 60 and still working was largely trading on his Savoy reputation but attempting to further his career as a comic actor. Sadly the theatres that were prepared to take his show were not the most glamorous. Yes, they played Manchester, but at the Royal Osborne Theatre – a grim old playhouse in a rough suburb of the city. Crewe, Burton-on –Trent, and Dewsbury were other dates on the tour. It was certainly not Number 1!

Miss St Maur appears not to have been in the show when it opened in Oxford in January 1913, (maybe still touring with A Girl’s Temptation), but she appears in the cast list the following week in Hastings.

The play did not do well.  This tour folded in April. Barrington returned to the West End to appear in other plays. Ways and Means appears to have been extensively re-written and presented later that year in the West End as The Gilded Pill.  It fared no better. Ms St Maur was not in it.

If Geraldine St Maur was indeed Louisa Moore of Lambeth, then she was nearly 60 by this time.   

And if she was, and never married, then she may have died in Lambeth, aged 63 in the last quarter of 1919.

So that’s my theory. I’m not sure how watertight it is, but that is it.  At least Kurt is convinced, and that’s good enough for me.

And it's good enough for me!  Now I have to find a new name for the "Too Hard Box" of the D'Oyly Carte archives!