Who WAS 'Little Buttercup' ?

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When I got up this morning, it was my intention to write just one more article to top off my little spurt of Gilbert and Sullivan biographies. 

You know how you get favourites among people you’ve never seen or heard or met? I check the international tennis results first thing every morning to see how Quentin Halys, Calvin Hemery and Manon Arcangioli are doing! And the cycling results for Lilian Calmejane and his team. 

Well, during my 40 years wandering in the Victorian musical theatre, I developed a devotion for, among others, the lady who called herself ‘Harriet Everard’. And, bit by bit, I put together a record of her career, culminating, as everyone knows, with her creation of the role of Little Buttercup in HMS Pinafore.

So, today, I would write up Harriet, that ‘plump and pleasing person’.

Now, anyone who has read my biographies … in my Victorian Vocalists and on my blog … knows that I do not just reel off a list of credits. Oh no. I like to investigate the background of the artist, his or her life out of the theatre, their family …

So, before I started in on ‘Miss Everard’, I did a morning’s digging. And so fruitfully did I dig, that the article on her darling career never got written. Instead, here comes some fascinating detail on her background! Well, fascinating to me!

Everybody knows that ‘Miss Everard’ or later ‘Miss H Everard’ was actually born Harriet(te) Emily Woollams. I can’t remember whether I was the first to reveal that, a hundred years ago, but anyway it is true. And attached to the bald facts, daughter of John Woollams – variously described as a builder and a decorator – and his wife Harriet née Graves. Doesn’t sound particularly interesting, does it? But it is.

‘Builder and decorator’ sounds like a local handyman. No. No way. Mr Woollams was a shining star of the British wallpaper world. His father was the biggest star. William Woollams of 31 Wigmore Street … ‘paper stainer’ … and he seems to have been around since the beginning of the 19th century!

I won’t detail his importance. If you are interested, there is a splendid book on the web detailing the Woollams influence on wallpaper:

https://archive.org/stream/historyofenglish00sugd/historyofenglish00sugd_djvu.txt

William married a Huguenot-descended lady by name Mary Ann Aumonier … and, well, it all gets genealogically vast after that … but they seem to have had a bunch of sons (see 1841 census) all but one of whom went into wallpaper. That one was the youngest, David Woollams, who started life as a ‘carver and gilder’ but apparently became a singer ‘in the Opera’. Whatever, he died a rich man, so I suspect he had a day job.

The highway and byways of the Woollams and Aumonier families would fill a book. After grandad’s death, the next generation took up the wallpapering – son William at 110 High Street Marylebone, and a John at 69 Marylebone Lane – I think, maybe, William with rather more success. They won prizes at the Great Exhibition and other trade fairs … yes, well, the book tells all. Even if it is sometimes difficult to sort out the Williams and the Johns!

So, enough of that. Let’s get on to Harriet[te]. 

Harriet was the first child of John Woollams and his wife Hariet[te] née Graves. They would have a heap more. Which is perhaps why Harriet appears to have been brought up by her aunt, Emily, who just happened to have married, in his later life, the much older goldsmith Fredéric Gibson … Aumonier, who died in 1866. Anyway, Harriet can be seen chez Aumonier in the 1861 census … 

Well, I’ll do the career tomorrow. Or maybe not. John Woollams sired several theatricals … had I better cover them? 

Oh, as a final touch: I suppose Miss Woollams isn’t a doozy as a stage name. I’ve always supposed that Harriet became ‘Everard’ because it sounded aristocratic. Never presume. I now find her grandparents were Jean Aumonier and Marie … Everard!

Career, husbands and all that jazz,  tomorrow!

The third wish: or, Pish Tush Bah!

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It’s the one that always goes wrong, isn’t it. And it seems to have gone wrong for me. Unless the two men here pictured are one and the same person, a few decades apart. They have the same name … and not a common one … but we’re talking theatre, so names mean nothing.

David Stone’s third labour for this Hercules was to solve the mystery over the appearance, disappearance, and identity of Frederick Bovill. Not something I’d ever thought of investigating. Mr Bovill’s career can be fitted (and has been) into a few lines.  Comes from nowhere to be featured as Pish Tush in The Mikado. Plays it through the run at the Savoy Goes on the road with the J W Turner and Henry Walsham Opera troupes, playing the baritone roles of Don Jose, Arnheim, Devilshoof, Luna, Danny Mann for eight months (‘too much vibrato’ ‘lacking in incisiveness’), then disappears for a while, surfacing to take tiny parts in the Carte productions of Ivanhoeand La Basoche. And that is effectively it.

Not many clues in there. Was he, I wondered, an amateur with something of a voice, fulfilling a desire to go on the stage? A friend of a friend of someone? But surely, then, he’d turn up in amateur productions. There must be a Reason for Mr Bovill, who couldn’t even sing the role adequately and had to hand over his part in the madrigal to one with a better range, being cast in The Mikado apparently with no previous experience.

And then name? Could it be real? I checked out the Fred Bovills of Britain. A grocer in Kingston. The Rector of Eggington. Mr F W Bovill of Harrow and New, classics scholar from Dorking (not he, he’s still at Oxford in 1886), a fish sauce and picklemaker …

I took another angle. After his little turn at the English Opera House, I see Fred performing twice. 12 May 1892 in Edgar Brightwell Skeet’s dramatic and humorous recital at Steinway Hall and then in the one performance of Alec Nelson’s operetta A Hundred Years Agoat the Royalty with Mr Smallwood Metcalfe. The two occasions have something in common: Mr Skeet and Mr Metcalfe are the chief tutors at Gustave Garcia’s stage school. And the operetta was composed by the conductor of the other concert: Mr Henry J Wood. So is there a connection between Bovill and the school, or even Henry Wood. It’s just a thought.

I wasn’t getting anywhere. Either he wasn’t really a Bovill or …

One last look. Dates-wise only one of the Freds seemed to fit. Yes, I’m afraid it’s the pickler … and during the years 1885-91 when our Fred was er ‘flourishing’, the pickler had three children. Each birth certificate confirms him as a ‘merchant’ … Claude Hardwicke Knight Bovill … what a name! Hang on! I KNOW Mr C H Bovill …. librettist and lyricist to the British musical theatre of the 20th century! Oh but wasn't he Charles Henry ... oh, I dunno.

Coincidence? Red herring? Maybe there’s an interview saying ’Daddy was Pish Tush’. Or Daddy was a pickler.

Anyway, that’s Daddy’s photo above … below our Fred.

My efforts have really discovered nothing. Mr Bovill will have to go into the UNSOLVED box for the meanwhile, to keep company with the biggest Gilbert and Sullivan identity mystery of all … WHO WAS ALICE MAY?

David Stone's Three Wishes: Number Two .. granted!

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BENTHAM, George [Buchan] (aka BENTAMI, Giorgio) (b Clifton, York, 9 December 1843; d Strand Palace Hotel, London 25 March 1911)

George Bentham was born in York in 1843, the son of Captain (later Lieutenant-Colonel) John Bentham, (d Torquay 9 October 1858) variously of the 6th dragoon guards, 52nd Light Infantry and the 3rd East Lancashire Militia, and the son of an army General, and his Leeds-born wife Emma Sophia née Ikin ‘youngest surviving daughter of Thomas Ikin, Esq of Leventhorpe House’ (m Brotherton, 7 February 1839). The family was well-connected, and in the 1851 census John and Emma, with daughters Harriet Mary Considine Bentham (10) and Caroline (9), and son George (7), can be seen living with Emma’s widowed brother, Thomas Bright Crosse, ‘magistrate and deputy lieutenant’ and some time MP for Wigan, at Shaw Hill, Whittle le Woods, Lancs, in a household which also includes a governess and nine servants inclusive of two nurses, a nurserymaid and a governess. The Crosse family ‘of Crosse Hall, Chorley’, as well as being of ancient lineage, were decidedly well off.

The young George took employment in the war office. Having discovered an attractive tenor voice, he also got involved in the amateur music-making which was a feature of high society life in London, and by 1866, the date of the first concert programmes I have dug up in which his name appears, he had won his way to the top of that particular tree.

The earliest is a concert in January 1866 given by the Margate Volunteers at the local Assembly Rooms. George performed that veriest chestnut ‘The Message’, Mrs Talfourd, the widow of the well-connected playwright Francis Talfourd and another prominent amateur singer, gave the florid ‘Carnival of Venice’ variations, and the two joined together in the duet from Rigoletto. Mrs Talfourd’s singing teacher, Emmanuel Aguilar, also took part. Maybe he was young Bentham’s teacher too, but it is never said. Anyway, the press raved: ‘Rarely do concert-goers hear such a tenor as Mr Bentham... his singing of ‘The Message’ was something superb.’

A couple of months later, he is at Torquay, singing at a concert given by ‘some members of the Wandering Minstrels’. The Wandering Minstrels was the foremost gentlemen’s amateur singing club in Britain, and it appears that George Bentham had, at 22 years of age, already risen to be a soloist with them. Later in the season, he and Mr Whitworth Jones (the former very appreciable professional opera basso known as ‘Henry Whitworth’) were the soloists in a very high-society concert given by the group at the West London School of Art.

At the end of March, he featured in the concert of the Civil Service Musical Society at the Hanover Square Rooms, and this time the London critics added their praise: ‘he has a beautiful tenor voice which was heard to much more advantage in Mr Frederick Clay’s very graceful song ‘The Shades of evening’, accompanied by the composer, than in the not very interesting air (balata) by Donizetti ‘Il pescatore’. Besides possessing a voice to excite envy, Mr Bentham has real musical feeling and sings with expression as true as it is unaffected.’ Along with his ballads, George also tackled opera, joining a Mr Swain in a duet from Mercadante’s Eliza e Claudio.

In April he visited Canterbury for a concert given by the professional vocalist Eleanor Armstrong. He gave his ‘Shades of Evening’ and won a double encore for his rendition of ‘Spirto gentil’, and the critic nodded ‘[he has] a very good tenor voice and sings somewhat after the sweet manner of Mr Hohler..’

The magic name. It had to come. For indeed, the two men were drawn from one and the same well. Both came from a wealthy and high-social background, and both had fine, true English tenor voices with, it seems, true upper class English enunciation and pronunciation. Both had been stars of the Wandering Minstrels. Both had been civil servants. But Thomas Hohler was a particular case.

Rare it was – and, indeed, I can think of no other previous example -- that a society amateur should quit the amateur ranks and take on a full-sized career as a professional vocalist. Most didn’t want or need to. Singing was a pleasurable and social activity not a job. But just a few years earlier Hohler had done it, and done it with more than a little success. George Bentham would follow where he had led.

Quite where and how he started his transformation, I do not know. He is still there in May of 1866, singing at Civil Service Society concert (‘he created quite an effect with the audience’), but he then disappears from my view for the whole of 1867. Studying in Italy? And mythology (on the say so of the Musical World) credits him with his having ‘made his operatic debut in Brussels Théâtre Italien du Cirque under the name of Bentami in 1869’. Which is certainly not right.

My first sighting of the remade Bentham is in 1868, when a correspondent of the Musical World writes from Copenhagen in to report on ‘a new English tenor’ who is appearing there in Il Trovatore ‘a great surprise… a soft, sonorous, sympathetic voice ... intonation as pure as the sound of a silver bell’. When he sang Rigoletto, alongside Pantaleone and Mlle Calisto, the local music press credited him with ‘eine hübsche Stimme, aber kein Spiel.’ By October, the reports are coming from Amsterdam where he is ‘primo tenore in the opera of the city’. ‘He has just signed an engagement as primo tenore for the Royal Theatre at Stockholm for ten weeks’. After that, it seems, he proceeded on to Italy. For, when he finally made it back home, he was billed as being ‘of the principal theatres of Italy’. It is always a suspicious bit of terminology, that is, and the truth of the matter is usually that the unnamed principal theatres are nothing of the kind, if indeed they exist at all. But anyway Bentham was on his way in his new career, and good tenors being as hard to find in the C19th as they are in the C21st … it is likely that he found gainful employment wherever he may have been.

The career of Tom Hohler had been launched, in April 1866, by Mapleson of the Italian opera and the experiment had been a success. Now Mapleson put the newest civil service tenore under contract, and George Bentham was able to return to Britain with a three-year contract for the Italian opera house in his pocket.

He began the British part of his professional career in Scotland (March 1871), where Mapleson’s company was playing a pre-London season. Glasgow voted his Almaviva ‘manly and musicianlike’, Edinburgh reported that as Elvino, to the Sonnambule of di Murska and of Sinico, ‘his tasteful vocalisation elicited hearty applause’, and as the company headed south Birmingham approved his ‘voice of agreeable quality … ‘ though finding ‘his acting and singing somewhat amateurish’.

He made his London debut playing the role of Carlo, opposite Ilma di Murska, in Linda di Chamonix (20 April 1871) and the critical response was fairly satisfying. But only fairly. The Times opined that ‘he must abide his time and acquire experience. That he possesses a voice to be envied none can dispute; moreover, he has talent into the bargain’ and added that he was much less nervous on the second night;another print referred to him as ‘a cultivated English amateur’ and compounded ‘… a nice tenor voice of the tender rather than the robust order and of these there is always an ample supply. His manner is quiet and modest, and his style careful, neat and small, more suited for musica di camera than the area of the Grand Opera’. The Musical World commented on what it considered to be nervousness, but continued ‘there was however much to commend …’ and ‘that he possesses a voice to be envied is beyond dispute’.

The ‘new tenor’ was much in demand. On the 20 May he appeared at the New Philharmonic concerts in a concert version of Idomeneo alongside Therese Titiens, two days later he shared the vocal duties with Clarice Sinico at the real Philharmonic Society, giving ‘Un aura amoroso’ and provoking the review ‘ .. a delightful tenor voice but much to learn’. It was a refrain he would hear often in the years to come.

On 24 May Idomeneo was repeated, on 25 May he joined di Murska, Edith Wynne, J G Patey and Janet Patey, Sims Reeves, and Sig Foli as soloists with Henry Leslie’s choir, and in the early days of June he appeared with some of his opera confreres at the Crystal Palace, took part in Mr Aptommas’s concert singing Donizetti and joining in ‘Un di se ben’ (‘he improves’), Wilhelm Kuhe’s concert, Wilhelm Ganz’s concert at St James’s Hall, sharing the vocals with Titiens, Natalie Carola, Vernon Rigby and Jules Lefort, and at Henry Leslie’s concert with a large portion of the opera company. When he appeared at the Royal Dramatic College concert on the stage of Her Majesty’s Theatre, he exhumed an old friend and ‘charmed the audience with a pretty song by Frederick Clay called ‘Shades of Evening’’.

And in the midst of all this activity he launched into a new role at Her Majesty’s, featured as Idreno to the Semiramide of Titiens, alongside Trebelli, Agnesi and Foli. ‘A tenor part only to be completely filled by an intelligent singer ... [he] added to the general efficiency’. And then, on the occasion of Mapleson’s Benefit in July, he was put forward as Lionel in Martha. The press commented‘years back petty jealousy and prejudice would have given a young English tenor no such chance as that which has favoured Mr Bentham’.

The concert engagements continued on till the end of the season, and in the interregnum between the London opera season and Mapleson’s provincial tour, George snared another top job: an engagement at the Gloucester Festival, sharing the tenor music with Vernon Rigby and Edward Lloyd, and alongside Titiens and Foli (Elijah, selection Azor e Zemire). Presumably he didn’t sing on the last day of the Festival, 8 September, for that day he was in London, at All Saints Church Kensington, tying the knot with twenty year-old mezzo Cecile Fernandez.

Vizzani

The newlyweds duly crossed to Dublin, where George stepped in to deputise for Vizzani in Il flauto magico and Cecile scored a success with her Smeaton in Anna Bolena. But Mr Bentham took umbrage when Zélie Trebelli was then given the role of Smeaton, refused to allow Cecile to go on in Il flauto magico, flaunted off with her to sing in Halle’s concerts in Manchester and booked them for Brighton in defiance of their Maplesonian contracts. As then the troupe proceeded on to Liverpool and dates beyond, Bentham was still with them, but he doesn’t seem to have done much. It seems he may have been suspended. Anyway, his manager sued him claiming he had ‘violated his contract by singing at the Gloucester Festival and at Dover last Sept without consent’.

And so, it was back to the concert halls -- the Crystal Palace with ‘Il mio tesoro’, ‘Ah si ben mio’ and the like, Ganz’s Saturday evenings with ‘O cara imagine’ -- and to reviews ranging from ‘there is little doubt that he will ultimately become one of our most popular tenors’ to the too familiar ‘he ought to do more than he does with so much voice as he possesses’.

And then they were up and gone. Mr and Mrs Bentham quit England and headed for Italy. News seeped back to Britain of their performing – one, the other or both – in Udine, at the Pergola in Florence, at the Teatro Bellini in Palermo. In January 1873 he sang Faust and she – for heaven’s sake – Marguerite in Malta to enthusiastic reviews, and in June he was reported singing Don Pasquale in Saenza. She was doing Rosina in Ferrara. When, that is she was not giving birth, in Florence, to a little Jack A Bentham (24 March 1873). Later, he turns up at the Teatro delle Valle in Rome (L’Ombra).

I don’t know what happened to little Jack, but something seems to have happened around about this time to George and Cecile. Like, he returned from Italy and she stayed. Playing at the Teatro Malibran in Venice. And when she does return, they are no longer working together, as they so often were before. And, according to the censi of 1881, 1891 and 1901, neither are they living together. She still bills herself much of the time as Madame Bentham-Fernandez, or Fernandez-Bentami or other suitable variation. But sometimes she is just Cecile Fernandez. It does seem as if the marriage may have had a very short effective life.

Back in London, George began to work. He took part in the Monday pops (‘O cara imagine’, Mendelssohn song) and replaced Vernon Rigby in the London Ballad Concerts delivering ‘The snow lies white’ and his faithful ‘The Shades of evening’, he insisted on ‘Salut, demeure chaste et pure’ at the British Orchestral Society (‘Mr Bentham proved his advance as a vocalist but to be frank he has yet much to learn in point of style’), returned to sing with Henry Leslie’s Choir and appeared in concert at the Albert Hall (‘When other lips’). And then, on 27 April, he reappeared with Mapleson at Her Majesty’s Theatre.

Faust was the vehicle chosen, with Marie Roze as Marguerite, Rota as a splendid Mephistopheles, de Reschi as Valentine and Trebelli as Siebel. But the result was the same: ‘Mr Bentham having been absent three years has improved the time by study so that many of the faults that were but too patent before have vanished. To be frank, there is yet something to acquire and something to discard ere Mr Bentham will take that position which his excellent voice should enable him to do ultimately. But every sign of advance should be welcomed and the young tenor had no reason to complain of the coldness of his audience, for kindly applause followed every effort.... perhaps most successful in the third act. The ‘Salve dimora’ was a little beyond his powers, but his rendering of the music was creditable and the duet especially showed him at his best..’

A Faust for whom ‘Salve dimora’ is beyond his powers?

When Faust was on the bills again, Italo Campanini and Christine Nilsson took the star roles. I suspect George Bentham may have been hired as a spare tenor or a general tenor understudy. However, later in the season he was given a Tamino to play. ‘His chief fault was his lack of animation’. There was always a fault of some kind, it seems. When he again played Tamino on tour, the Liverpool critic grumbled that he was ‘scarcely equal to the demands of [the part]’.

But engagements were not lacking. In September he returned to the Gloucester Festival, singing in the Rossini Stabat Mater with Titiens, Trebelli and Agnesi, Weber’s The Praise of Jehovah, Rossini’s Messe Solenelle and the tenor music in Elijah (‘beautiful voice and faulty intonation’), and, when that was done, he continued on to the Liverpool Festival (29 September) where the other tenors engaged were Sims Reeves and Edward Lloyd. On 14 October he joined Campanini and Lloyd as the tenor department at the Leeds Music Festival (‘an agreeable tenor voice … not always free from errors .. painfully flat’), and in November he travelled to Edinburgh for a performance of Benedict’s St Peter.

In the early part of 1875 he sang another Elijah, teamed with Marie Roze, Antoinette Sterling and Myron Whitney, at the Albert Hall, and yet again there was complaint about his intonation. Not something that had ever been a problem before.

In 1876, George Bentham returned to the operatic stage. But this time it was not the Maplesonian opera. Those days were gone. He joined up with something called the Imperial Italian Opera Company, a touring outfit of dubious stability, run by the ambitious Scottish baritone who called himself Enrico Campobello. It had a limited life, during which George sang Alfredo to the La Traviata of Emma Howson.

In the early part of 1877 he, however, returned to Mapleson. Not for opera this time, but for a very superior concert party tour which featured Titiens, Alwina Valleria, Agnes Bonn, del Puente, Brocolini and Borella. And in Manchester the press was able to report ‘he has seldom been heard to such advantage..’, ‘he has an exceptionally fine voice under perfect control and his singing was thoroughly artistic’. No faulty intonation? No lack of energy? No ‘voice on legs’? All those faults which George Bentham had seemingly had since day one, and of which he had apparently never succeeded in getting rid, had they all disappeared at last? Would and could his career, at 33 years of age, finally take off like Hohler’s.

The job that George Bentham got in the last part of the year 1877 was precisely the one that could and should have suited him to perfection. That could and should have allowed him to achieve that take-off. He was cast in the leading tenor role of Alexis in Mr W S Gilbert and Mr Arthur S Sullivan’s brand new English comic opera The Sorcerer. It should have been a doddle. Ideal casting. The music was exactly right for his not too robust English tenor voice. And act? He didn’t have to act. He simply had to play himself. With a certain amount of burlesque humour, of course, or at the least of understanding of burlesque humour.

Well, the often-told tales of the events surrounding the creation of the various Gilbert and Sullivan operas have told us that it wasn’t a doddle. George Bentham wasn’t bad as Alexis. He just wasn’t good. It seems that the humour of the thing escaped him. That even acting himself didn’t make him act convincingly. And that the languidness which had apparently always affected him as a performer was still there.

George Bentham played the role of Alexis for the opening months of the run of The Sorcerer, and then, when the show’s initial touring company was sent on the road, he was redeployed to play his original role in the provinces, whilst another upper-class – nay, aristocratic -- English tenor, George Power, took over at the Opera Comique. George Power would go on to create the tenor roles of HMS Pinafore and The Pirates of Penzance during his handful of years in the professional theatre. And George Bentham? Once the tour of The Sorcerer ended, he simply and quietly removed himself from a musical profession in which he seemingly could find no suitable niche. No place where he could sing Freddie Clay’s ballad, and little else. Age thirty four.

George Bentham ‘of independent means and no fixed abode’ was 67 when he died at the Strand Palace Hotel in 1911. Fatty degeneration of the heart for unnumbered years leading to a sudden heart failure. He had been ill, reported his death certificate ‘for a few minutes’.

The still official Madame Bentham didn’t come to register his death. ‘A T Crosse, cousin’ did the honours. ‘No fixed abode’ seems to have described this lost, vaguely talented man rather well.

The third little maid

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 When I sent my little Fred Clifton ‘discovery’ off to David Stone, the ‘Father of All D’Oyly Carte Biographers’, for our mutual rejoicing, I casually tossed off a ‘right, who next?’. I mean these things can’t be left as ‘don’t knows’ forever, after all, I’m getting greatly on in years, and who is the next nosy Gänzl? …

Well, he selected three for me to have a crack at, and one of them was the lady whom we know as Sibyl or Sybil Grey and whose memory, unfairly, lives on solely for having created the part of Peep Bo, to the Yum Yum of Leonora Braham and the Pitti Sing of Jessie Bond in The Mikado. Well, I’d never looked into Sibyl or Sybil before, and wasn’t aware that there was any mystery about who she was, although it was very ev-i-dent, from the variation in the spelling of her name, that she was no Sibyl or Sybil. So, who was she?

It wasn’t too hard to discover. She was born Ellen Sophia Taylor, 3 January 1860, in London’s Conduit Street West, the second daughter of a linen draper, Henry Taylor and his Exeter-born wife Susannah. ‘Sybil Grey’ was the name of an aristocrat, a racehorse, a novelistic and dramatic heroine (Marmion) … thus, just the sort of nom de théâtre for a young lass …

David Stone tells of her earliest career on the stage in detail:

‘Sybil Grey was a chorister and understudy during the original London production of The Pirates of Penzance at the Opera Comique in 1880, going on in the role of Kate for a short time in July. During the run of Patience at the Opera Comique her duties appear to be limited to the chorus, though she may well have understudied the part of Lady Saphir. Shortly after Patience was transferred to the Savoy (November 1881) she was given the non-singing role of Jane in the Desprez & Faning curtain raiser Mock Turtles.

When Iolanthe opened on November 25, 1882, she was given the small part of Fleta. She continued to play Jane in Mock Turtles until March 1883, when a new companion piece, A Private Wire, was inserted, with Miss Grey in the part of Mary, the maid. In October 1883, Miss Grey moved up (slightly) to Leila in Iolanthe, playing both Leila and Mary until both operas closed in January 1884.  She then created the part of Sacharissa in the first performance of Princess Ida, playing the role throughout the run, and when The Sorcerer and Trial by Jury were revived in October 1884, she was the First Bridesmaid in the shorter piece. For the initial production of The Mikado, she created the part of Peep-Bo, the third ‘little maid from school,’ playing it throughout a run of 672 performances, ending January 19, 1887.’

But there was much more, and much more of consequence to come. Miss Grey had another decade and more to spend on the stage, and in more than one hit show.

Well, I could give chapter and verse, but suffice it to say that her years with Carte done (she would return for some more Peep Boing, and to play Lady Amathis in Gilbert’s Broken Hearts and Leila in his Wicked World, but that was all), Miss Grey moved in the right direction: to the new hero of the London musical stage, George Edwardes. After a short tour with May Holt’s company, she was hired for the Gaiety Theatre, to play in the richly-cast burlesque of Frankenstein. In the role of Vanilla she was but one of four decorative ladies – the others were, no less, Jenny Rogers, Jenny M’Nulty and manager’s sister-in-law Emma Gwynne – who led the chorus of ‘bandits, villagers, soldiers and shepherdesses’. Frankenstein was not the hit counted upon and Miss Esmeralda was issued as a matinee item. Once again, Sybil featured as a gipsy of whom ‘pretty looks and an arch bearing’ were all required. When the play Lot 49 was added to the bill, she also appeared in that, the part of Polly the maid.

Her return to the Savoy Theatre ended, Sybil moved on to another monument of the British theatre: the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. It was Christmas pantomime time, the show was The Babes in the Wood with Harry Payne, Dan Leno as dame, and Harriet Vernon as Robin Hood. Sybil and Maggie Duggan headed the merry men.

Sybil and best-friend Rosina Brandram appeared in a musical version of Newport (‘The Song of the Looking Glass’) in a vanity production at Devonshire House, as Sybil continued on at Drury Lane (Deborah Wood in The Royal Oak ‘flitted about gracefully’, Royal Housemaid in Jack and the Beanstalk, King of Diamonds in Beauty and the Beast), but Mr Edwardes had other plans for her.

He placed Sybil, as a takeover, in the successful ‘triple bill’ production which ran at Terry’s Theatre and then Shaftesbury and Toole’s, and then the Court Theatre, and she remained with the company through a run of many, many months, playing at various times the different roles in the three playlets and the title-role in Nan, the Good-For-Nothing. She also appeared in a single tryout matinee of an unsatisfactory farce, Our Doctors (24 March 1891).

When the triple bill ended, she appeared as Sally in W J Hill’s old comedy vehicle, Crazed with C P Little and Robert Nainby, as a forepiece to The Guardsman, and the press commented on ‘a clever and experienced actress who, one imagines, would do well at one of our ‘improved’ music halls’. But Sybil wasn’t going there. George Edwardes had other uses for her. He imported her into the cast of his new hit musical comedy, The Gaiety Girl,and then into a second hit London musical An Artist’s Model, where she would later take over Lottie Venne’s prominent role of Madame Amélie. The third little maid had become a veritable leading lady.

And as if the racehorses and Marmion weren’t enough, Sybil now had to put up with Hilda Spong arriving at Drury Lane with her play The Duchess of Coolgardie. Miss Spong took the star role of … Sybil Grey!

But Sybil had another of her long runs coming up. She was engaged at the Vaudeville Theatre where the English adaptation of the famous farce L’Hôtel du libre Échange(A Night Out) was being produced. Again, it seems to have been a case of  understudy and/or take-over, but by August 1896 she is billed for the leading role of Mme Pinglet (originated by Fannie Ward). During the run she appeared also in a number of try-out matinees (Nurse Edith in Solomon’s Twins, The Swell Miss Fitzwell, A Ward of France) and, again, she remained with the production through the run.

When Edwardes produced the comedy Jalouse (The Dovecot) at the Duke of York’s Theatre (February 1898) with Seymour Hicks and Ellis Jeffries, Sybil was cast as the scheming servant-girl Durnford through the 100 plus nights of the run. The cast also included … Miss Leonora Braham.

She joined Horace Lingard’s Strand Comedy Company as Mrs Smith in another French comedy Why Smith Left Home, toured for Edwardes in A Night Out, but at the turn of the century and the arrival of the age of forty, she seems to have changed priorities. In the 1901 census, she can be seen (with Rosina) listed as 34 and ‘actress and masseuse’.

She seems to have done more massaging than acting in the following years. While Rosina plunged on with her celebrated career, I see Sybil announced to play in Three Little Maids (she was not one of the little maids, however, but Miss Deare, the postmistress), and in 1907 touring for Edwardes one more time as Poo-See in See-See.

70 year-old Sybil-Sibyl appeared alongside Misses Braham (77) and Bond (77) at a Mikado reunion in 1930. That must have been unpleasant. Miss Braham (centre) died the next year. Peep-Bo seems at that stage to have become a rather big little maid.

Ellen Sophia Taylor lived latterly in Lordship Lane, Dulwich. She died at the age of 79, in the nursing home at Ivy Bank, Queen’s Road, Taymount Rise in Forest Hill, 20 August 1939.  What she did in those last thirty years, I have no idea, but she’d had twenty enjoyable if not exactly starry ones in the theatre.

"A Piratical Maid of All Work"

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Why am I writing about Emily Cross? Surely she’s been written about enough. She even wrote her own memoirs in the Newcastle Daily Chronicle, although sadly I haven’t been able to find them: only a selection. ‘Emily Cross’ was her real name, there is no mystery about her background, her marriage, her children, so … why tackle her? Well, I just wanted to. Because her tale, in this day and age has got somewhat distorted. Not perhaps the facts (some of them) but the emphases. I mean, you would think that the main, or indeed the only, thing of worth that she did was to play the first performances of Ruth in The Pirates of Penzance on the London stage. And that is nonsense. She actually created and played more or less important roles for as long or longer than Ruth. Anyway, no comparisons, just read on.

Emily Cross was not born in Newcastle upon Tyne. She was born in Lyme Regis, Dorset. Her father was from the Dorset village of Wootton Fitzpaine and he can be seen in George’s Court, Lyme Regis, working as a weaver in the 1841 census. He is accompanied by his wife Elizabeth née Bowdidge and their earliest children Rebecca, Charles and John. Emily has yet to come. Likewise Albion (!) and Jane …

Around 1849, the family removed to St Peter Port in Guernsey (no, she wasn’t born there either!) where Ben, so the 1851 census says, worked as a ‘bath chair keeper’. In 1861, he is a ‘cloth manufacturer’, the boys are ‘a baker’ and ‘a potter’ and Emily is, already, ‘professor of music’.

It was in the Channel Islands (not in Newcastle) that Emily made her first appearances as a teenage vocalist. I have the review of one concert, attended by the local great and glorious, given by the young aspirant, which says that she has been heard in public previously … and in her memoirs she quotes the Messrs Arscott’s concert at the Working Men’s Club. So be it.

Very soon after the 1861 census, 15-year old Emily got a job. I don’t know how (but apparently courtesy of her singing teacher, a Mr Leggatt), but she was hired by (‘apprenticed to’) Mr Edward Dean Davis, actor-manager of the Newcastle Theatre Royal company, at far-off Dumfries and Newcastle. And the family, or at least Emily and mama to start with, moved north.

Well, I first see her 1 September 1862 ‘of Dumfries and Jersey’, performing at Newcastle. And billed! ‘Teacher’s pet’ is giving songs between the shows, behind Henry Loraine and Mrs Charles Calvert’s dramatic performances. Opening night, As You Like Itwas played, and Emily joined a quartet to sing ‘God Save the King’ and ‘Partant pour le Syrie’. And to make her second acting appearance – for, yes, she tells us that her first was at Dumfries, where she jumped in one night for an ailing actress. The Miller and his Men was played as afterpiece to the Shakespeare, and Emily played a small boy’s part. Another young actress/vocalist, Madame Juanita Garcia, who had recently debuted as Nora in The Poor Soldier at the Surrey, was also in the company and the quartet, and she too sang, alternate nights, between the shows, but it was Emily who go the attention, with her ‘Merry is the Greenwood’, ‘Come into the Garden, Maud’, ‘Kathleen Mavourneen’ and ‘La Manola’ (‘an attractive person and an excellent voice … encored’). 

It is October before I spy Emily billed in the press to play a role. James Anderson was guesting as Macbeth, and Emily sang the bass role of Hecate. And from then on, for more than four years, under the wing of Mr Davis, she was a featured favourite on the Newcastle stage. When the Nelson sisters visited she played the Fairy Queen in Conrad and Medora, she teamed with Lady Don as Balroubadour in Aladdin, Lemuel in Perdita, and doubtless as Di Vernon to the Lady’s Osbaldistone in Rob Roy. She was Lucy Marjoribanks in Lord Dundreary, Dandyni in Cinderella with the Lupinos, Nina in The Morning Call, Georgina in Our American Cousin with Sothern, Di Vernon with a more conventional Osbaldistone in Maurice de Solla, and with ‘Professor Anderson’ as Rob Roy, Sam Willoughby in The Ticket of Leave Man, Amy Robsart in the burlesque of Kenilworth, the Spirit of Mischief in the panto The Fairies Frolic with Fanny Addison, took the title-role in The Little Sentinel, Mary in The Marble Heart, the Duke de Gonzauge in a burlesque of The Motto, Lilac Lovel in The King’s Wager, Ada Ingot to the David Garrick of Sothern, Apollo in Ixion with Jenny Willmore and with Edith Challis as Venus, through end to end seasons, and there was general mourning amongst Novocastrian playgoers when it was announced that she was leaving.

She was going to Drury Lane. Emily’s ‘first appearance in London’ is oft quoted. In fact, it was a bit of a mess. The cast announced for Rob Roy for 16 March was topped by Sims Reeves as Osbaldistone, Phelps as Nicol Jarvie, and Powrie at the outlaw, but it didn’t happen. Mr Reeves, for the thousandth time, was ‘ill’. It finally got on a week later (23 March), with Reeves hurriedly replaced by William Harrison. The Era reported ‘a debutante whose claims to favour are of a strong kind. Very prepossessing in person and manner, her acting is easy and graceful and her reception was of the most cordial description. She sang the usual songs with much taste and expression and has a sweet voice of no great power but which she manages with considerable skill. Her first introduced song was encored, and in the unaccompanied duet with Mr Harrison, ‘Though you leave me now in sorrow’, and ‘A Highland Lad my Love Was Born’, Miss E Cross established her position with the audience..’. ‘The Diana of the play is the palest possible reflex of the Diana of the novel. Miss Cross, however, infused new spirit into the performance, and threw a grace of her own round the part. Her voice is a full, round mezzo-soprano, and her singing proved that her voice had been turned to no indifferent account. She sang ‘From Morn to Eve, so bonny-O’ and ‘John Hielandman’ and was encored in both.’ ‘sang so prettily and acted so well as to become a favourite with the audience’. Those who quibbled found her performance insufficiently ‘large’ for a theatre accustomed to ‘large’ acting and loud singing.

Powrie had an accident on opening night and had to be replaced by Swinburne for night two … but the hamstrung cast played their drama every night for three weeks.

When manager Chatterton later sued Reeves for broken contract, it came out in court that it was the tenor who, Louisa Pyne being unavailable, had been responsible for Emily’s hiring. And that she had been hired specifically for that one role, specifically to play opposite him!

Rob Roy, her Drury Lane (and Chatterton’s Benefit concert) contract over, was swiftly on her way to other major engagements. The first was at Liverpool where Phelps was to play Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream with burlesque boy Julia St George as Puck. Emily was cast as Oberon and ‘created an immense impression by the superior nature of her vocal qualities’, scoring an encore for ‘I know a bank’ with Miss St George. She played with the Wigans in The Poor Noblesse and The First Night, and when manager Alexander Henderson’s Benefit came round she actually played opposite him (not known as an actor!) in The Leap Year, and with David Fisher in the little Planche piece called Somebody Else.

She had just time to pop back to her old haunt in Guernsey for a concert at Clifton Hall, before it was on to Mr Chute for the opening of his new theatre at Bristol (14 October). The Tempest, with James Bennett as Prospero was the opening attraction, and – cast in yet another Priscilla Horton role – Miss Cross was Ariel. She stole the show: ‘one of the choicest bits of acting we have seen’ ‘It is but rarely that we hear such vocalisation on the stage’, ‘beautiful singing’ … and Chute promptly mounted Rob Roy, and The Little Rebel, Loan of a Lover, Macbeth (Hecate) and Hamlet with Emily as Ophelia, before bringing out, again, Rob Roy. Emily repeated her Diana to the Osbaldistone of a future singing star in ‘Frank Crellin’ (later to be ‘Celli’). Extending her engagement, she starred in The Colleen Bawn (with songs), played Josephine in The Child of the Regiment, and played principal boy in the Christmas Aladdin, until she had became as great a favourite in Bristol as she still was – her every move followed by the local press – in Newcastle. Shortly after, she was recalled to Bristol for a special engagement as Julia in Guy Mannering. Chute himself played Dandie, G F Rowe was Sampson and the hero was… Sims Reeves.

She returned north for 12 nights at South Shields (2 March 1868) and also to get married. Her husband was a Newcastle man, [Mark] Ernest Jobling, son of a local solicitor and later a mining engineer. They would have some 35 years of married life together.

In spite of reports that she was headed back to the struggling Chatterton and Drury Lane, when she returned to London in June it was under slightly less glamorous circumstances. She was engaged to repeat her Ophelia at the Princess’s Theatre. Two circumstances were against her. The Hamlet was a ‘gentlemanly, amateurish’ actor named Allerton (who, I suspect, was the money behind the affair), and Emily was pregnant. She was judged just ‘pleasing’.

She gave birth to a daughter, Lily, recte Agnes Lillian slightly too soon, in the privacy of Bodmin, Cornwall, 13 October 1868.

She returned to the stage under the management of Charles Calvert, at the Prince’s Theatre, Manchester at Christmas, playing in Goody Two Shoes (‘simple, fresh and unaffected a voice which if not very strong is particularly melodious’), and then at Easter returned to roots, and Mr Davis, for another run at Newcastle, Carlisle and Edinburgh. No juvenile now, she was a confirmed star and leading lady – The Tempest, The Ticket of Leave Man, Man of the World with Phelps, Desdemona, Rosalind (‘The Cuckoo Song’, ‘When Daisies Pied’), The Chimney Corner, Richelieu, Lady Teazle, Lady Gay Spanker, The Fool’s Revenge once more with Phelps, Ingomar, The Porter’s Knot … and then Liverpool for Christmas, as Jack Frost in Queen Bee (‘acted and sang in a style seldom witnessed in this kind of performance’). Manager: Mr E D Davis.

1870 was spent, again, largely with Davis, largely in Newcastle, largely en famille, and in March 1871, a second child, a son, Ernest Nathaniel Lambert Jobling was born. The baby was put in the care of a nurse while Emily continued to follow Davis to Blyth, York, Whitby, Sunderland and back to Newcastle, but 21 August 1871 small Ernest died, aged 5 months.

Emily carried on. Trouping around the north with Davis playing everything from East Lynne to The Colleen Bawn, The Power of the Heart and Charles II, to a musical comedy drama written by Cunningham Bridgman, with music by one amateur Frederic Clay, a Mr Liddell and .. tiens! .. Mr W A Leggatt of Jersey, now widowed and living in Alnwick. Shipmates was produced by Davis at Sunderland (1873) with Emily featured and making a success of a Clay song ‘Lover Mine’.

In 1874 a second daughter, May, was born.

Emily seemed to have given up theatrical ambition for family life, and her appearance over the next years were almost all in the north. She took to appearing as a guest with amateurs, and I spot her only rarely on the London boards, playing Twelfth Night for Charles Wyndham, Hamlet at the Park Theatre with Creswick and Fanny Huddart, Guy Mannering at Alexandra Palace with Foli, Gertrude Cave-Ashton and Wilford Morgan replacing, guess who, Sims Reeves (20 May 1876), as well as giving her Diana Vernon at Liverpool. When the famous Compton Benefit Trial by Jury, with its cast of celebrities was given, in March 1877, Emily was amongst the starry bridesmaids.

Again, a pregnant bridesmaid. 22 May 1877, at 19 Scarsdale Villas, London, she gave birth to her third daughter, Emily Alice Jobling.

She still continued to take the odd job. She sang Madame Lange to the Clairette of Connie Loseby in a production of La Fille de Madame Angot mounted by Alfred Cellier, she sang Siebel in Faust with Ellie Telma back in Guernsey, but seemingly she was, at this time, concentrating on being a wife and mother. So a comfy little job, in London …

So, now we get to the bit that everybody knows. Emily took a job at the Opera Comique, where the comic opera HMS Pinafore was being produced. She wasn’t cast in the main piece, but she played the little forepiece as Mrs Nankeen Worcester in Cups and Saucers with Richard Temple and, so it seems, as usual in such situations, covered the ladies’ roles in the principal attraction of the evening. I see that, during the run of Pinafore she deputised not only for Harriet Everard as Buttercup, but also for Emma Howson as Josephine.

At Christmas 1879 she was engaged at Bradford playing Queen Lucidora opposite the eternal Carry Nelson, but she was back in town in the new year when the incident occurred that would propel her into a new London role. Harriet Everard was injured in rehearsals for The Pirates of Penzance’s London production, and it was the ever-useful Emily who was called on ‘pro tem’ to introduce the role of Gilbert’s ‘piratical maid of all work’ to London. The opening night reviews mostly concentrated on her ‘jump in’ rather than her performance (‘acquitted herself remarkably well’ ‘much spirit and drollery’) but Emily proved herself more than just a jump-in, and played the role of Ruth for several months before Miss Everard and Alice Barnett took over. The management presented her with a suitably inscribed bracelet of thanks. I wonder where that is now.

She appeared in some more Bridgman pieces (Lovers’ Knots, Satisfaction ‘mirthful and vivacious), visited Bristol again, played with amateurs again, appeared in an unfortunate comic opera entitled Lola, and was hired again by the W S Gilbert team, for John Hollingshead’s revival of Princess Toto. Once again, she shared the forepiece Quid pro Quo, this time with George Temple. When the brief run of the comic opera finished, however, Emily stayed on at the Opera Comique. She was cast not only alongside George and Richard Temple and Robert Brough in Lovers’ Knots, but in the main play, in the character role of Mrs Pounceby in George Sims’s hit comedy The Mother-in-Law with its Aesthetic Quadrille.

An Adamless Eden

Emily appeared sporadically over the early 1880s both with amateurs (Portia, Rosalind etc) and professionally, now in character roles (Duchess of Breeks in An Adamless Eden, Seraphine Lovering in Doctor D), before in 1886 she was cast in the production of Pinero’s The Schoolmistress at the Court Theatre. It was the same story again. Cast in the supporting character role of Mrs Admiral Rankling, she again jumped in for a significant period for Mrs John Wood in the title-role of the hit play during its 10-month run.

Her new ‘fach’ as a character lady, playing vinegarish spinsters was established.

Mrs Wearwell in Mischief, Mary Ann in the Gaiety Theatre’s starry but misconceived Frankenstein, Lady Chartris in the try-out of Rutland Barrington’s Mr Barnes of New York and Mrs Ashwell in his The Dean’s Daughter ...

And then Emily’s name went missing from West End bills. Why? She was in Italy, with her daughters, to give them an ‘Italian’ musical education. And Lily turned into ‘Agnes Giglio’. Yes. The other two remained ‘Elsie Cross’ and ‘May Cross’.

Back in England, Emily joined Mrs Langtry’s company at the Haymarket for The Queen of Manoa (‘a most amusing depiction of an amateur recitress’), took part in a brief piece by the faithful Rutland Barrington (Bartonmere Towers), and did one more of her ‘saving the furniture’ acts when, cast in a supporting role in Pinero’s The Amazons, she succeeded to the star role when Rose Leclercq departed.

Rose Leclercq

She played at Terry’s Theatre, the Garrick and with Olga Nethersole’s company, travelled to New York with Beerbohm Tree’s troupe, staged a wee piece Lady Dorothy’s Scheme with her three daughters at Newcastle, then joined Elsie in Barrington’s unsuccessful attempt to the revive the German Reed entertainment. Once again Emily took a Priscilla Horton role – if one from a later era -- as Daphne in Happy Arcadia.

In 1895-6 she played at Terry’s Theatre, as the schoolmistress, Miss Romney, in The Strange Adventures of Miss Brown, and then as the sour Mrs Jedbury in the over a hundred nights of Jedbury Junior. Her last musical engagement was as Mrs Wapshott in the disappointing Belinda, and it seems that her last London appearance was with Lena Ashwell in Louis Parker’s Mayflower at the Metropole, Camberwell in 1899.

All three daughters had, by now, ventured on to the stage.

‘Lily’ (who tried being ‘Lily Ernst’ when she wasn’t ‘Agnes Giglio’) appeared in concert, the musicals The Baroness and The Venetian Singer and played Emily’s role of Di Vernon in a Scottish tour of Rob Roy before visiting South Africa (‘of Covent Garden fame’) where she married surveyor Edward Hopper (Cape Town 27 December 1895). She died 4 May 1961. Her son, Humfrey (sic) Greenwood Hopper, RN Captain, DSO, Croix de Guerre, RHS (1898-1992), had a distinguished naval career.

‘Elsie’, after a few years as an ingenue (The Geisha, Trilby, German Reed entertainment, Lost Stolen or Strayed, The New Barmaid, My Soldier Boy), married Charles Heyward Pitts-Tucker, lawyer (17 June 1899), and settled in Barnstaple, where she died in 1957.

May (‘Mary’), after appearances in several London musicals (His Excellency, The Kangaroo Girl) and touring plays (Trilby) wed engineer Arthur Lipscombe Begbie and died 1 January 1954 in Barnes.

Emily herself had more or less given up performing when she died, while on a visit to Elsie, in Barnstaple 4 January 1904. She was long survived by her husband, who died only 12 December 1921 at Port Sonachan in Argyleshire.

So, Emily Cross, actress, had a career of nearly forty years, of which her engagement as Ruth in The Pirates of Penzance was only one item. In her later years, she became favourite casting for spinster schoolmarms and acidulous Duchesses in the works of such as Pinero, but it is as Ruth, rather than that, or her early acclaimed Shakespearian work, that she is remembered.

Fred Clifton: a G&S player unveiled...

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Fred Clifton. Yes, the whole world of Gilbert and Sullivan scholarship knows of Fred Clifton. He’s the comic actor-singer who almost was. The man who after having played supporting roles in The Sorcerer (Notary) and HMS Pinafore (Bobstay) was intended for the London role of the Sergeant of Police in The Pirates of Penzance. But a certain Rutland Barrington begged for the part … so Fred’s chance for fame was pretty well lost. And it never really came again.

David Stone has summarised the central part of ‘Fred’s’ career on his G&S archive site, so I am not going to repeat that here ... I’ll just put in the bits about his life, rather than his career, that I’ve discovered.

 So, to start with, who actually was Fred? We have been longtime told that he was born in Birmingham, 29 May 1844. And guess what, half of that, I now discover, is right! And it is the date that is right! ‘Fred’ was actually born in Dudley, and it was his father’s name that was Fred. He was Tom. There they all are, in Castle Street, Dudley, in the 1851 census: Fred the hairdresser from Peterborough, mama Eliza, and four children of whom Tom is the oldest.

Oh, and their name is not, of course, Clifton. Fred was born Thomas Husler Green. How’s that for a discovery? And how did I discover it? Well …

Let’s dip into the early career. Someone said that ‘Fred’ started his career at Reading in 1861. Perfectly possible, but the first reference I’ve found to ‘Fred Clifton comique’, in tiny provincial  concerts, comes a year or two later.

But very soon, it’s ‘Mrs and Mrs Fred Clifton’. Really? I have to admit I never really believed it. ‘Marriages’ were not always of a fact in the Victorian theatre. But this one was a fact! And the lady? She was Mdlle Therese Brunelli, from Italy, pupil of San Giovanni (or sometimes ‘Don Giovanni’), prima donna La Scala, Milan, soprano …

And, wait a minute. 1859 already, Miss Brunette and Mr Clifton touring with Fred Younge's vaudeville and Petite Opera company ...? Is it they? ... it looks like it!

Anyway, ‘Mdlle Brunelli’ wasn’t rubbish. During her career, she sang major roles in London. But she was no Italian. Of course, she didn’t know that Census records would one day be on the internet, so in 1871, when Tom was pretending to be ‘Fred Clifton’ she blithely put herself down as Mrs Ellen M Clifton, born Teignmouth, Devon. 

Well, she was actually born Ellen Matilda Hird in Shaldon, across the water from Teignmouth, and she married Tom Green 13 November 1862 at Liverpool. And it was from that marriage record that I found out that ‘Fred Clifton’ was really Tom Green. 

The couple performed together in music halls and the like for several years (‘Mr & Mrs Fred Clifton, burlesque operatic, high and low comic, duettists and solo comic and sentimental singers’), often around the Hull or Sculcoates area where Ellen’s folk (father was a customs tide-watcher) lived. Dioramas, operettas, music-hall sketches – I have a long list of minor dates – until Mr D’Oyly Carte (agent) discovered ‘Therese’. And next thing she was up in London, starring in the title-role of Black Crook at the Alhambra!

At the same time, Fred was traipsing round with the Eldred opéra-bouffe company, and then as a support to Jolly John Nash in his ‘musical, mimetic, Protean’ act..

And then, somehow (I’m sure someone knows how), he, like Messrs Grossmith and Barrington, moved out of the ‘entertainment’ business and into Mr Carte’s company ..

Also, around about that time, it seems that ‘Fred’ dropped Ellen, and waltzed off with a lady who appears to have been a chorine named Mary or Marie Glover. They promptly had one daughter in England (while ‘Therese’ staunchly still billed herself as ‘Mrs Clifton’) and then fled across the Atlantic, as ‘bigamists’ in those days had a habit of doing, to where ‘Fred’ would find a moderate career and an obviously fulfilling family life which produced six more (illegitimate) children before his death in Boston on 7 September 1903.

‘Therese’ put an end to her singing career in the early 1880s, and can be seen in the 1891 and 1901 census working as an attendant at the Lunatic Asylum at Banstead in Surrey …

And that’s it.

So there you are. The details and facts which the various articles on Fred’s professional career, and all those G&S books don’t tell you, here they are! … come on, it only took me twenty years ..