From Wales to Broadway ... with Bells on!

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I was doodling over my morning cuppa, wondering whose life and career I would delve into today, when I chanced on a delightful photograph of Miss Laura Joyce. Victorian vocalist. I remembered investigating her years ago – probably as a sometime rival to Emily Soldene – so, well, why not her? If Microsoft hadn’t rendered her file unreadable. Nope! It had survived.

I glanced at her obituary … 'born in Berkshire 1858, real name Hannah Joyce Maskell, trained at the Royal Academy…’. Three lies in one breath! Undoubtedly, the Goddess of Truth and her pageboy, Mr Gänzl, were needed. So I loined up my girths, dug away, and now, with my daily lime and gin, I shall render the correct facts on the lady – which are pretty easy to sort out – for your delectation. Small warning, for some reason I gathered minutious notes of Laura’s background, all those decades ago, and I’m going to put most of them into this essay: so you can skip down a bit, if that doesn’t interest you. It interests me. I like to know the family background of my artists …

So first, place and date of birth. Laura Joyce Maskell’s birth record says she was born in the Commercial Road, Newport, Monmouthshire, Wales. Yes, Laura. She was always Laura. Though I can imagine that some handwritten ‘Laura’ might at some stage have been misread as ‘Hannah’. Anyway, Hannah had nothing to do with it.

The date of her birth was 6 May 1854. Has someone got mixed up with her Manchester christening which didn’t take place till later? Anyway, 1854.

Father was one James Henry Maskell (b Islington, 20 August 1824), son of the elder James Henry Maskell, mine host of the White Horse Inn and Posting House, Fetter Lane (d 78 Camden Road, 29 December 1870) and his wife … Joyce. I know little about the younger James. And the little isn’t very flattering. I see him in the 1861 census, saying he’s an auctioneer, and I see him at least once being bankrupted. That, plus future form, makes me think he was a bit of a hopeless Henry. He had two siblings who went into showbiz: George K who was a sometime manager of the Devonport Theatre and perished one night in the river near Gourock Pier, while seemingly out trolling, and Fanny ‘of the Brighton Theatre’ who became Mrs Walter Baynham ‘of the Brighton Theatre’.

 Mother was Maria Dalton Dauncey, daughter of James Dauncey sometime of Uley, Gloucestershire. The Daunceys appear to have been into the profitable local clothmaking manufacture. Maria was a tall, ‘imposing’ woman with ‘a sonorous voice’ and she subsequently decided on a career as a Reciter and Reader under the name ‘Mrs Dauncey Maskell’. So James became ‘Mr Dauncey Maskell’. Mrs Maskell was mildly appreciated as a ‘reader of average ability’ in women’s clubs (‘The Bells’, ‘The Diver’, ‘Dream of the Reveller’), from about 1864, when I see her in the ‘elocution class’ of the Barnsbury Institute.

Anyway, this unpromising pair produced a daughter (just one, I have a feeling they gave up trying) who was going to outshine anyone else in the family. And it must be admitted, one or both of them certainly gave her the chance. She was plugged and pushed from an early age. But she did NOT study at the Royal Academy of Music. She was coached in acting by her mother, and she studied music at the underrated London Academy of Music. Teacher: Schira. Who was perfectly good teacher.

Next ‘fact’. She made her debut at the Strand Theatre in The Loan of a Lover. Well, it’s not a total lie, this time. But I don’t think that non-professional performances really count as a ‘debut’. This event took place 4 August 1870, and it was an amateur evening mounted by her mother (’to show off her two pupils’). It was a very amdram event. The other girl went to pieces, missed entrances, mamma hadn’t learned her part, had to be loudly prompted and only Laura gave a performance. But Mamma (I presume) continued to supply tickets and paras to the press, who reported ‘Miss Maskell is destined for the lyric stage and arrangements have been made to bring her out in English opera next season’, before sending the teenager out on ‘a starring tour through Lancashire and Yorkshire’ in ‘an entertainment called Happy Hours of Fanciful Fun by Frank Green and Alfred Lee and, oh dear, Papa. She survived. Manchester even found her ‘a clever versatile and attractive actress and sustains with éclat a long series of character sketches and impersonations with the utmost vivacity and brilliance’. So Mamma decided to bring her to town. 

On 11 May 1871 Mamma gave an evening at St George’s Hall. And Laura was starred in two soi-disant operettas. Cupid mid the Roses and Love’s Disguises. Once again, everything but Laura was a shipwreck, and she headed back to the Manchester Mechanics’ Institute and like venues …

 But salvation was coming. Manchester obviously like her and, at Christmas 1871 she was cast as Oberon in the prologue to The Children in the Wood at the Theatre Royal. The Erapronounced: ‘in Miss Laura Joyce the theatre has secured a valuable actress and vocalist’. During 1872 she toured, as one of his attendant sylphs, with Howard Paul … but, more importantly, she somehow got herself on the books of a high-flying agent: Mr D’Oyly Carte.

The big musical and spectacular theatre managers of New York fed off agents such as Mr Carte for new and lovely performers. Niblo’s Garden had done a treat with such as the slightly passée British Mrs ‘Millie’ Lawrence of the music halls who had made the hit of The Black Crook under the pseudonym ‘Millie Cavendish’. There had been mishaps, such as poor Lucy Egerton in The White Fawn, but, by and large, ‘blawsted’ British was as fashionable in the New York theatre as, these days, are loud Russian sopranos in Berlin.

Jarrett and Palmer were about to produce their latest Niblo’s spectacular, and they contacted Mr Carte for starry singing ladies. Carte lined up the big, blonde soprano Cornélie d’Anka for them, and then a fine little singer named Marie Ros[s]etti (she was Miss Brennan from Norwich). But Cornélie she changea-da-mind, so Miss Laura Joyce was sent instead. And thus she set sail on the City of Baltimore 15 October 1872 for what was to be a new and splendid career. Oh, and of course, Mamma came too.

Miss Brennan from Norwich

The two English girls (and the mise-en-scene) were the successes of Leo and Lotos, and Laura’s singing of ‘The Beautiful Blue Danube’ (‘her powerful voice floating along’) was a highlight. Miss Brennan then went off to try herself in opera in Europe, but Miss Joyce stayed. Maybe Mamma couldn’t get out of her old mindset, and at one stage it was announced the Laura would bring out the old ‘entertainment’, but happily she didn’t. She stayed on at Niblo’s to feature in Azrael (Lisette) and The Beats of New York (Mary), and then she went and got married. 

She married one James Valentine Taylor, a well-off young man from Boston who was well-off only on inherited money. Which, in traditional fashion, he was spending fast. I sha’n’t spend time on Mr Taylor. They had two sons … between which Mrs Taylor returned to the stage to star in the title-role of Evangeline at the Boston Globe, alongside Harry Beckett … and divorced. She claimed he was drunk and violent, he claimed she and her family were draining him dry, and that father was the drunk … one way and another, I think it was not a marriage made on Olympus. We don’t need to follow them further, do we. Well, I have, but …

She returned to the stage at Christmas 1875, starring at the Boston Globe as Prince Amabel in Turko the Terrible, after which I see her in concert with the Berger Family and Jules Levy, then playing Caste (Polly Eccles) and Our Boys with the ‘New England Comedy Company’. Mamma was lecturing to Boston’s ladies about ‘What I Know About Readers and Reading’.

Then Laura escaped from Boston. She went to play her Evangeline role in Philadelphia, and there got a 6-month’s engagement with John Ford. Baltimore, Washington … Miss Hardcastle in She Stoops to Conquer, Lady Wagstaff in Pink Dominos, Miss Zulu in Forbidden Fruit … she ‘paralysed Joseph Jefferson with her Lydia Languish at Washington DC...’ played in Camille with Modjeska, and when her divorce was settled ventured back to Boston for more Evangeline …

 If her career seemed, at the moment, to be axed towards the non-musical stage, that was soon to change. In November 1878, she was hired to play Germaine to the Serpolette of Catherine Lewis in Les Cloches de Corneville, after which she appeared with another company (10 February 1879) as an ‘an admirable Buttercup’ to the Josephine of Annie Pixley. She was hired for more Buttercups, with Annis Montague and William Castle (Haverly’s Theater, Brooklyn, Philadelphia) and also took the title-role in Fatinitza and played Lady Allcash in Fra Diavolo, in the American musical The First Lifeguards in Brighton and as Lange in La Fille de Madame Angot.

In February 1880 she was hired, in the midst of a weak cast, by D’Oyly Carte to play Ruth in a firstPirates of Penzance in Chicago.She, A W F McCollin (Major General) and Marie Conron (Josephine) just saved the pirate ship from sinking.

Later that year she was engaged for Daly’s Theatre, New York. She played in a mixture of non-musical and musical plays (Hebe Josselyn in Our First Families, Signora Zanina in a perversion of Nisida entitled Zanina, Silena in Needles and Pins -- and deputising for Ada Rehan in the lead --, Gabrielle Prince in Quits, Mrs Leonora D Livermore in Americans Abroad, Georgette in Royal Youth, Merope Mallow in Cinderella at School), but henceforth she was to become a prized komische Alte in the musical theatre … and not just any theatre: she played for Comley Barton, at the Bijou, the Casino, the heart of American comic-opera world, and in the companies of John McCaull.

In the 1880s she appeared as Bathilde in Olivette, Lady Jane in Patience, Lady Sangazure in The Sorcerer, Mrs Cowslip in Virginia, Donna Scolastica in Heart and Hand, Manola in La Princesse de Trébizonde, Diana then Juno in Orphée aux enfers, Palmatica in The Beggar Student, Lady Clare in Nell Gwynne, more Lady Janes, more Ruths ..

In the middle of all this, she changed her name. She became Laura Joyce Bell (3 March 1883). She married the musical-comedy star Digby Valentine Bell. He took in Mamma and the two boys, they had one daughter together, and lived happily ever after for the 20 years until Laura’s death. Mamma lasted longer. Papa didn’t like Nyack, NJ, and fled back to Britain, but I guess he knew what side his bread was jammed and he was soon back.

McCaull was at his peak, at this time, shuffling first-class comic opera companies round America  -- I see Laura in The Mikado, The Crowing Hen, Indiana, Ruddigore – until finally he had to rationalise, and reduce to one company. He kept Laura to be his star character contralto, and Emily Soldene went home.

However, the golden period was over. Laura appeared in a series of indifferent American musicals (The Tar and the Tartar, Jupiter, The Queen of Brilliants, Princess Bonnie, Madeleine, The Sphinx, Nancy Lee etc) and toured in companies with her husband, first in comic opera, then, with considerable success, in farce comedy (The Midnight Bell, The Hoosier Doctor, The Walking Delegate, Joe the Hurdy Gurdy Gentleman).She took over from Ada Deaves in The Burgomaster in Chicago, and appeared with DeWolf Hopper, as Mrs Bardell, in Mr Pickwick (Digby was Sam Weller) …

And midst all this Papa died in New York (4 September 1897 aged 74).

Mamma lasted twenty years longer (d 2 December 1917), but Laura didn’t. She died in at her home at 1476 Lexington Ave, NYC 29 May 1904 of ‘heart disease’.

I’ve followed up the three children, Valentine, Herbert and Mrs Harry C Schlichting (inter alia), but have found naught to tell. The memorable Digby, of course, is enshrined in my Encyclopaedia of the Musical Theatre which everybody has …

Phew. Basta. 7.15pm. I think I’ve earned another lime (and gin). Now, who tomorrow?

The first modern Olympic Games ..

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We all know when the first Olympic Games of the modern era took place, don’t we?

Of course. Athens, 1896.

Wrong. We are quarter of a century too late with the fact and forty years late with the idea.

I have in front of me a report on the Olympian Games, date line 27 November 1870. Warning ‘it is only lately that anything like a systematic course of training for competitive athletic exercises has been seriously entertained’, it goes on to describe how the bequest of a certain wealthy Peloponnesian, living in Jassy, by the name of Evangelos Zappas (d 1865), had left a sum of thirty thousand francs per annum ‘to assist in establishing an Exhibition of [Greek] National Industry and of Competitive Athletics sports under the title of the ‘Olympia’ … [to] recur at intervals of four years, as in ancient times’.

A ‘tasteful building’, the Zappeion, 50 metres by 25, was erected among the ruined columns of the temple of Jupiter Olympus, to house the exhibition, and the ‘Olympian Games’ took place ‘on a recent Sunday afternoon in the ancient stadion at Athens’. Gosh! Those were the days! The games all over in an afternoon.

The stadion had in recent years been ‘a grass grown hollow frequented by flocks of sheep’, so the King had to buy up the paddocks from the ‘owners’. Which meant he got to keep the marble Hermes that was dug up. The excavations also uncovered the ancient marble judges’ (?) chairs and the ring of the race track …

When the big afternoon arrived the place was packed. 20,000 spectators it was estimated. And ‘some thirty well-formed men, whose flesh-coloured tights were the nearest approximation to the oiled nakedness of their ancestors’ appeared to take part. There was jumping (with and without the pole), and wrestling and running – 2 lengths of the stadion, so circa 400 metres – rope climbing, climbing the 20 metre mast, rope-pulling, throwing the 25cm discus or quoit, javelin throwing not for distance but at a target… and at the end of each event the victor climbed to the King’s seat to receive an olive crown from the royal hands. Second place got an olive branch from the Queen. Third a sprig of bay leaves. Mr Zappas had asked for gold and silver medals, but the olive was regarded as more authentic. And probably less expensive.

‘On the whole’ reported our witness, the [feats] were of a higher order of merit than was generally expected at this, the first attempt to revive the Olympic Games on the spot where the ancient Greeks covered themselves with glory over twenty-two centuries ago’.

I wonder if there was a second Olympian Games in 1874. Or if Mr Zappas’s money got sidewound into something else. I wonder if the King stuck with the enterprise. Probably not, given the state of Greece in the late C19th. But I must say, give or take the flesh-coloured body-stockings, I would have so loved to have been there. When Games were Games, and synchronized swimming and ping-pong weren’t invented …

A little more history. Mr Zappas. I’m sorry he wasn’t around to see his games. He’d been trying so hard for so long. And he had even got the Queen-Regent of Greece to sign a decree as long ago as 1858, re-establishing the Olympic Games. Sponsor, of course, Mr Zappas. Well, he got the Exhibition off the ground in 1859, but the Games (in spite of what is written) had to wait a bit longer. Still, when, in 1896, the new proposal to mount the ‘international’ (alas, dread word) games was mooted ‘mainly due to France and America’ and ‘the sudden growth of a taste for athletics in France’ was begun Evangelos was not forgotten. The press remembered his efforts.

Do folk today? I wonder. Pierre de Coubertin, secretary of the original 1896 committee (the president was the Baron de Courcel) gets the credit nowadays of being the father of the bloated baby now known as ‘the Olympics’. I think that title belongs to Evangelos.

PS can we reintroduce the long-jump with pole?

PPS this story isn't new, Evangelos is even on Wikipedia, but it is new to me, and the description warmed me!

A Bit of Jessie Bondage

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Or, stuff about the lady you, maybe, didn’t know...

BOND, Jessie [Charlotte] (b Pratt Street, London 10 January 1853; d Worthing 17 June 1942)

I have decided not to include in this collection of essays those performers who have had an entire book or books devoted to them … and Jessie Bond supplied her own, which is apparently (I have not read it) reasonably factual. But, in spite of the fact that the D’Oyly Carte fictions concerning her pre-Cartesian life have been largely swept away, and replaced by something nearer reality …

Anyway, I’ve decided to deal only with her early concert life and leave her when she takes to the comic opera stage.

Jessie was the daughter of John Bond (jr), a hereditary piano-maker, and lawyer’s daughter Elizabeth née Simson (m 13 April 1848), born in Camden Town, apparently in the Simson house, in 1853. She was the third child of a family which included two elder brothers and soon after two younger sisters.

The family moved to Liverpool when Jessie was three, and she studied piano with Isouard Praeger, making what appears to have been her first appearance at the Hope Hall in his concert of 18 May 1865 ‘aged 11’ alongside another local pianistic teeny aged 12. The next year (8 June 1866) the little girls repeated their act.

She subsequently studied voice with local music-master Ferdinand Alexis Schottländer, and made her public debut as a vocalist 18 November 1869 at a concert of his pupils, singing ‘Ah, quel giorno’ (Semiramide) and her teacher’s ditty ‘Oh, do say yes’. In 1871 (30 January) she made her ‘second appearance in public’ at a concert under her own name, singing ‘O thou afflicted’ (St Peter), the Dinorah goatherd song and his ‘The Spanish Beggar Girl’.

We are told that the teacher was a bad egg, and that he seduced the teenager (or worse) and forced or bamboozled her into a marriage (9 March 1870). A child was born, and died, he was allegedly unfaithful, and the marriage ended in divorce in 1872. Weird story.

Anyhow, Ferdinand whisked off to Ireland, remarried, had more children and lived long enough to see his ex-wife become a star.

Jessie was seen in Lancashire concerts for the next few years: with Mr and Mrs Howard Paul at the Royal Alexandra and the Queen’s Hall, in her first Messiah with the Liverpool Societa Armonica, singing ‘Ah quel giorno’, ‘Nobil signor’ and two of Horton C Allison’s songs at the young pianist’s concert (1872), at Birkenhead with Edith Wynne and Montem Smith in The May Queen, at Oswestry and the Liverpool Institute in more Messiahs and in a number of de Jong’s concerts in Liverpool, Bradford and Manchester (Dinorah, ‘The Sailor Boy’s Farewell’, ‘Looking Back’, ‘Ah quel giorno’, ‘Auld Robin Gray’, Randegger’s ‘Sleep dearest sleep’, ‘The Sailor Boy’s Return’ ‘quiet unassuming manner … ‘a contralto or mezzo-soprano of good quality, not, however, distinguished by power, and each effort was warmly received’).

She sang at the Liverpool Saturday Concerts (‘Terence’s Farewell’, ‘Wapping Old Stairs’ etc) in 1873, took the contralto music in Elijah with Edith Wynne, Bywater and Orlando Christian in Birkenhead (‘very far above the rank experience has taught us to look for in local singers’) and gave her ‘careful and finished rendering’ of the Messiah at the Liverpool Amphitheatre on Good Friday. She appeared in various miscellaneous concerts, another Messiah at Oswestry, Jephtha at Birkenhead, at Southport with Edward Lloyd, and at the Liverpool Ballad Concerts with Antoinette Sterling, Wynne, J W Turner and Whitney.

In 1876, she enrolled at the Royal Academy of Music. The statement that she ‘went to the RAM [as a pianist] and discovered a voice’ is so much nonsense, as are all other versions which elide the first half dozen years of her career into almost nothing. In fact, she passed a modest time at the Academy and very quickly stopped advertising herself as ‘RAM’.

She appeared at the Aquarium with Annie Tonnellier in September 1876, but she returned to Birkenhead at Messiah time, and also gave a concert (‘of the Crystal Palace and Aquarium'? … I’ve missed something! Ahha! Sullivan's Aquarium?) under her father’s management, at Douglas, Isle of Man in October. She sang ‘Ah s’estinto’ and Barnby’s ‘When the tide rolls in’ and played piano.

In 1877, she was seen in Liverpool with the Philharmonic Society alongside Mrs Osgood, Cummings and Maybrick, sang at Rivière’s proms at the Queen’s Theatre, the Scarborough Aquarium, the Glasgow Saturday Evenings, Kilburn (Balfe’s ‘Killarney’), with Helen Taylor’s lectures at Sadler’s Wells (Elijah), and with Thurley Beale in the concertina concerts at Langham Hall. On Good Friday 1878 she sang with Fred Packard in a Messiah in Liverpool.

Miss Jessie Bond seemed promised a little career, in minor and provincial concerts, to supplement her teaching activities. And then Mrs Howard Paul got terminally ill. And the tale of Jessie Bond, Savoyard, began.

She joined D’Oyly Carte to play a stripped down version of the part intended for Mrs Paul in HMS Pinafore, and stayed on to play the ‘Jessie Bond parts’ in the Gilbert and Sullivan operas. Which is related in detail in many books. Including mine.

She played several other engagements away from Savoy in later years (the musical comedy Go Bang, Gilbert’s His Excellency), and even pops up singing with Madame Konss-Baylis’s Gipsy Revellers, in 1890, before retiring to a rather more satisfactory second marriage.

Jessie’s sister, [Miriam] Neva Bond (1854-1936) – who shows up in the Saturday concerts at Liverpool, along with Miss Florence Bond and Mr W Bond (‘cello) in 1877 -- also became a member of the Savoy company.

Putting Emily in order: W S Gilbert's forgotten lady producer.

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It’s strange how some, once famous, actors, actresses and singers just disappear from public memory. It seems that a life full of theatrical and musical successes, some at the highest level, aren’t as effective as a bit of scandal or a royal or aristocratic connection. Pathetic creatures such as chorines Evelyn Nesbitt and Billie Carleton get a mention in print, now and again, a century and more on, but no one even knows what happened to such great stars as Anaïde Castellan and Amélie Deméric-Lablache. Oh, well, I guess that’s life. And publicity.

 I am prompted to these musings by the case of ‘Emily Fowler’. I suppose there are a dozen or two folk who, like myself, are immersed in the Victorian theatre who know who she was. And yet, she was a leading lady with Henry Neville, Dion Boucicault, Henry Irving, Charles Wyndham … she created the English version of the famous The Two Orphans… and she, three times, took theatres and produced plays such as W G Wills’s Nell Gwynne and a new musical comedy by Freddie Clay and W S Gilbert. So a few of the more avid Gilbert fans know her name. But anything about her?

 Well, much to my surprise (and pleasure), someone has put her on Wikipedia. It’s evident that the piece has been taken holus bolus from, I suspect, The Era, and it mentions a lot of the right plays and places, but it has got a bit tortured on the way from that Era to this. ‘She portrayed Helen Barry in The Two Orphans’. No, my dear, Helen Barry was an actress, a cast member. Emily had the lead, she portrayed the blind girl, Louise. Anyway, I thought I had better tidy her up. So here goes.

First off, Emily wasn’t born ‘Emily’. She was born in Rochdale 31 July 1847, the daughter of Samuel Matthew Fowler, a cabinet-maker, and Sophia née Fox, and christened Susannah, after grandma. There were two sisters (Clarissa, Sophia) and one brother (Samuel), and father died in 1860. By which time the family was in London.

I was pretty sure that with father dead, mother doing sewing for a living, and four children, someone with theatrical propensities would be pretty swiftly out earning a wage. So I looked. There! ‘Miss Fowler’ serio-comic performing at Deacon’s Music Hall next to Sadler’s Wells. Also at Jude’s, Dublin, and the Victoria, Newcastle. But always back at Deacon’s. Oh, look! Miss E Fowler at Palmer’s Music Hall, Upper Holloway (‘sang her serio comic songs with much taste and point and was loudly encored’) in 1863. Then ‘Miss E’ again in 1864 at Thornton’s in Leeds with Harry Liston. Why is she having an initial all of a sudden? 

Splat! Probably because Miss Fowler of Deacon’s brought her little sister on to the bill in Islington. Clara. Clarissa? No. Clara. And Miss becomes ‘Louisa Fowler’. There they are in the 1861 census, in Amwell, with widowed mother Mary, staymaker. Oh, heck, a wholly different family! They are going to get in my non-existent hair!

They didn’t. Louisa and Clara, ‘The Sisters Fowler’ got out of Amwell. In 1866, they got a job singing and dancing in variety in America. From New York, they headed to New Orleans … but they never got there. Their ship, with the Alhaiza opera troupe and their variety team aboard … over fifty theatricals in all … sank, and all but two of the passengers were drowned.

Susannah, now metamorphosed into Emily, surfaced, the following year (14 September 1867) on the London stage. The marvellous ‘Pattie’ Oliver had taken the little Royalty Theatre, in Dean Street, and there produced with huge success a burlesque version of Black-Eyed Susan. Long runs were not the style of the time, and so, as the burlesque travelled on to its 100th, 200th, 300th performance, a few cast changes intervened. Fanny Heath had created the bright little pants part of Gnatbrain. She’d moved on, and Emily (‘a comparatively speaking newcomer’) was hired as her replacement. She was entirely successful, and went on to play another boy, Augustus (‘a youth addicted to smoking surreptitiously’) in the not very successful Humbug, in the familiar forepieces John Jones and Married Daughters and Young Husbands, and then, 21 March 1868, when ‘See-u-san’ had finally been withdrawn, yet another boy, the foppish Florestein in a burlesque of The Bohemian Girl. The Merry Zingara of W S Gilbert.

Emily as Florestein

Pattie closed her season in July, but even without poor Louisa and Clara around, I don’t see ‘Emily’ around again for nearly half a year. This is a feature of her career: she seemed to have money, or access to money. She didn’t do no shit jobs. Just waited around for the good ones. Mind you, she had got married. If you could call it that. He was a chorister in the Royalty company who called himself ‘Renouf’. His actual name was John Frederick Fenner and, since they were wed 3 August 1867, it looks as if Emily was in the chorus at the Royalty before she got her first part with Pattie. Anyway, she got rid of him pretty smartly. Or he wandered off. They both ‘married’ again and he died in 1877.

Back to 1868 and Emily. Her next ‘shop’ was a nice one. John Hollingshead was putting together a company with which to open the brand new Gaiety Theatre. It was in one way unusual, in that a number of its members came, not from the theatre, but from the music halls. There was Annie Tremaine, there was Connie Loseby and … there was Emily Fowler, who, not so long since (well, I’m presuming it was she, Miss E!) had been singing at Thornton’s, Leeds. Annie and Connie would go on to be the singing stars of the Gaiety for years, while Emily moved on, but it seems that, at the start at least, it was Emily (with a less legitimate voice than those girls) who was top of the burlesque-girls list. Alongside burlesque boy, Nellie Farren.

This may be the role of Alice. Emily didn't get into skirts often art this stage.

Thus, on the opening night of the Gaiety, Emily appeared as Butts (a maid) in the play On the Cards, and as principal girl, Alice, in a burlesque of Robert le diable: Robert the Devil of W S Gilbert. Connie and Annie had smaller parts, and Isabella was turned into a beauty role for one Lillian Hastings’s legs. Emily played (‘Queen of Kokatouka’) in the next burlesque, Columbus, too, but, when the season ended, she was up and gone. Where? Why to the little Charing Cross Theatre, from where managers Messrs Bradwell and Field had just made a delicate exit. The new manager was to be Miss E Fowler. Aged 22.

Now, I can’t pass this event by without a very big WHAT? WHY? Leasing a London theatre was a vastly perilous exercise. Hiring a company and staff … they went bankrupt regularly. And Mrs Fowler is still sewing? Sorry, Emily has to be a front for somebody. Or somebody is supplying her with money. Well, I have the odd idea …

 Emily’s management opened with the drama Edendale, left over from the previous managers, and a new burlesque Very Little Faust and More Mephistopheles. She, of course, was Mephistopheles. In the ten months of her season, the theatre played a few old pieces, several burlesques (Abon Hassan, Ixion each with Emily in the title-role), and some new pieces, written and performed as leading man by Mr Wybert Reeve (Won at Last, Not So Bad after all). In spite of mediocre reviews, Reeve’s plays were kept on the bill for a considerable time. Was he Emily’s ‘backer’? However, the season would today be quite forgot, along with Mr Reeve’s plays, and the Illusions of Joseph J Dilley, were it not for the last new production, a musical comedy entitled The Gentleman in Black. Music by Freddie Clay, book by … W S Gilbert. About which enough has been written. Emily was the leading 'boy'.

Miss Fowler’s management of the Charing Cross ended at the finish of June, and it was gossiped that she was going to America. Maybe she did, but not for long, because at Christmas she was starring at the Olympic as Prince Lardi Dardi in The White Cat. And then as Kate Bertram in The Rights of Woman… a bit of a change! And it was a change.

 In 1871, she went out for a short tour with Dion Boucicault’s London Star company, playing Rosie Aircastle in his Elfie and Sam Willoughby in The Ticket of Leave Man, in 1872 she played opposite Dolly Dolaro in the burlesque of Zampa at the Court Theatre, and in 1873 she rejoined Neville, now managing the Olympic, for a run of increasingly important roles (Florence in Mystery, Lady Kate Fanshawe in Sour Grapes, Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing, Lady Betty Noel to the Lady Clancarty of Ada Cavendish, Suzanne in The School for Intrigue, Martha Gibbs in All That Glitters, Louise in The Two Orphans). She played her Much Ado at the Crystal Palace, as well as Helen in The Hunchback, alongside Creswick and Genevieve Ward, took the role of May in a major revival of The Ticket-of-Leave Man, appeared in a Benefit at Drury Lane acting in French (En Wagon)…and then she got married again.

Her husband John Callin Pemberton was the son of actress Amy Sedgwick. Unfortunately, the ceremony came a little too soon. Or fortunately. Anyway, they were divorced in 1879 on the grounds that ‘Mr Renouf’ hadn’t quite died when they were wed, so the marriage was illegal.

Emily moved on to play Katharine in Henry V at the Queen’s, in an unsatisfactory season at the St James’s (The Scar on the Wrist, more Lady Clancarty), and then she once again was billed as manager. Back at the Royalty where she had once been a chorus girl. This time it was shorter, but wholly successful. She appeared in the title-role of W G Wills’s Nell Gwynne and scored a huge success. And a supporting piece, from the French, entitled Scandal,was also liked. The next year, after appearances at Drury Lane (Perdita in A Winter’s Tale), the Princess’s, the Royalty and the Haymarket, she would take the two pieces to the country. Then As You Like It with Henry Neville, Constance in The Love Chase at a Benefit …

And she got married a third time (Reigate, 25 December 1880). And this time she got it right. Her husband was a career military man, Captain (later Major) Walter Latham Cox. Somewhat younger than she. He seems to have been quartered in Oxfordshire for a while.

 Anyway, Emily appeared, now, infrequently on the London stage. In 1881 she joined Henry Irving to play Emily L’Esparre in The Corsican Brothers at the Lyceum, but dropped out, so the papers suggested coyly, to have a baby. I don’t know about that. But for more than a decade Miss Fowler was absent from the West End stage. And then, in 1894, came the news that she had been summoned from China to play Lady Winifred Skipton in a version of Le Gendre de M Poirier for Charles Wyndham at the Criterion. And she came. Unfortunately An Aristocratic Alliance turned out to be a badly-adapted piece and a failure.

And that was it. I don’t think Emily wanted it to be. She advertised ‘disengaged’ through 1895 …

She was still, more or less, in the public eye. So I am rather surprised that, when she died, some time in mid 1897, I can find no report of it, anywhere. No obituary, no listing in the year’s theatrical necrology. And she didn’t die in China, she’s there in the deaths listings for Shoreditch, June quarter 1897. Why? And if she had money, where is her will? So, even if I’ve managed to summarise pretty accurately her splendid theatrical career, Emily still has the odd secret from me…  I suppose it’s another case of shell out a few quid for a death certificate!

The pictures in this article are mostly from the grand Guy Little collection at the V&A. Emily was much photographed …!

Mademoiselle Clary: Sparkeion of Croydon

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For a century and more, one of the puzzles which has troubled folk interested in the C19th musical theatre – and Gilbert and Sullivan in particular – is, who in the tarnation was ‘Mdlle Clary’ who was such a success on the London stage in the early 1870s, starring in opéra-bouffe and creating leading trouser roles in two interesting local musicals, in the early years of the modern British tradition? None of us had the faintest idea. She came from Belgium, made her hit, and vanished. Back to Europe, we supposed. But, oddly, she didn’t ever show up in a theatre again. 

There was simply nowhere to start, so we didn’t really try. When it came to writing a little note on her for my Encyclopaedia of the Musical Theatre, I simple grouped her in with some of the other myriad ‘Mlle Clary’s of the C19th – from the Opéra to the Comédie Française – and wrote:

‘One Mlle Clary (née Poirel-Tardieu), equipped with ‘a remarkably graceful figure, easy movements, a nice soprano voice and a very handsome face’ and billed as being ‘of Saint-Petersburg’, went to Britain as a member of Eugène Humbert's Théâtre des Fantaisies-Parisiennes company which played at the Gaiety Theatre in 1871 (Hélène in La Belle Hélène, Roland in Les Bavards etc) and stayed on, pleading in court, when Humbert tried to force her to return to continue her contract in Belgium, that she suffered too heavily from sea-sickness to make the crossing. Her court performance must have been convincing, for she remained in Britain where she created the rôles of the Grand Duke in Jonas's Cinderella the Younger (1871) and Sparkeion in Sullivan and Gilbert's Thespis, and played Naphtha in a revival of Hervé's Aladdin II, all at the Gaiety, as well appearing as Alexandrivoire in London's L’Oeil crevé (1872), Méphisto in Le Petit Faust at Holborn, and as La Belle Adrienne in Offenbach’s The Bohemians (Le Roman comique, 1873) at the Opéra-Comique. She then vanished from London and, as far as can be seen, from theatrical annals.'

I then turned to the next Mlle Clary, who came along a decade later… and trotted back to my next English singer. But my friend Sam Silvers more or less challenged me, yesterday, in response to my articles on Miss Tremaine and Miss Jolly of the Thespis cast, to sort out Mlle Clary, so this afternoon I thought, well, I may as well have a shot. So I did. And: ‘bullseye’. Oeil crevé.

Madeline (yes, she was called Madeline) was born in about 1846, in France, the daughter of Pierre-Etienne-Emile Poirel and Jeanne-Marguerite-Adelaide Tardieu. Maybe they weren’t married, or maybe the hyphenation was just an affectation, but she was officially plain Jeanne-Marie-Madeleine Poirel.

She made what was called her debut on the Paris stage in the hit comedy Mille Francs et ma fille at the Théâtre Déjazet in April 1868 (‘[elle] joue avec aisance et naturel la piquante Césarine. Elle est jolie et possède une voix agréable, qu’elle sait conduire’) and then I suppose came the Russian bit, the Belgian bit, the British bit, and the disappearing act.

Well, Madeline disappeared for the most common of reasons. No, not death. Marriage. On 24 January 1875, she became the wife of Pierre-Marie-Augustin (ka Auguste) Filon. The marriage took place at Rosière-les-Salines in the Meurthe-et-Moselle area of France, so I imagine that either his family or hers hailed from there. 

Their son, Louis-Napoléon-George Filon was born in France, but they later moved, in comfortable circumstances, back to Britain and settled in Croydon. In the 1901 census they can be seen at Godwin House, 68 St Augustine’s Avenue. The elders are living on their own means, and Louis is a maths teacher. They have a cook and a housemaid … By 1911, Louis has married a Swiss lady, and has two children, Madeline and Sydney, (and two servants) of his own, and is Professor of Mathematics at London University.

The Croydon dynasty continued as the grandchildren wed … and, well, Sophia Florsted Filon if you are still in Croydon, you are 20 years younger than my colleague Andrew Lamb, and you could have bumped into him on the railway station or in the supermarket … if only we had known!

So, there we are. All these decades we’ve been thinking ‘Mlle Clary’ had disappeared into the darkest Moselle, or a mausoleum, and she was, until her death, 30 December 1930, just down the road at Godwin House, Croydon …

A short career, but a delicious and memorable one. And now, at last, we know!

The swinging sisters from Port Huron or, more Madame Sanyeah …

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My cry for help on Phoebe the trapezist from Carlisle, and her alter egos, Ada and Maud, brought some immediate results! Betsy Miller from California (who has helped me with American delvings so many times before) wrote back…

‘I decided to look for that marriage. Didn't find it, but I did find John Conklin and M'lle Senyeah in San Francisco in January 1873. The 26 Oct., 1873, issue of the San Francisco Chronicle had an article about Sanyeah's Spangles. It begins, "In Justice Joachimsen's Court, yesterday morning, the suit of Phoebe Conklin and John Conklin against Thomas Quackenbush and Leander Sawyer was called. Mr. Conklin was proprietor of the circus which exhibited on Stockton street last Fall. The suit was brought to recover $200, the value of six red and green horse-cloths..." A long list of horse decoration and costumes for people follows and concludes with "one set of silver tights and one whip, which are alleged to be the separate property of Mrs. Conklin, acquired before her marriage." The article mentions that Mrs. Conklin is known on the bills as M'lle Sanyeah. It goes on to say that many of the items had been made by her "crossing the plains" from material purchased in London, Paris, NY, and other places. "Part of the articles she had made, thinking to play Mazeppa and St. George and the Dragon in this city (San Francisco)". She won return of the clothes or $200.’

So we have proof of Phoebe, indeed, for a while, being ‘Mrs Conklin’. But, better, Betsy continues …

‘Another article entitled Romance of the Trapeze was picked up by several papers. I saw it in the Chicago Inter Ocean of Sept 26, 1874. It was bylined Port Huron (Mich) Commercial. Reportedly, a young woman who was appearing with the Washburn Variety Troupe came to the paper to say that she was the youngest of 3 girls who had left Port Huron 8 years earlier. Their father was a painter and photographer who gave up his art to enter the Methodist ministry which he imposed on his family with ‘stern vigor.’ She was 9 years old at the time she left Port Huron. She said the sister ‘next older to herself was the Madame Sanyeah we had heard of, and that she was legally married to the man whose name she bore ... He had taught her to join with him in the perilous flying trapeze performance, and she had shared his dangers, until one day in one of the most thrilling feats her nerves failed her and she fell. Her arm was shattered and when she left the doctor's care her career as a gymnast was ended, for one arm was stiffened so that she might never use it again. Then the younger sister had taken her place.... This younger sister said she had only 4 months experience and had had one fall that laid her up for a while, but ‘she liked the business after all’.

And, sure enough The Evening Star of Washington D. C. reported on May 4, 1874: ‘Maud Sanyeah, while performing at Mahanoy City, Pa., on Wednesday evening, last, fell from a trapeze bar, breaking her left arm. She was taken to Philadelphia and admitted to the Pennsylvania hospital.’ This fall would have occurred after baby Aurelia died 21 March, 1874.’

And here is an advertisement from December 1870 … ‘Samuel Sanyeah brought to this country for the opening of Tammany Hall .. in no way connected with his first Madame Ada Sanyeah (Mrs George Holland) he having separated from her (not she from him) on 6thAugust 1869’. Sam goes on to say that the famous ‘Leap for Life’ was not original to them, ‘we copied it from ‘Perrier’ the Spanish lady gymnast then performing at the Bridge Street Amphitheatre, Manchester England, December 1867’. And he’s performing with Maude.

Well, Sam and Ada were in Manchester in December 1867, and there were two circuses -- Franconi's one featuring Azella , but no advertisements for the Spanish lady or the third-rate Amphitheatre

So, Ada did come to America. Did perform at Tammany and with Yankee Robinson .. and there she is advertising that she has ‘dispensed with male assistance’ and looking for work. There she is playing Mazeppa and The French Spy in Chicago, while Sam and Maude .. or Sam and ‘Mdlle’ are elsewhere … So where does Phoebe fit in? Phoebe Frost professionally known as Mme Sanyeah who ‘married’ 1872 in San Francisco …

And ach! another Madame S! Samuel advertises that due to Maude’s ‘illness’ he will perform 1873-4 with Mlle Leola. Little sister.? So who are Maud and James Sanyeah with Washburns in March 1874? A typo I think. And here is a Madame S – surely Phoebe -- touring with Conklin and arriving back from South America 1 April 1875.

And 20 January 1876, in Indianapolis, Maud has another son, in 1879 yet another, this time in Grand Rapids…

Now I’m in even more of a muddle than I was … and it seems I have far too many real or putative Madame Ss! I’m afraid I’m going to have to spend some more time on these ladies…

PS the 1900 census of the Kankakee asylum tells us that Sam was born in England in 1842, is 57 years of age, a printer and divorced … really?

PS Conklin died in 1885. I see that in 1880 he fathered a son, Charles John Conklin (16 July 1880; d 30 July 1959), later to become well-known as a silent film comedian.  I wonder who the mother was ... Phoebe was in Europe ..

The Jollys: from Buck House to the Workhouse

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JOLLY, Elizabeth (b Somerstown 1827)

JOLLY, Cecilia (b York Rd, Lambeth x 7 October 1832, d Peckham Workhouse 1904)

The fashion for duet-singing in the 1850s produced some outstanding pairs of singing sisters, topped by the Williamses and the Wellses, followed by such as the Broughams, the McAlpines and the Mascalls. Each of these families had the genealogical and musical talent to produce one soprano and one contralto. Mr and Mrs Jolly gave birth (amongst a volley of other babes) to two contraltos.

John Marks Jolly (b London 5 December 1790; d West Square, Southwark 1 July 1864) was a well-known musician in the London theatre and concert room. In his time, he played at most of the principal London theatres, and was conductor at and composed music for several, notably the Sans Pareil as early as 1815, and for a long stint at the Surrey ‘in its palmiest days’. His music was even played before the Majesties at Buckingham Palace.

J M Jolly in 1829

Mr Jolly married Sarah Ann Macklan (23 May 1813 St Botolph without Aldersgate), (1793-1868) and fathered Henry William (1814-1875), Amelia (b Clement Danes x 14 July 1816), Edward Moulton (b St Clement Danes 7 September 1819; d Barrington Rd, Lambeth February 1861), Charles Stuart(b London 17 February 1821; d Edmonton 1882), Sarah Anne (b London 31 October 1823), John Thomas (b 31 May 1825; d 4 November 1828), Elizabeth and Cecilia. Henry William became a musician and emigrated to America, Edward became a musician and stayed in England. The last two daughters became singing sisters.

I first see them out as a pair in June 1849, at Mr J Wild’s concert, but they got under way and into wider notice during the following year. In November they were purveying duets of their father’s manufacture at the National Hall, Holborn, beside Leffler and Perren, and in December they appeared at the Horns, Kennington, when their father presented a set of low-price concerts. The Era noticed ‘two sister voices, similar also in timbre, is a circumstance somewhat rare. The enunciation of both ladies is extraordinarily good, their notes have a full clear bell-like resonance’. They sang Jolly’s duet, ‘Beautiful Spring’, and Elizabeth (whom the Daily News insisted was J M Jolly’s sister, and making her debut on the occasion) gave his setting of Moncrieff’s ‘The Old Chimney Corner’.

In January 1851 they were at the London Mechanics Institute (‘The Lost Heart’), after which they went on the road for publisher Charles Jefferys, as a support act to the boy pianist Heinrich Werner. ‘They possess voices with remarkably deep tone and very clear intonation which combined with their simple and expressive style of singing ..’ applauded Liverpool, while Manchester opined ‘The elder one has a fine organ and they sing well together’. 

Thereafter I spot them at the Strand Music Hall, and various city concerts, and in January 1852 in Glasgow singing at Julian Adams’s concerts. In June, they started a season at the Vauxhall Gardens.

J E Carpenter

In 1853 they were hired by the writer and entertainer Joseph Edwards Carpenter (b St Georges With East, London 2 November 1813; d 20 Norland Square, Bayswater 6 May 1885) ‘the distinguished author of up to a thousand songs’ to vocally illustrate his Scenes and Songs from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the most enduring of the mass of Uncle Tom shows which followed the fashion for Mrs Stowe’s book. Carpenter lectured about the authoress and her work, and the girls sang songs with lyrics by him and music by Bishop, Edward Land, J E Perring, Henry Farmer, Bianchi Taylor, Edward Loder, E L Hime and, of course, J M Jolly. The pianist was W S Rooke, once of Amilie fame. The entertainment opened with three straight weeks at the Cabinet Theatre, King’s Cross, and progressed to the Manor House, Hackney and to Crosby Hall, and on 7 February set out from Hastings for a lengthy tour.

When Carpenter’s season finished they returned to concert singing and I note them at ‘Signor Borini’s concerts à la Jullien’ in Dublin 3 October 1853 duetting Jolly’s ‘The Gipsey Sisters’ and duet arrangement of ‘The Minstrel Boy’. Elizabeth gave ‘The Old Chimney Corner’ and ‘The Last Rose of Summer’, Cecilia sang Lover’s ‘The Land of the West’ and Farmer’s ‘The Little Evangelist’.

The following month they were given their chance, in the footsteps of the Misses Wells, at the prestigious London Wednesday Concerts (9 November, ‘The Twin Sisters’) at Exeter Hall, but the engagement seems to have been without a tomorrow.

In 1854 they returned to Carpenter for his new entertainment The Road, the River and the Railwhich had been playing since November at the Polytechnic with a Miss Blanche Younge as its musical part. The piece toured till the end of 1855, after which the Misses Jolly took to the music halls – Holder’s in Birmingham, the Philharmonic in Glasgow, the Surrey in Sheffield – and to a season at the Surrey Gardens. However, their career as a duo had its last flourish in the halls, and they became a fixture in the early 1860s in the choir at the Oxford and Cambridge Music Halls. Leader: John Marks Jolly. 

In 1863-4, they are at the Regent Music Hall, but quite what happened next, I am not sure. What careers the girls had thereafter, they in any case pursued separately. I see ‘Miss Cecilia Jolly’ on the bill at the Imperial Music Hall at Easter 1864, and all other mentions are just ‘Miss Jolly’. Is that Elizabeth, or is there another Miss Jolly?

Miss Jolly, who I presume is Elizabeth (apparently, the better singer of the pair) appears at the Regent, at Cremorne Gardens (‘a fine contralto’) and as principal resident contralto at the Alhambra through till 1867.

A Miss Jolly ‘female tenor’ turns up in the provincial halls and then (the same one?) for a while, as part of a duet team with Mr Tom Everard, comic. But that Miss Jolly is called Annie (‘contralto vocalist and ballad singer’) and later Ella Jolly, and she is still duetting while another one (Elizabeth, aged 42?) appears on the cast lists at the Gaiety Theatre, playing supporting parts in everything from plays to operas (Columbus, Mrs Mingle in Dearer than Life, Trusty in The Clandestine Marriage, Venus in Thespis ‘graceful and womanly’, Sheelagh in The Lily of Killarney &c) between 1871 and 1874 and as Cogia in Ali Baba at the Crystal Palace at Xmas 1871 with W H Payne, Annie Tremaine and J T Dalton. It is this Miss Jolly, surely, who is on the road in 1876 and 1877 in the Cornélie d’Anka and Alice May La Grande-Duchesse companies, and this Miss Jolly who is at the Prince of Wales Theatre, Liverpool, later in 1877 playing Clémentine in Barbe-bleue with R W South’s company. Yes. Pretty surely Elizabeth?

And just maybe in 1878 appearing at the Steam Clock Music Hall, Birmingham. She’d be over fifty, now.

I can’t be totally sure, for I now lose Elizabeth. But not Cecilia. Cecilia had a mishap in 1868, and gave birth to an illegitimate daughter, Cecilia Amy King Jolly (1868-1925). Presumably fathered by a Mr King. Mishaps were to be her lot, it seems, for – still calling herself ‘vocalist’ – she can be seen, in the 1881 and 1891 census living in the Peckham workhouse. She is still there, now ‘retired vocalist’, in 1901 and she died there, three years later.

The family historians say that Elizabeth died in 1916, aged 89. They also say she married one George Green Fenn in 1863. I don’t believe a word of it. The Eliza Jolly who married farmer Fenn of Streatham in 1861 was 32, and the daughter of John William Jolly, merchant … sigh, if it doesn’t fit, push it and squeeze it and pretend it fits … bloody family historians!

So more searching to do. Venus is still missing.

Coda: I have stumbled upon this amazingly vitriolic 1857 letter, written by someone who dared not sign his name, to Ben Webster of the Haymarket, concerning father Jolly ... before it vanishes, I append it here ...