Cartesians: B is for Broadway ..

The British nineteenth-century performers who played roles in the works of Messrs Sullivan and Gilbert did so, per se, pretty well entirely under the management of Richard D'Oyly Carte. Outside Britain, however, it was quite a different kettle of kippers. Carte brought companies, or too-often-underwhelming players, from England to give his definitive Savoy productions before American audiences, but he and his helpers, from E E Rice to John Stetson, also cast local artists, artists Anglo-American or plain American, who did not bear the stamp of the Savoy and all who steered her. A good number of both 'nationalities', who worked under such legitimate producers (I speak not of the provincial female Rackstraws and the male Buttercups), made a fine success. 

Up to now, I haven't included many of the breed in this series of wee pieces. I had enough to do weeding through the opaque seas of Savoy. But the other day, glancing through the G&S archive, I saw well-known (to me) names sitting untouched amongst the sludge of undecipherable chorines, and thought... errm. For some reason, I was in Letter 'B'. 'B' is a big letter, but apart from the wilfully obtuse ones such as Annie Bernard (what WAS her identity?) and G S Bradshaw (né Smith), the ones whom I've covered in my Encyclopaedia of the Musical Theatre, and such as Fred Billington who have been written about, at length, by others, most of the principal players who were left to be 'uncovered' were folk from the left-hand side of the Atlantic. So ... perhaps, time for a little cleaning of the B-stables?

Whom to choose? Baker, Barry, Barton, Benitz, Branson, Broderick, Burnham ...

Go...

Emma Mabella BAKER (b Aurora, Ill 18 July 1853; d Aurora 16 October 1936) is very often described -- then and now -- as the first Katisha in America. That is really nothing to boast about. The production concerned was a pirate one, which was shunted off Broadway after one performance. Emma Mabella would play Katisha (well) many times, around America, in the next 20 years, but her 'first', statistically correct as it may be, is worthless.

Miss Baker was born in Aurora, the daughter of Leonard H Baker, variously described as a milkman or a painter, and his wife Clementine née Dunham (b New York 29 January 1828; d Aurora 13 May 1920). She studied at the Jennings Seminary in that place, and settled down as a church choir singer and a music teacher. She was 27 years old, single, while her two younger sisters were married and breeding, when -- I wonder how -- whoever was putting together the company to support pianist Mrs Rivé-King in a concert tour, happened on her. She was hired, along with Mme Laura Bellini 'her first appearance in America ... three years leading soprano at La Scala' (she was Miss Laura Woolwine from Lebanon Ohio, and she'd not been near La Scala) and baritone George H Broderick, to tour from 8 November 1880 at Boston ...

 

It went rather well, and Miss Mabella and Mr Broderick moved on to other like engagements. I see them in Kansas with Litta, 

... as half of the Chicago Lyric Opera Company (4 singers, one piano), the Redpath Lyceum's Chicago Madrigal Club, Hayden and Davis's Chicago Church Choir theatre company, and, on 26 June 1883, the pair were married. Emma started a scrapbook, which recently came up for sale on ebay

I hope it went to a good home. It commemorated a grand marriage and good, often joint, professional career of twenty-two years, before George died of a stroke/pneumonia in 1905.

They worked largely in the theatre, in so many different cities and towns and productions and shows that I am not even attempt to be all-embracing ... I see them in the Chicago Museum Opera Company, playing Princess Toto, and at Chestnut Street Theatre, Philadelphia in Polly and as Crab and Eliza in Billee Taylor. On 6 July 1885, they were Pish Tush and Katisha in that flung-together Mikado, with Alice Harrison and Roland Reed, and in November, they were playing the same piece with John Templeton's Company, with Lucille Meredith and W H Seymour. In 1886, they took part in Philadelphia's The Mystic Isle, and in 1887 they went out with their own company, playing, of course, The Mikado. George was now Pooh Bah. 

Emma and Helen Lamont in Ruddigore

In 1888, they played with E C Stone's company in Philadelphia, and with a company organised by Stetson which played The Yeomen of the Guard and Ruddigore, featuring Washington soprano 'Helen Lamont' (Mrs Nellie McCartee née Lemon). Miss Lamont staged a summer season at Albaugh's in which the couple played Ruth and the Sergeant in The Pirates of Penzance, more Ruddigore, Yeomen, Mikado plus The Black Hussar, Amorita, Queen's Lace Handkerchief, The Beggar Student, A Night in Venice, Erminie, Nanon et al. Emma had some fine roles to play, from Palmatica to the Princesse de Gramponeur. She was developing a fine line in comedy, which would lengthen her stage career significantly.

She was briefly seen at Dockstader's in the home-made The Tallap[al]oosa , before they set out on another Stetson tour, this time playing the Duchess and the Inquisitor in The Gondoliers in a production voted in many ways better-cast than the Carte one on Broadway. When summer came it was back to Miss Lamont, Albaugh's, and another run of roles including Orlofsky and Blind in The Bat. 

1890 found them touring in Ina and Musette with Lotta and W S Rising, 1891-2 in The Little Tycoon, then summer season in Baltimore, before Emma was hired to play Ultrice in The Mountebanks (George was Elvino) with Lillian Russell. It didn't do wonderfully, but very much better than another home-made Philadelphia comic opera, Richard Stahl's Shing Ching, daughter of the moon (2 October 1893). In 1894, they toured in Philadelphia's Princess Bonnie, and the following year came to rest in San Francisco at the marvellously eclectic Tivoli Opera House. There, they appeared in such pieces as The Black Hussar and The Royal Middy, but also appeared as Mephistopheles and Martha in Faust and Emma 'carried the house by storm' as Minerva 'with an owl perched above her corkscrew curls' in good old Ixion.

In 1897 she played in New York in an American version of Drei Paare Schühe (At the French Ball), The Circus Girl and in 1898 took the role of Bianca in The Bride Elect, before they went off to Long Branch for the summer and an HMS Pinafore on a ship.

In the twentith century, I see her/them in Chris and the Magic Lamp (1900), The Burgomaster (1901), Sis Hopkins (Ma Hopkin, 1902) before they joined the touring company of A Chinese Honeymoon. It was a good engagement, a long engagement, but it was George's last. Emma, thoroughly established as a grande dame comedienne, carried on: two years with Anna Held in A Parisian Model, much less with Eddie Foy in Mr Hamlet of Broadway, The King of Cadonia (1909), Chicago's The Girl I Love, The Three Romeos (1911) ...

The Brodericks had long since retired back to Aurora, and it was there, a quarter of a century on from the effective end of her career, and over thirty years as a widow, 'Mabella' died in 1936.

George H[enry] BRODERICK (b Philadelphia 6 May 1855; d Aurora, Ill 10 May 1905) was one of the four musical sons of a Pennsylvania Irish shoemaker, who started his wokring life apprenticed to a house painter. He went on to a fine, solid career, as a singer in the theatre, working mostly alongside his wife, but his obituary made some of those common colonial claims of Euopean success which, as usual, don't stand up to investigation ..  The investigation, in this case, is befogged by the basso-operatic exploits of his brother, William Broderick, and the initial-muddlements of the newspaper establishment. But if he did, indeed, appear with Mapleson's troupe in America (Ferrando in Il Trovatore 1887, or was it William?), I can find no evidence of him playing in Europe.

I do see him, in 1888 singing with the so-called National Opera Company, playing the High Priest in Die Königin von Saba, Reinmar in Tannhäuser, Balbillus in Nero, and maybe the King in Aida (William is credited, but I think he was Emma Abbotting at the time). The experience seems to have been brief, and the underpar National Opera Company sank also. 

He clearly had a fine bass-baritone voice, which can be heard, to this day, on the recordings he made in 1900, and he proved himself capable of taking operatic roles, such as Mephistopheles, during the couple's time at the Tivoli, but it was in comic and light opera that he made his career. And that, I feel, in spite of a certain lack of humour in his playing. In the hundred or so reviews of his performances that I have read, it is almost inevitably his voice (and his looks) that gets spoken of ... but that is only a guess on my part. After all, he was playing A Chinese Honeymoon at his death ... and his photo as Pooh-Bah doesn't look too stick-like ...

Another to have a long career, was tenor turned comedian, Phil Branson. So why do I not have a portrait of him? Just a sketch of him and his wife in the older and tubbier years of his second career ..

The artist, in gentlemanly fashion, didn't go down to Mrs B's waistline!

Of course, Philip Frederick BRANSON (b St Louis 23 October 1858; d Ridgefield Park, NJ 20 or 21 July 1932), the son of clerk/book-keeper William W Branson and his wife, Carolina née Garthauser, started out, like all of us, as a slim, young vocalist, in his home town of St Louis. I see him in 1877 being appointed to the Jewish Temple at 17th Street and Pine, I see him in 1878 singing the tenor solos in the Mozart Requiem, alongside elder sister Ada (soprano), I see the pair of them singing at the local Church of the Messiah, and in 1979 he is singing Bruch's Odysseus at the Arion des Westens. I see the whole family at 1911 Hickory in the 1880 census, where Phil is firmly labelled as 'tenor singer'. As yet, an amateur. But Moritz Strakosh would put the skids under that. He hired the young man to support Emma Thursby in a concert tour. Just SHE, he, a violinist and a piano. He sang a solo ('Salve dimora' et al), and duetted with the lady as his contribution, and then went home. Back to the church choir, to local concerts and, in 1882, the other local lads in a quartet party. And he took part in his first musical, a local piece entitled L'Afrique (19 May 1881) produced at the Olympic, St Louis with a cast of the town's church singers. John McCaull picked the show up, produced it at New York's Bijou Theatre, and young Branson had a three-weeks taster of the lights of Broadway. 'The best tenor St Louis has had' was on his way.

He went out on the road with the Ford Opera Company, singing alongside what had become of Alice May and her husband, Louis Raymond, as lead tenor in a whole array of comic operas (The Beggar Student, The Merry War, The Queen's Lace Handkerchief, Les Manteaux Noirs, Nell Gwynne, The Little Duke, Fra Diavolo &c), and then joined up with the Thompson Opera Company, playing a similar repertoire. The company included a May Branson. Apparently Phil had married a statuesque lass from Cincinnati. It would not last long. The Thompson company produced a new musical, Manette, to star Carrie Godfrey (Mrs Thompson), but Manette didn't get seen much. When they got to Chicago's Highland House for the summer they played The Mikado (Nanki Poo, May was Peep Bo, Mrs T was Katisha) and almost all other operas were shelved.

However, Phil was either being a bit silly or had found an inimical journo: stories appeared about his attacking his wife in a drunken fit, or stalking out of the company over an imagined slight over precedence. Well, if he stalked out, he very quickly stalked back in, and the next week-month-year he was still playing The Mikado with Thompson. As well, understandably, as The Beggar Student and Erminie with their top duenna roles.

Then, in 1886, he was hired to play Cyril in John Stetson's production of Princess Ida at the Fifth Avenue Theatre. That was soon done, and he went on the road with Stetson's company playing Dunstable in Iolanthe (which he had already played with Thompson) and Dauntless in Iolanthe as well as Princess Ida. Somewhere along the line, young Phil had learned to dance rather comically, and his hornpipe as Dauntless cuased Boston to acclaim 'a delicious combination of harmony, in both his voice and his legs'.

In 1887 the Stetson comedian A W F McCollin took out an 'opera company' and Phil went along as tenor for the duration, into 1888, when he appeared for E E Rice in The Pearl of Pekin at the Bijou. He spent summer at home, playing in theUhrig's Cave summer season, then joined the Conried Opera Company (1889), before retuning to Stetson for The Gondoliers (Marco) and Iolanthe (Tololler) at the Boston Globe. The Gondoliers went on the road, with William Mestayer, Lillie Grubb and Theresa Vaughan sharing the billing, and when summer (at Memphis) was over, he joined the Mestayers production of Grab Bag. Rather far from Odysseus and the Mozart Requiem!

In 1891, he (and McCollin) joined the company at the famous Tivoli Opera House. Phil was top tenor, and he was seen as Marasquin in Giroflé-Giroflà, Rupert in Satanella, Barinkay in The Gipsy Baron, a local Amina or the Shah's Bride, Symon in The Beggar Student, Benozzo in Gasparone, Nanki Poo in The Mikado ...  The local press noted that his voice was sounding tired: 'give him a rest'! But he wasn't likely to take a rest in that role: Yum Yum was being played by a plump little Australian Jewess by the name of Tilly Salinger, and whatever went on behind that fan ... And on he went: Valentin in Olivette, Trombonius in Prince Methusalem, Don Luis in Les Manteaux Noirs .. until he was 'off'. The tenor department was well-covered at the efficient Tivoli, and the ever-changing programme rolled on. When Phil returned, Billee Taylor was produced and Arthur Messmer took the title-role while Phil played a comical Felix Flapper. When The Yeomen of the Guard was put up, he played Jack Point to Tillie's Elsie; when it was The Merry War he was Sebastiani to Tillie's Violetta. But when Trial by Jury was put up, he was still good for the Defendant to Gracie Plaisted's Plaintiff. Clover, the burlesque Beauty and the Beast (he was the Beast and Tillie was Beauty), Brissac in Les Mousquétaires au couvent followed, and Phil went to court and got a legal divorce from Mae/May on the grounds of desertion. The reason was clear to see... Just the time to get The Queen's Lace Handkerchief and Lecoq's The Hoolah (La jolie Persane) on the stage, introduce them as Jervaulx and Indiana in Indiana, him as Ange Pitou and the Prince in Boccaccio, and in the rather contrasting Ship Ahoy (Tillie was 'holidaying at the World's Fair), and a reprise of A Trip to Africa (Miradillo and Titania), and Mr Branson and Miss Salinger became man and wife (26 October 1893). Phil is said to have joked that, he being an Irish Catholic and Tillie an Australian Jewess, they decided to get wed in San Francisco's Unitarian Church. And married they were, until death did them part.

But the mill at the Tivoli kept on turning: La Princesse des Canaries (Inez and Inigo), A Night in Venice, Said Pasha, Die Fledermaus with our couple as Eisenstein and Rosalinde, The Island of Jewels, The Beggar Student (Jan, this time), Nanon (Hector and Ninon), more Hoolah (Nadir and Namouna) and Ship Ahoy , then Geneviève de Brabant, repeats of The Merry War and Clover, The Tar and the Tartar, The Gipsy Baron (in which Robert Dunbar sang Barinkay, and Phil was now Homonay), Iolanthe (Tololler and Phyllis), Patience (Colonel), a local Lallah Rookh for Christmas 1894, Jakobowki's Paola ... when HMS Pinafore was staged, Phil was Beckett, when The Brigands went on, he played Falsacappa, .. and then, after a marathon five years, which had seen Phil gradually turn from tenor to comedian, he left the Tiv, and headed east.

They played in a Philadelphia opera, The Sparrow, they toured with a 'Lyric Company of New York' in company of Tivoli colleagues, Francis and Alice Gaillard (The Bohemian Girl, Giroflé-Giroflà, Boccaccio, Olivette, Les Cloches de Corneville), they played at the Chicago Gaiety ... and returned to the Tiv. They made their rentrée as Florestein and Arline in The Bohemian Girl and the mill started a-turning again: The Geisha, Rip van Winkle. Mother Goose (Mr Branson dances, but he also sings and speaks which is not so agreeable'), Paul Jones  (Petit Pierre), The Pearl of Pekin .. with rather failing voice and increasing girth. He hung in there until 1900, then left. He related than Mrs Kreling, the manager, said to him 'come back any time', but he didn't. The mill was turning a bit too fast for fat and forty-plus.

They visited Honolulu with a company put together in San Francisco, and there was talk of their going to Australia. But they didn't. They went to San Jose, where Phil took a job as a clerk at the St James's Hotel. It looked like the end, but it wasn't. A couple of years later, he was spotted in San Jose, and next thing he was in Washington, playing for the Chase Company. And he found a new management which had seemingly unlimited faith in him: as a comedian and a stage director. The Aborn brothers would be his (and Tillie's) principal employers over his next fifteen years in the business, as he toured in The Fortune Teller, The Serenade (Colombo), The Tales of Hoffmann (Frantz), The Mikado (Mikado), Erminie (Brabazon), Fra Diavolo (Allcash), Carmen (Remendado), The Bohemian Girl (Florestein) and above all, as the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood. Tillie was now Dame Durden. In 1920, he played Robin Oakapple in Ruddigore under the Aborn management.

But in between the tranches of Aborn, he also appeared in Henry Savage's production of The Man from Now (1906, John P Pennypacker), in the long tour of The Prima Donna with Fritzi Scheff (1909-10), in The Girl on the Train, Gypsy Love (Niklas), and in 1914 in Dancing Around with Al Jolson. They toured with a deKoven Opera Company, in 1919 with Oh Boy! ...

 

And then they rested. And went to live in Ridgefield, NJ. Phil became an insurance man. Tillie died there in 1930. Two years later, Phil walked in front of a train.

Another to have a fine, full career in the musical theatre -- with its important dose of Gilbert and Sullivan, and a turn by the Tiv, was N[icholas] S BURNHAM (b 30 November ?1856; d 141 West 147th Street, Brooklyn 30 January 1925). Statistically, he's been a bit of a problem to me. He keeps getting muddled up with a Nicholas Stickney Burnham from Maine, train conductor cum grocer; he didn't marry (so no document); and he's supposed to have died in three different places on the same day. Actually, I don't even know whether 'Burnham' was his right name. Towards the end of his career, he appeared in some moving pictures, and he seems to be documented or 'documented' more there than in a theatrical connection. Anyone got Who's Who in Hollywood? All I can find is that he, allegedly, died aged 69, and was buried by the Actors' Fund.

Similarly, the beginnings of his career are rather cloudy. He is said to have played in a Pinafore company in Brooklyn in 1879. Hah! There were dozens. I've combed the professional ones, the amateur ones, the children's ones, the all-boys cast of the Apollo Club, the Cortada Amateur Glee Club (when Hebe interpolated 'Little Maid of Arcadee') one ... but it is apparently the barely professional one given by Henry Laurent at the Court SquareTheatre. Messrs Laurent (RR), Sol Smith (JP), Vincent Hogan (CC), A D Barker (DD), Harry Chapman (Bill). So, is he 'Harry Chapman'? Or merely under-billable.

In 1879 he seems to have joined the company at Daly's Theatre, then at Booth's, but we are on more traversable territory by 1883 when he joins E E Rice's tour of Pop playing the parts of Charles Page and then Jem Smart. The Rice Surprise Party followed up with Cinderella at School (chorus) and A Bottle of Ink (Pete), into which a large piece of Princess Ida was interpolated (Florian), with further long-running success.

He switched from Rice to Stetson to play the title-role in The Mikado, and scored a personal success. He would repeat the part many times over the years to come. This time it served him for a long tour, alongside such as J W Herbert, Brocolini, Mary Beebe/Geraldine Ulmar, Harry Allen, Alice Carle et al. When Stetson switched to Princess Ida, he was cast as Guron, when Patience was added he was Bunthorne's Solicitor, in Ruddigore, Old Adam, in The Yeomen of the Guard, Sir Richard. He spent summer with E G Stone (the Grau Comic Opera Company) where his Mikado was brough out once again.

He made it to the capital of comic opera in 1889, cast as the Duc della Volta in The Drum Major and the Chevalier de Brabazon in Erminie (both roles more comical than vocal), toured with Mestayer Grab Bag, and returned to town to play Max Culmbacher, alongside J W Herbert, in a 'sanitised' (by David Belasco) but successful version of Miss Helyett. Long stints on the road in Princess Bonnie (Captain Tarpaulin, 1893-5), an Americanised The Lady Slavey (Artemus Snipe, 1896-7), and The Telephone Girl (Ebenezer Fairfax, 1897-9) was relieved by a season at Koster & Bial's (The Koh-I-Noor), before he took up the part of Eucevious Bartavel in In Gay Paree (1899). He flung in another Mikado before heading back on the road, playing a long while as Samuel Rodd in Miss Bob White (1901-3), with time out for a summer season (featuring, of course, The Mikado) at Washington.

He appeared in the play The Bad Samaritan, and in 1906, he returned to the Casino Theater, to play in the musical comedy My Lady's Maid (Lady Madcap as was) as Palmer, the butler, but he was soon back on the road playing Ben Cobb in the long-touring comedy The Travelling Salesman (1908-10). Plays were now his field: The Daughter of Heaven (1912), Who's Who (1913), Lew Fields's The High Cost of Living et al, but he returned to the musical theatre in 1916 to play in the Hungarian musical Miss Springtime.

And, well, here's a pretty thing! Mayhap his real name was indeed Burnham. I see him in a New York census at West 164th Street, living with organist John N Burnham. John is blind. And he was born in Massachusetts of a Maine father and a Nova Scotian mother c 1867. 'Church organist'. So ...

As I said, Nicholas or Nick (no longer N S) Burnham appeared in films. There must have been a few of them for him to be included in so may filmish books, but I can only find one or two, notably a Legend of Sleepy Hollow arranged around the Rip van Winkle of Will Rodgers.

Not all the American 'B's had quite such substantial careers. J[ohn] J[oseph] BENITZ (b Pittsburgh 15 October 1848; d Pittsburgh 17 June 1887) didn't have time. But he left us a perfect set of data on his gravestone:

and a photograph ...

Born in Pittsburgh, the son of immigrant Bavarian parents, he studied in Munich, taught music in his native town, married, had a son .. and went on the stage as an operatic baritone. I see him in 1875-7 with the Richings-Bernard company singing in Letty or the Magician's Revenge (ie The Devil's In It), Le Brasseur de Preston, The Marriage of Figaro Eichberg's The Rose of Tyrol (Berthold), A Summer Night's Dream (15 October 1877, Fifth Avenue Theatre), then with Emelie Melville and the Hess Opera Company in Les Cloches de Corneville (1878). I see him on the road, as Ben Barnacle, with Brocolini and Eugene Clarke, in Billee Taylor, and as the Pirate King in Pirates of Penzance in 1880 ... and the next time I catch up with him is in the graveyard.

That's me B-ed out for now. I've opened a whole Pandora's Box of folk .. maybe I'd better retreat to the Savoy for my next trick ...

The sun's been over the yardarm a while now (OK it's winter, the sun goes down at 5pm!) and Wednesday is a wine day. I reckon I've earned it ... 

Cartesians: The Great Nunnery Scandal at Hull

Yes, that is where my latest delve into Carte-land has led me. To the piteous nunsense that took place in a Yorkshire Convent in the 1860s, laid the 'profession' open to ridicule, and which in the end occupied the Lord Chief Justice and the learned gentleman of the Queens Bench Court for nineteen whole days (Saurin vs Starr and Kennedy) ... but let us start at the beginning.

Around 1842, an Irishman by name John Connolly, his wife Roseanna, and the yearling son, Peter, emigated to the mainland, to Kingston-upon-Hull, where John had a job on the docks. The following year, they had a daughter whom they named Bridget. Bridget was sent to a local convent school, where she became a pupil teacher ...

The convent itself, a little enclave off well-off Irishwomen, was, some years later, to be the centre of much legal discord when Sister Mary Scholastica, otherwise Susan Maria Saurin, sued the others for, basically, squeezing her out of the place. Many a slightly soiled wimple was aired in court as the senior nuns (two) tried to justify their conduct, relating the tiny misdemeanours and disobediences of la Scholastica. One of these accusations of alleged gross misbehaviour involved the school clock. It had apparently been altered by Susan Mary, to allow sufficient time to finish her chores. Unthinkable! But Bridget came into court and 'confessed' that it was she who had fiddled with the hands ... It was now 1869, and Bridget had left the school at the dawn of the 'sixities. 

and she was now no longer 'Bridget', she was

Bessie ARMYTAGE [CONNOLLY, Bridget [?Elizabeth]] (b Hull c1843; d Brentford 22 May 1918), contralto, popular singer on the music-hall stages of northern England.

There are a couple of versions of Bessie's beginnings as a singer, the most popular being that she 'ran away' from the convent to go singing with Annie Tonnellier (by which I assume the H C Cooper company aka the British Operatic Association is meant). Well, I don't reckon she 'ran away': there was a gap between her convent days and her first steps as a professional singer, but I do spot her for the first time in the company of Madame T. The occasion is a concert at the Tipperary Steeplechase Meeting Concert (29 May 1865) where Annie, Bessie and Mr O'Donaghue of Limerick were the vocalists. They continued on to Queenstown, Youghal and then Annie went back to her operas and Bessie ...? 

I next spot Bessie touring round Wales (1866) with pianist, Fanny Sebri before (1867) coming to rest at Day's Crystal Palace Music Hall in Birmingham ... 'a young debutante with a sweet and well-cultivated soprano voice of extensive compass and a pleasing manner'. She was to stay nine months at this most classy of midland music halls, singing ballads and joining in the operatic selections, of which I have picked up The Slave, Martha, and The Barber of Seville. Annie Tonnellier and Cooper spent time there, as did a young Irish tenor named Tom Carroll. He would later become 'Tom Karl' and have a fine international career.

Annie Milner 'Tonnellier'

I see her, thereafter at the London Music Hall, Sheffield ('enthusiastic reception'), the Alexandra Hall, Manchester ('sentimental vocalist'), the Shakespeare Hotel, Belfast, the Borough Music Hall, Longton, at Nottingham, the Burnley Concert Hall, the Wakefield Concert Hall, in Scotland (Adalgisa to the Norma of Pauline Vaneri in the selections), at the Grand Concert Hall, Birmingham supporting Harry Rickards, at Hanley, Colchester, Walsall et al, to invariably grand notices for her fine contralto voice. At Christmas 1872, she ventured on to the pantomime stage in Little Red Riding Hood at the Queen's Manchester, and seems to have stayed on to appear with the company in ... East Lynne!

But then it was back to the Halls -- the Temperance Hall at Rochdale, the Victoria Great Grimsby, the Argyle Birkenhead, Hanley, Gordon's Music Hall Southampton, the Bristol Foresters, the Birmingam Concert Hall, the Cardiff Victoria Rooms, the Northampton Alhambra, the Dublin Grafton...  

For a while, in 1875-6, she teamed with soprano Annie Adey, but it was soon back to business as usual ... Edinburgh with Annie Tonnellier, the Belfast New Coloseum, singing Irish songs at Barrow, the Preston George Concert Hall, Stockton and even an engagement at Stockton as part of 'Professor Grant's Funny Folk Concert Party, and a date at the Alexandra, Walsall, sharing a bill with 'Tiny Tim' and 'Little Sunshine. 

And then after some fifteen years as a music-hall vocalist, Bessie Armytage took to the comic opera stage , as principal contralto with the D'Oyly Carte touring company. Over the next five years she appeared in the theatres of the British provinces -- 'wonderfully successful' as Little Buttercup, as Mrs Partlett to the Sangazure of Madge Stavart, as Ruth, and as Lady Jane in Patience ...

But Bessie was not to stick exclusively to comic opera. At the end of her time with Carte she returned to the Halls (I see her at Warrington, the Folly Variety Theatre of Manchester), she visited Margate's Hall by the Sea in concert and operetta (Dr Porter with Augustus and Gladys Cramer), she did a stint with Ilma Norina's opera company (1889) and, after some more music-hall dates, with Richard Cummings's company, playing The Doctor of Alcantara (Paquita).

In 1896, she was seen, with old Carte colleague Mary Duggan, in J J Dallas's One of the Girls (Miss Taplow), in 1899 she played the Duchess in Alice in Wonderland, and in 1900 toured as Lady Caroline Pontefract in A Woman of No Importance. In 1902 she played for Frederick Mouillot in The Man from Blankley's, played Queen Henpeckina in panto at Hastings, and (1903) in Wilfred Cotton's production of Mice and Men. 

Could she be the Bessie Armitage who can be spotted playing The Honeymoon Baby in 1913 ...?

Tidy-up time. Miss Saurin won L500, the defendants being found guilty of libel and conspiracy to eject her. The charges of assault and false imprisonment were rejected. The former Sister Mary Scholastica, the 'heroine' of 'almost the only authenticated nunnery scandal on British soil since the Reformation', died in London in 1878 at the age of 46. Single, of course. She left a sizeable L21,000 ... and some very bad-tempered Roman Catholic papers who, nevertheless, rejoiced that 'nothing prurient had been proven'.

Cartesians: the little soprano who remade herself... into a star!

It has become my hobby these last months to track down the 'whatever happened to' and the 'whence came (s)he' of the C19th D'Oyly Carte players. A number of them have tried to trick me by changing names in mid-career, so I have become kind of suspicious of artists who seem to have no past and no future. But I don't think I have come upon one quite so apparently determined to erase her past as the little lady who played the Princess Nekaya in Utopia (Limited) with the imported company in New York: Miss Aileen Burke. In her 'remake' of herself, she changed her surname, her date and place of birth, wiped her early career from her lifestory ... and, at fattish and fortyish, became a great big shining star in the West End musical firmament ...

Aileen [Daisy] BURKE (b Calcutta 14 February 1873; d London August 1939) was born in India. Not in London, four years later, as she would later claim in her Who's Who in the Theatre entry. Her father was a London commercial traveller by the name of Alfred David Burke (this she did admit!), her mother Emily Isabel[la] née Outhwaite, and they were married in India (I wonder what Mr Burke was travelling in) and had their first five chidren there before returning to Britain and Battersea. There they had a bunch more children (making ten in total), before father decided he'd had enough and did that mid-life thing of walking out on his family ...

In the meanwhile, Aileen had begun to study music and attended the Royal Academy. In see that, in 1893, she was commended in the contest for the Parepa Rosa Scholarship behind three ladies I don't know. And a few months later, she was on the road playing the Princess Nekaya in D'Oyly Carte's company. 

Nekaya on the right? 'black hair'

She travelled to America to repeat her role, and following that season, remained in America for more than two years, appearing with Louise Beaudet's company (alongside C D Marius), at the Star Theatre as principal girl, opposite Irene Verona, in Sinbad and as the Duchesse of Parthenay opposite Lillian Russell in The Little Duke ('a dainty little singer with black hair and eyes) ... and then Miss Burke vanished. And Miss Aileen d'Orme 'pupil of Marchesi', Sbriglia e tutti quanti arrived in London in early 1897 ... and 31 March opened at the Shaftesbury Theatre in 'the Armenian opera' The Yashmak 'fresh from the Paris conservatoire ... making her stage debut'. 

I think Mdlle d'Orme was recognised ('a newcomer, apparently, with a charming voice and appearance') but I can't see that anyone 'outed' her. But the www still features quotes such as 'Miss Aileen D'Orme was born in London of French and Irish parentage and completed her musical education in Paris ..'. 

She sang 'Hush, little girl, don't cry' and Lambelet's 'La Vie' in The Yashmak, and then moved on to London's productions of The Wizard of the Nile (Abydos), The Royal Star (Lucy Jebb) and The Coquette (Nella) before she was cast to play at Daly's Theatre in the revival of A Gaiety Girl (1899), playing the Juliette Nesville role of the maid, Mina. She took over the part of Yung Shi from Florence Collingbourne in San Toy, succeeded Maggie May as Princess Mehelaneh in The Country Girl... 

I'm not quite sure what happened next. I think it was a man. Anyway, she disappears from Daly's Theatre and a few years later is married to one George Earle Baker. Mr Baker was connected with mining speculation at Great Cobar in Western Australia ... she tells us that she 'retired on her marriage' (1908) and did not appear again until 1914. 

That appearance was (according to WWIT) in concert, and was followed in 1916 by the role that would make her a name: the plump and pleasing Alcolom, opposite the Ali of Courtice Pounds, in  the war-time spectacular Chu Chin Chow.

She duetted 'Any Time's Kissing Time' and, later, gave the beautiful 'I Long for the Sun' for five years.

Her domestic arrangements, however, took an opposite turning. Mr Baker's speculation went sour, he went bankrupt ... and he also began messing around. When Aileen divorced him, it was not Great Cobar which got the headlines, it was Chu Chin Chow!

In the post-Chu Chin Chow years, Aileen went on a concert tour with Clara Butt, in 1924 Mrs Aileen d'Orme Baker 'dramatic soprano' can be heard on WEAF, New York, and, as late as 1930, I see her singing on British radio. She also made a number of recordings.

She died in 1939, seemingly in Hinde Street, London. The British registers say that she was 55. She was 66.

In the deep midwinter ... Gerolstein, July 2020

July is gone ... was that winter?

Is that sunshine ...?

our little king-and-queendom

at frosty dawn

Then glooming dusk


 and moonlit night

New lampshades for old ...

Once, there was a forest ...

Time to start squawking

A couple of nights' supply of firewood

1 girl and 6 boys. And its mating season when those tails go up!

Cocky IV

Who needs a lawnmower?

Rain, and I become an all-invasive torrent

 

Jus' patrollin'

Is it spring yet?

Gertrude ... the prima donna with four surnames

.

Trying to get my not-quite-complete solutions to a good half-dozen Cartesians of all shapes and sizes ready for blogging ... Burke, Baker, Benitz, Branson, Broderick, Burnham, Briant (yes, I got stuck in hre Bs), Coop, Clarke, Davenport, Deveine ... oh dear!  And then a lovely photo of 'Gertrude Cave-Ashton' popped on to my desk, and I thought .. right ..  I've DONE her, so ....

CAVE-ASHTON, Gertrude [ANDREWS, Gertrude Eva] (b 27 West Square, Southwark 17 April 1855; d 34 Devonshire Street, Cavendish Square 30 March 1886)

 

The soprano who would be known as Gertrude Cave-Ashton was born, in London in 1855, into a musical family. Musical on its female side, in any case. Father, John Holman Andrews, was a warehouseman, a laceman. But mother, who was known as Jenny Constant, was a ‘professor of music’: a singer, the composer or arranger of several dozen published songs from 1840 onwards, but, most particularly, a well-known voice teacher.

 

She was also nine times (at least) a mother, having borne her first surviving child, Theodosia (b 4 Distaff Lane 18 November 1836), at nineteen, followed in quick succession by Henry, Holman and John, and then at a more leisurely pace by four more daughters Constance Sarah (b 7 November 1847), Mary Florence (b West Square, 17 April 1851), Harriet Edith (b West Square, 9 February 1853) and Gertrude Eva (b 17 April 1855), as well as one more son, Russell (b February 24 1849; d 1904).

 

I don’t know what Theodosia got up to. She seems to have died in 1914 after a difficult, unmarried life. Constance married a gentleman by the name of Morecraft who worked in the bicycle business and Russell was a choirboy at Westminster Abbey until puberty got the better of him and he ended up as a bachelor ‘commercial clerk’ and a ‘cigar merchant’. The other three girls, however, all followed in mother’s footsteps and made a career out of music. 

 

Florence – who taught music from a young age -- seems to have had something of a career as a vocalist, under the name of ‘Florence Ashton’. She can be seen in 1871 (‘pupil of Signor Lago’) being launched in a revival of George Tolhurst’s infamous oratorio Ruth at Chatham, singing with Mrs Macfarren at Islington and elsewhere, and on 13 December of the same year promoting her own modest concert at the Victoria Hall with a bill including Ellen Glanville, Anita Leoni and the Signori Danieli and Rocca on the bill. In the following February, she is on the programme at Sophia Flora Heilbronn’s concert along with Miss Leoni, Blanche Reives and others, and in August 1872, I spot her singing at the Bijou Theatre at the Ladies’ Industrial Society’s concert, on a semi-professional bill including a young actor Lionel Brough, Emma Schiff, Edward Murray and the pianist Alexandra Ehrenberg. In 1873 she toured an entertainment in partnership with Edward Compton, son of the well-known actor, and in 1874 she even made an appearance on the comic opera stage, playing Mlle Lange in William Offord’s tiny La Fille de Madame Angot company. In 1875 she was a member of P E van Noorden’s girl group, The Blondinette Minstrels. Thereafter, however, she seems to have limited herself to teaching and in the 1881 census she described herself as a ‘musical governess’.

 

Edith Holman Andrews, as she billed herself, had by far the longest career of the sisters in music but, as in the case of Florence, only a limited part of that career was as a performer (Bath Assembly Rooms ‘of the Albert Hall Concerts’ 1872). Edith at first helped, and later became the successor to, her mother who, as far back as the 1850s, was advertising: ‘Mrs John Holman Andrews’s Singing Class at the Hanover Square Rooms every Saturday at 12 o’clock. Ladies are requested to make personal application to Mrs Andrews on Wednesday or Saturday mornings. Terms of Messrs Cramer and other principal music-sellers’, or in 1860: ‘Mrs John Holman Andrews. Practice of Vocal Concerted Music at Cedar Lodge, Blackheath, on Mondays, and Saturdays at the Hanover Square Rooms’, and still, in the 1870s;  ‘… Brighton, Blackheath, Richmond, Croydon  … 38 Welbeck Street, Cavendish Square’.

From 1872, Edith’s (and, briefly, in 1872, Gertrude’s) name appeared alongside Jenny’s on the advertisements and, after their mother’s death (29 April 1878), the advertisements still flourished: ‘Miss Edith Holman Andrews’s series of soirées musicales for the practice of concerted music. Address 205 Albany Street, Gloucester Gate, Regents Park’ (1885); ‘Miss Edith Holman Andrews announces that she visits London on Wednesdays for the purpose of giving singing lessons at No 9 Nottingham Terrace, York Gate, Regents Park. Miss Holman Andrews has also resumed her visits to Reading, Putney, Sydenham, High Barnet, Finchley, Southgate, Oakley Park, Blackheath. address The Cottage, Ashstead, Surrey’ (1887). 

Edith had as long a career in music teaching as her mother had had, and she died at Eastbourne in 1923 (8 April).

 

Gertrude, however, if she was neither the first nor the most durable of the sisters in the world of music, was far and away the most successful. She began her career, in tandem with Edith, when not yet in her teens, billed in her earliest years as Gertrude Holman Andrews. The girls appeared together as early as 1867, when they can be spotted at a concert for the aid of the Building Fund for the British Schools, put on at Richmond on 6 November. The local critic decided that they ‘deserve special notice’, praising their ‘clear enunciation and pure tone’ and their mother for her ‘careful training’. Thereafter they were seen regularly singing unpretentious music in unpretentious surroundings whilst simultaneously giving lessons in both piano and voice. Gertrude also followed her mother’s lead as a songwriter and in 1871 Duff and Stewart published the song ‘Angels’ by sixteen-year-old ‘Gertrude Holman Andrews’.

 

I spy the girls in the 1872 summer season at the Margate Assembly Rooms, alongside tenor Montem Smith, and in the new year ‘Mrs Holman Andrews’ two daughters’ duetted – as they had done now for numerous years -- at their mother’s concert, in the company of such established singers as Edith Wynne, the Pateys and W H Cummings (‘[they] sing with an ease an a fluency rarely met with in such young artists’). In May, they were seen at the Hanover Square Rooms, in Helen Hogarth’s annual concert singing alongside Gardoni, Nordblom, Helen D’Alton, Katharine Poyntz, Vernon Rigby and the like, but around this time Edith retreated from performing and, come July, when Miss Gertrude Holman Andrews was seen out at the Brighton Aquarium, performing Benedict’s duet ‘Why am not I?’, it was in tandem with the (very) odd Yorkshire tenor who called himself Signor Tesseman. However, ‘Gertrude Holman Andrews’ (which was never the lady’s real name, pace the reference work of Messrs Brown and Stratton and all those who have copied them) had already bowed her last. For ‘Gertrude Ashton’ had taken her place. 

Tesseman

 Gertrude’s first teacher had, of course, been her mother. But she had, for some reason, seemingly, subsequently gone for a few lessons to Mr Thomas Thorpe Peed or Pede ‘of the Royal Academy of Music’, a tenor vocalist, lecturer, songwriter and the composer of a number of little operettas. In 1873, with the aim of giving his stage works a showing, Mr Pede took a lease on the under-popular Alexandra Theatre in Park Street, Regent's Park. He opened what he called the Royal Alexandra Theatre and Opera House, on 31 May, with a bill including his own operetta Marguerite. Gertrude was cast in the title-role, alongside the young tenor J W Turner, Estelle Emrick, T J Montelli and Kate M Nott. From May till the following February, Pede kept ‘his’ theatre open, and a full-length piece called The Magic Pearl (29 September), in which Gertrude played the Princess Zalouna alongside Turner, Alice Barth and a certain Mrs Mary Ann Marshall who called herself Marion St Clair, and who was apparently paying the bills, and two other short two-handed operettas, Moonstruck and A Lesson in Love with Miss Ashton and Mr Turner featured, were all given time on the stage, along with a Christmas extravaganza, In the Clouds and a pantomime, Mother Red Cap.

 

In the aftermath of this first appearance on the stage, Gertrude was, alas, obliged to put in another kind of appearance … in court. Estelle Emrick sued Pede, who had sacked her, for a year’s salary at 6gns a week. She called his music ‘rubbish’, he called her ‘ignorant and conceited’. Gertrude was among those who came into court tentatively to say dubiously supportive things on Pede’s behalf, but the lady won … and got a farthing and no costs!

 

The Alexandra experience over, Miss Ashton returned to the concert stage, and in 1874-5 she put in a number of distinctly successful appearances at the Margate Assembly Rooms, the Brighton Aquarium and Ramsgate’s Granville Hall. She also sang alongside Antoinette Sterling and Mme Lemmens-Sherrington at Islington on Hospital Sunday, featured with Edith Wynne, Edward Lloyd and Augusta Roche in a St Patrick’s Day concert at St James’s Hall, and took part in Edwin Ransford’s Ballad concert and his Golden Wedding concert, as well as appearing on a number of occasions with Thomas Lawler’s groups of soloists at city dinners. Undoubtedly her most upmarket platform engagement, however, was on 23 June at a charity concert mounted in the name of Christine Nilsson. Nilsson was supported by Titiens, Trebelli, Anna Belocca, Victor Capoul, Sims Reeves, Signor Foli, M de Soria … and Miss Ashton. Gertrude joined Foli and Capoul in the trio from Lucrezia Borgia.

 

During this time, she had also, if briefly, put her foot back on the dramatic stage in a performance, with Richard Temple and Wilford Morgan, of Breaking the Spell at the Alexandra Palace, but in June 1875 she moved into the West End for the first time. Marie Litton produced a little one-act operetta by B C Stephenson, music by Arthur Sullivan, as part of a bill at the St James’s Theatre (5 June), and she hired a pair of vocalists for the leading roles. The gentleman was an ephemeral American light baritone by the name of Carlos Florentine, the lady was Gertrude, who thus created the part of Laetitia in The Zoo. Miss Gertrude Ashton began the run of The Zoo, but she did not finish it under that name. For on a date unknown Gertrude Eva Andrews allegedly married one Frank Hugh Cave, a gentleman (according to the 1881 census) said to be of private means (but who is noticeably absent from nearly all public documents), at a place unknown …  Since she ‘remarried’ as ‘Andrews’ after his vanishment, after four children and not many more years, I beg to doubt the verity of the ‘marriage’ if not, even, of his identity. Unless he fiddled with his name, of course.

 Her next engagement confirmed that the young ‘Mrs Cave’ was going places. The venerated Mr Sims Reeves was booked to give guest performances of a number his standbys, including Rob Roy (20 July) and Guy Mannering (7 August), at the Crystal Palace, and Gertrude was hired to be one of his leading ladies. They led off with Rob Roy and the new young prima donna scored well: ‘As Diana Vernon, Miss Gertrude Cave-Ashton proved how greatly she has advanced in a short time as an artiste. She sang the duets with Mr Sims Reeves in excellent style and introduced ‘O where and o where has your hielan’ laddie gone’ and ‘Came ye by Athol’, both of which she gave with great brilliancy, and her share of the concerted music was also given with musicianly correctness. As an actress Miss Ashton has yet something to learn, but her intelligence is so great that we feel she will not be long ‘ere she is in every way fully competent to take a foremost position on the lyric boards. A great merit we must mention which was the very clear articulation of the text. Many singers mumble the words as if their mouths were full of plums. Not so with Miss Ashton, we could hear the dialogue with the greatest ease…’

In Guy Mannering Reeves was strongly supported, as Lucy Franklein and Annie Thirlwall were also in the cast. But it was Gertrude who played Julia Mannering and performed ‘Home Sweet Home’, ‘Bid me discourse’ and the ‘Echo Duet’ with Reeves.

The association with Sims Reeves continued through October and November, for the famous tenor spent those two months on the road, on a concert tour. He took with him as supporting artists Madame Cave-Ashton (soprano), his wife’s pupil, Helen D’Alton (contralto), Signor Foli (bass), Bertha Brousil, Henry Nicholson (flute) and Sydney Naylor (piano).

 

By 1876, the 21year-old Gertrude found herself firmly established in the London concert world. She appeared at the Royal Aquarium concerts (‘The Bird That Came in Spring’, Mme Sainton-Dolby’s ‘Song of the Sea’, ‘Robin Adair’ &c), at St James’s Hall on St Patrick’s Day (‘The Angel’s Whisper’, ‘Rory o More’), as featured vocalist at the Saturday pops (‘The Charmer’ and Sullivan’s ‘The distant shore’, accompanist: Julius Benedict), alongside Clara Schumann as featured pianist, and in the Boosey Ballad concerts, as well as joining the Reeves concert party for a further tour, and also appearing with the country’s favourite tenor in Guy Mannering and The Waterman at the Alexandra Palace. And in the midst of this activity, she found time to give birth to her first son, Harold Constant Cave (27 December 1875).

 

In 1877, she again appeared at Boosey’s London Ballad concerts (‘Love the Pilgrim’, ‘Rory O’More’), alongside Reeves, Lemmens-Sherrington, Maybrick, Lloyd and Antoinette Sterling, gave birth to an Arthur or Edward Reeves Cave (5 April 1877), and then, in August of the year, she began her most substantial operatic engagement to date when she joined Rose Hersee’s company at the Crystal Palace, sharing the soprano duties with the manageress in a brief series of thrice weekly performances. They opened (4 August) with The Marriage of Figaro, with Gertrude as Susanna to Miss Hersee’s Countess and the Figaro of Harry Campobello, and Gertrude subsequently appeared as Arline, to the Thaddeus of William Parkinson, in The Bohemian Girl and as Eily in The Lily of Killarney with J H Pearson, before a new opera company moved in and Miss Hersee‘s team headed for Manchester. At the Queen’s Theatre, Les Huguenots was given with Gertrude as Marguerite to the Valentine of Miss Hersee (‘scored an undisputed success’), and The Waterman, in which she played Wilhelmina opposite William Parkinson, as well as repeating her Arline and her Susanna and appearing in the title-role of Maritana.

 

This company, with various combinations of artists, continued on until Christmas, making a return visit to the Crystal Palace where The Secret Marriage was played with Gertrude teamed with Alice Barth, Florence St John, Lane, Temple and George Fox, and ending up filling the regular operatic Christmas slot at Cork and Limerick, with what was now called ‘William Parkinson’s Opera Company’, with Gertrude sharing prima donna-dom with Ida Gilliess Corri and Rose Hersee. Gertrude did Maritana (‘Madame Cave Ashton was Maritana and although during the first act she showed signs of nervousness these soon wore off and her performance on the whole was highly finished and artistic’), Arline to the Thaddeus of Parkinson, Eily alongside the Myles of Bernard Lane, Susanna to the Countess Almaviva of Rose Hersee and shared performances Leonora (Trovatore). 

In the new year, the company continued to Limerick, but with Annie Tonnellier as prima donna. For Madame Cave-Ashton had stepped briefly back into a lighter type of music and taken over the role of Aline in The Sorcerer at the London Opera Comique. However, she was soon back to more usual things, fulfilling concert engagements around the country, teaming again with Sims Reeves in Guy Mannering, and giving birth (22 May 1878) to her third child, a daughter who was named Eva Jenny Constant Cave, in memory of Jenny, who had died just weeks earlier.

 

The next years found Gertrude spending most of her time with one English opera company or another – at the Alexandra Palace with Richard Temple’s organization, at Covent Garden with Sims Reeves in The Waterman and The Beggar’s Opera, on tour with Charles Durand’s company as co-leading lady with Sophia Mariani in a wide repertoire of operas, with Frederick Archer’s , sharing prima donna duties with Blanche Cole, and in 1879 with Miss Cole’s company at the Standard Theatre. 27 June 1879 she gave birth to a premature, stillborn, fourth child.

 

In 1880, she toured for Charles Bernard, alongside Frank Celli and Annie Tonnellier, in the star role of La Petite Mademoiselle, visited Birmingham to play A Gay Cavalier, The Beggar’s Opera and Guy Mannering with Reeves, and also created leading roles in two new English comic operas, mounted in the provinces; John Crook’s The King’s Dragoons at the Theatre Royal, Manchester (1 November) and J E Mallandaine’s rather less consequent Celia at Reading (27 September). At Christmas time, she visited the Manchester Theatre Royal and played Fatima to the Bluebeard of Charles Collette. ‘Madame Cave-Ashton, who sings most charmingly has added to her prestige with the Manchester public by her triumphant share in the present production.’

 

In 1883 (21 August), she was back again at the Crystal Palace with what was now Richard Temple and Faulkner Leigh’s company, but which still included Rose Hersee, Lucy Franklein, Bessie Palmer and other Palace regulars, as well as the same J W Turner with whom Gertrude had made her stage debut at the Alexandra and a third prima donna, William Parkinson’s daughter Emily. Gertrude repeated her Susanna to the Countess of Miss Hersee, repeated her Eily, with composer Benedict conducting, sang Leonora in Il Trovatore with Turner, Bolton and Josephine Yorke and took the title-role in a first ever attempt to put on stage Sterndale Bennett’s highly popular cantata The May Queen (18 October). The Era reported ‘Madame Cave Ashton, although not the ideal of a May Queen, was to be praised greatly for her spirited rendering of the music, not only in the solo passages, but in the concerted music, where her bright, telling voice was of the utmost value’, but the essentially undramatic piece did not make an impression as an opera.

 

The following year, 1884, she took out her own little company, billed intermittently as the Crystal Palace Opera Company, but mostly as Mme Cave-Ashton’s company. They gave a two-week season in Norwich (14 April) playing Il Trovatore with William Parkinson as Manrico, Richard Cummings as Luna and Louise Lyle as Azucena, Maritana, Faust, La Sonnambula, Fra Diavolo, Die schöne Galathee, and The Rose of the Auvergne, with Madame taking the leading role in each and every opera. The season was a fine success, and Gertrude (‘she possesses vocal attainments of a high order, united to a pleasing style and these she utilises to considerable advantage’) and Parkinson, in particular, much appreciated, but the tour was an in-and-out affair. Parkinson was soon gone to bigger things and, more often than not, dates were filled just by Madame, Louise Lyle, Faulkner Leigh and baritone Conrad Gilbert King, giving selections from Rigoletto and Faust and performances of their shorter operettas – the Offenbach, the Suppé and the inevitable The Waterman --  to piano accompaniment. They did, however, pick up one prestigious addition to their little troupe when they went back into action on August Bank Holiday at Colchester. ‘Madame Carsoni, piano’ had been replaced by the elderly Sir Julius Benedict, and Gertrude advertised staunchly ‘Madame Cave-Ashton’s Opera Company. Full Chorus with Sir Julius Benedict. Rapidly booking for 1885. Only vacant dates three nights November 6th and six nights November 10th. Midland cities preferred. Three good sopranos required for chorus and two good basses able to sing small parts, also a leader (violin). Repertoire includes Il Trovatore, Maritana, La Sonnambula, Fra Diavolo, Rose of Castille, The Lily of Killarney, Faust &c … season recommencing Halifax 15 January 1885, reproduction of Benedict’s The Bride of Song conducted by the composer…’

At Colchester they gave Il Trovatore, with Gertrude teamed with Miss Lyle, Leigh as Manrico and J M Gordon as Luna, and on night two a selection from Lily of Killarney, with the composer conducting. At Ipswich, the performance consisted of parts of Faust, the Lily selection, piano-playing by Benedict, and the Rigoletto quartet. At Yarmouth Il Trovatore, The Waterman, Faust and Lily of Killarney were the backbone of the affair, and at Reading Faust, Maritana, Il Trovatore and bits of Lily, programmed, at each place, according to the forces available, in the list of mostly pleasant summery spots they visited .. Scarborough, Harrogate, Yarmouth, Brighton’s Pavilion, Newport, Reading West Hartlepool. Benedict’s contribution soon faded to a piano solo once or twice a date, and the occasional bit of stick-waving, but the reviews were invariably good (‘a rare musical treat’ etc) and, in its unpretentious way, what Gertrude’s team offered was well liked.

 

However, soon after the company had started on its 1885 tour, the bills changed. It was no longer the Cave-Ashton company, but The Grand Duchess company, sole and responsible manager Mr W M D’Almaine, with Sir Julius Benedict, Madame Cave-Ashton as the Grand Duchess and Miss Annie Poole as Wanda. William D’Almaine was a music-hall tenor singer of long experience, now attempting to get into management. Miss Poole was a fine comic opera soubrette. The rearranged team can be spotted, in March, at the Comedy Theatre in Manchester playing to ‘capital houses’ where Gertrude is noted as vivacious, and Annie Poole as interpolating a new song by Benedict, and the ancient himself ‘partially conducting’ and playing piano. They are clearly the main attractions. F Leigh and Mr King are still there, but Messrs Craufurd (Miss Poole’s husband) and Wotherspoon have arrived for the other main roles. And then Miss Poole is playing the Duchess. Mme Cave-Ashton is still there, though, for when they reach Great Yarmouth in the first week of April, she takes part in a sacred concert. And a wedding. During the Yarmouth date of D’Almaine’s struggling company, Gertrude Eva Cave became Gertrude Eva Lee. Mrs Faulkner Lee. She had married the tenor.

 

Faulkner Lee or Leigh? Who was he? The Era, which, at the time, wasn’t in the habit of printing nonsense, printed a piece in 1887 saying that his real name was Charles Oswell, ‘formerly of London, Cardiff, Yarmouth et al’, that he had been a surveyor, but gave it up temporarily to go on the stage. But the 1881 census lists Faulkner Lee vocalist born Shipdham, Norfolk, and the birth registers show a Faulkner Lee born at the end of 1848 and registered in exactly the right little area of Norfolk, so…? Well, it turns out that both are right.  The bankruptcy notices, for 1887, list Faulkner Lee sometimes known as Faulkner Leigh, Charles Oswell and Henry Leslie of Devonshire Street, Great Portland Street, formerly of Northampton Square, Middlesex, then of Norwich, Cardiff, Yarmouth, Thorpe, Manchester, Hull, Preston, Nottingham, Bradford and other places, surveyor, formerly operatic vocalist. Hmm. Mr Lee was the son of one, Francis Lee, land surveyor, registrar of births and deaths, agent to the Age Life Insurance Company and schoolmaster, and his wife Elizabeth née Woodrow, who shared his duties at the registry and hosted live-in boarders. Both Faulkner and his brother John were trained as organists, and the 1871 census shows young Faulkner living in Richmond as ‘organist, choirmaster and assistant architect’. He first came into a small part of the public eye as a vocalist in 1878, at the age of thirty (‘a small but not disagreeable voice which would be heard to advantage in a drawing room’), and his career was short. But for the moment it was at its peak. He was singing Manrico and Elvino and Don Jose and Fra Diavolo.

For yes. Suddenly, the repertoire was back. The company hit Norwich and Gertrude was back in saddle as Maritana, Amina in La Sonnambula, Wilhelmina, Leonora, the beautiful Galatea and Zerlina. And the Grand Duchess. William Parkinson was back too, Annie Poole was re-demoted (for one performance) to Wanda ... but one notable name was missing. Sir Julius wasn’t there. He had caught cold in Manchester and gone home to die.

And then the whole affair exploded. The next weeks the advertisements went out ‘Madame Cave-Ashton and Mr Faulkner Leigh are not now in any way connected with the company’… and, right next to that: ‘Grand Opera Company season opens at Norwich Whit Week, Madame Cave-Ashton and Mr Faulkner Leigh specially engaged, all communications to Mr Neil Carlton, Theatre Royal, Norwich. NB Mr W D’Almaine has no connection whatever with this company’. Gertrude and Lee had decided to flit to pastures greener, in the person of Mr Carlton, but of course the costumes for the half-a-dozen operas, costumes which had been so praised all round the country, were theirs, and they weren’t going without them. Carlton wrote a letter to D’Almaine’s manager asking him to get the costumes out of the theatre … and the explosion happened. It would end in the law courts.

Gertrude and Lee did open in Norwich. Not at the Theatre Royal but the Agricultural Hall. Parkinson joined them, and Lucy Franklein, and they put up The Bohemian Girl and Fra Diavolo for Faulkner Leigh’s fellow Norfolkians. And then, while poor, underfunded D’Almaine went to perdition, Gertrude and Lee sailed on to London. And on 31 July they opened … at the Empire Theatre. As a stop-gap programme in the off-season. The off-season of a house which was struggling even in the on-season. They gave The Rose of the Auvergne, The Waterman and their chunk of Faust with Henry Lewens, Herbert Sims Reeves, Mr Bentley, Louisa Lyle and Charles Manners. Alas, the thing had been flung on, the band were at a loss, the scenery and chorus were feeble, and Gertrude (whose personal reviews were excellent), Lewens, Lyle and Manners were left to their own. Reeves was termed ‘ladylike’ as Tom Tug, Leigh damned for his acting, and after a week or so the announcement went up for ‘Signor Arditi’s promenade concerts’ with Mme Cave-Ashton, F Leigh, C Manners and H Sims Reeves. Arditi. First Benedict, now Arditi. Anyway they don’t seem to have promenaded much. Soon, the Empire was closed.

 

I think this was the last time that the name of Gertrude Cave-Ashton appeared on a bill. Certainly on a London bill… She died in March 1886, at thirty years of age. ‘Disease of the liver, disease of the kidneys, dropsy…’, recorded the death certificate of ‘the wife of Mr Faulkner Lee, gentleman’. But Mr Lee wasn’t there to register his young wife’s demise: that was done by her sister, Constance Morecraft. Liver, kidneys … aged thirty .. ?

 

I don’t know what became of her children. Arthur is visible. After showing up in a boys’ home in the 1891 census, in 1901 and 1911 censi , he is a mechanical engineer or ‘stationary engineman’ in Kingham. Arthur Reeves Cave died in Saltley, 19 November 1948. Harold seems to have become a trunk-maker in St Pancras. Maybe. Eva is listed, in the 1911 census, as a hospital nurse.

 

But I do know what happened to her widower. Faulkner Lee sang on a bit. He ran the choir at St Matthias, Earls Court. And, apparently, he went into the Mohawk Minstrels and the Christy Minstrels for a little. But, mainly, he’d taken up surveying again. Then the fascinating tenor surveyor met a rather older widow lady from Exeter, by the name of Mary Ann Lound.  Mrs Lound was noticeably comfortably off, but had been rather close with her cash, much to the annoyance of her son, a lawyer, who wanted her to give some of it to him, to fill a few embarrassing holes. Faulkner Lee moved in with Mrs Lound, as her ‘manager’, and they travelled from Exeter to Brighton and Eastbourne and sometimes Paris, spending money, until Mr John Adams Lound jr was fit to burst. And did. The boiling barrister and the wounded tenor ended up in court – where the barrister had been a few times before, involved in cases ranging from misuse of trust funds to fraud to assault. Of course, he was right to be worried, for, in 1888, Mrs Lound became a slightly wrinkled bride. Faulkner Lee apparently continued to ‘pick up the odd five guineas by singing’ thereafter, but the career he had tried to build with Gertrude was over.

 

Gertrude Cave Ashton’s career had, at her early death, apparently already passed its peak. The dazzling young woman who had so appealed to Sims Reeves had, after her husband’s death or disappearance, frittered away into less than top-class engagements and companies. And into the less than first-class company of Mr Faulkner Lee. While such of her sometime co-workers as Blanche Cole, Sophia Mariani and Rose Hersee went on to head major companies, down through the years, she had ended up doing operatic selections to piano in her own small outfit. With Faulkner Lee. Or Leigh or Oswell.

 

And Mr Cave? Surely he is not the F H Cave who turns up in amateur dramatics at Richmond in 1900 … he’d have been 60 …