The (rest of the) American musical theatre volume two

Some while ago, I wrote an article about "The (rest of the) American Musical Theatre" featuring a bundle of musical shows of yesteryear that didn't play New York. 

https://kurtofgerolstein.blogspot.com/2023/02/the-rest-of-american-musical-did-you.html

I said, at the time, that I would add to it, from time to time, as further pieces turned up. But I can't. There are too many of them of which music sheets or other ephemera turn up regularly. So I'm going to bundle some of them in here and then, bit by bit, try to find out what and when they were.

NOBODY'S GIRL

A few well-known names on there. Ilse MARVENGA [MERLING, Adele Mary Ilse] (b Bremen 26 February 1896; d 30 September 1997) had been the original Käthe in The Student Prince. Busby Berkeley needs no explanation. John E Young, Gus Kahn ..  but William Ortmann? Friedrich Wilhelm Ortmann or Raumann (b 24 April 1887; New York ) was a Detroit man, son of German immigrants, who had returned to Germany to study music.  Quite where and when he encountered Miss Marvenga, I know not. I mean, he was a married man. She was brought to America to star in his flop Naughty Diana (1923). But they worked and travelled together as soprano and pianist for a considerable period. Anyway, 'Willi-Ortmann' didn't have much success as a musical-theatre composer, Frühling im Herbst (1920), produced in Berlin being his big moment. This one got coverage (three local boys!) at its Detroit production, but doesn't seem to have moved on from there. And who the blazes were 'Adaart'?

WITHIN THE LOOP

produced at the Teck Theater in Buffalo (22 November 1915) in preparation for a run at the American Music Hall in Chicago clearly underwent some heavy rewriting in rehearsals. Originally billed as the work of the multi-talented comedian Joseph Herbert, it dissolved into being credited to lyricist Ballard MacDonald and comedian Dave Lewis. Which seems to indicate that the comic star rewrote his material ....  The Messrs Shubert advertised it at first as a 'musical comedy', then as 'a revue in 7 scenes', then 8 scenes. The bookwriting credit didn't make it to the sheet music.  There were 125 chorines, 34 songs by Harry Carroll and MacDonald (mostly?) endless costumes ... and the whole darn thing -- which actress Anna Wheaton tells us the cast called 'Within the Soup' -- fizzled out in a week of one nighters. After which the scenery went up in flames during the get out. I suppose Mr Shubert lit the match.

PRINCE OF TATTERS

Produced at Oshkosh 24 April 1902, by Charles H Yale and Sidney R Ellis, as a vehicle for Dutch dialect actor/singer Al H Wilson, who had toured for them the previous season in something titled Watch on the Rhine.

 

Wilson played Prince Hugo de Reppert, the title said it all, and the piece -- in which his 'golden voice' was lavishly displayed in a score including a couple of yodel songs -- proved good for a considerable life in mostly minor touring dates. Sounds like John Hansen, no?

LISTEN TO ME

Another one of those meaningless titles of 100 years ago. But this show actually had a life.

Who were these folk? Well, they were actually busy professionals in the 'country' theatre of the early 1900s to 1920s.

Fred E Le COMTE (20 September 1868-25 May 1929) had been an advance agent, would be later manager of the Orpheum in Sioux City and [Benjamin] Frank[lin] FLESHER (5 October 1869- 23 June 1931) was a sometime band-leader. The two came together at the end of the century, running the Morey Stock Company, and moved into touring musicals -- Joe Howard's The Flower of the Ranch, The Prince of Tonight, A Modern Eve, September Morn and, in 1917, an original piece written by a young Mr Charles GEORGE [McGINNISS, Charles George] (b 8 May 1893; d 3 October 1960) from Hagerstown, Maryland. The prolific Mr George (Fifty-Fifty, Oh Dickey, My Once in a While, Go Easy Mabel, A China Doll &c) supplied book, lyrics and music and played the lead role in the cast of 36. The producers must have been pleased, for they followed up with more of Mr George's pieces .. and the team was still together in 1921 when Listen to Me was put out.

Produced at Waukesha 25 August, it was a happy piece of light entertainment of little pretension. The plot, such as it was, had Mr J Lucifer Devil sending the six temptations into the world for the undoing of man and 'opens in hell, jumps to the polar regions, switches to a mythical Candy Land, and winds up on the stage of a New York Theatre' providing thus many a popular scene for comedians Billy Moore and Billy Murphy, soprano Maude Baxter, dancer Barbara Bronell and Ross Robertson as Mr Devil. The show was still on the road in 1923

by which time Miss Bronell has become the main attraction, leading her to have the firm's next and most successful show A China Doll built round her.

THE TWO JANES

If Listen to Me survived through two years, The Two Janes seemingly lasted two weeks.

'

The comments of the Philly press say it all ..

THE MELTING OF MOLLY

Irene Franklin was a very popular and successful performer, but she did get involved with a few odd shows. Within the Loop (see above) was one. This one seems hard to find ...

The title is well-known. It was that of a 1912 novel by Kentucky authoress Maria Thompson Daviess, which became one of the most popular bits of light reading of its time ..

We know that the novel was made into a musical. It was played in New York in 1918 for a dozen weeks under the Shubert management, with a book by Edgar Smith and music by Sigmund Romberg. Isabelle Lowe was Molly, and Charles Purcell was leading man. But this piece of music is dated 1916. and the authorship is credited to Miss Franklin and her pianist husband,

 Burt Green. And yes ...  'a new American comedy with intderpolated songs' book by Mrs Daviess and Miss Franklin .. four new songs .. 'orchestra de luxe' of six string players (harp included) .. produced by Frederic McKay, of The Yankee Girl and The Wall Street Girl, seemingly in Detroit around the beginning of November. The company closed down in December saying that they would re-open in New York in the new year. They didn't. 

DICK WHITTINGTON

was a Shubert import from London's Drury Lane. It seems to have begun at the Boston Majestic, and made it to Philadelphia, but not New York in its some four months of life ...

OUT ON BROADWAY 

was in reality hardly a 'musical comedy', more a vaudeville act. 

It seems to have seen the light of stage in this form at Proctors Fifth Avenue, in December 1913: 'Will J Ward and his matinee girls 'a miniature musical comedy, brimful of comedy, mimic and excellent piano playing. Mr Ward sang several songs in his usual fine singing voice and captured a big hit. Miss [Irene] Martin ... did herself great credit' 'a capable offering'. Ward (b Providence RI 1884; d Brooklyn September 1949) was a headliner on the Keith circuit for 25 years, and later in New York nightclubs.

PRETTY BABY

was, I think, another Keith's offering. This one seemingly from 1919.

Hodges (b 24 May 1885; d 4 April 1971) started out in minstrel shows and progressed through vaudeville, films and every kind of showbusiness ...

THE JAPSKYS

This one -- a product of the Russky-Japsky war of 1904 -- was produced at the New Orpheum in Harlem in September of the year. Six principals 40 chorines, and a swatch of speciality acts, action (centred on a couple of Russian Jewish gents ) set in the Japanese Embassy in Korea ...

It progressed thence to the Columbia Music Hall in Boston, then to Canada, Brooklyn ... became billed as a comic opera .. holding its own with the Weber and Fields burlesque productions .. for several months

This one is definitely from a variety house. Oscar Hammerstein's Paradise Roof Garden above the Victoria Theatre presenting 'a new and unique program of this manager's own invention'. Apart from Emma Carus, the cast featured Eleanor Falk, Betty Youlton, Fred Valentine, and the principal item on the bill was a burlesque of Parsifal and the squabbles over its production outside Europe. Cosima Wagner vs Heinrich Conried. Written, of course, by Mr Hammerstein.

Parsifalia was slammed. Whether any of the numbers listed on this cover was part of it ... perhaps 'Lizzie O'Connor the great prima donna'?

This one puzzled me, until I realised it was a song interpolated into a comedy at Booth's Theater. Another husband and wife job. Successful playwright William Le Baron and his wife Mabel Haydee Hollins 

And to end this little handsful ... a Shubertian mystery

RED ROBIN

Jean Schwartz. I mean, that's a big name. Jack Scholl and Max Rich? They were associated on a short-lived revue at the Forrest Theatere in 1934. Producing Associates? Well, one of them was J J Shubert. And possibly Lee. Producing liaisons were a bit mucky hereabouts. They had been touring operetta (Blossom Time, The Student Prince, The Land of Smiles) around this time. The cover looks rather Austro-alpine ...  Ah! The back of the cover tells us that it is based on Ein Tag in Paradies (sic). Music by Rumshinsky. Joseph Rumshinsky of the Yiddish Folk Theater? Produced at the Grand Theater, Chicago 4 March 1933 ... book by Harry Clark and Kay Kenney ...

Seems rather odd. Why would you make another version of Ein Tag im Paradies when The Blue Paradise had already done well twenty years earlier. 

GOT IT!  It was the Shuberts attempt to make themselves a new Student Prince or Blossom Time, as a vehicle for their 'discovery', tenor Allan Jones. It appears to have lived and died in Chicago.

I seem to have many more of these little-known musicals ...  more later :-)

80th Birthday Album

 

So many (flattering) photos of ME these last days. I can't bear to throw any of them away. So I'm going to store them all here for my own private delectation in whatever years are left to me ...

A horse from Wendy <3

 

Goodbye, Red Tom. I've handed in my license!

Flowers from Czechoslovakia!

Never get photo-ed in profile at 80

That's enough. Onwards and upwards!

Now we are 80 -- a Botero Birthday!

Yes, next week I shall reach my eightieth birthday. Improbable, unlikely but true. It seems such a short time that I celebrated (if that is the right word!) my seventieth ...

https://kurtofgerolstein.blogspot.com/2016/02/70-boys-70.html

 Big party? inquired folks. No. Wendy and I will share a nice evening bottle of bubbly, quietly, at dear old Gerolstein, and that's all. 

But you must do something! No. And I don't want anyone else to do anything either. No 'surprises'. And above all, no gifts. I am of an age where I am disposing of the accumulated stuff of ages, not accumulating ..  a hug or a message is all I want! On this semi-memorable occasion it is I who should be giving thanks for 80 relatively painless years, and a still lively mind ...

Thought. It is I who should be giving the gifts ....

Flashback ...

Some ten years ago I visited, for the first time, the delightful café called BOTERO in the village of Maclean, NSW. I have visited many, many times since. In fact, on very occasion I have spent time in Australia. Botero blends a particularly delicious coffee which has become my staple. And makes a splendid risotto! It also sells the most delighful hessian shopping bags, hand-made from coffee sacking .. and I couldn't resist a few of those.

Wendy at Botero

I was carrying one, a few weeks ago, when I went shopping at the deli ('Fresca') in Rangiora (we are on the other side of the Tasman now!) and Luna, the lady there, admired it largely. And CLICK! The idea was born ..

I got on Messenger to Australia, and commissioned a dozen bags, suitably inscribed, as gifts for those folk who have helped me get through these last ten years. 

They have gone off to Berlin, California, New York, Leicestershire, Rangiora ...

I am delighted beyond measure ...

My birthday has benefitted Charity, which is never a bad thing. Yes, Myra James, the lady who makes these beautiful bags donates all proceeds to local charities ..

Thank you, Myra. Thank you, Botero ... there will be folks round the globe who will remember my 80th birthday ...

And if anyone is looking for a novel gift ... try these ...

Myra at Botero ...

Betsy and Freddy in California!

Brother John in Billa Barra Leicestershire

Jen in Sefton ..

Renee in Grafton ..

Paulie in the Berlin snows ...

Chloe in Canterbury

Mike and Rebecca in New Jersey

Hetty the little dancer from Philly

 

I've been 'visiting' Philadelphia a great deal in my various searches and writings recently. Occasionally I stop and investigate a little more deeply. Today this piece of music caught my eye ..

It is not exactly Mozart or Adolph Adam stuff, is it, but I wondered who was Miss Wilks, 'the American danseuse? So I looked, and .. oh dear ...

Henrietta Margaret Wilks was born in Philadelphia 1 January 1839, the first daughter of an Irish musician, Benjamin G S Wilks (1814-1890), from Dublin, and his American wife Marion Bates Packer.. Benjamin had been a singer and actor in the Philadelphia theatres. He also had something to do with firemen and proffered a song titled 'The Fireman's Barcarolle'. 25 April 1838 he married Maria Bates Parker, who apparently joined the company at the Walnut Street Theatre. Mr Wilks went on to become a company secretary (Hope Hose Company, Philadelphia Brass Band), his wife continued at the Walnut, and in 1855 a sixteen-year-old 'Miss H Wilks' made a first appearance in a pas seul. After that, Miss H featured on many programmes ...

She also featured in the marriage registers when she took to husband her young colleague, Mr Linington Roberts Shewell (17 June 1856). The couple appeared a little while at the Walnut, but ..

Henrietta died, aged just 18, on 15 May 1857. 

Shewell made himself a fair career, remarried ...  Father lived till 1890 

A short story and a sad one. I wonder why I picked that one.

Burning the Books .... my liber loathamostus

 

There is a 1933 memorial in Berlin's Bebelplatz, recording, very effectively, the Nazi 'burning of the books', the stark image of which has stuck in my mind over the fifteen years since I first saw it.

It seems, in retrospect, a terrible thing ... but, when one regards the question soberly, in 2026 ... well, I'm bound to admit there ARE some books that deserve to be destroyed. I have just had an encounter with the one which I would put top of my hit list. It does not deserve to have currency in any country in any time

No, I'm not talking about Mein Kampf or the latest Barbara Taylor Bradford. I'm not talking about any of the guns, guns, cars and sex rubbish-books that somehow still thrive, or even the 'I had sex with a spaceman' stuff. No one (I hope) keeps them (if anyone does) on any shelf but the 'imaginative f(r)iction' one.

My pet hate, my liber loathmostus is much more dangerous and frightening than they. Why? Because it is trying to pervert the English language, and force it into a kind of bland and incorrect kind of Amurrican dialect ...   Well, words are my business, my life, and to me this is 'life-threatening'.

Oh, the book in question is entitled The Chicago Manual of Style. Known in my circles and home as The Chicago Manual of Lack of Style. "Die, you creature of filth .." (Elektra 1966)

I have never read this Scheisterwerk. I don't wish to. And I shall continue to write AS I WISH without being 'instructed' by Chicago. But this abomination is a creeping ill. Even the editor (one of them) of my last book in England turned to this devil's dictionary for reference. And I have two works coming out shortly, both of which have suffered under its evil influence.

In the 1960s and 1970s, when I published my first books, we were not subjected to such linguistic tyranny. I remember how my editor laughingly queried my description of Katisha (Mikado) as 'dragonistic'. The neo-adjective was noted delightedly in a couple of reviews. 

I was inclined to errrrr .. I suffered from long sentences as a youth. The wondrous Caroline Richmond, my first and greatest copy-edior, gently modified them. I had the help of Caroline, blissfully, through my two biggest books, and Illinois wasn't ever mentioned. Oh! the good old days, before the era of fly-spotted pages!

But then .. the pc age and censorship (from America) arrived. You can't say 'aggressively Jewish' said Routledge. And well 'nigger minstrel'? Who is trying to change history? The minstrels, black or white, were America's first (and sole) original contribution to the world's musical theatre! EVERY abbreviation must have a fullstop. (Why?)

But back to the burnable book.

What good does it serve? Merely to make everybody's dicta just like everybody else's? What a ghastly, fascistic thought. 

In my youth Lady Chatterley's Lover and Another Country were 'banned'. I found both totally harmless. This monstrosity, attempting to impose montony and incorrectitude on the English (yes, English) language, is a threat to freedom of thought and expression ... not to mention good taste ...

BURN IT!

Immediate reply from a senior British publisher and writer: "I agree with you about the Chicago manual of Supposed Style, and I deeply regret that [you have] been subjected to the monstrosity.  It's all part of the reason why I prefer not to get involved with an American publisher"

BURN IT!

Cartesians: a bullseye in the Bartolozzi!

 

One by one they fall before the ruthless (or is that Frederic-less) onslaught of the mightily nosy Kurt Gänzl!

Emilie Petrelli, Lillian La Rue, even Millie Vere ... and the news has reached me that the indomitable Jeff Clarke has breached the granny of them all: 'Geraldine St Maur'!  Arggghhhh. He has promised to write up his research and discovery for this blog.

How could I equal that? I had to try! No sneaking out, chasing momentary minnows ... I had to get a Significant Fish ... one that no one else has ever got near to identifying. Like Geraldine St bloody Maur! And -- tee hee --  I've done it!

I don't know how Mr Carte found his cast for his first all-children Pinafore. A good number seem to have come from theatre-attached families.  The Pickerings and the Grattans and the Presanos we all know about. But the reviews went, very often, for the 'Little Buttercup' of the company: Miss Effie Mason.

My memories of 'Miss Mason' told me that she had been a cute child with a good contralto voice, who didn't do much thereafter. I know now that that was not wholly true. She soldiered on in the adult theatre in her twenties. She was clearly competent, but once the 'cute' was gone, she was just one of many girls traipsing My Sweetheart and its ilk around Britain in 1890s.

But. Who was 'Effie Mason'? That was my job for yesterday: to find out. Starting point: the 1881 census, and there she is, aged 11, with her mother, Jenny, in Scotland with the children's troupe. As Mason. Which was, I soon realised, a stage name. Sigh. 

Many performers tried to gather a glimmer of glory through claiming a relationship to a well-known actor or actress. Sometime it was even true, or sort-of-true. Effie claimed, in sob-story letter to The Era, to be 'a grand niece of the late Charles Mathews'. Yes, husband of the great Eliza Vestris née Bartolozzi. Well, it had to be checked out, but how?

I plugged on. And then a tiny press squiblet in January 1889 told me that Effie had married. No names were given, but her husband was 'son of the vicar of Sykehouse, Selby'. So off I set to Sykehouse where I had no trouble in locating the Rev J W M Milman. High-tail to the marriage records where I find - yay - Ernest Southey McKinley Milman getting wed to Effie Simpson Elizabeth Watkins.  5 January at Tooting. Gotcha girl. And oh! a witness to the wedding is Jane Bartolozzi Watkins ... Bartolozzi! it was true!

The degree of relationship was fair. Jane was the daughter of Joshua Rose Anderson, whose wife was Josephine Bartolozzi, sister to Madame Vestris. So Effie was blood-related to Vestris rather than to Mathews. Jane married one Octavius Charles Watkins of Brunswick Square, Bristol, who seems to have worked in various official jobs before moving to London where in the 1871 census he has beome a photographer. Jane was 'vocalist and confectioner'. Effie was one. Born 4 March 1870.

Effie stayed in the theatre for twenty years. But she never topped her Little Buttercup. She sang at the Aquarium in the spectacle Nelson, she played a child's role in Alex Henderson's successful Rip van Winkle, sang aged 13 at the Trocadero, the South London, in Manchester, in Glasgow. Pantomime became an annual event -- Sanger's, Leeds, Birmingham, Hanley, Newcastle -- and she returned to D'Oyly Carte to play Pitti Sing on tour between 1885-7. In her twenties, she went out in minor companies, topbilled in The Swiss Girl and My Sweetheart ... and that seems to have been it. 

Ernest, who in spite of his vicarage heritage, was an actor, and Effie had a son, who died as an infant, and a daughter Eugenie Effie McKinley (29 October 1894) who sometimes called herself 'Vestris' and was, of course, an actress. And, to tie things up, Jane died in 1909, Ernest in 1936, Effie in 1940. In the 1939 census Effie can be seen 'widow, incapacitated' in Sunbury on Thames with Eugenie. Eugenie didn't marry and died in 1960. 

So, there we are. 

MASON, Effie (WATKINS, Effie Simpson Elizabeth) (b London 4 March 1870; d 1940)

One more intransigent Cartesian outed. Who next ...?

Octavius Watkins photographs Mr Mathews

Annabelle and Thatch: a miracle on w82nd street.

 

What is coming over me?

I read very little for pleasure these days. I read for research, for reviewing ... not for fun. Not for enjoyment. And rare, rare is the moment when, as I read, I get that nice fuzzy, warm feeling of awwwwww. Much less smile out loud. But yesterday ...

I was in my Layzboy intending to watch the dear old Marlborough Harness races. Wendy was on the couch with her iphone. And she was looking at me oddly. I was reading a book and ... I was what? Grinning, giggling, chortling, aaaawing ... and then I laughed out loud. I hav'n't done that since I read Aristophanes, sixty years ago.

So what was this book that was causing such mirth? Such ohhhhh-ing from unimpressible me?

I have known Annabelle and Thatch for a number of years. They made their first appearance on face book as the stars of some darling fictional-factional anecdotes posted by musician and writer, Larry Moore. I always looked forward to the next! And now they have their own book. And it's a book which goes into another dimension.  Here we have the delicious tales of the daily lives of two (extra)ordinary kittens, rescued from the Animal Shelter (which eats little kittens for supper) and brought up in a New York apartment block. But we also have - not incidentally - the story of seventy-something Larry into whose life they bring a huge ray of sunshine ... 

Larry Moore can write. Don't laugh, 50% of people who do, can't. Larry can. The tales roll from his pen (when Annabelle hasn't eaten it) with a joyous facility that commands you to smile, chortle, snigger and laugh. When Annabelle bosses little Thatch "Stop chewing on that crucifix. It's bad for your teeth", I fell off my Layzboy with laughter.

Annabelle, by the way, is not only a bossy big sister. She has ambitions to be a Broadway star ... but you have to read about that in HER book! She would demand 90% commission! Little Thatch is her Sancho Panza ...

There is a wondrous group of supporting characters. The pigeons and sparrows outside the window (what are they saying?), the shitty whingeing neighbour-with-a-bicycle across the hall, Val the caretaker upon whom Annabelle has a crush ('I don't. HE has a crush on ME'), the frightful and frightening man with the python ... but top-billing goes to ... you guessed it! 

It is all quite simply enchanting, adorable, funny ... Annabelle and Thatch deserve to join the Pusstheon of Literary cats .. alongside Dick Whittington's cat, the Cat in the Hat, Alice's Cheshire Cat, Old Deuteronomy, le Chat Botté and other such famous felines.

As for the 140 publishers who rejected this gem in manuscript...  where do publishers find their readers these days?  Still cloning Barbara Taylor Bonker and John Crushem?

Congratulations Moreclacke Publishing and Robert Armin. You gave me my no1 book of 2024 (https://kurtofgerolstein.blogspot.com/2024/01/the-best-broadway-book-in-decades.html) and now you come up with this one!  Put me on your notification list for coming ventures.

Read it to us, Daddy!

Why hav'n't you written a book about me?

"Don't chew that crucifix ..."  Oh dear, I feel chortles in my chest ..

Back to Cartesia, or a break between books.

 

2026. The HENRY RUSSELL book is on the presses. The LYDIA THOMPSON book is turning into page proofs. Wendy is back from her cruise-holiday. Paul is in the dining room revamping his website ... horses and cats are quiet .. it's time to do 'nothing'. So, in between the harness racing from Nelson (where I first became addicted 70 years ago) and some mildly entertaining pre-season tennis on the TV ... I shall while away the morn with a little more disrobe-the-Cartesian fun.

So. Whom do I have here who needs a little elucidation?

Myfanwy NEWELL. Shouldn't be hard. 'of Newport, Wales'. Myfanwy Gwenllian Newell. Actually born in Hertfordshire 4 August 1888, daughter of Evan Cornelius Newell timber merchant and his wife Emily Georgina née EVE.

I see her in 1909 playing in a tour of The Dairymaids ('charming voice') before joining the Carte repertoire tour. After that stint I see but little of her, but she married William Henry BOLAND, became a mother, and died in West Clandon 19 January 1972.

That wasn't too hard. How about Olive TURNER. I think I fouled up on this one last time. She played soprano leads with the Repertory Company while Clara Dow was being Mrs William Vernour Fowlis. Here she is: Olive Mary TURNER. daughter of John Randal Turner and his wife Amy Cotton née STAPLETON. 

Born in New Barnet, apparently thoroughly musically-trained, but seemingly did not make performing a priority, although in the 1939 census she was still listing herself as 'vocalist and composer'. She was also a pretty fair pianist, as I see her playing Liszt duets with her husband. In that 1939 census she also chops 10 years off her age. And the authorities queried it. They allowed her 28 November 1894. They were too kind. It was 1890. But Olive's life seems to have been a tad original. At some stage in ealy 1925 she married musician Henry Baynton Power .. or had a son by him ... he was apparently a divorcé ...   She sang Lola in Cavalleria rusticana  in Norwich in 1927, with him as the orchestra. Anyway she was alive when he died in the Fulham Royal Cancer Hospital 31 August 1952. She inherited £941 14s 4d, but herself died in Hendon 15 October 1953.

Here's one who does not appear in the G&S Archive. But he turns up in the company cricket team! Cyril Leonard Dodsley FLAMSTEAD (var Flamsteed). With a name like that, he was, of course, a clergyman's son. Trained at the Guildhall, sang at St Katherine's Church: he must have been a tenor for I see him in a performance of St Paul in Bristol (1899), he joined the Carte forces in 1902 and remained a chorister until 1914. His war was not happy, and at the end he put himself into St David's home in Ealing, where he died 30 December 1938. The rest of the cricket team? Messrs White, Hewett, Worrall, Frank Steward, Puesch (?!), Morris, Brittain ... I guess that's the Mr White who got into a Scottish carriage accident in July 1910 ...

Others who do not appear in the Archive include Bertha Louisa Susan RISCH (1863-1933) later Mrs Edwin Emery Phillips who can be seen latterly directing G&S in Jarrow where they tell us that she appeared 'in principal contralto roles' with the Carte co, one May HESSIAN soprano from Newport who boasts 'of the D'Oyly Carte', a Lillian TALBOT (Mrs Lillian SUCKLING) from Bolton who advertises similarly, a curious Fred LYTTON 'principal baritone of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Co' and a Madame M Forbes-Wilson who played with and directed amateurs in Whitehaven under a similar tag. As for George WINDOWS 'of the ...'. I have no idea. Nora Prendergast?

Alma [Gwenllian] GRIFFITHS (b Cardiff 13 September 1887; d Ashford 1969) tells us she started her professional career in the Carte at around 1907. She quickly moved on, and had understudied Lily Elsie in The Merry Widow, Isobel Jay in Miss Hook of Holland and played in London's Lady Tatters before she threw it in and shot off to Capetown and a wealthy marriage with one Douglas Christofferson. 

Some folk who are indeed in the Archive I have been able to find additional info on. So ...

[George Richard] Hindmarsh JAMIESON (b Edinburgh 10 November 1871; d Sydney, Australia 25 July 1935) was one of those who promoted himself from chorister to 'principal' when he left England. His career in Australia was run of the mill, but 'of the D'Oyly Carte' featured in his obituary. For yes! He got one.

Another expat was the chap 'baritone of the Savoy Theatre' named Will LANSDOWNE (b 1872?) who emigrated Down Under in 1910. He sang a little, stage im Mikado in Adelaide, and after 1919, I see him not.

Of much more significance was Miss Ethel [Elizabeth] LEWIS (b 11 July 1889; de Dolphin Square, London 10 January 1982). She has definitely made the Archive! But only her professional life. Miss Lewis left the Carte to marry the teenaged [Francis] Geoffrey Pearson, third son of Viscount Cowdray in 1910. Geoffrey was killed 6 September 1914, in France, leaving her with a baby daughter. She appeared as the Hon Mrs Pearson in wartime charity events and in 1916 announced her return to the stage. In 1918 she married another wealthy man of the military, Henry John Francis Hunter. The marriage does not seem to have lasted.

Geoffrey Pearson

Another whose sizeable career with the Carte organisation is treated in the Archive is Fred[erick James] HEWETT (b Bradford 20 August 1872; d Bradford 1957). Originally a stationer and newsvendor, he returned to his original calling in later life, as well as directing amateur local productions. His wife was Cartesian chorister Alice BREWERTON (b Bradford 26 April 1884; d Bradford 1971) who performed lead role with the Bradford amateurs after her eight years with the company.

[Mary] Louise Githens TRIMBLE (b Pennsylvania 23 October 1882) was the daughter of William H Githens, a Philadelphia cigar-broker. and 'pupil of John Dennis Mehan'.  She married one Laurence Norton Trimble, who ventured as a film producer, and bore him a daughter (1912) before he walked off back to America. Louise stayed in England, worked as a vocalist, and eventually divorced him. I think I did her before. Anyway, she sang with concert parties, took her turn with the Carte, toured in La Poupée, The Pearl Girl, in revue and apparently died in England in 1969 or thereabouts.

Time to go back to work.  There are still a few 'late of the D'Oyly Carte' folks on my desktop.

Doris PASSMORE (daughter of Walter)

Sergeant HARVEY

Alice WADE 'a D'Oyly Carte prima donna'. Not on your Nellie. Chorus. In 1913 she was principal boy in the Exeter panto. Later 'entertainer at the piano'

Rupert MAR who seems to have been Canadian and at one stage in Henry Irving's Company. Died aged 53 at Lewes 29 October 1920.

Lillian CORNER/Marie RUSSELL (real/stage names) who seems to have been a music-hall attendant as a teenager

Shelford WALSH (d Bridport 1943) 'many years of the D'Oyly Carte' ... in what capacity? Solicitor, stage manager, operatic coach, director of the Gloucester amateurs. manager of the Theatre Royal, Bath ..

Good heavens! Ben FULLER of Australian fame says he was a member of the Children's Pirates troupe!

And Walter GILBERT won the Panama lottery!

All for another day when I have nothing to do.

When you start a rabbit running ... it runs this way and that and .. sometimes it finds its burrow.

I gave up on George WINDOWS (by any other spelling), but Jeff Clarke didn't. Tenor George Alfred WINDOWS (b Bristol 18 September 1879) seems to have been very briefly a Cartesian. What he was for much longer was a member of a group called the Wakeman quartette which had the peculiarity of being made up of contralto, tenor, baritone and bass. His name was advertised sometimes as Winders or Wenders or Warders .. but he had a good run with the quartette after which he became a semi-professional. The censi show him working as a cigarette machinist, a clerk, and by 1939 a widower and a fitter's labourer (motor). He died in Bristol aged 73, in 1953.

Thank you Jeff! I'll sort out some more sticky ones for you!!

While Jeff was opening and shutting Windows, I was not idle. Somehow I ended up on the 'M' page of the Archive, and I plumped for 'Eugenie MAYNARD'. The Archive tells us that she was active from 1880 to 1892, and during that time appeared in several Carte/Sullivan/Gilbert productions. She tells us, in the 1900 census that she is 33 (born October 1866), born in New York of Italian immigrant parents as Eugenia MAESTRI. Strange then that the 1870 census lists her as eight years old. By 1877, she is at the Academy of Our Lady of Mercy, being noticed for her musical talents, and by 1879 she is out on the road as a chorus singer in H B Mahn's company, star Jeannie Winston. In 1880 she joined E E Rice's company, and played in Claude Duval in New York, before moving on to the Casino Theatre. She also married Mr Archibald Finn Ackerly (10 August 1882) a well-bred young newspaperman by whom she had two daughters. She followed up by touring in  Brass Monkey and with deWolf Hopper in a supporting role in Wang and Panjandrum, but after her husband's death in 1896 she was less seen. Her surviving daughter died in 1909, but Eugenie lived a widow till her death 19 September 1937.