Lizzie Annandale: from Lazarillo to Little Buttercup

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ANNANDALE, Lizzie [née MEHLHAUS, Sarah Elizabeth] (b Baltimore c1851; d unknown)

Lizzie Mehlhaus (briefly Mrs Annandale) was touted in her time as the ‘prima American contralto’ and ‘the successor to Phillipps and Cary’. While she may not, really, have made it to those heights, she had a good career in America, and performed briefly in both Britain and Italy, before fading sadly at the last.

Lizzie was born in Baltimore, the daughter of Hamburg-Jewish businessman (‘tobacconist’, ‘sugar – or is it seegar? – merchant’, ‘cigar manufacturer’), Solomon J Mehlhaus (‘Mailhouse’ ‘Milehouse’), and his English wife. Solomon had left Germany for Britain in 1845, married (as Melhausen or Melhouson) Miss Emma Winer (b Petticoat Lane ?1 March 1827), daughter of a Minories fishmonger, at Ipswich in 1848 (22 April), and they departed for the United States the following year. Their daughter, Sarah Elizabeth, thus, was born in America. And Solomon changed his name yet again. The 1860 census seemingly gives it as ‘Madhouse’, but I think it would be ‘Mailhouse’ which is the name under which he applied for an American passport, when travelling to somewhere foreign with 12 year-old Lizzie in 1862. The local German press, however, insisted on ‘Mehlhaus’ to his dying day. In 1879. By which time Lizzie wasn’t a Mehlhaus anymore, anyway, because she had married (3 February 1870) and divorced (1879) a Scots retail clerk named William Johnstone Annandale (d 3 November 1887).

Mother Emma was, apparently, something of a singer, and Lizzie was taught music at Baltimore’s Peabody Institute. She seems to have made her first concert appearances there in 1872, with sufficient promise that, in June of the year, mother and daughter took off to Europe, in the obligatory fashion of the time, for lessons. They chose Milan, and they chose Lamperti, and Lizzie showed her occasional stuff in private and even public concert (‘Pensa alla patria’, duet with Varesi). They returned to Baltimore the following year, but Lizzie went back to Italy for a second bite and, in March 1875, I spot her at the Teatro Sociale in Monza, singing Casilda in Ruy Blas and Nancy in Martha with Santina Lezi and Alessandro Boetti. By April 1, however, she was back home and concertising in Maryland (‘Che faro’, Mozart, Rubinstein, Schumann ‘rühmlichste bekannte Altisitin stürmisch applaudiert’). In June, she travelled with Caroline Richings to California, as second contralto to Zelda Seguin, for a short season in opera but, thereafter, seems to have limited herself to more concerts in and around Baltimore, until the HMS Pinafore craze hit, and she found herself cast at the Broad Street Theatre, Philadelphia, to play Little Buttercup (‘sings sweetly and acts with much comic force’). When the Josephine left, Lizzie hitched her contralto up a notch and took over. She gave her Buttercup again at Ford’s, Washington (‘the famous contralto, late of the Strakosch Opera Co’) and at Baltimore with Miss Richings, and returned to Ford and Zimmermann for more light opera – Germaine in Les Cloches de Corneville, The Sorcerer and a homegrown piece called The Mayor, which was given a brief professional try.

In 1880-1, Lizzie was back with Strakosch and Hess, playing the contralto roles in Faust, Il Trovatore, Mefistofele et al, and then, in 1882, she joined Emma Abbott’s troupe. This was the move of Lizzie’s life and career. She would remain the principal contralto of the company through the whole nearly-a-decade of its existence, ending only with her dear friend, Emma’s, death. During those years, she played a huge range of roles in (versions of) operas of all kinds, from Arsace in Semiramide to Adalgisa in Norma, from the Gipsy Queen in The Bohemian Girl to Donna Carmen in The Rose of Castille, from Azucena, Nancy, Pierotto, Orsini, Frederic in Mignon and Smeaton to Dame Carruthers and Katisha, and to fulsome praise: ‘without a rival in English opera’. ‘The lady has a very fine contralto voice, rather verging in the register on the mezzo-soprano. It is very clear and powerful and well-cultivated’. In the off-season she even had time to pop across to England, and make a brief appearance with Carl Rosa’s Opera Troupe, at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, as the Gipsy Queen…

And then Emma died. And nothing was quite the same. She went out with a company playing The Royal Middy, she played some small opera seasons, and then she took out a Lizzie Annandale Opera Company with William Broderick, toured with an Alexander Spencer company which spent summer at St Louis’s Uhrig’s Cave, and then tried another venture of her own. It collapsed at Springfield, Missouri. And, as a result, Lizzie made the press in quite a novel way.

She appealed for financial help to the telegraphists Union. In 1883 she had stage a benefit for the striking telegraphists and donated some $3000 to their cause. Ever since, she had been their mascot, and the local branch was liable to turn up in mid-opera with flowers for the lady. Now, apparently, it was their turn to help her. I don’t know how much came in, but she got home eventually. The press loved it.

But things were going downhill. She played with something called the Rosenbach company, with the equally faded Payne Clarke, then she switched to the straight theatre and played with the aged Lydia Thompson and her family in The Upper Crust, and went on tour with Trilby singing ‘Ben Bolt’ as Madame Vinard. She played with the minor Marie Tavary opera troupe and, in 1897, a journalist ran across her in Maine singing with a troupe of amateurish variety folk (‘The performances were pathetic. Neither night were there over twenty in the audience’) called the Royce Rolleston Players. ‘She is now the wife of Frank Rolleston’ he reported, a fact confirmed by the 1892 census of Brooklyn, where the couple can be seen living in Baltic Street, with Lizzie’s mother. The Newark DailyAdvocate (Newark, Ohio) of May 2, 1895, in its write-up of a tour of The Crust of Society, talks about Lizzie and adds, 'Her husband, Frank Rolleston, is leading man of the company, and in order to be with him during his travels, Mr Lewis was enabled to get her at just one-third the salary she could really get in opera.’ In the May 17, 1904, Waterbury Evening Democrat of CT, they are reported to be playing in vaudeville at the Jacques in a ‘farcette’ called Oscar’s Birthday.

By the time, in 1910, that I stumble on her again, she seemingly has yet another husband, an Englishman named Mr Forster Richards. He and she are living in New Jersey, admitting to 46 years of age and 19 years of marriage. Perhaps he was ‘Frank Rolleston’. Then, in 1912 (‘aged 48’), they are crossing to Great Britain. And mother went too! They voyaged back and forth, and Emma Mailhouse seems to have died in New York, 13 April 1922. And Lizzie? She appears to have ended up in England. Because in 1930, three decades since she had troubled the world’s press, Lizzie’s photo appeared on the pages of the American papers. And even as far afield as Singapore. The 69-year-old some-time opera star, they reported, in florid journalese, was an invalid and in the Westminster Workhouse (‘From fame in opera – to the poorhouse’). She looked very good in the photo – especially considering she was 79, not 69. Mr Richards was there too, 67, bearded, chipper and smiling, yes, that could be 'Frank Rolleston' ...

And that’s where I leave them. The journalist seemingly didn’t keep in touch. Mr Forster Richards apparently died in 1951, aged 87. I imagine the considerably-older Lizzie had gone before. Perhaps the Elizabeth Richards who died in Lambeth in late 1938?

I append here a passage from Sadie Martin's book The Life and Professional Career of Emma Abbott (date 1891) which was written with the assistance of Emma. There are several paragraphs in the book about Lizzie Annandale. One says she ‘joined the company in 1881, and with the exception of one season, has since been continuously one of the most popular members. She has usually appeared six, and often seven times each week, and yet at the beginning of the present season her voice seemed as fresh as ever. So implicit was Miss Abbott's trust that her contralto would not fail her, Annandale never during her years of connection with the company had a regular understudy'.

‘It is not usually known that during her years of application abroad, Miss Annandale studied soprano roles, yet no one, or at least few, who ever heard her highest notes, failed to express surprise at their clearness. Her range is simply wonderful, extending two octaves, or from low A to A above the staff, singing either extreme with perfect ease, and pleasing effect. She has at various times assumed soprano roles, and always with success. Among these is Carmen, for which she was always cast at a performance of that opera by the Abbott company.’ The next paragraph tells that she was especially popular with patrons in the west. It goes on, ‘Patrons of the company soon learned to associate Abbott and Annandale professionally. Their Martha and Nancy, Leonora and Azucena, Norma and Adalgisa will long be remembered.’

The book may be a decided hagiography, but it seems pretty right where Lizzie is concerned.

Mons Offenbach's Queen of the Bouffes-Parisiens ...

The Queen of Offenbach's Bouffes? Oh, yes, I hear the unenlightened nod. 'Hortense Schneider. We've all heard of her'. I: 'And of whom else have you heard?' 'Well, err, nobody, really, but...'. I (forcibly): 'There are no buts. And you are wrong'. Deflation of the unenlightened.

That's what happens when history gets 'potted'. Offenbach = the Théâtre de Bouffes-Parisiens. Right. Offenbach = Schneider. Right.  Ergo: Schneider = the Bouffes. Not quite right. The memorable period of Mlle Schneider's heyday (though she, indeed, played, as early as 1855, at the Bouffes) came after Offenbach had moved the centre of his activities from his earliest, innovative little theatres to the larger stage of the Théâtre des Variétés. But, before that, he had launched a veritable horde of multicoloured opérettes, culminating in his first full length triumph, Orphée aux enfers (1858), to worldwide fame, at the Bouffes where, alongside such stalwart actress-singers as Mdlles Marie Dalmont, poor Aurélie Mareschal, Marguerite Macé-[Montrouge], Coraly Geoffroy and others less durable, one prima donna assoluta reigned supreme, as the uncontested ‘reine des Bouffes-Parisiens’ and ‘the personification of the Bouffes’ of the 1850s. The original Eurydice, the original Catarina Cornaro, the original Gracioso: Mademoiselle Lise Tautin.

'Die erste Operettensängerin von Paris, die beste Eurydice Offenbach's...' (Wiener Salonblatt 1872)

TAUTIN, Lise [VAISSIÈRE, Louise Émilie Victorine] (b Yvetot, 31 January 1834; d Bologna, 12 May 1874).

Born into a theatrical family -- great-niece of the popular melodrama actor, Jean-Baptiste dit Tautin ‘of the Ambigu, the Gaîté and the Boulevard du Temple’ (1770-1841, ‘all the lungpower of a Neapolitan diver’), and – in spite of what the chroniquers say -- a legitimate daughter of the artist and actor, Jacques Adolphe Vaissière dit Tautin (b Paris, 24 September 1804; d unknown) and his wife, needlewoman Victorine Marcotte -- Lise Tautin, apparently, made her first stage appearances at the Galéries Saint-Hubert in Brussels, in the year 1850. She played over the next seasons at the Brussels Théâtre du Vaudeville (La Jeunesse de Louis XIV), and at the Cirque, where she can be spotted appearing in a piece called La Chine à Bruxelles (21 March 1854), featuring a troupe of Chinese acrobats. And a dwarf.

Grand Théâtre, Lyon

Between September 1854 and July 1857, she played three seasons as deuxième, and then première, Dugazon at the Grand Théâtre de Lyon. Among the roles and pieces in which she appeared were Ekimona then Prascovia in the highly successful Lyonnaise production of L’Étoile du Nord, Lady Allcash in Fra Diavolo, Isabelle in Bonsoir, M Pantalon, Le Domino noir, Le Philtre, Ines in La Favorita, Célestine in Le Bouffe et le tailleur, Mlle Isidore d’Orbe in Le Sourd, a triumphant and cheered Oscar in Gustavus III, Jemmy in Guillaume Tell, Berthe de Simiane in Les Mousquetaires de la Reine, Urbain in Les Huguenots, Betly in Le Châlet, Ne touchez pas à la reine, and the title-role in Clapisson’s newly successful La Fanchonette. When she appeared in the féerie La Fille de l’Air, the press gasped to see this ‘chanteuse du grand opéra’ leading the amazon showgirls of the ballet. When she appeared with M.Offenbach’s visiting Bouffes-Parisiens company, playing in Ba-ta-clan, with Pradeau and Le Violoneux with Darcier, she won herself an immediate engagement to join the company on their return to the metropolis.

She made her début in Paris, at the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens, as Aspasie in Offenbach's Une demoiselle en loterie (1857, ‘Écoutez cette chanson là’) and was promptly acclaimed by the Figaro ‘the best acquisition the Bouffes has ever made’ and ‘la [Marie] Cabel of the Bouffes’. ‘L’événement capitale de la soirée’. ‘Elle a captivé la salle entière’… ‘Mlle Tautin sera, aux Bouffes, une étoile de première grandeur’ quoth Le Menéstral. And he was right.

She spent virtually all of the remainder of her twenty-year career and, indeed, her life playing under the aegis and/or in the works of Jacques Offenbach. She created the rôles of Fanchette in the original production of his Le Mariage aux lanternes (1857), Minette, the cat-lass, in La Chatte metamorphosée en femme (1858), the kitchen-lad, Croûte-au-pot in Mesdames de la Halle (1858, ‘un ravissant petit marmiton qui chante comme un rossignol’), Rosita in Un mari à la porte (1859), a quadruple role as Les Bouffes-Parisiens et al in Le Carnaval des revues (1860), and she found substantial and enduring fame as the original Eurydice of Orphée aux enfers (1858). One book claims that her dazzling performance of the heroine's famous Bacchanale gave birth to a new verb ‘tautiner’: ‘imiter la choréographie incendiaire de Mlle Tautin dans Orphée aux enfers’, ‘mettre le feu aux poudres par un cancan éléctrique’, ‘lancer la jambe en l’air avec audace, comme pour donner un coup de pied au ciel’. For Mdlle Tautin was a veritable triple threat – a seriously good voice, a delightful personality topped by delicious acting skill, and the dance talents and athleticism of a Rigolboche. And both public and critics adored her.

Mlle Tautin created three other major Offenbach rôles after that of Eurydice: the outstanding five-part travesty rôle of Gracioso etc in the original two-act version of Geneviève de Brabant (‘Le coeur perdu’), the dramatically beset Catarina Cornaro of Le Pont des soupirs (1861 ‘incomparable dans sa scène de folie’) and the vocally florid Ernestine, who pretends to be Henriette Sontag, in the one-act Monsieur Choufleuri restera chez lui le ...(1861, interpolating Offenbach’s 'Chanson de Barkouf'). She also played roles, created by her colleagues, in such pieces as Vent du soir, Le Chanson de Fortunio (Valentin), Les Bavards, Lischen et Fritzchen and Ba-ta-clan, both at the Bouffes and on their tours, in repertoire.

When Offenbach presented pieces from the pens of other composers, she appeared as Adelaide in Jonas’s Le petits prodiges (1857, ‘Turlututu, le chapeau pointu’), as Monsieur de Luxeuil in Gabrielli’s Le Petit cousin, Beaumesnil in Mme de Grandval’s opérette Le Sou de Lise, Doucette in Varney’s Le Polka des Sabots, or Saint-Ildefonse in Delibes’ Les Eaux d’Ems, pieces which made up the spectacles-coupés of the theatre's early programmes.

In 1858, she visited Berlin’s Kroll’s Theater with the Bouffes-Parisiens troupe, in 1860 it was Brussels, then Vienna’s Theater am Franz-Josef-Kai, Berlin’s Fredrich-Wilhelmstädtisches Theater and Nemzeti Szinház in Budapest in the summer of 1861, then, in 1862, she moved on to join the company at the Variétés (La Boîte au Lait, the revue Les mille et un songes, Les Bibelots du diable (Toby), L’Amour qué qu’est qu’ça, Le Bouchon de carafe, Marguerite in Faust et Patrie, Gimblette in Les Farces Dramatiques), and appeared briefly at the Châtelet, as the Princess Grudindoie in La Lampe d’Aladin. She returned ‘home’ to the Bouffes, thereafter – ‘le retour de Mlle Tautin a été fêté avec joie, comme celui de l’enfant prodigue’ -- and, subsequently, created there a further Offenbach rôle in Les Bergers (1865, La Sincère) as well as playing in such revivals as Nicolo’s Les Rendez- vous bourgeois. In 1868, again at the Variétés, she succeeded Hortense Schneider and Elise Garaît in the title-rôles of reprises of La Grande-Duchesse and La Belle Hélène, and starred as the re-made Catarina Cornaro in the extended, four-act version of Le Pont des soupirs, and in revue (Paris Tohu-bohu) before, in 1869, she again returned to the Bouffes to play Césarine in the first revival of Lecocq’s Fleur de thé.

She visited Russia and northern Europe for Johann Decker-Schenk (October 1870) with ‘the repertoire of Offenbach’, voyaged to South America (I have yet to find evidence of this!), and, in 1873, she appeared again on the London stage (24 April), which she had previously visited with the Bouffes troupe, for a fortnight in a French plays season (Hervé’s Les Folies Dramatiques).

And, throughout, she went from strength to strength. When she reprised her Eurydice at the Bouffes in 1865, the press cried ‘[elle] s’est montrée une véritable Ugalde, que dis-je, une Malibran!’. A few years earlier she had been pronounced the equal of the prime travesty player, Déjazet. Now, other folk were compared to her. And only one artist -- her successor (some said ‘imitator’ ) in the Offenbachiade -- Mlle Schneider, was allowed to have equalled her.

In the 1860s, she turned from opéra-bouffe to star in the spectacular féeries of the Paris stage (Aladin, Les sept châteaux du diable at the Châtelet) ...

Lise with Rose Deschamps

Lise Tautin died in Bologna, Italy, of the smallpox, in 1874, apparently whilst returning home from an engagement in Constantinople. The papers insisted she was thirty-six. She had, actually, just passed forty. The American press reported that she had been singing in Cairo and died in Boulogne-sur -mer. But who has ever believed American newspapers?

Her father, denominated ‘Tautin père’, alongside whom she played from her earliest days, was also, from 1858, a member of the Bouffes-Parisiens company, alongside his daughter, creating small rôles in, aming many others, Orphée aux enfers (Cerbère, cut after two weeks!), Le Tabellion in Delibes’s L’ Omelette à la Follembuche), in Geneviève de Brabant (Un Savant), Les Vivandières de la grande armée (Ramponneau), Le Carnaval des revues and Le Pont des soupirs (Gibetto).

The name of Lise Tautin is sometimes coupled, I feel unreasonably, with that of her more buzzwordy successor, Mdlle Schneider, and she is thus described as one of the glowing theatrical courtesans of the second empire. It appears, however, that this may be an error. Her private life hardly ever hit the contemporary papers (although her address 8 rue des Martyrs seems to have been well-known) and one reminiscer, describing her, marvelled that a girl who, on the stage, poured forth such joyous and radiant fun and buoyant sex-appeal was, in fact, off-stage, a quiet and unassuming person. Her ‘boyfriends’, it is related, were not at all of the bejewelled and money classes, but ordinary lads to whom she was devoted. However, I am told that her name does appear on the Parisian police lists of 'femmes galantes'. I suppose there is 'galante' and 'sort of galante'.

Most of the snippety biographies of Mlle Tautin sprawled around the internet are descended from the one, fairly accurate, French source, and all repeat the same copied facts and 'facts'. But I have found one scholarly website (http://www.artlyriquefr.fr/personnages/Tautin.html) that sorts out tidily the genealogy concerned, and separates Lise from her aunt Lise (also an actress and Mme Charles Cor, wife of the theatre manager at Carcassone). It appears that our Lise, eternally unmarried, did, however, have a daughter who had a daughter surnamed Tautin-Vaissière ...

But motherwise, really, this outstanding artist has to go down as the, or the most important of the, founding mothers of the opéra-bouffe.

PS Here is an article on Mons Tautin the elder (he had interchangeable christian names) which I append here merely to indicate the degree of his popularity and historical importance.

Wednesday at the Market with Kurt

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Wednesday. No loitering under the sheets. Wednesday is market day, and if I don't get there by 7am, Charly from the French Pan Tree will have cornered all the freshly-pulled baby carrots ...

So, up at 6.30, quick gulp of icy Cole's fizzy water, and on the road, with my sturdy Kitchen and Table shopping bag, and another eco-bag, full of friend Robert's 'empties', to return to the Felix the Mandarin-Juice man ...

I don't climb the hill, or cope with the final descent to the seaside, quite as stridingly as I did a year or two ago, and I'm particularly apprehensive today, as I'm not just shopping for one, as I usually am. Wendy, Pat and Rose arrive from New Zealand this weekend, so I'm stocking their fridge with their favourite farm-fresh goodies. Which that means, on the return journey, UP that 'descent', I'm going to be laden like a mule!

Well, I made it. Slowly, with the odd pause. Home by 8.30 (passing a tardy Charly on the way!) with my two bags of edible trophies ...!

Sorry, girls, no broccoli. When you are buying farm-fresh, you have to go with the seasons. No Chilean imports here, I'm afraid ...  just eggs too big to fit in a normal eggbox, avocados to set my friend, Angela's eyes a-popping, stubby little carrots that LOOK like carrots and not horse-feed, green tomatoes (hurrah! Greek salad ahoy!), fat lemons, limes and a heap of Pat's favourite mandarins ...

Chuckle. Don't worry, I didn't forget carnivorous me! 'Meat corner' for me is here.

On the right, Warren, from Boorabee Dorper Stud, whose home-grown lamb is quite simply the best I've ever tasted in my life -- even when cooked by me. Yes, I come from New Zealand, and lived long in France, but for me, it's first-prize to Boorabee, all the way.
Next to him is Jed's Esperanza pork stall ... it looked so good that, last week, I bought some. It's marinating, awaiting the fry pan, for it will be my today's lunch!

Ah, Wednesdays!

All shopping done, and all forces spent, my wee Wednesday 'treat' is to sit down with a cup of the excellent coffee brewed by the ladies from CCC, listen to a little of the deliciously unamplified music (we had a harpist a fortnight ago!), and gaze at the sea, as the sun climbs into the sky -- and the locals begin to shed their woolies --  until it is time to climb that hill!

Well, it's  done. Here I am, back in my office. Ready to start the day's work. There are twenty-two early C19th French poems to translate, three books and a musical to give my attention to, and I'm only up to letter B in my final checking of the Victorian Vocalists database before it settles down in the Harvard Library ... So, sorry, mate, I don't have time to give singing lessons  today

Oh. Dinner tonight? No. I'm not cooking. I'm heading for the French Pan Tree. I'll bet Charly's cooking up yet another culinary treat ... even if I DID get the carrots.. !

Johnny Wallace: godfather of the Australian musical theatre

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Today, in the expanses of Rookwood Cemetery, Sydney, Australia, with only the workmen as witnesses, a vacant-looking plot of earth became a last resting place. Oh, the grave in question had been occupied for 85 years, but the 93-year-old man buried therein had come from an old people’s home, and no-one had come forward to pay for a gravestone, or anything else but a little oblong hole … Until this year of 2019 … 180 years after his birth … when the man known to the theatre world as ‘Johnny Wallace’ finally got his little memorial.

So, why now? Well, first you have to know who Johnny was. Why he was kind-of-celebrated, why he became forgotten, and why, in the last decades he has been brought back to the limelight he once knew so well.

Here is a very brief version of John Clark’s career. He came into the theatre as a young man on the coat-tails of his ill-fated brother, who worked as ‘Alfred Wallace’. Thence the stage name of ‘J D Wallace’. He ‘grew up’ theatrically at Greenwich Theatre, where he sang, danced, played comedy, and, as one did in a little company, performed any other task wanted. In 1869, he was taken on by Emily Fowler ,at the Charing Cross Theatre, and there he found his niche. While still performing, he became, at 28, Miss Fowler’s stage director. His skills were quickly noticed, and he was ‘borrowed’ by the Swanborough family, at the Strand Theatre, and there he made his mark. He directed and choreographed W S Gilbert’s early musical The Gentleman in Black, the important 'musical comedy', Nemesis, and much of the rest of the voluble output of the best burlesque theatre in town, before he was promptly snapped up, at the end of his contract, by Emily Soldene, as comedian-burlesque dancer-director for her growingly-famous troupe …

NEMESIS: Harry Cox, Edward Terry, Marius and Johnny

With Soldene and her opéras-bouffes he would cross the world, introducing the Antipodes to a standard of stage-direction-cum-choreography that they had never seen before, and scoring a self-effacing hit within the huge success of the great Soldene troupe. Although he returned for a while to Britain, he did not remain, and returned to Australia to spend many years directing versions of the latest London hits for the best local managers, notably Williamson and Musgrove.

Johhny (right) and Alfred Brennir in Australia's Olivette

But Johnny wasn’t just a colonial director. He had one last London hurrah! to come. When Musgrove took London’s Shaftesbury Theatre, and there staged the American flop musical The Belle of New York, he imported 68 year-old Johnny ‘fidelity personified’ from Australia to direct. Johnny turned the piece into one of the biggest musical hits of the era, took it on the road for the first of its endless tours ... And then he went home.

He lived the last 35 years of his life in Australia, directed Australia’s megahit A Chinese Honeymoon in 1903, saw age creep on and new fashions in theatre arrive, but, as late as 1911, was still writing and directing pantomime for amateurs, as he and his times faded from fashionable memory. He was now just an old man with children who weren’t really interested, a garage full of theatricalia, and his garrulous memories…

Johnny’s resurrection started when I, Kurt Gänzl, wrote a vast 2-volume biography of Soldene. Johnny is one of the central characters, of course. Then, Julie Simpson, a great-great-granddaughter, who did value what her ancestor had been, read some of my writings, and got in touch. I told her ‘get thee to Rookwood and photograph the tomb’. She got, and came back to me with the distressing news. An unmarked grave. We decided that this should not be … dug deep in our wallets … and today Johnny has his little gravestone. I hope to get to see it sometime. But anyway, Johnny, old pal, you are not forgotten. Hehe, and you can tell your descendants their name isn’t Wallace ... it’s Clark.

Post scriptum: Today, Julie paid a visit to Rookwood cemetery and Johnny's little gravestone, and took some photographs. There you are, old chap. Good to see you ...

That was entertainment ..

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A few pictures, that are lying around on my desktop ... It seems a shame to throw them back as undersized pieces in the jigsaw of the entertainment world ... a world which, before television and mostly before consequential cinema, harboured in its ranks endless little, unpretentious performers and 'acts', barely professional, if at all, for little unpretentious venues ... The Wortley Institute Black and White Minstrels predated Robert Luff's famous company by half a century. Their 'black', however, seems to have been limited to their cuffs. I have only found one record of them performing, in 1907 at ... Hull!

The 'Dandy Coons' apparently did summer season in Margate in 1908 ...

More 'dandy' than coon? But the expression was current.

The Five Aubreys. A little kiddie song and dance act. Which one newspaper did the honour of describing in detail

Then there was 'Mr J W Delmar' 'Australian ventriloquist and entertainer' who turned up on various piers and in various halls in England and Wales in the late 1890s and the 1900s, before settling in Bridlington as manager  of the local People's Palace ..

At the other end of the scale of professionalism, came 'concert-party' groups like the long-lived Fol de Rols...

However, my favourite amongst the kind is 'Cecil Barrie's Empire Strolling Players'. It was a group which came from the Isle of Wight, as far as I can work out, and 'group' was rather pushing it. It basically consisted of Mr 'Cecil Barrie' and his wife 'Winifred Truce'. He gave comic songs, she gave character songs, they did a sketch, and a thought-reading act ... and it seems that on each occasion they donated the takings to some local charity, from Bledlow, Wilburton, Tipton St John, Colston Raleigh to St Giles-in-the Wood. They apparently truly strolled, for this photo survives ..

Yes! Canada! Also, we are told, 'during the war, he spent much time entertaining the wounded soldiers'.

'Cecil Barrie' was no fly-by-night act. He and the missus kept travelling  to Burnham, Henbury, Biddisham, Norton .. and I last spot them in 1929 at Horsley. And that's it. And I am pretty sure that I know why. 'Cecil' died. Now, of course, 'Cecil Barrie' wasn't his real name. And I am 99% sure I've cracked him. I reckon he was one Alfred Charles Linington (b Ryde 17 October 1885; d Ryde 19 December 1930), son of a Ryde waterman who, himself, worked as a pleasure boatman. I think so, because 10 October 1906, this Alfred married Trucie Rashley (b Ryde  1879; d Ryde 5 April 1965). Trucie's full name was Adela Winifred Truce Rashley and she was a dressmaker. 'Winifred Truce', got to be, don't it?

Trucie survived not only her husband, but their daughter Mrs Vera Hofman (1907-1964) and these photos of their jolly semi-professional life in the theatre survive them all.

And my desktop is cleared ... now I can start all over again!

Life is a bowl of summer soup ... with a good book on the side

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What a delicious weekend ...

Friday evening, our beloved local French restaurant reopened its doors for the winter. I, needless to say, had booked my table well in advance. Chef Charly and bosslady Merindah had been on a working excursion to the island of Mauritius and we were promised that we would see the influence of that culinary experience on the menu ...

Well, I have never been to Mauritius, but one has to experiment ... and that all sounded pretty nice to me! Well, I'm here to tell you it was. With bells on. Utterly delicious. Preceded by an equally delicious mackerel carpaccio and accompanied by a good Burgundy ...

Chuckle. I couldn't even wait for the soup to be poured over the fish before snapping the plate ... a fine, fine meal ...

Saturday was nap day. Recovery day. A little cool: as little, even, as 15 degrees, so I wasn't tempted to go across the road for a paddle. But Sunday dawned bright and beautiful. Sundays, the Kiosk on the beach stays open till  2pm, so one can go there for lunch. Lunch, a cup of coffee, the sunshine and a nice read of a good book.

And that's what I did. Lunch on André's pork miso soup (again!), nice coffee in a cardboard cup, the sunshine pouring down gently on my legs and my bald patch and ... the book. It turned out to be a good book indeed!

I've read (and reviewed) hundreds of fantasy novels in my time. But the works of anyone writing in that genre in the 21st century has to be compared in quality with the likes of the early books of Jordan, with Terry Pratchett, and with Terry Brooks.  Originality is hard to find. And paired with actual writing ability, even rarer. But this book, The Good Mage, succeeds on all counts. I've only read the first eight chapters, today, on the beach. Slow, I kniow. But with good books I read every word, only in the case of run-of-the-mill books do I speed-read and skip.

But here's the surprise. This book is a self-published work. It was apparently submitted to a number of commercial publishers ... well, we in the book business all know that nowadays commercial publishers don't read unsolicited manuscripts, or even most of the solicited ones, as they did in my day ... but turned down or  ringed round with such preposterous financial considerations as to make it impossible.

How do I know that?  Because the author, 'Solee Stagbeetle' is a young Yambonian. I read about him and his book on the Yamba Notice Board, and one of my first acts on arriving at my Winter Palace was to purchase a copy of The Good Mage. Solee delivered it in person, and my critic's brain immediately whispered too me: 'If he writes as well as he speaks ...'

Well, he does. He is a writer. No, not everybody who writes is. A huge percentage of books, and most things that come out of Universities, show the calculated signs of effort in the writing. Which makes for effortful and uncomfortable reading. Stagbeetle's prose rolls easily off the page, in natural, colourful, wholly accessible language, which carries the story eagerly forward ... it is so very, very readable. Writers are born, not created in Creative Literature classes, and, well, he was just, simply born that way.

Add to that, that the quota of originality in the tale hits a highpoint on page one ... and hasn't slackened by page 60 (that's where I'm up to) ...  this is a ruddy fine read. Congratulations, Sir Stagbeetle, and long may you write ....