Alf Pollard

Children of Pollards Lilliputian Opera Company with US soldiers in Manila. This photo was taken in early 1903, about six months after the Filipino American War had ended. Pollard Opera Companies Collection, Australian Performing Arts Collection, Melbourne.

Touring colonial outposts and the US, 1901–1909

By the second half of 1901, Charles Pollard and Nellie Chester felt confident enough to try a new market. Between September 1901 and February 1909, they ran four performance tours through North America, usually after stops on the way in Queensland, Manila, Honolulu and sometimes at port cities in China and Japan. The longest tour took the child performers away for an extraordinary 32 months, from September 1904 to February 1907. The breaks between tours were three months or so, which allowed for new children (if needs be) to be selected in Melbourne, and rehearsals to start.

Pollard Lilliputians in Manila, again, at the start of their marathon 1904–1907 tour, posing with Filipino soldiers and prisoners in chains. J. Willis Sayre Collection of Theatrical Photographs, University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, JWS24555.

On their first arrival in Honolulu in September 1901, Charles Pollard introduced the troupe to US audiences, in a manner that suggested some sort of social service was being conducted:

Every one of our children hails from Melbourne, and most of them from the five-mile radius... that includes Collingwood, Fitzroy and Carlton. They come from all classes, some from respectable parents, some from the street with no parents.¹

Girls in the chorus of The Geisha, c.1902.The officers were played by girls, from left, Emma Thomas (aged 17), daughter of a Collingwood ironmonger; Irene Goulding (aged 14), daughter of a Fitzroy boot maker; Lilly Thompson (aged 15), daughter of a Carlton bricklayer; the diminutive Daphne Trott or Pollard (aged 11), daughter of a Fitzroy furniture polisher. Pollard Opera Companies Collection, Australian Performing Arts Collection, Melbourne.

Before the company arrived in the US in 1901, Arthur Pollard had preceded them, making bookings and planting positive stories about the upcoming company tour in the local press. At least part of the challenge for the Pollards lay in emerging US attitudes to children performing on stage. On the US East coast, the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children had been highly influential in opposing the use of children on stage. The society’s president, Elbridge Gerry, found the practice of children singing and dancing, and especially performances by children’s troupes, particularly degrading.² Anticipating this, stories emphasizing a serious educational aspect to the Pollard Lilliputian Opera Company were planted in newspapers. In March 1902 one New York newspaper reported that the company was ‘actually an educational institution,’ which provided singing, stage training as well as a ‘common school education’.³

While on their first US tour, Pollards made one brief foray as far east as Chicago. A long account of the company and its serious credentials had appeared in the Chicago Tribune a few days before their opening at the Bush Temple of Music in May 1902. The account emphasized their strict schedule which included daily schooling with Mr Levy, ‘whose salary is paid by the Australian Government’. It went on to state that Nellie Chester was a ‘graduate physician’ who was accompanied by two nurses.⁴ It was all nonsense, of course. A week later the Pollards had closed their Chicago season. Complicated face-saving reasons were given, with a claim they had made a mistake by selecting a play too well known to open with, and that they were returning to Australia (which they were not), but the Chicago Tribune also acknowledged that ‘child opera does not appeal to Chicago’.⁵ It was another 12 years before a Pollards troupe finally appeared on the US east coast.

The program for a performance of The Lady Slaveyat Montreal’s Academy of Music, with the one week listing of comic operas for the week starting November 27, 1905. Almost every child’s age was mis-represented.

Author’s Collection

14-year-old Midas Martyn kept a diary of the Pollards tour of 1904–1907, which fortunately has survived. The diary reveals a non-stop program of travel and performance back and forth across Canada and up and down the US West coast. In many towns, the company’s stay was merely for a few days before moving on again. The company was in Sacramento in April 1906, when the San Francisco earthquake struck, 80 miles away. According to Midas’ diary they stayed in a park near their hotel during the day, waiting five days for a train booking to take them north.

It is difficult to see much time for schooling in the schedule Midas recorded, despite the regular claims made by the Pollards that they provided a teacher. Indeed, this writer can see little evidence of teaching going on at all in any of the Pollards tours. In the disastrous 1909 tour of India, Arthur Pollard employed 17-year-old dancer Ruby Ford to help maintain the pretence of having a teacher.⁶ The twenty-first century concept of teachers as qualified and registered professionals should not colour our understanding of the profession in 1900, an era when most teachers were yet to qualify and often still studying while working. What the Pollards were able to offer, fitfully, was some basic tuition in spelling, reading, writing and arithmetic, from someone who already had those skills.⁷

In her 1985 interview, Irene Goulding recalled with obvious regret that she didn’t get much schooling during her childhood. She also recalled telling her favourite teacher at the Bell Street School in Fitzroy that she was leaving to go away with the Pollards. Irene’s teacher told her it was a dreadful idea, but she was young and the chance to travel was too exciting.⁸ For many children like Irene, the chance to travel and see the world was overwhelmingly attractive. Free secondary schools had yet to be established, and a career on stage might be both an additional income stream for a working-class family and an exciting career option, an alternative to the inevitable apprenticeship or a life of factory work in inner Melbourne.

Irene Goulding with Ivy Trott in costume for The Gaiety Girl, c1904

Pollard Opera Companies Collection, Australian Performing Arts Collection, Melbourne

Oscar Heintz, c.1903

Pollard Opera Companies Collection, Australian Performing Arts Collection, Melbourne

This reality is starkly illustrated by 16-year-old Oscar Heintz’s decision not to return with the Pollards troupe in February 1907.⁹ While his younger twin siblings Freddie and Johnnie returned to their widowed mother Annie at the family home in Kerr Street, Fitzroy, Oscar threw himself on the mercy of the YMCA in Portland, Oregon.

Following another long tour to North America between July 1907 and May 1909, with a mostly fresh troupe, Charles Pollard announced his retirement, while Nellie Chester announced she was moving to the US. Some sense of the lucrative nature of running children’s opera troupes had been revealed in 1901, when one journalist claimed Charles and Nellie had netted £30,000 over the previous two years.¹⁰ Another report on the operations of Tom Pollard’s troupes operating in Australasia in 1900 suggests a similar success.¹¹

Charles Pollard (undated)

May Pollard Collection, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW

Arthur Pollard and the disaster in India 1909–1910

Following the retirement of Charles Pollard, in April 1909 the ‘ever genial and widely known’ Arthur Pollard was announced as the new proprietor and organiser of the branch of Pollards that travelled overseas.¹²

Unfortunately, Arthur Pollard had already developed a reputation for having a short temper. During the first tour of the US in 1901-2, he hit another Pollard brother, Henry (1857–1931) with a walking stick, after a dispute. The matter would have gone to court had Charles not returned from Chicago to make the peace between his brothers.¹³ Two months later, Arthur was taken to court after hitting a boy (not one of the troupe) in a park in Portland, Oregon. He admitted kicking the boy who (he said) had been ‘abusing his daughter’. He was given a fine and the matter dismissed.¹⁴ But Arthur Pollard had no daughter.

Arthur Pollard’s disastrous tour of India in 1909–1910 has been well documented by Arrighi, Rice and fictionalised by Kirsty Murray.¹⁵ There is no doubt he ill-treated some of the children in his care. In late 1909, while in Kuala Lumpur, he had struck Leah Leichner with a stick, inflicting a wound, ‘because she went out with a man in a motor car’.¹⁶ Following protracted court proceedings in Madras, he suddenly disappeared with the company profits and 18-year-old performer Irene Finlay, making his way to England. Arthur Pollard was publicly castigated for his treatment of the children and as others have observed, the Pollard brand name was thoroughly discredited as a result.¹⁷ In the Australian press, strenuous efforts were made to disassociate Arthur Pollard from his siblings Charles and Nellie, and from Tom Pollard, who was still active.¹⁸ It was also claimed, rather incredibly, that Nellie Chester had warned families that her brother Arthur was ‘not a fit man to have control of so many young people’.¹⁹

Arthur Pollard, seated, centre, with his Lilliputians, sometime in late 1909 or early 1910. The Leader (Melbourne) 21 May 1910, P24. State Library of Victoria.

Perhaps more tellingly, before Arthur Pollard’s troupe departed for Java on the SS Gracchus in July 1909, many of the previous tour’s most experienced performers opted out. All of the Chester children—May, Frank, Ernest, Charles and Willie, in addition to Jack Cherry, Ted McNamara, Fred Bindloss, Harold Fraser, Emily Davis and Eva Thompson chose to go to the US to work with Nellie Chester. With them went Alf Goulding, who had been the most recent stage manager and director.

As Arrighi and Rice note, the Australian Emigration Act of 1910 was a direct consequence of the public controversy surrounding the 1909–1910 Pollard tour. It stipulated that children (girls under 18 and boys under 16) could not be taken out of Australia to perform, without official approval.²⁰

Nellie Chester with her daughter May, often billed as May Pollard, and one of her sons. Undated.

May Pollard Collection, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

Nellie Chester and Pollards Juveniles in the US 1909–1920

Nellie Chester’s company began performing in North America in June 1909. They followed the Pollards well established route—through Hawaii, then British Columbia, followed by various stops in California. With a reputation to live up to, they were now presented in reports as ‘graduates’ or ‘senior Pollards.’ To further emphasise the connection to past successes and the Pollard brand name, most of the performers adopted the surname Pollard, even those who had previously appeared in North America under their real name. Fun on the Bristol was their first musical comedy. Alf Goulding, who had been behind the scenes for much of the previous decade, was now on stage again—as leading comedian.

Alf ‘Pollard’ (Goulding) and the cast in Miss Idlewildin November 1910

The Bakersfield Californian,6 November 1910, p.13. Newspapers.com

Alf Pollard as the widow

The San Diego Sun,20 October 1910, p.7. Newspapers.com

There were, however, new challenges for this latest manifestation of the Pollards. Even the youngest were now aged in their mid-teens and could now no longer pass as ‘Lilliputians’. In fact, most of the troupe were now in their early twenties. They were also competing against numerous other young adult troupes touring the US, as well as against the rising popularity of cinema. In addition, by late 1911, four of the male performers (Alf Goulding, Fred Bindloss, Jack Cherry and Harold Fraser) had drifted off to new opportunities. The troupe had to be supplemented by non-Australians, although this was usually not acknowledged.

In 1912, Nellie Chester returned to Australia, determined to replenish her troupe. She soon had 15 new Australians signed and could still count on a few experienced Pollard performers—like Teddy McNamara and Eva Pollard. The new Australian faces included Ethel Naylor and Leslie Donaghey, who had both been to India with Arthur Pollard. Five of the new girls were under 18 years of age. Amongst the youngest was Queenie Williams, who would become Pollards leading comedienne.

Some of Nellie Chester’s Australians. Left to right: Eva Pollard (Thompson) (The Burlington Free Press (Vermont), 31 January 1913, p.8), Queenie Williams (Los Angeles Herald, 17 February 1914, p.7) and Teddie McNamara in character (Vancouver Daily World, 3 January 1914, p.11). Newspapers.com.

The first performances were of the ever familiar, popular musicals—The Mikado, The Belle of New York, Sergeant Brue, The Toy Maker and La Belle Butterfly. Not surprisingly, the cities the troupe visited welcomed another return of a Pollards company, even if they all seemed a little older. And finally, in February 1915, after touring in California, the Pollards arrived in New York. There, at the Flatbush Theatre in Brooklyn, they performed their own ‘miniature’ musical opera A Millionaire for a Day.

The Dog Watch, later called Married by Wireless, toured the US between 1916 and 1919 (Wisconsin State Journal, 30 January 1919, p.8). Its special mechanical effects were impressive. Newspapers.com.

This was now the era of vaudeville, and the Pollard Juvenile troupe (its title constantly changed) shared the stage with in-house orchestras, motion picture shorts and other variety acts. Their stock in trade, the elaborate full-length musical comedy, had no place in this frantic world of the US vaudeville circuits. Until 1916, the Pollards, now led by Nellie’s son Ernest, tried developing condensed versions of their repertoire. In late 1916, the company launched their own new spectacular musical ‘playlet’ Married Via Wireless. For three years, this original musical production, with its impressive ‘behind the scenes maze of machinery … responsible for passing ships, a blinking lighthouse, (and) a murderous submarine at its work of destruction’,²¹ toured the US and Canada. Ernest Chester was credited with the very portable scenery design. The very slight plot related to ‘the romance of the wireless operator and the daughter of the ship’. Other original works—also relying on clever backstage machinery—included On Manila Bay (1919), and Earth to Moon (1920).

The End of the Pollard Dynasty

In the early 1920s Nellie Chester’s sons decided to use their engineering and mechanical skills in a new context, and in late 1922, the theatrical company commonly known as the Pollards, quietly wrapped up. At the same time, the Chester-Pollard Amusement Company was established, to manufacture mechanical arcade games for use in clubs, hotels and in the home. These large, mechanical, wooden-cased games were the forerunners of the pinball and amusement machines we know today.

The Chester Pollard amusement company appears to have continued production of these machines until the early 1930s. In the height of the Depression the company took to running their Sportland ‘nickel arcades’ rather than manufacturing. Their remarkably robust machines survive today in specialist collections.

In time the Chester brothers all turned to different careers—theatre management, real estate and engineering. With that, the Pollard brand name had finally disappeared.

By 1922, the Chester Pollard company produced amusement machines, such as the very popular Ballon Racer game.

Billboard,17 March 1923, p.96

A home version of miniature golf

The Cincinnati Enquirer(Ohio), 16 November 1930, p.27. Lantern Media History Digital Library.

Growing up with the Pollards

History belongs to the victors they say, or in this case, the adults and the handful of Lilliputians who became famous. Unfortunately, most of the Pollard performers remain as anonymous today as they were in their lifetimes. The most reliable information on the children comes from US records. Even then, their real and stage names were sometimes used inter-changeably and few personal details were recorded, because they were children.

This photo suggests some degree of normalness in the childhood of Pollards Lilliputians. It was taken c 1903–1904 at a beach in Seattle. Charles, Nellie and Arthur sit amongst the children. The adult Levy brothers are the only ones dressed to swim. Irene Goulding recalled she was too frightened to go in the water—like many of the children she had never learned to swim. Pollard Opera Companies Collection, Australian Performing Arts Collection, Melbourne.

Kate Rice has correctly observed that the children of the Pollards troupes had no agency in their working lives once apprenticed to the Pollards. Thanks to surviving Supreme court documents, we know something of the contractual arrangements made with their parents and can glimpse some of the bargaining that occurred. In 1904 the written contracts for well-known children like Daphne Trott and Teddy McNamara provided for a salary of 10 shillings per month for the first six months and after that, £1 pound per month. The money was paid to parents—sometimes in advance of the tour—with the contracts lasting for at least two years. We know this because in May 1904 Charles and Nellie were again in court, when their former musical director tried to set up his own Lilliputian Company to tour the US and attempted to poach some of the Pollards children. The attempt failed, but the documents suggest the parents of child performers used the exercise as a means to bargain for better pay from the Pollards.²² One cannot help but conclude that children were commodities in this exchange between parents and the Pollards as employers.

Not all parents were happy with the arrangements. Frank Goulding senior blamed the Pollards for the death of Frank Junior and began to send abusive postcards to Nellie Chester in early 1903, even while she engaged Alf and Irene. He also complained that the money promised to him was not being paid. His stream of abusive letters saw him end up in court, a lonely father, perhaps resentful of the choices his family had had to make.²³

Irene Finlay and Eva Pollard (Thompson) in character for A Runaway Girl

The San Francisco Dramatic Review,2 May 1908, p.2. Lantern Media History Digital Library.

The childhood experience of working for the Pollards was as varied as one might expect. Many of the Lilliputians thought highly of Charles Pollard and Nellie Chester. Irene Goulding still spoke fondly of Aunty Chester during her 1985 interview. Eva Thompson not only used the stage name Pollard but was also inclined to list Nellie Chester as her ‘adoptive mother’, although her own parents were alive and well in Melbourne. Although Willie Thomas gave up the stage to become a butcher, he kept his makeup box to the end of his days, suggesting a very strong sentimental attachment to his childhood as a Pollards actor. Irene Finlay decided to make her life with Arthur Pollard, a man 18 years her senior. The couple finally married, bigamously, in Auckland in February 1925. Her thanks to friends on his death in 1940, suggest it was an affectionate and stable relationship.²⁴ Yet at the other extreme, after the trauma of travelling with Arthur Pollard, Leah Leichner re-made herself, moving with her very young son back to India and then to Hong Kong, without ever acknowledging her years on stage with the Pollards. Oscar Heintz also left the stage, the Pollards and Australia behind, apparently without regret. He studied, and within a few years had a job, had married and had begun the process of US citizenship. He returned on a brief visit in 1929, a successful self-made man, working in the Neon lighting industry.

Charles Pollard and Nellie Chester were businesspeople ‘of their time’, whose behaviour reflected prevailing attitudes about employment practices, a child’s right to education and the risks involved in travel to conflict zones. They were only occasionally questioned publicly about what they were doing, in periods of what Arrighi characterises as instances of ‘moral panic’ in Australia, such as in 1910. But when Charles Pollard died in Sydney in February 1942 there was no public commentary in Australia, he was already entirely forgotten by the press. Perhaps the experience of child performers with the Pollards was something Australians wanted to forget. Not so on the North American west coast however, where newspapers acknowledged Nellie Chester as a theatrical pioneer, following her death in May 1944.²⁵

Endnotes

1. The Honolulu Advertiser, 14 September 1901, p.10

2. McArthur (1995), p.67

3. Democrat and Chronicle (New York), 9 March 1902, p.10

4. Chicago Tribune, 19 May 1902, p.12

5. Chicago Tribune, 27 May 1902, p.5

6. The Herald (Melbourne), 17 May 1910, p.5

7. Andrews & Towns (2017), pp.192–3

8. Irene Smith interview (1985)

9. In fact, several boys may have done this.

10. The Ballarat Star, 7 February 1901, p.4

11. The Ballarat Star, 14 July 1900, p.2

12. Truth (Brisbane), 18 April 1909, p.8

13. The Brainerd Daily Dispatch (Minnesota), 22 April 1902, p.2

14. The Portland Daily Journal (Oregon), 21 June 1902, p.1

15. Arrighi (2017) and Rice (2021)

16. The West Australian, 21 April 1910, p.3

17. See for example Truth (Perth), 4 June 1910, p.6 and The Argus (Melbourne), 18 October 1910, p.6

18. These efforts to disassociate Charles and Nellie from Arthur were still being made three years later. See Referee (Sydney), 8 January 1913, p.15

19. Daily Herald (Adelaide), 16 May 1910, p.5

20. Federal Register of Legislation (Australia) Emigration Act 1910. Assented 25 November 1910

21. Dayton Daily News (Ohio), 23 December 1917, p.43

22. Public Records Office Victoria. Civil Case Files (VPRS267) 1904/329 Charles Albert Pollard, Nellie Chester, Pollards Lilliputian Opera Company versus Ernest Augustus Wolffe

23. The Argus (Melbourne), 6 May 1903, p.7

24. Auckland Star, 11 October 1940, p.1

25. The Los Angeles Times, 21 May 1944, p.23

References

John Andrews & Deborah Towns, ‘A Secondary Education for All’? A History of State Secondary Schooling in Victoria, Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2017

Gillian Arrighi, ’The Controversial “Case of the Opera Children in the east”: Political Conflict between Popular Demand for Child Actors and Modernizing Cultural Policy on the Child’, Theatre Journal, 69, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017, pp.153–173

Gillian Arrighi and Victor Emeljanow (eds), Entertaining Children: The Participation of Youth in the Entertainment Industry, Palgrove MacMillan, New York, 2014. Chapter 3. ‘Children and Youth of the Empire: Tales of Transgression and Accommodation’, pp.51-71

Roger L. Bedard, ‘Is it a skip or a dance?: Elbridge T. Gerry’s campaign against child actors’, Youth Theatre Journal, 11:1,1997, pp.15–24

Peter Downes, The Pollards. A family and its child and adult opera companies in New Zealand and Australia 1880–1910, Steele Roberts, Aotearoa, New Zealand, 2002

Marah Gubar, ‘Who Watched the Children’s Pinafore? Age Transvestism on the nineteenth-century stage.’ Victorian Studies, Vol 54, No 3, Spring 2012

Sally Howes, Irene Smith interview, Cassette 616, Australian Performing Arts Collection, Art Centre Melbourne, 1985

Benjamin McArthur, ‘“Forbid them not”: Child Labor laws and political activism in the Theatre’, Theatre Survey, 36:2 November 1995, pp.63–80

Kirsty Murray, India Dark, Allen and Unwin, 2010

Kate Rice, Performing the Past podcast; Episode 4: So and So and Such and Such, Arts Centre, Melbourne, 2021, https://soundcloud.com/arts-centre-melbourne/performing-the-past-episode-3-so-and-so-and-such-and-such

Thanks

I am grateful to the families of Pollards Lilliputians, who have shared their family stories, especially:

Catherine Crocker regarding Midas Martyn,

Robert Maynard regarding Willie and Emma Thomas,

Brenda Young regarding Elsie Morris,

John and Joan Grant regarding Leah Leichner,

and the descendants of the Heintz, Goulding and Thompson families.