Queenie Williams

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.

With thearrival of Hugh J. Ward’s company, Ward was heralded as ‘A New Australian Manager’. Since his first appearance in Australia in 1899, as a member of the Hoyt-McKee company, American-born Ward had proved a popular actor and dancer, and his shift to management was a welcome move. In 1906, in association with George Willoughby, his English company had undertaken an eighteen-month tour of Australasia with the comedy The Man from Mexico. Having returned to London in 1908, he organised his own company, touring India, Burma, China, and the Straits Settlements. An article in Sydney’s Daily Telegraph (1 January 1910, p.6) noted:

In the tour in the East, just concluded, he was his own financier and manager; his knowledge of stage craft and long experience of the theatre enabled him to direct the production of his plays; and in the ultimate result, the box office receipts showed that the venture was, in a pecuniary sense, thoroughly successful. So far as the artistic merits of the productions are concerned, Sydney audiences who are enjoying the brisk acting of a talented, all-round company in “A Bachelor’s Honeymoon” will have but one opinion.

The Company’s first offering, A Bachelor’s Honeymoon, kicked off the 1909 Christmas season at the Palace, playing for a jolly six weeks. It was followed on 11 February 1910 by VIvian’s Papas, a farcical comedy by Leo Ditrichstein, that was described as a twin to A Bachelor’s Honeymoon on account of its ‘mirth-provoking qualities’. Vivian’s Papas had received its Australian debut during Hugh J. Ward’s initial Perth season, where it played several nights at the Theatre Royal from 12 June 1909.

Members of the Hugh J. Ward company on tour in the East. Hugh Ward is in the centre, with Grace Palotta to the left. From The Mirror, 21 May 1909, p.15.

Ditrichstein’s farce had premiered in New York in August 1903. The principal roles were played by Hattie Williams as Vivian Rogers, an actress who attracts the attention of two admirers or ‘papas’—Chester D. Farnham and Frederick W. Walker—played by comedians John C. Rice and Thomas A. Wise. In this production, the role of Alice Farnham, Chester’s wife, was played by Esther Tittell, a sister of actress Tittell Brune. Mixing comedy, drama and song, the play’s big attraction was a Wagnerian/grand opera spoof set against a realistic fire scene.

At the Palace, Grace Palotta had the titular role, renamed Vivian Gay, with Arthur Eldred and Hugh J. Ward as the two papas. As the piece contained several songs, tenor Walter Whyte was specially engaged to play one of the singing firemen; W.B. Beattie, another singer formerly with Williamson’s Royal Comic Opera Company, played the role of Edouard Pollak, a singing teacher. Ward’s wife, Grace Miller Ward (who would go on to establish herself as a noted Sydney-based singing teacher) paired with Whyte for the operatic fire scene. Maud Chetwynd (previously seen at the Palace with Allan Hamilton’s Dramatic Company in 1909) played the small role of Carrie the housemaid.

The fire scene provided an exciting climax to the play’s first act, with the Sydney Morning Herald (13 February 1910) observing: ‘Machinery recently imported from the United States provides a remarkable illusion, and it is hard to believe that the stage is not a mass of flames.’

From Table Talk (Melbourne), 1 July 1909, p.21. Author’s collection.

Vivian’s Papas played for just a week, closing on 18 February 1910. With the end of the season fast approaching, The Fencing Master (for the first time in Sydney) and The Man from Mexico(first introduced during the 1906 Willoughby-Ward tour), were performed for a week each. The first named play was a far cry from the antics of the two former plays. It was a serious drama, which provided Ward with the opportunity to show his versatility as an actor. A comedy-drama in three acts by Herbert Hall Winslow, the play was described by Ward as ‘one of the most beautiful and interesting plays I have ever had or seen’.¹ Ward played the title character, Angelo Rossi, an Italian nobleman who has emigrated to New York after killing a man in a duel. When his son seeks to marry a young lady (Grace Palotta) of an upright family, the father of another man (W.B. Beattie) also after her affections, recognises Rossi as the man in the duel, thereby jeopardising the son’s chances of a good marriage. 

Hugh Ward at the Palace, as seen by cartoonist Harry Julius

From The Bulletin (Sydney), 24 February 1910, p.8

Hugh Ward and Grace Palotta in The Man from Mexico, 1906. Photo by Talma, Sydney & Melbourne.

Author’s collection

The Fencing Master had received its premiere by Ward’s company in Calcutta in April 1909. According to Variety (May 1909), it ‘established a record for an opening of an American piece in point of distance from Broadway’. The same article noted that the play had been handed over to Ward without a title and ‘The Fencing Master’ had been selected by the players. It is not clear if the play was ever produced in America as the title had already been assigned to another work—Reginald de Koven’s 1892 opera—and would have been given another name. The piece received its first Australian outings in Perth in June 1909 and in Melbourne in August 1909.

The Man from Mexico, the comedy by George Broadhurst, that was the hit of the 1906 Willoughby-Ward season, brought the company’s Palace season to a close. Hugh Ward repeated his success as the ‘picturesque liar who talks about his adventures in Mexico so as to account for his absence from home while he has been serving a sentence in gaol’.² The audience demanded repeated encores of his song ‘Nobody’ (written by Alex Rogers, with music by Bert A. Williams, and first published in 1905). Grace Palotta and Reginald Wykeham reprised their roles, along with Celia Ghiloni and Maud Chetwynd.

Nellie Fergusson (Jovita de Sutro), Harry Diver (Tom Barnes), Ethel Buckley (Nell), Kenneth Hunter (Dick Gordon) in The Luck of Roaring Camp. Photos by Talma. From Punch (Melbourne), 10 February 1910, p.185.

With the departure of Hugh J. Ward, George Marlow’s company made a welcome return. They began their season on 5 March 1910 with the first Sydney production of The Luck of Roaring Camp, a melodrama in four acts by Benjamin Landeck, set on the Californian goldfields. It was apparently adapted from a story by American novelist Bret Harte (‘America’s Charles Dickins’), however, reviews soon revealed that the title was the only similarity. The Daily Telegraph, for example, noted, Landeck’s play ‘bears not the faintest resemblance to Bret Harte’s well-known story of the that name … It relates not to the doings of Oakhurst, the gambler; Stumpy, the good-natured Kentuck, and the rest of them, but the schemes of one Tom Barnes to obtain undisputed possession of a certain hidden mine, and to destroy the happiness of Will Gordon and Nell Curtis—persons who are conspicuously absent from the pages of Bret Harte’.³

Landeck’s play had first been performed in London at the Fulham Theatre in March 1909, and in Australia in January 1910 during George Marlow’s Adelaide season.

Ethel Buckley played the heroine, Nell (she was to repeat the role in a 1911 film-version of the play), with Nellie Fergusson as the Spanish adventuress, Jovita de Sutro, who along with Tom Barnes, played by Harry Diver, is one of the villains of the piece. Kenneth Hunter proved popular with audiences as Will Gordon, the hero, and J.P. O’Neill provided ‘a good deal of merriment’ as Mary Flynn, ‘a buxom dame’ who has buried two husbands.⁴

Palace audiences did not mind that the play had little to do with Bret Harte’s original story. It attracted packed houses, with Marlow reportedly turning people away each night. It played for the full three weeks of the season, after which the company departed for Western Australia.

Max Maxwell, 1909. Photo by Lafayette. From The Stage Year Book, 1910.

Author’s collection

The late John Brunton

State Library Victoria, Melbourne

On Easter Saturday, the Allan Hamilton-Max Maxwell Dramatic Company opened their season at the Palace. Following the retirement of Bland Holt, the sole rights to some of his greatest successes were secured by the new partnership of Hamilton and Maxwell. Allan Hamilton was a well-known and respected theatre manager, whose dramatic company had played at the Palace in 1909. Max Maxwell, a Tasmanian-born actor, had been with the Bland Holt company for 14 years, starting off in bit parts and graduating to leading man.

The company’s repertoire of plays included Woman and Wine, In London Town, Revenge, The Lights o’ London and Woman’s Hate. They also acquired the original scenery for these plays, painted by John Brunton, who had only recently died, in July 1909, aged 60. English-born Brunton had been in Australia since 1886, having been engaged by Willliamson, Garner and Musgrove at the Theatre Royal in Melbourne, painting backdrops for everything from Gilbert & Sullivan to pantomime and drama. By the early 1890s, he was also working on cloths for other managements, and in 1896 he had replaced W.B. Spong as scenic artist with Bland Holt. During his fifteen years with Holt, he painted the scenes for a raft of melodramas. In addition to the five selected for revival, they included The Cotton King, The Union Jack, The Prodigal Daughter, A Life of Pleasure, Straight from the Heart, Sporting Life, The Breaking of the Drought, The White Heather, The Great Millionaire and The Great Rescue. He was working on The Sins of Society at the time of his death.

Jennie Pollock. Photo by Talma.

Author’s collection

Charles Brown. Photo by May and Mina Moore.

State Library Victoria, Melbourne

Actors were drawn principally from the Bland Holt company, including Harrie Ireland, Jennie Pollock, Arthur Styan, Godfrey Cass and Charles Brown, while Beatrice Holloway was from the Hamiliton company.

Hamilton and Maxwell launched their Sydney season with Woman and Wine, a melodrama by Arthur Shirley and Benjamin Landeck. Bland Holt’s staging was carefully observed, and the play was presented in true ‘Blandholtian’ style. Set pieces included the Longchamps Steeplechase, the Japanese Ball, and the spectacular revolving set to the Paris Flower Market, which featured a duel with knives between two women!

From The Star (Sydney), 11 April 1910, p.8Woman and Wine was initially produced in 1897 at the Pavilion Theatre in London, and in March 1899 at the Princess’s Theatre.

When Bland Holt first staged the play in Melbourne in April 1899 and Sydney in June 1900, the principal characters were played by Elizabeth Watson/Harrie Ireland (Marcel Rigadout), Frances Ross (Mary Andrews), Fitzmaurice Gill (La Colombe), Walter Baker (Dick Seymour) and Arthur Styan (Pierre Crucru). For this current revival, Arthur Styan was the only actor from the original cast. Other roles were now played by Jennie Pollock (Marcel Rigadout), Beatrice Holloway (Mary Andrews), Vera Remee (La Colombe) and Max Maxwell (Dick Seymour).

Woman and Wine played for a fortnight, and on 16 April 1910, the company presented In London Town, a rag to riches melodrama by George R. Sims and Arthur Shirley. First produced in London at the Crown Theatre in Peckham in August 1899, the play entered Bland Holt’s repertoire the following year when it played three nights at the Opera House in Brisbane in April 1900. It was subsequently seen in Melbourne in June 1901 and Sydney in May 1902.

Once again, the only original cast member in the current revival was Arthur Styan who reprised his role of the blind tramp, Richard Norrison. Other parts were played by Max Maxwell (John Hargreaves), Godfrey Cass (Frank Dalton), Beatrice Holloway (Alice Dalton), Charles Brown (Jack Parker), Muriel Dale (Liddy Blist) and Jennie Pollock (Rosa Norrison).

Two weeks later, on 30 April 1910, the company presented their final revival of the season: Revenge, a romantic military drama by E. Hill Mitchelson. This was the most recent of the Bland Holt melodramas, receiving its first Australian outing at the Theatre Royal in Melbourne in January 1907. Woven around the Austrian revolution, this tale of daring-do was set in a royal palace, providing John Brunton with the opportunity to design some elaborate sets, ranging from a throne room to a prison. Max Maxwell played the dashing hero, Captain Loris Vanessa, with Godfrey Cass and Beatrice Holloway as the King and Queen. Richard Bellairs and Jennie Pollock added ‘weight and emphasis’ as the two baddies, Prince Orloff and Braga Vanessa.

Revengeproved a money-maker for Hamilton and Maxwell, but with West Pictures driven from the Glaciarium by the winter skaters and due to commence their season at the Palace Theatre on 7 May 1910, the melodrama company was required to call it quits. Thus, the company, comprising some 32 people and 130 tons of scenery, departed on a protracted tour of New Zealand and Tasmania.

West Pictures held court until the first week of September, and on 10 September 1910, the Hamilton-Maxwell company made a welcome return. Their opening production was Women’s Revenge by Henry Pettitt, one of the most popular dramas in the Bland Holt repertoire. First produced at the Adelphi Theatre in London in 1893, with Charles Warner (Frank Drummond), Elizabeth Robins (Mary Lonsdale), Gertrude Kingston (Mabel Wentworth), and Charles Cartwright (Jephtha Grimshaw) as the leads. The following year, it was performed in Australia for the first time by the Bland Holt company, with Edward Sass, Henrietta Watson, Edith Blande and Walter Baker. The scenery was designed by George and John Gordon. Holt mounted an elaborate revival in 1897 with new scenery by John Brunton. The leads, on this occasion, were Walter Baker, Elizabeth Watson, Frances Ross and John Cosgrove.

Ronald W. Riley. Photo by Doré Studios, Sydney.

State Library Victoria, Melbourne

Vera Remee. Photographer Unknown.

http://www.red-jos.net/desaxe.htm

The line-up of the Hamilton-Maxwell company was largely the same as it had been the previous March, with Beatrice Holloway, Max Maxwell and Richard Bellairs as the leads. However, two newcomers, Nellie Strong and Ronald W. Riley, now filled the roles vacated by Jennie Pollock and Arthur Styan, who had joined the Clarke and Meynell organisation.

Alas, one day into the season Beatrice Holloway fell ill with enteric fever (typhoid), with Vera Remee taking over the part of the heroine Mary Lonsdale.

Women’s Revenge played until 23 September. By way of farewelling the play—and in anticipation of the one to follow—‘J.B.’ contributed a little poem to the Bulletin.

From The Bulletin (Sydney), 22 September 1910, p.8

With the end of the season looming, Allan Hamilton announced two new dramas, The Little Breadwinnerand Why Men Love Women. These were being presented by arrangement with Messrs Clarke and Meynell.

The first of these plays, The Little Breadwinner, had already been performed throughout Western Australia, Victoria, and Queensland by the Clarke and Meynell company. It had been given its Australian premiere at His Majesty’s Theatre in Perth in February 1908, with G.P. Carey, Fred Coape, Beatrice Holloway, C.R. Stanford, Ida Gresham and Queenie Williams in the principal roles. The last named was a child star who had been seen to good effect in the Meynell and Gunn hit show The Fatal Wedding, performing with the ‘Tin Can Band’.

Described as a Domestic Drama in five acts, the play by J.A. Campbell, had first been performed in Birmingham in December 1905 (by J.A. Campbell’s own company), prior to opening in London, at the Standard Theatre, on 19 March 1906. The London cast included J.C. Aubrey (Lord William), C. King (Richard), Kathleen Russell (Margaret) and Little Maud Harris (Meg).

The play tells the story of Dick Lawrence, the adopted son of Lord William Dorrington, who wrongly convicted of stealing, is banished from the household. Moving to London with his betrothed, Margaret, the couple live in poverty, and with his wife now blind, they rely on their little daughter Meg to keep ‘the wolf from the door by singing in the street’. Eventually the true perpetrator of the theft is found, and the whole family is reunited.

The first Sydney production of The Little Breadwinner opened on 24 September 1910. Apart from Queenie Williams, who played Meg, the ‘little breadwinner’ of the title, the line up of the company was completely new, with Charles Brown (Lord William), Max Maxwell (Dick Lawrence), Vera Remee (Margaret), with Richard Bellairs as Joseph Prior, the chief villain.

Queenie Williams in c.1912, when she went to America. Photo by James & Bushnell, Seattle.

Sayre Collection of Theatrical Photographs, University of Washington Libraries

Nellie Strong, 1910. Photo by Talma.

State Library of New South Wales, Sydney

The Little Breadwinnerproved a little winner, especially the performance of Queenie Williams.⁵

The final play of the season was Why Men Love Women by Walter Howard, the author of the highly popular melodrama The Midnight Wedding. This play had been announced for performance by the Harcourt Beatty-Madge McIntosh company in 1908 but was not performed. And in early 1910, it was slated for performance in Melbourne by the Clarke-Meynell company. It finally received its first Australian production at Maitland (NSW) on 12 March 1910 by the Edwin Geach company. The principal characters were played by Walter Vincent (Gerald Fielding), Lottie Lyell (Violet Livingstone), Raymond Longford (Captain Serge Staniloff), Ida Gresham (Mariel Toloski), and C.R. Stanford (Maharajah of Balore).

Described as an ‘Anglo-Indian drama, with many stirring and sensational interests’, the play had first been performed in Manchester (UK) in 1901. It did very well in the British provinces, but never reached the West End.

When the play opened In Sydney on 8 October 1910, it was incorrectly advertised as being the ‘first production in Australia’. It received a warm reception, being ‘joyously acclaimed by a crowded house at the Palace Theatre’.⁶ The principal characters were performed by Vera Remee (Violet Livingstone), Max Maxwell (Gerald Fielding), Richard Bellairs (Captain Staniloff), Ronald W. Riley (Maharajah) and Nellie Strong (Muriel Zoluski). Interestingly, all the reviews make it clear that the title of the play is never really explained. There was a scene in which the hero gave a poetic speech, the ‘Allegory of Love, the Maiden, and the Rose’, which gave promise of a solution, but apparently left the most attentive listeners still without a firm answer!

Why Men Love Women played to packed houses, but was withdrawn at the height of it success on 28 October 1910 to make way for The Spider and the Fly. Described as a ‘sensational drama of modern times’, this new play, being performed in Australia for the first time, was written by two stalwarts of the genre, Sutton Vane and Arthur Shirley.

It had first been performed at the Grand Theatre, Brighton, in April 1906, and at the Kennington Theatre, London, the following August. The story of two half-brothers, one good, and one bad. The good brother, Cyril Girdlestone, is happily married with a wife and infant. Cyril had previously been tricked into a marriage with an adventuress, Lola Grey, but following her death was free to marry his true sweetheart, Edith McAllister. When Cyril’s half-brother, Welby, learns that Cyril has become the sole heir of their father’s fortune, he plots with Lola (who isn’t really dead, and who had married Cyril bigamously), to kill the young family. She sets a trap, whereby Cyril and Edith are locked in a room in which the ceiling can be mechanically lowered, thereby squashing any inhabitants! Ultimately the villainous Lola is caught in her own snare. The cast included Max Maxwell and Vera Remee as the hero and heroine, with Richard Bellairs as the scheming half-brother, and Nellie Strong as the adventuress.

The Spider and the Flywas played until 11 November 1910, and on the following night the company reprised the melodrama Revenge, which they had first presented earlier in the year—and which had been the hit of that season. Max Maxwell and Richard Bellairs once again played Captain Loris Vanessa and Prince Orloff respectively, while Ronald W. Riley and Vera Remee now played the King and Queen, with Nellie Strong as Braga Vanessa.

Revengeplayed for twelve nights, closing on 25 November, thus bringing the highly successful Hamilton-Maxwell season to an end. With the end of this engagement, the company was disbanded, with Max Maxwell and Allan Hamilton going their separate ways. Maxwell set off on a country tour, and readers will be happy to note that he was re-joined by Beatrice Holloway as his leading lady, fully recovered from her recent severe indisposition.

The following night, 26 November, saw the return to the Sydney stage of Maggie Moore, accompanied by her husband H.R. Roberts. Their company included many old favourites, including A.E. Greenaway, C.R. Stanford and Ethel Bashford.

From The Bulletin (Sydney), 24 November 1910, p.8The company’s three-week season saw the production of three plays, playing for a week each. The first was Shadows of a Great City, written by Joseph Jefferson and Livingston Robert Sherwell and first performed in America in 1884, Australia in 1885, and the UK in 1887. Set amidst the urban underbelly of the New York docks and on Blackwell’s Island, the play introduced a myriad of gritty characters. As Biddy Roonan, Maggie Moore played a big-hearted Irish washerwoman, replete with songs. (Interestingly, when the play was revived in Australia in 1887, the role of Biddy was played by comic Grattan Riggs.)

Six nights later, a change of bill saw a revival of A Gambler’s Sweetheart, originally performed by them eighteen months earlier, under the auspices of Clarke and Meynell. Written by Clay M. Greene (of Struck Oilfame), H.R. Roberts and Maggie Moore reprised their characters of Mason (the gambler) and Bessie Fairfax (his sweetheart). The Sydney Morning Herald observed of her performance, that she played Bessie ‘with a vivacity and archness reminiscent of her never-to-be-forgotten Lizzie Stofel [in Struck Oil].’⁷

The following night, Saturday, 9 December 1910, they presented their final offering, a revival of The Prince Chap, previously seen at the Palace during 1908. H.R. Roberts and A.E. Greenaway revived their original roles of William Peyton and the Earl of Henningford, as did Little Vera Huggett and Beryl Yates who played the girl Claudia in Acts 1 and 2 respectively. Ethel Bashford played Claudia in Act 3. As Maggie Moore was not in the play, the evening concluded with the one act farce The Chinese Question, specially written for her by Clay M. Greene, in which she played Kitty McShane (alias San See Lo).

Next the Mosman Musical Society took over the theatre for a week, from 17-23 December, presenting Auber’s comic opera Fra Diavolo.

The year cycled back to where it began with the return of Hugh J. Ward’s company, bringing with them a new comedy, The Girl from Rector’s.

To be continued

Endnotes

1. Kalgoorlie Miner, 23 June 1909, p.8

2. Referee, 2 March 1910, p.16

3. Daily Telegraph, 7 March 1910, p.10

4. Australian Town and Country Journal, 9 March 1910, p.51

5. For more information on the career of Queenie Williams, see Nick Murphy’s, Queenie Williams (1896-1962) & the last Pollard’s tour of America – Forgotten Australian Actors (forgottenaustralianactresses.com)

6. Sydney Morning Herald, 10 October 1910, p.5

7. Sydney Morning Herald, 5 December 1910, p.4

References

Allardyce Nicoll, English Drama 1900–1930: The beginnings of the modern period, Cambridge University Press, 1973

L. Carson (editor), The Stage Year Book, Carson & Comerford Lrd, 1910

Reginald Clarence, The Stage Cyclopaedia: A bibliography of play, Burt Franklin, 1970 (originally published in 1909)

Nick Murphy, Queenie Williams (1896-1962) & the last Pollard’s tour of America, Forgotten Australian Actors (website)

J.P. Wearing, The London Stage, 1900–1909: A calendar of productions, performers, and personnel, 2nd edition, Rowman & Littlefield, 2014

Newspapers

Australian Town and Country Journal (Sydney), The Bulletin (Sydney), The Daily Telegraph (Sydney), Kalgoorlie Miner, The Mirror (Sydney), Punch (Melbourne), The Referee (Sydney), The Star (Sydney), The Sydney Morning Herald, Table Talk (Melbourne)

Trove, https://trove.nla.gov.au/

Pictures

National Library of Australia, Canberra

State Library of New South Wales, Sydney

State Library Victoria, Melbourne

With thanks to

Rob Morrison, Nick Murphy