Simon Plant

Entertaining Mr Coppin: An Antipodean Showman in Civil War America, by Simon Plant, Theatre Heritage Australia, Melbourne, August 2025. RRP A$50.00.

In Simon Plant’s pen pictures, George Coppin is ‘a merry plum pudding of a man’ and an ‘intrepid wandering minstrel’. He went from being a lowly ‘street patterer’, a child actor and musician from Norfolk working small theatres in distant corners of the United Kingdom, to be a very successful ‘low’ comedian in the Australian colonies from 1843 onwards—notably, as the ‘jaunty journeyman’ character of ‘Billy Barlow’ who commented satirically on topical people and events. Then as well, for nearly forty years, Coppin became Australia’s leading stage entrepreneur, theatre owner and manager—and still a force to be reckoned with a decade after that again.

George Selth Coppin (1819–1906) has been studied before: Alec Bagot’s Coppin the Greatappeared in 1965, and four years later Sally O’Neill’s long Australian Dictionary of Biographyentry (in vol. 3) provided the facts of his life and a brief account of the aggressive entrepreneurship that projected him to the top of his profession. He has not always been regarded favourably; a review of Bagot’s book at the time queried ‘Coppin—How Great?’, while O’Neill concludes by noting ‘he was not always scrupulous in dealing with rivals’.

In this new study, Simon Plant offers us a more sympathetic portrait and observes that part of Coppin’s success was due to the empathy and support he gave his fellow players. He had come from near the bottom of English society and never forgot it; only in Australia could he become equal with the best of his fellow ‘Antipodeans’ (those born in the UK but making their way in the colonies). Coppin skirted bankruptcy several times, took risks on many ventures that didn’t come off, and provided for three wives and ten children. If he was hard in business, he was living in a harsh world and an unforgiving profession and he looked after others as well as himself.

Mining the major Coppin collection in the State Library Victoria as his predecessors did, Plant decided to go further and in more detail by focusing on just two years of Coppin’s long life: 1864–1865—not coincidentally, the last years of the tragic and bloody civil war in the United States of America.

On tour in the US for much of that time, Coppin had kept a detailed diary of everything he saw and heard. As a result, Entertaining Mr Coppinsuddenly leaps off the page not just as a wonderfully close-up story of the mid-nineteenth century stage in Australia and the USA (‘as true as I can make it’, says its author, and it is superbly researched and vividly narrated) but also as an important eyewitness account of American society during that terrible conflict as it impacted both those in California far from the ghastly battles of 1864, and their much closer fellow Americans in New York and the near/mid-west as the Confederacy collapsed, the war ended, the recriminations and revenge began, and Lincoln was assassinated. Coppin saw the President’s funeral procession from his hotel window. The US has since seen several Presidents murdered and many attempts on others including the present incumbent (twice, to date) and, reading Coppin’s memoir, where the declared attitudes, causes and consequences are remarkably similar, makes one wonder if soon we’ll be referring to it as the First US Civil War.

By the time Plant zooms in on the two years of his study, Coppin had been close to bankruptcy twice, paid back both sets of creditors in full mainly thanks to his own highly successful stage comic career, been elected to and resigned from the Victorian parliament, buried two wives, acquired three stepchildren and then married the eldest of these, Lucy, who was 18 (Coppin was 42). They had seven more children together; his diary suggests that he was a loving husband and affectionate father and stepfather and providing for their welfare was his abiding obsession.

Coppin’s opportunity for real wealth came in 1863 when Charles and Ellen Kean (née Tree) arrived in Australia. The Keans were in the estimation of many the doyens of British theatre (and certainly thought so themselves) with their repertoire of cut and paste spectacle Shakespeare and other historical dramas. Charles Kean was puffed as bringing ‘the greatest exponent of the greatest of all poets’ to ‘the land where the kangaroo and emu but lately held sway’. (And where 'the unlettered savage walked in solemn dignity in his native wilds' to quote from Richard Younge's address to the Keans.) Both Keans were now well past their prime, but they were hoping before retiring to cement their fortunes through a world tour. Coppin had contracted them for seasons in Melbourne, Sydney and elsewhere, and acted as both their manager and publicity agent. The success of this tour enabled him to settle his debts in Melbourne.

Charles Kean, regarding Coppin as ‘a good businessman’ and ‘truly honourable and upright’ but ‘common’ and ‘rude’, asked him to accompany them on their onward journey to the United States—though more as a servant than a fellow thespian. George, much as it distressed him to leave for 18 months his new young wife and the first four of his brood (Lucy was pregnant when he set sail for San Francisco), saw an opportunity to go on milking the Keans’ successes and make him and his family financially secure for life. Although there would be more difficult years ahead, he did.

From 1 October 1864 when the Keans and Coppin arrive in San Francisco, Entertaining Mr Coppinmanages to weave together (1) his work introducing himself to and befriending theatre owners and managers and newspaper reviewers, and selecting and booking suitable theatres; (2) supporting, nursing, cajoling and arguing with his difficult, needy and pompous stars with their alternating praise and condemnation and impossible demands (sometimes rescinded the next day without explanation or apology); and (3) trying to understand, often at a bar with a new acquaintance, the social and political maelstrom he found himself in—both because, as a man of the world and a once and future politician, it fascinated him, and because theatre in troubled times was doubly threatened.

Sometimes all three subjects collide: after Lincoln’s assassination at Ford’s Theatre in Washington shortly before the Keans were due to play there, Coppin had to cancel some performances out of respect; try to find Ford himself who, suspected of being complicit, had gone to ground; hurry to Washington to find a replacement venue after the US government announced that it intended to purchase and close Ford’s Theatre forever (it reopened in 1968, 103 years later); then persuade the Keans that their accommodation would be acceptable and the substitute playhouse satisfactory.

He had learned the hard way that he would get no thanks. On the Keans arrival in New York:

Coppin made sure every comfort was afforded the renowned artists. An open-top carriage drawn by four grey mares idled by the pier, ready to convey them to the Metropolitan Hotel where a small army of attendants—under the supervision of [the proprietor] —stood ready to meet their every whim. Four-poster beds and silk damask drapes, steam heating and the finest linen—everything was laid on in the Kean’s top floor apartment, but these luxuries did little to improve their peevish mood.

We are very uncomfortable in our Hotel here, very dear [expensive] & no attention.(pp.174–75)

It was a hard year, but Coppin undertook it tirelessly until, accepting that the Keans were ‘besotted with making money’ and would ‘wander about’ until one of them ‘breaks down altogether’, he finally found a way to resign honourably. He had been advance agent, venue hirer, hotel finder, publicist, bill poster, and counter and banker of the receipts. He even found time to perform himself to great acclaim and profit until Kean, concerned that this was taking too much of his employee’s time and affecting his (Kean’s) own audience numbers, made him stop. He befriended P.T. Barnum and, like the great showman, used the money he was earning to contract all sorts of entertainments to exploit after his return to Melbourne, from vaudeville glass blowers to roller skates. (The glass blowers flopped, his skating rink succeeded.) He cordially parted from the Keans over a glass of sherry in Philadelphia, hurried first to London to book more acts and then home.

Those (including the readers of On Stage) interested in the history of the popular theatre will find much to delight them in Entertaining Mr Coppin. There is Charles Kean directing the accompanying stock actors from the auditorium as a modern theatre director might; the sensitivities to be negotiated if such a supporting player was not cast according to his ‘line of business’; details of Kean’s own acting (he had supporting players who, when he forgot his lines which he frequently did, faced upstage and, imitating his voice, spoke for him). There’s a wonderful section (pp.131–41) when Coppin first arrives in New York and, ever the curious flaneur, goes up and down lower Manhattan from the Battery to Union Square, inspecting theatres, leaving his visiting card if the manager was out, and observing the tempo of ‘Empire City’. This is followed by an even longer section (pp.142-57) as, ‘miserable and lonely’, he negotiates with the hard-nosed impresarios of ‘Gotham’ to secure a theatre and a satisfactory share of the box office.

Coppin didn’t go whoring (or, at least, his diary denies it) and, mindful of his financial family responsibilities, he restrained his willingness to gamble, but long pub and club crawls were essential in learning the mores of his showbusiness companions:

A learned imbiber, Hingston knew the best places to ‘partake of a social glass’. Better still, he knew the bartenders. … A showman in America was at an advantage ‘if he is known at all the hotels, and [if] friendly with all the hotel clerks, so much superior will be his boarding and his lodging, and so much more will he be reckoned up as a specimen of that valuable class of people who are said to ‘know their way about’. (p.171)

In the end, though, it is Coppin’s observations on the people and society of the United States of America at the end of a ruinous war which are truly memorable and make Entertaining Mr Coppina work of wider interest and relevance. Plant quotes Charles Dickens’ observation (from 1842) that, in the land of the free, ‘there is no country, on the face of the earth, where there is less freedom of opinion’, which Coppin endorsed from his own encounters. In San Francisco, shortly before the Presidential ballot which would re-elect Lincoln, when he was dining at his hotel:

His companions at table—both Northerners—managed to suppress their differences for a time, but one gentleman, ‘Southern in his feelings and a supporter of General McClellan’, finally rose and stalked out in high dudgeon. Turning to the Australian visitor, the remaining diner explained: ‘that [man] is a friend of mine. We have been acquainted and connected in business for many years, and yet he would no more mind shooting me than he did eating my dinner, and after killing me he would think himself perfectly justified’. Coppin held his nerve. ‘We [in Australia] also have some excitement at election time’, he said, ‘but we seldom resort to shooting’. (p.82)

In New York Coppin had observed that Mammon ruled, and that ‘scarcely anyone venerates his God’, but on his way back to Australia he ‘began to collect his thoughts’ and tried to summarise his experiences. He applauded the efficiency of the metropolitan Fire Departments and the street cars and admired too the way they planted trees along their streets and resolved to introduce the same to Melbourne.

‘It is a wonderfully productive country’, he reported to Lucy, ‘and I am not surprised that emigrants prefer it to Australia.’ In the same letter, however, he warned ‘I should not like to change’ the colonies for the US. Having experienced the ‘unsettled state of America’, having ‘seen and heard … many acts of injustice’, he ‘would not bring up our children in this state of society for all the wealth in the land’. (p.259)

Ever the showman, he resolved to educate his fellow Antipodeans about both the greatness and the madness of America through an entertainment, Coppin in California. It was not a success.

A Most Entertaining Evening

held at The Showroom, Arts Centre Melbourne

On Monday, 11 August 2025, at 6.00 pm

The launch of Theatre Heritage Australia’s new book

Entertaining Mr. Coppin:

An Antipodean Showman in Civil War America

by Simon Plant

Dr Simon Piening—one of several Simons present on this auspicious occasion—began proceedings by introducing Simon Plant, the author of the book we were all eager to hear more about and to, most very likely, purchase—Entertaining Mr. Coppin—a book that represents five years of writing and research, and truly a labour of love and passion.

Dr Simon Piening

Simon and Fiona in full swing

The author then took to the stage, along with the evening’s moderator, writer and broadcaster Fiona Gruber, who asked Simon how Coppin came to be in Australia, when he arrived, and to tell us something about his early history. Simon’s book—beautifully designed by Simon Piening and scrupulously edited by Elisabeth Kumm—deals principally with the two years Coppin spent travelling to, and travelling within, the United States, and his experiences there in the 1860s, with his travelling companions and fellow artistes, Charles and Ellen Kean, but the 1840s had seen Coppin’s arrival here and his many ‘ups and downs’, the theatres he managed, bought, lost, built!—and in the 1850s, among other things, his eventual success entertaining Victoria’s goldfield miners—but in the 1860s he had spread his wings much, much further afield.

Paul Pry playbill

Coppin as Paul Pry

As a ‘low comedian’ the two principal characters he portrayed, over and over again, were the ‘street patterer’ Billie Barlow and the ‘village busybody’ Paul Pry.  Just as Simon was about to speak of the latter, who should appear but the man himself, Paul Pry, in search of a mislaid umbrella. Not one to intrude, nor of course to gossip, he then introduced himself to both Fiona and Simon, and to mention his book—“sorry, your book”—and upcoming attractions—for instance Cremorne Gardens, where he would be performing shortly.  At this point, with a switch of headgear (and accent), George Coppin made his appearance and regaled the audience with accounts and opinions of his time in ‘the States’—the good, the bad, and the sadly, very ugly. Two years away was far too long to be parted from his dear family—enough was more than enough!

Paul Pry appears...

Once Simon had the stage to himself again he spoke of the extreme discomfort George had experienced—the prolonged journey by sailing ship to America, the journeys taken in and around that mighty continent—combined with his chronic case of gout. Ships were damaged, cities were found to be uninhabitable, and tensions worsened between Coppin and the Keans—the ‘low comedian’ and the ‘serious tragedians’.  Coppin returned to Australia, where he went on to create, or to found, so much—to introduce treelined streets and horse-drawn trams to our city, roller-skating rinks—he co-founded Sorrento, along with ferries, hotels, the little steam railway—and in Melbourne the Old Colonists, a village for retired stage-performers – he was a Freemason, briefly a Parliamentarian – Simon spoke of Coppin’s family, his love for his wife and their many children, their homes, first at Cremorne Gardens, later Pine Grove in Richmond, and of course The Anchorage—still in existence—near Sorrento.  George kept himself well informed of all that was going on in the world—he read, he spoke to ships’ crews, he kept records and all the correspondence to his dear wife Lucy.

George Coppin

Coppin family

There was so much to George Coppin—there is so much more to tell!  Who will tackle this gigantic task—a full biography and one that supersedes Alec Bagot’s volume of the 1960s? However—Simon tells us—it will not be he …

The evening ended with a round of applause and a great round of ‘thank-yous’ for all concerned in the production of the book and/or its very successful launch—a huge thank-you to the Arts Centre’s Tom Dickins and Simon DeLacyLeacey—and to Simon Dwyer for so deftly manning the book stall.  In The Showroom’s foyer the book’s success was clearly evident by the queue of those eager to possess a copy, signed by the author himself, Simon Plant, Entertaining Mr. Coppin: An Antipodean Showman in Civil War America.

During the period May to August, members and friends of THA have enjoyed a full schedule of events in both Melbourne and Sydney.

On Friday, 3 May, author Simon Plant gave an exclusive talk as part of the 2024 Australian Heritage Festival. Simon, who is writing the book Entertaining Mr Coppin (to be published by THA in 2025), presented an illustrated talk titled Mr Coppin’s Tour of Civil War America.The event was held at the historic Savage Club in central Melbourne.

Our next event, in Sydney on Sunday, 23 June, was part of our series of events, The Stage on Sunday, held in conjunction with the Seaborn, Broughton & Walford Foundation in Neutral Bay. Our guest speaker was the actress Lynn Rainbow, who delighted the crowd, including many actor friends, with stories of her career on stage and TV. 

On Saturday, 29 June, the events' spotlight returned to Melbourne, when Jo Gilbert presented a captivating talk about her grandfather, the Melbourne-born songwriter and composer, Jack O’Hagan (1898–1987). The event, which was held at The Channel, at Arts Centre Melbourne, attracted a huge audience, possibly our largest, and Jo also autographed copies of her new book Along the Road to Gundagai, Biography of Jack O’Hagan and Birth of Australian Pop Culture.

We returned to Sydney for our second The Stage on Sunday event at the SB&W Foundation on 28 July, when Emeretis Professor Richard Fotheringham gave a two-part talk on the vaudeville singer Jenny Howard (1902–1996) and the actress/vocalist Joy Nichols (1925–1992). Richard is currently writing an autobiography of Joy Nichols in conjunction with the actress’s daughter, Roberta Hamond.

For our final Channel event for the quarter, on 10 August, Virginia Lovett, former Executive Director at the Melbourne Theatre Company, spoke of her experiences in the creative industies, notably her current position as the inaugural Director of Performing Arts at the University of Melbourne, which includes the running of a brand new performing arts building in Carlton.

These events programs have been a great success and we are thrilled to able to offer our supporters such an interesting and varied range of speakers who have given their time and shared their enthusiasms for the performing arts. We are also delighted with the partnerships we have developed in Melbourne and Sydney. Our association with The Channel now enters its seventh year, which is exciting; while in Sydney, Carolyn Lowry and the team at SB&W have been welcoming us for two years, and we hope this relationship will be able to flourish well into the future.