Florrie—Her Husbands and Homes
In various memoirs Florrie wrote in newspaper and magazine articles in Britain, she made no mention of her marriage in Sydney to policeman Walter Bew in 1893. And no evidence has emerged to indicate either a divorce or his death. So her marriage to Laurie Barnett in 1905 (where she declared herself to be a spinster) was likely to have been unlawful.
Florrie’s relationship, both personal and professional, with Percy Krone was clearly of significant importance for some years. From 1900 to 1905 he acted as her agent, and at the same time they were living together at the same addresses and travelling as ‘Mr and Mrs Percy Krone (Miss Florrie Forde)’.
Florrie Forde, 1930s. Photo by Perfect Photo Reproduction Co., London.
Edwards and Flanagan collection, Theatre Heritage Australia
Florrie Forde, 1930s. Photo by Kay Foley.
Edwards and Flanagan collection, Theatre Heritage Australia
Percy Krone had been born at St Kilda in Melbourne in 1865 (ten years before Florrie) and was educated at the Scotch college there. His father, Captain Henry Krone was Registrar-General of Victoria. Percy worked in Melbourne as a patent agent, then for G.W. Taylor and Co, property auctioneers, before first coming to London in 1889. But soon he returned to Australia, where (among other things) he played cricket for South Melbourne. Did he first see Florrie on stage there? In 1895 he married the first Mrs Krone in London, and they took their honeymoon by going to Australia, stopping off at Cape Town. By 1899 he was living in South Africa, searching for the ideal goldmine, when war broke out with the Boers. He is said to have fought in that conflict with the British army.
However, he came back to London before the end of that war (May 1902) and on 8 December 1900 the Era carried an advertisement for Florrie Forde announcing her representation as being carried out by Percy Krone of Clifton Lodge, Overton Road, Brixton. It gradually became clear that they both lived at this address in southwest London. The last we are to hear of them together was in March 1905, when a gift was noted from the pair to newlyweds (Charles Baxter and Lillian Kendall) at South Yarra.
Just eight months later, on 22 November 1905, Florrie was formally married to Laurence Barnett at Paddington Register Office in London. The switch in 1905 from Percy Krone to art dealer Laurie Barnett seems to have been rather precipitate. What exactly had been the nature of her relationship with Krone? Business certainly. Cohabiting too. But were they more than that, living together as man and wife? Perhaps we shall never really know.
However, from time-to-time Florrie dropped heavily coded clues. In an article she wrote for the People’s Journal in March 1914, she described ‘Billy’, a ‘bloodthirsty fellow’ who was weighed down by the ‘green-eyed monster’ of jealousy. Billy threatened to come to Florrie’s wedding and ‘shoot me’.1 Was Billy in reality Percy Krone? Or someone else entirely? A clue that makes the Percy identification more likely is that, in the article, Florrie compares Billy to Ananias. Why?
In the ‘Acts of the Apostles’ (Chapter 5), Ananias is revealed as having secretly kept a portion of the money from the followers of Jesus, having sold a plot of land. Is this what Percy had been doing as Florrie’s agent? And had she discovered it? It is interesting that Florrie was later written out of the narrative of Percy’s life. When he died in Melbourne in 1941, his widow announced that he had written the popular song ‘Down at the Old Bull and Bush’ (in reality he had written some new words in the English version of 1904), which had apparently been sung by ‘Kate Carney’ (with no mention of Florrie). Yet there is no mention anywhere of a relationship between Percy and Kate Carney, business or personal. Clearly, he had not told his new wife about Florrie.
In the event, to Florrie’s relief ‘Billy’ did not turn up at the wedding at Paddington Register Office, so there was no shooting. Florrie and Laurie were together for thirty years (until he died in October 1934)—the ‘great love story of my life’.
Florrie tells us that she first met Laurie Barnett on a train journey to Paris. He seemed shy, but they talked and she reflected that it was ‘in both instances love at first sight’ and that ‘neither of us saw the necessity of wasting time needlessly.’2 The encounter seems likely to have taken place in February 1905 following her Little Red Riding Hood pantomime season, which had opened at Derby before Christmas and ended in Edinburgh on 11 February. Then she had a two-week break, when she may well have had her crucial first meeting with Laurie.
In her Thomson’s Weekly News memoirs of 1916, Florrie makes every effort to set the record straight. She writes: ‘I plan to make the fact clear that I have only one husband, the only one I have ever had.’ The problem is: she may have wished it were so, but it is unlikely to be true.
Quite fortuitously (and unprecedentedly), following two more weeks back on the halls in London, Florrie had what appears to be a five week break from performing—time enough to get to know Laurie well. At the time of their marriage in November, Laurie was living at 203 Lauderdale Mansions in Maida Vale, and they may well have made their first home together there. However, by 1907 their address was given as 46 Binfield Road in Clapham and they remained there until 1915, when they moved to 101 Bedford Court Mansions in Bloomsbury, which remained their London base for thirteen years until May 1928, when they moved to 10 Howitt Road, Hampstead.3
Beanie Galletly in 1896. Photo by Falk Studios, Sydney.
From Melbourne Punch, 28 May 1896
Florrie Forde, 1910s, by unknown photographer
Edwards and Flanagan collection, Theatre Heritage Australia
In June 1920 an advertisement in The Stage announced the opening of a new venture between Florrie and her old Australian friend, the dancer and choreographer Beanie Galletly. It read:
Wanted … a number of attractive Young Ladies to train for the stage in the Art of Singing, Dancing and Deportment. Children’s Classes every Saturday under the personal supervision of Miss Beanie Galletly, Australian and Continental Danceuse. Good engagements assured for efficient people.
Applicants were requested to write to the two founders at 64a Brixton Road (which ran through Stockwell, between Kennington and Brixton in South London). Beanie had first appeared with Florrie in Sydney in 1895 and was to return as choreographer in Florrie’s revue Cameos of 1923 which toured extensively. Also in the early 1920s, Florrie and Beanie jointly owned a millinery. Perhaps that was also at Brixton Road.
Florrie’s Beach Club
In 1932 Florrie and Laurie made a major move. While maintaining a London base, they leased a bungalow, Gull’s Nest, on the south coast of England at Shoreham-by-Sea in Sussex. Just west of Brighton, it was some sixty miles (97 km) from London by train or car. There Florrie took over an existing dance club, renaming it Flo’s Beach Club. Laurie appears to have principally lived from that time at Shoreham, running Florrie’s club.
‘Bungalow Town’ at Shoreham, built on a spit of land, had become a colony for mainly music hall performers and actors since Marie Loftus had moved there around the turn of the century. Many of the dwellings were converted railway carriages. It was also to become an important centre for the early years of the British film industry.
Sadly, Laurie died at 58 at Shoreham on 22 October 1934—less than two years after moving there. Florrie gave up the club in 1936 but continued to maintain two homes until her own death in 1940—in London at 115 Park Poad, Regent’s Park, and in Shoreham at Goscote, 108 Old Fort Road.
That year, fearful of invasion, the army requisitioned and demolished the whole of the Bungalow Town development at Shoreham, turning it into a defensive minefield.
Hamilton Hill
Courtesy Geoff Bowden, British Music Hall Society
Nellie Melba, 1903. Photo by Walter Barnett, London.
National Portrait Gallery, London
Recording, Radio and Film
Florrie had arrived in London just in time for the explosive growth of sound recording, which was followed by radio and film. Florrie embraced all three new media.
Although sound recording with a phonograph had been invented by Thomas Edison in 1877, for many years it consisted of primitive recordings on fragile wax cylinders. The process was entirely mechanical—ie without electricity—with the performers clustered round an acoustic horn. By 1903, when Florrie Forde made her first cylinder recordings, technology had moved on somewhat, and by 1912 she had made over 220 cylinders—mostly for Edison labels but also for Sterling and Lambert.
In the meantime, flat discs and the gramophone were invented by Emile Berliner in 1887. This method used the same recording process with artists around a horn, but discs were much easier than cylinders to manufacture in bulk. As with cylinders, Florrie made her first disc recordings in 1903—for the Gramophone and Typewriter Company in London—and continued to make them until shortly before her death in 1939.
Florrie says that she was introduced to recording by Australian baritone Hamilton Hill, who took her to his recording company, most likely the Gramophone Company in London, to make a test record. It was of ‘Flo from Pimlico’, she recalled, but the company did not book her, her voice being judged to be ‘no use for the machines’. Hamilton Hill was already a best-selling artist, having made recordings of patriotic songs during the Boer War. And his Australia wife, dancer Beanie Galletly, was to remain a close friend and associate of Florrie.
She was taken to try again sometime later by comedian-singer Bert Shepherd, this time with a more successful outcome, coming away with a three year contract.4 The Gramophone Company (which became EMI, now Warner) and its other labels (Zonophone and later HMV), remained a major partner for her, but she also recorded for several Edison labels (cylinder and disc), Sterling, Ariel and others. Overall, Florrie is estimated to have made some 550 recordings.5
The years following 1903 experienced the birth of a new industry, together with dramatic growth in the sales of recordings and gramophones, and celebrated singers with large numbers of enthusiastic supporters benefitted accordingly. With her wide range of recorded popular songs, Florrie earned a steady income stream from them. However, this was nothing compared with two of her most successful Australian compatriots in Britain at that time – Nellie Melba and Peter Dawson.
It is extraordinary that three Australian singers should so dominate the British record market in the years before the First World War. They ploughed different furrows: Melba was principally an opera singer, while Dawson was a concert singer and Forde sang in music halls.
Peter Dawson, 1930s. Photo by Tornquist of Wellington.
National Portrait Gallery, London
Florrie Forde, 1920s, by unknown photographer
Edwards and Flanagan collection, Theatre Heritage Australia
Florrie’s deal with the Gramophone Company stipulated an annual fee of £30 (rising to £40 by 1913), plus £2.60 to £3.60 per recording made. The company archives reveal that, over the decade 1904 to 1913, she made a total of £1,133—quite a small proportion of her total income. Meanwhile, Peter Dawson revealed in his memoirs that in 1912 he made no less than 30 guineas a week (£31.50) from recording. He earned more than Florrie from recording because he was both a regular session singer and a classically trained artist.6
And after a lengthy wooing period, in 1904 the great diva Nellie Melba made her first recordings for the Gramophone Company. The deal was that she was paid £1,000 up front (roughly equivalent to £80,000 now), plus a royalty of five shillings (25p) per record sold. And her records sold for a guinea each (£1.05)—a higher price than any of her competitors—and carried a distinctive lilac-coloured label with her facsimile signature.7 In the year 1906, Melba earned £6,060 from GramCo royalties.
In the early years, in parallel with her recordings for the Gramophone Company, Florrie also formed a working relationship with a cylinder recording engineer, Russell Hunting, who had been working with Florrie for Edison before moving with her from 1904 to become a significant shareholder in the Sterling Record Company. Florrie and her then manager-partner Percy Krone were also shareholders, and she was to become their best-selling artist until 1908, by which time sales of cylinder recordings had declined, and the company went into liquidation.8
1925 saw the emergence of electrical recording through the introduction of the revolutionary Western Electric microphone. Florrie was said never to need to use a microphone in live performance, but, as with so many singers, she became adept at handling the new technology in the recording studio and on radio and for film. Among the most treasured of her post-microphone recordings are medleys of her most celebrated choruses from 1929 and 1936.
Although the first public radio broadcasts in Britain had been made in 1920 by the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Co,9 Florrie does not seem to have been on air until August 1929, broadcasting on the BBC’s 2LO service. A few days later, it was announced that she was to make a ‘broadcast for the first time from 5XX last night’,10 singing ‘Has anybody here seen Kelly?’, ‘Wearing her clogs and shawl’, ‘Lassie from Lancashire’, ‘Oh! Oh! Antonio’ and ‘Down at the Old Bull and Bush’. It was reported that ‘there was not the slightest trace of microphone nervousness …’. 11
Florrie was to have a career on radio in Britain through the 1930s—a mix of her recordings and live broadcasts—and her recordings were regularly broadcast in Australia, New Zealand and, presumably, other anglophone countries.
.jpg)
Scene from My Old Dutch, 1934. Photo by by James Jarché, for Daily Herald. National Portrait Gallery, London.
‘Talkies’ arrived in the mid-1920s, but it was not until 1933 that Florrie became involved with film. Her first venture was Say It with Flowers: A Symphony of London Life, which was shot at Twickenham Studios in November. In it, traders in a street market in the Old Kent Road rally round when a flower-seller falls ill. It stars Mary Clare, Ben Field and George Carney, with Florrie Forde, Marie Kendall and Charles Coborn as themselves. A mix of music hall and Cockney life, Florrie reprises ‘Lassie from Lancashire’, ‘Has anybody here seen Kelly?’, ‘Hold your hand out, naughty boy’, ‘Oh! Oh! Antonio’ and ‘Down at the Old Bull and Bush’. It was well-received and in May the BBC broadcast (a first) the soundtrack of the film’s music hall scene.
Next came My Old Dutch, shot at the Islington Studios of Gainsborough Pictures in April 1934, in which ageing cockney parents see their son die a hero in the Royal Flying Corps. It stars Gordon Harker, Betty Balfour and Florrie Forde (this time in an acting role as Aunt Bertha). It has recently been described as a ‘sentimental wallow’. At the time a Bristol theatre organised a showing as a ‘treat for old couples’.12
The third and last film that involved Florrie was Royal Cavalcade, which featured achievements made in the reign of George V and was part of his Silver Jubilee celebrations. It featured Marie Lohr, Hermione Baddeley and others with George Robey and Florrie Forde. It had six separate directors, and opened in 1935. Recently it was regarded as ‘thoroughly embarrassing’, while at the time an advertisement presented it as a ‘truly great film’ 13 In a cameo, Florrie re-enacted the original performance of ‘Tipperary’ in the Isle of Man in 1913.
In April 1936 Florrie had an offer to go and make movies in Hollywood. At the time she had been performing in her annual pantomime at the Lyceum in London. However, she said: ‘You know I’d rather make pictures in this country … In any case, I can’t go this year, for I’m booked up on the halls, and I’ve got my summer season at the Isle of Man.’ 14
Edwards and Flanagan collection, Theatre Heritage Australia
The Last Years
By 1934 Flanagan and Allen had moved on, beloved husband Laurie Barnett died on 22 October, and Florrie Forde had been performing professionally for forty-two years and was fifty-nine-years-old.
While she continued to tour through most of the year, there was less of it than in her heyday before the First World War. She spent several weeks filming Say it with Flowers and My Old Dutch and also took time on the south coast at her home at Shoreham, Gull’s Nest, and running her club there. In the summer of 1934 she performed as usual at the ballroom of Derby Castle in the Isle of Man. As the Christmas season approached, she started rehearsals for Sleeping Beauty at the Grand in Brighton.
With the exception of filming, the same pattern of work persisted for Florrie between 1935 and 1939. The pantomimes each year were based for several weeks in one theatre: Forty Thieves at the Lyceum in London (1935), Puss in Boots at the Shakespeare in Liverpool (1936), Queen of Hearts [click here to view rare footage of production] at the Theatre Royal in Edinburgh (1937, with Florrie as the Queen of Hearts), Aladdin at the Theatre Royal Edinburgh again (1938) and a final Aladdin back at the Shakespeare in Liverpool (1939).
By this late stage in her career, Florrie’s performances were overwhelmingly in the north of England and Scotland. In November 1939, she took up one of the major popular songs of the Second World War (which had started two months earlier)—‘We’re going to Hang out the Washing on the Siegfried Line’.
(left) The Tivoli, Aberdeen. Wikipedia. (right) One of Florrie’s last playbills. University of Glasgow.
Aladdin in Liverpool finished earlier than was usual for Florrie’s pantomimes—on 20 January 1940—perhaps because there was awareness that Liverpool would become a major target in the coming months for the Luftwaffe. But Florrie immediately went back to intensive touring (for a final time) with Moss Empires theatres—in London at Ilford and New Cross (with Hettie King), then at Birmingham, York, Portsmouth and Huddersfield. And then her last performances in London in the week of 11 March at the Gaumont at Holloway, followed by Manchester, Nottingham and Halifax (with Wee Georgie Wood) before her last week—at the Tivoli in Aberdeen.
Of the opening night at the Tivoli, the Aberdeen Press and Journal said:
The vaudeville bill … is the best that has been seen in the city for a considerable time. At the top is Florrie Forde, who can persuade any audience out of its self-consciousness to join in the chorus-singing which she leads. And war-time is the time for community singing.15
And Florrie taught them a new song: ‘Till the Lights of London Shine Again’. Three days later she was dead. The Press and Journal reported:
A few hours previously she had been wildly cheered by an audience of Navymen at Kingseat Naval Hospital. She had taken her company from the Tivoli Theatre, Aberdeen, to give a special show for the sailors.16
She sang for them a medley of her popular choruses. Her last song, according to the newspaper, was ‘Goodbye-ee’. 17 She was sixty-four and had been performing professionally in Australia, Britain and Ireland for forty-eight years.
Florrie’s death was carried as a significant news story in British and Irish newspapers: ‘her name was long a household word,’ said the Scotsman; ‘Tipperary’ was ‘the greatest marching song of the last war,’ wrote the South Wales Daily Post and ‘almost replaced the national anthem,’ asserted the People, which added that she was ‘big framed, big hearted.’ The Guardian noted that: ‘She defied all attempts by misguided managers to bring her up to date.’
Although she did not return to her birth country after 1897, nevertheless Australian newspapers carried the story in their dozens, but usually only in a few lines. Her half-brother, HW Snelling Ford at Guildford in Sydney’s western suburbs, graphically described her as the ‘Melba of the Masses’.18 And it seems that Melba concurred with this assessment. According to Frank Van Straten in his book, Tivoli, Melba said:
Hers is a voice of true Australian quality. She might have been trained for opera but, instead, gives pleasure to a far wider audience.19
Performing for wounded soldiers and sailors had been important for Florrie throughout her career in Britain, starting in the Boer War (when she did a benefit in 1900 at the Alhambra for Australian soldiers), then later in the two World Wars. A typical example came at Newcastle in December 1918, when 1,500 wounded soldiers were invited to a dress rehearsal of Cinderella. In 1921 and 1923 Florrie travelled to Cologne—to give her only performances in continental Europe—at the Scala Theatre in Cologne for soldiers of the occupying Rhine Army. And when the body of an unnamed sailor was washed up on shore at the Isle of Man, Florrie had him buried with a gravestone that read ‘Some Mother’s Son’.
Louis MacNeice, 1945. Photo by Howard Coster
National Portrait Gallery, London
Florrie Forde, 1930s, by unknown photographer
Edwards and Flanagan collection, Theatre Heritage Australia
Florrie was buried next to her eldest sister, Mrs Emily Brown (née Flannagan) at Streatham Park Cemetery in South London. The funeral cortege went from the home at Streatham Hill of the Crumners, Mrs Crumner being the niece, daughter of Emily, who had been Florrie’s principal boy in pantomime in the First World War, Flora Carlton. Among those who followed the cortege were Bud Flanagan, Chesney Allen, Aleta Turner, Bert Feldman, Prince Littler and Minnie Simpson, who had been Florrie’s ‘personal maid and companion’ over her last fifteen years. The Streatham News reported:
Hundreds of people were at the graveside including many old-time variety stars. Half the provincial theatres in Britain were represented … For some hours after the burial people were passing the grave admiring the flowers banked for 100 yards behind the turned earth.20
After her passing, Louis MacNeice wrote a poem, ‘Death of an Actress’. It has been touted by Florrie’s supporters as some kind of celebration of her life, an homage, but in reality it is typical of the way in which the separation of so-called high-brow from low-brow culture in twentieth century Britain could facilitate the relentlessly patronising tone of MacNeice’s poem.21
Although Florrie Forde never returned to her birth country, she was throughout her career a proud Australian, supporting other Aussies when they arrived in London. As noted, there were three Australians who dominated the scene in that generation—Nellie Melba, Peter Dawson and Florrie, each of them singing their own musical genre to their own audience.
www.findagrave.com/memorial/90165829/florrie-forde
Endnotes
1. Dundee People’s Journal, 21 March 1914
2. ibid.
3. Some twenty years ago, the present writer recommended to English Heritage that they put up a Blue Plaque on the Bedford Court Mansions property; after two years of cogitation, they declined, asserting that she had lived at Shoreham, not in London …
4. Fred Gaisberg credits Bert Shepherd with bringing a stream of music halls to The Gramophone Company for recording, including Ada Reeve, Vesta Victoria, Gus Elen, Albert Chevalier, George Mozart, Marie Lloyd, and Vesta Tilley; it may also have been Shepherd who introduced Syria Lamonte to Gaisberg
5. With grateful thanks to Keith Harrison for his list of Florrie Forde recordings which accompanies his book on Forde for the City of London Phonograph and Gramophone Society (2022); there seems to be no reliable estimate of Florrie’s total record sales
6. Peter Martland, Recording History: The British Record Industry 1888–1931, pp.191–92
7. Roger Neill, Melba’s First Recordings, Historic Masters, London, 2008, p.11
8. Keith Harrison, Florrie Forde: The World’s Greatest Chorus Singer, City of London Phonograph and Gramophone Society, 2022, pp.30–33
9. The first live broadcast concert was given by Dame Nellie Melba for Marconi in Chelmsford, Essex, on 15 June 1920
10. 5XX was the Daventry transmitter of the BBC, which had gone live in 1925 and was said to reach 94% of the population of Britain
11. Nottingham Evening Post, 27 August 1929
12. The Era, 24 October 1934
13. Leicester Chronicle, 4 May 1935
14. Evening Despatch, 24 April 1936
15. Aberdeen Press and Journal, 16 April 1940
16. Ibid, 19 April 1940
17. The death certificate recorded that she had died from ‘arterial hypertension, cerebral haemorrhage and cardiac failure’
18. Cumberland Argus, 22 May 1940
19. Van Straten had an undated, unsourced clipping with this quote
20. Streatham News, 26 April 1940
21. The hifalutin Cambridge Guide to the Arts in Britain: The Edwardian Age and the Inter-War Years (1989) scarcely mentions the existence of music hall; two rather different writers, both contemporaries of Florrie Forde, who took music hall arts and artists seriously were Rudyard Kipling and T.S. Eliot
Appendix 1: A selection of Florrie Forde’s most enduring songs
Click on headings to link to recordings on YouTube.
See Me Dance the polka
Published: 1886
Music and words: George Grossmith sen
Popularised by Billie Barlow, G Grossmith sen; in Australia by Billie Barlow, Florrie and others
After the Ball
Published: 1892 (USA, massive sales of sheet music)
Music and words: Charles K. Harris
First sung: Sam Doctor (amateur who forgot the words); popularised in USA by J. Aldrich Lilley; by Florrie Forde in 1893 at Melbourne and Sydney
Recorded: by many and by Florrie in 1934
Daisy Bell
Published 1892
Music and words: Harry Dacre
Recorded: Dan W. Quinn (US cylinder) 1893; Florrie Forde 1934
Refers to Prince of Wales (Edward VII) mistress Daisy Warwick; popularised by Katie Lawrence
Courtesy Geoff Bowden, British Music Hall Society
Victoria & Albert Museum, London
Goodbye, Dolly Gray
Published: 1897
Music: Paul Barnes; Words: Will D. Cobb
Recorded: USA Harry McDonough 1901; UK Hamilton Hill, Florrie Forde 1933
Composed in Spanish-American War; popular in Boer War
Down at the Old Bull and Bush
Published: As ‘Under the Anheuser Bush’ in USA 1903; UK (revised) 1904
Music: Harry Von Tilzer; Words (original): Andrew B Sterling; words (revised for UK): Percy Krone
First sung: Florrie Forde 1904
Recorded: USA Billy Murray 1904; Florrie Forde 1904
UK version references pub at Hampstead in London
www.fredgodfreysongs.ca
Sheet Music Warehouse
She’s a Lassie from Lancashire
Published: 1907
Music: C.W. Murphy; Words: Dan Lipton, John Neat
Original hit for Ella Retford 1907; sung and recorded Florrie Forde 1907
I do Like to be Beside the Seaside
Published: 1907
Music and words: John H. Glover-Kind
Popularised and recorded by Mark Sheridan and Florrie Forde 1909
Famously played on the organ at the Tower Ballroom Blackpool by Reginald Dixon 1930-1970
Published: 1908
Music: C.W. Murphy; Words Dan Lipton
Sung and recorded: Florrie Forde 1908
Included in From Melba to Sutherland: Australian Singers on Record 2016
Published: 1909
Music: C.W. Murphy; Words: Will Letters
Sung and recorded: Florrie Forde 1909
Kelly is the most common surname in the Isle of Man
Published: 1912
Music and words: Jack Judge and Harry Williams
First performed by composer Jack Judge 1912; performed by Florrie Forde at Isle of Man 1913, but dropped by her; re-adopted by Forde when it became popular marching song in First World War
Recorded: John McCormack 1914; Florrie Forde 1929
Hold Your Hand Out, Naughty Boy
Published: 1913
Music: C.W. Murphy; Words: Worton David
Sung and recorded: Florrie Forde 1913
Very popular in First World War
Hello! Hello! Who’s Your Lady Friend?
Published: 1913
Music: Harry Fragson; Words: Worton David and Bert Lee
Sung and recorded: Harry Fragson 1913; sung Florrie Forde 1913, recorded 1929
Popular in First World War
Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag
Published: 1915
Music: George Asaf (George Henry Powell); Words: Felix Powell (brother)
Sung Florrie Forde 1916; recorded by her 1929
Popular marching song in First World War
Goodbye-ee
Published: 1917
Music RP Weston; Words: Bert Lee
Sung and recorded: Florrie Forde 1917
I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles
Published: 1919
Music: John W. Kellett; Words: Jaap Kenbrovin (a collective of three)
Popularised in USA late 1919, UK in 1920 by Florrie Forde and others; recorded by her in medley 1936
Anthem of West Ham United
Yes, We Have No bananas
Published: 1923
Music: Irving Cohn; Words: Frank Silver
Recorded: USA Billy Jones, Billy Murray; performed 1923 by Florrie Forde (but not recorded by her)
Massive sales of sheet music (and bananas)
When You’re Smiling
Published: 1928
Music and words: Larry Shay, Mark Fisher, Joe Goodwin
Popularised in USA 1928-29; in UK in 1930 by Florrie Forde and others; not recorded by her
Unofficial anthem of Leicester City Football Club
We’re Going to Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line
Published: 1939
Music: Michael Carr; Words: Jimmy Kennedy (Irish)
First performed by Adelaide Hall 1939; by Florrie Forde 1939 (but not recorded by her)
Popular marching song in the Second World War
Appendix 2: Edwards and Flanagan
No, not another music hall double act. Rather, two men, both obsessed with the career of Florrie Forde, who lived near Oldham in Lancashire, and who exhaustively compiled scrapbooks of promotional materials, photographs and press cuttings from 1910 until her death in 1940. In fact, they kept two scrapbooks going in parallel throughout—one for Florrie and one for themselves.
They were Arthur Edwards and James Flanagan. Edwards complied the scrapbooks from 1910 to mid-1915 and Flanagan seamlessly took over the task from that point until Florrie’s death twenty-five years later. The only gap occurs in 1917, when, having initially joined up in 1915, Flanagan was sent to France in a platoon of the 22nd Battery of the Manchester Regiment. Wounded, he was repatriated to hospital in Britain before returning home.
Florrie was delighted with their work—as is the present writer. Currently, a set of four scrapbooks covering 1910 to 1930 are held in the Special Collections of the Templeman Library at the University of Kent in Canterbury, and a further three, covering from the late 1920s to 1940 are in the possession of Keith Harrison of the City of London Phonograph and Gramophone Society. The V&A in London has a further set which is unavailable at the time of writing.
Remarkably a further three scrapbooks made their way to Australia. Comprising some 74 portraits of Florrie dating from the 1910s onwards, these volumes, now in the possession of Theatre Heritage Australia, were in the collection of the late Frank Van Straten. When and where he came by these books remains a mystery but suffice to say THA is thrilled to be the custodians of such an important collection alongside three significant UK repositories.
Bibliography
Alomes, Stephen, When London Calls: The Expatriation of Australian Creative Artists to Britain, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999
Anderson, Gae, Tivoli King: Life of Harry Rickards Vaudeville Showman, Allambie Press, Sydney, 2009
Bailey, Peter (ed.), Music Hall: The Business of Pleasure, Open University Press, Milton Keynes, 1986
Bratton, JS (ed.), Music Hall: Performance and Style, Open University Press, Milton Keynes, 1986
Brisbane, Katharine (ed.), Entertaining Australia: The Performing Arts as Cultural History, Currency Press, Sydney, 1991
Brownrigg, Jeff, The Shamrock and the Wattle: Florrie Forde The World’s Greatest Chorus Singer, National Film and Sound Archive, Canberra, 1998 (CD booklet)
――, ‘Melba’s Puddin’: Corowa, Mulwala and our Cultural Past’, Papers on Parliament 32, Canberra, 1998
――, Florrie Forde (1875–1940), Australian Dictionary of Biography, Supplement, 2005
Cheshire, D.F., Music Hall in Britain, Farleigh Dickinson University Press, Cranbury NJ, 1974
Colquhoun, Edward and Nethercoate-Bryant, KT, Shoreham-by-Sea: Past and Present, Sutton Publishing, Stroud, 1997
Dawson, Peter, Fifty Years of Song, Hutchinson, London, 1951
Disher, M. Willson, Winkles and Champagne: Comedies and Tragedies of the Music Hall, Batsford, London, 1938
Djubal, Clay, ‘Florrie Forde’, Australian Variety Theatre Archive, forde-florrie-23122012.pdf (ozvta.com), 2012
Felstead, S. Theodore, Stars who made the Halls, T. Werner Laurie, London, 1946
Gaisberg, F.W., Music on Record, Robert Hale, London, 1947
Green, Benny (ed), The Last Empires: A Music Hall Companion, Pavilion/Michael Joseph, London, 1986
Harrison, Keith, Florrie Forde: The World’s Greatest Chorus Singer, The City of London Phonograph and Gramophone Society, London, 2022
Irvin, Eric, Dictionary of the Australian Theatre 1788–1914, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1985
Kilgarriff, Michael, Sing Us One of the Old Songs: A Guide to Popular Song 1860–1920, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998
Laver, James, Edwardian Promenade, Edward Hulton, London, 1958
Macqueen-Pope, W., The Melodies Linger On: The Story of Music Hall, W.H. Allen, London, 1950
Mander, Raymond and Mitchenson, Joe, British Music Hall: A Story in Pictures, Studio Vista, London, 1965
Martin-Jones, Tony, ‘Florrie Forde: Her Early Life in Australia’, Florrie Forde: her time in Australia (apex.net.au), 2020
Martland, Peter, Recording History: The British Record Industry 188801931, Scarecrow Press, Plymouth, 2013
Neill, Roger, Melba’s First Recordings, Historic Masters, London, 2008
――, ‘Going on the Halls’, unpublished, part of uncompleted dissertation, Goldsmiths College, London, 2013
――, ‘Re-discovering Syria Lamonte: Pioneering Recording Artist’ (online), Re-discovering Syria Lamonte: Pioneering Recording Artist - Theatre Heritage Australia, 2023
――, The Simonsens of St Kilda: A Family of Singers, Per Diem Projects, King’s Sutton, 2023
Short, Ernest, Fifty Years of Vaudeville, Eyre & Spottiswoode, London, 1946
Upward, Penelope, Florrie Forde: The Girl from Fitzroy (play), unpublished, nd
Van Straten, Frank, Tivoli, Thomas C. Lothian, Melbourne, 2003
――, Florence Young and the Golden Years of Australian Musical Theatre, Beleura, Mornington, 2009
――, ‘Fabulous Florrie Forde’, Stage Whispers, Fabulous Florrie Forde | Stage Whispers, 2013
Wilmut, Roger, Kindly Leave the Stage: The Story of Variety 1919–1960, Methuen, London, 1985
Woollacott, Angela, To Try Her Fortune in London: Australian Women, Colonialism and Modernity, Oxford University Press, New York, 2001
Acknowledgements
Thanks (for help of various kinds) to Christine Davies and colleagues (Templeman Library, University of Kent), Elisabeth Kumm, Tony Locantro, Tony Martin-Jones, Penelope Upward, Sophie Wilson
