Alf P. James as a featured extra (the stage door man) in MGM’s The Great Ziegfeld (1936). Like many who appeared in the film, he really had appeared on stage in Ziegfeld revues in the 1920s (screengrab from Author’s copy).
Alf P. James was an Australian-born variety artist and character actor. If we take the late nineteenth century press at its word, he was ‘a talented comedian of the highest class’, 1 who also sang and danced, and often developed his own material, while also turning to management at times. One early Australian review of his work at the Sydney Alhambra welcomed him as ‘a vastly funny young gentleman’. 2
There were also extraordinary events in his life. He twice toured colonial outposts of India and South-east Asia. He survived a catastrophic shipwreck in 1886 but was onstage only a few weeks later. He experienced an eventful departure from vaudeville in Vancouver, Canada in early 1905, but simply moved on to the US and managed to keep his reputation intact. He was an active performer with his second wife Kate Prior in variety in the 1910s in the US and UK, but the highlight of his career was a succession of supporting roles in the spectacular revues of Florenz Ziegfeld in the 1920s. His Sydney-born collaborator, Leon Errol spent much of his extremely successful career in North America creating and re-creating his life story, to the point it became unbelievably complicated. Not so Alf P. James. The subject of this article apparently saw no need to seek publicity, or perhaps, for reasons now unknown, actively avoided it. Photographs of him are hard to find, interviews are rare. Later in life he took supporting player and extra work in Hollywood, which has mistakenly given some cinema fans the impression that this was the sum of his career. It was merely a footnote.
Alfred Prior James was born in Sydney, Australia in 1865.3 His father Henry was a Sydney pawnbroker, who died when he was only ten years old.4 Just three years later, his mother Mary Ann nee Richardson also die, leaving Alf and four siblings to fend for themselves. How Alf ended up on stage we do not know, but he was only twenty when he had his first serious gig as a comedian—doing an Irish Policeman act —while touring with Harry Lyon's Tourists & Pantomime Company,5 and he was later to add more “Irish impersonations” while at Sydney’s Alhambra Music Hall.6
In 1885 Alf met Beatrice Lorne (real name Beatrice Heley), an emerging new singing talent who had first appeared with the Annis Montague-Charles Turner Opera company. Beatrice had been born in Scotland, and at age ten had arrived in Australia with her mother and stepfather. Although in later life she went on to a popular career in Canada, not all reviews of her early performances were enthusiastic. Brisbane’s Courier newspaper was scathing in an early report.7 However, Annis Montague’s unwavering support apparently gave Beatrice the skill and confidence to persevere, and by August both she and Alf were on tour together, performing light opera.8
Alf’s first wife Beatrice Lorne, born Beatrice Heley. Undated photo.
Yukon Archives, Maggie’s Museum collection, 77/60, #3.
Alf and Beatrice performing in the variety lineup in Mumbai (then Bombay), India in late 1885
The Times of India, 11 December 1885, p.2
In October 1885, Alf and Beatrice joined a tour of India. They arrived with a mixed group of performers, including tragedienne Louise Crawford and magician Madame Cora (Ursula Bush). This range of skills meant it was dubbed the “Unique Company” in some of its advertising. Newspaper reports show they appeared in a mix of legitimate theatre, panto and vaudeville in the later part of 1885, possibly adjusting their repertoire according to what we would now describe as audience demographics, as they travelled. In December 1885, The Times of India picked out Alf, playing Friday, in the Christmas pantomime Robinson Crusoe, for praise. He was the ‘greatest success of the evening … keeping the audience in good humour throughout and was repeatedly encored.’9 However, a further report in February 1886 indicated the company had quarrelled and broken into smaller groups.10
Alf and Beatrice had returned to Australia by mid-1886 and they married in Sydney in September.11 A few months later, in November, a daughter, Constance, was born of the union. She was given the middle name Annis, in honour of her mother’s great mentor.
Only a month after this happy event, on the night of 8 December 1886, Alf narrowly escaped death. He was on the coastal passenger ship Keilawarra enroute to his family (then in Brisbane), when it collided with another steamer, the Helen Nicholl, off the New South Wales coast. The Keilawarra sank quickly and in great chaos, taking as many as 40 people with her including almost all of the women and children. Of this incident, the usually taciturn Alf James gave a lengthy account for newspapers.12 This included an extraordinary description of his climbing into the rigging after the ships collided, and watching the chaos unfold on deck, before undressing and diving naked into the sea.13
The collision between Keilawarra and Helen Nicholl, David Syme and Co., 1886
State Library of Victoria, Melbourne
The contemporary reader cannot help but wonder what effect this awful event may have had on Alf. However, he was back at work only a few weeks later in the Christmas panto Dick Whittington, followed by a stint providing low comedy in The Queen of the Turf at Sydney’s Gaiety Theatre. 14 Only very occasionally did he recount the sinking again.15
Over the next five years, Alf James was most often associated with the Alhambra Music Hall in Sydney’s Haymarket area (with its cheerful slogan at the time being ‘Minstrel shows come and go, but we go on forever’). Alf continued with his Irish comic acts and sang amusing songs. Sometimes Beatrice appeared on the same program singing ballads, but she was now often billed as Beatrice James. They both performed in short farces—the sort that helped fill out variety programs, but we have little information about these, other than they were reported to be funny.
The Alhambra Music Hall lineup in December 1891
Sydney Morning Herald, 14 December 1891, p.2
Alf also had several interludes touring Australia with the popular John F. Sheridan and his company in 1890 and 1891. Sheridan’s repertoire included the musical comedies Fun on the Bristol and its sequel Bridget O’Brien Esq—his comic act as an Irish widow was well established and popular in Australia. Sheridan’s intention to take the act overseas may have influenced Alf and Beatrice in their decision to also try their luck in North America.
John Sheridan’s production of Fun on the Bristol, Criterion Theatre, Sydney, c.1890-1
State Library of Victoria, Melbourne
Female impersonator John F. Sheridan in 1892
Muskegon Chronicle (Michigan), 11 November 1892, p.8
By June 1892, Alf and Beatrice were in San Francisco.16 They soon found work at Charles Meyer’s Wigwam Theatre as “character vocalists”—easily absorbed into the regularly changing vaudeville lineup—alongside magicians, sketch artists, song and dance routines and acrobats.17 However, when John Sheridan arrived in New York later in 1892, Alf went to join him to reprise his supporting role as Cranbury in Mrs O’Brien esq.18
This proved not to be such a good idea. John Sheridan’s comic impersonation was now much less well received in New York than it had recently been in Australia. New York journalist Octavus Cohan introduced his dryly critical review with the heading ‘John F. Sheridan and his nonsensical hodgepodge’. He went on to state that if the play had really ‘enjoyed a … prosperous career in the land of the Kangaroo, [then] my only comment is that the stories … which we frequently hear of the great good nature of the antipodeans have not been exaggerated.’19 The play toured the US into 1893, but continued to receive variable reviews. At some point Alf left Sheridan’s company.
Alf and Beatrice’s marriage also came to an end at about this time. In March 1894 Beatrice filed for divorce.20 Now performing as Beatrice Lorne again, she built a successful career in California as the ‘Australian Nightingale’ (while the term was most famously used for Madame Melba, it was also freely applied to other Australian singers—including Maggie Liddle, Amy Sherwin and others). Gates (2020 and 2023) gives a detailed account of her later fame in Canada, now titled the ‘Klondike Nightingale’.
Alf next appears in the historical record in 1894 touring through China, Southeast Asia, and India, with a group called the Allison Vaudeville company. While the European diaspora living in port cities of ‘the East’ were usually delighted to have visiting variety troupes with familiar repertoires, it is clear that vaudeville could often offend. The North China Herald welcomed Alf’s success as a singer-comedian in Shanghai in September 1894 but also felt one of his ‘dances … was not in the best taste’, although they did not elaborate how. Presumably this was sexually suggestive—Alf’s other speciality, performing in ‘blackface’, did not attract criticism.21 Not for the first time, Alf appears to have been caught in the tension between an imperative to fill a popular vaudeville program by pushing the boundaries of acceptable taste, while still avoiding bad publicity or legal action for doing so.
At the end of this trip, Alf returned to the US and toured again including in another reprisal of Mrs O’Brien Esq. By 1900, he had turned in a new direction—stage managing vaudeville theatre—while still appearing on stage himself. After a stint doing this at Spokane in Washington state, he moved to Vancouver Canada. Here he settled for about five years, now earning a reputation for his rendition of Coster (working class London) songs, at the Savoy, then the Orpheum, finally at the New Savoy (ex-Empire) theatres. He was ‘unmistakably one of the best character actors seen here in legitimate or vaudeville’ heralded one local Canadian report.22 Unfortunately, as Vancouver journalist John Mackie has found, vaudeville in that city soon hit an impasse in late 1904. (Mackie, 2017)
In January 1905, Edward Odlum, a leading citizen and a moral crusader for the city, launched a broadside against the New Savoy’s ‘coarse, brutal and debasing show’, with a furious letter to the Vancouver Daily World. Alf James was prominent in the show, if not the headline act, as the surviving advertisements clearly indicate. How risqué was Alf James’s act? Unfortunately, we do not know, because it was the women of the show who particularly enraged Odlum—they were ‘filthy tongued actresses [who] should go to prison until they learn how to use clean language’. By way of contrast, a Japanese troupe he had seen on another night was ‘high-toned, clean, uplifting and an honor to themselves’. 23
Edward Odlum c.1916
From his book God’s Covenant Man, British-Israel, Robert Banks & Son London
The New Savoy’s program when Edward Odlum was in the audience. A very typical mix of acts, together with the new novelty—moving pictures
The Province (Vancouver), 29 December 1904, p.2
Perhaps this was Edward Odlum’s first experience of vaudeville, or maybe it really was as wild as he claimed. But whatever his involvement really was, Alf James was wise enough to leave Vancouver a few weeks later. He was soon headlining vaudeville in Washington state.24 The New Savoy limped on until late February, when Police finally raided it and the city cancelled its licence.25 Manager A.R. Dennis and several actresses were charged, but they skipped bail and made a run for the US. Remarkably, Alf’s reputation was completely unsoiled.
At the time of the Vancouver experience, Alf increasingly began to appear in partnership with a woman named Kate Prior, and at about this time, he adopted Alf P. James as his preferred stage name. Alf and Kate married in San Francisco in May 1906. On the marriage certificate she gave her real name as Kate Zimmerman, a 22-year-old from New York. Despite the age difference—Alf was now aged 42, they went on to build a successful personal and professional partnership, that lasted their entire lives.
Alf in Captain Barnacle’s Courtship in 1909
Grand Forks Herald (North Dakota), 24 May 1909, p.8
Kate Prior in her 1916 passport
Alf James and Kate Prior in 1909
The La Crosse Tribune (Wisconsin), 6 January 1909, p.2
Calling their partnership James and Prior, the couple worked up a piece for vaudeville entitled Captain Barnacle’s Courtship—a 20-minute skit in which an old salt fervently woos a pretty young lass, not knowing she has just recently married his son. Utilising an established joke character from vaudeville—Captain Ben Barnacle—it was first performed in 1906.26 In time its popularity meant the sketch was sometimes extended to a longer format, and by 1911 the Vitagraph film studio had stolen the idea, using it as the basis for several Captain Barnacle short films—featuring comedian John Bunny.
In 1909 Alf and Kate joined Australian Leon Errol in the Jersey Lillies company. It was Errol, as producer, who employed Alf and Kate, however, no publicity was ever given to the fact both Alf and Errol were from the same, faraway Australian city, or that their partners were also part of the company. (Leon Errol had married Stella Chatelaine in 1907). In fact, Alf went on to work with Leon Errol, on and off, for the next twenty years. Not once did the relationship between the two Australians rate a mention.
The Jersey Lillies on tour. Left: Variety, 12 November 1909. Right: Kansas City Globe,14 December 1910, p.3.
While Leon Errol signed for the Ziegfeld Follies in May 1911, but he was author of some of the acts Alf toured with—such as the two act burlesque Dugan the Deputy in 1913. One sketch Alf and Kate performed, The Strike, was credited as Alf’s work, as may have been another, a singing comedy piece entitled At the Depot.
Alf and Kate were now working almost continuously together—based in New York but also regularly on tour—and not just in vaudeville. In 1916, they both appeared as supporting players in a ‘high class society drama’—The Woman He Married, which toured cities of the US east coast. Allegedly based on real events, it was designed to teach ‘a great moral lesson to women of all ages’.27
In addition to undertaking another tour of India in 1914, Alf and Kate embarked on a performance tour of the British Isles. They arrived in Liverpool in January 1917 and spent the next three years in vaudeville lineups, presenting The Strike to British audiences. While they were popular enough to be kept in full time work, not all of their performances were enthusiastically received. One slightly stuffy review in the London Evening Telegraph observed The Strike to be ‘very American’, although it assured readers that ‘a good laugh’ was to be had all the same.28 When Alf and Kate replaced The Strike with Unkie in early 1919, this also met with mixed reaction. Dublin’s Freeman’s Journal complained that it was ‘not the type of act that appealed to Dublin audiences’. In fact, ‘a portion of the comedy [was] in dubious taste’—although, again, we do not know in what way.29
Alf and Kate travelled home to New York on the White Star liner Lapland in late November 1919. Also on board was Leon Errol, having completed a successful run in Albert de Courville’s, London revue Joy Bells. A few weeks later Alf was playing opposite Leon Errol in The Guest, for the Keith circuit. This again suggests the two Sydneysiders had a strong professional and personal relationship.
In this sketch, Leon Errol’s character was an inebriate named ‘Fuller Rye’, while Alf played ‘Paunce Set’, a long-suffering butler. Leon Errol’s jokes and his physical comedy based around drunkenness (his ‘rubber legs’) became his speciality—but it assumes a different meaning when we remember the US had just adopted Prohibition. It came into force in January 1920 and lasted for thirteen years.
One observation from an early review in the New York Clipper reminds us again of the dynamic and free-wheeling nature of vaudeville. The reviewer complained that Leon Errol persisted in the annoying habit of calling out to friends in the audience—although reassuring readers that it was still ‘a corking skit’.30 This vaudevillian practice of breaking the fourth wall and interacting with the audience had no impact on Errol’s popularity—indeed it was expected. Did Alf James also break the fourth wall whilst performing vaudeville? Almost certainly.
Most significantly however, in late 1920 Alf gained a supporting role as ‘Pops’ in the spectacular musical Sally that opened at Florenz Ziegfeld’s New Amsterdam Theatre. Described more recently as a ‘Cinderella’ musical (Cantu 2012), its rags to riches narrative featured the popular Marilynn Miller, with Leon Errol as one of the fairy godfathers. Sally proved to be a sensation—and financially hugely successful, running for more than 560 performances in New York alone. As well as establishing Miller as a rising star, it undoubtedly confirmed 55-year-old Alf as a valuable supporting player in Ziegfeld’s eyes.
Alf followed this success with a string of other appearances in Florenz Ziegfeld’s revues, including The Ziegfeld Follies of 1924, Louie the 14th in 1925, Rio Rita in 1927–8 and finally Simple Simon in 1930.
The program for Louie the 14th, with Alf James taking two roles in the cast. Performing this in April 1926 in Chicago, Leon Errol, broke an ankle doing his drunken stagger act, bringing the show to a early close.
Louie the 14th was followed by Rio Rita, another major Ziegfeld revue. In this, Alf played the Mexican bandit Davalos. The revue was also famous for establishing Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey as a popular comedy partnership.
Characters from Ziegfeld’s Rio Rita in late 1928. Chicago Tribune, 21 October 1928
Alf and Kate moved from New York to Los Angeles in about 1931. Alf’s transition into a character actor in film coincided with all those changes that occurred at the end of the 1920s—the arrival of the talkies and the catastrophe of the Great Depression. Variety theatre did not disappear overnight because of this, but now aged in his mid-60s, Alf may well have decided to try something else—perhaps he felt movie work would be less onerous. At about this time, Kate James was employed in Los Angeles by the WPA agency (Works Progress Administration), a massive New Deal initiative that included creative arts projects, including employing drama teachers.
Alf died in Hollywood in October 1946. The Internet Movie Database suggests that he appeared in more than fifty films between 1931 and 1939—in most cases as an uncredited extra, but often with some lines.
Variety posted a polite acknowledgement of his career on his passing, although they seemed to be unaware of just how long he had been at work—and how varied his experiences were.31 The films that survive as his legacy however, show a predictably narrow range of roles—elderly storekeepers, clerks of the court, gardeners, farmers, postmen and random doddery fathers. In company with other middle-aged Australians working in Hollywood’s Golden Age—Robert Greig, Harry Allen, Charles Bennett, Tempe Pigott and others, he was well and truly typecast by the end of his career.
Alf P. James as the town doctor (left) and Nat Pendleton as ‘Bouncer’ (right) in the 1932 B-Western Hell Fire Austin, 1932. Screengrab—Youtube.
Alf as the Squire in Cockeyed Cavaliers, 1934. Australians Snub Pollard, Frank Baker and Robert Greig also appeared in this. Screengrab—Author’s Copy.
Alf as landowner John Street with cowboy star Buck Jones in Rocky Rhodes (1934)—yet another Western B film. Screengrab—Youtube.
Some Alf James films online
Hell Fire Austin 1932 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QX12om7Gh9E&t=2627s
Unknown Valley 1933 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WB9xw6mnOIA
Rocky Rhodes 1934 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6N5qrcW1lw
Broadway Bill or Strictly Confidential 1934
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=086wi3-RJHA
Lady of Secrets 1936 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHqdXcKWz8s
The Rage of Paris 1938 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uv7VFJiG-3Y
Endnotes
1. Hong Kong Telegraph 28 September 1894, p.3
2. Australian Star (Sydney), 22 March 1892, p.7
3. New South Wales Birth Certificate 2236/1865, Alfred Prior James, 12 October 1865
4. Sydney Morning Herald, 20 October1875, p.1
5. Gympie Miner, 31 October 1884, p.2
6. Sydney Morning Herald, 9 April 1889, p.5
7. Brisbane Courier, 11 February 1885, p.5
8. Northern Star (Lismore) 19 August 1885, p.3
9. The Times of India (Mumbai) 28 December 1885, p.5
10. The Lantern (Adelaide) 27 February 1886, p.6
11. Melbourne Punch, 21 October 1886, p.8
12. Queensland Times, Ipswich Herald and General Advertiser, (Ipswich Qld) 16 December 1886 p3
13. See Filewood, 2018, for an analysis of the disaster
14. The Daily Telegraph (Sydney) 8 February 1887, p.4
15. See for example The Oklahoma News, 12 March 1909,·p.5
16. Melbourne Punch, 9 June 1892, p.7
17. San Francisco Chronicle, 29 August 1892, p.8
18. Buffalo Sunday Morning News (New York) 23 October 1892, p.5
19. Daily Sentinel (New York), 11 November 1892,·p.4
20. San Francisco Chronicle, 21 March 1894, p.9
21. North China Herald and Supreme Court and Consular Gazette (Shanghai) 14 September 1894
22. The Province (Vancouver)14 October 1901,·p.8
23. Vancouver Daily World, 3 January 1905
24. The News Tribune (Washington)18 February 1905, p.18
25. Vancouver Daily World, 28 February 1905, p.1
26. The San Diego Sun, 10 April 1906, p.8
27. The Tennessean Sun,29 October 1916,·p.36
28. Evening Telegraph (London), 10 July 1917,·p.2
29. Freeman’s Journal (Dublin), 15 July 1919, p.5
30. New York Clipper, 7 January 1920, p.9
31. Variety, 16 October 1946
References
Maya Cantu, ‘Musical of the month: Sally’, New York Public Library, 28 December 2012
https://www.nypl.org/blog/2012/12/28/musical-month-sally-1920 (accessed 2 May 2026)
Bill Cassara, The Leon Errol Story, Bear Manor Media, 2027. Copy of sections kindly provided by the author in advance.
Frank Cullen, Vaudeville Old & New. An Encyclopedia of Variety Performers in America, 2 vols. Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2007
Billy H. Doyle, The Ultimate Directory of Silent and Sound Era Performers: A Necrology of Actors and Actresses, Scarecrow Press,1999
Karen Filewood, Impact at Sea. Societal Sensibilities in Late Victorian Australia, A Honours thesis in History at the University of New England, Academia.edu.
https://www.academia.edu/42190906/IMPACT_AT_SEA_Societal_Sensibilities_in_Late_Victorian_Australia. December 2018 (Accessed 2 May 2026)
Michael Gates, History Hunter: Beatrice Lorne—The ‘Klondike Nightingale’, Yukon News, https://yukon-news.com/2020/11/21/history-hunter-beatrice-lorne-the-klondike-nightingale/ 21 November 2020 (Accessed 2 May 2026)
Michael Gates, Hollywood in the Klondike, Lost Moose publishing, 2023
John Mackie, This Week in History, 1905: Filthy-tongued actresses cause a ruckus at Vancouver vaudeville house, Vancouver Sun, https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/this-week-in-history-1905-filthy-tongued-actresses-cause-a-ruckus-at-vancouver-vaudeville-house 6 January 2017. (Accessed 2 May 2026)
Evelyn Mack Truitt, Who Was Who on Screen, Bowker publishing, 1977
