(left) Fitzroy girls Daphne Pollard and Leah Leichner in costume for The Geisha, Shanghai, 1905. J. Willis Sayre Collection of Theatrical Photographs, University of Washington Libraries Special Collections, JWS24603. (right) Daphne Pollard at the height of her Hollywood fame, Motion Picture News Blue Book, 1930, P255. Lantern Digital Library & the Internet Archive.
Australian born Daphne Pollard is remembered today for a string of Hollywood comedies she appeared in between 1927 and 1934—with the likes of Shemp Howard (of three Stooges fame), and Laurel & Hardy.
However, Daphne Pollard is unique in several respects. A capable dancer, singer, and comedienne, she made the transition from child performer to adult performer, apparently with ease. She was physically very small, described as ‘cute’ when younger, but was quite unremarkable looking as an adult, except when in character. She was a colonial in the eyes of Britons, although to North Americans her Australianness meant nothing. She was one of a small group of successful comediennes at the time, and notably one who did not reach her position by developing an onstage partnership act with a male (as, for example, Mae Dahlberg did with Stan Laurel, or Nellie Finlay with Harry Quealy). By the time she appeared as Oliver Hardy’s diminutive wife in Hal Roach’s Our Relations in 1936, she had been a performer for more than 35 years—having made a seamless transition from stage to film in 1927.
Despite her great success, she never performed in her hometown of Melbourne.
Daphne Pollard in wig and costume for a Pollard’s performance in the US, c.1903–1905
J. Willis Sayre Collection of Theatrical Photographs, University of Washington Libraries Special Collections, JWS23646
Daphne’s birthplace at 56 Kerr Street, Fitzroy, is one of the white cottages on the right
Author’s collection
Daphne Trott was born in inner-city Melbourne. Her mother Annie gave birth to her in a modest two-bedroom cottage at 56 Kerr Street, Fitzroy in 1891—there were already five older siblings in the house. Daphne’s father Walter Trott was a furniture polisher and upholsterer—there appears to have been no theatrical tradition running in the family. In 1898 and 1899, her older sister Ivy was appearing in Australian pantomimes and her success is likely to have encouraged Daphne’s interest in performing. However, some evidence suggests that Daphne’s mother was also very active in encouraging her children to go on the stage. During a dispute over contracts in May 1904, it was Annie Trott who did the negotiating, rather than Walter.1
Her education in stage craft was thanks to that unusual Australian institution, the Melbourne wing of Pollard’s Lilliputian Opera Company.2 Daphne spent seven formative years with the Pollards—from the age of 9 to about 16. Run by Charles Pollard and Nellie Chester, children of the original James Pollard, the Pollard Lilliputian Opera Company regrouped in Melbourne for an international tour every year or two, with new performers being added as needed, as some got too old, lost interest or branched out on their own.
Charles Pollard and Nellie Chester usually selected their troupe from inner Melbourne—and they were almost always the children of skilled or semi-skilled workers, like Walter Trott. Neighbours of the Trotts who also joined Pollard’s included Alice and Ethel Bennetto—the daughters of a bricklayer; the Heintz twins—Freddie and Johnnie and their older brother Oscar—the children of a baker; Emma and Willie Thomas—the children of an ironmonger; and Leah Leichner—the daughter of a tailor. The children were contracted to Pollard’s in a manner we would find unthinkable today, and their nominal salary was paid to parents via a trust, and sometimes in advance. The Pollards undertook to educate the child performers—including in all aspects of stage craft.
Cashing in on the enthusiasm for child actors performing as adults in popular light opera, Charles Pollard and Nellie Chester had developed a juvenile touring performance model, based in part on their own experiences with their father and with their extended family. Brother-in-law Tom Pollard (who changed his birth name of O’Sullivan to Pollard) ran another troupe with a similar name and to the same business model. While company records have long since disappeared, there is enough evidence surviving to indicate that the troupes were hugely lucrative. On one occasion, Charles Pollard told a newspaper he had netted £30,000 in two years.3
Daphne’s first extended overseas performance tour took place when she was 9 years old. In company with 22 girls (including older sisters Myrtle and Ivy), 7 boys and 13 adults, the Pollard’s Lilliputian Opera Company departed Australia in June 1900 for a nine-month tour that took in Singapore, Penang, Rangoon, and Calcutta. Their productions were popular musicals—including A Runaway Girl, The Belle of New York, HMS Pinafore, A Gaiety Girl, The Geisha, often performed by rotation in the one short season in a city. Audiences were usually familiar with these musicals, but the novelty was in the clever child performers taking the adult roles. A second tour departed Melbourne in September 1901, this time heading directly to the US and Canada for twelve months.
By late 1901, Daphne Trott had adopted the stage name Daphne Pollard. Reviews of her performances show that the Pollards saw her potential and began to headline her at an early age. Given her short stature—she grew to be a little under 145 cms or 4 foot 9 inches tall—her age was consistently under-stated to reinforce the impression she was a child prodigy. While in India in December 1900, Charles Pollard led a journalist for The Englishman’s Overland Mail to believe Daphne was only four years old. For The San Francisco Chronicle in November 1901, the ‘dainty’ actress was seven, and had ‘already become a great favourite’ with audiences and a ‘queen of the comic opera’. Interviewed at length by Blanche Partington of The San Francisco Call in 1906, she was now reported to be 12. The interview demonstrates 15-year-old Daphne’s admirable skills at delivering a polite but suitably childlike interview for the press. Importantly, this interview revealed that the Pollards regularly took time out to watch other shows, and also took responsibility for training each other. Daphne said that Alf Goulding (by then the company’s stage manager) had taught her all she knew.4 Goulding remained a lifelong friend.
Daphne Pollard, Shanghai, China c.1905
National Library of Australia, Canberra
Cast list for a Pollard performance of The Belle of New York, at San Francisco’s Tivoli Theatre, 11 November 1901.5
Author’s collection
Daphne may have been given the stage name ‘Pollard’ as a reward for her performance skills, but surviving records show many children in the company regularly changed names, and sometimes even non-existent performers were added to theatre programs—surely these were pranks by the children that adults went along with, also serving to give the impression that the company was larger than it really was. Shipping manifests, one of the few clues as to who was really in the company at any given time, also show child performers like Daphne used her stage name Pollard and her real name Trott interchangeably.
Daphne and Ivy went on two more tours with the Pollards; from January 1903 to April 1904, followed by another very long tour from mid-1904 to February 1907. In July 1904 a short season was spent testing out performances in Queensland, followed by travel through South-East Asia, including stops at Manila, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Japan, before a big season playing to enthusiastic North American audiences, who were often delighted when the young Australians revisited their town. However, the Pollards did not manage to storm the US east coast as they had hoped. New York’s Gerry Society, or the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, were particularly active in keeping children off the stage—and the Pollards did not tempt fate by travelling to the eastern US states.
Separating advance publicity copy from real reviews in newspapers is not easy, but one Queensland journalist likely provided a genuine response after seeing The Belle of New York, just before the company departed for the Far East in July 1904:
Little Miss Daphne Pollard, as Cora Angelique, took the house completely by storm as a Queen of Comic Opera in a sumptuous array of white satin. She was a beautiful midget queen of charming pertness and great vivacity. She was like one of those prize wax bride dolls, very much animated and imbued with the motives of human ‘grown-ups’. The wee lady not only sang and acted well, but there was the poetry of motion in her dancing.6
Daphne Pollard with the Lilliputians in Manila c.1904.7 Daphne Pollard is the girl in white, standing at the front, right. Harold Fraser, later Hollywood actor Snub Pollard, is standing at the extreme right. The twin boys are Freddie and Johnnie Heintz, also from Kerr Street, Fitzroy.
J. Willis Sayre Collection of Theatrical Photographs, University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, JWS24555
Soon after their return to Australia in early 1907, it was announced that Daphne and Ivy were leaving the Pollards. They had accepted contracts with US theatre entrepreneur Frank W. Healy to join his San Francisco Opera Company. They arrived back in North America in August 1907 and set about touring again in light operas, including Dolly Varden, The Singing Girl and The Toymaker, throughout the west coast states of the US.
Daphne Pollard while in the San Francisco Opera Company in c.1907–8
Author’s collection
Daphne Pollard in a character role, The Billboard, 30 July 1910, p.10
Lantern Digital Library & the Internet Archive
Daphne Pollard sometimes spoke of the importance of her family and these comments assume a greater meaning when we realise that over the next year, her parents and most of her siblings moved to the US permanently, settling in Seattle. In relocating overseas to be with their performing daughters, the Trotts were unique amongst parents of the Pollard’s company—most could not afford to, or did not wish to make the move.
And finally, in late 1908, Daphne Pollard appeared in New York, in Mr. Hamlet of Broadway at the Casino Theatre. It was only a short run of three weeks, but it was enough to introduce her to a new group of audiences on the US east coast. She then performed in a series of vaudeville engagements for the William Morris Agency throughout the US and Canada
When she appeared at Pantages Theatres on the US west coast in April 1910, she was billed as the ‘smallest, cutest and cleverest comedienne’—her reputation from the Pollard days still loomed large in publicity. Perhaps she was tiring of this very familiar commentary. For a time she joined her family and made Seattle her home, heading up her own stock company. In July 1911 she married Ellington Strother Bunch, an editor on The Seattle Times, and announced she was retiring from the stage—albeit with considerable fanfare. In a long interview, she told the Los Angeles Herald that she had now left the stage for good. ‘For two years … I have known that the glamour was gone and I have wanted to leave’.8 Never the less, two years later, she was back on stage again.
From early 1914 she reappeared in a series of touring musical comedies in California—The Girl Behind the Counter and A Knight for a Day (with Pollard alumnus Alf Goulding and Billy Bevan). In Candy Store, which followed, one reviewer felt she was so good she near eclipsed the rest of the cast. She was a clever performer, who sang well and ‘did comedy better’. Daphne was ‘likable, pretty, winsome … and the big hit of the show’.9 By this time, new photos of a more mature Daphne were arranged, and there is a sense that she now wished to leave the cute child persona behind.
23-year-old Daphne Pollard, from The San Francisco Call, 16 June 1914
California Digital Newspaper Collection, University of California
The program cover for Zig-Zag! at the London Hippodrome in 1917
Author’s collection
A professional breakthrough was gaining a part in The Passing Show of 1915, advertised as ‘a whirl of fun, music and girls’, a major New York revue produced by Jacob and Lee Shubert, and designed in the style of, and as competition to, Ziegfeld’s Follies. Despite the criticisms that a meaningful plot was absent, the revue was hugely popular and after four months at New York’s Winter Garden theatre, it toured cities in the US. Such was Daphne Pollard’s success as ’Ruby, the modern working girl’, that British producer Albert de Courville offered her a contract for his forthcoming London show, which she accepted.
De Courville’s spectacular revues at the Hippodrome resonated with enthusiastic audiences keen for distraction, particularly in wartime. His formula for successful stage shows was outlined in his 1928 autobiography—which included spectacle, speciality dancing, changes of scenery, trick properties, special lighting effects and regular changes of ‘girls in different costumes’.10 His seventh revue, Zig-Zag! also proved to be a great success—it opened at the Hippodrome in January 1917 and ran for over 650 performances. The standout act was a low comedy scene set in the Stone Age, which Daphne played with George Robey and George Clarke.
British audiences had not seen Daphne before, and the reception was very positive. She danced and sang with a ‘dainty grace … truly a little actress of whom our Antipodean cousins should be proud’ reported one London newspaper,11 while the Stage claimed she was ‘one of the best eccentric dancers’ to be seen in London, her performance was ‘one of the most prominent successes of the revue’.12 In late 1918, a new edition of Zig Zag! was put on in Paris at the Folies Bergère—with the Stone Age scene still a feature.
Intriguingly, at least one of the songs she performed in the review, I’m a Ragtime Germ, is credited to three people, including her
While Daphne Pollard had become highly competent in self-promotion (she often provided the press with colourful accounts of her career), her genuine passion for the stage seems to have been well and truly established—even before these extravagant British revues. In late 1916, for The Green Book Magazine, she wrote an extended piece on how a variety show unfolded, from a backstage perspective.13 And interviewed by Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences archivist Sam Gill in the 1970s, Daphne said she had declined offers of film contracts at this time, simply because she was making such good money on the stage.14
The French/English program for Zig-Zag! from its run at the Folies Bergère. Although the revue had been largely changed, ‘Idylle Prehistorique’ (the Stone Age act) remained a feature.
Author’s collection
Daphne Pollard in England, c.1920
Author’s collection
Not surprisingly given her success, Daphne Pollard took roles in other de Courville revues over the next few years, including Box O’ Tricks (1918), Joy Bells with fellow Australian Leon Errol (1919), and Jig Saw (1920).
Daphne moved back and forth between the US and UK at least six times between 1916 and 1926 to take on lucrative contracts. She took some time out of work in England in 1922 to give birth to a son, but apart from this break she was almost continuously on stage.
Not everything Daphne appeared in was a roaring success. After Dinner, an Ernest Rolls revue in London in 1921 met mixed reviews, and despite acknowledgement of the skills of some of the cast—including Daphne, the show only ran for 35 performances at The Lyric. But she was a reliable and popular enough performer to be called in again by de Courville, to bolster another of his London revues, The Rainbow in early 1923.
A clue to her success by this time was provided by a British reviewer who commented on her skills in this way:
While possessed of a nice voice … [Daphne Pollard] depends mostly upon her body movements, facial expressions and general whimsical mannerisms to please, and she goes just sufficiently near the line of demarcation that separates real humour from … vulgarity.15
In the second half of 1923, she returned to New York again for a role in a new Schubert brothers’ revue, the Greenwich Village Follies, again in the style of the Ziegfeld Follies. Some of Daphne’s later stage and screen characters made their first appearance in this revue. In an Act 1 sketch entitled Everybody Welcome, written by Paul Gerard Smith, she played a foolish, newly arrived English immigrant – who would later become screen character Harriet Hemmingway. In Act 2’s Wanted-A Man, she played a lovelorn woman interested in a policeman, so similar to her character Emmy who pursues fireman Smoky Moe in His First Flame (1935).
Daphne’s appearance in this revue is famous for another reason. In October 1923 she threatened to lead a walkout, after popular African-American comedian, singer and dancer Florence Mills was added to the cast, and advertising profiled her. Bill Egan has suggested that Daphne probably viewed Florence Mills as a professional threat, ‘a darker version of herself’.16 Even at the time, the ‘hyra-headed monster of race prejudice’ was also suggested as Daphne Pollard’s motivation.17
New York’s Daily News on 14 and 15 October 1923. On the left—the advertisement for the Follies that profiled Florence Mills. At right, the advertisement the next day, presumably after Daphne Pollard’s threat was made.
Newspapers.com
The Greenwich Village Follies continued through several editions into 1925. By January 1926, Daphne was back in England again, touring in variety, adjusting her act for British audiences and recycling popular numbers from the big revues she had been a part of. At the end of 1926 she had returned to the US, appearing on the Keith-Albee circuit, where the sketch Everybody’s Welcome again made an appearance.
Daphne Pollard on stage c.1923. Motion Picture Classic, vol. XVIII, Dec 1923.
Lantern Digital Library & the Internet Archive
In June 1927, Daphne finally signed up to appear in films for Mack Sennett, accompanied by considerable publicity.18 Sennett’s studio made much use of stage comedians, but Daphne Pollard was one of few women to be brought onboard. Perhaps her old friend and established director, Alf Goulding, also encouraged her at this time, but it appears the jump to films was mostly a financial decision. She headlined her first film for Sennett, a recognition of her popularity.
Brent Walker notes Daphne’s contract was just for three months, at $350 per week, with options for extensions and increases. The Girl from Everywhere was her first film, which famously also featured Sennett’s bathing girls in a short colour segment and was the first of a string of ‘Sennett Girl Comedies’. In this topical film about movie-making, Daphne Pollard took the character role of wardrobe mistress, Minnie Stich.
Of the films she appeared in during 1928-9, most were for Mack Sennett. Three Sennett girl films—Run Girl Run, The Swim Princess and The Campus Carmen were directed by Alf Goulding, while several included Billy Bevan, another former Pollard’s member. Also appearing with Daphne in the Sennett girl films was Carole Lombard. Lombard later claimed that she and Daphne were ‘in hysterics the whole time’ they worked together. Daphne was ‘the best sport of the whole gang’ she said.19 The last of the Sennett Girl comedies, Matchmaking Mamma, was released in March 1929. In this film, Daphne took on one of the traditional objects of humour for Sennett, the society woman with an absurd name—Mrs. Cornelius McNitt.
Amongst her 1928 films was a now lost comedy short with the wordy title Daphne Pollard in Cleo to Cleopatra, an early Vitaphone sound film. Details of this are scarce, but it was released in the middle of the year, in the rush by studios to find material for sound films and was almost certainly based on a sketch that appeared in Joy Bells in 1920, that one British reviewer had described as ‘excruciatingly funny’.20 This was not the only time a stage character reappeared in one of her films. Harriet Hemingway, the English immigrant, from ‘Huntershire county, ‘Hingland’, also made a reappearance on screen in America or Bust (1930) and Help Wanted, Female (1931).
The Old Barn, a Sennett talkie from 1928, featuring Daphne as a fortune teller, appearing alongside Sennett regulars Andy Clyde, Thelma Hill and Johnny Burke, demonstrates the approach the studio was taking at the time. The script is comprised of two scenes– a boarding house scene and a spooky barn scene, cobbled together by the news that ‘Strangler Dan’ is on the loose. The film depends heavily on its dialogue—watched today it is interesting to hear the clarity of Daphne Pollard’s voice. Her accent, the result of years of experience and practice on stage, sits comfortably with what American viewers would think of as a trans-Atlantic accent.
Daphne Pollard (as Minnie Stitch, centre) with Carole Lombard and Dot Farley in The Girl from Everywhere (1927). Descriptive Catalogue of Kodascope Library Motion Pictures, 1936.
Lantern Digital Library & the Internet Archive
Daphne Pollard as Dora in The Campus Vamp (1928), which also featured Carole Lombard and Sally Eilers. Descriptive Catalogue of Kodascope Library Motion Pictures, 1936.
Lantern Digital Library & the Internet Archive
It is the case that Daphne Pollard is best remembered for playing older, eccentric matronly figures such as Aunt Agnes in Honeymoon Zeppelin (1930) or Oliver Hardy’s demanding wife ‘Daphne Hardy’ in Thicker than Water (1935) and Our Relations (1936). She also often played maids or cooks, called Hilda, or Minnie, or Millie, complete with pursed lips, hair tied back in a tight bun, and usually possessed of a bad temper.
However, a survey of the films in her short movie career also shows she took a variety of character roles. In Warner Brothers’ Smoked Hams (1934), she and Shemp Howard play parodies of themselves—two B-grade travelling vaudevillians, named Henry Howard and Emma Pollard. In His First Flame (1935), also with Shemp Howard, she takes a flirtatious soubrette role most effectively, although she was now aged well into her 40s. In Bulls and Bears (1930), Mack Sennett’s take on the stock market crash of October 1929, she provides a dance of joy, having invested all Andy Clyde’s (her grocer husband’s) savings—she thinks—in the stock market. The dance is probably reminiscent of some of the ‘grotesque dancing’ she had a reputation for performing on stage. Her singing voice can be heard in Honeymoon Zeppelin, where she also provides the ever popular, funny drunkard act. Her voice is also heard in RKO’s melodrama The Lady Refuses (1931), where she has a minor role as a maid.
Daphne Pollard with regular Sennett co-stars Marjorie Beebe and Andy Clyde in Racket Cheers, a comedy short about gangsters and prohibition released in late 1930. Exhibitors Herald World, 6 Dec 1930.
Lantern Digital Library & the Internet Archive
Daphne never abandoned the stage. At various times while working in Hollywood she embarked upon US tours, performing variety acts that were shown in combination with feature film presentations. Even in 1932, the Lyric Theatre in Indianapolis headlined her live performance on stage, in support of a Barbara Stanwyck and George Brent film The Purchase Price. Advance publicity announced the ‘noted English Comedienne’ would be live on stage to deliver four ‘original’ song-scenes, including a bathing costume scene from the ‘Gay Nineties’ and the Policeman sketch (which of course, was not original).21 It helped that Daphne Pollard was also an established screen star by this time, too.
In November 1935, following what would be her last performance tour of east coast theatres, Daphne Pollard travelled back across the US to her home in California. With an admirable determination, she said all she could to reporters to drum up confidence in vaudeville. ‘Vaudeville is coming back’ she announced. ‘Theatres … with one picture and a balanced bill of vaudeville, are packing them in.’22 These were brave words, but vaudeville was doomed. Most theatres had already dropped variety and moved to film-only programs.
She did go back work again in Hollywood, for Hal Roach, appearing in several Laurel and Hardy features, playing Ollie’s wife ‘Daphne Hardy’. Although she appears not to have been very active after 1936, she maintained her profile in casting directories, sometimes being listed on the same page as fellow Australian actor Tempe Pigott, who also specialised in character roles.23
Amongst Daphne Pollard’s final film roles was that of Mumsy, in Tillie the Toiler (1941), a Columbia film based on a popular comic strip. The Exhibitor, June–Dec 1941.
Lantern Digital Library & the Internet Archive
One of few insights into Daphne as a person survived in the recollections of former Pollard performer Willie Thomas. Thomas, by 1918 an Australian soldier serving in France, met her after seeing Box O’Tricks, while he was on leave in London. The incongruity of a soldier who had been experiencing the horrors of fighting on the Western Front meeting a vaudeville performer backstage after a show is extraordinary. Yet the reunion was a joyful one and the memory of it and Daphne’s warm welcome remained with Thomas all his life.24
However, Stan Laurel’s published correspondence suggests Daphne was a more complex person. In later life Stan Laurel and Daphne were friends who occasionally corresponded and sometimes rang each other—but he recounted she had hung up on him once, still annoyed because he hadn’t sent her any postcards when he travelled through England in 1947.25
Daphne Pollard died in Los Angeles in 1978, her stock-broker husband Ellington having predeceased her in 1959. By the 1970s she was one of the last of the former Pollard performers living, and notably had led a very stable personal life by comparison with most of her old colleagues. Her friend and Fitzroy neighbour Alf Goulding had married six times and died in California in 1972. Snub Pollard (Harold Fraser) had died in 1962. He had been married three times and spent most of his later years as a film extra. Billy Bevan had married twice and suffered a fatal heart attack at his farm in 1957—having also spent much of his later career working as an extra. Teddy McNamara died of pneumonia in early 1928, on the eve of great success as a comic partner to Sammy Cohen. Freddie Heintz, Daphne’s neighbour from Kerr Street, Fitzroy and the more colourful of the Heintz twins, died in the US in 1949, having worked fruitlessly to establish himself on the stage and where he had ended up a handyman. Willie Thomas however, returned to Australia after the war and became a butcher. He kept his makeup box from the Pollard days until his death in 1969.
Daphne Pollard, the diminutive female comedian from working class Fitzroy who conquered the stage in London and New York and then appeared in Hollywood, deserves better recognition from Australians today. Fortunately, we can still gain some appreciation of her ability from her surviving films, many of which are now in the public domain.
Daphne Pollard Filmography
Campus Carmen (Silent, 1928)
The Old Barn (1930)
Swing High (1930)
She Whoops to Conquer (1933) (Shortened TV version)
Run Girl, Run (Silent, 1928)
The Campus Vamp (Silent, 1928)
Campus Carmen (Silent, 1928)
Matchmaking Mamma (Silent, 1929)
The Old Barn (1930)
Bulls and Bears (1930)
Breakfast in Bed (1930)
Honeymoon Zeppelin (1930)
Swing High (1930)
Breakfast in Bed (1930)
Help Wanted, Female (1931)
The Lady Refuses (1931)
She Whoops to Conquer (1933) (Shortened TV version)
Smoked Hams (1934)
His First Flame (1935)
Thicker than Water (1935)
Our Relations (1935)
References
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, 2017, pp.153–173. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Peter Downes, The Pollards, Steele Roberts, New Zealand, 2002
Bill Egan, Florence Mills: Harlem Jazz Queen, The Scarecrow Press, Oxford, 2004
Linda Martin and Kerry Segrave, Women in Comedy, Citadel Press, New Jersey,1986
Brent E. Walker, Mack Sennett’s Fun Factory: A History and Filmography of His Studio and His Keystone and Mack Sennett Comedies, with Biographies of Players and Personnel, McFarland Inc., United Kingdom, 2010
Endnotes
1. See Public Records Office Victoria, VPRS 269 1904/329, Civil Case Files Supreme Court of Victoria, Charles Pollard, Nellie Chester, Pollard’s Lilliputian Opera Company v. Ernest Augustus Wolffe.
2. The author uses the word ‘unusual’ deliberately—as people were conflicted about children appearing on the stage even at the time. Irene Goulding recalled her teacher at the Bell Street Primary school in Fitzroy did not approve of her leaving school for a career as a Pollard’s performer. Sally Dawes interview with Irene Goulding, 1985. Australian Performing Arts Collection.
3. The Ballarat Star (Ballarat, Vic), 7 February 1901, p.4. National Library of Australia. This is approximately $4,600,000 in 2021 currency.
4. The San Francisco Call, 4 March 1906, p.23. California Digital Newspaper Collection, University of California.
5. Real names (Ivy Trott, Emma Thomas, Alice Bennetto) are mixed in with stage names (Daphne Pollard, Myrtle Pollard, Harold Hill) and made-up names based on Australian theatre figures (‘Benny Musgrove’, ‘Cyril Keightley’).
6. The Telegraph (Brisbane) 18 July 1904, p.7. National Library of Australia.
7. The photo is also a reminder that Pollard’s troupes operated firmly in a European colonial world, and that expectations about what children should be exposed to were very different to those of the twenty-first century. Here, the company appear to be posing with Filipino prisoners in chains.
8. Los Angeles Herald, 7 August 1911, p.5. California Digital Newspaper Collection, University of California.
9. The Sacramento Bee, 17 August 1914, p.14. Newspapers.com.
10. Albert de Courville, I Tell You, Chapman and Hall, London, 1928, pp.157–158
11. The Sporting Times (London), 3 February 1917, P3. British Newspaper Archive.
12. The Stage, 8 February 1917, p.2. British Newspaper Archive.
13. The Green Book Magazine, Vol 16, July–Dec 1916, pp.737–740. Via Internet Archive.
14. Brent Walker, p.174
15. The Sunday Sun (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK), 13 March 1921, p.12. British Newspaper Archive.
16. Bill Egan, pp.100–101
17. The Pittsburgh Courier, 3 November 1923, p.9. Newspapers.com. This paper reported Florence Mills was earning $1000 per week for the appearance.
18. The Los Angeles Times, 4 June 1927, p.24. California Digital Newspaper Collection, University of California.
19. Frederick W. Ott. The Films of Carole Lombard, Secaucus, New Jersey, Citadel Press, 1974, p.20
20. The Weekly Dispatch (London), 21 March 1920, p.7. Newspapers.com
21. The Indianapolis Times, 23 July, 1932, p.5. Newspapers.com
22. The Ogden Standard-Examiner (Utah), 9 November 1935, p.22. Newspapers.com
23. Academy Players Directory, No 8, July 1938. Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences.
24. Personal information, Willie Thomas’s grandson to author 2020.
25. LettersfromStan.com, the Stan Laurel Correspondence Archive Project. Letters to Betty Healy, 3 July 1953 and 17 Feb 1959.
