Charles Pollard

Young Australians in Canada: A Pollards Lilliputian Opera Company troupe on the steps of the Badminton Hotel, Vancouver, in August 1902.¹  Major Matthews Collection, AM54-S4: Port P1375, City of Vancouver Archives.

Although Pollards Lilliputian Opera Company ² has often been celebrated as an exemplary Australian theatrical institution, it really owed its existence to a business model that the Pollard family stumbled upon and refined in the 1880s and 90s. The Pollards had successfully tapped into existing public enthusiasm for child performance and musical comedy. In this article I explore the work of siblings Charles Alfred Pollard (1858–1942) and Eleanor Jane ‘Nellie’ Chester (1861–1944), who ran a series of highly publicised juvenile troupes—usually entitled Pollards Lilliputian Opera Company or similar—through South Africa, India, Asia and North America, between 1896 and 1922.

The Australasian activities of Charles and Nellie’s brother-in-law, Tom Pollard (born Tom O’Sullivan) were well documented by Peter Downes in The Pollards(2002). Unfortunately, for reasons of space, Downes did not include the Charles Pollard and Nellie Chester troupes. Only recently have writers revisited this extraordinary Australian enterprise and the awkward issue of indentured child performers working for prolonged periods overseas (Arrighi and Emeljanow, 2014, Arrighi 2017, Rice 2021). The Pollards business practices have also tended to be overshadowed by the subsequent success of a handful of their former actors, to the extent we might mistakenly conclude this was the experience for all of them.

Almost all the child performers were from Melbourne’s inner suburbs. A few were only 10 years of age, the majority were girls, and all were apprenticed to the Pollards in a way we would find unthinkable today. The performance tours took these children away for at least twelve months, and on one occasion for 32 months. It was once claimed that thousands of children graduated from the Pollards, but the real figure is probably closer to 100. There was no graduation at a given age really—the Pollards ended their association with children because they had physically developed and no longer looked young enough to be Lilliputians.³

Family patriarch James Joseph Pollard (1833–1884).[Downes dates this photo to 1881.]

May Pollard Collection, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

Family members Olive Pollard (1870–1952) and May Pollard (1868–1970) the twelfth and thirteenth children of the Pollard family, were young enough to be performing in the first company tour in Singapore in 1884

May Pollard Collection, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

The background—James Joseph Pollard and his family troupe of 1880–1886

Charles Pollard and Nellie Chester were the fifth and seventh children respectively of James Joseph Pollard (1833–1884) and his first wife Mary Weippert. Peter Downes has described in some detail the vibrant life of the Pollard family in Launceston Tasmania—their 1870s home was a bustling centre of musical activity. There were sixteen living Pollard children by 1882 and although only the males of the family were educated at school (the girls were educated at home), all were expected to take up music.⁴  It was this James Pollard, his children and their extended family who created the model that became the phenomenally successful Pollard Lilliputian Opera Companies, beginning in 1880.

Arrighi and Emeljanow (2014) have found that the ‘line of inheritance’ of child or juvenile performance troupes traces to Richard D’Oyly Carte’s production of HMS Pinafore in London over the Christmas of 1879–1880. It was only six months later, in May 1880, that James Pollard mounted his production of HMS Pinafore in Launceston, Tasmania with many of the leading roles taken by his own children, supplemented by local children. One of the youngest was his own son, Arthur Pollard (1873–1940), aged 7.

Older Pollard siblings—including Charles and Nellie—provided musical accompaniment and helped manage the company. Tom O’Sullivan progressed from playing in the orchestra, to stage management and direction, also adopting the surname Pollard, even before marrying into the family.⁵ The enterprise was a great success, and the Pollards business model evolved as they performed more widely in Australia and New Zealand. In time, other comic operas were added to their repertoire, including Les Cloches de Corneville, The Little Dukeand La Fille De Madame Angot. Importantly however, in mid–1883, while performing in Queensland, James Pollard made the decision to take the troupe overseas to perform in Batavia [now Jakarta], and then via various stops to Calcutta [now Kolkata]. The decision was extraordinary because it was taken without reference to other parents, with whom James Pollard had only a loose agreement. At least some accounts suggest the children did not know where they were going until they were at sea.⁶  On the way, senior members of the troupe, including Tom and Charles Pollard, wrote home to parents to inform them of their new plans. Charles Pollard’s letter to one parent reveals that the adult Pollards knew quite well the liberty they had taken in leaving Australia, and the resulting bad publicity, including accusations of kidnapping, was hardly surprising.

The decision by the Pollards to take children overseas without parental approval attracted widespread criticism. This cartoon from a contemporary Melbourne paper also displays race views typical of the era.

Melbourne Punch,3 January 1884, p.5, State Library Victoria

Dear Mrs Salinger,
You will no doubt know before you receive this letter that the company are going to Calcutta for the Exhibition⁷ … Of course you ought to have been informed, but it [the decision] was made so hurriedly that we … [had] no time to write … You have nothing to blame [your children] Herbert or Lena for, so you must blame me. C.A. Pollard.⁸

The apologetic letters home didn’t help, although most parents could do little about it. Under pressure from Victoria’s colonial government, the Pollards made a commitment to be back in Melbourne again by June 1884. The tour may well have been a financial success, as one published account states that it reaped £12,000, ⁹ but in many respects it must also have been chaotic. On arrival in Singapore the troupe was quarantined for two weeks because Cholera was detected.¹⁰ Then in September 1883 James Pollard’s oldest son and the group’s conductor, Jim, died while the troupe was in Rangoon—by his own hand, by accident or deliberately—it no longer seems clear which, while family patriarch James Pollard himself developed dropsy and died soon after the troupe returned to Australia.

Charles and Tom Pollard continued running the troupe in Australia and New Zealand until early 1886, when Charles resigned. A few months later, Tom Pollard wrapped the company up.

It seemed as if the Pollards Lilliputian story was over.

Charles Pollard, Nellie Chester and younger sibling Arthur Pollard. Enlarged, from Major Matthews Collection, AM54-S4: Port P1375, City of Vancouver Archives.

Charles Pollard and Nellie Chester touring the Empire, 1896–1901

It was Tom Pollard who first resuscitated a juvenile troupe in 1891, with encouragement from J.C. Williamson’s. Over the next six years, his company emerged as a leading Australian juvenile troupe, even after 1896 when Lilliputian was dropped from the name on account of the maturing of its members.

In the late 1880s, Charles Pollard and his wife Florence Hedworth (a former Pollard player whose stage name had been Flo De Lorne) had established themselves as musicians and importers of instruments in North Queensland, in the booming mining town of Charters Towers.¹¹  Younger brother Arthur was also living in Charters Towers, with Mary Hall, his new wife, running a music store and a school of music.

At the same time, Nellie Pollard was raising a family in India, having married Daniel Chester, a British civil servant, in September 1884.

While there is no surviving evidence that Charles and Nellie consulted with brother-in-law Tom Pollard in the establishment of a second Pollards company in 1896, it seems likely they did. As later events would show, the Pollards usually kept themselves closely informed about what other members of the family were doing. Equally importantly, Tom’s wife ‘Teny’ Pollard was a close friend of Flo, Charles’ wife.¹² The agreement seems to have been that Tom Pollard’s troupes would work primarily in Australasia, while Charles and Nellie’s would operate outside Australasia—although an exception seems to have been made for Queensland, where Charles and Nellie often tested out their repertoire before leaving Australia.

Studio portrait of Charles Pollard, c.1905

May Pollard Collection, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

Nellie Chester, c.1903, surrounded by girls from inner Melbourne, with, from left; May Topping (born 1890), Ivy Trott (born 1887), Alice McNamara (born 1888), Alice Bennetto (born 1885) and Irene Goulding (born 1888)

Pollard Opera Companies Collection, Australian Performing Arts Collection, Melbourne

Charles and Nellie went about setting up their Pollard Lilliputian Opera Company with remarkable speed, approaching juvenile performers who were already making a name for themselves on stage in Melbourne—including Violet and Maggie Martin, Frank and Alf Goulding, Connie and Ina Milne—all children from inner Melbourne aged under 14 years. The new troupe embarked on the SS Argus bound for Calcutta, in late September 1896. This time, parents knew their children were to perform overseas for a prolonged season—there were no more accusations of kidnapping. The repertoire was the familiar list of popular comic operas, including HMS Pinafore,The Pirates of Penzance,La Mascotteand Dorothy.

Some members of the first troupe in 1896. Left to Right: 11-year-old Violet Martin was the daughter of a furniture polisher from Fitzroy. Alf and Frank Goulding were the sons of a shoemaker and sometime actor, also from Fitzroy, aged 11 and 13 respectively. Pollard Opera Companies Collection, Australian Performing Arts Collection, Melbourne.

To Charles and Nellie, the choice of Calcutta as the first city in a performance tour made sense. Of course, they had performed there thirteen years before, but it was also the capital of British India and a vibrant economic centre of the Empire, and the city regularly hosted visiting troupes—including some from Australia’s colonies. Charles and Nellie may not have known that bubonic plague had broken out in Bombay in September 1896, about the time they were to leave for Calcutta. If they did know, they were almost certainly not concerned, as they would have shared the imperial view that this was something that concerned the indigenous population, not Europeans. However, the tragedy was that one member of the troupe did succumb to a contagious disease only weeks after their arrival in Calcutta. 13-year-old Frank Goulding died a hideous death of confluent smallpox on 18 January1897. Determined to protect the Pollard reputation, the story was given out that he had died of pneumonia.

The troupe was well received in Calcutta, and again when they moved on to Singapore in April, and to Hong Kong in May and Shanghai in July 1897. Expatriate newspaper reviews enthused about the young performers, reflecting the great popularity of talented children performing the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan and George Edwardes. In a final stop again in Calcutta in November 1897, (and despite the further spread of bubonic plague through Indian cities) the company presented their new opera Paul Jones. Calcutta’s Englishmanreported that while the play was recognised as ‘not their best opera’, there was ‘a hearty greeting given to the Pollards’ and the production’s success was unqualified. ‘It seems but yesterday since they were here.’¹³ This was to become a feature of the Pollards touring model—visiting and revisiting locations where they were known and could count on a crowd, bringing back familiar favourites whilst also adding newly acquired comic operas.

On a return to Calcutta in November 1900, reviews were even more enthusiastic.

They are so cheerful, so bright, and do their work with such spirit and go that it is impossible not to like them. We are sincerely glad to see that Mr Pollard’s clever little company are slowly but surely working their way into favour with the public … We strongly advise people to go see the little company. They are well worth a visit.¹⁴

But not all audiences felt comfortable watching children play adult roles in saucy comic operas. One correspondent for the Hong Kong Daily Press reminded readers:

Pollard’s Lilliputians are children, but their performance is anything but childish … That shrimp of a maiden … who portrays a woman many times divorced, how are we to regard her?¹⁵

While touring in the United States, the issue of children performing professionally on stage, and especially in comic opera, would emerge as a significant problem for the company.

The hard lesson the Pollards had learned about bad publicity in 1883–4 in Calcutta had not been forgotten. Having moved on to South Africa in May 1899, Charles and Nellie invited a journalist to interview their child performers. Sydney’s Refereecarried a very long report in July. It was orchestrated, of course—children were named, but gave themselves the wrong ages. They all sounded happy and contented and they spoke warmly of which plays they liked and countries they preferred—South Africa being a favourite.¹⁶  Cynical though we might be today, there is enough in the interview to indicate it was really conducted. The children did call Nellie Chester ‘Aunty Chester’. Irene Goulding (aged 11, not 8 as reported) really had been very ill as the journalist reported. Interviewed 86 years later, Irene recalled she had been so ill she was hallucinating that the Prince of Wales was in the room, but still spoke warmly of Aunty Chester and her large case of medicines.¹⁷

The troupe was still in South Africa in October 1899, when fighting—the Second Boer war—broke out. A year or so later, Arthur Pollard recounted for a US paper what had happened.

After playing … [in Pretoria for] two weeks, some of the Dutch officials gave us a gentle hint to get out … We got our baggage together on four hours’ notice and started for Kimberley … We played from the middle of September to the 10^th of October, when Mr Rhodes gave us [another] hint to get out at once.¹⁸

Charles Pollard was delayed in Kimberley to attend to the troupe’s finances and became trapped in a siege of the town for four months. Although the rest of the adults and children in the Pollard troupe had made it to Queenstown [now Komani], extraordinarily, they continued to perform, and did not leave South Africa until 24 January 1900. This was obviously a commercial decision, and based on the supreme confidence that the Empire would prevail in the South African war.

Hall’s Juvenile Opera Company in South Africa, 1900–1903

Within weeks of their return to Melbourne on the Salamis in February 1900, Charles Pollard and Nellie Chester took some of the adults who accompanied their troupe to court. The issue was that stage manager Harry Hall and Alice Landershut wanted to start their own juvenile troupe, apparently to specialise in South African touring. Pollard and Chester claimed £500 for loss of earnings and alleged that Hall and Landershut wanted to entice children still under contract to them into the new troupe and named children from the Topping, Sheddon and Finlay families as having been approached. But in most of the modern accounts of Hall’s Australian Juveniles, a simple truth is overlooked. Alice Landeshut was Alice Pollard (1863–1950)—a sibling of Charles and Nellie and eighth child of the Pollard family. Alice had been one of supervising adults in South Africa with Charles and Nellie.

Only a few weeks after the matter was listed, on 28 March 1900, Alice Landeshut and Harry Hall’s troupe, aka Hall’s Australian Juvenile Company, departed on the SS Persic for Cape Town, with the Sheddon and Finlay children aboard, suggesting that the Pollards had reached some sort of understanding with each other. As later accounts would note, Alice Landeshut was actually the troupe’s sole proprietor and was also conductor, while Harry Hall was director.¹⁹ It was in fact—a thoroughly Pollard family affair. William Pollard (1871–1944 and 14^th child of the family) was the machinist while May Pollard (1868–1970 and 12^th child of the family) was stage manager.²⁰

Alice Landeshut nee Pollard, c.1905

May Pollard Collection, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

Charles Pollard (undated)

May Pollard Collection, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

Harry Hall was on record as indignantly denying that the company was composed of ‘Pollard remnants’, but the very close connections—through memberships of the Pollard family and by performers appearing in both Halls and Pollards, are impossible to ignore.²¹

The fighting in South Africa seems to have had no impact on the company’s commitment to perform, and they travelled on regardless. Harry Hall died unexpectedly in South Africa in late October 1903 and the juveniles returned to Australia sometime in early 1904. A few, like Roy Smith, May and Harold Fraser (who became Snub Pollard in Hollywood years later) simply moved across to Charles Pollard and Nellie Chester’s troupe and joined their long 1904–1907 tour of the US. Alice remarried in South Africa, returned to Australia and pursued other interests.

To be continued

Endnotes

1. Vancouver Daily World, 19 August 1902, p.2

2. I have followed Peter Downes style, generally using the title word Pollards, although Pollard’s was also used at the time. Liliputian was the spelling preferred by Tom Pollard, while Lilliputian (with three Ls) was used by Charles and Nellie.

3. Gillian Arrighi and Victor Emeljanow (2014) cover the issue of what legally and socially constituted childhood

4. Downes, (2002), p.14

5. Downes, (2002), pp.12–19

6. Downes, (2002), pp.60–63

7. The Calcutta International Exhibition was held between December 1883 and March 1884

8. The Times of India, 24 January 1884, p.6

9. One of many celebratory accounts about the Pollards, written with a mix of intimate knowledge and wild inaccuracy. The Daily Post (Hobart), 30 March 1909, p.6.

10. Downes, (2002), p.56

11. The Northern Miner (Charter’s Towers), 3 September 1896, p.2

12. Downes (2002), p.66

13. The Englishman (Calcutta), 4 November 1897, p.13

14. The Englishman (Calcutta), 29 November 1900, p.16

15. The Hong Kong Daily Press, 27 December 1907, p.17

16. The Referee (Sydney), 5 July 1899, p.10

17. Irene Smith interview (1985)

18. The Minneapolis Journal, 21 March 1902, p.8

19. The Daily Telegraph (Sydney), 1 March 1902 p.6

20. The Newsletter: An Australian Paper for Australian People (Sydney), 9 March 1901, p.7

21. Further confusing the historical record is the fact Tom Pollard also took his troupe to South Africa in 1903

References

John Andrews & Deborah Towns, ‘A Secondary Education for All’? A History of State Secondary Schooling in Victoria, Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2017

Gillian Arrighi, ’The Controversial “Case of the Opera Children in the east”: Political Conflict between Popular Demand for Child Actors and Modernizing Cultural Policy on the Child’, Theatre Journal, 69, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017, pp.153–173

Gillian Arrighi and Victor Emeljanow (eds), Entertaining Children: The Participation of Youth in the Entertainment Industry, Palgrove MacMillan, New York, 2014. Chapter 3. ‘Children and Youth of the Empire: Tales of Transgression and Accommodation’, pp.51-71

Roger L. Bedard, ‘Is it a skip or a dance?: Elbridge T. Gerry’s campaign against child actors’, Youth Theatre Journal, 11:1,1997, pp.15–24

Peter Downes, The Pollards. A family and its child and adult opera companies in New Zealand and Australia 1880–1910, Steele Roberts, Aotearoa, New Zealand, 2002

Marah Gubar, ‘Who Watched the Children’s Pinafore? Age Transvestism on the nineteenth-century stage.’ Victorian Studies, Vol 54, No 3, Spring 2012

Sally Howes, Irene Smith interview, Cassette 616, Australian Performing Arts Collection, Art Centre Melbourne, 1985

Benjamin McArthur, ‘“Forbid them not”: Child Labor laws and political activism in the Theatre’, Theatre Survey, 36:2 November 1995, pp.63–80

Kirsty Murray, India Dark, Allen and Unwin, 2010

Kate Rice, Performing the Past podcast; Episode 4: So and So and Such and Such, Arts Centre, Melbourne, 2021, https://soundcloud.com/arts-centre-melbourne/performing-the-past-episode-3-so-and-so-and-such-and-such

Thanks

I am grateful to the families of Pollards Lilliputians, who have shared their family stories, especially:

Catherine Crocker regarding Midas Martyn,

Robert Maynard regarding Willie and Emma Thomas,

Brenda Young regarding Elsie Morris,

John and Joan Grant regarding Leah Leichner,

and the descendants of the Heintz, Goulding and Thompson families.

Children of Pollards Lilliputian Opera Company with US soldiers in Manila. This photo was taken in early 1903, about six months after the Filipino American War had ended. Pollard Opera Companies Collection, Australian Performing Arts Collection, Melbourne.

Touring colonial outposts and the US, 1901–1909

By the second half of 1901, Charles Pollard and Nellie Chester felt confident enough to try a new market. Between September 1901 and February 1909, they ran four performance tours through North America, usually after stops on the way in Queensland, Manila, Honolulu and sometimes at port cities in China and Japan. The longest tour took the child performers away for an extraordinary 32 months, from September 1904 to February 1907. The breaks between tours were three months or so, which allowed for new children (if needs be) to be selected in Melbourne, and rehearsals to start.

Pollard Lilliputians in Manila, again, at the start of their marathon 1904–1907 tour, posing with Filipino soldiers and prisoners in chains. J. Willis Sayre Collection of Theatrical Photographs, University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, JWS24555.

On their first arrival in Honolulu in September 1901, Charles Pollard introduced the troupe to US audiences, in a manner that suggested some sort of social service was being conducted:

Every one of our children hails from Melbourne, and most of them from the five-mile radius... that includes Collingwood, Fitzroy and Carlton. They come from all classes, some from respectable parents, some from the street with no parents.¹

Girls in the chorus of The Geisha, c.1902.The officers were played by girls, from left, Emma Thomas (aged 17), daughter of a Collingwood ironmonger; Irene Goulding (aged 14), daughter of a Fitzroy boot maker; Lilly Thompson (aged 15), daughter of a Carlton bricklayer; the diminutive Daphne Trott or Pollard (aged 11), daughter of a Fitzroy furniture polisher. Pollard Opera Companies Collection, Australian Performing Arts Collection, Melbourne.

Before the company arrived in the US in 1901, Arthur Pollard had preceded them, making bookings and planting positive stories about the upcoming company tour in the local press. At least part of the challenge for the Pollards lay in emerging US attitudes to children performing on stage. On the US East coast, the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children had been highly influential in opposing the use of children on stage. The society’s president, Elbridge Gerry, found the practice of children singing and dancing, and especially performances by children’s troupes, particularly degrading.² Anticipating this, stories emphasizing a serious educational aspect to the Pollard Lilliputian Opera Company were planted in newspapers. In March 1902 one New York newspaper reported that the company was ‘actually an educational institution,’ which provided singing, stage training as well as a ‘common school education’.³

While on their first US tour, Pollards made one brief foray as far east as Chicago. A long account of the company and its serious credentials had appeared in the Chicago Tribune a few days before their opening at the Bush Temple of Music in May 1902. The account emphasized their strict schedule which included daily schooling with Mr Levy, ‘whose salary is paid by the Australian Government’. It went on to state that Nellie Chester was a ‘graduate physician’ who was accompanied by two nurses.⁴ It was all nonsense, of course. A week later the Pollards had closed their Chicago season. Complicated face-saving reasons were given, with a claim they had made a mistake by selecting a play too well known to open with, and that they were returning to Australia (which they were not), but the Chicago Tribune also acknowledged that ‘child opera does not appeal to Chicago’.⁵ It was another 12 years before a Pollards troupe finally appeared on the US east coast.

The program for a performance of The Lady Slaveyat Montreal’s Academy of Music, with the one week listing of comic operas for the week starting November 27, 1905. Almost every child’s age was mis-represented.

Author’s Collection

14-year-old Midas Martyn kept a diary of the Pollards tour of 1904–1907, which fortunately has survived. The diary reveals a non-stop program of travel and performance back and forth across Canada and up and down the US West coast. In many towns, the company’s stay was merely for a few days before moving on again. The company was in Sacramento in April 1906, when the San Francisco earthquake struck, 80 miles away. According to Midas’ diary they stayed in a park near their hotel during the day, waiting five days for a train booking to take them north.

It is difficult to see much time for schooling in the schedule Midas recorded, despite the regular claims made by the Pollards that they provided a teacher. Indeed, this writer can see little evidence of teaching going on at all in any of the Pollards tours. In the disastrous 1909 tour of India, Arthur Pollard employed 17-year-old dancer Ruby Ford to help maintain the pretence of having a teacher.⁶ The twenty-first century concept of teachers as qualified and registered professionals should not colour our understanding of the profession in 1900, an era when most teachers were yet to qualify and often still studying while working. What the Pollards were able to offer, fitfully, was some basic tuition in spelling, reading, writing and arithmetic, from someone who already had those skills.⁷

In her 1985 interview, Irene Goulding recalled with obvious regret that she didn’t get much schooling during her childhood. She also recalled telling her favourite teacher at the Bell Street School in Fitzroy that she was leaving to go away with the Pollards. Irene’s teacher told her it was a dreadful idea, but she was young and the chance to travel was too exciting.⁸ For many children like Irene, the chance to travel and see the world was overwhelmingly attractive. Free secondary schools had yet to be established, and a career on stage might be both an additional income stream for a working-class family and an exciting career option, an alternative to the inevitable apprenticeship or a life of factory work in inner Melbourne.

Irene Goulding with Ivy Trott in costume for The Gaiety Girl, c1904

Pollard Opera Companies Collection, Australian Performing Arts Collection, Melbourne

Oscar Heintz, c.1903

Pollard Opera Companies Collection, Australian Performing Arts Collection, Melbourne

This reality is starkly illustrated by 16-year-old Oscar Heintz’s decision not to return with the Pollards troupe in February 1907.⁹ While his younger twin siblings Freddie and Johnnie returned to their widowed mother Annie at the family home in Kerr Street, Fitzroy, Oscar threw himself on the mercy of the YMCA in Portland, Oregon.

Following another long tour to North America between July 1907 and May 1909, with a mostly fresh troupe, Charles Pollard announced his retirement, while Nellie Chester announced she was moving to the US. Some sense of the lucrative nature of running children’s opera troupes had been revealed in 1901, when one journalist claimed Charles and Nellie had netted £30,000 over the previous two years.¹⁰ Another report on the operations of Tom Pollard’s troupes operating in Australasia in 1900 suggests a similar success.¹¹

Charles Pollard (undated)

May Pollard Collection, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW

Arthur Pollard and the disaster in India 1909–1910

Following the retirement of Charles Pollard, in April 1909 the ‘ever genial and widely known’ Arthur Pollard was announced as the new proprietor and organiser of the branch of Pollards that travelled overseas.¹²

Unfortunately, Arthur Pollard had already developed a reputation for having a short temper. During the first tour of the US in 1901-2, he hit another Pollard brother, Henry (1857–1931) with a walking stick, after a dispute. The matter would have gone to court had Charles not returned from Chicago to make the peace between his brothers.¹³ Two months later, Arthur was taken to court after hitting a boy (not one of the troupe) in a park in Portland, Oregon. He admitted kicking the boy who (he said) had been ‘abusing his daughter’. He was given a fine and the matter dismissed.¹⁴ But Arthur Pollard had no daughter.

Arthur Pollard’s disastrous tour of India in 1909–1910 has been well documented by Arrighi, Rice and fictionalised by Kirsty Murray.¹⁵ There is no doubt he ill-treated some of the children in his care. In late 1909, while in Kuala Lumpur, he had struck Leah Leichner with a stick, inflicting a wound, ‘because she went out with a man in a motor car’.¹⁶ Following protracted court proceedings in Madras, he suddenly disappeared with the company profits and 18-year-old performer Irene Finlay, making his way to England. Arthur Pollard was publicly castigated for his treatment of the children and as others have observed, the Pollard brand name was thoroughly discredited as a result.¹⁷ In the Australian press, strenuous efforts were made to disassociate Arthur Pollard from his siblings Charles and Nellie, and from Tom Pollard, who was still active.¹⁸ It was also claimed, rather incredibly, that Nellie Chester had warned families that her brother Arthur was ‘not a fit man to have control of so many young people’.¹⁹

Arthur Pollard, seated, centre, with his Lilliputians, sometime in late 1909 or early 1910. The Leader (Melbourne) 21 May 1910, P24. State Library of Victoria.

Perhaps more tellingly, before Arthur Pollard’s troupe departed for Java on the SS Gracchus in July 1909, many of the previous tour’s most experienced performers opted out. All of the Chester children—May, Frank, Ernest, Charles and Willie, in addition to Jack Cherry, Ted McNamara, Fred Bindloss, Harold Fraser, Emily Davis and Eva Thompson chose to go to the US to work with Nellie Chester. With them went Alf Goulding, who had been the most recent stage manager and director.

As Arrighi and Rice note, the Australian Emigration Act of 1910 was a direct consequence of the public controversy surrounding the 1909–1910 Pollard tour. It stipulated that children (girls under 18 and boys under 16) could not be taken out of Australia to perform, without official approval.²⁰

Nellie Chester with her daughter May, often billed as May Pollard, and one of her sons. Undated.

May Pollard Collection, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

Nellie Chester and Pollards Juveniles in the US 1909–1920

Nellie Chester’s company began performing in North America in June 1909. They followed the Pollards well established route—through Hawaii, then British Columbia, followed by various stops in California. With a reputation to live up to, they were now presented in reports as ‘graduates’ or ‘senior Pollards.’ To further emphasise the connection to past successes and the Pollard brand name, most of the performers adopted the surname Pollard, even those who had previously appeared in North America under their real name. Fun on the Bristol was their first musical comedy. Alf Goulding, who had been behind the scenes for much of the previous decade, was now on stage again—as leading comedian.

Alf ‘Pollard’ (Goulding) and the cast in Miss Idlewildin November 1910

The Bakersfield Californian,6 November 1910, p.13. Newspapers.com

Alf Pollard as the widow

The San Diego Sun,20 October 1910, p.7. Newspapers.com

There were, however, new challenges for this latest manifestation of the Pollards. Even the youngest were now aged in their mid-teens and could now no longer pass as ‘Lilliputians’. In fact, most of the troupe were now in their early twenties. They were also competing against numerous other young adult troupes touring the US, as well as against the rising popularity of cinema. In addition, by late 1911, four of the male performers (Alf Goulding, Fred Bindloss, Jack Cherry and Harold Fraser) had drifted off to new opportunities. The troupe had to be supplemented by non-Australians, although this was usually not acknowledged.

In 1912, Nellie Chester returned to Australia, determined to replenish her troupe. She soon had 15 new Australians signed and could still count on a few experienced Pollard performers—like Teddy McNamara and Eva Pollard. The new Australian faces included Ethel Naylor and Leslie Donaghey, who had both been to India with Arthur Pollard. Five of the new girls were under 18 years of age. Amongst the youngest was Queenie Williams, who would become Pollards leading comedienne.

Some of Nellie Chester’s Australians. Left to right: Eva Pollard (Thompson) (The Burlington Free Press (Vermont), 31 January 1913, p.8), Queenie Williams (Los Angeles Herald, 17 February 1914, p.7) and Teddie McNamara in character (Vancouver Daily World, 3 January 1914, p.11). Newspapers.com.

The first performances were of the ever familiar, popular musicals—The Mikado, The Belle of New York, Sergeant Brue, The Toy Maker and La Belle Butterfly. Not surprisingly, the cities the troupe visited welcomed another return of a Pollards company, even if they all seemed a little older. And finally, in February 1915, after touring in California, the Pollards arrived in New York. There, at the Flatbush Theatre in Brooklyn, they performed their own ‘miniature’ musical opera A Millionaire for a Day.

The Dog Watch, later called Married by Wireless, toured the US between 1916 and 1919 (Wisconsin State Journal, 30 January 1919, p.8). Its special mechanical effects were impressive. Newspapers.com.

This was now the era of vaudeville, and the Pollard Juvenile troupe (its title constantly changed) shared the stage with in-house orchestras, motion picture shorts and other variety acts. Their stock in trade, the elaborate full-length musical comedy, had no place in this frantic world of the US vaudeville circuits. Until 1916, the Pollards, now led by Nellie’s son Ernest, tried developing condensed versions of their repertoire. In late 1916, the company launched their own new spectacular musical ‘playlet’ Married Via Wireless. For three years, this original musical production, with its impressive ‘behind the scenes maze of machinery … responsible for passing ships, a blinking lighthouse, (and) a murderous submarine at its work of destruction’,²¹ toured the US and Canada. Ernest Chester was credited with the very portable scenery design. The very slight plot related to ‘the romance of the wireless operator and the daughter of the ship’. Other original works—also relying on clever backstage machinery—included On Manila Bay (1919), and Earth to Moon (1920).

The End of the Pollard Dynasty

In the early 1920s Nellie Chester’s sons decided to use their engineering and mechanical skills in a new context, and in late 1922, the theatrical company commonly known as the Pollards, quietly wrapped up. At the same time, the Chester-Pollard Amusement Company was established, to manufacture mechanical arcade games for use in clubs, hotels and in the home. These large, mechanical, wooden-cased games were the forerunners of the pinball and amusement machines we know today.

The Chester Pollard amusement company appears to have continued production of these machines until the early 1930s. In the height of the Depression the company took to running their Sportland ‘nickel arcades’ rather than manufacturing. Their remarkably robust machines survive today in specialist collections.

In time the Chester brothers all turned to different careers—theatre management, real estate and engineering. With that, the Pollard brand name had finally disappeared.

By 1922, the Chester Pollard company produced amusement machines, such as the very popular Ballon Racer game.

Billboard,17 March 1923, p.96

A home version of miniature golf

The Cincinnati Enquirer(Ohio), 16 November 1930, p.27. Lantern Media History Digital Library.

Growing up with the Pollards

History belongs to the victors they say, or in this case, the adults and the handful of Lilliputians who became famous. Unfortunately, most of the Pollard performers remain as anonymous today as they were in their lifetimes. The most reliable information on the children comes from US records. Even then, their real and stage names were sometimes used inter-changeably and few personal details were recorded, because they were children.

This photo suggests some degree of normalness in the childhood of Pollards Lilliputians. It was taken c 1903–1904 at a beach in Seattle. Charles, Nellie and Arthur sit amongst the children. The adult Levy brothers are the only ones dressed to swim. Irene Goulding recalled she was too frightened to go in the water—like many of the children she had never learned to swim. Pollard Opera Companies Collection, Australian Performing Arts Collection, Melbourne.

Kate Rice has correctly observed that the children of the Pollards troupes had no agency in their working lives once apprenticed to the Pollards. Thanks to surviving Supreme court documents, we know something of the contractual arrangements made with their parents and can glimpse some of the bargaining that occurred. In 1904 the written contracts for well-known children like Daphne Trott and Teddy McNamara provided for a salary of 10 shillings per month for the first six months and after that, £1 pound per month. The money was paid to parents—sometimes in advance of the tour—with the contracts lasting for at least two years. We know this because in May 1904 Charles and Nellie were again in court, when their former musical director tried to set up his own Lilliputian Company to tour the US and attempted to poach some of the Pollards children. The attempt failed, but the documents suggest the parents of child performers used the exercise as a means to bargain for better pay from the Pollards.²² One cannot help but conclude that children were commodities in this exchange between parents and the Pollards as employers.

Not all parents were happy with the arrangements. Frank Goulding senior blamed the Pollards for the death of Frank Junior and began to send abusive postcards to Nellie Chester in early 1903, even while she engaged Alf and Irene. He also complained that the money promised to him was not being paid. His stream of abusive letters saw him end up in court, a lonely father, perhaps resentful of the choices his family had had to make.²³

Irene Finlay and Eva Pollard (Thompson) in character for A Runaway Girl

The San Francisco Dramatic Review,2 May 1908, p.2. Lantern Media History Digital Library.

The childhood experience of working for the Pollards was as varied as one might expect. Many of the Lilliputians thought highly of Charles Pollard and Nellie Chester. Irene Goulding still spoke fondly of Aunty Chester during her 1985 interview. Eva Thompson not only used the stage name Pollard but was also inclined to list Nellie Chester as her ‘adoptive mother’, although her own parents were alive and well in Melbourne. Although Willie Thomas gave up the stage to become a butcher, he kept his makeup box to the end of his days, suggesting a very strong sentimental attachment to his childhood as a Pollards actor. Irene Finlay decided to make her life with Arthur Pollard, a man 18 years her senior. The couple finally married, bigamously, in Auckland in February 1925. Her thanks to friends on his death in 1940, suggest it was an affectionate and stable relationship.²⁴ Yet at the other extreme, after the trauma of travelling with Arthur Pollard, Leah Leichner re-made herself, moving with her very young son back to India and then to Hong Kong, without ever acknowledging her years on stage with the Pollards. Oscar Heintz also left the stage, the Pollards and Australia behind, apparently without regret. He studied, and within a few years had a job, had married and had begun the process of US citizenship. He returned on a brief visit in 1929, a successful self-made man, working in the Neon lighting industry.

Charles Pollard and Nellie Chester were businesspeople ‘of their time’, whose behaviour reflected prevailing attitudes about employment practices, a child’s right to education and the risks involved in travel to conflict zones. They were only occasionally questioned publicly about what they were doing, in periods of what Arrighi characterises as instances of ‘moral panic’ in Australia, such as in 1910. But when Charles Pollard died in Sydney in February 1942 there was no public commentary in Australia, he was already entirely forgotten by the press. Perhaps the experience of child performers with the Pollards was something Australians wanted to forget. Not so on the North American west coast however, where newspapers acknowledged Nellie Chester as a theatrical pioneer, following her death in May 1944.²⁵

Endnotes

1. The Honolulu Advertiser, 14 September 1901, p.10

2. McArthur (1995), p.67

3. Democrat and Chronicle (New York), 9 March 1902, p.10

4. Chicago Tribune, 19 May 1902, p.12

5. Chicago Tribune, 27 May 1902, p.5

6. The Herald (Melbourne), 17 May 1910, p.5

7. Andrews & Towns (2017), pp.192–3

8. Irene Smith interview (1985)

9. In fact, several boys may have done this.

10. The Ballarat Star, 7 February 1901, p.4

11. The Ballarat Star, 14 July 1900, p.2

12. Truth (Brisbane), 18 April 1909, p.8

13. The Brainerd Daily Dispatch (Minnesota), 22 April 1902, p.2

14. The Portland Daily Journal (Oregon), 21 June 1902, p.1

15. Arrighi (2017) and Rice (2021)

16. The West Australian, 21 April 1910, p.3

17. See for example Truth (Perth), 4 June 1910, p.6 and The Argus (Melbourne), 18 October 1910, p.6

18. These efforts to disassociate Charles and Nellie from Arthur were still being made three years later. See Referee (Sydney), 8 January 1913, p.15

19. Daily Herald (Adelaide), 16 May 1910, p.5

20. Federal Register of Legislation (Australia) Emigration Act 1910. Assented 25 November 1910

21. Dayton Daily News (Ohio), 23 December 1917, p.43

22. Public Records Office Victoria. Civil Case Files (VPRS267) 1904/329 Charles Albert Pollard, Nellie Chester, Pollards Lilliputian Opera Company versus Ernest Augustus Wolffe

23. The Argus (Melbourne), 6 May 1903, p.7

24. Auckland Star, 11 October 1940, p.1

25. The Los Angeles Times, 21 May 1944, p.23

References

John Andrews & Deborah Towns, ‘A Secondary Education for All’? A History of State Secondary Schooling in Victoria, Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2017

Gillian Arrighi, ’The Controversial “Case of the Opera Children in the east”: Political Conflict between Popular Demand for Child Actors and Modernizing Cultural Policy on the Child’, Theatre Journal, 69, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017, pp.153–173

Gillian Arrighi and Victor Emeljanow (eds), Entertaining Children: The Participation of Youth in the Entertainment Industry, Palgrove MacMillan, New York, 2014. Chapter 3. ‘Children and Youth of the Empire: Tales of Transgression and Accommodation’, pp.51-71

Roger L. Bedard, ‘Is it a skip or a dance?: Elbridge T. Gerry’s campaign against child actors’, Youth Theatre Journal, 11:1,1997, pp.15–24

Peter Downes, The Pollards. A family and its child and adult opera companies in New Zealand and Australia 1880–1910, Steele Roberts, Aotearoa, New Zealand, 2002

Marah Gubar, ‘Who Watched the Children’s Pinafore? Age Transvestism on the nineteenth-century stage.’ Victorian Studies, Vol 54, No 3, Spring 2012

Sally Howes, Irene Smith interview, Cassette 616, Australian Performing Arts Collection, Art Centre Melbourne, 1985

Benjamin McArthur, ‘“Forbid them not”: Child Labor laws and political activism in the Theatre’, Theatre Survey, 36:2 November 1995, pp.63–80

Kirsty Murray, India Dark, Allen and Unwin, 2010

Kate Rice, Performing the Past podcast; Episode 4: So and So and Such and Such, Arts Centre, Melbourne, 2021, https://soundcloud.com/arts-centre-melbourne/performing-the-past-episode-3-so-and-so-and-such-and-such

Thanks

I am grateful to the families of Pollards Lilliputians, who have shared their family stories, especially:

Catherine Crocker regarding Midas Martyn,

Robert Maynard regarding Willie and Emma Thomas,

Brenda Young regarding Elsie Morris,

John and Joan Grant regarding Leah Leichner,

and the descendants of the Heintz, Goulding and Thompson families.