Florrie Forde

In my childhood in England in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the golden years of music hall were already long gone. Of course there were vestiges that remained―occasionally on the wireless, more regularly at pantomimes and in ‘variety’ shows at still-functioning end-of-the-pier theatres. These featured former stars of the post-First World War decline. Then at the start of the 1960s came Joan Littlewood’s Oh! What a Lovely War, which debunked the nationalistic patriotism which drove so many young men to sign up and give their lives so unceremoniously. It was packed full of music hall songs, several of them popularised by Florrie Forde.¹ 

Young Florrie FordeWhile from a young age getting to know so many of Florrie’s songs, I had no idea that she was Australian―although in fact she had featured her origins strongly in her initial years in Britain before the turn of the century. Nor did I realise that she had been such a major star and that she performed continuously between her debut in Sydney in 1892 and her death in Scotland in 1940―just two years short of a half-century on the stage.

Florrie Forde was born Flora Flannagan, probably at 88 (now 122) Gertrude Street in Fitzroy, Melbourne, on 16 August 1875. Her father, (Francis) Lott Flannagan, was previously a stonemason but by then a publican, born in Ireland.² And in Florrie’s birth certificate, her mother Phoebe Cahill (née Simmons) is said to have been born in the USA. Before Flannagan, whom she married in Melbourne in 1876, Phoebe had been married to Daniel James Cahill (since 1861). With Cahill she had several children, then Lott and Phoebe together had a further nine, only four of whom survived beyond early childhood (Emily b.1868, Francis b.1872, Hannah (Nan) b.1874, Flora b.1875). Flora, the last of the survivors, was named after a sister who had predeceased her.

While her first two husbands were of Irish heritage, Phoebe herself seems to have been Jewish, born in 1846 the daughter of Barnett Simmons and Susan Solomans. Her relationship with Lott Flannagan seems to have been over by the end of the 1870s and in 1883 she married for a third time, declaring herself to be Phoebe Cahill (although Lott Flannagan was still alive―by that time living as a publican in Sydney―and possibly Daniel Cahill too). This time she married a Melbourne-based theatrical and society costumier, Thomas Henry Snelling Ford, who was to take over in 1888 his stepfather’s business (Ford and Son) in Russell Street, Melbourne. Phoebe and Thomas were to have more offspring. While Thomas had a ‘proper job’ in Melbourne, he also moonlighted, playing the banjo in the music halls.³ He also played other stringed instruments―fiddles (which he made) and zithers among them.

That her stepfather played on the halls seems not to have been noticed until recently and it is important in that it will have provided Flora with a practical introduction to the genre. From the start of her performing career, she styled herself Florrie Ford (after her stepfather but initially without an e, which was to be added within six months).

Florrie says that she first went to school at St Peter’s (presumably Eastern Hill), then at St Mary’s Convent (Carlton Gardens). She emphasises that the ‘family’ was as many as nineteen (including all the surviving children of Phoebe’s three marriages) and it has been suggested that several of them (including Flora) were ‘parked out’, so the convent, taking boarders, looks a good bet. And the costumier’s business will have generated the necessary fees.

Florrie will most likely have left school at fourteen―and she writes that she then spent time in her stepfather’s costumier business in Russell Street, where she learned to design dresses―a skill she took into her future performing career.

Clearly, she showed real promise as a singer from childhood. She wrote:

Once I had heard a song I seemed to record the tune in my memory with the precision of a phonograph record.

She described her young voice as contralto, but her mother, having risen in the world, did not see ‘actress’ in her talented daughter’s future. Phoebe insisted that she learn the piano, but Florrie hated it and stopped. ‘Singing made me happy’, she declared.

It is interesting that her first public performances (at 14–15) were to sing for her stepfather’s marionette theatre (another of his talents).

In the latter part of 1891 Florrie left home in Melbourne at just fifteen, travelling to Sydney, intent on a career in the music halls, where she stayed with her older sister Nan (Hannah), recently married to Navy man Alfred Tiltman in Melbourne. Nan and Alfred later transferred to live at the Devonport naval base in southwest England and she and Florrie were to remain close until she died there at 38 in 1912.⁴ 

Apprenticeship in Australia

Florrie Forde spent the first five years of her performing life (aged 16 to 21) ―all of it in Australia―fundamentally learning her trade. These years were mainly spent in seasons of three to six months, alternating between Sydney and Melbourne, with one season each in Brisbane and Adelaide, before travelling to try her luck in London. The majority of these engagements were as a music hall singer―one of a list of performers including all sorts of vaudeville entertainers―appreciated by audiences and critics but rarely headlining. Then Florrie extended her experience―as a singing actress in pantomime and musical comedy.

While much of our knowledge of Florrie’s performing career, both in Australia and in Britain, comes from contemporary newspaper reports, she also wrote a series of memoir pieces for publications, the most wide-ranging of them being ‘My Life Story’, told on a weekly basis in seven parts for Thomson’s Weekly News from 16 February 1916. Particularly revealing are the parts dealing with her early performing years in Australia.

While music hall in Britain had grown up in the second half of the nineteenth century in venues principally developed from pubs, in Australia, it had followed suit, but mostly was situated in theatres with proscenium arches. As a consequence, while every town and city in Britain, indeed many suburbs, had a music hall, in Australia it was mostly confined to the major metropolises.⁵ 

Many reports on the early performances of Florrie Ford (without the e) have 1 February 1892 as the date of her debut – at the Polytechnic Music Hall underneath the Imperial Arcade in Pitt Street, Sydney―and this was the occasion put out in her lifetime in press reports. Yet by the beginning of February that year, Florrie had already performed (from 9 November 1891) with Arthur Gordon’s Grand Variety Entertainments in the ‘middle of Sydney Harbour’ on the SS Alathea. She was one of twenty ‘artistes’ providing entertainment as they went on a ‘grand trip round the harbour’.

In Sydney, young Florrie was most impressed by the English burlesque actress Billie Barlow, learning to imitate her songs and even her walk. Around the same time, Florrie was introduced to (and auditioned with) the Canadian dancer-impresario, Dan Tracey, who gave her a job as a ‘chair-warmer’, a chorus girl, in Tracey’s company at the School of Arts, Pitt Street. This was to turn into a real solo booking with Tracey some months later.

Florrie’s debut at the Polytechnic was not on 1 February 1892, but in fact six weeks earlier (Saturday 19 December 1891), when she sang a ‘serio-comic’ song, ‘Don’t you believe it’―a ‘great attraction’―and later a duet as the Ford Sisters (‘Florrie and Carrie’), ‘See us dance the polka’.⁶ Was ‘Carrie’ her sister Nan, who later in England was a dance teacher, or someone else entirely? Someone else, says Florrie, but who?⁷ 

Florrie Forde with her sister, Photo by Stewart and Co, Melbourne

State Library Victoria, Melbourne

‘See me dance the polka’

At the supposed Polytechnic debut on Saturday I February, Florrie sang with Amy Olive, together as the Bowery Sisters (no more Ford Sisters, it seems), but in fact she also made another debut on the Sunday―with Steve Adson’s promenade concert at the Port Jackson Pavilion at Chowder Bay.⁸ For one shilling, the customers were ferried to that bay, together with a brass band on board, the concert itself being free. In order to ward off the wowsers, these Sunday concerts were labelled ‘Sacred and Classical’ and Florrie was to be a featured performer at them through the following months until early June, while continuing on Saturdays, a ‘great favourite’ with the Polytechnic. Again, on Sundays in early June, Florrie sang in the ‘Sacred and Classical Concerts’ at the Centennial Hall in Walker Street, North Sydney.

However, learning of her daughter’s theatrical exploits in Sydney, Florrie’s mother was devastated and sent Florrie’s brother (was this Francis?) up to Sydney to persuade her to cease and desist before bringing the family into disrepute. According to Florrie, mother thought of theatre folk as ‘poor lost souls, not fit for the society of respectable, decent folk.’ Florrie went home immediately to Melbourne in order to try to persuade Phoebe, and ‘[mother] bravely determined to cast aside all her foolish prejudices’, and be proud of her daughter’s success, if that were to come.

At some point that year, Florrie reports, she was approached by the American co-leader of the Montague-Turner Opera Company, impresario and tenor Charles Turner, who had heard Florrie sing and tried to persuade her to abandon the music hall stage and join his opera company. The Montague-Turner company was regularly on tour through Australia and New Zealand, always seeming to be short on resources, human and financial. Florrie turned him down.

While Florrie was back in Sydney, her mother Phoebe died at forty-six at her home with Thomas Ford in Bourke Street.⁹ Unreported in the Australian press, Florrie performed in a minor role (as a fairy) with Billie Barlow in June 1892 at Her Majesty’s in Sydney in the pantomime-burlesque Randolph the Reckless.¹⁰  This was produced by George Rignold, who was to play such a crucial role in Florrie’s development as a singing actor in 1894–95.

The young Florrie Forde

State Library Victoria, Melbourne

Billie Barlow, 1892, photo by Falk/H. Walter Barnett

Pantomime was to become a major factor in Florrie’s career, although in the future always in lead roles. Born in London in 1863, Billie Barlow had made her name in the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan in London and New York before touring in Australia (in musical comedy, pantomime and music hall) three times―initially in 1891–93. Florrie was so besotted by Barlow that she took care of Billie’s wigs through the run of Randolph and its successors.

Florrie performed at the Gaiety until mid-August. In late June of 1892, Florrie returned to Melbourne to perform, booked to headline at the Gaiety Theatre with Dan Tracey’s company, opening on Monday 27 June.

On 10 September, Florrie was back in Sydney, this time with Dan Tracey’s other Gaiety company (at the School of Arts in Pitt Street). As before, Florrie juggled two employers―performing for Tracey in the week, while on Sundays going to sing at the Coogee Aquarium, an arrangement that continued through to March 1893. At Coogee, Florrie sang with the Alabama Minstrels ‘in her male impersonations and in her original character “Bubbles”’.

Florrie was married on 2 February 1893 to Walter Bew, an English-born water policeman, at the Mariner’s Church on the Rocks in Sydney. In the New South Wales official register of marriages, Florrie gave her name as Flora Flanagan. And the event was reported in the Free Lance newspaper in Melbourne three years later (on 30 April 1896). They seem not to have co-habited for any length of time, if at all, and the marriage was not mentioned in Florrie’s memoirs of 1916.¹¹ 

There was a special benefit at the Opera House in Sydney (corner King and York Streets) on Friday 3 March 1893 for the manager of the Vaudeville Minstrel and Specialty Company, Alf Hazlewood, featuring some 70+ performers, ‘six shows in one’ according to the advertisement in the Sydney Morning Herald, but in the event, it was Florrie who particularly caught the attention of the Evening News’s reporter:

Miss Florrie Forde sang a witty topical song full of allusions to our late Governor and political situation.

The late Governor of New South Wales was the genial Earl of Jersey, recently returned to London after a somewhat uneventful governorship.

In April Florrie switched to the new vaudeville company at the Alhambra Music Hall (George Street Haymarket), with whom she was to perform over a six-month period until September. Many of the songs she sang at the Alhambra were noted as winners, among them: ‘The Wrong Man’ (sung in England by Marie Lloyd), ‘Oh! Mr Chevalier’, ‘Dear Little Girls’, ‘One of the Light Brigade’ and ‘Life’s Highway’ (sung by Jenny Hill in England). 

By October 1893 Florrie was back in Melbourne with the Alhambra Palace of Varieties at the Opera House. The Lorgnette noted: ‘Miss Florrie Forde at the Alhambra is a worthy successor of Miss Billie Barlow on the Melbourne stage.’

On 21 November, The Sportsman, reported on Florrie’s progress in Melbourne:

There may be nothing very elaborate in the music of ‘After the Ball’, but no one can deny that it is ‘catchy’, very catchy. Since Miss Florrie Forde sang it at the Alhambra Theatre all the lads are whistling it―a sure sign of popularity.

The Melbourne public’s response to ‘After the Ball’ was a sign of things to come for Florrie Forde. Composed by Charles K. Harris, it had been published in America the previous year and is said to have sold over a million copies of the sheet music. She was to record it in London forty-one years later (in 1934).

‘After the Ball’

Harry Rickards

Florrie returned to Sydney in January 1894, this time, for the first time, to perform at Harry Rickards’s Tivoli Theatre. Florrie was introduced in publicity in the Sydney Morning Herald as a ‘serio-comic and descriptive singer and impersonator’, terms not so easy to uncode at this distance, but serio-comic was a regular descriptor for singers who were said to combine (as the phrase implies) the weighty with the humorous.

Born in London in 1843, Harry Rickards was initially a comic singer in the London music halls before travelling to perform successfully in Australia for the first time in 1871. He returned to London in 1876, where he built a reputation as a ‘lion comique’. He was back in Australia in 1885, where in 1893 he was to purchase the Garrick Theatre in the Haymarket, renaming it the Tivoli and establishing himself as its impresario. From 1894 until the time Florrie left Australia for London, Rickards was to be a major influence on her career.

Florrie continued with his company at the Tivoli in Sydney until June 1894 and, as they did not open on Sundays, she returned to perform on those days at the Coogee Aquarium. On 30 April the Tivoli company went to the Theatre Royal in Brisbane, giving a one-off benefit there for Florrie. The Brisbane event was some kind of try-out and Florrie was to return to the Theatre Royal there for a season a year later (opening on Monday 1 April 1895).

In August 1894 Florrie moved on from the Rickards company at the Tivoli to open with Harry Barrington’s Variety and Burlesque Company at the School of Arts in Pitt Street, remaining there through September and early October, before returning to Melbourne with the Cogill Brothers company at the Oxford Theatre.

However, in December 1894 Florrie for the first time took a major role as a singing actress ― in a Christmas pantomime at Her Majesty’s Theatre (at that time Sydney’s finest)―George Rignold’s The House that Jack Built with Florrie as Jack (the first of many Principal Boys to come). In the cast was a soprano who was to become a regular performer with Florrie both in Australia and England―Melbourne-born soprano Florence Esdaile (a pupil of Lucy Chambers). The role was a breakthrough for Florrie―treating her for the first time as a star commodity―and complimentary cabinet photos of her in role were offered to patrons. Reviewing the opening night (22 December), the Australian Star wrote:

Miss Florrie Forde sang and acted splendidly as Jack, and when she had anything to say she spoke her lines well. Miss Forde has a powerful voice and every item she rendered during the interpretation of a very severe part was encored.

George Rignold was a Birmingham-born Shakespearean actor who had been involved in the building of Her Majesty’s Theatre in Sydney in 1887―and was the lessee and impresario until 1895. Florrie was able, working with him on theatrical productions, to develop her nascent acting skills. She also befriended the famous English actress Kate Bishop, who was temporarily retired from the stage in order to bring up her talented young daughter Marie Lohr.¹² Bishop designed Florrie’s costume as Jack.

George Rignold

State Library Victoria, Melbourne

The young Marie Lohr, 1903, photo by H. Walter Barnett

Following the pantomime, she was retained to perform in a double bill at Her Majesty’s in February 1895: the drama Black Eyed Susan by Douglas Jerrold, followed by a burlesque, Susan with Two Lovely Black Eyes. In the drama George Rignold played the seaman William, a role he had acted extensively in London, while Florrie was to play the same role in the burlesque. The Sydney Morning Herald reported:

Miss Florrie Forde’s confidence and aplomb enabled her to act cheerily and well as William, and she was very properly encored for the rattling song (with chorus), ‘At Four O’Clock in the Morning’.

However, the Herald critic’s praises did not extend to Florrie’s singing: ‘… she must learn to modulate her voice and to sing from the head, as the chest fortissimo throughout an entire piece is apt to become monotonous.’ Was this the first negative feedback for Florrie on her vocal capabilities? And perhaps the last? It was certainly not something she took to heart, her many later recordings being dominated by her distinctive chest voice.

Around February/March 1895 rumours started to circulate (doubtless prompted by her) that Florrie was planning to ‘go home’―to try her luck in London. In the event, two years were to pass before she was to leave, the months filled with more performing work, principally in Sydney and Melbourne, but also taking a season each in Brisbane and Adelaide.

She opened on Monday 1 April 1895 at the Theatre Royal in Brisbane with the Concert Variety and Ballad Company, the season running for some six weeks. One of her colleagues there was a singer with a famous five-octave range (contralto-mezzo-soprano extending up to top F), Ada Colley. Born at Parramatta, and with a career that started in opera but migrated to the music hall, Ada made the journey to England a few months before Florrie, in January 1897. 

Ada Colley

Florence Esdaile

State Library Victoria, Melbourne

In May and June 1895 Florrie sang with Frank M. Clark’s Empire Company at the Bijou Theatre in Melbourne, but by the end of June she had returned to Sydney and Harry Rickards’s company at the Tivoli, where a colleague was Florence Esdaile again. In October she moved with Rickards’s Tivoli company to his Melbourne theatre, the Opera House.

That Christmas, Florrie took a major role with Charles B Westmacott’s company at the Theatre Royal in Sydney as a Gaiety Girl in Pat, or the Bells of Rathbeal―not so much a panto, more a musical comedy―the score originating from half a dozen different composers, the play by Harry Monkhouse. This extended her skills as an actress once more and led on to more theatrical work with that company, Florrie taking the role of Jenny Wibbles, a coster girl, in The Work Girl, a melodrama with songs from London, which was followed by The Enemy’s Camp, where she had a smaller role, Clairette. The latter transferred in April to the Theatre Royal in Melbourne. The dancing in both shows was choreographed and led by Beanie Galletly (wife of baritone Hamilton Hill), who was to become a close friend and business associate of Florrie in England.

In the remaining ten months before she embarked for London, Florrie worked continuously in Harry Rickards’s Tivoli companies―in Melbourne, touring in Ballarat, Bendigo and Geelong, then Sydney and then (with Wybert Reeve’s company) at the Theatre Royal in Adelaide. On Tuesday 22 December 1896 there was a Tivoli benefit for Florrie at the Opera House in Melbourne, the star attraction (aside from her) being the ‘White Eyed Kaffir’, G.H. Chirgwin. Born in London in 1854, Chirgwin was a star performer, combining the black-faced minstrel fashion with cockney material. He and Florrie performed on the same Tivoli bill in Melbourne and Sydney through January to early March.

G.H. Chirgwin

SS Gulf of Bothnia

Her apprenticeship complete, it seems that Florrie left Australia (from Sydney or Melbourne?) in the second half of March 1897. She had been encouraged to take this step both by Rickards and by Chirgwin. She tells us that she sailed on the Gulf of Bothnia, mainly a cargo ship with a handful of passengers, arriving in London on 19 May 1897. As Australian poet Victor Daley put it:

They leave us – artists, singers, all―
When London calls aloud,
Commanding to her Festival
   The gifted crowd.¹³

What would the future hold for Florrie Forde?

Getting established in Britain (and Ireland)

While the exodus of talented Australians―principally to London, but also to Paris, Leipzig, Vienna and elsewhere in Europe―had been going on for decades, with musicians and singers, artists and writers, the flood increased dramatically after Nellie Melba’s triumph in 1887 in Brussels. Among them were other pupils of Mathilde Marchesi in Paris, including Frances Saville, Amy Sherwin, Ada Crossley, Amy Castles, Florence Young, Frances Alda and Evelyn Scotney; plus pupils of other singing teachers in Paris and London, including Lalla Miranda, Margherita Grandi, Peter Dawson and Walter Kirby; among pianists, the best went to Leschetizky in Vienna, the finest violinists to Ševčík in Prague.

But Australian singers who came to ply their trade in Europe were not solely working in the opera houses and concert halls. Many were clearly destined for the more egalitarian music halls, which were overwhelmingly located in Britain.

The Australians who rose to stardom in British music halls in the first decade of the new century included comic singers Albert Whelan and Billy Williams, the ‘living statue’ La Milo (Pansy Montague), champion swimmer Annette Kellermann, ‘the world’s greatest liar’ Louis de Rougemont and (above them all) Florrie Forde.

La Milo, photo by Bassano, London

Louis de Rougemont, 1898, photo by H. Walter Barnett

But there were also classically-trained Australian singers who, unable to get regular work in classical venues in Britain, turned successfully to the halls, including Alice Hollander, L’Incognita (Violet Mount) and baritone Hamilton Hill, and four others who had performed with Florrie on bills in Australia―Syria Lamonte, Ada Colley, Florence Esdaile and her sister Stella Esdaile, all sopranos. Many of them were to feature in Britain on the same bills as Florrie.¹⁴

Florrie carried with her on the voyage to London a letter of introduction to Mr Charles Morton. Morton, often called ‘the father of the halls’ had transformed the Canterbury Arms in Westminster Bridge Road into a music hall in 1852-54, later taking over the Palace Theatre at Cambridge Circus.¹⁵ His programs were by earlier pub standards high quality and Morton introduced ballet and opera into his bills.

Charles Morton

Not wasting time, Florrie went to see Morton the Monday after she landed and had an audition with him at the Palace two weeks later. Unusually, performing for an audience of one, Florrie was afflicted with stage-fright. But Morton reassured her and asked her to start again. He liked her but was clear that her style was not suited to his theatres and she should go try her luck with ‘syndicate halls’.

She did just that and was about to audition with Harry Lundy, when Harry Rickards, on one of his regular trips from Australia, met up with Lundy and was surprised to learn that he was about to audition Florrie. ‘Is she any good?’ Lundy wanted to know. Any good? ‘She’s the Marie Lloyd of Australia,’ said Rickards. The outcome was that Florrie was given a contract at £8 a turn, starting with an opening night in London at three different ‘syndicate’ halls on the evening of August Bank Holiday.

Previously published summaries of the performing career of Florrie Forde assert that she made her debut in London on Monday 2 August 1897 (August Bank Holiday) at three different music hall venues in the capital―the South London Palace, the London Pavilion and the Oxford. And this is indeed the case. But not mentioned is that she had performed through the previous month in Britain―first at Oswald Stoll’s Empire Theatre in Cardiff (from 2 July) and then (from 10 July) at the Star Palace of Varieties at Barrow-in-Furness in the far north-west of England.

Oswald Stoll

Harry Lauder

Of her Cardiff debut, the Music Hall and Theatre Review reported that it had been an unusual evening. The audience ‘could not cease applauding … there was more applause on Monday than I have ever heard at Mr Stoll’s splendid hall.’ And he/she went on to note:

Florrie Forde, an Australian vocalist, sang a couple of songs in capital style, they were catchy songs, and the refrains were taken up most enthusiastically.

On the same bill in Cardiff was the celebrated Scottish singer-comedian Harry Lauder. The Era reported more modestly that the audience at Barrow had given Florrie a ‘flattering reception’. Altogether a highly encouraging start to Florrie’s new life in Britain―and with her famous three London debuts in one evening yet to come.

The three London debuts on August Bank Holiday 1897 were: the London Pavilion (on the corner of Shaftesbury Avenue and Coventry Street at Piccadilly Circus) with Dan Leno, James Fawn and Vesta Victoria; the Oxford (corner of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road (again with Dan Leno); and the South London Palace (London Road, Lambeth). Two venues in the heart of the West End of London (theatreland) and one in Cockneyland. All went well. The Daily Telegraph reported on her turn at the Oxford:

Miss Florrie Forde from Australia … has a fascinating appearance, good enunciation and a finished style.

The Oxford Music Hall, Oxford Street

The London Pavilion, Piccadilly Circus

An accolade for the still twenty-one-year-old. In reality, Florrie had a cold and was afraid that she would be unable to perform, something that doesn’t happen in Australia, according to her. Anyway, ‘cold or no cold, they gave me a good reception.’ It must have been good enough as Florrie was given a five-year contract with the Moss and Stoll circuits.

She continued at the three London music halls through August and September before opening on the south coast at the Empire Theatre in Brighton, returning to the capital in October, this time to Norton’s Canterbury Theatre, south of the river on Westminster Bridge Road. On the same bill at the Canterbury were G.H. Chirgwin, the White-Eyed Kaffir (who had encouraged her move to London when they performed together in Australia), comedian R.G. Knowles (who will have seen Florrie perform there), Charles Godfrey and the young George Robey. Alongside the Canterbury, Florrie also appeared at the Paragon Theatre in the Mile End Road in the East End of London.

Florrie’s re-acquaintance with R.G. Knowles was fortuitous in that he agitated on her behalf, recommending her for the pantomime he was about to appear in at Birmingham. However, this was not to be―Moss and Stoll held her to her contract with their music halls―so she had to wait a year before making her debut in Britain in pantomime.

Several of the London halls that Florrie had performed in between August and November 1897 were controlled by ‘the syndicate’, managed by George Adney Payne (1846–1907)―the London Pavilion, the Oxford, the South London Palace, the Metropolitan, the Canterbury and the Paragon in the Mile End Road.

George Adney Payne

Well-established by this time in London, Florrie returned to major regional cities, opening first in late November in Liverpool at the New Empire Theatre in Lime Street (owner Edward Moss) with coster comedian Gus Elen, followed by Glasgow (with her Australian colleague Florence Esdaile), Newcastle, Hull, Sheffield and Birmingham.

At the end of January 1898, Florrie came back to London, again appearing at several music halls―the Hammersmith Theatre of Varieties, the London Pavilion (again), the Oxford (again), the Metropolitan (in the Edgware Road, Paddington) with the great Marie Lloyd, and the London Theatre at Shoreditch with Katie Lawrence.

Marie Lloyd

Gatti’s Hungerford Palace of Varieties: Second Turn of Miss Katie Lawrence, Walter Sickert, 1887-88

Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney 

Altogether Florrie Forde’s first six months in Britain had started with a bang and had steadily built her reputation as a promising top-flight music hall artist, both in London and in several major towns and cities of England and Wales. In a piece that was to foreshadow so much of Florrie Forde’s emerging career, the Echo in London (on 11 March), reviewing her recent appearances, observed:

This week at the Oxford she celebrates on the virtues of the worker’s daughter. The song in question is unambitious, but it boasts of a good chorus. And Miss Florrie sings it with gusto, and in her blue tights makes as gallant a figure as Miss Harriet Vernon.¹⁶ 

In the remaining months of the century―from April 1898―Florrie established a pattern that was to serve her well going forward. She toured outside London for several months, followed by months back in the capital, where she performed nightly at three or even four halls. And over the Christmas season, she was ‘principal boy’ in a major pantomime either in London or in the regions.

In April she made her debut in Scotland at the Empire Palace in Edinburgh (with the famous beauty Lily Langtry, a mistress of the Prince of Wales, also on the bill),¹⁷ followed by Empire Theatres at Newcastle and Liverpool (with Langtry again), and Empire Palaces at Sheffield and Birmingham. All of these theatres were part of the burgeoning provincial network run by Edward Moss.

Back in London in May, Florrie made a return south of the Thames to the Canterbury, where a star-studded cast included Dan Leno, Lily Langtry and her Australian compatriot Florence Esdaile. On the same nights she was at the Tivoli (with Leno, Vesta Tilley, Eugene Stratton, George Robey and the ‘Jersey Lily’), and at the Paragon in the Mile End Road and (later) the London in Shoreditch. Of Florrie at the Paragon, the Era reported:

Miss Florrie Forde, looking very handsome in a principal boy’s costume, sang in an interesting fashion of the humble love of a coster, of a girl who is quite good enough for him.

At the turn of the century, the infinite gradations of the British class system were still being rehearsed in East End music halls. Notices in newspapers started to appear regularly stating that Florrie was fully booked until 1900.

In mid-August, Florrie left London again, briefly this time, for more Empire theatres belonging to Moss―at Nottingham and Cardiff (where she had made her UK debut), But in September she was back in London at the three theatres where she had made her London debut: the Oxford, the South London and the London Pavilion. Sharing the bill with her was a galaxy of music hall stars, including Dan Leno, George Robey, Charles Coborn, and two she had previously shared the bill with, in Australia, Billie Barlow and G.H. Chirgwin.

Remaining in London in October, Florrie performed with Marie Lloyd at the Collins, and also at the Metropolitan in Edgware Road, before leaving for the Palace Theatre at Manchester and the Empire Palace at Leeds. Booked for the first time in Britain as principal boy for a major pantomime, Cinderella, at the Shakespeare Theatre in Clapham, she started rehearsals in mid-December, where she was to be ‘sprightly and charming’.

Cinderella at the Shakespeare

The South London Press, 28 January 1899, p.5

However, Cinderella at Clapham was not the bed of roses she might have anticipated. Handed the script, she learned her part as principal boy and was disappointed that it contained only three rather indifferent songs. And she was not thrilled with her costumes. It gradually became apparent to her that both the management of the theatre and her performing colleagues regarded her as an untried beginner―a potential dud―and worked effectively to sideline her. In the event, of course, she was triumphant and over time she was given more and better songs and dialogue.

The last year of the century continued the pattern for Florrie. Cinderella at Clapham closed early in February, followed by a week at the Lyric in Dublin, ‘storming all hearts’, her debut in Ireland. Did she make play of her (part) Irish ancestry there?

Then came four months in London, playing at most of the top music hall venues with the greatest stars of the day. First came the Collins, the Metropolitan and the London at Shoreditch, then the Tivoli, the Canterbury and the Paragon, and finally the London Pavilion, the Oxford and the South London―she was back to where she had started. The Era reported of Florrie at the Pavilion that she ‘proclaims in song her intention of becoming a society lady.’ Some hope! Regular co-performers on her bills were Dan Leno, George Robey, G.H. Chirgwin and Bransby Williams.

And on 9 May 1899 a special performance was given at the Oxford to greet the touring Australian cricketers – with Alma Obrey, Florence Esdaile, Billie Barlow and Florrie all performing.¹⁸ The St James’s Gazettereported: ‘… as a mark of honour most of the performers wore the Australian colours―green and old gold.’

From July to early October Florrie returned to a demanding weekly regime through Moss’s northern circuit of Empire Theatres―Edinburgh, Glasgow, Newcastle, South Shields, Leeds, Hull, Bradford, Liverpool, Birmingham, Sheffield and Manchester.

However, in October 1899 the Boer War broke out in South Africa and music hall programs were adapted to reflect patriotic priorities―sometimes with the inclusion of a recitation of Kipling’s specially written poem, ‘The Absent-Minded Beggar’.¹⁹  Florrie was now back in London at her usual venues, before starting rehearsal in December for her next pantomime―Cinderella again, but this time at the Grand in Newcastle.

In December, Edward Moss and Oswald Stoll merged their chains of theatres, many of them at that time outside of London, forming a virtual monopoly of regional music halls and its emerging mutation, ‘variety’. Stoll was to run the business, Moss Empires Ltd, which in time expanded its London presence and overall had more than 50 venues.

To be continued...

Endnotes

1. I saw the film when it came out in 1969; Oh! What a Cast: Maggie Smith, Dirk Bogarde, John Gielgud, John Mills, Kenneth More, Laurence Olivier, Jack Hawkins, Corin Redgrave, Michael Redgrave, Vanessa Redgrave, Ralph Richardson, Ian Holm, Nanette Newman, Phyllis Calvert, Edward Fox, Susannah York, John Clements …

2. Lott Flannagan sold his stonemasons business in Williamstown in 1872, taking the United Service Club Hotel in Gertrude Street Fitzroy with its ten rooms; he had been declared insolvent in 1869 and was again in 1882, by which time he was lessee/publican at the United Service Club Hotel at Castlereagh Street in Sydney

3. Table Talk (Melbourne), 12 February 1903, p.14

4. The Royal Australian Navy only became independent from the Royal Navy in 1901 (the year of federation)

5. It has been estimated that in 1875 there were 375 music halls in London and 384 in the rest of England; in 1888 there were 473 in London

6. The managing director at the Polytechnic was John Saville Smith, who had previously been the husband and manager of soprano Frances Saville; she took his name, having been Frances Simonsen

7. A likely candidate is another beginner on the halls, contralto Carrie Ford

8. On the same bill at Chowder Bay was the ‘serio-comic’ singer Alma Obrey (and husband Bob Baxter), who was to reappear frequently with Florrie in Australia and Britain; Obrey had arrived in Melbourne from London in late 1889 and returned to London in 1896

9. Was Phoebe pregnant again?

10. Florrie revealed her role in Randolph the Reckless in a brief memoir in The People’s Journal, 21 March 1914; the epithet was later used to characterise the Australian writer Randolph Bedford

11. Perhaps Florrie suspected that Bew’s former wife Eleanor Jane Rogers from 1882 (Harrison, p.11) was still alive?

12. This writer saw Marie Lohr as Lady Bracknell in Half in Earnest at the Belgrade, Coventry in 1958

13. ‘When London Calls’ by Victor Daley: first published by The Bulletin, 8 December 1900

14. Another Antipodean who appeared in Britain with Florrie was New Zealand-born siffleur (whistler) Borneo Gardiner

15. Currently home to Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

16. Harriet Vernon was a veteran music hall and pantomime artist, famous for her figure in tights

17. Or was she Langtry’s fake music hall double?

18. 1899 was the first cricket tour of England by Australia to include five test matches; the Australian team included Victor Trumper (his test debut), while for England the first test at Trent Bridge saw the last appearance of W.G. Grace and the first of Wilfred Rhodes

19. ‘The Absent-Minded Beggar’ was written by Kipling in October 1899 as a patriotic piece with the specific aim of raising funds for British soldiers and their families.

Bibliography

Alomes, Stephen, When London Calls: The Expatriation of Australian Creative Artists to Britain, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999

Anderson, Gae, Tivoli King: Life of Harry Rickards Vaudeville Showman, Allambie Press, Sydney, 2009

Bailey, Peter (ed.), Music Hall: The Business of Pleasure, Open University Press, Milton Keynes, 1986

Bratton, JS (ed.), Music Hall: Performance and Style, Open University Press, Milton Keynes, 1986

Brisbane, Katharine (ed.), Entertaining Australia: The Performing Arts as Cultural History, Currency Press, Sydney, 1991

Brownrigg, Jeff, The Shamrock and the Wattle: Florrie Forde The World’s Greatest Chorus Singer, National Film and Sound Archive, Canberra, 1998 (CD booklet)

――, ‘Melba’s Puddin’: Corowa, Mulwala and our Cultural Past’, Papers on Parliament 32, Canberra, 1998

――, Florrie Forde (1875–1940), Australian Dictionary of Biography, Supplement, 2005

Cheshire, D.F., Music Hall in Britain, Farleigh Dickinson University Press, Cranbury NJ, 1974

Colquhoun, Edward and Nethercoate-Bryant, KT, Shoreham-by-Sea: Past and Present, Sutton Publishing, Stroud, 1997

Dawson, Peter, Fifty Years of Song, Hutchinson, London, 1951

Disher, M. Willson, Winkles and Champagne: Comedies and Tragedies of the Music Hall, Batsford, London, 1938

Djubal, Clay, ‘Florrie Forde’, Australian Variety Theatre Archive, forde-florrie-23122012.pdf (ozvta.com), 2012

Felstead, S. Theodore, Stars who made the Halls, T. Werner Laurie, London, 1946

Gaisberg, F.W., Music on Record, Robert Hale, London, 1947

Green, Benny (ed), The Last Empires: A Music Hall Companion, Pavilion/Michael Joseph, London, 1986

Harrison, Keith, Florrie Forde: The World’s Greatest Chorus Singer, The City of London Phonograph and Gramophone Society, London, 2022

Irvin, Eric, Dictionary of the Australian Theatre 1788–1914, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1985

Kilgarriff, Michael, Sing Us One of the Old Songs: A Guide to Popular Song 1860–1920, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998

Laver, James, Edwardian Promenade, Edward Hulton, London, 1958

Macqueen-Pope, W., The Melodies Linger On: The Story of Music Hall, W.H. Allen, London, 1950

Mander, Raymond and Mitchenson, Joe, British Music Hall: A Story in Pictures, Studio Vista, London, 1965

Martin-Jones, Tony, ‘Florrie Forde: Her Early Life in Australia’, Florrie Forde: her time in Australia (apex.net.au), 2020

Martland, Peter, Recording History: The British Record Industry 188801931, Scarecrow Press, Plymouth, 2013

Neill, Roger, Melba’s First Recordings, Historic Masters, London, 2008

――, ‘Going on the Halls’, unpublished, part of uncompleted dissertation, Goldsmiths College, London, 2013

――, ‘Re-discovering Syria Lamonte: Pioneering Recording Artist’ (online), Re-discovering Syria Lamonte: Pioneering Recording Artist - Theatre Heritage Australia, 2023

――, The Simonsens of St Kilda: A Family of Singers, Per Diem Projects, King’s Sutton, 2023

Short, Ernest, Fifty Years of Vaudeville, Eyre & Spottiswoode, London, 1946

Upward, Penelope, Florrie Forde: The Girl from Fitzroy (play), unpublished, nd

Van Straten, Frank, Tivoli, Thomas C. Lothian, Melbourne, 2003

――, Florence Young and the Golden Years of Australian Musical Theatre, Beleura, Mornington, 2009

――, ‘Fabulous Florrie Forde’, Stage Whispers, Fabulous Florrie Forde | Stage Whispers, 2013

Wilmut, Roger, Kindly Leave the Stage: The Story of Variety 1919–1960, Methuen, London, 1985

Woollacott, Angela, To Try Her Fortune in London: Australian Women, Colonialism and Modernity, Oxford University Press, New York, 2001

Acknowledgements

Thanks (for help of various kinds) to Christine Davies and colleagues (Templeman Library, University of Kent), Elisabeth Kumm, Tony Locantro, Tony Martin-Jones, Penelope Upward, Sophie Wilson

Florrie in the New Century

While popular musical tastes were constantly changing during the first four decades of the twentieth century, resulting in the steady decline of music hall, its offspring ‘variety’ continued to prosper, accommodating several new musical fashions, all of them vigorously promoted by the newly popular media of recording and (later) radio.

So while Florrie Forde continued throughout her career with her particular brand of chorus song, around her emerged various forms of jazz (ragtime, New Orleans, Dixieland, swing etc), together with changing styles of popular musical theatre (Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Ivor Novello, Noel Coward etc). And with those new forms, new styles of singing, including the growth in popularity of crooners. Alongside these new musical styles, there was a growing divide between supposedly highbrow and lowbrow forms (and audiences), with Florrie’s music seen to be decidedly low.

Photo by Dobson Ltd., Liverpool

In the new century, Florrie’s years followed a familiar pattern: seasons performing at usually multiple music halls in London, alternating with provincial tours in the towns and cities of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland; a summer season at Douglas, Isle of Man, immediately followed by a week or two usually at the Palace at Blackpool Tower; and a Christmas season in pantomime. Interspersed in her calendar would be days spent in the recording studio (and later radio and film studios) and occasional weeks of vacation. Florrie was always clear that she achieved her sustained success through constant hard work.  

In the years between the beginning of the new century and the start of the First World War (at the end of July 1914), Florrie not only returned regularly to perform at the London music halls and the provincial theatres at which she had previously appeared, but also at a very wide range of new venues.

Alhambra Theatre, London, 1901, from a postcard

ebay

In London, many of her new venues were in the inner and outer suburbs, usually the poorer rather than the more well-heeled ones, including Hippodromes in Rotherhithe, Willesden, Ealing, Richmond, Ilford, Putney and Lewisham (many of the theatres designed by the brilliant Frank Matcham). And in central London she added Gatti’s in Westminster Bridge Road and the Royal Holborn among others.

Billy Williams

Albert Whelan

In June 1900 Florrie performed in a benefit at the Alhambra for the widows of Australasians killed in the war in South Africa. Other Australians on the bill included sopranos Lalla Miranda and Rosa Bird, contralto Maggie Stirling, violinist Johann Kruse, dancer Saharet, and artists Percy Spence and Rossi Ashton. Among the audience were Madame Melba (who had paid five guineas for her box) and the great singer-actor-director Emily Soldene.

Over the years, Florrie had a reputation for helping other Australian music hall performers as they arrived in Britain. In books on the great years of the form, she is regularly linked with two others as top stars—both born in Melbourne—Billy Williams and Albert Whelan.

Billy Williams had arrived in London late in 1899, quickly establishing himself as another popular singer of chorus songs—‘the man in the velvet suit’. He first appeared on a bill with Florrie at the Camberwell Palace in May 1903 and in 1906 she is reputed to have introduced Billy to her record companies, initiating for him a major new career opportunity. Among his many hit songs was ‘When father papered the parlour’ of 1910. Like Florrie, he and his family later moved to live at Shoreham near Brighton on the south coast, where he died in 1915.

Albert Whelan arrived nearly two years after Williams—in October 1901—and did not appear on a bill with Florrie until May 1906 (at the Camberwell Palace). Clearly, he had established himself as a star performer without her assistance – and by 1905 he had already recorded one of his most famous songs, ‘The Whistling Bowery Boy’. Florrie and Albert appeared together occasionally, but in 1917 they topped the bill together at the Palace in Salford, and again in 1921 at the Palace in Blackpool.

In the new century, while touring (a week at a time), again Florrie went back to all the provincial cities she had performed in previously (with many theatres still owned by Moss Empires and managed by Oswald Stoll), now adding a whole range of smaller cities and towns all over Britain. Some of these might now seem quite surprising—for example Birkenhead, Salford, Ayr, Ashton-under-Lyme, Dewsbury, West Hartlepool and Chatham. Wherever there was a venue, much appreciated by audiences, Florrie would be there.

Sheet music for Down at the Old Bull & Bush

National Library of Australia, Canberra

Flyer from 1907

Victoria & Albert Museum, London

In 1904 Florrie introduced the first of her songs which was to become both a major hit and a stayer over decades in British popular culture, ‘Down at the Old Bull and Bush’. It had been commissioned the year before by a major American brewing company as ‘Under at the Anheuser Bush’. It was successful and noticed by London-based song pushers, who realised that it needed to be anglicised (as the brewery was not at that time known in Britain). In the event, the new words were provided by another Australian, Percy Krone, who was both agent for Florrie and cohabiting with her in Brixton, apparently as man and wife. More on Percy and Florrie later.

Now based on a well-known pub in Hampstead, ‘Bull and Bush’ rapidly became touted as Florrie’s ‘latest success’ when she performed at the Hippodrome in Blackpool in prime holiday season in August, and by December, featured in that year’s pantomime at Derby, Little Red Riding Hood, the local paper noted that it was a ‘really good old-fashioned pantomime song’ that had the potential to be ‘well remembered’. Already in 1904, Florrie recorded her ‘Bull and Bush’ (with orchestra) for the Gramophone Company at their studios at 21 City Road in central London.¹ 

While star music hall artists like Florrie were well rewarded, at this period lesser lights were treated by managers of syndicate theatres far less generously, and early in 1907 there was a strike called by the Variety Artistes Federation aimed at improving terms and conditions for the rank and file. It started at the Holborn Empire in January and became widespread across London. Among the leaders of the action was top star Marie Lloyd, but performers at Oswald Stoll’s theatres chose not to be involved, among them Florrie Forde, who was performing in Cinderella for impresario Francis Laidler at his Prince’s Theatre, Bradford, at that time. The dispute was resolved in February.² 

Leading up to the war, there followed for Florrie a steady stream of new songs that became both hits at the time and long-term stayers: ‘She’s a Lassie from Lancashire’ in 1907; ‘Oh! Oh! Antonio’ (1908); ‘Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly’ (1909); ‘I do like to be beside the seaside’ (1909); ‘Flanagan’ (1910); and ‘Hold your hand out, naughty boy’ in 1913.

‘The World’s Greatest Chorus Singer’

Aside from sheet music sales, as gramophone ownership grew swiftly, each of these songs was released on record sung by her around the time that she introduced them into her act. It was important for Florrie to have access to the most promising new songs, so she maintained close relationships with leading publishers in London’s Tin Pan Alley, Denmark Street, among them Lawrence Wright and Bert Feldman. It was Feldman who introduced Florrie to ‘Tipperary’.

Where possible, Florrie organised sole ownership for songs that promised success, one of these being ‘Bull and Bush’, but the reality of the music hall was that new songs that struck a chord with the public were often sung by many artists, Florrie among them. ‘Hello, hello, who’s your lady friend?’ and ‘I do like to be beside the seaside’ were both popularised by Mark Sheridan, and ‘She’s a Lassie from Lancashire’ by Ella Retford.

It was in 1907 that Florrie first adopted the tagline that she was to use throughout the rest of her performing career: ‘THE WORLD’S GREATEST CHORUS SINGER’. This was no small claim in an era awash with chorus songs and chorus singers. Florrie was very clear concerning her approach:

An audience doesn’t take much invitation to cotton on to a good chorus, especially in one of these waltz numbers. It’s more difficult to get them to join you in a ballad chorus, and in this respect I was rather pleasantly surprised at the way the audience took up a very pretty ballad I sang in the Isle of Man. It is called ‘The Garden of Roses’.³ 

The Royal Garden Party at the Palace Theatre, 1912. Florrie is the first from the left, three rows from the top. From The Sketch (London), 3 July 1912.

A first Royal Command Performance held at a public theatre with the king (George V) present took place at the Palace Theatre in London on 1 July 1912, the bill crowded with music hall acts of the day. Florrie was merely there to sing in the national anthem along with 142 others in the finale, but this was more than the great Marie Lloyd, who was not even invited. Contemporary reports of the event lament the lack of true music hall spirit.

Although there were many future Royal Variety events, Florrie was not to appear again before 1935 which took place at the London Palladium—in its finale, ‘Cavalcade of Variety’, with some three dozen others. Her last appearance at a Command performance was in 1938 (before George VI), also in a finale. Among the others in it was comedian George Mozart, who had first appeared with Florrie on bills in 1897.

The Great War and After

When war with Germany started and Zeppelin bombing, principally of London, arrived (from January 1915), Florrie Forde’s pattern of performances changed as a consequence. There were to be more weeks, particularly in the north of England and Scotland, and less weeks in London. In fact, Florrie did not return much to London until May/June of 1918, when she did weeks at New Cross, Walthamstow, Tottenham, East Ham, Finsbury, Stratford, Chelsea, Euston and Brixton. And she returned at that time to the South London in Lambeth, where she had performed on her first night in the capital in 1897.

The major hit song, virtually from the start of the war (28 July 1914) was Jack Judge’s ‘It’s a long way to Tipperary’ and from the start Florrie was credited as its ‘original singer’. In reality, it had been first sung in public by its composer, but the publisher Bert Feldman had persuaded Florrie to sing it during her summer season in July-August 1913 at the Derby Castle ballroom at Douglas, Isle of Man (first performance 21 July 1913). There she taught audiences to sing the chorus, but for some reason she did not much like the song and dropped it. Nevertheless, according to Feldman, it ‘swept into favour in the North of England … becoming extremely popular’. And with the advent of war, it became ‘the song that inspires our soldiers … a good marching song … [that] took Boulogne by storm.’ ⁴  

The Blackpool Palace, 1900s, from a postcard. amounderness.co.uk

Florrie swiftly re-adopted ‘Tipperary’ into her act everywhere and it became sung ‘in restaurants, theatres, music halls and on piers.’ Even German prisoners of war took it up.⁵  By November 1914 Florrie was singing it to wounded servicemen in Dundee Eastern Hospital, ‘greatly appreciated by the soldiers.’ ⁶  

From December 1915, Florrie included a new song, ‘Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag’ into her new pantomime ‘Jack and Jill’ at the Palace Theatre (part of the Blackpool Tower complex). Again, it was destined to become a popular marching song for the soldiers.

It remains something of a mystery as to why Florrie did not record either ‘Tipperary’ or ‘Pack up your troubles’ until 1929, and then only in truncated form in a medley. Perhaps she felt she did not need to.

Following the cessation of hostilities, Florrie immediately returned to her usual annual schedules, but with the happy return of longer seasons in the music halls and variety theatres of London. Much of the provincial touring was, as before, at Moss Empire theatres. And the seasons in the capital were substantially with London Syndicate Halls (now managed by Walter Gibbons, son-in-law of George Adney Payne, who had succeeded Payne in the company after his death in 1907). 

‘The Original Singer of Tipperary’. Photo by J.P. Bamber, Liverpool.

Sheet music for ‘Good-bye Dolly Gray’

However, the interwar period saw a rapid decline in the music hall. There was increased competition—from the continued growth of the recording industry, from radio and from cinema, all of which new media Florrie Forde engaged in. And from 1919 there was the spectacular arrival of new music from America—jazz in its various forms and offspring—starting with the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. The ODJB billed itself as the creators of jazz, but in reality they were followers not leaders and consisted of five very white Americans. They caused a furore in Britain and soon there were British imitators, including a multitude of dance bands.

And there was a decisive move from traditional alcohol-fuelled music halls with tables and chairs to variety theatres with proscenium arches and fixed rows of seats. Music hall would never be the same again. Many of the old stars had gone, many of the famous halls closed.

Florrie herself went through a period of experimentation and change, and in 1916 and 1920 she tried out her first ‘revues’—entitled Midnight Revels and Confusion. The revue form still required several performers—but implied some form of connective tissue between acts as opposed to performers simply following each other at roughly ten-minute intervals. But these were not the big names of pre-war years, and so presumably cost a good deal less, with a larger cut going to the headline star and organiser, in this case Florrie Forde.

For Florrie, the revue format took a major step forward in February 1923 when she introduced Cameos of 1923 ‘a bright revue on topical subjects’—which was written by Reg Bolton and produced by Florrie. The cast included comedian Bolton and Stella Esdaile, sister of her old colleague from Australia, Florence Esdaile.

Photo by J.P. Bamber, Liverpool

By this stage of her career Florrie was trading on her old hit songs. After the Great War, with musical fashions changed, for her successful new songs were harder to find. But there were two exceptions—‘I’m forever blowing bubbles’ in 1920, and ‘Yes, we have no bananas’ three years later. ‘Bubbles’ was a massive hit song, sung and recorded by many, while ‘Bananas’ was if anything even more popular. Composed by Frank Silver and Irving Cohn, it was published in America in 1923, but swiftly also established itself as a major hit in Britain, sung by all and sundry and adopted by Florrie Forde as a centrepiece of her shows. ‘One day it was unheard of—the next day it just happened,’ said its British publisher, Lawrence Wright.⁷  She seems to have first introduced it in her act in her midsummer performances at the Derby Castle ballroom at Douglas, Isle of Man.

At the Palace in Plymouth in August, Florrie went on to introduce an on-stage competition—for the best imitation of Miss Florrie Forde singing the chorus of ‘Yes, we have no bananas’. There were five pounds in prizes, these to be presented by Florrie. So successful was this innovation that Plymouth was followed by Ayr, Glasgow and Edinburgh. At Leeds in October, in addition to the competition, Florrie also sold bananas for charity, and on 24 October she performed in the Floral Hall at Covent Garden, auctioning bananas, in order to raise funds for nearby Bart’s Hospital.

Flanagan and Allen and Aleta and Florrie

If one searches online for the comedians Bud Flanagan and Chesney Allen, there is usually just a single sentence referencing their work with Florrie Forde—their CVs are dominated by their later work with the Crazy Gang. In reality, they came together under the guidance of Florrie and worked with her over nearly a ten-year period.

Chesney Allen first appeared with Florrie at the Finsbury Park Empire in London in a pantomime, Robinson Crusoe, in December 1921—at that time he was in a double act, Stanford and Allen. He had been performing with Stanford for two years, and they were booked again by Florrie for 1923–24 pantomime, Cinderella, which opened at the Alhambra in Bradford in December. Also in that cast was principal girl, Cinders, played by Aleta Turner. While Stanford and Allen provided ‘droll business’, Aleta Turner ‘brought the house down’ with her singing.

When Cinderella closed, having toured widely, Aleta Turner and Stanford and Allen continued with Florrie in revue through 1924 until they came together again in Florrie’s pantomime of 1924–25, Jack and Jill, which started in December at the Palace in Blackpool.

By this stage, Turner, Stanford and Allen were firmly established in Florrie’s company, and together they opened a new revue, Here’s to You, at the Grand in Bolton on 30 March 1925. That show toured continuously around England before moving on to the next panto together, Robinson Crusoe (which opened at the Alhambra in Bradford again).

However, at some point Stan Stanford must have fallen out of favour and was replaced when Here’s to You re-opened in March 1926 by the twenty-nine-years-old Bud Flanagan, now coupled with Chesney. Had Stan fallen out with Chesney? Or with Florrie? Or was it simply because Bud was the more talented? This little group—Florrie, Aleta, Bud and Chesney—were to form the core team in all their performances together until 1932. Their new revue in 1930, The Non-Stops, premiered at the Tivoli in Hull in February and carried the little team through theatre after theatre in the following months. In October Florrie adopted a new hit song, one of the last before the onset of the Second World War, ‘When you’re smiling’.

Aleta Turner had come from Cleethorpes (near Grimsby on the Lincolnshire coast) and had little onstage experience when she was auditioned—‘so nervous’—in 1923 by Florrie. She married Chesney Allen in 1925, having been onstage together for two years. Florrie’s second husband Laurie Barnett was best man at their wedding. Chesney had been born in Brighton in 1894 and was articled in a law office in his youth, before turning to the stage, initially as an actor in rep, then turning to variety as a comic straight man. Their marriage lasted until his death in 1982, he claiming that he owed everything to Aleta.

Flanagan (right) and Allen

Born at Whitechapel in the East End in 1896, Bud was initially named Chaim Reuben Weintrop, the son of Polish Jews. There are two versions of his renaming for the stage: his version was that Flanagan was the name of a disliked sergeant in the war; the other is that Florrie encouraged him to use her father’s surname. Perhaps both are true. At twelve, Reuben (Bud) was on stage for the first time as a conjuror at the Cambridge Music Hall in Bishopsgate.

While they were with Florrie, she was the star. But when they moved on from her in 1932, Flanagan and Allen were to become perhaps the most beloved of variety performers, famous for their gentle wit and their songs, which included ‘Underneath the Arches’, ‘Run, Rabbit, Run’, ‘We’re going to hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line’ (also sung by Florrie) and ‘Shine on Harvest Moon’.

However, Chesney Allen was professionally much more to Florrie than simply a talented performer. Starting with the new, long-running revue, Us, in March 1927, Chesney co-produced the show with Florrie. In it, Bud was the Crook and Chesney the Flash Crook. This was followed—with Florrie and Chesney co-producing again—by Flo and Co, which ran through the remainder of 1928 until the Xmas pantomime Jack and Jill intervened, returning to run through 1929.  

And Chesney had a third important role for Florrie: for some years he operated as her manager (although exactly which years these were I have as yet been unable to identify). Clearly he had a talent for management, moving on to take up that role with a theatrical agency and with Flanagan and Allen’s best-remembered lineup, the Crazy Gang.

It is possible that a motivation for Flanagan and Allen to move on and find new work was that in the summer of 1932 Florrie was unwell and did not perform from mid-May to late-July. During that time, she had a major operation after which she went home to recover, only to have to return to hospital a second time. She then recovered not at home, but in a nursing home at Hampstead. By 29 July she was back performing again—at the Isle of Man.

Isle of Man, Blackpool and Pantomime

From 1900 until 1939, Florrie performed two to four weeks each July-August at Douglas, the main town in the Isle of Man, followed by a short season at the Palace at Blackpool Tower. There, with the exception of her 1901 season (when she was at the Palace Theatre in Douglas), she sang at the ballroom at the Derby Castle, the sole star performer at each evening’s ball. The only gap over four decades was during the years of the First World War, when travel to the island was prohibited. She was to become a beloved feature of the season there, entertaining constantly changing holidaymakers, many of them from nearby Lancashire.

Derby Castle

Florrie’s cottage at Niarbyl

www.mikehigginbottominterestingtimes.co.uk

From the start, Florrie became devoted to the Isle of Man. The key to it was the air, Florrie wrote:

Draughts of it make the old feel young. The miserable become merry. The saddest of souls break the silence with song. The confirmed invalid takes a new lease of life. And class distinctions are swept aside.

This is perhaps as close as we may get to understanding the underlying purpose of Florrie Forde’s life and work.

Two of Florrie’s most famous songs—‘Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly?’ and ‘Flanagan’—both of which might be seen as Irish, in fact celebrate the Isle of Man. They were composed by C.W. Murphy with lyrics by Will Letters. And, of course, ‘Flanagan’ references Florrie’s original surname.⁸  

At the Derby Castle ballroom, the years went by without a hitch until 1929, which Florrie described as ‘the worst year I’ve ever known’, with numbers of holidaymakers down. Curiously, that summer season was two months before the onset of the Wall Street Crash and the ensuing Great Depression.

At some point, probably around 1923, she rented and stayed at a remote cottage at Niarbyl on the other side of the island, taking an extra week’s vacation there—the whole stay ‘combining business with pleasure’. Clearly, her stay on the Isle of Man each year represented for Florrie the greatest pleasure.

By the time that Florrie Forde came to her first pantomime in Britain, she had already had a major taste of the form back in Australia—in George Rignold’s The House that Jack Built at Her Majesty’s in Sydney in December 1894—starting at the top as Principal Boy, a role she was to perform regularly over the following decades.

As noted, her first panto in Britain was Cinderella in December 1898 at the Shakespeare Theatre at Clapham in southwest London. She was twenty-three. It was a theatrical form (suitable for whole families) that had grown in Britain out of the Italian commedia dell’artein the 18th and early 19th centuries, which included storytelling, improvisation, songs and much laughter, and including a range of stock characters—a pair of young lovers (Harlequin and Columbine), plus the girl’s father and several comic servants.

Essentially, the Principal Boy in panto, Prince Charming. had grown out of Harlequin, but in Britain he was usually performed by a young woman in tights. This was the role that Florrie inhabited, a slender young thing in 1898, over the years gradually filling out to 18+ stone (115 kg) but still wearing the tights.

And Florrie Forde was not alone: from the late nineteenth century, British pantomimes had usually included celebrity music hall stars, among them her regular colleagues on the halls’ bills—Harriet Vernon, Dan Leno, George Robey and others—a tradition that has persisted. In recent years, when Sir Ian McKellen was in the media as Widow Twankey and Mother Goose.

The 1898–99 pantomime season in London was perhaps unique in employing four leading Australians to play Principal Boy in four different productions: Nellie Stewart as Dick Whittington at Drury Lane; Florence Young also Dick at the Grand, Fulham; Sophie Harris in Cinderella at the Princess of Wales, Kennington; and Florrie Forde also in Cinderella at the Shakespeare, Clapham.⁹  

Photo by Albert Sachs, Bradford

Florrie was booked to perform Cinderella again in the following two years—first at the Grand in Newcastle-on-Tyne for the Christmas season 1899–1900, and then in Glasgow in 1900–01, which she cancelled. Was she ill? It seems not, as she performed constantly through that Christmas season into February, playing (weekly) a series of Moss Empires venues in northern Britain and Ireland (Leeds, Newcastle, Glasgow, Belfast and on).

Aside from the House that Jack Built and Cinderella, over the years Florrie was in altogether a dozen different pantomimes, many of them repeated in different productions: Little Red Riding Hood,Babes in the Wood,Jack and Jill,Robinson Crusoe,Robin Hood,Sleeping Beauty,The Forty Thieves,Puss in Boots,Queen of Hearts and Aladdin.

Florrie starred in pantomimes for three seasons under the management of George Bryden Phillips―first in 1901–02 opening at the Prince’s Theatre at Portsmouth, then the following Christmas season at the Shakespeare in Clapham, followed in 1904–05 by the Grand at Derby.

Then between 1906 and 1911 Florrie’s pantomimes were presented at theatres in Yorkshire owned by impresario Francis Laidler—widely known as the King of Pantomime—mostly at his Prince’s Theatre in Bradford (Cinderella in 1906, Little Red Riding Hood in 1908, Babes in the Wood in 1910), but also at his Theatre Royal in nearby Leeds (Babes in the Wood in 1909, Cinderella in 1911).

However, Florrie decided in 1912 that it was time to mount her own productions, but she was contracted to Laidler for the coming years, so she asked him to be released from the contract and he graciously agreed. Florrie was so pleased that she ran a substantial advertisement in the newspapers thanking him.

For two years (1901–02 and 1902–03) Florrie’s Little Red Riding Hood shows had opened in the south of England (first Portsmouth, next year Clapham) before going north (York then Bordesley in Birmingham and Leeds). This pattern set the precedent for Forde’s pantomimes becoming touring shows, and from 1912–13 (when she launched her first post-Laidler pantomime, Babes in the Wood, written by comedian Gilbert Payne) through to 1932–33, her pantomimes would progress across the two to three month period to anything between three and eleven different cities, in the earlier years exclusively in the north of England and Scotland, but in the later years also including weeks in the poorer suburbs of London (at the Alexandra Stoke Newington, the Empire Kilburn and the Hippodrome Ilford).

The principal girl to Florrie’s principal boy from 1914 to 1917 was singer and dancer Flora Carlton, ‘the Dainty Australian girl’, who was in fact Florrie’s niece, daughter of her eldest sister, Emily Brown (née Flanagan).

For the two seasons 1934–35 and 35–36, Florrie’s pantos reverted to being performed at a single theatre—first in Brighton, then at the Lyceum in London, before touring again in her final years until 1939–40, when she stayed put at the Shakespeare in Liverpool.  Elisabeth Kumm collection

To be continued...

Endnotes

1. 21 City Road is now a Tesco Express mini-supermarket

2. ‘Managers in a small way: The Professionalisation of Variety Artists, 1860-1914’ by Lois Rutherford, 106-11, in Peter Bailey, Music Hall: The Business of Pleasure (1986)

3. Cutting (1910, no source or date), Edwards/Flanagan Scrapbook 1 (Templeman Library, University of Kent); ‘Garden of Roses’: Johann Schmid/JE Dempsey, 1909

4. Daily News (London), 4 September 1914

5. The Stage, 24 September 1914

6. Dundee Courier, 20 November 1914

7. Bexhill-on-Sea Chronicle, 11 August 1923

8. C.W. Murphy wrote many songs popularised by Florrie, among them ‘She’s a Lassie from Lancashire’, ‘Oh! Oh! Antonio’, ‘Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly?’, ‘Hold your hand out, Naughty Boy’ and ‘Flanagan’; Murphy died in 1913 

9. British-Australasian, 5 January 1899 

Note on Images

Unless otherwise indicated, items are from the Edwards and Flanagan collection, now part of the Frank Van Straten collection, Theatre Heritage Australia

Bibliography

Alomes, Stephen, When London Calls: The Expatriation of Australian Creative Artists to Britain, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999

Anderson, Gae, Tivoli King: Life of Harry Rickards Vaudeville Showman, Allambie Press, Sydney, 2009

Bailey, Peter (ed.), Music Hall: The Business of Pleasure, Open University Press, Milton Keynes, 1986

Bratton, JS (ed.), Music Hall: Performance and Style, Open University Press, Milton Keynes, 1986

Brisbane, Katharine (ed.), Entertaining Australia: The Performing Arts as Cultural History, Currency Press, Sydney, 1991

Brownrigg, Jeff, The Shamrock and the Wattle: Florrie Forde The World’s Greatest Chorus Singer, National Film and Sound Archive, Canberra, 1998 (CD booklet)

――, ‘Melba’s Puddin’: Corowa, Mulwala and our Cultural Past’, Papers on Parliament 32, Canberra, 1998

――, Florrie Forde (1875–1940), Australian Dictionary of Biography, Supplement, 2005

Cheshire, D.F., Music Hall in Britain, Farleigh Dickinson University Press, Cranbury NJ, 1974

Colquhoun, Edward and Nethercoate-Bryant, KT, Shoreham-by-Sea: Past and Present, Sutton Publishing, Stroud, 1997

Dawson, Peter, Fifty Years of Song, Hutchinson, London, 1951

Disher, M. Willson, Winkles and Champagne: Comedies and Tragedies of the Music Hall, Batsford, London, 1938

Djubal, Clay, ‘Florrie Forde’, Australian Variety Theatre Archive, forde-florrie-23122012.pdf (ozvta.com), 2012

Felstead, S. Theodore, Stars who made the Halls, T. Werner Laurie, London, 1946

Gaisberg, F.W., Music on Record, Robert Hale, London, 1947

Green, Benny (ed), The Last Empires: A Music Hall Companion, Pavilion/Michael Joseph, London, 1986

Harrison, Keith, Florrie Forde: The World’s Greatest Chorus Singer, The City of London Phonograph and Gramophone Society, London, 2022

Irvin, Eric, Dictionary of the Australian Theatre 1788–1914, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1985

Kilgarriff, Michael, Sing Us One of the Old Songs: A Guide to Popular Song 1860–1920, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998

Laver, James, Edwardian Promenade, Edward Hulton, London, 1958

Macqueen-Pope, W., The Melodies Linger On: The Story of Music Hall, W.H. Allen, London, 1950

Mander, Raymond and Mitchenson, Joe, British Music Hall: A Story in Pictures, Studio Vista, London, 1965

Martin-Jones, Tony, ‘Florrie Forde: Her Early Life in Australia’, Florrie Forde: her time in Australia (apex.net.au), 2020

Martland, Peter, Recording History: The British Record Industry 188801931, Scarecrow Press, Plymouth, 2013

Neill, Roger, Melba’s First Recordings, Historic Masters, London, 2008

――, ‘Going on the Halls’, unpublished, part of uncompleted dissertation, Goldsmiths College, London, 2013

――, ‘Re-discovering Syria Lamonte: Pioneering Recording Artist’ (online), Re-discovering Syria Lamonte: Pioneering Recording Artist - Theatre Heritage Australia, 2023

――, The Simonsens of St Kilda: A Family of Singers, Per Diem Projects, King’s Sutton, 2023

Short, Ernest, Fifty Years of Vaudeville, Eyre & Spottiswoode, London, 1946

Upward, Penelope, Florrie Forde: The Girl from Fitzroy (play), unpublished, nd

Van Straten, Frank, Tivoli, Thomas C. Lothian, Melbourne, 2003

――, Florence Young and the Golden Years of Australian Musical Theatre, Beleura, Mornington, 2009

――, ‘Fabulous Florrie Forde’, Stage Whispers, Fabulous Florrie Forde | Stage Whispers, 2013

Wilmut, Roger, Kindly Leave the Stage: The Story of Variety 1919–1960, Methuen, London, 1985

Woollacott, Angela, To Try Her Fortune in London: Australian Women, Colonialism and Modernity, Oxford University Press, New York, 2001

Acknowledgements

Thanks (for help of various kinds) to Christine Davies and colleagues (Templeman Library, University of Kent), Elisabeth Kumm, Tony Locantro, Tony Martin-Jones, Penelope Upward, Sophie Wilson

Florrie—Her Husbands and Homes

In various memoirs Florrie wrote in newspaper and magazine articles in Britain, she made no mention of her marriage in Sydney to policeman Walter Bew in 1893. And no evidence has emerged to indicate either a divorce or his death. So her marriage to Laurie Barnett in 1905 (where she declared herself to be a spinster) was likely to have been unlawful.

Florrie’s relationship, both personal and professional, with Percy Krone was clearly of significant importance for some years. From 1900 to 1905 he acted as her agent, and at the same time they were living together at the same addresses and travelling as ‘Mr and Mrs Percy Krone (Miss Florrie Forde)’.

Florrie Forde, 1930s. Photo by Perfect Photo Reproduction Co., London.

Edwards and Flanagan collection, Theatre Heritage Australia

Florrie Forde, 1930s. Photo by Kay Foley.

Edwards and Flanagan collection, Theatre Heritage Australia

Percy Krone had been born at St Kilda in Melbourne in 1865 (ten years before Florrie) and was educated at the Scotch college there. His father, Captain Henry Krone was Registrar-General of Victoria. Percy worked in Melbourne as a patent agent, then for G.W. Taylor and Co, property auctioneers, before first coming to London in 1889. But soon he returned to Australia, where (among other things) he played cricket for South Melbourne. Did he first see Florrie on stage there? In 1895 he married the first Mrs Krone in London, and they took their honeymoon by going to Australia, stopping off at Cape Town. By 1899 he was living in South Africa, searching for the ideal goldmine, when war broke out with the Boers. He is said to have fought in that conflict with the British army.

However, he came back to London before the end of that war (May 1902) and on 8 December 1900 the Era carried an advertisement for Florrie Forde announcing her representation as being carried out by Percy Krone of Clifton Lodge, Overton Road, Brixton. It gradually became clear that they both lived at this address in southwest London. The last we are to hear of them together was in March 1905, when a gift was noted from the pair to newlyweds (Charles Baxter and Lillian Kendall) at South Yarra.

Just eight months later, on 22 November 1905, Florrie was formally married to Laurence Barnett at Paddington Register Office in London. The switch in 1905 from Percy Krone to art dealer Laurie Barnett seems to have been rather precipitate. What exactly had been the nature of her relationship with Krone? Business certainly. Cohabiting too. But were they more than that, living together as man and wife? Perhaps we shall never really know.

However, from time-to-time Florrie dropped heavily coded clues. In an article she wrote for the People’s Journal in March 1914, she described ‘Billy’, a ‘bloodthirsty fellow’ who was weighed down by the ‘green-eyed monster’ of jealousy. Billy threatened to come to Florrie’s wedding and ‘shoot me’.¹ Was Billy in reality Percy Krone? Or someone else entirely? A clue that makes the Percy identification more likely is that, in the article, Florrie compares Billy to Ananias. Why?

In the ‘Acts of the Apostles’ (Chapter 5), Ananias is revealed as having secretly kept a portion of the money from the followers of Jesus, having sold a plot of land. Is this what Percy had been doing as Florrie’s agent? And had she discovered it? It is interesting that Florrie was later written out of the narrative of Percy’s life. When he died in Melbourne in 1941, his widow announced that he had written the popular song ‘Down at the Old Bull and Bush’ (in reality he had written some new words in the English version of 1904), which had apparently been sung by ‘Kate Carney’ (with no mention of Florrie). Yet there is no mention anywhere of a relationship between Percy and Kate Carney, business or personal. Clearly, he had not told his new wife about Florrie.

In the event, to Florrie’s relief ‘Billy’ did not turn up at the wedding at Paddington Register Office, so there was no shooting. Florrie and Laurie were together for thirty years (until he died in October 1934)—the ‘great love story of my life’.

Florrie tells us that she first met Laurie Barnett on a train journey to Paris. He seemed shy, but they talked and she reflected that it was ‘in both instances love at first sight’ and that ‘neither of us saw the necessity of wasting time needlessly.’² The encounter seems likely to have taken place in February 1905 following her Little Red Riding Hood pantomime season, which had opened at Derby before Christmas and ended in Edinburgh on 11 February. Then she had a two-week break, when she may well have had her crucial first meeting with Laurie.

In her Thomson’s Weekly News memoirs of 1916, Florrie makes every effort to set the record straight. She writes: ‘I plan to make the fact clear that I have only one husband, the only one I have ever had.’ The problem is: she may have wished it were so, but it is unlikely to be true.

Quite fortuitously (and unprecedentedly), following two more weeks back on the halls in London, Florrie had what appears to be a five week break from performing—time enough to get to know Laurie well. At the time of their marriage in November, Laurie was living at 203 Lauderdale Mansions in Maida Vale, and they may well have made their first home together there. However, by 1907 their address was given as 46 Binfield Road in Clapham and they remained there until 1915, when they moved to 101 Bedford Court Mansions in Bloomsbury, which remained their London base for thirteen years until May 1928, when they moved to 10 Howitt Road, Hampstead.³

Beanie Galletly in 1896. Photo by Falk Studios, Sydney.

From Melbourne Punch, 28 May 1896

Florrie Forde, 1910s, by unknown photographer

Edwards and Flanagan collection, Theatre Heritage Australia

In June 1920 an advertisement in The Stage announced the opening of a new venture between Florrie and her old Australian friend, the dancer and choreographer Beanie Galletly. It read:

Wanted … a number of attractive Young Ladies to train for the stage in the Art of Singing, Dancing and Deportment. Children’s Classes every Saturday under the personal supervision of Miss Beanie Galletly, Australian and Continental Danceuse. Good engagements assured for efficient people.

Applicants were requested to write to the two founders at 64a Brixton Road (which ran through Stockwell, between Kennington and Brixton in South London). Beanie had first appeared with Florrie in Sydney in 1895 and was to return as choreographer in Florrie’s revue Cameos of 1923 which toured extensively. Also in the early 1920s, Florrie and Beanie jointly owned a millinery. Perhaps that was also at Brixton Road.

Florrie’s Beach Club

In 1932 Florrie and Laurie made a major move. While maintaining a London base, they leased a bungalow, Gull’s Nest, on the south coast of England at Shoreham-by-Sea in Sussex. Just west of Brighton, it was some sixty miles (97 km) from London by train or car. There Florrie took over an existing dance club, renaming it Flo’s Beach Club. Laurie appears to have principally lived from that time at Shoreham, running Florrie’s club.

‘Bungalow Town’ at Shoreham, built on a spit of land, had become a colony for mainly music hall performers and actors since Marie Loftus had moved there around the turn of the century. Many of the dwellings were converted railway carriages. It was also to become an important centre for the early years of the British film industry. 

Sadly, Laurie died at 58 at Shoreham on 22 October 1934—less than two years after moving there. Florrie gave up the club in 1936 but continued to maintain two homes until her own death in 1940—in London at 115 Park Poad, Regent’s Park, and in Shoreham at Goscote, 108 Old Fort Road.

That year, fearful of invasion, the army requisitioned and demolished the whole of the Bungalow Town development at Shoreham, turning it into a defensive minefield.

Hamilton Hill

Courtesy Geoff Bowden, British Music Hall Society

Nellie Melba, 1903. Photo by Walter Barnett, London.

National Portrait Gallery, London

Recording, Radio and Film

Florrie had arrived in London just in time for the explosive growth of sound recording, which was followed by radio and film. Florrie embraced all three new media.

Although sound recording with a phonograph had been invented by Thomas Edison in 1877, for many years it consisted of primitive recordings on fragile wax cylinders. The process was entirely mechanical—ie without electricity—with the performers clustered round an acoustic horn. By 1903, when Florrie Forde made her first cylinder recordings, technology had moved on somewhat, and by 1912 she had made over 220 cylinders—mostly for Edison labels but also for Sterling and Lambert.

In the meantime, flat discs and the gramophone were invented by Emile Berliner in 1887. This method used the same recording process with artists around a horn, but discs were much easier than cylinders to manufacture in bulk. As with cylinders, Florrie made her first disc recordings in 1903—for the Gramophone and Typewriter Company in London—and continued to make them until shortly before her death in 1939.

Florrie says that she was introduced to recording by Australian baritone Hamilton Hill, who took her to his recording company, most likely the Gramophone Company in London, to make a test record. It was of ‘Flo from Pimlico’, she recalled, but the company did not book her, her voice being judged to be ‘no use for the machines’. Hamilton Hill was already a best-selling artist, having made recordings of patriotic songs during the Boer War. And his Australia wife, dancer Beanie Galletly, was to remain a close friend and associate of Florrie.

She was taken to try again sometime later by comedian-singer Bert Shepherd, this time with a more successful outcome, coming away with a three year contract.⁴ The Gramophone Company (which became EMI, now Warner) and its other labels (Zonophone and later HMV), remained a major partner for her, but she also recorded for several Edison labels (cylinder and disc), Sterling, Ariel and others. Overall, Florrie is estimated to have made some 550 recordings.⁵

The years following 1903 experienced the birth of a new industry, together with dramatic growth in the sales of recordings and gramophones, and celebrated singers with large numbers of enthusiastic supporters benefitted accordingly. With her wide range of recorded popular songs, Florrie earned a steady income stream from them. However, this was nothing compared with two of her most successful Australian compatriots in Britain at that time – Nellie Melba and Peter Dawson.

It is extraordinary that three Australian singers should so dominate the British record market in the years before the First World War. They ploughed different furrows: Melba was principally an opera singer, while Dawson was a concert singer and Forde sang in music halls.

Peter Dawson, 1930s. Photo by Tornquist of Wellington.

National Portrait Gallery, London

Florrie Forde, 1920s, by unknown photographer

Edwards and Flanagan collection, Theatre Heritage Australia

Florrie’s deal with the Gramophone Company stipulated an annual fee of £30 (rising to £40 by 1913), plus £2.60 to £3.60 per recording made. The company archives reveal that, over the decade 1904 to 1913, she made a total of £1,133—quite a small proportion of her total income. Meanwhile, Peter Dawson revealed in his memoirs that in 1912 he made no less than 30 guineas a week (£31.50) from recording. He earned more than Florrie from recording because he was both a regular session singer and a classically trained artist.⁶

And after a lengthy wooing period, in 1904 the great diva Nellie Melba made her first recordings for the Gramophone Company. The deal was that she was paid £1,000 up front (roughly equivalent to £80,000 now), plus a royalty of five shillings (25p) per record sold. And her records sold for a guinea each (£1.05)—a higher price than any of her competitors—and carried a distinctive lilac-coloured label with her facsimile signature.⁷ In the year 1906, Melba earned £6,060 from GramCo royalties.

In the early years, in parallel with her recordings for the Gramophone Company, Florrie also formed a working relationship with a cylinder recording engineer, Russell Hunting, who had been working with Florrie for Edison before moving with her from 1904 to become a significant shareholder in the Sterling Record Company. Florrie and her then manager-partner Percy Krone were also shareholders, and she was to become their best-selling artist until 1908, by which time sales of cylinder recordings had declined, and the company went into liquidation.⁸

1925 saw the emergence of electrical recording through the introduction of the revolutionary Western Electric microphone. Florrie was said never to need to use a microphone in live performance, but, as with so many singers, she became adept at handling the new technology in the recording studio and on radio and for film. Among the most treasured of her post-microphone recordings are medleys of her most celebrated choruses from 1929 and 1936.

Although the first public radio broadcasts in Britain had been made in 1920 by the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Co,⁹ Florrie does not seem to have been on air until August 1929, broadcasting on the BBC’s 2LO service. A few days later, it was announced that she was to make a ‘broadcast for the first time from 5XX last night’,¹⁰ singing ‘Has anybody here seen Kelly?’, ‘Wearing her clogs and shawl’, ‘Lassie from Lancashire’, ‘Oh! Oh! Antonio’ and ‘Down at the Old Bull and Bush’. It was reported that ‘there was not the slightest trace of microphone nervousness …’. ¹¹

Florrie was to have a career on radio in Britain through the 1930s—a mix of her recordings and live broadcasts—and her recordings were regularly broadcast in Australia, New Zealand and, presumably, other anglophone countries.

Scene from My Old Dutch, 1934. Photo by by James Jarché, for Daily Herald. National Portrait Gallery, London.

‘Talkies’ arrived in the mid-1920s, but it was not until 1933 that Florrie became involved with film. Her first venture was Say It with Flowers: A Symphony of London Life, which was shot at Twickenham Studios in November. In it, traders in a street market in the Old Kent Road rally round when a flower-seller falls ill. It stars Mary Clare, Ben Field and George Carney, with Florrie Forde, Marie Kendall and Charles Coborn as themselves. A mix of music hall and Cockney life, Florrie reprises ‘Lassie from Lancashire’, ‘Has anybody here seen Kelly?’, ‘Hold your hand out, naughty boy’, ‘Oh! Oh! Antonio’ and ‘Down at the Old Bull and Bush’. It was well-received and in May the BBC broadcast (a first) the soundtrack of the film’s music hall scene.

Next came My Old Dutch, shot at the Islington Studios of Gainsborough Pictures in April 1934, in which ageing cockney parents see their son die a hero in the Royal Flying Corps. It stars Gordon Harker, Betty Balfour and Florrie Forde (this time in an acting role as Aunt Bertha). It has recently been described as a ‘sentimental wallow’. At the time a Bristol theatre organised a showing as a ‘treat for old couples’.¹²

The third and last film that involved Florrie was Royal Cavalcade, which featured achievements made in the reign of George V and was part of his Silver Jubilee celebrations. It featured Marie Lohr, Hermione Baddeley and others with George Robey and Florrie Forde. It had six separate directors, and opened in 1935. Recently it was regarded as ‘thoroughly embarrassing’, while at the time an advertisement presented it as a ‘truly great film’ ¹³ In a cameo, Florrie re-enacted the original performance of ‘Tipperary’ in the Isle of Man in 1913.

In April 1936 Florrie had an offer to go and make movies in Hollywood. At the time she had been performing in her annual pantomime at the Lyceum in London. However, she said: ‘You know I’d rather make pictures in this country … In any case, I can’t go this year, for I’m booked up on the halls, and I’ve got my summer season at the Isle of Man.’ ¹⁴

Edwards and Flanagan collection, Theatre Heritage Australia

The Last Years

By 1934 Flanagan and Allen had moved on, beloved husband Laurie Barnett died on 22 October, and Florrie Forde had been performing professionally for forty-two years and was fifty-nine-years-old.

While she continued to tour through most of the year, there was less of it than in her heyday before the First World War. She spent several weeks filming Say it with Flowers and My Old Dutchand also took time on the south coast at her home at Shoreham, Gull’s Nest, and running her club there. In the summer of 1934 she performed as usual at the ballroom of Derby Castle in the Isle of Man. As the Christmas season approached, she started rehearsals for Sleeping Beauty at the Grand in Brighton.

With the exception of filming, the same pattern of work persisted for Florrie between 1935 and 1939. The pantomimes each year were based for several weeks in one theatre: Forty Thievesat the Lyceum in London (1935), Puss in Boots at the Shakespeare in Liverpool (1936), Queen of Hearts [click here to view rare footage of production] at the Theatre Royal in Edinburgh (1937, with Florrie as the Queen of Hearts), Aladdin at the Theatre Royal Edinburgh again (1938) and a final Aladdin back at the Shakespeare in Liverpool (1939).

By this late stage in her career, Florrie’s performances were overwhelmingly in the north of England and Scotland. In November 1939, she took up one of the major popular songs of the Second World War (which had started two months earlier)—‘We’re going to Hang out the Washing on the Siegfried Line’.

(left) The Tivoli, Aberdeen. Wikipedia. (right) One of Florrie’s last playbills. University of Glasgow.

Aladdin in Liverpool finished earlier than was usual for Florrie’s pantomimes—on 20 January 1940—perhaps because there was awareness that Liverpool would become a major target in the coming months for the Luftwaffe. But Florrie immediately went back to intensive touring (for a final time) with Moss Empires theatres—in London at Ilford and New Cross (with Hettie King), then at Birmingham, York, Portsmouth and Huddersfield. And then her last performances in London in the week of 11 March at the Gaumont at Holloway, followed by Manchester, Nottingham and Halifax (with Wee Georgie Wood) before her last week—at the Tivoli in Aberdeen.

Of the opening night at the Tivoli, the Aberdeen Press and Journal said:

The vaudeville bill … is the best that has been seen in the city for a considerable time. At the top is Florrie Forde, who can persuade any audience out of its self-consciousness to join in the chorus-singing which she leads. And war-time is the time for community singing.¹⁵

And Florrie taught them a new song: ‘Till the Lights of London Shine Again’. Three days later she was dead. The Press and Journal reported:

A few hours previously she had been wildly cheered by an audience of Navymen at Kingseat Naval Hospital. She had taken her company from the Tivoli Theatre, Aberdeen, to give a special show for the sailors.¹⁶

She sang for them a medley of her popular choruses. Her last song, according to the newspaper, was ‘Goodbye-ee’. ¹⁷ She was sixty-four and had been performing professionally in Australia, Britain and Ireland for forty-eight years.

Florrie’s death was carried as a significant news story in British and Irish newspapers: ‘her name was long a household word,’ said the Scotsman; ‘Tipperary’ was ‘the greatest marching song of the last war,’ wrote the South Wales Daily Post and ‘almost replaced the national anthem,’ asserted the People, which added that she was ‘big framed, big hearted.’ The Guardian noted that: ‘She defied all attempts by misguided managers to bring her up to date.’

Although she did not return to her birth country after 1897, nevertheless Australian newspapers carried the story in their dozens, but usually only in a few lines. Her half-brother, HW Snelling Ford at Guildford in Sydney’s western suburbs, graphically described her as the ‘Melba of the Masses’.¹⁸ And it seems that Melba concurred with this assessment. According to Frank Van Straten in his book, Tivoli, Melba said:

Hers is a voice of true Australian quality. She might have been trained for opera but, instead, gives pleasure to a far wider audience.¹⁹

Performing for wounded soldiers and sailors had been important for Florrie throughout her career in Britain, starting in the Boer War (when she did a benefit in 1900 at the Alhambra for Australian soldiers), then later in the two World Wars. A typical example came at Newcastle in December 1918, when 1,500 wounded soldiers were invited to a dress rehearsal of Cinderella. In 1921 and 1923 Florrie travelled to Cologne—to give her only performances in continental Europe—at the Scala Theatre in Cologne for soldiers of the occupying Rhine Army. And when the body of an unnamed sailor was washed up on shore at the Isle of Man, Florrie had him buried with a gravestone that read ‘Some Mother’s Son’.

Louis MacNeice, 1945. Photo by Howard Coster

National Portrait Gallery, London

Florrie Forde, 1930s, by unknown photographer

Edwards and Flanagan collection, Theatre Heritage Australia

Florrie was buried next to her eldest sister, Mrs Emily Brown (née Flannagan) at Streatham Park Cemetery in South London. The funeral cortege went from the home at Streatham Hill of the Crumners, Mrs Crumner being the niece, daughter of Emily, who had been Florrie’s principal boy in pantomime in the First World War, Flora Carlton. Among those who followed the cortege were Bud Flanagan, Chesney Allen, Aleta Turner, Bert Feldman, Prince Littler and Minnie Simpson, who had been Florrie’s ‘personal maid and companion’ over her last fifteen years. The Streatham News reported:

Hundreds of people were at the graveside including many old-time variety stars. Half the provincial theatres in Britain were represented … For some hours after the burial people were passing the grave admiring the flowers banked for 100 yards behind the turned earth.²⁰

After her passing, Louis MacNeice wrote a poem, ‘Death of an Actress’. It has been touted by Florrie’s supporters as some kind of celebration of her life, an homage, but in reality it is typical of the way in which the separation of so-called high-brow from low-brow culture in twentieth century Britain could facilitate the relentlessly patronising tone of MacNeice’s poem.²¹

Although Florrie Forde never returned to her birth country, she was throughout her career a proud Australian, supporting other Aussies when they arrived in London. As noted, there were three Australians who dominated the scene in that generation—Nellie Melba, Peter Dawson and Florrie, each of them singing their own musical genre to their own audience.

www.findagrave.com/memorial/90165829/florrie-forde

Endnotes

1. Dundee People’s Journal, 21 March 1914

2. ibid.

3. Some twenty years ago, the present writer recommended to English Heritage that they put up a Blue Plaque on the Bedford Court Mansions property; after two years of cogitation, they declined, asserting that she had lived at Shoreham, not in London … 

4. Fred Gaisberg credits Bert Shepherd with bringing a stream of music halls to The Gramophone Company for recording, including Ada Reeve, Vesta Victoria, Gus Elen, Albert Chevalier, George Mozart, Marie Lloyd, and Vesta Tilley; it may also have been Shepherd who introduced Syria Lamonte to Gaisberg

5. With grateful thanks to Keith Harrison for his list of Florrie Forde recordings which accompanies his book on Forde for the City of London Phonograph and Gramophone Society (2022); there seems to be no reliable estimate of Florrie’s total record sales

6. Peter Martland, Recording History: The British Record Industry 1888–1931, pp.191–92

7. Roger Neill, Melba’s First Recordings, Historic Masters, London, 2008, p.11

8. Keith Harrison, Florrie Forde: The World’s Greatest Chorus Singer, City of London Phonograph and Gramophone Society, 2022, pp.30–33

9. The first live broadcast concert was given by Dame Nellie Melba for Marconi in Chelmsford, Essex, on 15 June 1920

10. 5XX was the Daventry transmitter of the BBC, which had gone live in 1925 and was said to reach 94% of the population of Britain

11. Nottingham Evening Post, 27 August 1929

12. The Era, 24 October 1934

13. Leicester Chronicle, 4 May 1935

14. Evening Despatch, 24 April 1936

15. Aberdeen Press and Journal, 16 April 1940

16. Ibid, 19 April 1940

17. The death certificate recorded that she had died from ‘arterial hypertension, cerebral haemorrhage and cardiac failure’

18. Cumberland Argus, 22 May 1940

19. Van Straten had an undated, unsourced clipping with this quote

20. Streatham News, 26 April 1940

21. The hifalutin Cambridge Guide to the Arts in Britain: The Edwardian Age and the Inter-War Years (1989) scarcely mentions the existence of music hall; two rather different writers, both contemporaries of Florrie Forde, who took music hall arts and artists seriously were Rudyard Kipling and T.S. Eliot

Appendix 1: A selection of Florrie Forde’s most enduring songs 

Click on headings to link to recordings on YouTube.

See Me Dance the polka

Published: 1886

Music and words: George Grossmith sen

Popularised by Billie Barlow, G Grossmith sen; in Australia by Billie Barlow, Florrie and others

After the Ball

Published: 1892 (USA, massive sales of sheet music)

Music and words: Charles K. Harris

First sung: Sam Doctor (amateur who forgot the words); popularised in USA by J. Aldrich Lilley; by Florrie Forde in 1893 at Melbourne and Sydney  

Recorded: by many and by Florrie in 1934

Daisy Bell

Published 1892

Music and words: Harry Dacre

Recorded: Dan W. Quinn (US cylinder) 1893; Florrie Forde 1934

Refers to Prince of Wales (Edward VII) mistress Daisy Warwick; popularised by Katie Lawrence

Courtesy Geoff Bowden, British Music Hall Society

Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Goodbye, Dolly Gray

Published: 1897

Music: Paul Barnes; Words: Will D. Cobb

Recorded: USA Harry McDonough 1901; UK Hamilton Hill, Florrie Forde 1933

Composed in Spanish-American War; popular in Boer War

Down at the Old Bull and Bush

Published: As ‘Under the Anheuser Bush’ in USA 1903; UK (revised) 1904

Music: Harry Von Tilzer; Words (original): Andrew B Sterling; words (revised for UK): Percy Krone

First sung: Florrie Forde 1904

Recorded: USA Billy Murray 1904; Florrie Forde 1904

UK version references pub at Hampstead in London

www.fredgodfreysongs.ca

Sheet Music Warehouse

She’s a Lassie from Lancashire

Published: 1907

Music: C.W. Murphy; Words: Dan Lipton, John Neat

Original hit for Ella Retford 1907; sung and recorded Florrie Forde 1907

I do Like to be Beside the Seaside

Published: 1907

Music and words: John H. Glover-Kind

Popularised and recorded by Mark Sheridan and Florrie Forde 1909

Famously played on the organ at the Tower Ballroom Blackpool by Reginald Dixon 1930-1970

Oh! Oh! Antonio

Published: 1908

Music: C.W. Murphy; Words Dan Lipton

Sung and recorded: Florrie Forde 1908

Included in From Melba to Sutherland: Australian Singers on Record 2016 

Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly?

Published: 1909

Music: C.W. Murphy; Words: Will Letters

Sung and recorded: Florrie Forde 1909

Kelly is the most common surname in the Isle of Man

It’s a Long Way to Tipperary

Published: 1912

Music and words: Jack Judge and Harry Williams

First performed by composer Jack Judge 1912; performed by Florrie Forde at Isle of Man 1913, but dropped by her; re-adopted by Forde when it became popular marching song in First World War 

Recorded: John McCormack 1914; Florrie Forde 1929

Hold Your Hand Out, Naughty Boy

Published: 1913

Music: C.W. Murphy; Words: Worton David

Sung and recorded: Florrie Forde 1913

Very popular in First World War

Hello!  Hello! Who’s Your Lady Friend?

Published: 1913

Music: Harry Fragson; Words: Worton David and Bert Lee

Sung and recorded: Harry Fragson 1913; sung Florrie Forde 1913, recorded 1929

Popular in First World War

Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag

Published: 1915

Music: George Asaf (George Henry Powell); Words: Felix Powell (brother)

Sung Florrie Forde 1916; recorded by her 1929

Popular marching song in First World War

Goodbye-ee

Published: 1917

Music RP Weston; Words: Bert Lee

Sung and recorded: Florrie Forde 1917

I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles

Published: 1919

Music: John W. Kellett; Words: Jaap Kenbrovin (a collective of three)

Popularised in USA late 1919, UK in 1920 by Florrie Forde and others; recorded by her in medley 1936  

Anthem of West Ham United

Yes, We Have No bananas

Published: 1923

Music: Irving Cohn; Words: Frank Silver

Recorded: USA Billy Jones, Billy Murray; performed 1923 by Florrie Forde (but not recorded by her)

Massive sales of sheet music (and bananas)

When You’re Smiling

Published: 1928

Music and words: Larry Shay, Mark Fisher, Joe Goodwin

Popularised in USA 1928-29; in UK in 1930 by Florrie Forde and others; not recorded by her

Unofficial anthem of Leicester City Football Club

We’re Going to Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line

Published: 1939

Music: Michael Carr; Words: Jimmy Kennedy (Irish)

First performed by Adelaide Hall 1939; by Florrie Forde 1939 (but not recorded by her)

Popular marching song in the Second World War

Appendix 2: Edwards and Flanagan

No, not another music hall double act. Rather, two men, both obsessed with the career of Florrie Forde, who lived near Oldham in Lancashire, and who exhaustively compiled scrapbooks of promotional materials, photographs and press cuttings from 1910 until her death in 1940. In fact, they kept two scrapbooks going in parallel throughout—one for Florrie and one for themselves.

They were Arthur Edwards and James Flanagan. Edwards complied the scrapbooks from 1910 to mid-1915 and Flanagan seamlessly took over the task from that point until Florrie’s death twenty-five years later. The only gap occurs in 1917, when, having initially joined up in 1915, Flanagan was sent to France in a platoon of the 22nd Battery of the Manchester Regiment. Wounded, he was repatriated to hospital in Britain before returning home.

Florrie was delighted with their work—as is the present writer.  Currently, a set of four scrapbooks covering 1910 to 1930 are held in the Special Collections of the Templeman Library at the University of Kent in Canterbury, and a further three, covering from the late 1920s to 1940 are in the possession of Keith Harrison of the City of London Phonograph and Gramophone Society. The V&A in London has a further set which is unavailable at the time of writing.

Remarkably a further three scrapbooks made their way to Australia. Comprising some 74 portraits of Florrie dating from the 1910s onwards, these volumes, now in the possession of Theatre Heritage Australia, were in the collection of the late Frank Van Straten. When and where he came by these books remains a mystery but suffice to say THA is thrilled to be the custodians of such an important collection alongside three significant UK repositories.

Bibliography

Alomes, Stephen, When London Calls: The Expatriation of Australian Creative Artists to Britain, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999

Anderson, Gae, Tivoli King: Life of Harry Rickards Vaudeville Showman, Allambie Press, Sydney, 2009

Bailey, Peter (ed.), Music Hall: The Business of Pleasure, Open University Press, Milton Keynes, 1986

Bratton, JS (ed.), Music Hall: Performance and Style, Open University Press, Milton Keynes, 1986

Brisbane, Katharine (ed.), Entertaining Australia: The Performing Arts as Cultural History, Currency Press, Sydney, 1991

Brownrigg, Jeff, The Shamrock and the Wattle: Florrie Forde The World’s Greatest Chorus Singer, National Film and Sound Archive, Canberra, 1998 (CD booklet)

――, ‘Melba’s Puddin’: Corowa, Mulwala and our Cultural Past’, Papers on Parliament 32, Canberra, 1998

――, Florrie Forde (1875–1940), Australian Dictionary of Biography, Supplement, 2005

Cheshire, D.F., Music Hall in Britain, Farleigh Dickinson University Press, Cranbury NJ, 1974

Colquhoun, Edward and Nethercoate-Bryant, KT, Shoreham-by-Sea: Past and Present, Sutton Publishing, Stroud, 1997

Dawson, Peter, Fifty Years of Song, Hutchinson, London, 1951

Disher, M. Willson, Winkles and Champagne: Comedies and Tragedies of the Music Hall, Batsford, London, 1938

Djubal, Clay, ‘Florrie Forde’, Australian Variety Theatre Archive, forde-florrie-23122012.pdf (ozvta.com), 2012

Felstead, S. Theodore, Stars who made the Halls, T. Werner Laurie, London, 1946

Gaisberg, F.W., Music on Record, Robert Hale, London, 1947

Green, Benny (ed), The Last Empires: A Music Hall Companion, Pavilion/Michael Joseph, London, 1986

Harrison, Keith, Florrie Forde: The World’s Greatest Chorus Singer, The City of London Phonograph and Gramophone Society, London, 2022

Irvin, Eric, Dictionary of the Australian Theatre 1788–1914, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1985

Kilgarriff, Michael, Sing Us One of the Old Songs: A Guide to Popular Song 1860–1920, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998

Laver, James, Edwardian Promenade, Edward Hulton, London, 1958

Macqueen-Pope, W., The Melodies Linger On: The Story of Music Hall, W.H. Allen, London, 1950

Mander, Raymond and Mitchenson, Joe, British Music Hall: A Story in Pictures, Studio Vista, London, 1965

Martin-Jones, Tony, ‘Florrie Forde: Her Early Life in Australia’, Florrie Forde: her time in Australia (apex.net.au), 2020

Martland, Peter, Recording History: The British Record Industry 188801931, Scarecrow Press, Plymouth, 2013

Neill, Roger, Melba’s First Recordings, Historic Masters, London, 2008

――, ‘Going on the Halls’, unpublished, part of uncompleted dissertation, Goldsmiths College, London, 2013

――, ‘Re-discovering Syria Lamonte: Pioneering Recording Artist’ (online), Re-discovering Syria Lamonte: Pioneering Recording Artist - Theatre Heritage Australia, 2023

――, The Simonsens of St Kilda: A Family of Singers, Per Diem Projects, King’s Sutton, 2023

Short, Ernest, Fifty Years of Vaudeville, Eyre & Spottiswoode, London, 1946

Upward, Penelope, Florrie Forde: The Girl from Fitzroy (play), unpublished, nd

Van Straten, Frank, Tivoli, Thomas C. Lothian, Melbourne, 2003

――, Florence Young and the Golden Years of Australian Musical Theatre, Beleura, Mornington, 2009

――, ‘Fabulous Florrie Forde’, Stage Whispers, Fabulous Florrie Forde | Stage Whispers, 2013

Wilmut, Roger, Kindly Leave the Stage: The Story of Variety 1919–1960, Methuen, London, 1985

Woollacott, Angela, To Try Her Fortune in London: Australian Women, Colonialism and Modernity, Oxford University Press, New York, 2001

Acknowledgements

Thanks (for help of various kinds) to Christine Davies and colleagues (Templeman Library, University of Kent), Elisabeth Kumm, Tony Locantro, Tony Martin-Jones, Penelope Upward, Sophie Wilson

Harry Rickards, c.1895. Photo by Talma, Melbourne. State Library of New South Wales, Sydney.On Christmas Eve 1896, George Adams opened his little vaudeville theatre in Pitt Street, Sydney, amongst much fanfare. ‘With regard to decorations, the theatre has no equal in Australia, and possibly it is superior to any building of its kind in London’, wrote one paper. Scenic artist Phil Goatcher, who designed the auditorium in a spectacular Indian style, was also the first lessee. But lack of experience as a theatre manager and arguments and law suits with his business partner, spelled disaster for the enterprise. ‘For a few nights it drew large audiences, and then a bit of a frost set in.’¹

After only six weeks, Goatcher’s lesseeship of the Palace Theatre came to an abrupt end. George Adams turned to Harry Rickards, striking a three-year lease with Australia’s undisputed King of Vaudeville. For Rickards this was an opportunity to secure a monopoly in this class of business, look at expanding his empire, and at the same time fend off any competition. But could Sydney support two variety theatres?

Without any interruption to programming, Goatcher’s company made their final appearance on 29 January 1897, and the following evening, Harry Rickards’ company took over the stage, with Rickards’ brother John C. Leete as General Manager.

While a couple of Goatcher performers joined the ranks of the new company, most were drawn from Rickards other theatres, the Sydney Tivoli and Melbourne Opera House.

Grand Opening Night on Saturday, 30 January 1897, was a great success and boded well for the new venture. ‘Mr Harry Rickards has reason to feel satisfied with the result of his initial performance at this bright little playhouse on Saturday night’, wrote the Evening News. ‘From a financial as well as artistic standpoint it was a gratifying success.’²

Carl Hertz, c.1897

Falk Album, Theatre Heritage Australia, Falk 075/8

Florrie Forde, c.1897

Gordon Ireland Album, State Library Victoria, Melbourne

The line up boasted a number of popular artists, seen before at the Tivoli, including American illusionist Carl Hertz, supported by his wife Mdlle D’Alton, and champion whistler Frank Lawton in his ‘The Whistling Waiter’ sketch. Other artists were Australian serio-comic Florrie Forde (singing ‘Oh Harris, Ain’t it Nice in Paris’ and ‘I am an Innocent Dickie Bird’); grotesque dancers and acrobats The Three Delevines; American sketch duo Albert Bellman and Lottie Moore; mandolin artists, the Winterton Sisters; child serio-comic and dancer Little Alma Gray; and Ada Colley, the Australian Canary. Of the newcomers, there was Edgar Granville, an English character comedian who delighted audiences with several songs, including ‘I Haven’t Got it Out Yet’ and ‘This Life is But a Derby’, and ‘Tiddle-ee-wink, what d’ye Think of Me’, which he sang, dressed in widow’s weeds!

Three weeks later, armed with photos of his new theatre, Rickards left for England and Europe to recruit enough new talent to fill the bills at his three theatres.

Vaudevillian all-rounder Will Crackles, c.1897

Gordon Ireland Album, State Library Victoria, Melbourne

C.H. Chirgwin, aka ‘The White-Eyed Musical Kaffir’, c.1897

Gordon Ireland Album, State Library Victoria, Melbourne

Over the next three months, the programme at the Palace changed, with new artists joining the bill. From England came vaudevillian all-rounder Will Crackles; C.H. Chirgwin (‘The White-Eyed Musical Kaffir’); serio-comic and dancer, Jessie De Grey; and comedian Harry Shine. Among the locals there was soprano Florrie Esdaile; dancers Lucy Cobb and Millie Osborne; and ‘the clever contralto’ Hettie Patey.

The vaudeville season closed on 3 April 1897 ‘pending the new engagements now being made by Mr Rickards in Europe and America’.³

While waiting for his brother to return with the new artists, John C. Leete oversaw a varied programme of entertainment at the Palace. From 17–30 April 1897, star violinist Ovide Musin gave a series of concerts, and from 1 May, John Gourlay and Percy St John’s Musical Comedy Company presented a short season of plays, including Gourlay’s musical farcical comedy Skipped by the Light of the Moon. With the conclusion of the Gourlay season on 29 May, the Palace closed, and remained so until Rickards’ return from overseas in August 1897.

Rickards’ plan was to run the Palace along new lines from the Tivoli, with completely different entertainments at his two Sydney theatres. During the break, the Palace stage was enlarged by six feet to accommodate some of the new acts.

Among the novelties secured by Rickards was the Biograph—an early motion picture projector—billed as the ‘very latest and most wonderful invention’ and the ‘marvel of the Nineteenth Century’. Rickards was said to have paid £3,000 to secure the sole Australian rights for six months. In an interview, he described it as being ‘a great advance upon Lumière’s Cinematographe’, which Carl Hertz had introduced to Tivoli audiences in 1896.⁴

Made and operated by the American Biograph Company, the projector was the invention of Herman Casler (1867-1939). Unlike Edison’s Kinetograph, which used 35 mm gauge film, Casler’s Biograph employed 68/70 mm sprocket-less film which produced an exceptionally large and clear image. From September 1896 it was being presented at vaudeville houses in America, and in March 1897 it was included on the bill at the Palace Theatre of Varieties in London for the first time. It would remain an attraction at the London Palace until 1902.

Rickards’ Biograph-Vaudeville Company re-opened the Palace on Monday, 23 August 1897. The first night programme comprised twelve short films including ‘President McKinley Receiving the Result of His Election, ‘Union Square New York, ‘The Falls of Niagara’ and ‘The Horseless Fire Engine’. This last named film, which showed a New York fire engine ‘snorting out volumes of smoke and raising clouds of dust’ as it races off to a extinguish a fire, was one of the most popular and repeated on subsequent nights by popular demand.⁵

Sheet music for ‘The Little Tin Gee-Gee’, one of the songs introduced at the Palace by Fanny Wentworth in 1897

National Library of Australia, Canberra

Fannie Liddiard, c.1897

Gordon Ireland Album, State Library Victoria, Melbourne

The Biograph was just one of the highlights of a packed programme. Opening night also saw the first Australian appearance of Fanny Wentworth, an English pianist, vocalist and character entertainer, who introduced the song ‘The Little Tin Gee-Gee’; the return of Lilian Tree, an operatic prima donna, who had previously been seen in Australia with the Simonsen Opera Company; Master Arthur Sherwood, a boy mezzo-soprano; illusionist Professor Charles Marritt; and Australian popular favourite, operatic and character vocalist Fanny Liddiard. The Biograph-Vaudeville combination ran until 30 September 1897.

Scene from A Bunch of Keys, 1897, with Addie Conyers centre right. Stereo glass plate negative by an unknown photographer.

Museum of Applied Arts & Sciences, Sydney

A season of American musical comedies by Charles H. Hoyt followed on 2 October with A Bunch of Keys, featuring another of Rickards’ recent acquisitions, Addie Conyers, supported by Fannie Liddiard, Lottie Moore, Albert Bellman and George Lauri. This was not Conyers first Australian appearance, she had been seen in 1892–93 as a member of the London Gaiety Burlesque Company.

Binks the Photographer followed on 20 October, with William Gourlay, Addie Conyers, Minnie Everett, Marietta Nash and George Lauri, but it lasted only a week. It seems American plays were not a popular choice and audiences stayed away. The musical comedy season came to an abrupt end on 26 November 1897—and with it, Harry Rickards’ lease on the Palace.

With audience numbers at the Tivoli in decline, Rickards soon realised that Sydney couldn’t profitably support two vaudeville houses. He reluctantly decided, after eleven months, to give up his lease on the Palace and devote his energies to the management of the Tivoli and the Opera House in Melbourne.

With Rickards’ early departure, George Adams’ representative Harrie Skinner was given the task of finding a suitable tenant for the theatre, and soon communications were being issued to leading English, American and European agents and managers.

In order to keep the ‘lights on’ between seasons, the theatre was made available to amateur groups such as the Lotus Club and Sydney Comedy Club.

Oscar Eliason aka Dante the Great, c.1898

Gordon Ireland Album, State Library Victoria, Melbourne

‘Dante the Great’ poster, 1898

Will Alma Conjuring Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne

From 8 October 1898–9 December 1898, the theatre played host to an extended season by the 29-year-old American magician Dante the Great, who was making his first appearance in Australia. Hailed as ‘the greatest magician living’, Dante lived up to the hype and enthralled audiences with his ‘original experiments in sleight-of-hand’. He also performed a number of elaborate tricks including ‘The Marvellous Bicyclist’, wherein his assistant Mdlle Edmunda (the stage name of his wife Virginia Eliason] ‘cycles through the air, upside down, in and out, backwards and forwards, in complete defiance of all the laws of gravitation’. In another trick, ‘The Beggar’s Dream’, Mdlle Edmunda, wearing rags, is placed under a canopy on a platform, and almost immediately her rags vanish and she is wearing a magnificent evening dress. Dante kept audiences spellbound for two months.⁶

Skinner’s next big coup was the engagement of Orpheus Myron McAdoo, an American singer and minstrel impresario, who was making a return visit to Australia.

McAdoo was a big draw card, having cemented a position as a favourite with Australian concert-goers since his first trip in 1888 with Fisk’s Jubilee Singers. He made a second extended visit with Fisk’s company in 1892 and remained on until 1895 with his own company, McAdoo’s Jubilee Singers. McAdoo had a deep voice, described as an ‘A-flat basso profundo’.

Orpheus Myron McAdoo, c.1898. Photo by Talma, Melbourne.

Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University Library, New Haven, USA

‘An Evening with the Jubilee Singers’ by Bert Levy

Sydney Mail, 21 January 1899, p.151

McAdoo’s Jubilee Singers, during the 1890s. McAdoo is in the back row, second from left, with Mattie Allen McAdoo on his right. Photo by Talma, Melbourne.

National Library of Australia, Canberra.

Flashlight photograph of a scene from The Sea Nymphs, an operetta performed by the Lands Department Draftsmen’s Association on 10 May 1899

State Library of New South Wales, Sydney

The McAdoo company opened at the Palace on Saturday, 17 December 1898, for an initial three weeks, but ended up staying for two-months. The company specialised in singing plantation songs, jubilee choruses and glees. Favourite songs included ‘Steal Away to Jesus’, ‘The Lord’s Prayer’ and ‘Hear Dem Bells’. In addition to McAdoo, the principal members of the company were Mattie Allan McAdoo (Mrs McAdoo), billed as ‘the only lady tenor’—her rendition of ‘Come into the Garden, Maude’ was warmly encored; and Susie B. Anderson—described as ‘America’s Black Melba’—who sang the ‘Queen of the Night’ aria from The Magic Flute.

The current season ended on 28 January 1899 and in March 1899, McAdoo departed for America to organise a full-size African-American minstrel troupe. He placed recruitment advertisements in the Indianapolis Freeman informing prospective artistes: ‘The Palace Theatre, Sidney [sic], is the handsomest and most complete vaudeville house in the world.’⁷

During McAdoo’s absence, the Lands Department Draftsmen's Association gave a performance of Farnie and Lecocq’s operetta The Sea Nymphs on Friday, 10 May 1899. The following night, Dante returned for a four-week season (11 March 1899–8 April 1899), bringing with him a raft of new illusionistic wonders.

In June 1899, McAdoo returned with his new company, the Georgia Minstrels and Alabama Cakewalkers. They opened at the Palace on the seventeenth of the month. The first part of the entertainment resembled an ordinary minstrel show, ‘but the numbers introduced were greatly above those in the usual minstrel show’, including comic songs and dances. One of his leading recruits was the singer Flora Batson, known as the ‘coloured Jenny Lind’. Another was William Ferry, a rubber-boned performer known as ‘The Human Frog’. The second part of the bill introduced the ‘Cakewalk’, which saw the complete company strutting about the stage amid ‘rousing roars of laughter’ from the audience.⁸

Two weeks into the season, a rival minstrel company opened at the nearby Criterion Theatre. The presence of two similar outfits in Sydney proved challenging for McAdoo, and after struggling on for a further fortnight, he closed his season at the Palace on 12 July 1899 and embarked on an extended tour of the regions.

Programme for the week commencing 28 October 1899. Richards’ recycled the front covers of his Tivoli programmes for his shows at the Palace.

Mitchell Library Performance Program Collection, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney

Programme for the week commencing 28 October 1899. The reverse side of the programme is headed Palace Theatre and lists the acts.

Mitchell Library Performance Program Collection, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney

In the early hours of Monday morning on 11 September 1899, fire broke out in Harry Rickards’ Tivoli Theatre in Castlereagh Street. The building was entirely gutted, destroying valuable sets, costumes and personal belongings. Rickards had only recently purchased the freehold of the building, having leased it since 1893. Fortunately the theatre was insured, but only for half its value. Though Rickards was in England at the time of the fire securing new acts, manager Leete lost no time in finding a new venue and the following day the company re-opened at the nearby Palace at a matinee performance. As one journalist put it:

The pretty little Palace Theatre—one of George Adams’ white elephants—will now have a chance to return the owner some interest on the outlay in its construction and elaborate decoration, which was carried out on a scale that no one but a ‘sweep promoter’ could stand.⁹

Rickards’ company remained at the Palace for five months, while the Tivoli Theatre was being rebuilt. To save costs, they reused the Tivoli programme covers.

Pages from a scrapbook showing Palace Theatre programmes from 1899

Author’s collection

Pages from a scrapbook showing Palace and Tivoli theatre programmes from 1899

Author’s collection

Little Alma Gray, c.1899. Photo by Talma, Melbourne.

Gordon Ireland Album, State Library Victoria, Melbourne

Polish juggler Paul Cinquevalli, c.1900. Photo by London Stereoscopic.

National Portrait Gallery, London

Artists who appeared at the Palace at this time included the London comedian and raconteur G.W. Hunter; the world renown Polish juggler Paul Cinquevalli (said to be one of the highest-paid entertainers ever engaged by Rickards); opera singer Signor Jesse Brandani (who interrupted his walking tour of the world to appear for a few nights); character vocalist Tom Costello; and the Russian specialty performers the Newsky Family; along with numerous old favourites such as Little Alma Gray.

The Tivoli company gave their last performance at the Palace on 19 January 1900. As the new Tivoli was still not complete, Rickards relocated his company to the Criterion Theatre pending the launch of his new variety theatre on 12 April 1900.

With Rickards out of the way, Adams had big plans for the Palace.

To be continued

Endnotes

1. Clarence and Richmond Examiner (Grafton, NSW), 6 April 1897, p.4.

2. Evening News (Sydney), 1 February 1897, p.3.

3. Daily Telegraph (Sydney), 5 April 1897, p.6.

4. Daily Telegraph (Sydney), 17 August 1897, p.6.

5. Sydney Morning Herald, 30 August 1897, p.3.

6. Daily Telegraph (Sydney), 10 October 1898, p.9.

7. Bill Egan, African American Entertainers in Australia and New Zealand, p.72.

8. Sydney Morning Herald, 19 June 1899, p.8.

9. Kalgoorlie Western Argus, 5 October 1899, p.24.

References

Gae Anderson, Tivoli King: Life of Harry Rickards, Vaudeville Showman, Sid Harta Publishing, Glen Waverley, Vic, 2008.

Bill Egan, African American Entertainers in Australia and New Zealand: A history, 1788-1941, McFarland & Company, Jefferson, North Carolina, 2019.

Frank Van Straten, Tivoli, Thomas C. Lothian, South Melbourne, Vic, 2003.

Charles Waller, Magical Nights at the Theatre, Gerald Taylor Productions, Melbourne, 1980.

Newspapers

Australian Town and Country Journal (Sydney, NSW); Clarence and Richmond Examiner (Grafton, NSW), Daily Telegraph (Sydney, NSW); Evening News (Sydney, NSW); Kalgoorlie WesternArgus (WA), Sydney Morning Herald (NSW); Table Talk (Melbourne, Vic)

Acknowledgements

John S. Clark, Mimi Colligan, Bill Egan, Frank Van Straten