Look upon this picture...

...which effectively is about all I've been doing for the last two weeks.  Whenever I THINK I'm getting somewhere, the more I wonder and need to know about. 

So far, I think I've identified about half of the people on the photograph but it isn't a very exact science, using the very small amount of pictorial evidence available, much of it from twenty or so years later.  (I'm also not brilliant with faces: something to do with being very short sighted, I think.)  People can change a lot in twenty years. Oscar Asche is unmistakable.  Marion Terry looks so much like Ellen, her more famous sister, that there's little doubt who she is either.  

Other photographs from different sources have helped a little: there's a photo in Trewin's book which seems to have come via Elisabeth Kirby.  ALthough she dates it as 1895, it was clearly taken on the same day as the V&A photograph because the subjects are wearing identical clothes, standing beside the Gower statue. It  helped to confirm the identities of Nicholson, Clarence, Harcourt Williams and Garnet Holme.   Cast lists have given me names to search, but Google isn't always able to find images which aren't of performers in a role: for example, about the only picture I can find of H.R. Hignett is not much use at all in identifying him in 'every day life'!

The most frustrating thing has been coming across other brilliant photos which aren't actually correctly labelled, either with the source, or the people on them!  For example, there's a fabulous photo of the Benson football team in 'Victorian Stratford upon Avon in Old Photographs' but it is simply dated '1890s' and the only people named are Benson, Constance Benson, Oscar Asche, O.B Clarence (wrongly 'O.P') and Richmond, Benson's valet.  Some of the faces are recognisable from the V&A photo - Asche, Nicholson and Clarence are easy enough to recognise, but others are much less so I am certain that Hignett is also on  the photo  - but then again,  I can't be sure which of three people is him - he's hard to recognise without all the fake hair!

However, during my hunting some interesting stories have started to emerge to fill in the background of these names and I am definitely going to feature some of them here.  Most interesting from a local perspective is an actor called Edwin Ling who moved to Sunderland because of its connection with Henry Irving and was very vocal in trying to get a permanent memorial in the town to commemorate the actor's first professional performance.  He played Irving on stage in the 1920s and toured in Shakespeare with Henry Baynton's company until his death in 1930.  I'm pretty sure he died in Sunderland and I'm now trying to track down details of his burial. I feel it would be rather nice to have a Bensonian in the town!  

My final 'breakthrough' this week was the discovery that Nora Nicholson - sister to Hubert Nicholson and a member of the Benson Company from 1912 - had written an autobiography - 'Chameleon's Dish'. A second hand copy is on its way here and I am very anxious to read it! Nora Nicholson became better known in the 1960s and 70s because of her television work - most notably in The Forsyte Saga where she played Aunt Juley, but she began her career with Benson, playing Puck and Anne Ford amongst other roles. Even as an elderly woman, her smile is almost identical to her elder brother's.

Now am I in Arden, the more fool I...

For 'Arden' read 'Stratford upon Avon.' Yes, mentally, I'm there again and have been for a couple of hours already this evening.  Monday nights have become sacred to Benson searching and this evening I decided to tackle the long over-due problem of making sense of the Stratford performances.  You'd think, given the significance of Stratford to Benson (and the significance of Benson to Stratford) that this would be relatively easy, but for several reasons a complete record of the Bensons' performances has been frustrating me.

One reason for this is the result of a book - more accurately two books - published in the early 1980s - "Theatre at Stratford-Upon-Avon: Set. a Catalogue-Index to Productions of the Shakespeare Memorial/Royal Shakespeare Theatre, 1879-1978" by Michael Mullen and Karen Morris Muriello who used early computer technology to create a digital index of the productions held by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Archives. I stumbled across a reasonably-priced second hand copy on ebay when I was beginning my research over ten years ago and it has proved invaluable, if not entirely infallible. Despite my best attempts at using it to fill in the rep, there remained several noticeable gaps, particularly around the war years of 1914 -1918.

So tonight I rolled up my (hypothetical) sleeves and used the British Library Newspaper Archive and the Stratford upon Avon Herald, which provided detailed listings for most of the Festival performances, with the notable exception of 1913, which is still proving difficult to complete.

A couple of other things have come to light this week as well. The first is a photograph of actors from Benson's Company in 1916, taken - unusually - at what was at that time the BACK of the Memorial Theatre - corresponding to the current FRONT of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. The building which is now the Costume Department is also clearly visible in the background, as are several of the Waterside cottages.

James Dale (Pistol) Leah Hanman (Boy) Rose Edouin (Hostess/Mistress Quickly) W.H. Quinton (Bardolph) and H. O. Nicholson (Nym) The photograph comes from The Sphere April 29th 1916 and is part of an article about the Tercentenary celebrations. File:Shakespeare's Tercentenary The Benson Company 1916 cropped.jpg - Wikimedia Commons



The second photograph that popped up this week comes from the V&A archives and is a picture taken by Sir Benjamin Stone, showing the theatrical company with noted local persons in 1900. Shakespeare Festival, Stratford-upon-Avon, 1900 | Stone, Benjamin (Sir) | V&A Explore The Collections (vam.ac.uk)

This is particularly interesting because this is the year Benson stayed in London, trying to revive his post -fire fortunes with a flagging Lyceum season , and instead sent a representative group headed by Oscar Asche to perform that year's birthday play, which was Pericles. The production was, by all accounts, a disastrous one, the play having been virtually rewritten by the veteran actor John Coleman. Running at 3 1/2 hours in length, Coleman had replaced the 'unsavoury' elements in the play with his own words, and at over 70 he was stretching everyone's imagination as the young Prince of Tyre. Trewin's account is largely based on Oscar Asche's book - the review in the Stratford upon Avon Herald is about as damning as is it possible to be!

In the photo, Asche can be clearly seen in the back row, to the right of the doorway - on the far left of this picture.  After a bit of digging, I've identified the two men next to him as H. Asherton Tonge and H.O. Nicholson.

And at the left edge of the photograph I spotted another interesting face...

Is that perhaps Dick the Shakespearean Dog as a puppy??! It certainly looks like him - or a predecessor.  I'm pretty sure the dog-wrangler is Garnet Holme (who is such an interesting person he probably needs a post to himself at some point!)  Again, this was taken at the back of the theatre - the current front.  A few years ago the RSC posted this photo on Facebook which gives a clear indication of where the photo was set up.

I'm now working to try and identify the rest of the company and when I get a bit further, I'll add a key to the photograph.  There are some very characterful faces here - what a fabulous photograph.  It makes me wonder if there are other group photos like this from other seasons and where they might be...

Finally, a bizarre clipping from the Stratford upon Avon Herald on 28th August 1914, a few weeks after the outbreak of war. This was on the same page as the listings for the final week of the 1914 Summer Festival, which had been somewhat more muted than anticipated as a result of the declaration of war on 4th August.

Shakespeare Summer Season, Under The Direction Of Mr. F. R. Benson. Memorial Theatre, Stratford-Upon-Avon, August Ist To August 20th, 1914 | Stratford-Upon-Avon Herald | Friday 28 August 1914 | British Newspaper Archive

This gave me a bit of a 'WarHorse' moment - clearly the Brigade's usual horses were heading to the Front, but it does seem a bit extreme to expect the victims of fire to provide their own horses if they want the fire extinguishing! Just one of those lovely bits of social history that brings the events of 110 years ago a little closer.  

"...where men have read/ His fame unparalleled..."

In researching late Victorian and Edwardian Shakespeare, it sometimes feels as if all roads lead inevitably to the Lyceum Theatre on the Strand in London.  There's no escaping Sir Henry Irving: he is a figure that dwarfs the rest of the theatre world, someone whose name still resonates when others are lost to history.  And this week, I've been aware of his giant shadow on the periphery of both my reading and writing.  

Laurence Irving, the actor's grandson, wrote the definitive Irving biography which weighs in at over 700 pages.  He also wrote two books about Irving's sons, the first of which - The Successors - I've just devoured in two days, and which has left me greedy for more.  Fortunately, I already have his later book The Precarious Crust on my bookshelf where it has sat patiently since 2000 waiting for me to realise the truth that, without some understanding of Irving there can be no explanation of Benson.

Laurence Irving is actually very positive about Benson, which is refreshing, (particularly considering that his uncle's experience with the company may well have contributed to a suicide attempt whilst in Ireland on tour). He also provides a useful comparison between the Benson Company and that of Ben Greet who was touring a similar circuit with the same kinds of plays - Shakespeare and 'Old English Comedies' like School for Scandal, making the point that these provincial companies effectively replaced the stock theatre companies which had been the training route for actors of Sir Henry's generation.  Extracts from letters sent to and from the Irvings and Dorothea Baird who would become H.B. Irving's wife, give a real flavour of life on the road.

My home town of Sunderland has the claim to fame of being the place where Sir Henry Irving first performed and, through reading The Successors, I've found out that H.B. also first played Hamlet here with Greet's company, a performance I'm planning to track down in the local paper.  

Both the Royal Lyceum and the Theatre Royal are long gone, but there is a little bit of Irving history in the entrance to the Winter Gardens, Museum and Art Gallery, in the form of a plaque which was unveiled by that other great provincial tourer, Sir John Martin-Harvey in 1925.  In fact, a snippet of newreel footage still exists of that plaque being unveiled. Sir John Martin Harvey (1925) (youtube.com)

Benson was sometimes referred to as 'The Irving of the Provinces' and initially he made the most of his short experience of working at the Lyceum in his advertising.  Irving would come to Benson's aid after the Newcastle fire, having himself suffered a similar disaster which consumed his stock of costumes and sets, stored in railway arches which caught fire.  And both Irving and Benson would end their careers in Bradford - Irving collapsed and died at the Midland Hotel after a performance on stage in 1904. Benson was knocked down by a cyclist after stepping out of the stage door and he struck his head on a lamp post.  He would not act again.

Laurence Irving's writing is vibrant and all-engrossing - the family's history reads like a theatrical version of The Forsyte Saga and I can't help feeling it would make a fabulous TV series!  

O, call back yesterday – bid time return!

 

A Hamlet's-eye view of Autumn just starting in Stratford

I have been back from Stratford for a week and I'm only now getting a chance to sort out my notes, my second hand book purchases and my photographs from five nights staying in the cottage I like to pretend is my second home.  I'm struggling to get my head round the fact that my greatly anticipated September visit is past and gone already! It was the availability of the cottage that made me decide in July that I needed to make another visit.  The fact that the dates available included the last weekend of the summer holidays enabled me to shoe-horn four performances into four nights, gave me a chance to see As You Like It in the outdoor Garden Theatre and also take in a talk by Simon Russell-Beale in conversation with Greg Doran on the Sunday evening.

Sunday's performance was the final one for the Garden Theatre - it was fascinating watching it being dismantled on Monday! - and there was some doubt as to whether the weather would mean it was cancelled: as an entirely metal structure, thunder storms present a particular hazard! We were late starting but the atmosphere was fabulous and the 'edited' 90 minute text managed to squeeze in all the significant lines.  There was something particularly wonderful about being in that space, just feet away from the doorway where Henry Ainley was photographed as Orlando c.1910 - the photograph that started the Bensonian obsession for me!

 I'd requested some material for the Monday and Tuesday openings at the Birthplace Reading Room to make up for missing out in February, delving into the minutes of the Company after 1911, with a particular focus on the build up to the American tour.  It was fascinating - if rather sad - to observe Benson gradually losing control of his company after the Memorial Theatre stepped in to try and deal with the vast amount of debt he'd built up.  

As always, I kept my eyes open for Bensoniana around Stratford and found this addition to The Greenwood Tree in the Great Garden of New Place, which I had not seen the last time I had been there - evidence that there are other Merry Shrews out there! An entirely appropriate epithet, I think!

The theatre's exhibition space had changed some of its exhibits since the last time I visited it and this time, the Benson cabinet displayed Constance Benson's outfit as Mistress Ford.  At close view, it appears to be made from very heavy wool - almost blanket-weight - fabric, which moths had clearly had some fun nibbling on over the years, as it was patched in several places.  The lack of embellishment on this fitted with the studio portrait from Dublin and the photograph from The Tatler in 1902 which showed the Laundry Basket scene:

It was suggested by the label that this was one of the costumes borrowed, possibly from Irving, after the Newcastle Theatre Royal fire.  Merry Wives of Windsor was one of this summer's plays as was The School for Scandal, both, of course, regularly played on tour by all of the Benson companies.  Both were fabulous - performed by largely the same cast - as was Pericles - a play which I saw at the Globe some years ago and really didn't enjoy much.  This production had, admittedly, had some quite creative editing - doubling Gower and Marina was inspired - and was very simply but effectively staged in The Swan, with an exceptional central performance from Alfred Enoch.  It is still a flawed play but it did polish up well!  I was very impressed by what I saw of the RSC's season and the whole place seems to have a renewed sense of energy and purpose.

Stratford was as lovely as ever, although last year's heatwave was replaced by some very humid and then showery weather which felt much more autumn-like than I'd been expecting.  I am so grateful for these short 'escapes' to Stratford and the chance to indulge my obsession! Having the cottage so close to hand is incredible and having somewhere to come back to at the end of the day where I can type up my notes in comfort, prepare my own food and basically please myself is an absolute godsend.  Fingers crossed that 2025 provides at least one opportunity to do it all again.

Sunflowers I bought to celebrate being back in Stratford in September!

It is a purposed thing, and grows by plot...

Well, that's what I keep telling myself about the behemoth of ten years intermittent research into the Benson repertory! I'm more or less stuck at the moment on 83% complete which is about as much as I've been able to squeeze from the wonderful British Library Newspaper Archive.  So... what do I do with it? It has to be accessible or it remains a vanity project

My current thinking is that the data could be cloud-hosted as a Google sheets document both here and on another blog site just for the data - without all my bletherings attached! In order to do this, however, I have to do some serious work at standardising the data and making sure there are as few human errors as possible. I started this only intending to document the North East visits of the companies to inform my Masters' dissertation and so the early entries are inconsistent and I've used some annotations that even I don't really understand.  Then there's a lack of consistency in the inputting of play titles and even in the recording of midweek matinees, not to mention the erratic nature of some of my late-night spelling: Juliet Caesar isn't a play anyone really wants to see...!  I'm burning the midnight oil each night, trying to get this part right so that I can try to migrate the data across in order to publish the 'work in progress' database by the end of this month.  I can then keep it updated and hopefully-eventually - reach a 90% complete point, which would feel like a huge achievement.

I still want to write about Benson but, to do that, I need more information. So, in September I head Stratford-wards again for another couple of days of Reading Room exploration.  The scholarship money is much depleted now, but a nice cheque from the Tax Office has given me the excuse to book 'my' lovely cottage again, just for four nights this time, and to buy tickets to see As You Like It in the outdoor theatre, School for Scandal, Pericles and Merry Wives.  When I come home, I will start the writing...  I will, honestly!

The quote is Coriolanus and this is Benson AS Coriolanus:

The map of days outworn...

Today marks ten years since I graduated from the Shakespeare Institute and - inevitably - that fact has led to not a little soul searching.  Ten years on, and the performance database remains incomplete and I'm having to accept that some of the 560 or so remaining entries will never be filled.  The jubilation of tracking down an elusive visit to some Corn Exchange or Civic Hall is often over-balanced by the sense of  frustration when there is no mention in the local press of any theatrical activity. 

Feeling frustrated with my inability to complete the task I'd set myself, I wondered if there was actually anything useful I could do with the material I did have.  After all, although I might not have the rep for every visit, I am reasonably sure that I've managed to place the companies for around 99% of the time they were on the road.  After the Tyne Theatre conference in September, I'd wondered about the feasibility of creating a map to track the progress of each company and yesterday, I finally bit the bullet and started on it.  Using Google maps, I added a marker for every place a Benson company visited, creating an individual 'layer' for each company so that it is easy to see the spread of each company and the overlap.  I've also started to add notes about the dates played at each location and intend to include some information about the venue as well.

Google maps store any changes I make to the cloud and I can also share the information easily through this link Benson Companies Touring Map and can, should I wish to do so, ultimately make it visible to google searching. 

Immediately, the visual impact of this task was incredibly useful: places which had been little more than names suddenly had an actual geographic location. The concentration of the South/C/London company in the Southern part of Wales - at this time, the mining centre of the country - and the heavy concentration of the Principal company around the outskirts of London are both really noticeable.

The markers helped to not only show where the companies had been, but also to highlight where they hadn't.  For example, looking at the North Yorkshire area I was surprised to realise that reasonably big market towns such as Richmond, Thirsk and Pickering were not on the South Company's tours at all.  This cannot have been because of difficulty of transport ( as was clearly the case in the Northwest of Scotland or the centre of Wales) as a rail infrastructure was there.  

Equally, towns like Doncaster and Swindon, which might reasonably have expected visits from the North or Principal companies, do not appear to have any visits at all (and both were notable 'railway towns' in the late 19th and early 20th centuries).  Either I am missing key touring dates to some of these places, or the data speaks for itself.

I had never before thought about what might be missing from the touring schedule of the companies, assuming the four corners of the country had been equally covered when in fact there is a real imbalance, a favouring of the east coast of Scotland over the west, the midlands and the south over the north and west of England and very little attempt at venturing beyond the major towns in Ireland.

Some places have multiple tags and appear for two, three or even four companies - often beginning with the Principal company and then receiving visits from the North (B) company and latterly the South (C), London or Midland Companies before being revisited by FRB as part of his post 1920 touring under the 'Bensonian' or H.V. Neilson.

Clearly there are questions which need to be answered about the touring circuits Benson companies followed and it would be interesting to know if any of the equivalent companies 'on the road' at around the same time (Martin-Harvey, Calvert etc) visited similar places.

As always, the more I think I know, the more there is to find out...!

Benson as Shylock c.1900

Shakespeare Day 2024

It's Shakespeare's Birthday - always a happy day for any Merry Shrew.  Since I last posted here, I've sneaked in a further visit to Stratford for the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust's 'Winter School', taking in a wonderful performance of 'The Merchant of Venice:1936' and a gloriously silly Midsummer Night's Dream, which was so good, I went back to see it again the next night from the 'cheap seats'. 

Unfortunately, I was recovering (slowly) from a really unpleasant chest infection and so I made the decision to skip the Reading Room this time: I wouldn't have liked to be in the same space as someone coughing as much as I was.  

The weather was largely rainy and cold - it was February after all - and Stratford seemed a little lack-lustre. The Shakespeare Hotel was closed 'for extensive renovation' although no work at all appeared to be going on as far as I could see, and New Place was closed for the winter as well, (although the lack of foliage did mean I could peep through the gates to check on the tree!) 

I'd had such good intentions in September, but the best laid schemes had been plotted without the family emergency that took over most of November and December and is still causing issues now with time and space.  It means that a lot of what I'd planned to do just hasn't happened, and I'm sometimes a bit frustrated.  During my September visit, I'd had thoughts that seemed to point the way I ought to go but then life got in the way.

However, the data base is always there and I've really put a lot of effort since I came back from Stratford into trying to break through the last barriers around the North, South and Midland Companies.  Despite all the wonderful stuff on the British Library website, finding this last 23% of entries is proving a challenge.  I'm getting results, but there are still huge holes to fill.  Yesterday and today I managed to fill in enough to make the total complete 80%.  It feels like something of an achievement but it has been hard fought for!

To celebrate, tomorrow I'm heading into Newcastle to the Tyneside Cinema to see the John Singer Sargent exhibition 'on screen': its actually on at the Tate in London and it is exactly the sort of exhibition which - only a few months ago - I'd have been dashing down to see.  As it is, this is the best compromise.  I won't, of course, be able to linger in front of the Ellen Terry Lady Macbeth dress the way I'd have done 'in real life' but it is better than nothing!

My second hand book hunting took me to Sedbergh a couple of weeks ago where I picked up an old  book about Stratford and a book of theatrical memoirs by Sidney Blow 'The Ghost walks on Fridays'. Blow was a young actor at the turn of the century who married Hilda Trevallyan , the actress who originated the role of Wendy in Peter Pan.  It's very gossipy and flits about from story to story, but the highlight so far has been a wonderfully catty account by Irene Vanbrugh of rehearsing at His Majesty's with Ellen Terry. written as a playscript.  There's lots of period detail of theatres in London and New York at the time the Bensons were touring and it's a very easy read.  

Tonight, no proper Shakespeare for me but there will be cake.  Happy Birthday, Mr Shakespeare!