When Icicles Hang By The Wall

My, but it was SO cold in Stratford last week...

My Christmas present to myself was one night away to see Twelfth Night at the RST.  It was one of my favourite plays - perhaps only eclipsed by Midsummer Night's Dream in my affections - and I had been desperate to see it.  As it happened, I could not have chosen a better way to start 2025.

That's Newcastle Castle in the background...

Leaving home before 7am to catch a bus to Newcastle, however, I wondered if I was being entirely sensible.  My phone suggested that although it was -3 C it FELT like -12 C and although I had six - yes SIX - layers of clothing on, I was still cold.  Transport was reliable, for once, and I was in Stratford by just after 1.30pm, managed to thaw out at the theatre and then checked into the Premier Inn which is very close by - a lovely room which I'd got at a very good rate, it being midweek, midwinter and term time.

I was booked on a Costume Tour at 3.30 which I was really excited about and which absolutely lived up to expectation.  The improved Costume department headquarters are very impressive and it was lovely to see work in progress as we were taken through each of the departments by our knowledgeable and very enthusiastic guide, Josh.  The highlight, undoubtably, was the chance to wander through the costume racks - as a costume geek, I was in heaven.  (Apparently there are also two other similar floors and some 'historically significant' costumes are stored in archival conditions off-site!) I admit to a pang or two of envy at those working there and a desire to rifle through some of the costumes to see if there were any I recognised...  

Being able to meet up with my friends from University for tea afterwards was also lovely - they'd already been to see Twelfth Night so gave me a hint of what to expect.  I'd booked a 'partially restricted view' seat in the Stalls which was actually excellent - at a fraction of what the person sitting next to me had paid, I don't think I actually missed anything.  And as performances go, it was one of the best I've seen and the music was wonderful. (Actually, I've never seen a poor production of Twelfth Night - I think there's a bit of magic in it!)

I couldn't actually see what the camera was taking when I framed this: the sun was so bright.

I woke up with a bad migraine on Thursday morning, brought on possible by the extreme cold and air pressure issues. My usual remedy of Paracetamol, flat Coca Cola and '4head' applied, I was determined to try and make the best of it and after coffee and food (Huffkins' breakfast bun!) I did feel much better. By Thursday morning the waters of the Avon, which had burst their banks on Tuesday, had subsided and so I was able to do my usual walk, along past the church, over the bridge and back along the recreation ground side.  It was icy and muddy and a bit tricky in places, but very peaceful and a glorious day, despite the cold. The canal basin was frozen - the second time I've been here when that's happened.

A quick visit to the exhibition -  just to see the Benson windows really - and then back to the station, to Birmingham and home. I'd been in Stratford exactly 24 hours - enough time to top up the batteries and touch base.  It is never enough, however long I'm there, and I'd really seen and done everything I could in the time.

Why do I love it so? Our friend Jacqueline maintains my heart and soul have long resided there and I just have to follow them sometimes! I am so grateful to be able to take off like this and have the resources and time to indulge what is more than a passion now - it is an essential. I probably won't get back until the end of the summer - when hopefully I can visit the archives so this wintery visit is going to have to last me for a while.  

Shadow-selfie with Bobble Hat!

In the meantime, there are newspapers still to search and data to collect and maybe - just maybe - stories to write...

And so once more return...

 In the five days since Christmas Day I have made the rather ridiculous decision to go down to Stratford to see Twelfth Night before it closes on January 18th. I can justify it to myself in lots of ways but it still feels a little self-indulgent.  I can't even combine it with an archive trip. But it is calling me back and I know I'd regret it if I didn't go. My friends who live in Leicestershire have already seen it and were really impressed and I am desperate to see Sam West as Malvolio.   I received some unexpected money just before Christmas and it seemed like a good way to use some of it.  The Wardrobe tours have started up again as well and that is an extra incentive.  

So, last night, after much soul searching, I booked a very reasonable hotel -  midweek and out of school holidays - a much less reasonably priced train ticket and a bargain seat in the stalls - partial restricted view.  I'll only be in Stratford for 24 hours.  It will be freezing cold - Stratford is always cold in January and the forecast is grim for the coming weeks - and I won't have the luxury of staying in my little cottage, but having made the decision, the thought of it cancels out all sane logic.  I needed something to look forward to once the Christmas festivities are over.  And if, as I suspect, 2025 becomes another tough year to navigate, at least I'll have started it with something positive.  

There's been very little time to work on the database at all since the start of November - Christmas preparation, other commitments and family illness.  Today, I spent the whole day digging into the American newspaper archive again to finish off the hunt for Garnet Holme and discovered a link between him and Henry Herbert, the leading actor of the Benson North (No 2) Company, which added another layer to the story and helped identify another face on the V&A Benjamin Stone photograph.  By 1914 he was living in New York and his wife - Gladys Vanderzee -seems to have worked with Holme on several different productions. (My favourite find today was an interesting story about a parrot called Lola who decided she did not want to take part in a play and made her dislike of both Holme and of Mrs Herbert VERY clear...!)

Unvalued jewels

Two events this week have helped me reflect on the ridiculous nature of historical research and how it can never be entirely complete, but also on its importance.  Still very busy excavating Garnet Holme,  I've now reached 1918 in the Newspaper Archive and have so many questions I want answers to, but which, to be honest, I'll probably never find. 

On Wednesday, I joined the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Research Conversation for November on Zoom, in which the inspiring Dr Varsha Panjwani was discussing "Women making Shakespeare today". In a really accessible and thoughful presentation, she drew attention to the fact that there is still a lack of documentation of how female performers approach roles in Shakespeare and a tendency to overlook the contribution of many of the female characters when writing about productions.  I know there is a definite male bias in documentation around the Benson Company- largely a result of the time in which it operated - but I hadn't stopped to consider that, a century later, the 'white, male, middle class'
narrative might still be the 'received version' when it comes to theatre history.  Looking at the V&A Benjamin Stone photograph, I was much more able to identify many of the actors, whereas the women in the Company were much harder to find out about.  Apart from Constance Benson and Elisabeth Fagan, I haven't really found much written from the female perspective of the Company and that is a shame.  What I took away from the hour was a reminder that any history is, by definition, an incomplete one. 

Then, on Thursday, I took a trip to York to see Paterson Joseph's one-man show 'Sancho and Me' which proved to be, in some ways, the flip side to Dr Panjwani's talk.  I'm a huge fan of Paterson Joseph - his acting AND his writing -any evening in his presence is always a starry one. His novel is based on the play he wrote about Charles Ignatius Sancho and came about because of a fascinating research rabbit hole he fell into.  Unable to find answers to the questions he had about Sancho, he used creative imagination to invent a fictional narrative, using the information he did have and the experiences of others who lived at the time.  His enthusiasm (- obsession? - ) was infectious. With a sense of theatrical mischief, he gave over the second part of the evening to a kind of sophisticated 'teacher in role'  exercise in which he became Sancho to answer the audience's questions.  It was an evening of pure joy - watching an actor communicate, move and challenge an audience through passion, energy and sheer exuberance. 

And both events have made me think again about those 'unvalued jewels' that slip through the pages of history, people who may have been important, once, but didn't leave a record of their lives, just little glints here and there for us to wonder at.  As I continue to sift through my own obsession's long-buried treasure, both valuable cultural encounters last week have given me pause for thought and not a little determination to keep on digging...

Anonymous squirrel in York's Museum Gardens, burying his own bits of treasure.

Happy Birthday, FRB!

 Just a quick post this week - I'm still busy with Garnet Holme! - to commemorate the birth on November 4th 1858 of Sir Frank Benson.  Still inspiring, all these years later.

Working towards a round unvarnished tale...

Oh, what a rabbit-hole I've dropped through!  And it is all the fault of that dog...

My research to name as many people as possible on the Benjamin Stone 1900 Company photograph  led to identification of Garnet Holme, stage manager and actor, friend of Harcourt Williams and - potentially - owner of THAT DOG.  And then, scratching the surface, I discovered a whole life-story just waiting to be explored - a story that moves from Sussex to Cambridge to Stratford and then to Yale, Berkley, the Yosemite National Park and finally ends with ashes scattered on a hillside in California.  It includes a missing suitcase, stolen costumes, Australian 'Field Ball', a solar eclipse, a best-selling novel about indigenous Americans and outdoor pageantry on a scale which I find difficult to even imagine and a heritage which is still going strong today.  It has led me to the American Newspaper Archive and an exploration through newspapers from across California and then the wider continent.   

I now feel absolutely obliged to follow this one through to the bitter end - and when I have, I promise I will a round, unvarnished tale deliver... (but I still don't know who's dog this is!)

Words. words, words...

 I've given myself a bit of a reading week this week.  I started with Nora Nicholson's autobiography, 'Chameleon's Dish', the earliest chapters of which concern the connection between the Nicolson family and the Benson Companies.  Nora's experiences as a student member of the Company are particularly interesting - she enrolled as a student in September 1912 at the cost of £40  - the modern equivalent would be around £5,700.  "We travelled with the company, spent our mornings in class (drama, diction, dancing and fencing), attended rehearsals and walked on at night - usually seven plays a week (...) We were sent on for ladies in waiting, fairies and screaming  mobs in Julius Caesar.  I even portrayed a dead woman in Coriolanus."

Nora as Puck around 1913. nora_nicholson.jpg (570×413) (warwickshire.gov.uk) 

"I wish I could explain the alchemy of Frank Benson's teaching.  As an actor, he came behind many of the youngsters he nurtured into fame, but as a director he was unparalleled.  He would stride into rehearsals, start operations with shouts of " Breath! breath! breath! - aimed at some panting student - hit upon a faulty inflection and  more than likely spend half the morning correcting it, and then stroll through his own part , littering it with astonishing paraphrase and highly original punctuation.  But when it came to interpreting a part for someone else, here was magic.  I can still remember his faultless portrayal of Puck, at rehearsal, with myself  struggling to imitate him.  I found no teacher equal to him until I came under the direction of Lewis Casson and Tyrone Guthrie, twenty years later.  They didn't teach you how to act, they taught you to be."  

She also claims that it was her brother who gave The Black Swan its alternative epithet of 'The Dirty Duck.'  I rather hope it was!

My second read of the week was Constance Benson's 'Mainly Players' which I've read several times since first borrowing it from the University Library in Hull.  I bought my own copy in Baggins' Book Bazaar in Rochester in 1991: the first of a considerable number of second hand book purchases since!  The last time I read it, I was working on my dissertation and focused mainly on her description of the Newcastle Theatre Royal fire.  This time, I was looking to fill out more detail about the members of the company and was able to add quite a few names and dates to check out against reviews etc. 

I feel that Constance Benson is rather marginalised in Benson history: she isn't memorialised in a window at Stratford, (although there was newspaper talk of one being added in the 1950s, it doesn't seem to have ever materialised) and, perhaps largely because of her dispute with the Board in 1911, the received Company narrative has sometimes painted her as a hinderance to the Company rather than an asset.  However, she inspired a great deal of loyalty from members of the Company and seems to have acted as something of a go-between in the Company's dealings with its Leader, and a sense of her loyalty to him despite their eventual estrangement comes clearly through the text of her book.   That she often found him frustrating is clear enough but there is an element of understanding of his motives and drive there too, even if I could sometimes wish she had written just a little less candidly...

During my last visit to Stratford in September, I looked at the minutes of the meetings of the Company after Archibald Flower assumed control and found a copy of the letter which J.C. Trewin quotes in "Benson and the Bensonians" in which Benson asserts "She is invaluable to me...she represents and stands for so much of what is called the Bensonian spirit..." (Trewin, 187)  Ultimately, Benson would choose Shakespeare - or perhaps, more accurately, Stratford - over loyalty to her, but I like to think he was entirely truthful.  Constance sees the end of the Bensonians as being the final, patchy season in  Stratford in 1919 and, in many ways, she is right: what comes after this is a shadow of the Company she helped to steer and shape as well as support financially.  

She did not warrant the same number of obituaries as her husband and I've been unable to find any information about her funeral from the British Newspaper Archive.  However, The Stage endorsed Benson's opinion from 1911, describing her as" a kindly woman(...) always accessible to Bensonians in their troubles, little or great..." The Stage 24/1/46  

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.