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.

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!