The squirrel's hoard...

 

Stratford in the Autumn is always lovely, particularly when the weather is as kind as it was on Monday and Tuesday of last week.  After a nightmare journey during which delays and severely overcrowded trains led to missed connections and my intended arrival time of 5.30pm became 7.45pm, it was a relief to step out on Monday morning to this gloriously blue sky.   I'd travelled on Sunday to maximise time to research and offset the more expensive accommodation costs of Monday and Tuesday nights with a bargain Sunday stay and, on the whole, it was worth the extra effort.  Engineering on the East Coast mainline all weekend had threatened a lengthy bus replacement journey and so I opted for travel to Carlisle and then onto Birmingham - a trip that costs approximately half the cost of a CrossCountry train from Newcastle to Birmingham... a cost fully re-imbursed without question thanks to 'Delay Repay'! 

Monday was spent in the Shakespeare Institute Library which is an absolute delight: space, silence, helpful librarians and things one just can't get anywhere else! Working from 10 till 4, I accessed several books that have eluded me over the years and also a dissertation that I needed to look at and which opened up a few more lines of enquiry for further visits.

Tuesday and Wednesday morning were spent in the more familiar surroundings Shakespeare Birthplace Archives where I'd asked to see the boxes of material connected to W.H. Savery, the former business manager and sometime partner of the Bensons.  

There are several large boxes which have been loosely organised into themes, but there is no catalogue listing of what is in each box, so it really felt like a bit of a treasure hunt.  Some of it was not really useful to me - Savery remained connected to the Memorial Theatre long after Benson left in 1919 - but all of it was fascinating, particularly the material connected to the laying of the foundations of the new theatre and its subsequent opening.

As always, time went quickly, and although there were sparks coming off the paper I was writing so fast, there remains one (very large!) unopened box which I still need to explore the next time I'm there in February.

 I've come home with around 60 pages of handwritten (scribbled!) notes which I'm gradually deciphering and expanding, with several things I'm already following up in the British Newspaper Archive.  

One of them concerns the Coronet Theatre in Notting Hill where the Bensons had a regular four week season, supported by subscription bookings.  As I went through the contents of Box 2, I found a stack of typed and handwritten letters going back and forth between  W. H. Savery and Henry Tossell, the Company's representative in London, concerning the rather dubious financial activities of the theatre's Lessee, one John Halpin.  

Because of the way the letters had been arranged in the folder, the most recent was on the top so I effectively discovered the story in reverse order.  The first letter confirmed the cancellation of the Coronet season for 1912 which came as something of a surprise - the Company generally did well out of the season and it provided a London showcase for their productions (albeit away from the West End).

Letter followed letter, criss-crossing between London, Liverpool and Birmingham through the middle of October, (Company headed notepaper contained the sub-headings 'This week' and 'Next week' on the address side!) much the way that emails do today.  Tossell's letters were typed, but several of Savery's were handwritten - he had very even and readable handwriting, thankfully!  and between them they reveal an attempt to defraud the Benson Company of advance bookings.

Savery was initially concerned at the way Halpin - who only held a six month lease on the theatre - wanted to handle all the subscription booking through his own box office.  The Company offered good discounts for patrons who booked across all ten productions in the season and, generally, the money for these would be placed in a separate joint account, set up by the Company and the Theatre, to be kept separate from general box office takings.  Halpin had initially agreed to these terms but then become difficult, saying his 'Directors' would not countenance such an agreement. In addition, Savery discovered Halpin was offering the Company's tickets at a further reduced price as part of his own 'subscription season'.  

"It shows there is some shady business behind everything(...)" Savery wrote to Tossell on October 16th.  "It all proves he wants absolute cash in his hands and this would never do. (...)  I like Halpin's sauce in saying the agreement must lapse unless we stand to arrangements made. He is the one not sticking to arrangements..."

Tossell agreed: "It is perfectly obvious that he does not want to agree to this in order that our advance bookings may be at his disposal."  

By doing a bit of digging through accounting and legal channels,  Savery  discovered that the 'Directors' were actually just Halpin himself and a sleeping partner friend, that Halpin was in serious financial difficulty and that he had set up John Halpin Ltd whilst still an undischarged bankrupt as a result of a previous theatrical endeavour which had collapsed.

Halpin, in the meantime, stopped replying to letters and did not appear at prearranged meetings with Tossell, claiming illness.  Savery then took the decision to cancel the season, writing to the 'Committee' of supporters - some 220+ people - to explain that due to "an inability to agree to terms", the season would not be going ahead, even though the publicity materials had all been printed.

Savery's instincts were proved entirely right. By December, Halpin was up in court, having been arrested for 'non-compliance' with a court order to hand over box office funds in lieu of rent, the theatre landlord having started proceedings against him.  Halpin again pleaded illness for his delay and was released. The theatre was forced to close through lack of funds in February 1912 and by April, 'John Halpin Ltd' had been declared bankrupt.   Halpin's expenditure on the theatre had been greater than he had expected and the costs for the lavish pantomime 'Babes in the Wood' had not been recovered through ticket sales. At its winding up, the liabilities of the company stood at £2,762 and its assets, which included the office furniture, were only worth £164. 

From the details in The Stage and The Era, it seems as if Halpin was more a chancer than a rogue: he found work quickly as Company Manager for a touring company and continued in that role until his sudden death from consumption in 1916.

Savery found alternative dates for the Benson Company in February 1912 and when they returned to the Coronet  in October 1912, it was under new management, sub-let to Messers Murray King and Clarke by lessee W.H. Savery! 

J.C. Trewin wrote Savery's obituary when he died, aged 81:  "Probably he knew and kept more secrets than anyone in that organisation [The Memorial Theatre] (...) Frank Benson, with his charming vagueness about expenditure, owed a great deal to Bill's financial knowledge. Time and again, Savery was able to ease FRB through periods of stress with (...) charm and understanding."  Birmingham Post 11/8/1960

Having spent so much time 'with' the man last week, I have a great deal of admiration for him - and am very grateful for his hoarding instincts!

Safe in a ditch...?

It is safe to say that this week has not worked out as I expected it to.  I had great plans to visit Sunderland University Library on Wednesday to do a lot of writing and quite a bit of reading.  Only I reckoned without the Gas Board who, in the process of digging up my little quiet terraced street to lay new gas mains, also went a bit 'gung-ho' with my front path and effectively barricaded me in by digging a two-foot deep hole directly outside my front door... without telling me!

As if that wasn't enough, my existing gas pipe was inspected, deemed unacceptably narrow - 3/4 inch rather than 1 inch - and there was talk of having to drill a hole in the outside wall - which necessitated me moving a bookcase (and the 70 books that live on it) and quite a bit of Shakespeare memorabilia which is in the porch.  It appears now that the issue wasn't quite as bleak as was painted and the bookcase could've stayed put...

The gas workers hadn't brought any boards to cover the hole (!?) and they made the very unhelpful suggestion that I use the back door instead.  Since access to my backdoor is down a dimly-lit back lane, where ghoulies and ghosties are known to lurk, I decided to wait till the coast was clear and then embrace my inner FRB. Thinking of his pole-vaulting into Harfleur in Henry V, I valiantly 'jumped' the space (having first removed the hurdles - I know my limitations!) to make my escape.

Unable to settle to anything with all this going on, my blissful writing day evaporated into indulgence in much comfort food and whinging to anyone who would listen to my woes.

Two days on, my gas is currently disconnected and I'm sitting feeling sorry for myself whilst hoping someone will come and fit the new pipe back to the meter...

A somewhat larger hole is also preventing me from reaching my garden which is directly opposite my house. The sharp-eyed may notice some vulgar (and non-Shakespearean!) graffiti added by local youths, I suspect, which appropriately sums up how I feel about the whole situation this week... 

I had started to write a much nicer post about books and another one about Garnet Holme, but they will have to wait till the crisis is over and I can at least put the heating on again!

Confined to barracks, I've created a little Bensonian corner with copies of a few postcards on one of the cupboard doors next to my desk.  The hope is that the Bensons and Bensonians will smile down at me when I'm feeling 'in despair with fortune.'  

Seriously hoping for some better days next week...!

Much matter to be heard and learn'd...

I am recently returned from Birmingham and Stratford, having spent a week attending the induction for the PhD course, with all the anxiety and excitement which inevitably goes along with such a thing.  On balance, the excitement has been foremost, revolving around finally setting foot inside the Shakespeare Institute, being able to talk about Benson to my heart's content, having a full week to think exclusively about what it is I'm trying to/want to do and of course, the joys of being able to use a University Library again.  

Dashing though to Stratford last Monday, I managed to squeeze in a brief visit to 'The Play's the Thing' exhibition, which changes some of its exhibits each year around the end of March.  I was keen to see if there was a 'new' Benson costume, and was delighted to see that it was the red Lady Macbeth dress I'd missed the last time it was on display, along with a sumptuous red velvet cloak.  Sadly, the label was entirely wrong - it actually referred to the pink and purple dress which was displayed two years ago - and I found myself feeling a tad indignant on CB's behalf: how much more effort would it have taken to create the right label? And does no one ever check these things?

So, to keep the record straight, this is the description of the costume from 'Stage Costumes and Accessories in the London Museum' by M. R. Holmes, published by HMSO in 1968.

Dress of deep red silk, with full skirt and very wide bell sleeves gathered into a body made of oriental brocade and three horizontal bands of green silk and gold braid.  Sleeves edged with gold fringe.  Long train of vermillion velvet lined with yellow silk and augmented with elaborate gold embroidery and jewels.  Worn by Constance Benson in the Banquet scene.

This costume was actually chosen as the frontispiece of the catalogue - the ONLY colour plate in the volume - and Holmes writes about it more fully in his introduction. He begins by referencing the fire in Newcastle and then continues:

"Irving was touring in America, but cabled his agents and had baskets of rich dresses and materials sent from his own store, and one of Constance Benson's dresses as Lady Macbeth shows what ingenious use was made of them.  In the banquet scene of the third act, she wore a magnificent mantle of vermillion velvet, rich with embroidery and jewels, and with it, a gown made by combining a bodice made of rich-looking oriental fabric with sleeves and a skirt of deep red silk.  The two make an impressive and harmonious whole and it is only a detailed scrutiny of the embroidery on the mantle that reveals it as having been intended originally for a court train of the [French] First Empire, presumably in the scene of the Napoleonic reception in Madame Sans-Gene which Irving had produced a little before [in 1897], but was not likely to revive."

Brackets are my additions.  

My photographs suffer from the usual light glare on glass - it was a very sunny day and the Benson window was positively glowing! - and I was very aware that I was running late for getting food and catching my train back so they are not quite as crisp or detailed as I  would have liked.  

 

 

I returned to Stratford on Friday for the Shakespeare Institute Induction day, one of the highlights of which was a tour of the absolutely wonderful library! I'm now plotting and planning a return in order to browse the shelves at greater leisure.  

My tables...

As promised, a little more information about the spreadsheet of performers I posted last week:

Benson Company sample performer spreadsheet

I've used the casting from the Stratford upon Avon Festival performances, as catalogued by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and I've added in casting from the London 1900 season and the 1913/14 North American tour, both of which can be found in the appendices in J.C. Trewin's Benson and the Bensonians.  

The Stratford dates, in particular, also cover guest appearances, often by 'Old Bensonians' who came back to slot into productions alongside the regular cast.  Where this appears to be the case I've marked their entry with an asterisk after the name.  Other 'special guests' include performers such as Johnston Forbes Robertson, Herbert Beerbohm Tree and Ellen Terry who were never members of the Benson Company.

Sheet 1 lists the performances for each season along with the performers who appeared, with FRB and CB first and then others arranged in alphabetical order, with the parts they played.  I've separated out performers who were listed as only appearing once in the season into a separate alphabetical sequence.  Often these are people local to Stratford who might appear in small or 'thinking' roles. They also include some 'faux' performers - the company often doubled roles using different names, the most famous being 'Walter Plinge' (and at times, his extended family!). Some, like B.Righton and M.Argate are clearly intended as puns - my favourite so far has to be L.Oakel - but others which are less conspicuous such as 'Mr James' 'Mr Sherrard' also appear frequently. Trewin makes it clear that these names could be inter-changeable between performers, making it difficult to identify how role-doubling worked in performance.

Sheet 2 takes performers who appear in at least two seasons with the Principal Company and lists their roles chronologically.  The intention here is to show some degree of career progression and the range of roles undertaken by each person both within any given season and across seasons. Again, an asterisk implies a guest role.

(I am intending that Sheet 3, which is currently blank, will provide some basic biographical information for each of these performers - I'm still working on this at the moment!)

The information is, inevitably, very Stratford-centric at the moment, which isn't necessarily reflective of the Company on tour across the provinces.  As I come across casting - either on programmes or in reviews - I will add to this.  I also want to extend the casting to later iterations of the company and expand it to cover the North and South Companies where possible.  

A surprise popped up on my Facebook page this week - a publicity postcard advertising the appearance of Oscar Asche and Lily Brayton at the King's Theatre in Sunderland.  Now long gone - as is Crowtree Road where it stood and the 1970s leisure centre that replaced it - the site is today part of the Bridges  shopping centre , having been badly damaged in an air raid during the Second World War.                                          

Kings Theatre in the centre of the picture with the dome of the Londonderry pub - now the Peacock - clearly visible at the end of the street.

O Time...

Slightly off topic this morning... looking at Osmond Tearle's touring in the 1870s through the old pages of the Era, I came across one of those fabulous stories that just have to be shared.

It concerns Tearle's business manager, Walter Hastings, and is only funny because it could have been tragic:

The photograph is of Ayr's town hall clock - presumably the culprit!

What a piece of work...!!!

Last time I posted, I had decided to create a basic reference spreadsheet of performers in the Principal Company, taken from the records in the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust archive catalogue, Well, I might have slightly underestimated how long that task would take, even given such a limited frame of reference.

However, I think it will have been worth the effort when I finally reach the end of it...

Up until now, I suppose I've just had lots of names sloshing round in my head, with only the vaguest idea about dates,  roles and career progression. It has been fascinating to see how the personnel of the Principal Company changed over the years that they were the resident company at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre.  The spreadsheet has also highlighted some persons of interest outside the 'usual suspects' who may be worthy of further exploration because their stories suggest something about what it meant to be a touring Shakespearean in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

J.C. Trewin's  'Benson and the Bensonians' gives as much credit in its title to those who passed through the companies as FRB himself and the list of Bensonians name-checked in the book is impressive. Re-reading it again this week, every sentence seems crammed with information and I'm in awe of the research and collation such a work must have taken.  It has done very little for my Pre-PhD nerves or my inevitable imposter syndrome.  I once sat behind the seat dedicated to  Trewin in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre and I feel that's still where I am - just sitting in his shadow!

A few interesting things I've stumbled across this week include two separate essays about Lily Brayton's career, information about Alice Denvil's theatrical family (one of her sisters was apparently the wardrobe mistress at Drury Lane) and the revelation that actress Tita Brand was actually Michael Morpurgo's maternal grandmother.  

I've also unearthed another article by Arthur Machen which contains some fascinating details about 'Pastoral' performances, based on his experiences with the 'vacation' company of Harcourt Williams and Garnet Holme.  Because of the spreadsheet it has been really easy to identify the other performers he refers to, usually only by character name or as 'A'. 'B' or 'C' and I can see it will also be useful when trying to identify actors in uncredited photographs.

He finishes his recollection with the following, which I rather liked: 

I remember once in Hampshire, Rosalind and Orlando, Jaques and Touchstone, and the rest of that company of forest wanderers, made their entrance by strolling down under the pines, knee deep in heather and bracken; and I should think those fantastic figures, glinting amongst the green, must have added no small charm to the show (...) In a wicked, tiresome world such as this is, when men earn their living for the most part by ‘doing  business’ or by such other evil and squalid tricks, there seems nothing more innocent or more charming than this device of wandering from wood to wood in odd dresses, in doublets and trunk hose, with false beards and painted faces, speaking Shakespeare’s lines, and trying to murmur the airs of Arden in the fairy age to this dull and gloomy time. 

According to the review in the Derbyshire Advertiser and Journal  on Friday 12th July 1901, Rosalind was played by Constance Robertson, Orlando by Harcourt Williams, Arthur Whitby was Jaques and H.O. Nicholson played Touchstone.  

(The illustration is by Charles A. Buchel)

UPDATE: Benson Company Performers sample database is now here!!!  Some tweaks and changes still to make but v1 is live.  I'll post more details next week, but Sheet 1 focuses on rep, Sheet 2 lists the roles played by any performer in the sample who spent two or more seasons with the company within the framework of the Stratford 1886-1916 performances.

You were best to call them generally...

After my visit to York last week, I was spurred into action by Maurice Crichton's comments about the way Benson's company might have reflected Shakespeare's own, with specific roles marked for particular players. His interest in the range of roles played by actors within the repertory, has led me to think about how to start thinking about the actor's perspective of the company. 

I'd wrestled before with trying to catalogue actors who were part of the company across the years of its existence, and had been defeated because I didn't know what I would find most useful and in trying to record 'everything' I quickly became overwhelmed by it. However last week's conversation led me to think much more about the kinds of information that I actually need to know, the best way to document it and and how it could be made usefully accessible. 

Midweek, something did suggest itself as providing a potentially useful sample - a kind of 'snapshot' of the company across its many iterations.   J.C. Trewin includes a table as an appendix to his book which covers the 1900 Lyceum season and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust has cast lists for all the productions at Stratford.  Looking at these creates a possible starting point.  Hopefully, then, by supplementing this with reviews and advertising, it might be possible to create comparable data for the  'missing' years when the Company wasn't in Stratford, and even potentially extend that into information about the North (B) and South (C) companies.

I tried to think about what information that would be the most use to anyone who was sufficiently interested to look at it.  As well as knowing what roles any actor played, it might be useful to see if any 'career progression' could be noticed and to note when people joined, left or returned to the company.  When I began to look closely at the SBT material, it was clear that there were also a number of 'one role' people each season - could they be locals, recruited for the Festival, rather than regular members of the company? And then there are the doubling 'names' - Walter Plinge and F.Anney being, famously, the ones most employed, although  M.Argate, B. Righton and (my personal favourite) L,Oakall  all appear on cast lists! (There's also good chapter in 'The Dillen' about local supers -there are some fabulous bits about the theatre and FRB in there, which I will return to in a later post!)

I've used Microsoft Excel to create a spread sheet with three separate pages, using the same information slightly differently on each. The main page is arranged in listings for each season to allow for searching across a specific production or year; the second focuses on actors in alphabetical order with their chronologically arranged roles across the years to show career progression and continuity, and the third lists the 'extra' one-role actors and doublers.  

After two days of pretty solid work - and a steep learning curve as far as Excel is concerned! - I've reached 1906 and am already noticing interesting patterns. Benson purchased what was basically an 'old fashioned' stock touring company from Walter Bentley and the structure of that seems to have remained largely unchanged, with actors employed for a specific 'line' of roles.  Some years are 'watershed' years with a high turnover within the company - 1900/01 being the main one because of the financial fallout from the London season - but there is a surprising amount of stability within the Company, generally provided by a backbone of  actors like George Weir, H.O. Nicholson and Arthur Whitby.  

Casting for events like the 'Histories' and the 'eternity' Hamlet in 1901 show a challenging range of roles which were out of the usual rep.  And I had no idea that there were so many characters called 'Balthazar' across Shakespeare's plays. Usually played by an actress, poor Leah Hanman (who was also the Company's resident Puck) must have had to keep her wits about her to remember which Balthazar she was playing each day!

As the Festival grew, and the number of performances increased, there are 'guest' returners for specific parts - Genevive Ward for Volumnia, Alice Denvil and Eleanor Aickin for Mistress Quickly - and later on I know there are many guest appearances by former Bensonians - Henry Ainley as Orlando, Matheson Lang and his wife Hutin Briton as the Macbeths etc - and guest 'stars' - Constance Collier, Lena Ashwell and Ellen Terry.  These 'non typical' repertory weeks will certainly need to be supplemented by material from touring reviews and programmes as it would be more useful to me to know who played these roles on a day-to-day basis

Programme from Theatre Royal Belfast 1899 

I don't know, without that conversation last week, whether any of this would have occurred to me. As it is, it has come at a perfect point - I'm now desperate to 'get going'  - and amassing background material like this can only be a useful occupation! Being 'accepted' as a student again (my official ID card arrived this week and my log-in details work on academic publishing websites) has also made me feel I once again have the right to spend hours pouring over all this stuff and can stop feeling guilty about it!

And this is only one of several things I jotted down after speaking to Maurice - a timely reminder that sharing knowledge and hearing others' opinions can only improve my thought processes!

Programme from Theatre Royal Belfast 1899 

(Hopefully, next week's post will be accompanied by a link to the spreadsheet - once I've finished its first iteration and figured out how to convert it to Google Sheets!)