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.