One week on...

… and I might have discovered something interesting about Benson's heroics in the Theatre Royal fire.  With true Bensonian serendipity, it concerns a place where I was taken by a very lovely friend two weeks ago - a bar in Market Street  I'd never been in before - and at the time I was totally unaware that it had played a part in the story I was trying to write!  Still not quite ready to share it all, but I've been writing like mad, grazing all the source materials again and trying to make sense of all the accounts of that night, placed together.  It is amazing what we know... and what we don't.  I've spent several hours this week on this and I'm delighted with the way it is knitting together.  Just need to return to that bar with a camera, knowing what I know... EXCITED!

These are internet sourced images.  Going to add my own once I've been back...

Stand Well Back...

I've been sidelining a little by returning to the Theatre Royal Newcastle fire of 1899 and attempting to 'write it up' in an accessible way.  I've been seduced by the creative non-fiction genre and I'm playing with words on the page at the moment.

Anyway, as part of the research I've spent this evening using the British Newspaper Archives to cross reference accounts of the fire with the books I've already used.  In the process of trying to ascertain exactly what happened, I've unearthed a cat story (we love a good cat story!) and some very graphic descriptions of what the Shields Daily Gazette called the 'Thrilling Spectacle' of the Theatre Royal in flames!  Much more of all this later (I promise) : the finest gem I unearthed was on the BFI website -

https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-turn-out-of-the-newcastle-fire-brigade-1901-1901-online

This is silent film footage of the Newcastle fire brigade in a publicity film from 1901 and it is two minutes of absolute joy.  Watch out for the policeman at the start, waving bystanders out of the way, the little dog (with a death wish?) running in front of the fire engines, the firemen running along with the fire escape ladder, the two naughty boys deliberately running back and forth across the road in front of the local dignitaries and the frequent re-appearance of one man with a flat cap who is much more interested in the camera than in the fire brigade!

And just when you think it's all over... the fire engines are suddenly there again, rushing around in the background!

It is rather reminiscent of a Buster Keaton film...

Enjoy!

Side-tracked by Jumbo...

I have to admit that one of the great joys of researching the Benson company is the side-tracking which often occurs when I'm looking at old newspapers on the British Library Newspaper Archive site.  Today, working my way through old copies of the Newcastle Evening Chronicle, I stumbled across this:

It was December 1886 when 'Jumbo, the Great Mammoth Cheese weighing 4,172 lbs made from the milk of 3,300 cows... milked by over 300 dairymaids' was on exhibition at Lipton's Grocery Shop in Newcastle's Clayton Road, just round the corner from the Theatre Royal where the Bensons were appearing that week.

If the sight of a 'most wonderful and gigantic mountain of cheese' wasn't enough of an inducement to visit Lipton's: 'When being made numerous sovereigns and half-sovereigns - provided by Mr Lipton - were mixed amongst the curds.  The gold becomes the property of the lucky purchaser when the cheese is cut.'  

As always, the discovery of such a gem leads to a bit of further google searching, and I soon discovered that Sir Thomas Lipton's cheese was in fact a mere crumb in giant cheese terms, dwarfed in 1893 by the Mammoth Canadian Cheese sent by rail to the World's Fair in Chicago:

So heavy was this cheese that it actually smashed through the floor of the exhibition building!  In Perth, Ontario, there is even a life-sized monument to it beside the railway line...

Lipton was a self-made grocery magnate and tea importer who was born in a Glasgow tenement but rose to be 'Grocer to the King' as well as a keen yachtsman, winning a host of trophies which are now on display in his home city.   His chain of grocery shops survived in the UK into the 1970s, becoming 'Presto' before disappearing into the vast Unilever empire.  His company name still survives as a tea trademark.

Jumbo the giant cheese was mentioned again in the advertising columns of The Evening Chronicle a week later:

when 'contractors' were needed for 'digging operations' on the cheese! Extra sovereigns and half sovereigns were added to the cheese as a 'Christmas treat' before the cheese was cut.  The extra NOTICE:

'Mr Lipton will not be responsible should anyone be choked by the sovereigns or half-sovereigns while eating the cheese'

suggests that someone may well have tried that particular trick!  

I've failed to find any photo of Lipton's shop in Clayton Street although the building still stands - it's a British Heart Foundation charity shop now.  However, Newcastle Libraries have this image of Lipton's in 1920's Byker  (just down the road from the Byker Grand Theatre where FRB had laid the foundation stone and given the first performance on its stage.)

Newcastle Libraries  https://www.flickr.com/photos/newcastlelibraries/4091031058/in/album-72157622716564955/

How much more exciting does that look than a modern supermarket?

(I have had a very successful Bensonian day too - I forced myself not to attend to the cheese until I'd done a couple of hours of digging of my own!)

Snowbound

'View' (??!!)  from the window Tuesday morning

They're calling it 'The Beast from The East'.  It is a Siberian weather system which has all of the UK in its grip and which is causing road, rail and communication chaos. It must be bad: for the first time in a 27 year teaching career, I've had snow days - normally, we're too close to the North Sea Coast for the snow to make much of an impact but the last three days have seen almost constant snow and temperatures well below freezing. 

As someone with a natural tendency towards hibernation, the chance to stay in doors, huddled under my newly-completed patchwork quilt, and comfort-eat has been a real delight.  Feeling like an intrepid explorer, I've only been as far as the nearest post box and the 24hour garage over the road since Tuesday, coming back with bread and soup and Jaffa cakes and vowing not to stir forth again until I can see pavement.  I've done lots of work for work, and so I think I might spend the rest of today Benson hunting.

We're actually cossetted from the weather these days - winters in the past were often much colder and snowier than this.  What would it have been like, moving the Company from place to place in the extremes of a bad winter?  Less than a minute of Googling found me at this British snowfall table, and the temptation to try an match it up to the data base is proving irresistible!  I'm quite sure FRB would have simply soldiered on, regardless of any blizzard!

I also remembered a book I'd downloaded onto my Kindle several years ago but which I haven't read yet. Snowbound is a collection of short stories written by Bram Stoker, famed author of Dracula as well as being Sir Henry Irving's right-hand man.  A Touring theatre company, travelling by train, finds itself stuck in a snowdrift somewhere in Scotland.  To pass the time, while they wait to be rescued, they tell each other stories.  First published in 1908, it sounds like exactly the thing I need to sit and read as I wait for the snow to go...

Stay warm and safe!

UPDATE!

Finished Snowbound last night: some interesting ideas about how one might start a 'safe' fire in a railway carriage using props and basic theatrical equipment - amazing what one can achieve with a 'thunder sheet'! Some interesting stories particularly those told from a backstage perspective. Too many attempts to reproduce dialect in non standard spelling does make parts hard going. However, the highlight was the story about the Star Trap. This stood out as having been much more carefully thought out and considered. All in all, a pretty good book to read when actually snowbound!

Bensonian obituaries

Today is the anniversary of Frank Benson's death: on the evening of December 31st 1939.  At 81, and increasingly frail through the first bitter winter of the Second World War, he had caught a cold which then developed into pneumonia over Christmas.  It was six years since he had finally retired from touring.  His final words, (according to J.C. Trewin) were 'Thank you very much.'

Yesterday, I spent a luxurious day 'playing' with the data base, filling in a few more gaps, before deciding to see what I could find in terms of comments in obituaries.  His death was widely reported across the country, and many newspapers reflected on memories of past theatre performances which his name conjured up.

The Scotsman talked of his 'electric personality...the Don Quixote of the stage...'. The Yorkshire Post reflected that he was 'the doyen of an age of full-blooded acting, of golden speech, of graceful movement, a page of theatrical history has closed forever with his death.'  The Birmingham Daily Post considered 'no man in his time better deserved to be called the father of the English Stage.'

My favourite comment, however, comes from the Manchester Evening News: 'Behind the scenes tonight, in almost every theatre in the land they will be talking of Bensonian days for there is hardly a show put on but numbers in its cast someone who is a link with those tours in some way.'

#SAVE HARKER'S STUDIO

You know how much I love serendipity? Well, yet again things have all somehow come together at the same time in the Merry Shrew Universe to illuminate yet another dusty corner of my theatrical research. Although what happens on stage is relatively easy to uncover, the workings of the Backstage World are a different matter entirely.  Discovering information about set and costumes, lighting and special effects can be very difficult and so finding something about that realm is a joy.

This summer I spent a week in Galloway in Scotland and managed to con my fellow travellers into a trip to Wigtown.  This is Scotland's 'Book town' - a bit like a Scots Hay-on-Wye - and amongst other delights I found a rarity in the wonderful Old Bank Bookshop - a copy of Joseph Harker's memoirs Studio and Stage published in 1924.  In all my rummaging in bookshops over the years I'd never seen a copy. Naturally, I had to bring it home...

Joseph Harker was a famous scenic painter, best known for his work with Henry Irving and Beerbohm Tree. (Rumour has it that Bram Stoker actually named Jonathan Harker after him when he wrote Dracula.) Harker also produced work for the Bensons, notably working on their production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. I read his book in one sitting - with a wry smile at his comments about 'modern staging' - and then, once I was back at home, did a little light Googling. To my amazement I discovered that Harker's actual studio in Walworth is still in existence and still being used for painting scenery.  Look here to see some fabulous photographs of the interior, which is currently a theatrical chandler's shop.  There is even a Pathe newsreel showing Harker painting a forty-foot canvas in the studio.

Sadly, its fate seems very uncertain.  Southwark Council have granted planning permission for the building to be 'redeveloped' (their word: mine would be much more emotive!) into 'luxury flats' when the current lease comes to an end in January 2018. The criminal and wanton destruction of this Grade 2 listed building is barbaric.  It is a unique and living piece of heritage as well as being an unbroken link back to Edwardian Theatre.  

However, it won't go down without a fight.  There's an online petition and pressure from all sorts of organisations and groups, including the Victorian Society, the Theatres Trust and The Harker family themselves to try and make the council reconsider their decision.  I really hope they do. Once destroyed, another link in the fragile chain between then and now will be broken.

Greenock Hyperbole!

Discovered today in the GREENOCK TELEGRAPH of May 18th 1889, reminiscent of Mr Vincent Crummells.