Nepo Baby

 In my continuing research around the life, times and connections of Miss Ethel Warwick, I was interested to see how many members of the acting profession were actually children of actors. It seemed so normal that the fact Ethel did not come from a long line of thespians seemed noteworthy to the newspapers.  In recent years, I have heard the term 'Nepo Baby' used against actors (actually, normally actresses) as if to explain how they became famous so promptly. Maya Hawke, Angelina Jolie, Carrie Fisher and the many others could not possibly be talented!  It must be their famous parents! All this leads me to the slightly cautionary tale of Miss Nancy Waller...

Lewis Waller as Lysander (1900)

My adoration of Lewis Waller is well and truly on display in this post, but he and his wife Florence West were a theatrical power couple beyond compare. Despite the fact that she was repeatedly referred to as 'Mrs Lewis Waller' rather than her stage name belays the fact that she was equally as important and respected as he was. I'm trying to think of a modern equivalent - Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz? Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively? Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick? - Anyway, when Oscar Wilde wrote An Ideal Husband in 1895, she was his Mrs Cheveley, which is recommendation enough. Despite the birth of her son Edmund in 1884 and her daughter Nancy twelve years later, Florence didn't seem to break her stride, going off on tour not long after Nancy's birth in 1896. 

Edmund Waller (c.1920)

While Edmund obviously is of interest to me because of his marriage to Ethel Warwick, I noticed that he seemed to try to keep a professional distance from his parents.  In this, he mostly failed because (a) his parents were superstars and (b) I'm not convinced he was a good enough actor to get out from under his father's shadow.  I can definitely see having a father ruling the acting profession you are trying to break into being a massive problem, although arguably Michael Douglas would say otherwise, as would Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estervez.  Maybe because Edmund was born while the couple were building their careers, or because Nancy arrived at the beginning of her parents' superstardom, not to mention the fact that she was incredibly cute, Nancy started appearing in the Wallers' publicity photographs.

Florence West and Daughter (c.1900)

Nancy was only 6 years when she took to the stage. This beat Ellen Terry (aged 9) but was the same age as Drew Barrymore in ET.  The last was particularly illuminating to me as Drew Barrymore as Gertie is so natural and charming that it is easy to see how a child can make a brilliant actress.  The newspaper's were equally charmed, as the Birmingham Mail reported 'This embryo actress rejoices at having arrived at the mature age of six, and is quite convinced that to forbid her playing Toto every night is an injustice for which somebody ought to answer.' The problem came in her mother's production of Zaza in 1901 which featured Nancy as 'Toto', although the Wallers really only wanted their daughter to perform in the matinees.  Nancy was obviously having none of it. She was so praised for her performance that the Empire News wrote a poem 'To a Sweet Child on her First Appearance'...

Baby came and played a part,

Baby won applause.

Baby gained the public's heart;

Why was it? Because - 

Baby was real and Baby was fresh,

Baby remarks she was a 'b'cess'*

Hush-a-bye Baby, on the tree top,

When Baby appears the applause doesn't stop.

(*This is 'baby babble' for 'success')

Ellen Terry and her granddaughter Nelly Gordon (c.1918)

For Edwardian actresses, having children could well trip up your career (for Health and Safety reasons - Juliet isn't usually heavily pregnant during the balcony scene) but it seems Florence didn't seem to slow down and used motherhood in publicity.  Suddenly there were not only pictures of Florence, of Mrs Lewis Waller, but also of Mrs Lewis Waller and Daughter.  In this, she is not unusual, as actresses like Ivy Close and Ellen Terry took a similar stance, feeding the public with carefully curated images of aspirational family. Ellen Terry went as far as to be pictured with her grandchildren, I think in a way displaying an acting dynasty. It almost didn't matter if the child went on the stage in a professional way, the novelty of being the child of a famous actor was a pull to theatre crowds who were already feeling involved in their idols private lives.  Thinking about the private lives of the generation before the Wallers, it was a very sterilised picture that the public were exposed to.  

What I find interesting about Nancy is that she quite quickly becomes her father's sidekick, appearing with him, photographed by him and generally being his shadow. As you will know from my post on Waller, he was absolutely worshipped and so I think this sort of content would have been massively popular with his public. I also notice that there are frustratingly few photographs of his with his wife, which can be read in many ways.  They did not seem to act together after 1900, the period which seems to have sparked the mass producing of picture postcards of actors. Also, she might have wished to keep a bit of a distance from being Waller's wife, being the lesser of the pair if they had been pictured together. This, of course, is not the case with Nancy.

In November 1908, Nancy appeared at the Royal Command performance of The Duke's Motto at Windsor, a play which famously stared her father in one of his popular 'cape and sword' pieces, revived in the autumn of 1908. When they performed for the King, Nancy was included in the cast as a page.  It was apparent that although she had previously appeared in her parent's plays, she was not regarded as anything other than their child.

Stereoscope picture of Lewis and Nancy Waller (c.1902)

Nancy very quickly got into the role of the actress-daughter in the family business, talking to the press about her performances in a grown up manner, although still under 10 years old.  She shared the role of Toto in Zaza with a girl who could play the recorder (which the character required).  Nancy had to have a man behind the curtain playing for her while she mimed and she told the newspapers of an incident when he missed his cue only to start playing when she was not in position making her scramble to her spot and the audience laughed in fond appreciation. She quickly became Lewis' Daughter (TM), a role of its own. When he sailed to New York in 1911, she was reported to have been on the dockside, waving him away.  Partly because her brother was so much older than her, and partly because he was married by 1908 to fellow actress Ethel Warwick, Nancy seemed to act as the 'only child' to her parents, especially her father, a beautiful, slightly melancholic-faced child beside her handsome, noble father.

Florence West's work kept her very busy, touring in Zaza internationally and also making the role of Milady in The Three Musketeers her own, garnering a letter from old friend Oscar Wilde who declared he had heard her 'Miladi' was brilliant. She was generous, encouraging, professional and brilliant, moving audiences to tears on a regular basis and so it was a terrible shock to everyone when she died in November 1912, aged only 53.

Mrs Lewis Waller and Daughter (c.1903)

I was impressed that Florence's obituary in The Era did not mention her children at all, or her husband to any great extent, concentrating solely on her and her accomplishments.  While this sounds appropriate to a modern ear, you can imagine what a leap that was for the Edwardian public. Mentioned in passing in her obituary in the Aberdeen Press and Journal is possibly a reason why Nancy became her father's shadow.  In 1906, after a long run with Zaza, Florence went to Algiers to recover from a nervous breakdown, which was only reported as she was involved in a court case over a motor car and unable to appear in court. After her return, she appeared in music hall rather than grand drama, arranging abbreviated versions of her greatest hits, and delighting audiences with lighter fare than before.  She moved to Flanshaw outside Bognor Regis on the south coast, possibly for her health, while it appears Nancy remained in London at least part of the time, with her father.

It is unsurprising therefore that when Lewis Waller set off on tour to Australia and South Africa in 1913, he took Nancy with him, not to mention his son Edmund as well. The group had a lucky escape when Waller's car collided with a tram, miraculously sparing all the passengers but totally wrecking the car.  The family of actors returned to a country suddenly at war, and Waller was required to give his Henry V speech for recruitment purposes, touring the country, again with Nancy in tow. She was with him in Nottingham in 1915 when he and Madge Titheradge began a tour which was halted in October when he became ill and was taken for rest to the Rufford Hotel. The newspapers were agog for days as Nancy and her uncle, Waller's brother and manager, remained by his bedside.  For a day he seemed to rally, then he died in his sleep from double pneumonia with Nancy still in the chair beside him. He was three days short of his 55th birthday, and 19 year old Nancy was an orphan.

As I have relayed in my post on Ethel Warwick, by 1915 Edmund had divorced her.  The whole affair of the death of Florence, coupled with Edmund's fleeing his wife and child abroad and having to be retrieved, put an large amount of stress on Waller, who acted as far as he could on Ethel's behalf. With both parents dead and (excuse me saying so) a less than ideal brother, Nancy turned seriously to acting.  She made her screen debut in 1916 in The Mill Owner's Daughter (also known as The Little Mayoress) where she played the lead.  Having grown up in the industry I'm sure she was aware that it was uncertain and very competitive, even with the name she had.  The same year as her movie debut, Nancy took the role of 'party guest' in The Boomerang, a hotly anticipated American comedy which required pretty girls as bit-part players.  I find it interesting that she also found a side hussle in costume, becoming friends with fellow actress and theatrical costumer, the amazingly-named Gladys Archbutt...

Gladys and Dog (c.1900)

Gladys was making a great living as an actress but either was a realist or just found her passion lay in costume as I found her through this advert...

In 1919, Gladys and 'E Lewis Waller' (presumably Edmund) opened a theatrical costume shop in Chandos Street which had exhibitions every Friday in the shop on a miniature stage. Both Gladys and Edmund were stakeholders and partners but a matter of months later, Gladys announced in the newspaper that she had other plans. In The Era in February 1920, Gladys reported she had severed all ties with the Chandos Street business and was sailing to New York to go into partnership with Nancy. By this point Nancy had inherited her father's money (payable either on marriage or her 21st birthday) and so with her money and dreams of film stardom, Nancy crossed the Atlantic and there met Horton Edward Pratt.

Horton had arrived from Australia as Horton Pfaff in 1920, changing his name to Pratt along the way. Six foot tall and no doubt handsome, Horton and Nancy fell in love.  She had been acting in films (un-named in the papers) but vowed to give it all up to become the wife of Horton Pratt, a merchant. It was mentioned throughout the newspapers that she had suddenly married this unknown man and cabled her news to home.  Nancy was described as a famous movie actress and her brother Edmund, merely the husband of another famous movie actress, his new wife Marie Blanche (aka Marie Peacock from Scarborough, also a daughter of an actor, William Peacock, who started on the stage as a child). I'm guessing it was entirely respectable and expected that Nancy would give up her acting and live the life of Mrs Pratt, and to be fair the couple travelled a fair amount in the 1920s (thank you to the passenger listings on Ancestry).  Mr and Mrs Pratt, who kept the same address in London as well as New York, travelled across the Atlantic, including a trip to Buenos Aires. In January 1929, on the Cunard ship Mauretania, Horton and Nancy travelled back to New York from Southampton.  However, in July Nancy returned alone.  Well, not quite alone as she had some interesting shipmates...

Yes, he looks like trouble...

Amongst the passengers of the White Star Line ship Adriatic sailing from New York to Liverpool in the summer of 1929 was George Pitt-Rivers.  As I work with archaeologists as my day job, I immediately recognised the name but he's a gitweasel. Good Lord, that's an understatement, as his Wikipedia page involves the phrase 'he always wore his golden swastika badge.' If Nancy had 'accidentally' thrown him overboard it would have been for the best.  Far more conducive to smooth seas was a fellow actor, sailing for one last visit to home before returning to Hollywood.  He's quite obscure, you probably haven't heard of him....

That's young Archibald Leach from Bristol.  I hope he made something of himself...

Poor old Nancy had returned a divorced woman almost a decade after retiring from acting, not the most forgiving of careers to return to as a thirty-something woman.  As actresses like Gabrielle Ray can testify, if you give up your seat at the acting table, there are around a dozen pretty young women ready to take it and it's a devil to get back.  Nancy had her surname, now reclaimed, to aid her, even if it is only to talk about her father. In 1933, a particularly sad report in the Daily News read: 

'Miss Nancy Lewis Waller...the only daughter of the late Mr Lewis Waller, the actor, asks us to state that a man of the same name who was brought from prison to give evidence in a recent High Court case has no connection to her father or her family.'

It is dubious whether or not in 1933 anyone would think of Lewis Waller, or if they did, not be familiar with the particulars of his family. I also think it is interesting that not only did Nancy shed her married name but also brought all her Father's name into hers, as if to keep the flame alive. Her name also appeared in conjunction with a funeral at Stratford Upon Avon, for the autograph-hunting Parish Clerk who had amassed a noteworthy collection that included Nancy, Ellen Terry and the Princess of Schleswig-Holstein.  Nancy slipped into obscurity, travelling again to America and within Europe but finally settling down on the south coast like her mother.  She died in 1972 in Worthing, West Sussex, over 20 years older than either of her parents managed and a decade more than her brother.

Nancy and her Dad (c.1912)

Nancy's life isn't exactly ground-breaking and she has a trajectory opposite to those I normally study.  Miss Waller was born into the limelight, her path to fame fairly well marked out for her.  Reporters hang on her every word aged 6, for goodness sake, but even then neither her or her brother attained the sort of fame either of their parents found. To be the child of a superstar must be incredibly hard in so many ways, even more these days because I could find not one report that implied Nancy got any of her fame merely through her connections. I think for the media Nancy was forever stuck as the little girl clutching the hand of a theatrical god and she never got to change the story.

A Stunning Man

 I love finding the names of models behind Pre-Raphaelite paintings as I think the histories of these (often working-class) women are important in regards to the creations of the works. Over the last few years especially, we seem to have made great strides in uncovering the names and lives of all the fleeting models who appeared in one or two pictures but today I'm going to tell you about a model who appeared in some of the best known Pre-Raphaelite (and adjacent) images and continued to work well into the twentieth century.  However, when I read the name in the newspaper I had no idea who they were. Let's change that today because this Pre-Raphaelite stunner is a bit different, not least because he's a chap.  Say hello to Domenico Antonio Reitzo...

Sketch for King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid (1884) Edward Burne-Jones

Now with the lovely Mr Reitzo, there is a lot of dreamy mythology which I am in no mood to shatter because I think it is an important part of who he was and what he meant to countless generations of artists.  This is a chap who spanned artworks from John Everett Millais until the Second World War, and was still modelling into his 80s. I will attempt to tell his story as best I can but I suspect when we start looking, his contribution to art will be enormous.

The story goes that while Valentine Cameron Prinsep and his friend Edward Burne-Jones were in Italy in 1859, he saw a small Italian boy running down the street. So bewitched was he with the child's appearance that he sponsored the boy (and possibly also his family?) to come to England and continue modelling.  While that is a lovely story, Domenico Reitzo, also known as Prinzi and 'Dom' to the countless artists he modelled for, wasn't born until December 1861 or possibly 1863 depending if you rely on the 1939 census or the certificates he brought from Italy. However, there are further issues with this timing when you see some of the paintings he posed for, so I'm guessing he was actually born earlier but still brought over to London as a child to act as an artist's model.  There are some definite issues of child welfare, and I'm not at all sure his parents were brought with him.  Goodness, the nineteenth century was exciting, wasn't it...?

As a child, Dom was very much in demand, but it was when it grew up that he became the superstar of the Victorian art world.  He was allegedly one of the first models at the Slade, employed by Edward Poynter, and he continued to model there every year until the 1940s. The painting that brought him to celebrity was undoubtedly Millais' image of Walter Raleigh as a boy...

The Boyhood of Raleigh (1870) John Everett Millais

You see the problem of his birth-date as Dom is not one of the little boys, but the man who is pointing out to sea. If you believe Prinsep's account that he met a little boy in the late 1850s then that could be a chap in his late teens with a false moustache, but there is no way he is a 10 year old. From the Slade work, Edward Poynter used him in a fresco in St Stephen's in Dulwich for the Trial and Martyrdom of St Stephen between 1871 and 1873. It seems amazing that Dom managed to fit this fairly steady modelling work around making and selling his own ice cream, which feels a bit of a stereotype for an Italian man in England but I bet a handsome man with a cornetto is popular everywhere...

Habour of Refuge (1872) Frederick Walker

Here we have Dom as the chap with the scythe, representing the inevitability of death as he cuts down people like grass. F G Stephen's reviewing the piece in The Athenaeum made much of the labourer's 'lithe limbs' in 'an agony of energy' and he seems to have turned the head of the young woman about to come down the steps. The romantic potential of the young man is something that the artists who flocked to him couldn't wait to exploit...

Harmony (1877) Frank Dicksee

Harmony was a painting reported as featuring the handsome features of our chap, but the writer in the newspaper in 1939 attributed it to Luke Fildes.  I can only imagine that they meant this one, and the young man looking devotedly at his lady love certainly looks like Dom.  What I love about this is that Dicksee was so young when he painted it, only 24 years old.  The girl was Hilda Spencer (not Hilda Carline Spencer), a young art student at Queens College where Dicksee was teaching, so these three young people produced such a wonderful, romantic image.

Romeo and Juliet (1884) Frank Dicksee

As Dicksee had scored so big with Harmony, it's unsurprising that he would try and recapture the magic in another picture and so we have 1884's Romeo and Juliet. This image was one of the plates in a gift book of the play in 1884 and was described in The Bookseller as featuring 'such a man and woman as Shakespeare must have pictured to himself.' 

In the meantime, Dom was also living a normal life. In 1890, he married local lass Mary Richards, signing the register with a cross as he was illiterate.  What I found interesting is that, despite being unable to write or (allegedly) read, Reitzo was never frightened to come forward and do the right thing in terms of participating in legal proceedings.  There are at least two instances of his involvement in crime (on the right side, I hasten to say), once where he tackled a mugger and made a citizen's arrest, and again where he witnessed a fight that resulted in a death.  He went to the Old Bailey as a witness testifying in Italian and English and putting up with cross-questioning.  

Speak! Speak! (1895) John Everett Millais

At the same time, he was still appearing in famous paintings. He was the startled husband, crying out at the spirit of his dead wife in Speak! Speak! and the Bromsgrove and Droitwich Messenger called the work 'one of the principal points of attraction in this year's Academy pictures.'

King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid (1884) Edward Burne-Jones

I have found newspaper articles that claim Dom modelled for Leighton, Alma Tadema, Watts, Rossetti, Perugini, Shannon and Ricketts, Harry Bates, Singer Sargent, Orpen, Sickert and Glyn Philpot which is a really extraordinary collection of artists.  He was King Cophetua in Burne-Jones' picture, which is so important I can't believe I never asked who that was, but once you see his face, you can spot him everywhere. In an article written about him in 1949, it was claimed that every living artist who had studied in London would have drawn him at the very least. In total, he posed for around 80 years which is an astonishing contribution to art.

He and Mary had children and continued to live their extraordinary/ordinary life, appearing in the 1911 census living at 50 Lancaster Street in Southwark (which is definitely not there anymore, which is a shame as I am constantly looking for people to propose for Blue Plaques) and he is listed as an 'ice cream vendor.'  Of the seven children they had, only two, Betsy and Mary, survived. By 1921, Mary is still living at home, although has been married and now has her son, Domenico (obviously named for her Dad) living with them as well. They had moved to the very lovely (if it is original, and I'd love a building historian's view on this) Fryers Street in Vauxhall. The 1920s also saw Dom pose for the Exeter war memorial as one of the soldier's around the base...

He's in his 60s by this point and still working and looking glorious.  By the 1930s, he had moved to Grace House in Kennington, and the newspaper article on him recorded his 'two surviving sons' had done well in life, one an engineer and the other a solicitor - possibly they meant son-in-laws or even grandsons by this point. Mary's son is listed as a baker in 1939, on Kensington Park Road, which still seems to be an Italian eatery according to Google Maps.

The South London Observer ran an article on Dom's career in July 1939.  In this version of the story, the little boy was running along the road in St John's Wood when he was discovered by Prinsep and whisked away to artistic stardom.  It reported on the queues of Royal Academicians who lined the streets vying for his services (which is a brilliant visual) and how he had been courted by the greats of the nineteenth century.  Even after all those years, and despite saving enough money to retire, our chap was far too much in love with his career to give it up. Grace House was also a very short walk to the City and Guild of London Art School on Kennington Park Road where he still modelled. Innes Fripp, head of the school in 1939, had known Dom for 45 years, stating he had posed at every art school in London. One anecdote he shared was that the model had been mistaken for Peter the Painter and almost lynched by a mob in Whitechapel.  The police hauled him off to the local station but he was rescued by some famous artists who he called and announced he was their favourite model. 

Apologies for the quality, I pinched it off the Newspaper Archive

I am delighted that finally in the 1939 register, Domenico Reitzo is finally listed as an artist model. He and Mary are living at 47 Kennington Oval (which must be Grace House, looking at the map). The London Evening News catch up with him again a decade later in June of 1949, aged almost 90 and the star of the Royal Academy once more. Henry K McElwee's picture The Old Model caused quite a stir, not only because it is a moving piece but because of the heritage. In the newspaper article, they place the grainy image above next to a Poynter sketch from St Stephen's just to emphasise that although art had changed, the inspiration behind it had not.  A further charming article from the summer of 1949 reported on a 'Grandfather's club' that had been formed and there was a weekly get-together of elderly gentlemen in Camberwell including 89 year old Mr J Webb, renown Dahlia grower and broadcaster known as 'Daddy Dahlia', and one who had been at the relief of Ladysmith and the Egyptian campaign of the 19th century, but the star was, as ever, the 'most immortal' Domenico Reitzo, praised to the hilt as the superstar he was.

Finally, on 3rd December 1949, Reitzo died. He had been taken into hospital after the death of his beloved Mary in November, and in the London Evening News, it was reported that hers was a loss he couldn't recover from. His 'immortal face' graced many walls, both domestic and gallery, and the question remains, if he is so 'immortal' why is he not better known?

Okay, so I know I shout 'retrospective!' far too much, but I am seriously going to try and get something done for Domenico Reitzo, if only in the publishing of this post.  I will try (as I always do) to get him a Blue Plaque because his contribution is massive to the art we all love. I know that our interest in models is quite a niche thing in art history in many ways, but it strikes me that it can be a bit sexist. I'm guessing, in the case of the Pre-Raphaelites, the men were a bit of a side-show with the women being the main event, and quite often they used each other as models, but there is no excuse for me not knowing this handsome chap's name. The list of people Dom posed for is extensive, so if you are more familiar with the output of some of the above and want to suggest other pictures Mr Reitzo could be the model for, email them over or pop them in the comments as I will be compiling a case for him. It's about time he got to be immortal again.

Mrs Shepherd's Locket

Sometimes the most innocent of items can have a history that makes you feel in awe.  After my Ma-in-Law's sudden passing last year, the redoubtable Mr Walker found himself in touch with all the different parts of our family, including our family in New Zealand. One amazing outcome of those conversations was that the very lovely Lynda offered to send our daughter Lily-Rose a locket that had been passed through the women of the family.  However, it was no ordinary locket...

As you can see, it's in its original box from E Davis of Leicester Square, Walsall.  Lynda told us that it was given to her grandmother from an older lady who they looked after as she suffered from poor health.  It was this lady's wish that Lynda's mum would receive it in time and it was then passed to Lynda.  The locket is lovely, but it was the background that makes it extra special for Lily because the older lady was ill health because of what had happened to her when she was younger.  This locket belonged to Mary Louisa Shepherd...

Mary Louisa Shepherd, or Louisa as she seems to have liked to be called, was born Mary Miles in Minety, Wiltshire in March of 1875.  Like most families in Wiltshire (my own included) Louisa came from a long line of Agricultural Labourers.  By the time she was a teenager, she was the only servant to a farmer and his family just outside Chippenham, also north Wiltshire.  In the south of Gloucestershire (just above Wiltshire), was William Thomas Shepherd, son of a saddler, and the couple met and married in 1902. By 1911 the couple had moved to Walsall, north of Birmingham, taking William' widowed mother with them.  William had work as a porter for a furniture dealer and they lived at 72 Brace Street, a very pleasant road of small houses.  Looking at the census, there are lots of different occupations living there, from licenced victuallers, railway porters and a Prudential agent.  However, two years later, Louisa was sent to jail.

Along with the locket, Lynda passed us some postcards which were very old and very special. As a group they tell a fascinating story. I'll start with this family group...

This is David Lloyd George, his wife Margaret and daughter Megan.  On the back it reads 'WELSH TROOPS PICTURE POST CARD DAY In Aid of THE NATIONAL FUND FOR WELSH TROOPS' which dates the postcard to around 1914-1918 (someone has removed the stamp and postmark).  The card has a brief note on the back that reads 

'Dear Mrs Sheppard [sic] Wishing you a good Xmas and Bright New Year. 

Hear you are doing well so be careful. Good luck, Edgar Jones'

Edgar Jones was an MP for Merthyr Tydfil from 1910 to 1918 and his wife was a NUWSS secretary and very politically active. Whilst I would be tempted to just think the card was from a friend, the formal nature of the message and the warning to 'be careful' seemed odd, but when you take into account Louisa's actions in July of 1913, it begins to make sense.

Two other postcards from Mrs Shepherd's collection were of Mrs Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel.  By this point, you can probably guess why Louisa Shepherd was arrested. 

The last two postcards are of marches for women's suffrage - the first shows a 'Leicester' banner and the other shows a banner reading 'TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION IS TYRANNY,' both being carried in a long procession of women in Edwardian dress. The presence of the Pankhurst postcards hints at a more militant interest in equal rights for women and Mrs Shepherd does not let us down...

The Grand Hotel, Colmore Row, Birmingham

July 1913 was a hot year for Suffragette action.  Mrs Pankhurst continued to escape the police and when Herbert Asquith, Prime Minister, blocked any progress for women's votes, his visit to Birmingham was always going to be an explosive one.  Asquith was attending a dinner for the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce at the Grand Hotel on Colmore Row when a group of women decided to smash the place up and got arrested.  Louisa and a woman called Florence Ward were the ring leaders, and I have to say the reports of what they did are astonishing. Windows were smashed with large bolts wrapped in leaflets reading 'broken pledges reap broken windows.' Louisa smashed the windows of the smoking room and also had half a brick in her handbag.  Both women gave their address as 19 Leicester Street, Walsall, the offices of the WSPU. Florence Ward asked the judge 'I ask you which ought to go to prison...Mr Asquith who breaks promises or a woman who breaks a little bit of glass?' 

Louisa specified her grievance with the 'Cat and Mouse Act' which she declared 'very horrid and very cruel' which had become law in the Spring of 1913.  This allowed the imprisonment and force feeding of a suffragette on hunger strike until she became ill, then she was released to recover, then reimprisoned. The state-sanctioned torture of women was designed to break the suffragette's mission and just an escalation in the violence, rather than actually looking at the matter of giving women the vote. Louisa, and no doubt the other suffragettes who opted not to pay the 40 shilling fine and go to jail with a vow to go on hunger strike, was force fed, leading to health complications for the rest of her life.  She was released later in the summer, then rearrested (as part of the Cat and Mouse Bill) in the September.

I am indebted to this page for some context for Black Country Suffragettes and quite honestly it makes me feel grateful and alarmingly militant reading what these women did for us. I also found Louisa listed here, as 'Sheppard' as on the postcard from Edgar Jones, but it is definitely the same woman, possibly allowing the surname to be misspelt.

My husband's family lived a few doors down from the Shepherds on Brace Street and looked after Louisa in her old age.  By the 1939 register, William Shepherd is listed as incapacitated, and according to Lynda, Louisa's health was poor due to the force-feeding. William died in December of 1948 with Louisa following him in January 1957, leaving the locket to Lily's Great Great Grandma, and then to Great Great Auntie Barbara, Lynda's Mum. I've always told Lily about the importance of voting, she actually got to vote for the first time last year, but something like this brings it home to you that such a basic right as having a say in what happens to you as a woman is something so recently won.

Thank you again Lynda for such a treasure which we will keep very safe indeed.

The Accidental Pre-Raphaelitism of Miss Gabrielle Ray

Today's post is a bit of fun, but don't worry if you just read my stuff for the words 'then everything took a tragic turn...' because I promise you there is a bit of misery too. Mainly, I wanted to just point out something that occurred to me while researching Edwardian actresses.  First of all, let me introduce you to the gorgeous Gabrielle Ray...

I mean, my goodness me, stunning. Gabrielle Elizabeth Clifford Cook, or Miss Ray, or Gabs to her friends, was a dancer, singer and actress and one of the most famous beauties of her generation.  Born in 1883 in Stockport in the North of England, she came from a fairly wealthy family and her sister Gladys (1879-1920) was also an actress, known as Gladys Raymond...

This is not a biographical piece on Ray as there are some cracking ones out there (but I will give you a bit of tragedy later).The purpose of this post is calling Our Gabs out for being Accidentally Pre-Raphaelite...

Okay, we'll start somewhere really obvious.  Here we have a 1906 card where Gabrielle Ray is being Millais' Bubbles...

Bubbles (1886)

It's uncanny.  As I've already spoken about in this post, the recreation of paintings is not an unusual thing, but possibly pretending to be a small boy is a novel move.

Now Miss Ray has arrived with her lilies, a very Pre-Raphaelite prop, and it might be a tad tenuous but I can see things like Rossetti's Sanctas Lilias and Cooksey's Maria Virgo but we can call on Rossetti's Virgin Mary pictures as well.

Maria Virgo (1915) May Louise Greville Cooksey

If a lily is a standard Pre-Raphaelite prop meaning the innocence and purity of the Virgin Mary, then I was surprised to see Miss Ray posing with a bird.  Those of us lucky enough to do Open University A102 will remember the pictures of 'kept' women with birds, how women are also caged pets etc etc.  I must admit Miss Ray's bird is both exotic and slightly sinister. And stuffed.

I remember lots of Victorian pictures of women with their caged birds, and even Byam Shaw's image of Maud Atkinson releasing the bird as she would like to be released (as you can see in this post), but I've chosen this Val Prinsep image as the girl looks remarkably like Miss Ray...

Reclining Woman with Parrot (undated) Val Prinsep

The exotic dress, the bosoms, it's practically the same picture!

Girl with Lovebirds (1876) Henry Guillaume Schlesinger

Yes, this is the sort of thing I was remembering, where women are like pretty exotic birds and we must keep them in nice warm house with plenty of seed, or something.  Either way, I'd love to know where the photographer who took Gabrielle's picture got that bird. It is striking, to say the least.

I now draw your attention to the genre of Pre-Raphaelitism that is 'woman emerging from foliage' as Miss Ray is demonstrating here...

I obviously thought of Rossetti's Fiammetta and her apple blossoms

A Vision of Fiammetta (1878) Dante Gabriel Rossetti

But equally I could have gone with Julia Margaret Cameron's image of Alice Liddell lurking in a hedge...

Ceres (Alice Liddell) (1872) Julia Margaret Cameron

Or in fact something like Sophie Anderson's Capril girl who looks very happy about her flowers...

Capril Girl With Flowers (undated) Sophie Anderson

Good for her, it's nice to have a hobby.

The picture that really set me off on this frankly ridiculous post was this one...

Oh, come on now, she's definitely referencing this painting by Frederick Sandys...

Love's Shadow (1867) Frederick Sandys

We're looking at around 40 years between the images but the moment I saw (and subsequently bought) this postcard on eBay, I knew it was either consciously or unconsciously a call-back to another actress, Mary Emma Jones/Sandys, the common-law wife and model of Frederick.  Mary was also still alive and, depending if this postcard was after Sandys death in 1904, putting on performances to pay the bills.

Finally, I saw this image of Gabrielle...

which reminded me of this image of Florence Welch (from this post)...

which obviously led me to this painting, which incorporates a multiple image of Jane Morris...

Astarte Syriaca (1877) Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Yes, I know that Jane isn't all three women, her daughter May is one of them, but the effect is of a multiple of the same goddess. With Gabrielle's image, reflected in the mirror, I'm guessing there is a hint of her life as an actress, being in front of the mirror to prepare for the stage, but also the many parts she will play, the many facets of her personality. I would be remiss if I didn't also mention the images of Fanny Cornforth and Alexa Wilding in front of mirrors in such works as Lady Lilith or Fazio's Mistress. A woman in reflection is a trope, for want of a better word, also buying into the notion of women's vanity, but judging by Gabrielle's expression, I wonder if there is more to the term 'reflection' here.  What is she thinking?

Gabrielle Ray (c.1910) Foulsham and Banfield, London

Miss Ray was only 10 years old when she took to the stage in 1893, but from that point she became a star. She was just shy of 30 years old when she retired from the stage in order to marry Eric Loder in the Spring of 1912, however less than a year later he had cleared off and committed adultery, giving her grounds for a divorce. Meanwhile, her beautiful sister Gladys had married railway engineer John Winnington in 1910. Despite regularly appearing in plays throughout the war and after, Gladys suddenly disappeared from public life, dying in 1920 of cancer in the Barnsley Hall Asylum in Bromsgrove.  

Gabrielle kept working, but her original fame had been damaged by her retirement and the scandal around her marriage and she never found the same popularity.  Mental health issues caused her to have a breakdown in 1936.  She lived out the rest of her life in Holloway Sanatorium where she was visited by her fellow actresses including Lily Elsie.  She was remembered by the staff there as a small, neat old lady who enjoyed going out in the car and shopping, walking in the nearby village, being quiet and cheerful.  She died in May of 1973 and had an obituary in The Stage which tactfully reported that 'for half a century, she has lived away from theatrical circles.'

Apologies for the tragic ending, but the point of this rambling post is the currency of Pre-Raphaelite imagery, fifty years after its creation.  I'm not sure if I think the echoing of these paintings is deliberate either by Gabrielle Ray or the photographer but it is a very strong coincidence if it isn't.  More likely, the poses and props of Pre-Raphaelitism had become their own graphic language that superseded the original meaning and place to become the standard of feminine beauty, easily understood by the viewer. My hunt continues for inadvertent Pre-Raphaelitism but it has been a charming diversion to spend time with Miss Ray.