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“A wedding doesn’t change things much, except that the bride’s nearest relations can shut their eyes in peace.”

—Birds of a Feather.

And so we were married.... We had a funny wedding day. Harry, being an Irishman, and, like all Irishmen, subject to queer, sudden ways of sentiment, insisted that in the afternoon we should call on his eldest sister! I cannot remember that he had, up to then, shown any overwhelming affection for her, but that afternoon the “Irishman” came to the top, and we called on “herself”. We then dined at Simpson’s, and went off to our respective theatres to work.

I was rehearsing at the time for a musical play—The Mountebanks, by W. S. Gilbert. I went to him, rather nervous, and asked if I “might be excused the afternoon rehearsal”. He naturally asked “why?”; and blushingly, I don’t doubt, I told him “to get married”. He was most intrigued at the idea, and said I might be “excused rehearsals” for a week.

Three weeks after we were married, Edward Terry sent for Harry to come to his dressing-room—and I may say here that Terry’s Theatre only possessed three dressing-rooms: one, under the stage, for Edward Terry, one for the men of the company, and another for the women—the reason for this scarcity being that, when the theatre was built, the dressing-rooms were forgotten! I believe the same thing happened when the theatre was built at Brixton; if anyone has played at the theatre in question, and will remember the extraordinary shapes of the rooms, they will readily believe it! But to go back to Terry’s—Harry was sent for, and Edward Terry presented him with two books, which he said would be of the greatest use to him and me. They were Dr. Chavasse’s Advice to a Mother and Dr. Chavasse’s Advice to a Wife. I do not know if anyone reads Dr. Chavasse in these days, but then he was the authority on how to bring up children. Fred Grove assured me that he brought up a family on Dr. Chavasse.

Anyone who has seen my husband’s “evergreen play,” Eliza Comes to Stay, may remember the extract from the book—the very book that Edward Terry gave to us—which he uses in the play. I give it here; I think it is worth quoting:

“Question: Is there any objection, when it is cutting its teeth, to the child sucking its thumb?

“Answer: None at all. The thumb is the best gum-stick in the world. It is ‘handy’; it is neither too hard nor too soft; there is no danger of it being swallowed and thus choking the child.”

Photograph by Alfred Ellis, London, W. To face p. 30 Harry as Howard Bompas “The Times” 1891

It was during the run of The Late Lamented that I first met Fanny Brough, President and one of the founders of the Theatrical Ladies’ Guild, which has done so much splendid work. She worked with Mrs. Carson (wife of the then Editor of The Stage), who was the originator of the Guild. When the Music Hall Ladies’ Guild began, some years later, they ran their organisation on the same lines. Two of the founders, I think I am right in saying, of the Musical Hall Ladies’ Guild, were the unfortunate Belle Elmore (the Wife of Crippen, who killed her) and Edie Karno, the wife of Mr. Fred Karno, of Mumming Birds fame.

Speaking of Fanny Brough reminds me of others of that famous family. Lal Brough, who held a kind of informal gathering at his house, with its pleasant garden, each Sunday morning. It was a recognised thing to “go along to Lal Brough’s” about 10.30 to 11 on Sunday. About 1 everyone left for their respective homes, in time for the lunch which was waiting there. Looking back, thinking of those Sunday morning gatherings, it seems to me that we have become less simple, less easily contented; who now wants a party, even of the least formal kind, to begin in the morning? We have all turned our days “upside down”—we begin our enjoyment when the night is half over, we dance until the (not very) small hours, and certainly very very few of us want to meet our friends at 11 a.m. They were happy Sundays at Lal Brough’s, but they belong to a side of stage social life which is now, unhappily, over and done. They belong, as did the host, to “the old order”.

Sydney Brough, Lal Brough’s son, was a person of marvellous coolness and resource. I was once playing with him in a special matinée of A Scrap of Paper, in which he had a big duel scene. While the curtain was down, some thoughtful person had cleared the stage of all “unnecessary impedimenta”, including the daggers needed for the fight. When Brough should have seized them, they were nowhere in sight. Most people would have “dried up”—not Sydney Brough. He composed a long speech while he looked all over the stage for the missing daggers; he looked everywhere—talking all the time—and finally found them—on the top of a large cupboard, on the stage!

In 1892 I played in Our Boys with William Farren, who was “a darling”, and Davy James—he was very ill at the time, I remember, and very “nervy”. May Whitty (now Dame May Webster) and I used to dress above his room. We used to laugh immoderately at everything; poor David James used to hate the noise we made, and used to send up word to us, “Will you young women not laugh so much!” Speaking of May Whitty reminds me that one paper said of our respective performances in the play: “If these two young ladies must be in the play, they should change parts.”

Cicely Richards was in the cast too; she later played Nerissa in The Merchant of Venice, with Irving, at Drury Lane, and I took Decima—who, be it said, had never read or seen the play—to see it. Her comment, looking at Shakespeare’s masterpiece strictly from a “Musical Comedy” point of view, was “I don’t think much of the Rosina Brandram part”—the said part being “Nerissa,” and Rosina Brandram at that time the heavy contralto in the Gilbert and Sullivan operas.

It was in A Pantomime Rehearsal that I first met Ellaline Terriss; we were the “two gifted amateurs” who sing a duet. She was as pretty as a picture, and as nice as she was pretty. I also sang a song, called “Poor Little Fay”, and at the revival “Ma Cherie”, by Paul Rubens, which, I think, Edna May sang later on in the music halls. I know she came one evening to hear the song, and sat in a box, which made me very nervous. She was very quiet and rather shy—at least so I found her when we met.

Charlie Brookfield was in the Pantomime Rehearsal, playing the part created by Brandon Thomas. He was a most perfectly groomed man, and always wore magnificent and huge button-holes, as really smart young men did at that time. The bills for these button-holes used to come in, and also bills for many other things as well, for he was always in debt; it used to cause great excitement as to whether “Charlie” would get safely in and out of the theatre without having a writ served on him.

There are hundreds of good stories about Charles Brookfield, some of them—well, not to be told here—but I can venture on two, at least. When Frank Curzon was engaged to Isabel Jay, someone—one of the pests who think the fact that a woman is on the stage gives them a right to insult her—sent her a series of insulting letters, or postcards—I forget which. Curzon was, naturally, very angry, and stated in the Press that he would give £100 reward to find the writer. Brookfield walked into the club one day and said, “Frank Curzon in a new rôle, I see.” Someone asked, “What rôle?” “Jay’s disinfectant,” replied Brookfield. He was walking down Maiden Lane one morning with a friend, and then Maiden Lane was by no means the most reputable street in London. “I wonder why they call it Maiden Lane?” said his friend. “Oh,” responded Brookfield, “just a piece of damned sarcasm on the part of the L.C.C.” At the time when Wyndham was playing David Garrick, he was sitting one day in the Garrick Club under the portrait of the “great little man”. Brookfield came up. “’Pon my word,” he began, “it’s perfectly wonderful; you get more like Garrick every day.” Wyndham smiled. “Yes,” went on Brookfield, “and less like him every night.” When Tree built His Majesty’s, he was very proud of the building, and used to love to escort people past the place and hear their flattering comments on the beauty of the building. One day he took Brookfield. They stopped to gaze on “my beautiful theatre”, and Tree waited for the usual praise. After a long pause, Brookfield said: “Damned lot of windows to clean.” He could, and did, say very witty, but bitter and cutting, things, which sometimes wounded people badly; yet he said pathetically to a friend once: “Can’t think why some people dislike me so!”

About this time, or perhaps rather earlier (as a matter of fact, I think it was in Culprits), I met Walter Everard, who, though quite an elderly man, did such good work with the Army of Occupation in Cologne; he is still, I think, doing work in Germany for the British Army.

In Man and Woman I met the ill-fated couple, Arthur Dacre and Amy Roselle. She was the first well-known actress to appear on the music halls. She went to the Empire to do recitations. She was much interviewed, and much nonsense was talked and written about the moral “uplift” such an act would give to the “wicked Empire”—which was just what the directors of the Empire, which was not in very good odour at the time, wanted. She was a queer, rather aloof woman, who took little notice of anyone. He, too, was moody, and always struck me as rather unbalanced. They went to Australia later, taking with them a bag of English earth. There they found that their popularity had gone, poor things! He shot her and then killed himself, leaving the request that the English earth might be scattered over them.

Lena Ashwell was in the cast. She was not very happy; for some reason, Amy Roselle did not like her, and did nothing to make things smooth for her. Lena Ashwell, in those days, was a vague person, which was rather extraordinary, as she was a very fine athlete, and the two qualities did not seem to go together. She also played in a first piece with Charles Fulton. One day her voice gave out, and I offered to “read the part for her” (otherwise there could have been no curtain-raiser)—a nasty, nerve-racking business; but, funnily enough, I was not nearly so nervous as poor Charles Fulton, who literally got “dithery”.

Henry Neville was also in Man and Woman. A delightful actor, he is one of the Stage’s most courtly gentlemen, one of those rare people whose manners are as perfect at ten in the morning as they are at ten at night. Writing of Henry Neville reminds me that later he was going to appear at a very big matinée for Ellen Terry at Drury Lane, in which “all stars” were to appear in the dance in Much Ado. Everybody who was anybody was to appear—Fred Terry, Neville, my husband, Ben Webster, and many more whose names I cannot remember at the moment. At ten each morning down they went to rehearse. Edith Craig was producing the dance, and put them through their paces. Apparently they were not very “bright”, and Edie was very cross. Finally she burst out: “No, no, no—and if you can’t do it any better than that, you shan’t be allowed to do it at all!” Evidently after that they really “tried hard”, for they certainly were allowed to “do it”, as the programme bears witness.

In a special matinée at the old Gaiety I met Robert Sevier. He had written a play called The Younger Son, which I heard was his own life when he was in Australia. I don’t think it was a great success—at anyrate, it was not played again—but Sevier enjoyed the rehearsals enormously. After the matinée he asked all the company to dinner at his house in Lowdnes Square. His wife, Lady Violet Sevier, was present. Sevier enjoyed the dinner, as he had done the rehearsals, but she—well, she “bore with us”; there was a frigid kindness about her which made one feel that—to put it mildly—she “suffered” our presence, and regarded the whole thing as an eccentricity of “Robert’s” (I cannot imagine that she ever called him “Bob”, as did the rest of the world).

Photograph by Alfred Ellis, London, W. To face p. 37 Pepita “Little Christopher Columbus”

The same year, 1893, I played in Little Christopher Columbus. Teddie Lonnen was the comedian. May Yohe played “Christopher”, and played it very well too; I impersonated her, in the action of the play. We had to change clothes, for reasons which were part of the plot. She was not an easy person to work with, and she certainly—at that time, at all events—did not like me. This play was the only one in which I ever rehearsed “foxy”—that is, did not put in the business I was going to play eventually. The reason was this: as I gradually “built up” the part, putting in bits of “business” during the rehearsals, I used to find the next morning that they were “cut”: “That line is ‘out’, Miss Moore,” or “Perhaps you’d better not do that, Miss Moore.” So “Miss Moore” simply walked through the rehearsals, to the horror of the producer. I used to go home and rehearse there. But on the first night I “let myself go”, and put into the part all I had rehearsed at home. The producer was less unhappy about me after that first night! However, it still went on after we had produced. Almost every night the stage manager would come to my room: “Miss Moore, a message for you—would you run across the stage less noisily, you shake the theatre”; would I stand further “up stage”; or would I do this, or that, or the other. Oh! May Yohe, you really were rather trying in those days; still, things did improve, and eventually she really was very nice to me. It was in Little Christopher Columbus that I wore “boy’s clothes”. I thought they suited me—in fact, I still think they did—a ballet shirt, coat (and not a particularly short coat either) and—breeches. But, behold the Deus ex machina, in the person of my husband! He came to the dress rehearsal, and later we rode home to our little flat in Chelsea on the top of a bus, discussing the play. Suddenly, as if struck by a bright thought, he turned to me and said: “Don’t you think you’d look awfully well in a cloak?” I felt dubious, and said so, but that did not shake him. “I do,” he said, and added: “Your legs are much too pretty to show! I’ll see about it in the morning.” He did! Early next morning he went up and saw Monsieur Alias, the cloak was made and delivered to me at the theatre that very evening, and I wore it too. It covered me from head to foot; with great difficulty, I managed to show one ankle. But Harry approved of it, very warmly indeed.

There is a sequel to that story. Twenty years after, I appeared at a big charity matinée at the Chelsea Palace as “Eve”—not Eve of the Garden of Eden, but “Eve” of The Tatler. I wore a very abbreviated skirt, which allowed the display of a good deal of long black boots and silk stocking. Ellen Terry had been appearing as the “Spirit of Chelsea”. After the performance she stood chatting to Harry and me. “Your legs are perfectly charming; why haven’t we seen them before?” I pointed to Harry as explanation. She turned to him. “Disgraceful,” she said, adding: “You ought to be shot.”

I was engaged to follow Miss Ada Reeve in The Shop Girl at the Gaiety Theatre. It was a ghastly experience, as I had, for the few rehearsals that were given me, only a piano to supply the music, and my first appearance on the stage was my introduction to the band. I had to sing a duet with Mr. Seymour Hicks—I think it was “Oh listen to the band”—at anyrate, I know a perambulator was used in the song. Mr. Hicks’s one idea was to “get pace”, and as I sang he kept up a running commentary of remarks to spur me on to fresh efforts. Under his breath—and not always under his breath either—he urged me to “keep it up”, to “get on with it”, until I felt more like a mental collapse than being bright or amusing. This was continued at most of the performances which followed; I sang, or tried to sing, accompanied by the band—and Mr. Hicks. Then, suddenly—quite suddenly—he changed. The theatre barometer swung from “Stormy” to “Set fair”. Even then, I think, I had learnt that such a sudden change—either in the barometer or human beings—means that a storm is brewing. It was!

I remember saying to Harry, when I got home one evening after this change, “I shall be out of the theatre in a fortnight; Seymour Hicks has been so extraordinarily pleasant to me—no faults, nothing but praise.” What a prophet I was!

As I was going to the dressing-room the next evening, I met Mr. George Edwardes on the stairs. He called to me, very loudly, so that everyone else could hear, “Oh! I shan’t want you after next Friday!” I protested that I had signed for the “run”. I was told that, though I might have done so, he had not, and so... well!

It was before the days when Sydney Valentine fought and died for the standard contract, before the days when he had laboured to make the Actors’ Association a thing of real use to artists—a real Trades Union; so I did not claim my salary “for the run”, but the fact that I received a cheque from the management “in settlement of all claims” is significant.

Another rather “trying time” was many years later when I appeared “on the halls”. Let me say here that I have played the halls since, and found everyone—staff, manager, and other artists—very kind; but at that time “sketches had been doing badly”, and when the date approached on which I was to play at the—no, on second thoughts I won’t give the name of the hall—the management asked me either to cancel or postpone the date. I refused. I had engaged my company, which included Ernest Thesiger, Bassett Roe, and several other excellent artists, for a month, and the production had been costly, so I protested that they must either “play me or pay me”. They did the latter, in two ways—one in cash, the other in rudeness. How I hated that engagement! But even that had its bright spot, and I look back and remember the kindness of the “Prime Minister of Mirth”, Mr. George Robey, who was appearing at that particular hall at the time. He did everything that could be done to smooth the way for me.

I seem to have been unlucky with “sketches” at that time. I had a one-act comedy—and a very amusing comedy too; my son later used it as a curtain-raiser, and I played it at several of the big halls: as the Americans say, “It went big.”

I thought I would strike out on my own and see an agent myself, without saying anything to anybody. This is what happened. (I should say that this is only a few years ago, when I had thought for some time that as an actress I was fairly well known.)

I called on the agent in question; he was established in large and most comfortable offices in the West End. I was ushered into the Presence! He was a very elegant gentleman, rather too stout perhaps. He sat at a perfectly enormous desk, swinging about in a swivel chair, and, without rising or asking me to sit down (which I promptly did), he opened the interview:

“Who are you?” I supplied the information.

“Don’t know you,” he replied. “What d’you want?” I told him, as briefly as possible. At the word “sketch” he stopped me, and with a plump hand he pounded some letters that lay on his desk. “Sketches,” he repeated solemnly, “I can get sketches three-a-penny, and good people to play ’em. Nothing doing.”

I stood up and walked to the door, then perhaps he remembered that he had seen me in a play or something—I don’t know; anyway, he called after me, “Here, who did you say you were?” “Still Eva Moore,” I said calmly, and made my exit.

All agents may not be like that; I hope they are not; but I fancy he is one of the really successful ones. Perhaps their manners are in inverse ratio to their bank balances.

Talking of agents, I heard of one who was listening to a patriotic ballad being sung at the Empire during the war. A man who was with him did not like it, and said, “You know, that kind of stuff doesn’t do any good to the Empire”—meaning the British Empire. “No,” was the reply; “they don’t go well at the Alhambra, for that matter, either.”