Gertie the Gaiety Girl

A curious piece of family lore was brought to mind when I listened to a podcast episode about researching theatre ancestors. It was that "Gertie was a gaiety girl". Gaiety girl? My im

agination offered up images of sexy dancers but I doubted such women would get a mention at the box office. Plus, we had more than one Gertie in our family tree. Still, the podcast encouraged me to go searching, and the exercise proved very illuminating.

The fact that my mother  and aunt knew about Gertie's career in theatre pointed to her being the more recent Gertrude in the family tree. That would be Gertrude Parker, elder sister of Maude Parker. In other words, this was my Grandad's aunt on his mother's side.  She was born in 1871 in Marylebone and appeared on the 1891 census aged 20 and working as a parlour maid/domestic servant.

According to the podcast, it was typical for theatre people to have two jobs. Because of the inconsistency of stage work, they generally had a regular day job as well. In the case of Gaiety girls, working at the Gaiety Theatre in London's West End, their night job involved singing and dancing as members of the chorus in musical comedies. It was glamorous too, by the sounds of it, because London's top couturiers of the 1890s  designed fashionable bathing suits and clothes for the girls to wear on stage, knowing that their appearance in the theatre and in illustrated periodicals would serve as excellent publicity for their latest fashion lines.

The Gaiety Theatre was situated on Aldwych, at the eastern end of the Strand in Westminster. It had seating for 2000 people on four levels. Interestingly, the proprietor chose to ban smoking and drinking from the main theatre, instead providing separate saloons for these activities. Lighting was  achieved with a novel gaslighting system which created an appealing ambiance. The music was live and the script was witty, but manager George Edwardes was careful to steer clear of the racier elements of burlesque in order to please a slightly more refined audience.

The gaiety girls themselves were respectable young women, polite and well-mannered, according to Wikipedia. They drew people to the theatre and the surrounding restaurants and were regarded as suitable dates for bright young men. The term "stage door Johnnies" comes from the wealthy gentlemen who stood waiting for the chorus girls to emerge from the theatre after the show so they could take them out to dinner.

According to author Alan Hyman, who wrote the book The Gaiety Years, many unlikely matches occurred as a result of this practice. "At the old Gaiety in the Strand the chorus was becoming a matrimonial agency for girls with ambitions to marry into the peerage." After  the star Connie Gilchrist married  the 7th Earl of Orkney,, several other show girls abandoned George Edwards to marry noblemen, bankers or stockbrokers. "The Guv’nor finding this was playing ducks and drakes with his theatrical plans had a 'nuptial clause' inserted in every contract. ... Debutantes were competing with the other girls to get into the Gaiety chorus while upper-class youths were joining the ranks of the chorus boys."

Our Gaiety girl, Gertrude, married Harry Milner Willis, an accountant. The marriage took place   in 1892,  before George Edwards rose to the height of his career with shows that went to Broadway. Nevertheless, she may have participated in earlier productions, such as Faust up to Date [1888], Carmen up to Data [1890], and Cinder Ellen up too Late [1891].

Investigating the link between Gertie and the theatre taught me a lot about Edwardian musical comedy and London society in the 1890s. It also explained something about a family heirloom. I had inherited from my mother an autograph book full of signatures from actors and actresses. My aunt had been unable to remember how  it had come to be in the family, so my sister and I had assumed that Grandad, being so well-travelled, must have also collected autographs as a hobby. Now I believe it was Auntie Gertie who gathered the signatures because it was her that mixed in theatre circles, rubbing shoulders with the stars of the day and many minor characters who would go on to build illustrious careers.

 Photo credit: Miss Broughton in swing, by The National Archives UK.

When finding the right location evokes discontent and puzzlement

The address we have for Maude Alice Ritchie in 1918 comes off a statutory declaration she made at the Marylebone Police Station. In it, she states that her son, David Scott Ritchie, was born in Paddington on 31 March 1902 and that her present address is 40 Brown Street. This, then, was where my husband, daughter and I headed after leaving Paddington Green.

Brown Street is near the Marble Arch tube station but not that far from the Marylebone tube station and Huntsworth Mews. It felt like a long way, although it wasn't really. I think the distance felt great because we had already covered several kilometres on foot and I'm unaccustomed to so much walking. A timely reminder that my great-grandparents' lifestyle was substantially more strenuous than ours.

Leaving the busy thoroughfare and passing a quaint-looking pub, we reached an intersection with brick terrace houses to the left and right. Everything was quiet, it being the middle of the afternoon with no-one around. I had the feeling that this was a neighbourhood of reserved, hardworking people who prized their little corner of tranquility in a sprawling, fast-paced city.

The house we were looking for was close to the intersection with an unassuming front door. I was sorry I hadn't done more research about the impact of the Second World War on Brown Street, since it would have been useful in ascertaining whether what we were seeing was the original facade of the house or something that had been added later. Then again, this could not have been Maude's own house since she wasn't a property owner. This was just another place of work for my great-grandmother. Grandad himself had probably never lived here.

All I could glean from my visit was a sense of how close Maude had lived to her childhood home and her siblings, if indeed they had all remained in the area. What I really wanted to know was why her own little family was so split up. Walking the streets she walked and seeing the house where she worked didn't really satisfy my curiosity. If anything, it raised more questions than it answered.

Help wanted with the history of Broadley Street

Maude Alice Parker, my great-grandmother, lived in Earl Street at the time of the 1891 census. Today the street has been renamed Broadley Street. I visited there on my recent trip to England, although I doubt it resembles the old Earl Street much these days. A wide, attractive road with good pavements now runs where, probably, a couple of narrow lanes wove before.

If anyone can contribute information about when and why Earl Street became Broadley Street, it would be of great help to me. At this point, I only have suppositions to go on. The following are some thoughts currently brewing in my mind:

Maude and her family lived in a house that is not numbered in the census. I assume this means the houses didn't have a proper numbering system. It is unlikely, therefore, that the family occupied rooms in a large boarding establishment. More likely, they lived in a cottage in a row

On a more whimsical note, the new name "Broadley Street" calls to mind something I read in a wonderful Phil Rickman novel entitled Curfew

. The novel features a gentleman who is investing money into the resuscitation of a depressed town in Herefordshire based on what he knows about ley lines. ley lines are generally regarded as pseudoscience because of the tendency of New Age enthusiasts to equate them with pathways of spiritual power. Yet when Alfred Watkins first coined the phrase in 1921, he was thinking more in terms of ancient trackways for navigation in a densely forested landscape. What is especially interesting is that Watkins coined the term "ley" because the first line he discerned passed through several towns whose names contained the syllable "ley", suggesting that the towns were named thus because they "lay" on the ancient trackways.

So, I'm posing the question: does the name Broadley Street have deep, prehistoric roots? Was there once a marker, such as a standing stone or spring, to guide the footsteps of Britain's early inhabitants? Or is the name simply derived from a certain mr Broadley who happened to live nearby? I rather like the idea that the street in which my great-grandmother came of age was an ancient trackway, but if she only ever knew it as Earl Street, that's okay too.

A visit to Huntsworth Mews

Before i describe my visit to Huntsworth Mews, let me warn you that this is not an account which will satisfy the scientifically-minded reader. I can't read maps or street signs, nor can I describe with confidence what an edifice looks like. Visual impairment forces me to focus on what I pick up through my intuition and so I'll ask you to be content with that.

I had researched a little about Huntsworth Mews, as reported in a previous post, but that research didn't prepare me very well for what I found. i was expecting a quaint, cobbled street with Victorian row houses, complete with two steps leading up to a painted door. Instead, i found what appeared to me like a yard. If there had once been front doors at ground level — or even stables and carriage houses — they were now gone, replaced by garages for the residents who lived in the upstairs apartments.

This was disappointing because I couldn't see any pretty Victorian architecture on the house fronts at all. Perhaps this was because there never had been any, the houses having been accommodation for servants in days gone by. or perhaps renovations to the buildings had resulted in the loss of old-fashioned details, especially if those details had been too weathered or damaged to restore.

The old archway leading from the outer street into the mews is, however, still as it always was. Standing beside it, I had a sense of what the atmosphere must once have been like. I could imagine horses passing in and out of the gate, some carrying riders on errands for their masters,, others pulling carriages decked out with curtains and plush velvet seats. Inside the mews, boot makers, bucklers, dressmakers and spinners would be working in a patch of sheltered sunlight, keeping company with their neighbours. Mothers of small children would be busy with washing, cooking and cleaning the house, while the children themselves would be scooting round the edges, chasing the odd tabby cat or chanting rhymes as their grandmothers had taught them to do.

Summer time would probably have been hot in that closed, paved space, but winter would have been fairly cosy, especially if horses were stabled under the houses and hearth-fires were kept burning. Maude's family numbered 12 in all at the time, which would also have added to the feeling of warmth.

My overall impression of Huntsworth Mews was favourable. It was a solid place from which to embark on life's journey in the latter half of the 19th century. Not only were the buildings strong and protective, but the community they housed were knitted together in both work and leisure, producing a comfortable and nurturing environment.

Walking in my great-grandmother's footsteps

A recent trip to England to see our daughter gave my husband and I an opportunity to look up some addresses that feature in the narrative of my grandfather's mother, Maude Alice Parker nee Ritchie. I had collated the addresses into a list from census records and other documentation. Google then assisted in the plotting of the points on a map and coming up with a route to link them all. This post is about the route we took, while future posts will detail the events which took place at each location.

Our starting point was Piccadilly Circus where we were staying. We boarded a tube for Marylebone Station and rose to street level via a couple of very long escalators. I believe Marylebone Station is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, underground train station in London, although this would only apply to the upper platform since deep-level tunnelling came later. It's hard to imagine what the old station would have looked like in the late 1800's, given the crowds of sneakered tourists and suited businessmen, not to mention electric cars, vans and double-decker buses that populate the area today.

Following the satellite navigation, we made our way to Huntsworth Mews where Maude lived as a little girl. Not much of the facade remains now but the secluded, paved road is just the same as it was.

Next we walked to Broadley Street, formerly Earl Street, where Maude lived in her early teens. The street is now an attractive residential road, although I have a sense that it comprised much less salubrious accommodation at the end of the 19th century. It has nice wide pavements now and the houses are set back a little from the street, suggesting that the upgrading of the area may have included some demolition of small cottages.

Our walk took us through a busy and very noisy part of town to what used to be the Paddington Green Children's Hospital. It is now a care centre but the red brick gate-posts and facade are reminiscent of times past. This was where my grandfather was born. Directly opposite the gates of the old hospital is Paddington Green itself, a fenced park with very wintry-looking trees. No doubt Maude would have known it well.

Heading into Westminster, we found Brown Street, the address given by Maude on her statutory declaration of David's birth. That was in 1918 when my grandfather was 16. Standing on the corner, I caught a snatch of conversation between two young men in suits and gleaned from their discussion about finance that they were probably in the banking sector.

By this time, it was mid-afternoon. Catching a bus, we emerged at Knightsbridge where some of London's most expensive property is located. After admiring the beautiful facades of buildings occupied by property brokers, accountants and lawyers in Curzon Street, we reached Mayfair and Chesterfield Street. This is another very impressive road, much quieter than Curzon Street and thick with blue signs identifying the addresses of historical notaries such as author Somerset Maugham, prime minister Anthony Eden and fashion leader Beau Brummell. Right in the middle of all this fame and fortune lived the Viscount Hood at the residence which now houses the High Commission of the Bahamas. It was here that Maude worked in 1901 as a kitchen maid and met the man who was to become her husband.

Staying amongst the rich and famous, we made our way across Green Park to St James Square. Our route took us along the mall and the area where the Queen's horses are stabled. There was a convoy of motorcycles ahead of us which could have been escorting an important official but it wasn't likely to have been any of the royals as they are currently in Sandringham, to the best of our knowledge. Anyway, we finally reached St James Square and the address where Maude was working in 1911. It is now the London headquarters of the Rolex Watch Company.

With the sun sinking fast and the temperature dropping, we hurried through St James Park back to Piccadilly Circus. Two things stood out to me from the afternoon's long ramble: Firstly, that what was for us just a tiny part of the city was, in Maude's day, quite a substantial portion of it. And secondly, that the 1939-1945 war must have wrought extensive damage in the streets through which we'd passed although I detected nothing but neatness and order.

A truly fortuitous find in the 1901 census

Census records are a rich source of information for the family historian. If you are lucky, you can find the names, birth dates and birth locations of a whole family, plus the occasional brother-in-law, elderly parent or future marriage partner. Especially useful are the details you discover about where a family lived over the course of time and how their occupations developed or changed.

But sometimes you hit a brick wall and are unable to locate a person on a census record at all. This happened for me in both Maude Alice Parker and David Scott Ritchie senior's cases. Knowing that gaps on the census can indicate travel, military service or institutionalisation, I tried broadening my search to include locations outside of London and even the United Kingdom, but with no luck.

What puzzled me was that I had evidence to suggest that Maude and David were right there in Paddington. For one thing, the pair were married in Paddington in the first quarter of 1902. For another, Maude's statutory declaration citing the date of my grandfather's birth also gave the address where they were living, which was 22 Albert Street in the same neighbourhood. Surely they could not have been out of the country in 1901?

In desperation, I began searching for anyone named Parker who was born around 1879 in Marylebone who appeared on the 1901 census. There were a few hits that came up for women named Maude or Alice, so I checked those out first. Sure enough, there was an Alice Parker working as a kitchen maid at a house in Chesterfield Street, Mayfair. The age was slightly out but everything else looked promising.

The transcription on Ancestry made it look as if the house was full of foreigners, so muddled were some of the names. But a few searches on Google soon solved that mystery. What I had in front of me was the household of the Viscount Francis Hood. The status of the family is born out by the number of servants they employed, as well as the fact that their home on Chesterfield Street is now the premises of the High Commission of the Bahamas.

An even bigger surprise came when I scrutinised the names of the other servants living in the house. A footman from Tottenham was among them and his name was Daria Ritchie. Now, it's not rocket science to realise that "David" can appear as "Daria" if the entry was scribbled, and, indeed, another genealogist had noted the error in transcription of this name as well as several others.

So, I've found my missing lovers! It is quite likely that Maude met David through her job, although perhaps they met beforehand and enlisted together. The main thing is, i have an address for them before they married. Slowly but surely, i am building a timeline for them and, by extension, for my grandfather's early life.

Illustration from "Directions to Servants in general; and in particular to the Butler, Cook, Footman, Coachman, Groom, House-Steward and Land-Steward, Porter, Dairy-Maid, Chamber-Maid, Nurse, Laundress, House-Keeper, Tutoress or Governess, etc", "Miscellaneous Single Works"

Author: Swift, Jonathan Shelfmark: "British Library HMNTS 1077.i.45."

Changes evident in1891 Marylebone

Sometime between 1881 and 1891, the Parker family moved from Huntsworth Mews to Earl Street. Perhaps this was because the family had shrunk with the older children leaving home and Ann Watson no longer staying with them. The 1891 census records just 5 people in the household, as opposed to the 12 listed ten years earlier.

Actually, I struggled to find Earl Street in the pages cataloguing London streets. Unlike Hunstworth Mews, it didn't pop up on property websites offering centrally-located residential accommodation. I wondered whether it had been bombed in the war and had to be cleared, but that wasn't the case. It turns out that the name of the street was changed in the early 19th century to Broadley Street, and that it is, in fact, very close to huntsworth Mews. The only difference is that Huntsworth Mews comprises terrace houses while Broadley Street consists mostly of flats.

As before, while researching the history of the area, I was astonished at what I found. What is today a bustling area of London, alive with night life and exhibitions, was once overrun with rats and rampant with disease. Just down the road in Lisson Grove, a veritable rabbit warren of hovels was built on ground poisoned by cess-pits, and thieves and murderers were said to be lurking in the shadows, ready to pounce on anyone who could relieve their grinding poverty and hunger. Maude would have been familiar with the nearby Marylebone Workhouse and the foundlings who ended up there. I doubt she could have harboured any sentimentality amidst such deprivation. On the contrary, I wouldn't be surprised if, at age 11, she was a tough pre-teen herself.

It isn't clear how many times Jane Parker, her mother, gave birth after Maude arrived in the world. What the 1891 census tells us is that young Alfred Parker was born in 1884, bringing the number of children in the family up to ten. Perhaps there was another child between him and Maude, say in 1882, who succumbed to illness, but I will have to search for a birth record to check that. At any rate, Maude must have been exposed to some pretty gruesome sights, smells and sounds in her formative years.

Maude Parker's first home in Marylebone

Not being a resident of London, I had to be taught how to pronounce Marylebone. One apparently has to say "Marly-bin", or something to that effect. Anyway, for those interested in where names come from, this part of London takes its name from the 900-year-old parish that was originally called St Mary the Virgin, or St Mary of the Born.

Maude's first home was in Huntsworth Mews, which is described on Wikipedia as a "through road with a cul-de-sac section, approached through an entrance under a building on Gloucester Place in Westminster, leading onto Taunton Mews". Note that I have to rely on other people's word pictures because I can't read maps or view photographs myself. Apparently both Huntsworth Mews and Taunton Mews are within the Westminster City Council’s Dorset Square Conservation Area, meaning that the large red brick and terracotta buildings still retain their original late Victorian style. The mews is said to have been named after Huntsworth in Somerset because the estate that originally owned the land, the Portman Estate, also owned land there.

Back in 1881 when Maude was an infant, Huntsworth Mews provided stable/ coach house accommodation to the main houses on Gloucester Place. As such, it represented the "back quarters" to the fancy houses near Regent's Park. In fact, when Charles Booth drew up his famous Poverty Maps for the city of Westminster in 1898, less than two decades later, the inhabitants of the mews were classified as very poor. But by that time, the Parkers had moved out, as we shall see later.

Nowadays, of course, Huntsworth Mews is situated in one of the most fashionable parts of London. Property websites emphasise that it is located a 3-minute walk from Marylebone Tube Station on one side and a 3-minute walk from Baker Street Tube Station on the other. The prestigious Landmark London Hotel, originally the Great Central Hotel, is just four minutes away, while Madame Tussaud's and St Marylebone's Church can be reached in just six minutes. If you are looking to buy a one-bedroom terrace house measuring 75 square metres, you are looking at 1.1 million pounds.

The thought of being able to visit the place where my great-grandmother lived in the centre of London is rather thrilling. Many other old buildings have been demolished to make way for new properties in the scramble for urban office space. I did read that Huntsworth Mews was damaged by a high-explosive bomb during World War II but the buildings were thankfully repaired. At least for the time being, our family can visit the site of Maude's early childhood and get a sense of how close she lived to many of the most famous Victorian landmarks.

Illustration from "Metropolitan Improvements ... From original drawings by T. H. Shepherd, etc" Author: ELMES, James. Contributor: SHEPHERD, Thomas Hosmer. Shelfmark: "British Library HMNTS 010349.s.3."

Starting with a single historical document

In the beginning of our family history journey, it was my sister who took the lead. She had all the documents that had been in my mother's home when she passed away. My sister said she would collate the documents needed for the UK citizenship application if I would take care of the forms, so I willingly left the matter in her hands.

That was when we realised there was no actual birth certificate to be found. What we had instead was a statutory declaration made at the Police Court in Marylebone within the Metropolitan District. The declaration, signed by Maude Alice Ritchie, stated that she was the mother of David Scott Ritchie who had been born on 31 March 1902 in the Paddington Green Children's Hospital in London. The statement, dated 1918, also gave the addresses at which she had been living at the time of his birth and her present address.

It was this all-important piece of paper, then, that gave us a starting-point. I dread to think what we would have done if it had not been in my mother's file. With Mom gone and my aunt in her late eighties with a sketchy memory for details, we might have been sitting with a first name for David's mother and nothing else. As it was, the information given to us was thin, but it was enough to go on.

Caring for old family records is vitally important, although it is not something that is taught at school or even modelled much in our society. Here in South Africa, we have such a short history of record-keeping that everything, if lost, can be reapplied for from the Department of Home Affairs, bank, hospital or school, or so it seems. Then again, I've never had to apply for a 100-year-old document before. Chances are it would be even harder here than in Britain. Whatever the case, though, the moral of the story is that family documents are valuable and should be treated as such. One never knows when a descendant will need a vital record to open doors of opportunity or research a hitherto-unsuspected hereditary trait.