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”.