LAURENCE IRVING
Laurence Sydney Brodribb Irving, actor, author and manager, was the second son of the late Sir Henry Irving, born in London August 5, 1870. He was educated at Marlborough College and the New College, Oxford. Later he spent three years in Russia studying for the Foreign Office. He made his first appearance on the stage in F. R. Benson’s Shakespearean company in Dundee in 1893, and for the next two years was with J. L. Toole’s company. Mr. Irving played in provincial tours, appearing in “A Bunch of Violets,” “Trilby,” and “Under the Red Robe,” from 1896 until 1898. In the latter year he joined his father, for whom he wrote the play “Peter the Great,” which proved a disastrous experiment, although it was a work of considerable cleverness and force. He was the translator of “Robespierre,” written especially for his father by Sardou, and he himself played Tallien. He was the Junius Brutus in his father’s unfortunate revival of “Coriolanus,” and later was Colonel Midwinter in “Waterloo,” Fouche in “Madame Sans Gêne,” Antonio in “The Merchant of Venice,” Nemours in “Louis XI,” and Valentine in “Faust.” In all these diverse characters he manifested marked intelligence and ability, although his histrionic facility was developed slowly. He then entered into management for himself, acting in England in “Bonnie Dundee” and “Richard Lovelace,” with moderate popular success, but no little critical approval, and later in “Raffles.” He had made great advancement as an actor, proving himself an eccentric comedian of fine finish and incisive force, when he and his wife (Mabel Hackney) appeared in New York in 1909-1910 in “The Incubus” (“Les Hannetons”), and “The Three Daughters of M. Dupont.” In both these plays he won critical and popular approval. Recently, he was the Iago in Sir Herbert Tree’s revival of “Othello.”
SIR HERBERT TREE’S TRIBUTE
Sir Herbert Tree has written the following tribute to Laurence Irving:
“We actors were proud of Laurence Irving in life and no less proud of him in death. There was always something fateful about his personality, and one feels that his end is in tragic harmony with his being. Irving was an idealist, fearless of standing by his ideals in any company. He was a scholar in knowledge as in expression, and as an actor had already attained to a great height. His work, like the man himself, was always original.”
Technically Irving stood at the very top of his profession. As an actor with power to thrill and hold his public, he had few equals and fewer superiors. Personally, he was a man of rare charm of manner, courteous, dignified, serious in conversation, and imbued with the highest ideals. His devoted wife, whose whole career was wrapped up in her husband’s success, was herself an actress of distinction whose loss is deeply deplored.
They did honor to their profession and added dignity to the stage upon which they had so often appeared together and from which they were destined, in the end, to pass—together, as they would have wished it to be.
COMMISSIONER REES
The late Commissioner David M. Rees entered the Salvation Army Service from Reading in 1882. He was at the time of his death Territorial Commissioner for Canada for the second time. He was at one time Principal of the International Training College in London, and later became Field Secretary for the United Kingdom, assuming afterwards the office of Territorial Commissioner for South Africa and Sweden. He married Captain Ruth Babington in the year 1885.
The last official function performed by Commissioner Rees was the conduct of the farewell service at the Salvation Army Temple on Wednesday night. On that occasion he was full of life and spirits. Every speaker on the platform was stimulated by his enthusiastic and delightfully humorous address. At the close he leaned over the desk during the singing of “God be with you till we meet again,” and shook hands with a group of young men in the front seats, perfect strangers to him, but brothers in their presence at the service.