The working life of Museum of London

Since my first blog on Cheiro, quite a lot has happened and I had to rethink my approach somewhat. As you might have gathered from my tone, I was, and I guess still am, quite sceptical about Count Hamon’s own version of his life story. Now that I have exchanged quite a few emails with Judy, whose father knew Hamon’s wife, and who has told me more about the Countess’s later years, I have realised that while this might still be the tale of a con artist of sorts, it has a sad ending, which casts a shadow over the preceding years.

But I am getting ahead of myself and I might pursue my initial line for a little longer. So, let’s stay with the Count for one or two more blog entries. Before I start, a reminder what (literally) sparked off this quest: here is a second pair of shoes made by Pluchino for the Countess in 1925.

According to his Wikipedia entry, Cheiro was born William John Warner on 1 November 1866 in Bray, near Dublin, which seems to be confirmed by a Church Baptism Record. On that date a William Warner (no mentioning of John) was indeed born or baptised. The boy’s father is listed as William Warner, Parish Clerk, living at the School House with the boy’s mother Margaret (whose maiden name might have been Thompson).

For what happened in the next 25 years or so, we have to rely, for now, on Cheiro’s own statements. In Confessions: Memoirs of a Modern Seer (1932), Cheiro claimed that his ‘father’s principal study was that of higher mathematics’, not entirely improbable for a parish clerk. William’s mother ‘came from Greek and French stock’ and his paternal grandfather had ‘lost a considerable sum of money in speculation in China’. Warner junior was sent to a ’strict school’ to be trained ‘for some religious calling’, but had to return home when Warner senior was ‘ruined by land speculation’. Young William did not stay long in Bray. It seems that he took off for London in around 1883,  at the tender age of 17(ish).

One day, alone in the big city, William walks along the Thames all the way to the docks and steps onto a ship about to leave for Bombay. Shortly after his arrival in India, the very first person William happens to meet turns out to be the ‘descendant of the old Joshi caste, who had kept the Study of the Hand, together with that of Astrology, alive since some far-distant date’. William is invited to stay with the man’s associates and only returns to London two or three years later, having inherited a ‘considerable amount of money’ from a relative. He spends a year taking over 1000 impressions of hands in hospitals, asylums and prisons, before taking off again, this time to Egypt. A common occurrence in the Warner household, it seems, William’s inheritance is embezzled and he has to return to London where he promptly helps to solve a murder in the East End, before turning his renaissance man abilities to writing, possibly publishing some of his works in the Rev Robert P. Downes’ weekly magazine Great Thoughts from Master Minds.

I am not entirely convinced about these sojourns abroad and am wondering whether they hide something a little less interesting. I am surprised that the Count (we will get to to the Count story next time) does not say more about his time in India, excusing this omission by the claim that ‘Histories of India and guide books have already painted the picture better, perhaps, than I could do.’ Interestingly, everything about the old man he first encounters in Bombay reminds William ‘of a book my mother had let me read, dealing with Yogis of India’. According to an article in The New York Times of 28 October 1942, Cheiro was ‘a former hotel pageboy of Belfast, Ireland’, and maybe that’s where he spent some of the 1880s.

According to another source (John Michael Greer’s The new encyclopaedia of the occult, 2003) ‘Warner himself first seems to have surfaced in England in the 1880s, as a stagehand in London theaters, using the name Louis Warner’. Intriguingly a Louis Warner, actor, was registered in Bloomsbury in 1891, but his age is listed as 22 (William would have been 25) and his birthplace is Tipperary in Ireland. As far as I can tell, no Louis Warner was born in Tipperary in the late 1860s …

We have reached the end of the 1890s and William (Louis?) Warner’s metamorphosis into Cheiro. After a lot of deliberation, one night, the palm reader’s ‘tired brain dreamt of names by hundreds, till suddenly I seemed to see in Greek and English the name “CHEIRO” standing out before me’. One wonders what took him so long as Cheir seems to be the Greek word for hand and Cheiromancy (or Chiromancy) is a fancy word for palm reading.

In 1892 William produced the first of more than 25 publications: Cheiro’s Book of the Hand, available for 1s. 6d. from the Record Press at 376 Strand in London, which received a number of favourable reviews all over the country. Around the same time Cheiro opened a practice in New Bond Street, as was reported in The North-Eastern Daily Gazette on 17 October 1892:

London Notes
It might generally be supposed that the days when professors of the “Black Art” could earn a princely competence are passed and done with. This is by no means the case, however. In New Bond-street a gentleman calling himself “Cheiro Palmist” holds a daily levee in a suite of rooms at No. 106, and his visitors, mostly if not entirely of the gentler sex, submit the palms of their hands to his view, form which he proceeds to enlighten them as to their own immediate future. Mr “Cheiro” asks no fee for his confidences, leaving it to his clients to pay him what they will out of gratitude. As he is patronised by “society ladies,” and is more or less “the thing,” I suppose he will escape the fate of the gipsy fortune-teller.

Despite having become ‘the thing’ in London, Cheiro might have gone to America between 1892 and 1896. In any case, he brought out Comfort’s palmistry guide with I & M Ottenheimer, an American publishing house, in 1894.

Four years later, an advertisement published on Christmas eve in The Morning Post informed its now doubt delighted readers:

Closed only on December 26.
108, New Bond-Street.
Cheiro.
Hours eleven to five.
Cheiro’s work needs no wordy advertisement.

The portrait below might have been taken around this time. It shows the palmist ‘experimenting with Professor D’Odiardi’s “Thought Machine”‘. (Professor Edmond Savary d’Odiardi was a ‘medical electrician’ and his apparatus could apparently show the action of thought in the brain.)

Over the next 20 years, until his wedding to our Countess, Cheiro was involved in a surprising range of activities, which I will attempt to summaries in my next entry.

I often seem to be more interested in the former wearers of objects in our collection than the objects themselves. That is even more true in the case of former owners who seem to resist revealing themselves. The following (and I’m afraid there will be more than one instalment) could be the script of a silent movie, complete with over-made-up villain, deceivingly pretty villainess and impressively shocked bystanders, although the writer of the title cards for this one would have their work cut out.

Where to start? Well, it’s always good to begin with some lovely shoes. The image below shows a pair made by Ignazio Pluchino (who really deserves his own blog entry) that are part of a small collection of dress items from the 1920s donated to the Museum in 1968. The shoes are now on display in our Galleries of Modern London, as well as a black satin evening coat from Machinka given at the same time.

The objects came to the Museum not directly from their former owner, but ‘through’ someone else, who may or may not be significant (I’m still working on that one). According to the sparse notes in the object file, the shoes belonged to a certain ‘Countess N. de Hamong’. The short entry in our register reads: ‘All worn by the donor, wife of the palmist Count de Hamong, who died 1933.’ As we will see, you cannot believe anything in this story, not even a museum register entry.

As much as this goes against the feminist leanings of a woman of my age and background, let’s continue not with the Countess, but with her illustrious husband. You might want to take a moment to check his wikipedia entry. From this you will learn that Cheiro  [pronounced ki-ro] was ‘an Irish astrologer and colourful occult figure of the early 20th century. His sobriquet, Cheiro, derives from the word cheiromancy, meaning palmistry.’ So far, so good. Let’s now turn to the gentleman’s obituary published in The Times on 9 October 1936:

DEATH OF “CHEIRO”
Count Louis Hamon, who was well known for his works on palmistry and occultism under the name of “Cheiro” died in New York yesterday at the age of 69, states Reuter. He founded L’Entente Cordiale in Paris in 1901, and was proprietor and editor of the Anglo-Colonial American Register from 1900 to 1914. He had been a correspondent in the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars, had travelled extensively, and was founder-member of the Pacific-Geographic Society. Of late years he had been in Hollywood as a scenario writer.

Much to my amazement, I found one of Cheiro’s many works in our library (once our librarian is back, I will find out, I hope, how it got there), namely Cheiro’s Memoirs – The Reminiscences of a Society Palmist published in 1912. In the chapter ‘On the Making of a Seer’, Cheiro, whose counterfeit from the book you can admire below, briefly turns to his noble ancestry: ‘On my father’s side I am of Norman descent, on my mother’s from a French family, born in Ireland, and I may say almost bred on books.’

In a later tome, Confessions: Memoirs of a Modern Seer, published in 1932 (and available on google books, if you really have nothing else to do), Cheiro elaborates:

On my father’s side I am of Norman descent, and come of a family who can trace their lineage back to Rollo, the first Duke of Normandy.

As he became a Christian in order to marry the daughter of the King of France, I will only mention en passant a Pagan ancestor, known as Hamon the Sea-king, who with one blow from his battle-axe struck of the head of St. Hellier to prevent his converting his sailors to Christianity. Historical records show that this incident took place on July 17th, A.D. 526.

I may, however, add that one of his descendants, the uncle of William the First, by joining “The Conqueror” with a fleet of four hundred ships and a large force of men, decided the invasion of England. He received for his reward six of the largest counties of England and was named Prince of Glamorganshire. Subsequently, this man, Robert de Hamon, became such “a good Christian” that he established the first monastery in Britain, laid the foundation of Tewkesbury Cathedral, and is to-day honoured by a procession of bishops that once every hundred years makes a pilgrimage around his tomb.

I thought it might be interesting to juxtapose this lovely story, that probably contains just the right mixture of truths, half-truths and outright lies, with an excerpt from an article in The New York Times of 7 January 1909:

Hamon’s life before he came to Paris was a mystery. It was known that he had been “Cheiro, the Palmist,” and this “Cheiro,” it was said, had acquired vast sums of money in England and America, but how he had acquired the title of “Count” was not known, nor did that fact cause much anxiety, though he claimed to have inherited it from his father, who had received it from the Pope.

Paris? The Pope? Vast sums of money? You see what we are dealing with here. It will take some time, and arguably a greater sleuth, to unravel the mystery of the “Count” and his “Countess”, but I will do my best to make sense of it over the coming weeks. As Chiromancer Cheiro also seems to have been implicated in some way in the Curse of Tutankhamun, don’t be surprised if you never hear of me again …

While improving the storage situation in some of the drawers in our Strong Room, Catherine, one of our Applied Arts conservators, found a number of rather lovely rosettes. She asked me to have a look at the objects as they all have NN numbers (is this a tautology, I wonder?). NN means ‘No Number’ and signifies that the original object identifier has been lost. Of course this kind of thing would not happen nowadays and mainly affects objects that came to the museum a long, long time ago. It is often possible to find the original number (I won’t go into details how) and reuniting an object with its identifier is strangely satisfying. No such luck with the rosettes – yet – so I don’t know how and when they were acquired.

The group of rosettes was accompanied by a handwritten list whose original composer thought they had identified one of the rosettees as ‘Q Vic’s daughter’ (this turned out to be a red herring, see below). I thought one of the sitters was Queen Alexandra and I was also quite sure that I had seen one of the three uniformed gentlemen before (I used to have a job which at times necessitated looking at large numbers of images of members of the royal family).

I went with my hunch and checked out the images of Alexandra on the National Portrait Gallery website (invaluable for a wannabe-royal-spotter). And, of course, there it was. Alexandra of Denmark was photographed in her lovely dress by W. & D. Downey in 1896.

Next I tried my luck with the rather dashing young gent. After going through Queen Victoria’s male children (I know, I know, I should have known better), I turned to King Edward VII’s offspring and the NPG came up trumps again: you see before you Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale, the eldest son of Alexandra and Edward, photographed by Lafayette in 1889.

Looking at images of the royal couple’s other children led to Princess Maud of Wales, Prince Albert Victor’s youngest sister. Or so I thought at first. Have a look at the photo on her Wikipedia entry. Same, or very similar dress, wouldn’t you agree, but the palm tree is on the wrong side. The three daughters of Edward and Alexandra seem to have occasionally sported very similar outfits, and looking at this photo makes me think the image above shows Victoria, Maud’s older sister, and was taken at a similar date (she’s the one who was supposed to be ‘Q Vic’s daughter’).

So far I have not mentioned the purpose of the rosettes, but some of you have probably guessed it (not that I am entirely sure myself). We have similar objects in the costume store, which relate to the wedding of the Prince of Wales and Alexandra of Denmark in 1863 and have been catalogued as ‘wedding favours’. The rosettes in our group seem to have been originally stuck to something and luckily, one is still affixed to a small silver envelope.

The writing on the back of the envelope identified this second uniformed gentleman as ‘King of Saxony’. The sitter was the last monarch of this kingdom and ascended to the throne as Frederick Augustus III in 1904. I cannot quite read the rest of the writing (it would have helped photographing the envelope with the bottom flap underneath the top one) but the fourth word could be Frederick, I suppose, and the last two lines might be ‘Dresden’ and ‘11 August 1907′. If you know what happened on that day and what Frederick Augustus had to do with it, please let me know. Several people have suggested the little envelope, which was once sealed, might have contained a tiny sliver of wedding cake and that’s what I’m going with until I’m being told otherwise.

The wedding connection let me to the gentleman with the impressive moustache. For a while I thought he was Princess Maud’s husband, Prince Carl of Denmark (later King Haakon VII of Norway). While he is usually depicted with his moustache ends pointing upwards, they pointed down in his youth, when he looked not unlike the man in the photo. However, some further research on the NPG website lead me to Alexander Duff, 1st Duke of Fife, who married Princess Louise of Wales, the eldest daughter of Alexandra and Edward, in 1889.

But that’s were my luck ran out (and I realised there are other things one can do with one’s evenings). I cannot find gentleman No. 4. I had my money on King Edward VII as a young man for a while, wrongly, I now believe. The future King George V did not look entirely different before he grew a beard, but if it was him he would surely have a crown (coronet?) above his head, like the others. The mysterious gentleman’s decorations should provide a clue to those who know more about that kind of thing (the one at the top right seems to show the letter ‘L’).

I wonder how the favours relate to the weddings they were made for? The rosette with Alexandra must have been lovingly assembled in or after 1896, the date of the Downey photograph. Does that mean it relates to the wedding of her daughter Princess Maud in that year? Was Princess Maud’s rosette made on the occasion of the wedding of her sister Princess Louise in 1889 and did every member of a royal family receive their own personalised favour? This would explain why the rosettes of Princess Maud, the Duke of Fife and Prince Albert Victor seem to have been made with the same ribbon and lace. And why does the anonymous sitter have orange blossom beneath his counterfeit, does this mean he was the groom? But then, should not the Duke of Fife be adorned with orange blossom as his rosette was probably produced for his own wedding? Oh, I don’t know …

I have the feeling that I am overlooking something very obvious and/or am leading myself up the garden path. So, if you can help, either with the identification of our young man or with further information on the use of this kind of rosette, please let me know.

The other day I was looking for knickers when I came upon these strange, worm-like creatures. This is not entirely true. I was indeed looking for knickers as I was preparing for a visit by a student who is researching 1930s underwear. But I found the worms in a box, which was supposed to hold two chemisettes. These are like double-bibs, made up of the upper front and back part of a blouse to cover a low décolletage. I presume in the 1930s chemisettes would have been worn underneath suits, but that needs a bit more research on my part (any excuse to get the old Vogues out …). The chemisettes in question were very pretty and delicate but I was completely distracted by the worms.

As is my usual fashion when I ‘find’ something interesting, I dragged assorted, and long-suffering, textile conservators and interns away from their work and they all professed never to have seen anything like it.

As you can see, the creatures are made up of very thin metal thread, which seems to have been wound around a cotton core. The ‘things’ are not stiff and seemed to be prone to wriggling, but of course they didn’t really. I just had a quick trawl through the net and the only similar objects I could find where advertised on ebay as Vintage Skein Silver Metallic Thread French Quality! Not exactly the same but similar-ish, I would say.

Our skeins belong to a group of objects that were given to the Museum in 2005 by the granddaughter of the original owner. In the late 1920s, George Henry Evans and his wife Elizabeth opened their Model Gown house ‘Devana’ in Great Portland Street. Apparently, royalty, debutantes and stage and screen stars were among their clientele and they seem to have specialized in wedding dresses.

The box also contains belts, sequin and bead motives and other bits and bobs, which I will look at more closely when I get a moment. Even more exciting is an album containing newspaper clippings, wedding photographs and what looks like advertising shots.

Most of the dresses in the photographs impress by their figure-hugging cut, rather than by their embellishments. But a notice in The Times from 17 March 1939 listing gowns worn at what must have been one of the last Courts before the War, shows that Devana could definitely do high impact:

‘Mrs Henry Beaumont. – A gown of heavy silver brocade embossed in a daisy design, draped on the shoulders and the gauged bodice finished with a band of clustered diamante. Train of the same brocade lined with georgette and ruched around the edge. (Devana)’

The photograph above shows one of the beautiful Devana models. It is not quite clear whether the belt-like feature is embroidered or made of some sort of foil, but the metallic thread would have been perfect for this kind of decoration.

If you have any further information about Devana or even have come across one of the company’s dresses, please let us know.

Last week Hilary and I spent a happy hour moving small offcuts from post-it notes around a plan of the costume store. The offcuts represented the contents of particular storage units, for which we were trying to find better homes. We will soon start a game of musical chairs to remedy a few anomalies that crept in last year when we had to finish the store refurbishment in a hurry to focus on the new galleries.

Before our fabulous new mobile units were installed, we moved about 18,000 objects to various other stores at London Wall and to Mortimer Wheeler House (I might do another blog about the whole operation in the future). We have finally managed to return all the objects but some ended up in places where they don’t really belong and where they are probably unhappy.

Our shoes also need some rearranging but first they had to be unwrapped. Before their vacation, the shoes had been carefully covered in tissue paper, bound by a cotton ribbon and a label with their number. As you can see from the above picture, these shoe parcels looked very pretty but it has been a nightmare trying to find anything.

For the past few months, Clare, one of our many interns and volunteers, has been quietly (well, there’s always a bit of tissue rustling) working away on Friday afternoons to get everything back in order. Every time I have mentioned Clare’s work to some of our other volunteers, they seemed slightly jealous. I wonder why …

It might sound fun (and Clare assures me it is) but it is also a major undertaking. I cannot tell you exactly how many shoes we have. On our database, one pair could have just one record, or two (one for each shoe), or even three (one for each shoe and a group record). In any case, we have more than 1000 pairs and last Friday Clare unwrapped the very last parcel.

You have seen the ‘before’ shot above, below is a photo of Clare in action and the end result together with a cupboard she had prepared earlier.

As you can see, some men’s shoes have managed to sneak into one of the women’s shoe cupboards and there’s at least one pair that does not fit the chronology. When the shoes came back we relied on the database to determine their new location and sometimes it was not entirely clear whether a parcel contained male or female shoes. Sorting all this out will be part of the second phase when we will also replace some of the tissue paper and other supports inside the shoes.

I’m yet to find out whether Clare wants to continue working with the shoes. If she wants to move on to other objects, I don’t think I will have much trouble finding someone else to take over. It’s a dirty job …

Today I went to the General Store, one of my favourite places in the Museum. It should really be called the Miscellaneous Store because this is where we keep small and medium-size objects that do not belong into the metal, glass or ceramic stores (although they might be, at least partially, made of these materials) and are not valuable enough to be kept in the Strong Room. You can find all sorts of wonderful things there. I particularly like the spectacles, plastic jewellery, the various writing instruments, clay pipes and curling tongs.

I was with a student who is writing her dissertation about the kind of products women were encouraged to use during World War II. We had already examined our very good collection of utility shoes in the costume store and were moving on to make-up and toiletries. While my visitor was photographing lipsticks, powder puffs, nail care products and such like, I had a bit of time to rummage. And this is what I found:

Bizarre, non? The nice long German word translates as ‘fingertip shapers’ (sounds much more elegant in French, as always). In case you were wondering exactly what to do with these clips, very helpful instructions are pasted inside the lid demonstrating what happens before, during and after use.

As you can see below, each individual metal shaper includes a powerful spring and the inside is lined with chamois leather. All five Fingerspitzenformer seem to be of identical size, which is a little bit surprising. I would have expected (not sure ‘expected’ is the right word here) a slightly bigger contraption for the thumb.

The little box was given to us in 1974 but there is not further information on our database (I have not checked the object file). The font and the illustrations suggested a date around the turn of the century, and it seems that is about right.

In 2006 fingertip shapers were displayed at the Hermesvilla, an outpost of the Vienna Museum, in an exhibition about the fashionable female wardrobe of the 20th century. They were shown in the first section, covering the period 1900-1909. It seems my Viennese colleagues like their shapers as much as I like ours and had already included them in a display about corsets in 1984, and more recently brought them out again for an exhibition on fashions of the Ringstraßenzeit (1860-1890).

Unsurprisingly, the shapers were supposed to be worn at night, presumably left and right hand taking their turn. I like that the box is so pretty and there is no writing on the outside, so you could have displayed it on your dressing or bedside table and no one would have known that you weren’t born with perfectly shaped fingertips.

In the name of science I, carefully, put one of the shapers on my index finger. It fitted well but was very tight and I certainly would not want to, probably couldn’t, sleep with all five of them, chamois leather or not (if I did, I guess sleeping alone would be advisable). Of course I am now wondering whether the Fingerspitzenformer worked and whether they were widely used (I doubt it). Maybe I should make a trip to Vienna? I have always been quite partial to Sachertorte …

When I was a teenager, I went on a long holiday with my dad without taking any books. I don’t know how this happened, particularly as it was not the first time and previously I had ended up reading the collected stories of Edgar Allan Poe, not a good idea if you’re an impressionable 12-year old. This time we went to America, but my English was not good enough for local publications and I had to resort to my father’s stack of books again.

It included a book on PSI, or paranormal activity (I think the possible use of PSI in the Soviet Union was a hot topic at the time) and One Hundred Years of Solitude, which I found very, very hard going. Having just spent rather a long time to find the title of the third book, unsuccessfully, I am beginning to wonder whether it ever existed. I seem to remember that it was about a man who lived alone in the jungle (which one I don’t know). The forest kept encroaching on the little plot of land he had cleared, so he had to cut back the vegetation again, and again, and again.

Why am I telling you this? Well, sometimes, on a bad day, I feel like the lonely man in the jungle. What is it about dress stores that makes boxes multiply until they cover every available surface? What entices balls of (acid-free) tissue to congregate in corners and objects in trays to appear out of nowhere?

Don’t get me wrong, we make very effort to keep our workspace and store uncluttered but, mysteriously, it never quite seems to work. Every now and again we put on our lab coats and have a big clear up and much to my horror quite a few of the objects and boxes turn out to have been left unattended by myself. I’m not quite sure what induces this particular amnesia and sometimes it seems easier to assume that things happen in the store when no one is around. Maybe some elves or gremlins with a keen interest in dress history come out at night to hunt for examples of whitework or special types of quilting and don’t quite get round to putting everything away.

Encroaching cardboard forests are not the only mystery occurrences. Why, when I look for, say, a nightgown or a some silk knickers in a box full of the same, the one I am after is always at the bottom? Or, why do I sometimes not find the object at all until I go through everything a second or third time and suddenly, and quite magically, it is there?

You might think hanging garments behave differently. Not so. They are all hiding underneath Tyvek bags so I have to check the label to find the dress or suit, or whatever I need that day. Sometimes I can miss an object several times and when, in desperation, I drag someone else to the hanging bay, they spot it immediately. Do some objects shun the limelight, do they not want to be inspected?

Or what about the fact that quite often I take a larger object out of a box and when I try to put it back again it seems to have expanded and does not want to fit anymore? Or, why, if after some cajoling it does fit, do I always end up with at least one spare tissue roll or pad?

I don’t even want to think about what the mannequins and their assorted limbs get up to at night. Poe, magic realism and PSI all thrown together – probably not a good idea …

I can finally show you my all time favourite photograph of Gertie Millar. As you can see, she is sitting on what is probably a flower stand in a fancy, striped playsuit acessorised by striped socks, lovely white shoes and a Struwwelpeter wig. The actress is surrounded by soft toys (what kind of animal is hanging next to her head?) as the photo alludes to Toy Town, a musical number from the revue Bric-à-Brac, which premiered at the Palace Theatre (the one where Priscilla Queen of the Desert has replaced Les Misérables) on 18 September 1915, roughly a year after the outbreak of World War I.

Revues were a new musical genre, which became increasingly popular just before the war. As we have seen, the plots of musical comedies usually demanded complete suspension of disbelief from their audience, but there was at least some sort of narrative thread linking the musical numbers. Bric-à-Brac was different. According to Ken Reeves, a connoisseur of musical theatre, who very kindly dropped off a copy of his book Gertie Millar and the Edwardesian Legacy at the museum last week, the revue

‘was in reality the chief and penultimate item in a bill of entertainment of six or seven items which was presented under the Bric-à-Brac title. [...] The entire programme of revue and non-revue items began with the instrumental playing of a march and it typically continued with an act by a comedienne who was followed variously by acrobats, a singer, a cartoonist or some other variety artiste or artistes, and these performers were succeeded by the Palace orchestra’s playing a selection of musical pieces prior to the playing of Bric-à-Brac. [...] The Palace’s programme of entertainment was brought to an end by the showing of a moving picture programme which was called The Events of an Hour.’

The actual revue consisted of seven scenes, with an interval between scenes three and four. Gertie Millar, as Polly Myrtle, sang Chalk Farm to Camberwell Green in scene one, appeared under various guises in scenes three and four, rendered Neville was a Devil (what a brilliant title!) in scene six and ended the revue with the duet I’m Simply Crazy over You.

The highlight of the evening was a number in scene seven, in which Gertie donned her Jumping Jack outfit to sing Toy Town, accompanied by 16 similarly clad chorus girls, all sporting ‘flam-coloured tousled wigs’ (The Stage). The theatre historian W. J. MacQueen Pope (1888-1960) was enraptured by the Palace Girls calling them ‘the finest dancing troupe of their kind the stage ever saw’ (Ghost and Greasepaint, 1951).

The Jumping Jack number reminded J.T. Grein of the Sunday Times of the ‘pit-a-pat of nursery days, long behind us, to which the mind turns back so willingly.’ According to the Tatler (29 September 1915) Toy Town was ‘the most beautiful scene of all … so exquisite as to make a success of the revue without anything else. When the curtain rises you hear a sigh of rapture go all around the hose.’

No doubt this sigh was also provoked by the set, not a nursery, as you might expect, but an Italian Garden, described by Grein as ‘amethyst merging into chalcedony, behind black cypresses that grew beside the balustrade of a marble walk’. This seemingly incongruous design was the brainchild of no other than the British Egyptologist Arthur Weigall (1888-1934), who had returned from Egypt a few years earlier. In 1905, the 25-year old Weigall had replaced Howard Carter as Chief Inspector of Antiquities for Upper Egypt at Luxor and, as journalist, he would later cover the opening of the tomb of Tutankhamun. In between, this Renaissance man successfully designed for the stage and moving pictures and penned film reviews for the Daily Mail.

You have to thank The Gramophone Company that it is still possible to hear Gertie singing Toy Town. According to an advertisement published in The Times on 15 November 1915:

‘The other day half-a-dozen motor cars pulled into the little village of Hayes Middlesex. The passengers in these cars were some of the most highly paid revue artistes of the world, consisting of the principals from the Palace Theatre who had come to “His Master’s Voice” Laboratories and Recording Rooms to re-enact the record Revue “Bric-a-Brac” [sic, contemporary accounts usually omit the accent].’

The wonderful facilities in this ‘laboratory’ meant that prospective buyers would ‘not only hear the voice of Miss Gertie Millar singing her hits, but you seem to catch the exclusive spirit of originality and individuality which characterizes all of Miss Millar’s work.’

This was good news for people outside London as ‘no matter how remote your home may be from the metropolis of the world, you can produce within the confines of your home, the record Revue of this year, “Bric-a-Brac”, in all its original purity and charm.’

Never mind the record, what about the dog, I hear you asking. The website of the National Portrait Gallery features a considerable number of photographs taken by Rita Martin. One of them is enticingly listed as ‘Gertie Millar as Jumping Jack with her dog “Chum” in “On The Tiles” a sketch from “Bric-à-Brac”‘. There is no accompanying image, but the description seems to refer to a photo from the sequence shown here.

Judging from Gertie and Chum’s interaction and the fact the our album contains the above photo of Gertie, this time in fashionable dress, I would not be surprised if the dog was hers, rather than a living studio prop. Gertie’s love of dogs was well known. James Jupp, stage door-keeper at the Gaiety for more than 30 years, recalled:

‘Miss Gertie Millar is an example of what talent and personality will do on the stage. There was a time when police had to marshal the crowds that gathered round the theatre to catch even a fleeting glimpse of her, as with her Pekingese, she darted from stage-door to motor-car’ (The Gaiety Stage Door, 1923, p. 55).

In 1934, no other than P.G. Wodehouse, then Gertie’s neighbor in Le Touquet in France, mentioned in a letter that he had been asked to ‘exercise her spotted carriage dog occasionally’.

I will give Gertie, her Pekingese, Mastiff and Dalmatian a well-deserved break now. I am hoping to get an appointment at the National Portrait Gallery and will report on Rita Martin once I’ve been there. For now, I hope you enjoy the photos as much as I do.

* Information about Weigall and his involvement in Bric-à-Brac is from Julia Hankey’s book A Passion for Egypt: Arthur Weigall, Tutankhamun and the ‘Curse of the Pharaos (Tauris 2007).

On 25 January 1909 The Times published a lengthy review of a ‘New Musical Play, in Two Acts’, that had premiered at the Gaiety Theatre two days earlier. Part of the reason why the article was so long was the comedy’s complicated, if not very original, plot. When the play moved to the Knickerbocker Theatre in New York the following year, one critic described it as the ‘familiar he-fell-in-love-with-one-who-was-beneath-him-in-station type’ (The New York Times, 30 August 1910). Similarly, Richard Traubner in his guide to operetta (Routledge 2003) thought it was a show of the ‘typical department-store-salesgirl-meets-disguised-rich-earl-spurns-and-finally-accepts-him variety’.

Gertie Millar played Mary Gibbs, a girl from Yorkshire, like the actress herself, who works as a shop assistant selling sweets at the extremely thinly disguised Garrods department store. As you would expect, Miss Gibbs has many admirers, an entire chorus of ‘dudes’. Now more commonly associated with The Big Lebowski, the term dude had been popular since the 1870s and was used to describe well-dressed gentlemen and/or men who had no experience of life outside a big city, as is supported by the lyrics of the dudes’ song:

‘A fashionable band of brothers / Are we, You see!
Whatever one has done the others / Must do It too!
Our clothes and hats are made to match, / They show it! They show it!
We have one bill for all the batch, / And owe it, and owe it!’

The main dude is Lord Eynsford, the son of the millionaire Earl of St. Ives, who pretends to be a humble bank clerk so as not to frighten off Mary. When she finds out the truth she decides to leave London, but not before making a last visit to White City. The Great White City had been erected the previous year to the north of Shepherds Bush as the venue for the 1908 Olympics and to house an exhibition to celebrate French-British relations. The ground’s name derived from the cladding of its temporary structures, which was made of gleaming white marble.

To make the farcical plot even more complicated, during a visit to Garrods the bag of Mary’s cousin Timothy had been mixed up with that of Hughie Pierrepoint, an ‘amateur criminal’. Timothy finds himself in the possession of the Ascot Gold Cup, which Hughie happens to have stolen from the country house of no other than Lord St. Ives. Timothy also makes his way to White City where he disguises himself as a marathon runner, ends up the first to enter the stadium and is hailed as the winner of the race. Needles to say, in the end, somehow, all turns out well and Mary gets to marry her Lord.

As Joel H. Kaplan and Sheila Stowell show in their book Theatre & Fashion: Oscar Wilde to the Suffragettes (Cambridge University Press 1994), in the Edwardian age female consumption and the stage were closely connected (foreshadowing the role of Hollywood a little later). Setting a play in a department store provided many opportunities for product placement and one New York critic noted ‘Of course, an audience let loose in a dress-making establishment doesn’t care much about plot so it is not surprising that the gowns surpass the narrative in prominence’ (quoted in Richard Traubner, Operetta: a theatrical history, Routledge 2003).

Our Miss Gibbs was not the first play to use this ploy (sorry, couldn’t help it). One of the Gaiety’s earlier successes had been The Shop Girl (1894) partly set in the ‘Mantle Department at the Royal Stores’. In 1906 The Girl Behind the Counter was performed at the Wyndham’s Theatre in which ‘Winnie Willoughby’ masquerades as a shop assistant at the Maison Duval where customers and chorus sing that ‘They’ve been shopping till they’re dropping …’.

While The Times critic bemoaned the improbability of the plot of Our Miss Gibbs (as if musical comedies ever had probable story lines), he noted nevertheless that ‘the work of the shop itself is being carried on very much as it would be in a real shop’. This verisimilitude must have been aided by the fact that Messrs. Harrods Ltd., never missing an advertising opportunity, provided the dresses for Act 1.

It was in the second act, in the Court of Honour of the Franco-British Exhibition, that Gertie finally donned her dark blue Pierrot costume and performed one of her most famous numbers, Moonstruck, written by her husband Lionel Monckton:

‘I’m such a silly when the moon comes out; / I hardly seem to know what I’m about;
Skipping, hopping, never never stopping, / I can’t keep still, although I try.
I’m all a-quiver when the moonbeams glance; / That is the moment when I long to dance.
I can never close a sleepy eye / When the moon comes creeping up the sky!’

Thankfully a recording of Gertie has survived and you can sing your own version with the help of this fabulous website (it is song no. 20).

Gertie was supported by a chorus of no less than eight similarly clad chorus girls. Following the publication of the Belgian writer Albert Giraud’s cycle of poems Pierrot lunaire: Rondels bergamasque in 1884, Pierrots’ moon-madness was often depicted, although I’m not sure Giraud’s poems were in the forefront of Lionel Monckton’s mind.

It would be wonderful to know who exactly was responsible for the outfits for the Moonstruck scene. As was customary, the programme for Our Miss Gibbs provides a full list of the designers and costumiers involved in the production. Overall responsibility lay with the prolific Attilio Comelli (1858-1925), who not only had been the house designer for the Royal Opera House since the 1880s but also found time to design costumes for Christmas pantomimes in Australia where many of his beautiful drawings are still preserved.

Comelli is at the head of a long list of illustrious names, but I don’t know (yet) how exactly they would have worked with Comelli. Not much is known these days about the French designer Jeanne Margaine-Lacroix, but according to The New York Times (24 March 1912) she ‘created the Sheath, and the Slashed Skirts’. Madame Lucile, one of the most famous dressmakers of the time, often provided dresses for the stage and Gertie was also one of her private clients.

There is also a ‘Miss Fisher’, probably ‘Mary E. Fisher Ltd, Costumiers, 26 Bedford Street, Covent Garden WC’, who advertised as provider of ‘Historical and Fancy Dresses of every description specially designed for Hire or Purchase’ in The Play Pictorial in 1914. ‘Madame Herbert’ might be Madame Pauline Herbert of 8 Orchard Street, who was praised for her ‘charming work’ in the same publication.

The costumiers B.J. Simmons & Co, founded in 1857, worked on many productions in the West End and had a workshop in Covent Garden until 1964. And of course the company now simply known as ‘Angels’, but in 1909 still named after its founder ‘Morris Angel & Son’ was also involved.

I have not yet tracked down Burkinshaw & Knights, or Johns & Bonham, but I suspect they might have been responsible for the suits of the dapper dudes. And if you know more about Conwyn (???) Garden, I’d like to hear from you.

I would have loved to have seen this no doubt super-lavish production and I am sure would have been enthralled by the Moonstruck scene. However, Gertie’s Pierrot costume is, in my view, surpassed by an outfit she wore in the 1915 production of Bric-à-Brac, which will be the subject of my next, and probably last, Gertie installment, as well as the mysterious photo album the images in this post are taken from.

For now, have a quick look at Gertie playing Pied Piper to a troupe of 12 child pierrots, who seem to be sleepwalking, one of the most bizarre images I have seen in a long time (if the link doesn’t work, or you cannot enlarge the image, click here and search for ‘Gertie Millar Pierrot’.

Last weekend I took some of our lab coats home. We have a washing machine at work but washing powder is of course verboten and I thought they needed some serious enzyme action. I am disappointed. They are not as dazzling as I expected them to be from the TV ads of one of the products I used. But my disappointment probably has another, deeper reason (doesn’t it always?).

I think I was hoping for a complete transformation of these standard issue coats – into what exactly, I don’t know. I am aware that lab coats are mainly meant to be useful, but couldn’t they also be a little bit exciting? That they are not, is probably the reason why we only tend to wear them to protect ourselves from objects (you might think this kind of object does not exist in a dress store, welcome to the freezer room).

Occasionally – very occasionally, I swear – Hilary and I discuss our dream work wear and we have found it to be a tricky business. It is not easy to find something that combines utility with beauty and with the need to preserve (or acquire?) authority. Hilary came upon this beautiful Vogue pattern, which has the added advantage that it is ’straight from Paris’ (via America, mind). It would make a lovely lab coat, but I’m not so sure about the authority situation, and it would need serious customisation to be super-practical.

I always thought my favourite uniform would be a jumpsuit-type-thing. At my last workplace I was known to don my Tyvek suit at the slightest provocation (I kept it in my desk drawer, just in case …). I loved my boiler suit, but even I have to admit that it wasn’t very flattering (white does nothing for me), it didn’t have any pockets and, true to its name, there were microclimate issues.

Having always been an admirer of Constructivist art and design, I thought Rodchenko’s overall might be it (scroll down a bit on this page), but now that I have looked at it again, I’m not so keen on the leather trim. A friend recommended Ernesto Thayaht’s TuTa, which I really, really like, particularly as I have just realised I have a detailed pattern in a book at home. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy also looked very good in his ‘Arbeitsanzug‘.

Maybe a flying suit like the ones popular in the 1980s could work? Here is a beautiful example from our collection:

This one was bought from Austin Reed, oh yes, and worn over a T-shirt with rolled-up sleeves with the suit’s legs tucked into thick, white, woolly ankle socks. The look was completed with Dunlop plimsols, also preserved at the Museum. And this was six years before Top Gun!

I could have suits in different colours, one for each day of the week (or for particular moods) with a lamé number for special occasions. I could even have my name embroidered in a suitable spot, a non-negotiable requirement for the kind of work outfit I’m after.

Or maybe a smock, like the one below, apparently worn by a milkman as a bit of an advertising gimmick around 1900? But who would do the smocking?

Oh, I don’t know. Maybe you do? If you have found the perfect solution, want to share a fabulous customisation job or provide the address of a supplier of practical, yet stylish, work wear, we would love to hear from you! And you don’t have to be a girl.

PS: Gertie Millar’s story will be resumed next week.