The working life of Museum of London

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’.