I thought it would be all so simple; I would look up the birth details of Adelaide Bowering, and with the small gems that historians hold birth and death dates to be, set them neatly in their ready sterling silver prongs—commonly called parentheses— even if I had to add an annoying “circa”. But this was not to be.
She was of course, an actress, known as Mrs. John Blennerhassett Steele (also an actor, but she was better known) and they had come to Australia with not only happy reputations, but the hard board-treading that puts serious miles on one’s repertoire. My first stop was the column inches devoted to the passing of J.B.Steele, who had died at the Liverpool Asylum in Sydney in 1904, fondly remembered by a few friend in the press with active pens. It mentioned a few snippets but nothing much, otehr than they had separated because of his “bohemian lifestyle”. Her death in 1899 was barely recorded here in Australia, and the small snippets scattered, left no clue as to her origins.
In “Players And Playwrights I Have Known” John Coleman relates a tale told to him by Frederick Balsir Chatterton about Chatterton’s first venture in theatrical management done on a shoestring, and it had been “Othello”. The character of Emilia was played by a Miss Blanchard, whom he noted — at the time of telling the tale — as then currently doing the rounds with Mrs. Langtry, under the name Adelaide Bowring. She was a Blanchard!? The Covent Garden Blanchards? The holy sixty-four of Garrick, Blanchards? The very loins of pantomime Blanchards?
I thought perhaps not, for her name appears nowhere in the papers of the day under Miss Blanchard, and I had thought that if one’s pedigree was so gilded, there’d be no apparent reason to replace it with Bowering (this is, by the way, the way the English press spelled it). The earliest record I found so far of Adelaide is as a Miss Bowering on October 10th, 1852, making her début at the Surrey Theatre Royal as Amanda Leigh (sharing the role with another actress, Clara Wynne) and Mrs. Playfair (fees and parts were in a savage economy) in “Seasons” based upon Thompson’s celebrated poem, and it was said of her that she was “of the Edinburgh Theatre”. There might even have been a mention of her earlier (if she had been inaccurate about her age), as I had found “Oxberry's Budget of Plays” of 1844 publishing an angry reply by an actor, when they had delivered a “verdict of annihilation” upon a young lady named Miss Bow(e)ring who had appeared in the Manchester Theatre Royal’s “London Assurance”, and who the actor-correspondent had thought “worthy and exemplary”. If this is Adelaide, then her later age was wildly extravagant.
In the ERA of May 1854 she was performing with a newcomer, E. B.Steele [sic] and by October of 1855 was performing at the Royal Queen’s Theatre in Hull, Yorkshire, with Steele. In that very year, on the 30th of April, an Adelaide Jane Rebecca Byerly married a John Benjamin Steele, in Holy Trinity, in Hull: there are no other John Steeles or Adelaide anybodies marrying in England at this date or with such a suite of names—surely that is not a coincidence.
In the 1861 census they are both rooming, along with four other non-“professional” lodgers, at Elizabeth Smith’s house in George Street, Stranton in Durham, and both give their birthplaces as Ireland (or at least that what the familysearch website has transcribed, and their occupation as “theatrical performer”. John is not fully entered in familysearch database but is simply noted as “B” and I have not seen the original scan of the census record, so I wonder if the transcriber could not handle what may have been Blennerhassett or Benjamin written in too woolly a scrawl. So, John “Benjamin” Steele becomes a puzzle; I was given to understand that Blennerhassett was his actual birth name. Maybe I was wrong, but wait—J.B.Steele’s death in Sydney listed his name as Steele, not Blennerhassett, despite the claim that he was buried with his original name on the coffin nameplate. The father’s name is Samuel in the both the marriage record, and the NSW death index of Mr. Steele. Was he a man of Steele? Or was Blennerhasset just whimsical kryptonite to make us all nauseous? The whole thing smacked of that elaborate side-stepping that usually accompanies origins from the wrong side of the blanket. Steele, according to his obituary writers, was assumed to have made his début in Cork. Was he Irish of birth? Blennerhassett is a well documented family, and there is no record of the John Blennerhassett supposed to have been his father “off Marrion Square”, Dublin.
But back to Adelaide. It became more curious when I found a Jane Rebecca Byerlee christened in 1829 at Saint Dunstan’s in Stepney, daughter of Mr. William Byerlee and wife, Charlotte Dunckley (married, Saint Matthew’s in Bethnal Green, London 11 August 1822). Jane Rebecca Byerlee had several siblings, all born within a few years of each other, and although their actual birth places are not recorded, it looks as they never left London. William Byerlee was a rigger, and his widow and two daughters, Elizabeth and Jane were enumerated as hempstresses in the 1851 censuses. Was this the thing from which Adelaide Bowering was escaping or have I wandered up the wrong alley?
I note with curiosity that there was a English actor named William Byerly of a generation or two earlier that made his début in New York in 1769.
Then, I spotted a Rebecca Bryerly [sic], of a generation previous to Jane Rebecca, that had married a Mr. Henry Lewis Blanchard, Music Master, son of Thomas Blanchard. There are those Blanchards, again, and that name, Thomas, the name thrice borne by three Blanchards coming out of the misama of the 1700s and resolving into greasepaint and rouge in the 1800s.
In 1891, Adelaide was living at home, giving her birthplace as London, with sevant Harritte Selvage of Sussex, and a Lodger, Elizabeth B. Church. So between 1861 and 1891 she changed her mind about her birthplace. We do know with surety where she died: at Number 20 Illminster Gardens, Wandsworth, on the 26th of May, 1899 as Adelaide Steele, and is buried on the 30th of May at Morden, (now called the Battersea New Cemetery), Surrey. The cemetery website has no online record of her.
This is where the search ends, for the moment.
PS. I have lately found the death of a William Blanchard of 1848, a pantomimist of Edinburgh who died in Greenock, and who owned a dog show—what an end. Was this a relation? Stay tuned.
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