Charles Dillon (3)

Stars, especially early ones, are apt to leave stories of their origins that, to charitably put it, are untrue. Charles Dillon was a slight exception, in that it was always implied that he was illegitimate, but the account was rouged and powdered: pathos even in memory.

In the ERA I found some accounts by a commercial clerk, who, after Dillon's death took to writing fond reminiscences of Dillon, and the theatre. The ERA correspondent's name was Algernon Sydney Roalfe Cooper, and in one letter he declares himself to have been Dillon's cousin and offers even a short story of his boyhood days, lamenting Dillon's never-written memoirs.

Algernon S.R.Cooper was indeed Charles Dillon's cousin, on his mother's side; Algernon was born in 1822 to John Cooper and Melicent [sic] Roalfe, whose sister, Eliza Mary Roalfe had married actor Arthur Dillon in 1822. Both girls were London born daughters of — I believe — Clement Roalfe (1758-1802) of Little Earl Street, Seven Dials, London (a victualler — Lord, the numbers of stage folk whose social uterus was a Hotel or Public House is beyond counting!) and Elizabeth Harris (they married at Bethal Green) in 1780.

Eliza Mary Roalfe was born in Piccadilly, Middlesex and became pregnant by a comedian, John James Church between 1818-1819 with young Charles John being the result. Charles John "Church" despite being born in Diss (which straddles the border between Norfolk and Suffolk) in 1819, is not listed not on the IGI, nor would I expect him to be if his parents were never married. There was a Charles James Church christened on the 8th of August, 1819 in Newport, Shropshire with the right parental names, and it must be said that with strolling players, their children's birthing couch and christening font are sometimes not within respectable distance. Some research into the theatre in these places at that time will have to be done.

John James Church was a drunkard, and I cannot find his age (but he started his London stage career in 1813 under Elliston), but he abandoned Eliza for greener fields because J.J.Church married in Norwich in 1821 to Emma Louisa Forster, and he was said to have been the son of Dr. Church of City Road, London. Why was he in Norwich?

Well, less that a year later Eliza Roalfe married Arthur Yates Dillon, an actor, whom Algernon recalled was a 'bit of a tyrant.' Arthur stated in a census that he was born in the East Indies, and perhaps he was; there was a definite Arthur Dillon christened in Madras of 1802, which would make him 20 when marrying Miss Roalfe who was 34 — not an impossible age gap and in theatrical circles, a common one: perhaps she had charms. Perhaps it is not him, but of interest is that Arthur Dillon was not an unknown name in the early 19th century and the name was from an Irish family caught up in the Revolution and their Arthur Dillon ended up under the guillotine, and I suspect young Arthur Yates Dillion was from that family, though possibly of consanguinous distance (one of the Irish Dillons was Governor of Tobago)

John James Church died, impoverished, during 1864 in Chelsea, having been very ill since 1859 a year in which he had collapsed with hunger and exposure, and was taken to a hospital and aided by several actors. The last of his days were spent in painting and glazing, and even that ended.

Arthur Dillon established his acting agency in 1840 where he first started using the middle name Yates; was it is to use, or was this just the advantage of associated glory? He died on November 24th 1856 having struggled greatly.

Roalfe is such a rare name, and of Kentish origin, and I believe that was where Charles Dillon's maternal line hailed from.

Of the wives of Charles Dillon, and of the offspring, I will say more later.

Charles Dillon (2)

Charles Church, called Dillon, or perhaps Charles John Church was an unsophisticated actor; not classically trained, nor the pupil of a great actor turned elocutionist, but simply a man who gained, by long experience as a strolling player, the basics of acting and pleasing a crowd.

Of his acting not much is written but what is written stands out, and is repeated over and over again: his Belphegor. The play from which the character draws its fame, in its English version was called "Belphegor: the Mountbank" or "Belphegor, or the Pride of Birth" or "Belphegor; Wife's Inconstancy" and the iteration goes on. It was a piece called "Paillasse" by D'Ennery who adapted it for the stage for Frédéric Lemaître. Such was its success that it crossed the channel in translation.

Its plot is simple; a strolling player, a Mountebank arrives — with his wife — at a nobleman's house during a fair, and the wife is informed by the Nobleman's trusted counsellor, that she is the daughter of that nobleman and is thus advised to abandon her husband through a legal dissolution, and to take up her station. Both Belphegor and his wife laugh at the suggestion and leave, only to have the nobleman's counsellor pursue, and convince the wife to return with him, using the leverage of her sick daughter to achieve his aim.

Belphegor is then hounded from town to village, in company of his faithful son. Belphegor eventually returns — disguised — to the home of the nobleman to find that the companion that has been the nobleman's counsel was an escaped convict and confidence trickster, who is then exposed by Belphegor.

Finally it is revealed that it is really Belphegor, the Mountebank himself, who is the long lost child of the desperate nobleman.

Dillon is always spoken of as having portrayed that role with such anguish and emotion, that it moved all who saw the performance. What is interesting is that the well from which the emotion was draw may well have been Dillon's childhood itself. Born is Diss, Norfolk, his mother was betrayed by a strolling player and then abandoned. This strolling player we think, was one Arthur Church, and Charles' mother was then taken in by another kinder actor, who according to Charles himself was named Dillon and whose kindness he relayed by carrying his name. One has to wonder about the resonant power of Dillon's own domestic tragedy, and how he turned that chaos into a force that was focussed through various 'abandonment and wandering' roles.

He was also known for his King Lear, which is no surprise, given the familiar nature of the anguish that Dillon obviously carried with him throughout his life.

(Ben Webster at the 1851 Adelphi version)

Charles Dillon, the English Lemaître

Normally I wax prosaic about a subject, but my thoughts upon the poor player hereunder described in an Australian obituary, will come later, when his portrait is delivered. 

"Connected with the epoch of which I speak there rises before me the image of an actor who has sometimes been called the English Lemaitre. This was the unfortunate Charles Dillon, who certainly possessd the gift of genius, although, as in the case of his great French prototype, it was accompanied by infirmities which clouded its brightness and shortened his life. 

He was a singularly ugly man. with no forehead worth speaking of, and in order to remedy nature's oversight in this respect, he was accustomed to shave off a portion of his front hair; his nose was nondescript, his eyes glittered with a light that could be either mirthful or baleful, according to the mood of the moment, and a heavy black moustache concealed a vast mouth, that bristled with what might be called fangs rather than teeth. Yet when you saw him in Belphegor, -or in King Lear, upon the stage, or you listened to his conversation, overturning with humorous anecdote, outside of the theatre, you forgot all about his ordinary features.

His was born at Diss, in Suffolk, in the year 1819, and commenced his career in Richardson's Theatre, which used to travel from fair to fair in England, and present to a succession of critical audiences a thrilling drama, a dance, and a pantomime in the short space of 20 miuutes. Charles Dillon's mother had been betrayed, deserted, and left starve by a strolling player named Church; and the boy adopted the name of a strolling actor who had befriended him. On quitting Richardson's booth, he connected himself with a sucession of provincial companies, and had his full share of the hardships and privations which were — at that time — inseparable from such a career. 

During an engagement at Stafford he played Iago to Brooke's Othello, and the Desdemona of  the tragedy was a pretty brunette named Clara Conquest, who had not long before consented to become Mrs. Dillon. Having acquired an established reputation in Edinburgh, Dublin, Liverpool, and Manchester, he procured an engagement in London, where he made his first appearance at Sadler's Wells Theatre, on the 21st of April, 1850. The character he chose was that in which, a few years later, he presented himself to a Melbourne audience at the  Theatre Royal, namely, that of Belphegor, in a translation of "Paillasse." Next morning The Times declared that his acting would " become a topic of conversation amongst all whose discourse turned upon the merits of plays and players." Charles Dillon's reputation was made. 

Less than six months afterwards he became the lessee of the Lyceum, where his company included Miss Marie Wilton (Mrs. Bancroft), J. L. Toole, Miss Woolgar, and Mr. William Brough; and the highest critical authorities in London, The Times, The Daily News, the Saturday Review, the Spectator, and the Atheneum, concurred in praising his Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth, Louis the Eleventh, D’Artagnan, and Claude Melnotte. With his careless and thriftless habits and complete ignorance of finance it was inevitable that Dillon should get into difficulties, and when his creditors became importunate and he was impressed with the fear of being arrested, he fled to the United States. On the voyage he had the misfortune to break his leg in two places daring a violent storm, and he landed in New York penniless and a cripple. 

He procured an engagement at Wallack's Theatre, and limped out to the stage as Belphegor to confront a thin and chilly audience. But he vindicated his powers as an actor, and gained a fair amount of fame, but very little money. Thence he stretched across the country to California and Nevada, and, having scraped together the means of paying his passage to Australia, came out here, where he made a great hit in his favourite character ot the starving mountebank. I remember few things more exquisite in their kind than his simple, natural expression of silent anguish and hopeless sorrow in the great scene where the famishing man, sublime in his friendless misery, and utterly broken down with grief and hunger, heroically strove to shake himself together, and to struggle through his exhibition of professional buffoonery in the public street. His little bit of business with the shawl, after he had made the discovery that the wife he adored had abandoned him, was almost agonising in its silent pathos. 

I think his Lear came next in point of high quality. His elocution betrayed at times a want of culture and refinement, but the more passionate scenes of the tragedy atoned for all deficiencies. In the delivery of that magnificent imprecation beginning, " Hear, Nature, hear," the actor displayed an immensity of feeling, an impetuosity of manner, a dreadful energy of purpose, and a pathos of expression which sent a thrill through the spectators, and the storm of passion which spent itself in a rain of tears brought the water into many eyes. When, stunned by the incredible ingratitude of both his daughters, he turned, in blank amazement, to the heavens  for comfort in his desolation, Dillon was equally impressive, pathetic, and effective. He tell off somewhat, in the third act; but throughout the mad scene, and in the midst  of those "bursts of reason's half-extinguished I glare," he displayed that quality ot sensibility which was one of the distinguishing features of his acting. There were tears in in his voice as he uttered the words, "Pray do not mock me," and the last scene in the last act was altogether admirable; while the touching iteration of the word “never." In that wonderful dying speech of Lears, uttered " in doubt more touching than despair," was so mournfully cadenced as to give it its full, sorrow-fraught meaning. The performance, taken as a whole, was so grand as to astonish and perplex you; because its uncommon merit was so inconsistent with the common character of the actor's mind and ordinary manner. 

On the stage he was a man of genius, off it he was very apt to become a mere bibulous Bohemian ; and I doubt whether the plandits of a crowded theatre gave him so much pleasure as he felt when leaning over the back bar ot the Argus Hotel and narrating anecdotes of his professional career, and of the many famous actors and actrtsses he had known, to a circle of listeners which comprised some of the brightest men at that time connected with the press, the stage, and the legal Profession. He was, like most actors, an excellent mimic, and could reproduce Charles Kean, Fechter, Phelps, and other players to the life so as to give the utmost dramatic effect to the stories he would tell of each.

He left Australia towards the end of 1867 reappearing at Sadler’s Wells as Lear in February, 1868; playing afterwards at Drury Lane, from whence his besetting  weakness banished him in 1878.  Then he dropped out  of London life altogether, and fell back upon the management ot a strolling company. At Hawick, in Berwickshire, in June, 1881, poor Dillon played his last part, Othello, to a pitifully small audience, treated his company to some ale at a tavern adjoining the theatre, amused them by relating some of his Australian experiences, sallied out into High Street in a cheerful mood, raised his hand to his head, exclaiming, “God! can this be death?” and fell dead upon the pavement.” —The Australasian, Oct 2 1886

[Pictures to come…]

Little Girl of Rangoon

In 1863, Charles R. Faylor actor, arrived in India from San Francisco where he had been with his wife Nellie Brown soubrette turned comedienne and songstress; and actress and dancer, Lizzie Gordon. They were accompanied by "Little Petite Cerito" who I suspect was Faylor's daughter by Nellie. Nellie died of Cholera in Shanghai fairly early on, while Faylor was captured in company of the Taeping rebels in 1865 and was beheaded by the Chinese Imperial troupes. Lizzie Gordon, finding herself in Rangoon died in May of 1866, when La Petite was placed in an Orphanage.

Knowing the fraternal reach of the show-business professional, I believe she was eventually brought back to the USA. Charles Thorne Junior, who had toured and knew Faylor well, may have adopted her, as Thorne's first or second wife, was a Brown, and likely Aunt to la petite.

Anyway, this is ancient and obscure history, and I place here a picture taken in Rangoon of a small child in a miniature pantomime-theatrical costume: very likely to be 'La Petite Cerito" who danced with Lizzie Gordon until 1866.

I include her here for the elucidation of the EBAY buyer who payed well above what the item was worth had it been bid for without knowing who it was.

Heller

Not only did Heller leave a messy will, an irate wife, and a mistress that died overweight and poor, he also left a nephew, whose identity was disavowed but to which I add this recent snippet. Make of it what thou wilt.

Water Under the Bridge

It sure looks as if I have abandoned this blog, but not so. A good two years of family crisis and the tempest therein has hacked away at my time, desire and nerves. I shall be posting again soon, not for the readers, of which there are none, but for the researchers as yet unborn that will be viewing the archive.

Sparrows and the China Cottage

In the boxing ring that is the frontal part of my mind there are two opposing corners at the moment: in one there are issues wearing the red satin boxer silks of part life memory; and in the other, the blue satin silks belonging to real-world research with stringent requirements.

I can remember things about my family from the 1840s until I left England in 1855, and I can recall things that were so, like two father figures, but one not an actual father, a cantankerous mother, interfering in-laws, money problems, past successes surviving as remembered glories, and the overarching, ever-present gloom of Dickensian poverty, ragged black bombazine and other clichés of the mid-Victorian aesthetic…at least as history likes to present it.

But I also have the detective work that must be carried out on the ground, in the present and carefully so, and always with one part of my psychic apparatus set aside for clues, corner-of-the-eye shimmers and the most subtle of indicators and sentiments.

My supposedly biological family, the Sparrows, wrote letters to their in-laws, the Morrises who had emigrated to Tasmania and the letters survive today, in Sydney. They are called rather charmingly, "The China Cottage Letters."Among the list of correspondents are many of the people whose names I have read in the research I have done upon the Sparrows. I could write a booklet on the Sparrow Tea Family and their in-laws the Phythians. Tea, tea, tea. Is this why I like tea cups, tea and the theatre around it, even though I am a coffee or hot-chocolate man?

Among these are Robert Sparrow (I think he was Robert Sparrow Smythe's real father) Frederick Sparrow ("his uncles paid for his education") and Henry who died in 1820, and who is most important but for what reason I cannot say, nor even guess. But that he is important is beyond debate. I also feel that I have got something slightly wrong and that the slight error has not-so-sleight implications.

The letters I hope will shed light on the family dynamic and what the heck was going on, and the fact that they are sitting in Sydney, unexamined is a great extravaganza of a tease.

Obviously, I can't wait to get my eyeballs on them, or at least a proxy set of eyeballs.