Everyone in this book except Horrie was a real person. Names and timelines of events were compiled using newspaper reports, court records, reviews of performances, interviews, birth, marriage and death certificates, photographs, theatrical posters, advertisements, archived objects and scrapbooks held in public and private collections. What could not be verified –including conversations, thoughts, and speculative conclusions – has been imagined.
Characters in this novel use offensive words common to the period, including ‘native’, ‘Aborigine’, ‘Chinaman’ and ‘Negro’. Other racist attitudes and concepts are included, such as ‘blackface’ music-hall acts, the ‘White Australia’ immigrant exclusion policy and displaying Aboriginal people as museum exhibits. Obviously, these attitudes and cruelties were wrong then, and shameful now, and should be read in a historical context. I don’t want to pretend they never existed.
The Ada Delroy Company performed in the following places between 1888 and 1910.
New South Wales
Aberdeen
Albury
Armidale
Ballina
Balmain
Bathurst
Bellingen
Bowraville
Broken Hill
Casino
Cobar
Coffs Harbour
Coogee
Coopernook
Coraki
Cundleton
Dubbo
Gladstone
Goulburn
Grafton
Gunnedah
Hillgrove
Inverell
Kempsey
Kyogle
Laurieton
Lismore
Macksville
Maclean
Maitland
Moree
Muswellbrook
Narrabri
Newcastle
Orange
Parramatta
Penrith
Port Macquarie
Quirindi
Raymond Terrace
Richmond River
Rozelle
Scone
Singleton
Smithtown
Sydney
Tamworth
Taree
Tenterfield
Urunga
Wagga Wagga
Wallsend
Wingham
Victoria
Albury
Ararat
Bairnsdale
Ballarat
Benalla
Bendigo
Briagalong
Camperdown
Castlemaine
Colac
Corowa
Echuca
Footscray
Foster
Geelong
Hamilton
Horsham
Leongatha
Maffra
Maryborough
Melbourne
Morwell
Portland
Prahran
Rutherglen
Sale
Seymour
St Arnaud
Stratford
Sydney
Terang
Trafalgar
Traralgon
Walhalla
Wallaroo
Wangaratta
Warragul
Warrnambool
Yarram
Queensland
Bourke
Brisbane
Bundaberg
Cairns
Charters Towers
Cooktown
Glen Innes
Gympie
Hatton
Ipswich
Mackay
Marian
Maryborough
Mount Garnet
Mount Morgan
Rockhampton
Toowoomba
Townsville
Walkerston
Wallangarra
Warwick
South Australia
Adelaide
Broken Hill
Burra
Carrieton
Edithburgh
Gawler
Glenelg
Hindmarsh
Kadina
Kapunda
Mount Barker
Mount Gambier
Petersburg
Port Adelaide
Port Augusta
Port Pirie
Quorn
Stirling
Unley
Wallaroo
Western Australia
Albany
Boulder
Bunbury
Coolgardie
Cottlesloe
Fremantle
Gwalia
Kalgoorlie
Kanowna
Katanning
Kookynie
Leonora
Perth
York
Tasmania
Burnie
Deloraine
Devonport
Gormanston
Hobart
La Trobe
Launceston
Lefroy
Linda Valley
Queenstown
Scottsdale
Sheffield
Stanley
Strahan
Ulverstone
Waratah
Zeehan
Northern Territory
Darwin
Torres Strait
Thursday Island
Bangkok, Siam
Colombo, Ceylon
Hong Kong
Malaya
Mandalay, Burma
Manila, The Philippines
Rangoon, Burma
Shanghai, China
Singapore
Yokohama, Japan
Washington, USA
New Jersey, USA
Vancouver, Canada
Victoria, Canada
Ashburton
Auckland
Blenheim
Casterton
Christchurch
Dannevirke
Dunedin
Fielding
Gisborne
Gore
Greymouth
Greytown
Harewa
Hastings
Hawkes Bay
Hokitika
Invercargill
Karangahake
Lyttleton
Manawatu
Marton
Masterton
Milton
Napier
Nelson
New Plymouth
Oamaru
Paeroa
Palmerston
Palmerston North
Petone
Picton
Reefton
Riverton
Taranaki
Tarawera
Temuka
Thames
Timaru
Waihi
Waipawa
Whanganui
Wellington
Winton
Agra
Allahabad
Bombay
Calcutta
Cawnpore
Delhi
Khyber Pass
Lahore
Lucknow
Madras
Meerut
Peshawar
Quetta
Rawalpindi
Tuticorin
Umballa
(Some places visited, then in India, are now in Pakistan. Some have alternative or newer names.)
Bulawayo, now in Zimbabwe
Capetown
Dundee
Durban
East London
Johannesburg
Kimberley
Kroonstad
Ladysmith
Mafeking, now Mahikeng
Maritzburg, aka Pietermaritzburg
Newcastle
Port Elizabeth
Pretoria
Salisbury, now Harare,
Zimbabwe
Transvaal
Vryburg
Aberdeen
Bath
Bedford
Belfast
Birkenhead
Birmingham
Blackburn
Bolton
Bristol
Cardiff
Cheltenham
Derby
Dublin
Dundee
Edinburgh
Glasgow
Gloucester
Grafton
Grantham
Greenwich
Halifax
Hammersmith
Hartlepool
Hoxton
Hull
Knightsbridge
Lambeth
Leeds
Leicester
Liverpool
London
Manchester
Marylebone
Middlesbrough
Middlesex
Newcastle-on-Tyne
Nottingham
Plymouth
Portsmouth
Reading
Rochdale
Salford
Sheffield
Southampton
Stockport
Stockton-on-Tees
Sunderland
Wigan
Wolverhampton
ADA DELROY, born Elizabeth Ann Blanche Breslin, died of tuberculosis in 1911, aged forty-six, at home in Malvern, Melbourne.
JIM BELL retired as a stage manager and lived with Lizzie in ‘slum’ housing on Little Hanover Street, Fitzroy, Melbourne, before he died in 1916, aged sixty-eight.
LIZZIE BELL married Edmund Montgomery in 1916 soon after Jim’s death. They moved to Sydney where he repaired boots, advertising as ‘The Count of Monty Christo’. Lizzie died in 1954, aged eighty-one.
EDMUND MONTGOMERY was divorced in 1912 for desertion and drunkenness; Auckland court exhibits included two self-pitying letters to his wife Ettie in water-stained soluble pencil (tears or whiskey?). One letter mentions ‘Lizzie Bell whom I have cruelly wronged’ and boasts of an opportunity to marry a talented musician. Monty died in in 1926.
DOC ROWE toured with the Bells after Cissie died, then married his second wife, Maud. She did the White Mahatma act as Mystic Mora. Their daughter Buxar ran their mail-order magic business in Melbourne. Doc Rowe died in 1954, aged seventy-four.
UNDER-THE-TABLE BOYS James junior, Charles, William and Walter all spent time as advance men and managers. James served in WWI and died aged eighty-one in Beechworth. Walter ran a failed circus in Sale, Charles went to the US and William to London.
BERYL BELL, born in 1902, was raised by adoptive parents in South Australia. In 1921, as a young maid, she married bootmaker Robert Sherwell in Collingwood, Melbourne. Her marriage certificate says her parents’ names were Ada Delroy and Robert Bell.
ROBERT ‘BOB’ BELL worked the Tivoli circuit as a versatile performer, mostly in the west. Bob was in Melbourne when the Ada Delroy Company was in New Zealand in 1901 (the time Beryl was conceived). He died in 1937, aged about sixty-nine, possibly at the Old Colonists’ Homes in Clifton Hill.
LOÏE FULLER is probably the only lesbian inventor to survive the Chicago fire of 1871; perform in the Buffalo Bill Roadshow and at the Folies Bergères; invent performance art, a dance craze, revolving gel lighting, stage mirrors and the audience black-out; divorce a convicted trigamist; start a Japanese–European dance troupe; launch the career of Isadora Duncan; dance on the top platform of the Eiffel Tower; use Edison’s lab to test the first glow-in-the-dark radium-painted costumes; be used as a subject by Lalique, Rodin and Toulouse-Lautrec; become pals with Professor Marie Curie and the Queen of Romania; and survive one of the first double mastectomies in 1925. She died in Paris in 1928, aged sixty-six.
HARRY RICKARDS died in 1911, aged sixty-eight. Kate Rickards helped fund the Crown Street maternity hospital and staged mass Christmas dinners for Sydney’s poor until she died in 1922, aged sixty-two. She was buried at sea near Egypt, en route to Australia.
‘PROFESSOR’ S.S. (SAM) BALDWIN divorced Kitty and went broke. A scrapbook of the Baldwin–Bells Butterflies tour is online, part of the University of Texas Ransom Center’s Houdini collection. Baldwin licensed the White Mahatma act to other magicians and performed as a spiritualist with ‘Shadow Baldwin’ (not his daughter, despite the billing). He kept in touch with the Bell–Rowe families and died in 1926.
CLARA BALDWIN, Baldwin’s wife and stage companion until 1888, gave clairvoyant advice on love and pigeon racing in Sydney as ‘Madam Hope’, became addicted to morphia and alcohol, and died in 1889.
KITTY RUSSELL/BALDWIN continued to perform as ‘The Clairvoyant Queen’ and ‘Mrs Baldwin Slade’. She lived to be over eighty and died in 1934.
ED (TEDDY) FORD, the facialist comedian, made a success on English stages of his singing swagman character ‘The Sundowner’ before retiring in Australia.
IRVING SAYLES, when aged sixteen, played in the first baseball game in Australia at the founding of the St Kilda club in 1879. Known as Gus to his pals, he died suddenly in Christchurch, aged fifty-two. He travelled no further than New Zealand after 1901, fearing his re-entry would be stopped by new ‘White Australia policy’ laws.
HARRY HOUDINI survived his dive into the Yarra and soon after declared himself the first man to fly an aeroplane under full control in Australia. (He almost certainly wasn’t.) He died in 1926.
LITTLE TICH (HARRY RELPH) performed his ‘Big Boots’ stilt dance and his Loïe Fuller Serpentine burlesque worldwide (videos are posted on YouTube). He died in 1928. He was so famous that ‘tich’ still means ‘very small’ today.
KIRKHAM EVANS, who disrupted Adelaide shows on the grounds of ‘untruths’, was associated with many boys’ groups, including the Scouts. In 1917 he fled Australia overnight, ahead of an exposé of his ‘unnatural behaviours’. An unknown person has written on a 1915 photograph of him, now in the State Library of South Australia. It says, ‘a bad egg’.
FANNIE DANGO married an Australian squatter. Her income would have been reduced by four-fifths had she remarried after his death in 1923. She remained a wealthy widow until she died, aged ninety-one, in 1972.
MADAM MARZELLA was last heard of playing Californian carnivals, in tent shows. The Ada Delroy Company sold a large parcel of land with ocean views in Cottesloe, near Fremantle, Western Australia, in 1897. Now several suburban blocks in Mosman Park, centred around Jimbell Street, named after Jim Bell, the land is worth tens of millions of dollars.
The Melbourne and Sydney TIVOLI THEATRES showed vaudeville, pantomime and showgirl revues until 1966. Melbourne’s Bourke Street and Sydney’s Castlereagh Street sites are now office buildings.
Other theatres where the Ada Delroy Company performed still stand, including the Gaiety Theatre, Zeehan, Tasmania; the Theatre Royal Castlemaine; Her Majesty’s Theatre Ballarat; the Fremantle Town Hall; and many small regional halls. Cyclone Tracy ruined the old Darwin Town Hall but some wall fragments remain. Ada probably performed benefits at Her Majesty’s and the Princess Theatre, both surviving in Melbourne. Ada played the Wanganui Royal Opera House, New Zealand.
Melbourne’s Theosophical Society now occupies a newer building on the Russell Street, Melbourne, site of the original VICTORIAN SPIRITUALISTS’ UNION and séance venue where George Spriggs ‘materialised a spirit’ who posted a letter. The Catholic University has replaced Mr Spriggs’s Brunswick Street house where ‘spirits’ ate biscuits and danced in his garden.
THE COOGEE PALACE AQUARIUM lost its dome in 1945. Renovated in the 1980s, it’s now the Coogee Pavilion.
A large part of the MELBOURNE EXHIBITION BUILDINGS endures in the Carlton Gardens. The Melbourne Museum has replaced the extra sheds and the spare dome from 1888. A line of trees stands in lieu of the switchback railway (roller-coaster). Over the road, Irving Sayles’s old boarding house survives in Nicholson St.
BLOCK ARCADE, COLLINS STREET, MELBOURNE. The Singer mural ceiling remains, now above the Crabtree & Evelyn shop. The arcade’s ground floor and basement configurations are almost the s
ame as they were in 1889. The French Jewelbox shop sells antique jewellery and is on the lookout for the ‘Ada’ name brooch. There is a plan to revive the Winter Gardens café underneath the arcade, where Helena Rubinstein was a waitress in 1901.
The OLD COLONISTS’ HOMES COTTAGES in North Fitzroy, now Clifton Hill, are still used as housing for older people. My great-great-great-grandmother, Elizabeth Wills, donated a cottage in 1898 that still stands. Cottages are no longer reserved for decayed actors.
All photographs that appear within the text and on the inside covers of Ada are out of copyright.
Overture
Wallona Aritta, tattooed performer, c1910. Photographer unknown; Atlas and Vulcana, c1903. Photographer unknown, Talma Studios; Pansy Montague, ‘The Water Nymph’, c1906. Photograph by Alfred Cecil Rowlandson; all courtesy State Library of Victoria Pictures Collection.
1. Our Stage Was All The World
The Ada Delroy Company in Afghanistan, c1897. Photographer unknown; courtesy Joy Bell and the Bell Family.
2. Rehearsal
‘Oh What a Difference’ Lancashire dialect postcard.
3. Escapology
Kate Leete aka Kate Rickards in Tootsie Sloper costume, 1888–89. Unknown photographer; courtesy the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Sydney.
4. Knockabout Routines
‘Madam Marzella and Her Wonderful Birds’, c1904. Photographer unknown, Talma Studios; from a newspaper clipping in theatrical scrapbook, State Library of Victoria Pictures Collection.
5. Messages from the Other Side
Colour lithograph poster of ‘The World’s Greatest Psychic Sensation’ White Mahatmas with devils, c1900–1915. Artist unknown.
6. Dancing in Fire
Loïe Fuller performing the Serpentine dance, c1897. Photograph by Isaiah West Taber.
7. Balancing Act
Facial comedian Ed Ford, publicity photograph, c1910. Photographer unknown.
8. The Farce
Ada Delroy, c1895. Photographer unknown, Talma Studios; State Library of Victoria Manuscripts Collection.
Photographs included in final pages
Madame Abomah ‘the giantess’ publicity card, c1900–1910.
Open box of MacRobertson’s chocolates, State Library of Victoria Pictures Collection, early 20th Century.
Loïe Fuller’s patent application drawings for her Serpentine costume and sticks, lodged in 1894.
Lillie May Bryer, Stereoscopic Studios, c1890s, State Library of Victoria Pictures Collection.