The Fabulous Flexmores

Richard Flexmore Geatter was born in Kennington, Surrey, on September 15th, 1824. Twenty-seven days earlier — on August 19th, 1824 — a playbill for the New Surrey Theatre, Blackfriars Road, had already advertised “a Comic Dance by Messrs. Flexmore, Honor, and Jonas” in a production called The Festival of Lanterns. The performer billed as “Flexmore” was not the not-yet-born Richard. It was his father.

Richard Flexmore Gatter — the family's own surname, without the theatrical “e” that later crept into “Geatter” and without “Flexmore” attached to it at birth — had been performing professionally as “Mr Flexmore” from at least April 1811, when a Theatre Royal, York playbill cast him as “Toby Lump” in Rival Rustics, dancing alongside the Giroux family. Two years later, marrying Ann Fancourt Pether at St Anne’s, Liverpool, on March 23rd, 1813, he gave his own occupation on the certificate, plainly, as “Stage Player.” He danced again at the Theatre Royal, Manchester, in November 1827, on a benefit night for Mr Bradbury the clown. He died in March 1837, in Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire — twenty-three years before the son who would make the name famous.

Richard began his own career at the Victoria Theatre at around eight years old, in 1832, trained — per the only named early teacher on record — “by a Mr Frampton.” By 1835 he was shadow-dancing in The Man in the Moon at a small Chelsea theatre; by 1844 he had his first documented Clown role, at the Grecian Saloon.

His breakthrough came at the Olympic under T. D. Davenport, 1845–46, and it was soon after, at the Princess’s Theatre, that his signature gift emerged: precise, affectionate imitations of the great ballerinas of the day — Taglioni, Carlotta Grisi, Fanny Cerrito, Jules Perrot — danced, by every account, with a comic clown’s body doing a prima donna’s steps. He went on to the Adelphi (1852–53), took a monkey role at the Surrey (1857), and played the Wolf transforming into Clown in Little Red Riding Hood at Covent Garden (1858–59). His final pantomime was Jack-in-the-Box, Drury Lane, Christmas 1859 — eight months before his death.

On July 28th, 1849, at St Mary’s, Lambeth, Richard married Francisca Christophosa Auriol — daughter of the celebrated French clown Jean-Baptiste Auriol, one of the most famous circus performers in Europe. Francisca was a performer of real standing in her own right; the 1851 census records her occupation, in her own household, as “Professor of Dancing.” Seven weeks after the wedding, the couple appeared together on a bill at the Queen’s Theatre, Hull — billed, tellingly, as “Madlle. Auriol & Mr. Flexmore.” She kept her own name. She too had earned the right to do so.

By the night of the 1851 census, Richard, Francisca, and Richard’s widowed mother Ann were all living together at 66 Hercules Buildings, Lambeth, with Richard recorded as head of household. A newspaper item the following year — “Flexmore Back Garden Menagerie” — places him two doors along, at No. 60, suggesting the family shifted within the same street. Either way, Richard’s presence on Hercules Buildings ran for the better part of a decade, right through to his death at No. 66 in 1860.

This is the same Lambeth street — later renamed Hercules Road — where, decades afterward, an impresario named Henry “Harry” Wieland is documented living and working. Close enough, geographically, to matter to the theory this site explores in its next chapter. Not yet close enough, chronologically, to prove it.

Even in his own lifetime, people tried to borrow the name. In March 1854, Richard wrote to the Morning Post to publicly disown a young man of eighteen or nineteen who had defrauded the Drury Lane manager E. T. Smith of £10 by posing as “the son of Mr. Flexmore, the clown.” Richard, not yet thirty himself, noted with dry precision that he had been “certainly a bachelor” a decade earlier, and declined — in his own words — “to father him.”

It is a small, funny, slightly sad episode. It is also, in miniature, the exact story this entire site tells: the moment a stage name becomes valuable enough — strangers start to borrow it. Richard lived to see it happen once, to his evident irritation. Within a few decades it had happened many times over — not as fraud, but as tribute, homage, and the same kind of honest professional inheritance his own father had once claimed for himself.

Richard’s health failed quickly at the end. In 1859, according to a contemporary account, fellow clown Harry Payne — playing a bear in the same production — had to step into the Clown role mid-performance because Flexmore had collapsed. Richard died at 66 Hercules Buildings on August 20th, 1860, of consumption, not yet thirty-six years old. He was buried a week later, on August 27th, at All Souls, Kensal Green, beneath a monument funded by public subscription — designed by Richard Wynn Keene, the deaf theatrical costumier and mechanist who worked under the professional name “Dykwynkyn,” and completed in 1862.

Richard Wynn Keene was born in Birmingham on December 9th, 1809, and was — per the Museum of Music History’s own account of his life — “afflicted with total deafness from an early period of his life.” He trained first as a sculptor, then spent a decade in industry and invention: in 1838 he co-patented, with John Danforth Greenwood, a hard ornamental plaster known as Keene’s cement, and from 1841 to 1851 ran a terracotta manufacturing business supplying architectural features and mosaic work. Somewhere in the 1850s he moved into the theatre full-time, and it is there that his name survives.

From 1852 to 1879 he designed for seventeen consecutive pantomimes at Drury Lane, responsible — in the words of one contemporary account — for “all the hundreds of Masks, Devices, Properties and Dresses” the productions required, and celebrated for grotesque, inventive imagery. It was in this capacity, in 1862, that he designed Richard Flexmore’s own monument at Kensal Green — the single point at which his story and this site’s cross. In 1876, at the age of sixty-seven, his reputation carried him further still: Bayreuth commissioned him to build the mechanical animals for the original production of Wagner’s Ring — a dragon for Fafner, a bear, a magpie, ravens, and sacrificial rams for Fricka. The dragon alone cost £500 and, having lost a piece of its neck in transit, reportedly never worked as intended; the animals as a whole were judged unsuited to operatic drama. It remains a striking commission all the same, for a man whose ordinary trade was Drury Lane pantomime.

The name itself, “Dykwynkyn,” is first recorded attached to his costumes for the 1854 Drury Lane pantomime. Wikipedia’s own account calls it simply “a comic shortening of his name”; the Museum of Music History’s account, in a small but telling difference of phrasing, describes it instead as the name “that Richard Wynn Keene adopted for his pantomime work” — his own professional choice, not only a label given to him by others. Neither source explains, in so many words, how the sound “Dykwynkyn” came about.

Keene did not end well. He died on November 28th, 1887, paralysed and bedridden, in a workhouse infirmary — his burial at Brookwood Cemetery paid for by a theatrical charity, in a grave that remains unmarked to this day. A man who spent thirty years building the props, monsters, and monuments other people were remembered by has, a century and a half later, none of his own. This is offered here, in whatever small way a website can manage, as one.

Keene furnished the design; another man’s hands actually cut the stone. The Era’s report of the monument’s completion — published Sunday, February 9th, 1862 — is explicit on the point: “The design, furnished by Mr. Richard Wynn Keene, an artist so familiar to the public under his punning pseudonym of Dykwynkyn, has been ably executed by Mr. John Chapman, Sculptor, 23, East-place, Walworth.” Beyond that one credit line, nothing further about Chapman has yet come to light — no other commission, no other trace of the workshop at East-place. This site records what the source actually says and no more.

The same report describes the finished monument in some detail: a double plinth surmounting a pedestal with base and cornice moulding, nine feet six inches in total height, its upper angles carved with four masked heads representing Tragedy and Comedy on one side and Music and Poetry on the other, festoons of oak and ivy bound with ribbons running between them, and, on the front, a tambourine, walking-stick, and pair of fancy slippers carved in relief around an urn entwined with a laurel wreath — the small, specific props of Richard’s own trade, rendered permanent in stone. The inscription itself reads:

In Memory of
RICHARD FLEXMORE GATTER,
who died August 20th, 1860.

“A fellow of infinite jest.”—SHAKSPERE.

The completion itself was not entirely smooth: the Committee had originally intended to place the monument on Tuesday, February 4th, but as it was being lowered into position the tackle of the machinery gave way, and the work had to be finished the following day. The Era noted that Chapman “properly and honourably finished his contract, to the satisfaction of all present,” and that he had undertaken to carry out the whole of his workmanship at cost price alone.

Richard and Francisca had no surviving children. Widowed at thirty-one, Francisca did not disappear from the stage: within twelve days a theatrical gossip column reported she had already returned to Paris for a new engagement, “where she has been an immense favourite.” A year later she married her own first cousin, Achille Auriol. On September 1st, 1862, she gave birth to a daughter, who died the same day. Francisca herself died within days of the birth — the exact date recorded three different ways across three separate sources, never yet resolved to a single certainty. Mother, child, and, with them, the last direct line of the family that had given the world “Flexmore,” were gone within roughly a fortnight of one another, little more than two years after Richard’s own death.

The Geatter bloodline, in the most literal sense, ended there. The name did not.

Two performers who trained under Richard as children went on to recall him by name, decades later, entirely independently of one another. Fred Vokes, interviewed in 1886, put it simply: “‘Flexmore,’ says Mr Vokes, ‘was the greatest man that ever gave me a lesson in dancing. He gave me three lessons, and died.’” His sister Jessie Vokes, in her own 1884 obituary, was remembered as having been “taught the art of dancing by the late Mr Flexmore.”

In January 1885 — twenty-five years after Richard’s death — a double act billed as “Thomson and Flexmore, Les Vrai Diables” opened at Astley’s Amphitheatre, London’s most famous circus venue, performing knockabout comedy under a name to which neither performer had any documented blood right. In December 1874, an illustrated feature titled “Some Famous Clowns” placed Flexmore’s own portrait alongside Joseph Grimaldi’s — among the handful of names Victorian England still considered essential to the art, fourteen years after his death.

By the time Ellen Mary Ann Dunn adopted the stage name Lily Flexmore in 1896 — the subject of this site’s companion, lilyflexmore.co.uk — “Flexmore” had already been carried, earned, and re-earned by a Wieland-trained circus dynasty, a family of leg-mania dancers, a set of stage sisters, a ringmaster who made it his own legal middle name, and at least one unrelated double act performing under it at London’s grandest circus venue. Richard Flexmore Geatter’s own bloodline gave the world exactly two generations, then stopped. The name he was given — and which his own father had been given before him — kept going for nearly a century more.

Read Richard’s full biography, in full record-by-record detail, on The People →

The phrase survives as a fragment — a single line from a 27-year-old review, describing a performer who was not himself a Flexmore. But it is not the only evidence that “Flexmore” functioned, within Victorian performance circles, as something closer to a training lineage than a surname. Two of Richard’s own former pupils said so themselves, independently, decades later. Fred Vokes, interviewed in 1886: “‘Flexmore,’ says Mr Vokes, ‘was the greatest man that ever gave me a lesson in dancing.’” His sister Jessie, in her own 1884 obituary, was remembered as “taught the art of dancing by the late Mr Flexmore.”

Taken together, this is enough to support a real proposition — that a Flexmore–Wieland performance lineage existed in some form. It is not enough to prove a formal academy ever existed. This site’s own working verdict, reached independently by more than one pass through the evidence, is careful on exactly this point: a Flexmore–Wieland performance lineage is supported. A formal academy is a credible research hypothesis, not yet a demonstrated fact. It is also why this site is called “The Fabulous Flexmores” and not “The Flexmore School.”

Henry William “Harry” Wieland was a gymnastic-act agent and impresario of real standing. Per an 1895 history of the variety stage, he controlled engagements at the Crystal Palace from 1868, managed the acrobatic troupe the Hanlons and the act Brothers Volta, left the Crystal Palace in 1878 to run a circus on the Continent, remained abroad until 1890, and then returned to London to work at the Royal Aquarium. In 1870 he founded the agency that still carries his most famous client’s name in its own title — the H. W. Wieland (Zaeo) Agency — and it was Harry who devised the serpentine dance routine his wife performed in her final stage appearances around 1898–99. He was still working as “a Music Hall Agent” as late as 1906.

That wife was Adelaide Zaeo Wieland — the celebrated aerialist whose own story, and her foster sister Clara’s, is told in full in Chapter Four. Her civil death certificate, dated April 2nd, 1906, records her as “Wife of Henry William Wieland, a Music Hall Agent,” with Harry himself as the informant, present at her death. It is the firmest piece of evidence in the entire Wieland puzzle: whoever else gets tangled up in this story, this specific man is confirmed, beyond doubt, as her husband.

Harry Wieland married at least twice. His first wife, Elizabeth Wieland, died on November 15th, 1890, of septicaemia and diffuse cellulitis, aged forty-four — at an address recorded on her death certificate as Hercules Lodge, Hercules Buildings. Harry himself is named as the informant, present at her death. Adelaide Zaeo’s own death certificate confirms the marriage to her was current in 1906; since Elizabeth was still his wife in November 1890, the marriage to Adelaide must date from sometime after that.

Elizabeth’s death certificate matters here for a second reason. It places Harry Wieland at Hercules Buildings — the same street where Richard Flexmore Geatter had lived and died thirty years earlier — on a firmly dated November day in 1890, a full year earlier and more precise than the 1891 census this research previously relied on for the same address.

Here is where the story tangles. A civil death certificate, entirely separate from Harry’s, records a William Henry Wieland — note the names reversed — a Vocalist, aged thirty-five, who died of Phthisis on September 7th, 1866, at 316 Walworth Road. Phthisis is consumption: the same disease that killed Richard Flexmore Geatter six years earlier, in the same part of South London.

The family’s own research paper on this subject describes the two Wieland men as father and son: “William Wieland’s son, Harry, lived for a time at 46 Hercules Street, not far from Flexmore’s home at 60 Hercules Buildings.” Taken at face value, that single sentence would do a great deal of work for this site’s theory — tying a Wieland directly to Richard’s own street within his own lifetime.

Strip away the father/son question and one fact remains solid: a Wieland lived on Richard Flexmore Geatter’s own street. Richard was at 60 or 66 Hercules Buildings from at least 1852 until his death there in 1860. Harry Wieland is confirmed at Hercules Lodge, Hercules Buildings, in November 1890, and at 46 Hercules Road — the same street, renamed — in the 1891 census. That is a real, documented proximity. It is just not, yet, the right decade.

None of this unravels the theory for which this site is named. A Flexmore–Wieland performance lineage is still the best-supported reading of the evidence gathered so far — the 1867 review, the Vokes family’s own testimony, and a documented, if not yet chronologically pinned down, geographic overlap. What it does show is how easily a single evocative phrase can outrun the paperwork behind it, and why this site treats “a credible research hypothesis” and “a demonstrated fact” as two different things worth keeping separate.

Sophia Gilleno Giles (1864–1949) performed as an equestrienne under the name “Marie Flexmore” — and was known more casually, right into her own 1949 death notice, simply as “Mrs Flexmore.” She is the subject of not one but two separate 1934 newspaper interviews looking back on a life spent, by her own account, in circus and caravan from childhood. She rode bareback for the celebrated ‘Lord’ George Sanger’s circus, and later took over management of the family business herself. Her own father, William Henry Gilleno Giles, performing as “Funny Frisk,” died in September 1874 after being struck in the head by a brick thrown by a heckler who refused to pay admission at a Birmingham gymnastic show — a witness’s cry of “Oh, Mr Gilleno, there’s a brick coming” survives in the coroner’s inquest report. His killer was convicted of manslaughter. The “Funny Frisk” name outlived him: a clown billed as “Funny Frisky (Giles Gilleno)” was still touring with Tudor’s New Circus in 1896, twenty-two years after the man who first used it had died.

Sophia married Edward Knight in 1883 — carrying the Flexmore name directly into the family this site will return to in Chapter Five.

Sophia’s father-in-law, Thomas “Flexible” Flexmore Knight (b.1835), carried “Flexmore” as part of his own working name, not merely a billing. It passed to his grandson: Albert Edward Flexmore Knight had “Flexmore” as his actual legal middle name, confirmed directly in family records. A WWI-era showland service record describes him plainly: “Ringmaster and agent in advance. Albert Edward Knight (Flexmore). Born Birmingham... nephew of Harry Gilleno, the clown Funny Frisk.” By the second generation, in other words, “Flexmore” was not a stage trick at all — it was simply the family’s name, worn as naturally as any inherited surname, despite no documented blood tie to Richard whatsoever. The fuller story of this circus dynasty, and its own unexpected personal thread, is Chapter Five.

Three of George and Elizabeth Prodger’s daughters — Florence, Lydia, and Elizabeth (“Bessie”) Prodger — performed together as the “Sisters Flexmore.” The earliest documented mention found in this research is a warm notice from a London hall in 1883, when the sisters would still have been in their teens and twenties:

They went on to tour London, Dublin, the United States, and South Africa across the following two decades, still billed as the Sisters Flexmore as late as 1904. Lydia’s own name is recorded formally in the family’s genealogical record as “Lydia Flexmore /Prodger/” — a stage name that had, for her at least, become close to a second legal identity.

The sisters were three of George Prodger (1834–1898) and Elizabeth Griffin’s (1834–1919) seven children, married 26th December 1853 at the parish church of St Clement, Hastings, Sussex — George a 21-year-old carpenter, son of William Prodger, a painter; Elizabeth a 20-year-old, daughter of Thomas Griffin, a stationer. Their eldest child, George Henry Prodger (1855–1912), was not part of the act; he married Frances Manning in 1879 and had three children of his own. Unlike so many of the performers elsewhere in this research, the Sisters Flexmore were long-lived: Elizabeth “Bessie” Prodger (1857–1949) married Robert L. Roberts; Florence Prodger (1864–1945) married Arthur Seymore Bull (1866–1927); and Lydia Prodger (1870–1960) married Samuel G. Tattersall (1868–1950), with whom she had three children — Florence L. Tattersall (1905–1985), Jack Tattersall (b.1909), and Edward M. Tattersall (1912–1972). All three sisters lived into their seventies, eighties, or nineties — Bessie the longest-lived, to ninety-two.

Florence Prodger’s husband, Arthur Seymore Bull, came with a family history of his own worth setting down. His parents were Richard Smith Bull (1843–1908) and Frances Amelia Smithson (1844–1909) — and their marriage did not last. A High Court of Justice divorce petition, Probate Divorce and Admiralty Division, filed 10th March 1877 and held in the family’s own genealogical record, is styled “Bull otherwise Boleyn, Frances Amelia v. Bull otherwise Boleyn, Richard Smith” — a petition for dissolution of marriage, solicitor J. R. Wood of 44 Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The divorce was granted on the grounds of Richard’s infidelity; he went on to marry the woman named as co-respondent, Fanny Whiteside Brough. Frances, in 1880, married again herself — to Theodore Casimir Roussel.

That name turns out to belong to a genuinely notable figure. Théodore Roussel (1847–1926) was a French-born, self-taught painter and etcher who settled in England in 1878 and became, from 1885 onward, a close friend of James McNeill Whistler — Whistler taught him etching and drypoint and remained, in the words of Roussel’s own biographers, a lifelong friend and mentor. Roussel made his name in 1887 with The Reading Girl, a life-size nude that caused real controversy in its day, and went on to become one of the pioneers of colour etching in Britain, serving as the first President of the Society of Graver Printers in Colour when it was founded in 1909. Through Frances’s second marriage, in other words, Florence Prodger’s own mother-in-law became, for the last three decades of her life, the wife of a painter who moved in Whistler’s own circle.

Arthur built a career of his own: by the 1921 census he was Chief Passenger Agent for the Sudan Government Railways & Steamers, out of the company’s London office, negotiating with archaeologists such as John Garstang to turn excavations at Meroe into tourist attractions and organising “Combined Circular Tours” from Cairo to Khartoum. By the time of his death he was recorded more simply as a ‘Company Director.’ He died of angina pectoris at 76a Streatham Hill on 15th February 1927, aged sixty, with Florence present at his death. She outlived him by eighteen years, dying a widow at 72 Cricklade Avenue, Streatham Hill, on 4th May 1945, her probate granted to the National Provincial Bank. Florence performed on into her own thirties and beyond — a February 1898 Johannesburg review, from the same South African tour the Sisters Flexmore made together, singled her out solo: “Miss Florrie Flexmore is a fine contortionist, and also does a good song and dance.”

Laurence Sidney May (1863–1928) performed as an eccentric, leg-mania dancer under the name “Fred Flexmore” — a pointed contrast for a man whose father, the Reverend Frederick Schiller May, was Rector of High Laver, Ongar, Essex, and personally officiated at his own sons’ weddings. Laurence danced at two of London’s grandest variety houses, the Alhambra and the Empire, in 1904, before an injury around 1906 ended his performing career. He did not disappear from the stage — he simply moved behind it, becoming a genuinely prolific pantomime author. His own obituary in The Stage, 1928, put it plainly: after the accident, “he devoted his attention to the writing of humorous verse and pantomime books.” Over the following two decades he wrote at least half a dozen produced pantomimes, from Aladdin at Kingston-on-Thames in 1898 to a fourth Aladdin, at the Kennington Theatre, in 1924.

There is a sixth performer who carried the name, closer to this site’s own heart than any of the other five: George Ambrose White (1875–1933), who performed as a comedian under the name George Flexmore. He was, by the time of his death, a newspaper representative for Associated Newspapers and the Evening News at Carmelite House, Blackfriars — and forty newspaper vans followed his hearse when he died on September 26th, 1933. He was also, from 1899, the husband of Ellen Mary Ann Dunn. “Flexmore” was, for George, a trade name used extensively and consistently — on the bill, on his own 1921 census return, and on his infant daughter’s 1899 birth and death certificates, the second of which he signed himself as informant, “G. A. Flexmore, Father” — but, unlike Albert Edward Flexmore Knight in the previous entry, it was never his legal name; no record has yet been found of any formal change of name.

George Flexmore’s own story, and Ellen’s, belongs properly to this site’s companion, lilyflexmore.co.uk. He is named here only to complete the count: by 1899, a woman who would herself go on to build a thirty-year career as Lily Flexmore was already married to a man performing under the same borrowed name. Whether that marriage shaped her own choice of stage name, or simply confirmed a decision she had already made three years earlier, is not resolved — but it means that by the turn of the century, “Flexmore” was not just a name Ellen adopted. It was, briefly, a name shared at her own breakfast table.

Adelaide “Zaeo” Wieland (c.1863–1906) was, by her own account, “still a child” when Harry Wieland — already an established trainer of gymnasts and owner of a travelling circus — first noticed her and began training her himself: riding, animal work, the high wire, and eventually the aerial dive act that made her famous. Her first great dive came at Alexandra Palace in 1879, from a platform fifty feet up, before an audience of twelve thousand; she later left a vivid first-person account of the walk out onto the wire, the dive itself, and the rebound off the safety net, quoted at length in her own obituary. A continental tour followed — in Valencia she gave half of a £200 fee to the Hospital for Incurables and was commended by the Queen of Spain; in Lisbon, under royal patronage, she made a reported £4,000 profit over an eight-week season. In Trieste, a piece of decorative iron, dislodged by an overexcited spectator, struck her while she was on the trapeze trying to divert it from the crowd below — she was “prostrate for three months,” and among those who showed her kindness during the recovery were Sir Richard and Lady Isabel Burton, the explorer and his wife.

Her fame brought scandal as well as admiration: at the Royal Aquarium, the National Vigilance Association attacked an advertising poster made from her own studio photograph as indecent, feeding directly into London County Council licensing debates over the venue, with Captain Molesworth conducting the Aquarium’s defence. Her very last stage appearances, at the Oxford Music Hall and the Palace Theatre around 1898–99, were not aerial work at all, but dance:

Adelaide’s civil death certificate — the single firmest document in the entire Wieland puzzle — settles a question this site has carried since Chapter Two: whether the impresario who trained her was also her husband.

This confirms both the marriage itself and the husband’s exact name — Henry William, not William Henry — meaning this is unambiguously the “Harry” Wieland of Chapter Two, not the separate William Henry Wieland who died in 1866. The exact marriage date and record have not yet been located. The obituary gives her cause of death as “heart disease following typhoid fever”; the certificate itself disagrees, giving “Hepatic Cirrhosis, Cerebral Haemorrhage,” certified by A. A. C. Grant, M.B. — recorded here as a genuine, unresolved discrepancy rather than smoothed into agreement, since period press obituaries routinely softened a cause of death and the certificate is the more reliable document. She was buried April 6th, 1906, at Nunhead Cemetery, plot 63/20125, thought to lie near the music-hall singer Alfred Vance — though some graves in that section are known to have been later moved, so the exact plot is not treated as certain.

Clara’s own career could hardly have looked more different from her foster sister’s. Two American newspaper profiles — Wisconsin, December 1895, and Iowa, June 1896 — survive describing her as a serpentine dancer and singer, trained from childhood to a genuinely remarkable standard:

The same profile describes her travelling from childhood with her father and “his invention, the celebrated ‘Zeo’” — contemporaries, in other words, understood Adelaide’s aerial persona as something Clara’s own father figure had built. Wherever the family stayed any length of time, Clara was placed “under the best procurable master of music, singing, acting, mime and dancing,” and came away fluent in French, Italian, and Arabic, and trained in haute-école riding from circus life, before settling on singing and dance as her own preference. She debuted a “new prismatic serpentine dance” at the Empire, Leicester Square, in June 1893; spent five years at the Aquarium, Westminster, performing her “mirror dance”; and was engaged as a vocalist at the Empire for somewhere between 68 and 69 weeks, the two press accounts not quite agreeing on the exact number. She left London for America from the Palace Theatre, Cambridge Circus, brought over by “a firm of American managers,” and appeared in US vaudeville and burlesque, including Gentleman Joe.

Two English court reports from the same year place a married, financially strained Clara back in London. In a Westminster County Court interpleader case:

…successfully claimed a fortnight’s salary of £40, paid into court by the proprietors of Gatti’s Music Hall, against a rival claim from a man named Hewitt over an assigned loan. A separate King’s Bench report from the same clipping batch has “Miss Clara Wieland, the well-known music hall artist, suing through her husband, Mr. William Henry Perette Thring,” seeking £60 in damages from the proprietor of the Bedford Palace of Varieties, Camden Town, for breach of a four-week engagement. The defence argued she had no standing to sue at all — she had already assigned away her interest in the contract in exchange for cash advances — and the judge substituted her assignee as plaintiff in her place; the jury found for the claimed amount regardless. Read together, the two cases point to a married name of some form of Perette/Parette Thring, and to a woman repeatedly borrowing against her own future earnings by 1900–01 — a specific, evidenced financial strain, not speculation, appearing twice in one year. Her husband’s first two names, “William Henry,” echo the Wieland naming pattern from Chapter Two, but the surnames are entirely different, and this should not be read as a family connection without further evidence.

A loose thread this research has not yet tied off: a comedienne named Elizabeth Wieland was touring in 1913, praised by the Paris edition of the Daily Mail for her turn as Pimpernel in “Lively Lucerne” at the Alhambra, and later advertised touring the same production in South Africa — sharing an advertisement, incidentally, with Fred Kitchen, Jun. A separate 1910 US travel record describes an “Elizabeth A. Wieland,” born England 1882, resident in Philadelphia and filed by the researcher under the working title “Elizabeth Adelaide Wieland” — though nothing in the record itself confirms that middle name.

None of this — the dive at Alexandra Palace, the Trieste injury, the Aquarium scandal, the American tour, the two court cases, the unplaced third Elizabeth — was visible while Adelaide and Clara were still being read as one uncertain identity. Splitting them apart did not resolve every question the two women raise; if anything it raised new ones, about a father figure with three different names and a comedienne who may or may not belong to this family at all. But it replaced one flattened, half-real figure with two real, independently documented lives, each with its own career, its own marriage, and its own unanswered questions still open on their own terms.

William Henry Gilleno Giles (b.1823), who performed as “Funny Frisk,” married Janet Lockhart and, between them, they raised at least ten children into the family trade — a fuller list than this chapter first carried: Henry William Gilleno Giles (1857–1932, Birmingham), Albert Edward Gilleno Giles (1862–1899, Worcester), William Giles (b.1845), Charlotte Taylor Giles (1850–1928, later “Mademoiselle Carlotta Fabian”), Ellen Gilleno Giles (b.1856), Juliet Gilleno Giles (b.1858), Thomas Charles Giles (1860–1905), Alfred Gilleno Giles (b.1864), Louisa Lorne Gilleno Giles (b.1870), and Sophia (1864–1949) — the “Marie Flexmore” of Chapter Three. Four of these siblings — Juliet, Thomas Charles, Alfred, and Marie’s own precise dates — were added to this research on 17 August 2026; the full family record is on The People → His death, in September 1874, is already told in full there: struck in the head by a brick thrown by a heckler at a Birmingham gymnastic show, a witness’s cry of “Oh, Mr Gilleno, there’s a brick coming” preserved in the coroner’s own inquest report, his killer convicted of manslaughter.

What Chapter Three did not have room for is what happened to the name afterward. A clown billed as “Funny Frisky (Giles Gilleno)” was still touring, at Tudor’s New Circus in Cambridge, in the autumn of 1896 — twenty-two years after the patriarch who first used the name had died. On age and family position alone, the likeliest candidate to have inherited it is his eldest son, Henry William Gilleno Giles, who would have been about thirty-nine that year.

The same 1896 Tudor’s Circus season billed a separate act: “the Gilleno Brothers (Albert and Tom),” musical clowns coaxing tunes out of “bells and bellows, ducks and banjo,” performing as part of a wider “Gilleno Family Troupe” advertised as their father and nine siblings strong. The same brothers took part in a “Vienna Ladies’ Orchestra” sketch — disguising themselves as female musicians before revealing the act as farce mid-performance, a specific piece of stage business worth remembering if it ever surfaces again elsewhere in this research. A photograph of the act survives, credited to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France; it has not yet been secured for use here, and the same permission the site already owes Stuart Gibbs for his own colourised images is owed here too, before it appears anywhere public.

Charlotte Taylor Giles, Sophia’s sister, toured as “Mademoiselle Carlotta Fabian” alongside her husband, clown James Patrick Bantry-Fagan, performing as “Monsieur Fabian.” What neither of them advertised was that James had already married once before — Ada Isaacs, in 1869 — six years ahead of his 1875 marriage to Charlotte. The two marriages held together, unnoticed, for nine years, until coincidence undid them: in November 1884, both wives happened to be performing in Liverpool in the same week, with rival circuses, Ada at Cooke’s and James and Charlotte at Hengler’s. Ada had him arrested.

The court was not persuaded: twelve months’ imprisonment with hard labour, at HMP Liverpool, following a trial that opened on the 10th of February 1885. The marriage to Charlotte, remarkably, survived it. James died in Ireland in 1914; Charlotte moved to Canada afterward “to live with a sister” — the press account naming no one further.

Between 1895 and 1900, a working circus performer billed as “Marie Flexmore, Equestrian” toured with “Luko” and the “Sisters Lockhart” — the Lockhart name itself an echo of Janet Lockhart, matriarch of the whole Gilleno family. For some time this research treated her as a possible separate person: a touring performer, well evidenced, tentatively identified as Sophia’s own sister, “Marie G. Giles.” A 1911 Irish census return settles the question the other way. The household head at Pound Lane, Clogheen, Co. Tipperary — a 45-year-old widowed “Travelling Bazaar and Show Owner” — is recorded there as Marie Flexmore, and living with her, by name, are her children Eva Matilda and Albert Edward, both already independently documented elsewhere in this research as Sophia’s own. “Marie Flexmore, Equestrian” was Sophia herself.

That also resolves a WWI-era showland service record naming Albert Edward Flexmore Knight’s mother directly:

This site had previously read that record as a clerical conflation — one sister’s name mistakenly attached to another sister’s son — because every other source, the family’s own GEDCOM records included, gives Albert’s mother as Sophia. It was not a conflation. “Marie” was Sophia’s own performing name, used here as naturally as “Mrs Flexmore” is used elsewhere. The correction is recorded here rather than quietly folded away, because that is exactly what this site exists to do.

Sophia Gilleno Giles gave not one but two separate newspaper interviews in 1934, looking back on a lifetime in circus and caravan. The first, already quoted on this site, describes her years riding bareback for ‘Lord’ George Sanger. A second, independently found, adds a title of its own — “Circus Memories: Seventy Years in a Caravan” — and a wider sweep: touring across the British Isles, Canada, South America, Africa, and France, and, after her husband Edward Knight’s death, taking over management of the family circus business herself.

What neither 1934 interview mentions is that Sophia had, by then, already crossed the Atlantic herself. She emigrated to Canada in 1920 — the same year as her daughter Eva — and the 1921 Canadian census finds her at 627 Hamilton Road, London, Ontario, listed as “Sub-tenant Head,” a widow of fifty-four. Eva is recorded in the same household — but as her “Niece,” not her daughter.

Sophia and Edward Knight’s daughter Eva Matilda Knight was born on the 6th of September 1884, in Shrewsbury, and grew up, like every child in this family, inside the trade — documented on her own record as a “Travelling Theatre Artiste.” On the 4th of November 1913, in Edenderry, County Offaly, she married Matthew Mooney — the marriage this whole chapter has been building toward, and this researcher’s own grand-uncle.

The years that followed were not easy ones, and this research does not soften that. In June 1920, Eva was committed to Mountjoy Prison, charged with attempting suicide; Matthew is recorded in the prison register as her husband, present at the address they shared, 80 Seville Place. By November of that year she had emigrated to Canada aboard the SS Metagama, staying with her aunt Louisa Gilleno Giles Howard in Ontario. In June 1922, in Detroit, she married a second time, to John Michael Barry — a marriage this research has found no evidence was ever preceded by a divorce from Matthew, and treats, on that basis, as probably bigamous rather than confirmed so. Two children followed: a son, Jack Barry, born 1924, and an infant daughter recorded in some documents as Mary Jean Barry and in others as Mary Jean Baker, who lived only from April to September 1929 — a surname discrepancy this research has not been able to reconcile.

In 1936, Eva returned to England with her son Jack, to her mother Sophia’s home in Ramsgate. Her final years are documented through two local newspaper reports of a further crisis in the spring of 1951 — the exact date given differently in each, either the 20th or the 30th of March — and two subsequent appearances before Ramsgate Magistrates’ Court, on the 1st and 2nd of April and again on the 1st of May. She died on the 10th of May 1951. Her death certificate names her, in full, “Eva Matilda Barry otherwise Mooney,” and gives the cause of death as cerebral haemorrhage — a description this research neither connects to nor separates from the crisis that preceded it, because the certificate itself does not say, and nothing would be gained by guessing on her behalf. She was fifty-six.

Matthew Mooney was born in Dublin in June 1892, son of Matthew Mooney Sr. and Elizabeth Ann Smyth — herself born aboard a ship near Auckland, New Zealand, a detail this research has not yet had the chance to follow further. He married Eva in Edenderry in November 1913, and is recorded, six and a half years later, standing beside her in the Mountjoy Prison register as her husband. He died on the 13th of July 1942, in Bohernabreena, Dublin.

Matthew Mooney was this researcher’s own grand-uncle. Every other person in this five-chapter site — Richard Flexmore Geatter, Harry and Adelaide Wieland, the five successor Flexmores, Zaeo and Clara — came to this research as a subject: someone found, followed, and written up from the outside. Eva and Matthew are the one exception. They were already, unknowingly, part of this researcher’s own family tree, waiting to be noticed rather than discovered — and it is only because of that marriage, and the questions it raised, that this whole site, and its two companions, exist at all.

The two threads this chapter has followed — the name, and the family — meet in one place: the Knight family itself. This research began with Ellen Mary Ann Dunn, footballer as Ruth Coupland and contortionist and comedienne as Lily Flexmore, the subject of this site’s companion, lilyflexmore.co.uk, whose married stage name sent this research backward to Richard Flexmore Geatter and forward again through everyone else who ever carried it — the Wielands, the five unrelated successors, and, in this chapter, Thomas “Flexible” Flexmore Knight’s own family. It was in the course of following that same Knight family — not Ellen’s own life, but the people her borrowed name had led this research to — that Eva Matilda Knight turned out to be already, unknowingly, part of this researcher’s own family tree, through her marriage to Matthew Mooney. Ellen’s stage name is what set this whole research project moving. It was pure coincidence, discovered only after the fact, that one of the families it eventually led to was already this researcher’s own.