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 had earned it too.

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 that strangers start borrowing 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 the scene-painter Charles Keene, “Dykwynkyn,” and completed in 1862.

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 neither performer had any documented blood right to. 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 comedian who made it his own legal 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.