The People

Richard was not the first Flexmore. His father, born Richard Gatter around 1781 — the family’s own surname, with no theatrical “e” and no “Flexmore” attached at birth — had been performing professionally as “Mr Flexmore” since at least April 1811, when a Theatre Royal, York playbill cast him as “Toby Lump” in Rival Rustics, dancing alongside the Giroux family. He appeared at the Sans Pareil Theatre in December 1813, and married Ann Fancourt Pether — herself born at 83 Hercules Buildings, Lambeth, in 1786, decades before her son and grandson would ever live on the same street — at St Anne’s, Liverpool, on March 23rd, 1813, giving his own occupation on the certificate as “Stage Player.” He danced again at the Theatre Royal, Manchester, in November 1827, on a benefit night for Mr Bradbury the clown, and died in March 1837 in Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire — twenty-three years before the son who would make the name famous, and, per Richard’s own 1849 marriage certificate, already named there as “dec’d” and a “Dancing Master” by trade.

Richard had two known siblings: Isabella Flexmore Gatter (b. abt 1816, baptised Liverpool April 2nd, 1817 — explaining why the family was in Liverpool for that baptism, ahead of their move to Lambeth) and Mary Ann Flexmore (b. abt 1822, d. February 12th, 1830, buried at St Mary, Lambeth, aged about eight; her original burial register entry, No. 600, survives). A later ambiguity in the family’s own records — a “Mary Ann Flexmore Gatter,” born about 1849 in Lambeth, who married Edward George Andrews on December 27th, 1868 — is now resolved: she was Isabella’s daughter, Richard’s niece, not his own child. Richard and Francisca are not known to have had a surviving child of their own.

Richard began his own career at the Victoria Theatre around eight years old, in 1832, trained — per the only named early teacher on record for him — “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.

A lithograph found among the researcher's own family archive gives that Princess’s Theatre period its first specific date, ballet, and named partner: “Mad’lle Auriol & Mr Flexmore, in the favourite Pas de la Truandaise, in the Ballet of Esmeralda, played at the Princess’s Theatre, produced by Mr Flexmore, April 24th, 1848.” This is the earliest documented performance found so far between Richard and his future wife — over fifteen months before their wedding, and while Francisca was still, per her own marriage certificate the following year, a minor. La Esmeralda was Jules Perrot’s own 1844 ballet, so Richard was here working directly with the Perrot repertoire in the same decade Perrot himself was active — and the credit “produced by Mr Flexmore” suggests he had a hand in staging the piece, not merely performing in it.

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 and circus performer Jean-Baptiste Auriol. The original certificate (St Mary, Lambeth, No. 240) survives, and it adds real detail beyond what any family tree alone would give: Richard’s own occupation is recorded as “Dancing Master,” not merely “Comedian” or “Pantomimist” as later census returns would have it; his residence is given as 66 Hercules Buildings; and Francisca, a minor at the time, is recorded residing at 93 Hercules Buildings, with her own father named directly — “Jean Baptiste Auriol, Equestrian.” The officiant was Andrew Magee, Curate, and the witnesses included Francisca’s own pre-marriage signature, “F. C. Auriol.”

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, their “Last Appearances” before moving on — billed, tellingly, as “Madlle. Auriol & Mr. Flexmore.” She kept her own stage name. She had earned it too, and it was normal practice for a performer of her own reputation to do so.

Richard’s connection to his father-in-law’s continental circus business went beyond family occasion. A bail-court report from May 5th, 1860 — “A Clown’s Salary” — records Jean Baptiste Auriol suing a rival equestrian clown, performing as “Macaire” (real name Clarke), for breach of a touring engagement contract. Auriol’s circus, playing Bradford and short a first-rate clown, had “telegraphed to Mr Flexmore, the celebrated London clown, and son-in-law to Mr Auriol, to send word who can come.” Richard put Auriol in touch with Clarke, who initially agreed terms — twelve pounds a week, plus benefit and travelling expenses — before reneging for a better offer at Manchester. The jury found for Auriol; one hundred and seventy-nine pounds awarded, with immediate execution granted. It shows Richard, only months before his own death, acting as a working fixer inside his father-in-law’s business, not merely a son-in-law by name.

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, aged 25, occupation “Comedian/Pantomimist.” 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 — the same Lambeth street, later renamed Hercules Road, where, decades afterward, the impresario Henry “Harry” Wieland is documented living and working (see Chapter Two). Close enough, geographically, to matter to that question. Not yet close enough, chronologically, to prove it: no Wieland residence record earlier than the 1891 census has yet turned up.

Two performers who trained under Richard as children recalled him by name, decades later, entirely independently of one another. Fred Vokes, interviewed in 1886, put it simply:

His sister Jessie Vokes, in her own 1884 obituary, was independently remembered as having been “taught the art of dancing by the late Mr Flexmore” — and, per Fred’s own account, performed “Florence in The Dumb Savoyard, with Mr Flexmore” specifically. Set alongside his own named teacher (“a Mr Frampton”) and his likely pupil Charles Lauri — the subject of the 1867 “Wieland and Flexmore school” review explored in Chapter Two — these two names make Richard, by the end of his short life, a teacher in his own right as much as a performer.

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.”

It is a small, funny, slightly sad episode, and 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, fellow clown Harry Payne — playing a bear in the same production — had to step into the Clown role mid-performance because Flexmore had collapsed. Two further claims from this final period remain genuinely unverified, and are recorded here rather than quietly dropped or asserted as fact: a note appended to one source states Richard “performed a fifty-night marathon at the original Teatro Circo, Madrid,” founded by the Irish horse-tamer and impresario Thomas Price; and a 1929 newspaper account of a lion escaping a travelling menagerie in Charmouth, Dorset, names an assistant manager whose surname reads ambiguously as either “Plexmore” or “Flexmore” — sixty-nine years after Richard’s death, far too late and too thin a lead to connect to him with any confidence. Neither claim has a primary source of its own yet.

Richard died at 66 Hercules Buildings on August 20th, 1860, of consumption, not yet thirty-six years old.

On August 30th, 1860, Francisca wrote to The Era in her own voice, correcting a report that a benefit had been arranged for her without her knowledge:

The letter confirms three things at once: that she signed publicly as “Franciska Flexmore,” not “Auriol”; that she had already, independently, arranged financial support for Ann Fancourt Pether without needing public charity; and that the Kensal Green memorial was already being organised by “several gentlemen” of Richard’s own profession within ten days of his death, with her blessing but not, on this evidence, her own initiative. The “Mr Boleno” she names is not a stray reference — the same name appears fourteen years later on a tribute plate alongside Richard’s own portrait (see below), confirming him as a real, contemporary, professionally-connected clown.

Richard was buried a week after his death, on August 27th, 1860, 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.

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. Sometime in the 1850s he moved into the theatre full-time, designing for seventeen consecutive pantomimes at Drury Lane between 1852 and 1879 — 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’s own monument: the single point at which Keene’s long career and this family’s story 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.

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. Chapter One of the five-chapter narrative tells his fuller story still, including the researcher’s own reading of how “Dykwynkyn” likely sounded in the mouth of a man who had been totally deaf since childhood, and why that reading — offered as belief, not a documented finding — matters to how his chosen name should be heard.

A later description of the grave, filed among family papers as “Flexmore Monument 1883,” gives a vivid account of the stonework:

The same piece gives Richard’s age at death as twenty-eight — sharply at odds with his documented age of thirty-five, and almost certainly an error in that specific article rather than a correction to the established record, but recorded here rather than silently dropped. It also describes Jean-Baptiste Auriol as having set aside his own “contempt for England and the English” to consent to his only daughter’s marriage — a vivid characterisation, whatever its precise accuracy.

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.

In December 1866, a “Mrs. Flexmore Xmas Pudding Fund” collected small weekly and one-off donations — from theatre proprietors, fellow performers, and a theatre company collection — “to buy Mrs Flexmore her Christmas pudding,” describing “the old lady (nearly 90 years of age)” as “not forgotten at this festive season.” This almost certainly means Ann Fancourt Pether rather than Francisca, though “nearly 90” sits oddly against her own established 1786 birth year, which would make her about eighty in 1866 — possibly connected to a separate, already-unresolved discrepancy over her exact age at death.

The researcher's own 2024 photographs of the memorial show a severely weathered, broken-topped stone column; only “RICHARD FLEXMORE…” remains faintly legible on the shaft, with nothing further of the inscription recoverable by inspection alone. It stands, unrestored, as a possible future documentation project — in the same spirit as the Nellie Honeyball grave on the Rise of the Lionesses site.

In December 1874 — fourteen years after his death — an illustrated feature titled “Farewell! Some Famous Clowns” placed Richard’s own portrait, in a purple costume, among ten named clowns considered essential to the art, alongside Joseph Grimaldi himself. A higher-resolution copy of the same plate, found later in the researcher's own Ancestry gallery, corrected an earlier misreading of two neighbouring names: the portrait beside Richard’s is Charles Lauri — almost certainly the same Charles Lauri of the 1867 “Wieland and Flexmore school” review, making this a second, independent sighting of the two men associated with each other — and a third portrait, first misread as “Petino,” is in fact Boleno: the same Mr Boleno named in Francisca’s own letter above.

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. 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 many times over. The rest of that story is what the site’s five chapters tell.

The clearest evidence yet found for how thoroughly “Flexmore” outgrew Richard’s own bloodline comes from a family with no documented blood connection to the Geatters at all. Frederick W Flaxman was born in 1846, the son of John Flaxman and Sarah Browne; his own brother, Walter Wallis Flaxman (1849–1863), kept the family’s original spelling. Frederick did not. By 1869, when his eldest son was registered, the family’s name had become Flexmore outright — not a stage alias assumed for a night’s billing, but the surname entered on a birth certificate, and the one his own children carried for the rest of their lives: Frederick C (b. 1869), George A (1870–1957), Florence E (1872–1959), Handel J (1874–1961), Maud Alice (1875–1961), Albert (1879–1880, died in infancy), Evelyn (b. 1879), and Ethel M C (1883–1981).

The family went on to earn the name on stage in its own right. Michael Kilgarriff’s music-hall reference work Sing Us One of the Old Songs records Florence, George, and Handel (billed as “Hank” or “Hanky”) performing together as the Flexmore Trio, or Flexmore Three, their sister Maud appearing solo in “Angels of the Night,” and their father Fred himself performing a solo turn, “Britannia’s Brave Defenders.” The same entry separately notes “another Fred Flexmore,” who died on August 29th, 1928, aged 65, described there as a nephew of Richard Flexmore (1824–60) — raising the tantalising possibility of an actual family link between the two Flexmore lines, though it is not yet clear from this source alone whether that nephew is this same Frederick or a distinct relative, and no further record of the connection has yet been found.

The researcher’s own working theory, offered here as conjecture rather than a settled finding: Frederick, born a Flaxman fourteen years before Richard’s death in 1860, appears to have taken up the name only afterward — sometime in the nine years between Richard’s death and his own eldest son’s 1869 birth. If that reading holds, it fits the pattern the rest of this chapter already tells: the name was taken up after Richard was gone, not while he was still alive to object to it, leaving his own claim to having originated “Flexmore” undisturbed. No direct record of the name change itself — a deed, a notice, an explanation in the family’s own words — has yet turned up.

One further detail from this family is worth setting down, for its own sake rather than for what it proves. Frederick’s son George A Flexmore (1870–1957) married a woman named Mary Ann White, and in June 1897 the couple had a daughter, Lilian Elsie Mary Flexmore, born at 12 Vivian Road, Bethnal Green, to George, a bicycle maker, and his wife. She died five weeks later, on August 9th, 1897, of “want of breast milk” and diarrhoea convulsions, her mother present at the death; her father appears to have registered her birth that same day. A Flexmore married to a White, raising a family in the 1890s, happens by pure coincidence to echo the pairing at the centre of this site’s own companion story — Lily Flexmore and George Ambrose White. There is no connection whatsoever between the two couples. But a life measured in five weeks deserves a line of its own, coincidence or not.

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.” Just over a year later, on August 24th, 1861, she married her own first cousin, Achille Auriol, of Lavaur, Tarn (son of Dominique Auriol and Catherine Raynaud) — not, as one reading of the family tree might suggest, a son of Jean-Baptiste Auriol himself. On September 1st, 1862, she gave birth to a daughter, who died the same day. Francisca herself died within days of the birth — her own death recorded three different ways across three separate sources (September 3rd, September 7th, and October 3rd, 1862), 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.

The family’s grandparents, William Vokes (1784–1828) and Ann Squires (1790–1878), gave way to a second generation — recorded on the family’s own genealogical record as Frederick S. Vokes (1816–1890) and Sarah Jane Godden (1816–1897), and given more fully in secondary sourcing as Frederick Strafford Thwaites Vokes, a theatrical costumier and wigmaker, and Sarah Jane Biddulph, née Godden (1818–1897) — whose children became the touring act billed as the “Vokes Children” and, later, simply the Vokes Family: Frederick Mortimer “Fred” Vokes (1846–1888), Jessie Catherine Biddulph Vokes (1848–1884), Victoria Rosaline Sarah Vokes (1850–1894), and Theodosia Rosina Vokes (1854–1894), always billed and remembered simply as “Rosina.” A fifth member of the troupe, Walter Fawdon (1844–1904), joined as a boy, took the stage name Fawdon Vokes, and was billed throughout his career as the family’s “foster brother” — he was not a blood relative at all, and now has his own full entry, further down this page.

Jessie’s own obituary states that she appeared, at only four years old, “with her brother and sisters as one of the ‘Vokes Children’” at the Operetta House, Edinburgh, in 1861 — a plural, collective description consistent with Victoria’s and Rosina’s presence in the act from early childhood, though it does not name either sister individually.

Fred Vokes gave a first-person interview to The Era, published April 3rd, 1886, in which he named Richard Flexmore, unprompted, as his own teacher — a statement that lines up exactly with Richard’s 1860 death, since Fred would have been a young teenager at the time:

The dry final line — disclaiming any causal link between his lessons and his teacher’s death — is Fred’s own joke, not this research’s editorialising, and it is quoted here in full for exactly that reason.

Fred — christened Frederick Mortimer Vokes, born January 22nd, 1846, in Clerkenwell, London, and billed throughout his career as the “Legmania” dancer for his eccentric, contortionist style of leg-work — was the eldest of the siblings and, by most contemporary accounts, the act’s leading light. He danced the family through their decade-long run of Theatre Royal, Drury Lane pantomimes (1868–1879) and across multiple American tours, and one 1868 review in The Daily Telegraph judged that he “dances as few men in this world probably could dance or would wish to dance.” He married the actress Martha Isabella “Bella” Moore (1854–1913), daughter of the minstrel performer George Washington Moore, on March 25th, 1873, at St James’s Church, Piccadilly; of their children, only one, Lillian Victoria (1874–1952), survived to adulthood. The marriage ended badly: Bella filed for divorce in January 1888 on grounds of adultery, and the case remained unresolved when Fred died, on June 3rd, 1888, at 16 Blenheim Road, Marylebone — the same house, as it turns out, where his sister Victoria would die six years later. His GRO death certificate, obtained since the previous version of this page, gives the cause as cirrhosis of the liver, with haematemesis (three hours) and asthenia, certified by Dr H. Neale of Marylebone; his occupation is recorded as ‘Comedian.’ The informant was a brother-in-law present at the death, his surname not clearly legible in the digitised register image. This corrects an earlier version of this page, which, following secondary sourcing, described his death only vaguely as being caused by paralysis.

Jessie Vokes’s own obituary, published in The Stage on Friday, August 8th, 1884, independently confirms her brother’s account without ever mentioning it — the two statements were made two years apart, in different papers, by different people, and agree regardless. It records that she “had the advantage of receiving instruction from that experienced actor, Mr William Creswick, and she was taught the art of dancing by the late Mr Flexmore,” and names a specific shared role: “Florence, in The Dumb Savoyard, with Mr Flexmore.” Her other credited early parts read like a roll call of the mid-Victorian stage’s leading men: Teddy in Dred, with Mr Creswick in the principal part; Mamilius in A Winter’s Tale, with Samuel Phelps; Tyro in The Pirates of Savannah, with Charles Mathews; Prince Arthur in King John, with Messrs Phelps and Creswick; and the Prince of Wales in Richard III, with Barry Sullivan. In her final season, in Red Riding Hood at Her Majesty’s, she played Miss Minerva Birch, the schoolmistress.

Jessie — christened Jessie Catherine Biddulph Vokes, born June 14th, 1848, in Clerkenwell, London — was brought up to the stage from early childhood, appearing at the Surrey Theatre by the age of four and listed, aged thirteen, as an “Actress” on the 1861 census. Her first notable hit came as one of Triplet’s children in Masks and Faces, dancing a jig with Benjamin Webster and the late Mrs R. Honner. She never married, and left an estate of £3,034 15s. The obituary’s “Chit-Chat” column records her death plainly: “It is with sincere regret that I have to record the death of Miss Jessie Vokes, who has been suffering from congestion of the liver, died on Tuesday last.” Her GRO death certificate, obtained since the previous version of this page, settles the date the obituary itself left ambiguous: Jessie died on Monday, August 4th, 1884, at 16 Loudoun Road, of hepatic congestion (twelve months) and cholaemia (twenty-four hours), certified by C. S. Watkins, M.R.C.S. — a precise medical match for the obituary’s own “congestion of the liver.” Her occupation at death is given as ‘Annuitant,’ suggesting she had already left the stage and was living on an income of her own by 1884.

Victoria — christened Victoria Rosalina Sarah Vokes, born August 25th, 1850, in Clapham — made her first stage appearance, by one account, at only two years old, and was already billed as an “Actress” on the 1861 census at age eleven. Unlike her sister Rosina below, Victoria never married. She danced through the same decade of Drury Lane pantomimes as her siblings (1868–1879) and the same run of American tours, but also built an individual reputation beyond the family act: in 1871 she replaced Adelaide Neilson as Amy Robsart in Kenilworth at Drury Lane, and in 1873, playing the boy in The Children in the Wood, drew a compliment from Lewis Carroll himself, who wrote that he had “never seen anything more graceful than Miss Victoria Vokes as the boy.” Later, after the family act had run its course, she continued performing on her own account at the Shaftesbury Theatre — in My Lady Help (1890) and, opposite Fawdon Vokes, as Mrs O’Braggerty in Hubby (1891). She died on December 2nd, 1894, at 16 Blenheim Road, Marylebone — her GRO death certificate giving the cause as meningitis (ten days) and asthenia, certified by Dr W. H. Neale, and her occupation as ‘Actress’ — and is buried, like the rest of the family, at Brompton Cemetery. It was, as it turns out, the same house where Fred had died six years before her, not (as an earlier version of this page had it) a separate address shared with Jessie.

Rosina — christened Theodosia Rosina Vokes, born October 18th, 1854, in Clapham, and always billed simply as “Rosina” — was, by the estimate of at least one contemporary newspaper account, “infinitely the cleverest, the most bewitching” of the four siblings. She danced through the same Drury Lane pantomime run as Fred, Jessie, and Victoria (playing, among other roles, Fatima in Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, 1876, and Princess in Aladdin, 1874), and on March 10th, 1877, married Cecil Jalland Page Clay (1848–1920); their two children, Herbert James Clay (1878–1959) and Edith Florence Elfrida Clay (1880–1966), were born in the years immediately following. Marriage did not end her stage career: by March 1891 she was leading her own “Rosina Vokes Company” on an American tour, reported that month to have fallen seriously ill in Chicago, its dates cancelled for a fortnight; she went on to a nine-year run of American engagements in all, from 1885 to 1893, giving her final performance at the National Theatre, Washington, D.C., in December 1893. She died a little over a month later, on Saturday, January 27th, 1894, at Ivy Cottage, Babbacombe — ten months before her sister Victoria. Her GRO death certificate, since located, gives her occupation as ‘Wife of Cecil Clay, of Independent Means,’ and the cause of death as debility (three months) and syncope, certified by Dr Thos Finch, M.B. — a more clinical account than, and not quite the same as, the “dropsy” given in the contemporary press notices below; both are recorded here rather than one being quietly dropped. Her body was brought back to London for burial four days later, on Wednesday, January 31st, 1894, at Brompton Cemetery, grave 4E/113.9/20.9 — a family grave rather than a solitary one, dug, per the burial register, to a depth of nine feet, which Liam Mooney reads as a sign the plot was intended from the outset for further use. It went on to hold her own mother, buried there as ‘Sarah Jane Biddulph Vokes’ in February 1897, and, in March 1904, Cecil Clay’s own elder sister, Emily Clay (1832–1904) — one of James Clay (1804–1873) and Eliza Charlotte Woolrych’s (1806–1855) several children, and so Rosina’s own sister-in-law, not the unrelated mystery burial for which the previous revision of this page took her. Both the death certificate and the burial register give Rosina’s age as 36 — three years short of the 39 implied by her October 1854 birth date, the same three-year gap already found on Jessie’s own certificate above, and now looking less like an isolated error than a pattern in how this family recorded its own ages. Contemporary press notices, syndicated that week across several regional papers, confirm her married identity in so many words: “Rosina Vokes (Mrs Clay), the actress” — independent corroboration, printed the week of her own death, of the marriage this revision of the page has restored to her rather than to Victoria.

The Vokes Children made their London debut at the Lyceum Theatre on December 26th, 1868, in the pantomime of Humpty Dumpty, and went on to anchor the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane pantomime for eleven consecutive seasons, 1868 to 1879 — among them Beauty and the Beast (1869), Tom Thumb (1871), Aladdin (1874), Dick Whittington (1875), Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (1876), Cinderella (1878), and, their last, Bluebeard (1879). The family made its Paris debut at the Théâtre du Châtelet in August 1870, cut short by the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, and its American debut at the Union Square Theatre, New York, on April 15th, 1872, in The Belles of the Kitchen. From there, per Jessie’s own obituary, “the Vokes have crossed the Atlantic ten times, and the Rocky Mountains twice” — playing a month’s engagement in Salt Lake City, journeying through the Yosemite Valley, and appearing, in the obituary’s own words, “in every important city in Great Britain, Ireland, the United States, and Canada.” That westward touring put the family on the American frontier during the very years the frontier itself was making history: their first American season opened in April 1872, and by June 25th–26th, 1876, when Custer’s Seventh Cavalry was annihilated at the Little Bighorn in Montana Territory, the Vokes Children had already been criss-crossing that same continent for four years. No document places them anywhere near Montana that particular week, and this is noted here only as a coincidence of timing, not a claimed connection — but it is a reminder of just how far, and into how unsettled a country, this touring theatrical family carried Richard Flexmore’s dancing lessons. By the close of the 1870s, per later theatrical-history accounts, the public was wearying of the Vokes Family act, and its manager Augustus Harris was said to have found the family too demanding a fixture — and the family, in turn, to have found him tyrannical; Rosina’s 1877 marriage had already begun to draw the act apart before the decade was out. It is against that whole scale of touring fame, and its eventual decline, that the family’s shared memory of a single mid-century London dancing clown stands out: two Vokes children, on two separate continents’ worth of stages between them, still naming the same teacher a quarter of a century after his death.

One member of the troupe belongs to this family’s story but not to its bloodline, and this revision of the page now gives him the same full, stand-alone treatment as everyone else in it, rather than a closing paragraph inside someone else’s chapter. Fawdon Vokes’s own full biography follows immediately below.

Walter Fawdon was born in Soho, London, in 1844, and joined the Vokes household and act as a boy. The 1871 census, taken at the height of the family’s Drury Lane years, records him living among them and states his relationship to the household plainly: “no relation.” He changed his own name to Walter Vokes and was billed for the whole of his working life under the stage name Fawdon Vokes — a name that was, by every public account, treated as simply his, not a borrowed one.

Fawdon danced every one of the same eleven consecutive Theatre Royal, Drury Lane pantomime seasons, 1868 to 1879, as Fred, Jessie, Victoria, and Rosina, and crossed the Atlantic with them on the same American tours. A Times review of Tom Thumb, 1871, praised him individually as a court fool “who had apparently danced himself out of his mind in his infancy” — a notice on his own account, not simply as one name among the family’s billing. After the family act itself had run its course, he continued performing alongside its members individually: in 1891, at the Shaftesbury Theatre, he was still on stage opposite Victoria Vokes, as her partner, in Hubby.

Fawdon married Ann Vokes and had two children recorded under the Fawdon Vokes surname. He outlived every one of the four blood siblings he had performed alongside — Jessie (1884), Fred (1888), Rosina (1894), and Victoria (1894) — dying in 1904, twenty years after the first of them and a full generation after Richard Flexmore Geatter, the man Fred and Jessie both credited with teaching them to dance. No document has been found connecting Fawdon to Richard directly, and none is claimed here.

Fawdon Vokes is not named on this site for any connection to Richard Flexmore — none has been found — but for the same reason the whole site exists. Chapter One and the biography of Richard Flexmore Geatter above are built on a single premise: that “Flexmore” was a name earned through craft and community, not passed down by blood. Fawdon Vokes lived that same premise out, on the same stages, at the same time, under a different family’s name — a “foster brother” for over forty years who was never, on paper, family at all. The whole troupe together, Fawdon among them, is pictured in the colourised cabinet card in the Vokes Family documents above; no separate primary-source image of Fawdon alone has yet been located.

Francisca was born on May 22nd, 1829, in Aschaffenburg, Unterfranken, Bavaria — a detail confirmed by two independent sources on her own Ancestry record, and worth stating plainly because an auto-generated “life story” summary on the same record gets it wrong twice over, claiming a birth in “Paris, France in 1831.” That summary sits directly above the correctly dated and placed birth fact on the same page — a useful reminder, confirmed here as elsewhere on this site, that AI-generated narrative text is not itself a source, and has to be checked against the record beneath it every time.

Her father was Jean-Baptiste Auriol, one of the most celebrated circus clowns and equestrians of the nineteenth century — see his own entry on this page below. Her younger brother, Jean Baptiste Guillaume Auriol, born May 3rd, 1834, in Brandenburg, Berlin, followed their father into the ring as an equestrian performer, an “Écuyer”; he married Marie Honorine Kenebel in 1855 and died young, on February 3rd, 1857, in Passy, aged only twenty-two.

Francisca’s mother is where the record still disagrees with itself. The family tree behind this research names her as Amélie Jeanne Georgine Christine Belling, born June 3rd, 1809, in Rostock, Mecklenburg — and lists her directly as the mother of both Francisca (1829) and Jean Baptiste Guillaume (1834). But the same source records Amélie’s own marriage to Jean-Baptiste Auriol as taking place on January 7th, 1858, at St John the Evangelist, Lambeth — nearly three decades after Francisca’s birth, and a year after her brother’s death. Both things cannot straightforwardly be true at once as a single, tidy timeline: either Jean-Baptiste and Amélie were partners for decades, touring the Continent together, before formalising an English marriage late in life, which would not have been unusual for performers whose working lives crossed borders and jurisdictions constantly — or two different women have been conflated under one name somewhere in the record. This page treats it as an open question, not a finding, and it refines rather than replaces this research’s earlier, more cautious note, which had described the 1858 marriage as Jean-Baptiste’s second, to a wife other than Francisca’s mother. A third spelling has since joined the other two: Francisca’s own death certificate, transcribed in August 2026, names her mother as “Anne Belling” — closer to the marriage certificate’s “Anna Belling” than to the family tree’s fuller “Amélie Jeanne Georgine Christine,” and treated here as a further, suggestive data point rather than a resolution.

Francisca was performing in London well before she married Richard, and well before most family trees had previously credited her with an independent career. On May 6th, 1847, “Mademoiselle Auriol” appeared at the Royal Italian Opera, Covent Garden, in Rossini’s Semiramide — a record long known to exist in the researcher's own family archive but, until now, never successfully read at full resolution. It gives her stated age as sixteen; her own birth date of May 22nd, 1829, would in fact make her seventeen at that performance, a fortnight or so short of her eighteenth birthday. A year’s discrepancy in a performer’s stated stage age is a small, ordinary kind of imprecision — ages were rounded, adjusted, and sometimes simply guessed at by the printer — but it is recorded here rather than silently smoothed over.

Less than a year later, on March 20th, 1848, an “Alien Arrivals” record places her arriving at Dover, England — about five weeks before her earliest documented performance alongside Richard, the Pas de la Truandaise from the ballet of Esmeralda, at the Princess’s Theatre on April 24th, 1848 (told in full on Richard’s own page above). Read together, these two records suggest Francisca crossed to England specifically for that engagement, or one very like it — not as a settled resident who happened to be a performer, but as a touring professional following the work, more than a year before she and Richard were married.

Banns were published at St Mary’s, Lambeth, on three successive Sundays — the 8th, 15th, and 22nd of July, 1849 — naming “Richard Flexmore Geatter, Bachelor” and “Francisca Christophora Auriol, Spinster” as entry No. 336, directly beneath an unrelated entry for a James Boddy and Elizabeth Howes. The wedding itself followed on July 28th, 1849, at the same church — the original certificate, No. 240, giving Richard’s occupation as “Dancing Master,” his residence as 66 Hercules Buildings, and Francisca’s as 93 Hercules Buildings, with her father named directly: “Jean Baptiste Auriol, Equestrian.” Francisca, still a minor, signed her own name on the register as “F. C. Auriol.”

She did not become simply “Mrs Flexmore” on her wedding day. Seven weeks later, on September 14th, 1849, the couple appeared together at the Queen’s Theatre, Hull, billed as “Madlle. Auriol & Mr. Flexmore” — her own established stage name kept fully intact, ahead of his. A further review, on October 24th, 1849, at the Princess’s Theatre, London, records the newlyweds performing together again, weeks after the Hull engagement.

By the night of the 1851 census, Francisca was recorded in her own household, at 66 Hercules Buildings, Lambeth, under her own professional title: “Professor of Dancing.” Not “wife,” not “actress” — a specific, credentialed occupation, entered into the official record of England in her own right. Her own later obituary would remember her as “a graceful danseuse at the Princess’s and at Drury-lane Theatres,” and as having performed with Richard “in the chief cities of Europe” after their marriage — a touring itinerary this research has not yet been able to fully reconstruct.

Two later, more distant sightings help sketch that itinerary. An American paper, The Charleston Daily Courier, carried a notice on August 5th, 1853, reporting on a Paris performance — evidence that her and Richard’s reputation had, by then, crossed the Atlantic in press coverage, even if only as a picked-up foreign item. And on June 4th, 1857, the Belfast News-Letter records “Flexmore & Auriol” appearing at the Theatre Royal, Belfast — a precise date and venue for what family memory had previously placed only vaguely as “Belfast or Dublin, sometime in 1857.”

Her father’s business reached directly into the marriage, too. A bail-court report from May 5th, 1860 — “A Clown’s Salary,” told in full on Richard’s page above — shows Jean-Baptiste Auriol suing a rival clown for breach of contract, with Richard acting as the intermediary who found the replacement performer, described in the report itself as “son-in-law to Mr Auriol.” Only months before Richard’s own death, the Flexmore and Auriol working lives were still directly, practically entangled.

Richard died at 66 Hercules Buildings on August 20th, 1860. Francisca did not disappear from view. Twelve days later, on September 1st, 1860, the Volunteer Service Gazette’s “Theatrical Gossip” column reported: “Madame Auriol (the widow of Mr Richard Flexmore) returns to Paris, where she has been offered an engagement, and in this capital she was an immense favourite.” Ten days after Richard’s death, on August 30th, 1860, she had already written — in her own voice, over her own signature — to The Era, declining an unauthorised benefit proposed on her behalf, confirming she had independently arranged an allowance for Richard’s mother, and welcoming contributions toward the Kensal Green memorial. That letter is quoted in full on Richard’s own page above; it stands as the clearest surviving record of Francisca’s own words.

Just over a year after Richard’s death, on August 24th, 1861, Francisca married again, in the 16th arrondissement of Paris — to Achille Auriol, born 1833 in Lavaur, Tarn, her own first cousin, recorded on her death certificate as a Tapissier (upholsterer) sharing her address. On September 1st, 1862, she gave birth to a daughter, who died at birth. Francisca herself died six days later — and her own civil death certificate, found and transcribed in August 2026 after standing as an open question in this research for years, now fixes the moment precisely: one o’clock in the afternoon on September 7th, 1862 (“une heure du soir,” the period’s standard way of marking an afternoon hour), at her residence, 44 Rue du Bel Air, in Paris’s 16th arrondissement — two doors from the witness Charles Clauserwitz, a 28-year-old rentier recorded at No. 46 on the same street. The certificate names her, in an apparent variant of her baptismal name, as “Christophe Francisca Auriol,” gives her age as thirty-two against a documented birth that would make her thirty-three, and records her occupation simply as “sans profession.” Two neighbours — Clauserwitz, and Auguste Richardot, a 52-year-old carriage painter of the same street — appeared as witnesses to declare the death before Pierre Klein, Adjoint au Maire of the 16th arrondissement, at two o’clock the following morning: a gap of roughly thirteen hours that reflects ordinary period practice, not delay or irregularity, comfortably within the twenty-four-hour window for declaring a death required under the Napoleonic Civil Code. This finally supersedes the three competing dates (September 3rd, September 7th, and October 3rd) this research had tracked across secondary sources over time; September 7th, now confirmed by Francisca’s own primary record down to the hour, stands as settled.

Achille Auriol’s own parentage record, confirmed by the researcher directly, names his mother as Catherine Raynaud, of Lavaur, Tarn — settling, in passing, a question this research had puzzled over: one layout of the underlying Ancestry family tree positions Achille’s profile ambiguously enough to invite a misreading as Jean-Baptiste Auriol’s own son, rather than as Francisca’s first cousin and Jean-Baptiste’s nephew by marriage. His own birth and parentage records confirm the latter. Widowed a second time by Francisca’s death, Achille went on to marry again — to Constance Félicité Maubert, in Paris, in 1873 — and lived until 1906, in Tarn.

Her obituary, “The Late Madame Auriol,” was published in The Era on September 26th, 1862 — about three weeks after her death, following an earlier, shorter announcement the paper had already run the week before:

The obituary gives her father Jean-Baptiste Auriol’s age at the time as “in his sixty-fifth year” — implying a birth around 1797–98 — against a structured family-tree record elsewhere giving his dates as 1806–1881, a discrepancy of roughly nine years that has not yet been resolved, and that echoes a separate, similarly unresolved question about Jean-Baptiste’s own birth year raised elsewhere in this research. It is recorded here rather than quietly picking one figure over the other.

Jean-Baptiste Auriol was born on August 13th, 1806, in Toulouse, Haute-Garonne — his own civil birth record, viewed directly, survives, naming his parents as Louis Auriol and Marie Cécile Gouzy, with the family’s residence given as Toulouse. This single record does real work: it resolves a discrepancy this research has carried for some time, between a primary-sourced obituary calculation suggesting a birth around 1797–98 and a secondary career summary giving 1806. The birth record settles it in favour of 1806.

A residence record from 1821, when Jean-Baptiste was fifteen, places him still in Toulouse, his marital status given as “Célibataire” — single — with an occupation that has not transcribed cleanly enough to state with confidence. The following year, his mother Marie Cécile died in Toulouse, on June 11th, 1822, aged thirty-nine. Two years after that, on June 18th, 1824, his father Louis died in Agen — the same marriage record that would later name Louis as an “Artist” by occupation, a detail that survived to appear on his son’s own marriage certificate more than three decades later. By seventeen, Jean-Baptiste Auriol had lost both parents.

Between 1829 and 1835, four children were born to Jean-Baptiste Auriol across Germany: Francisca Christophora (May 22nd, 1829, Aschaffenburg, Bavaria — see her own full biography above), Clotilde Antoinette Auriol (1833, place not yet recorded), Jean Baptiste Guillaume Auriol (May 3rd, 1834, Brandenburg, Berlin), and Jean Paul Auriol (1835, place not yet recorded). Clotilde and Jean Paul are new to this research as of this page — neither previously appears anywhere else in this site or the underlying family archive, and nothing further is yet known about either of them.

No marriage record has been found for Jean-Baptiste Auriol from this period, and his own eventual English marriage certificate, thirteen years later, describes him as a “Bachelor” — legally unmarried before that day. Four children born across a six-year span to a man who had, on his own later marriage record, never before been married is not on its own unusual for a touring Continental performer’s life in this period; unmarried, long-term partnerships were common enough in travelling circus families. But it does mean the mother of these four children remains formally unidentified in this research, a question this page returns to below.

By 1840, Jean-Baptiste Auriol was established enough as a performer to be recorded simply as “Jean Baptiste Auriol — Performer,” alongside a single surviving image: a strip of seven acrobatic figures in full colour, captioned in French across a repertoire of stunts — tightrope, stilts (“les échasses”), balance (“l’équilibre”), and others — filed under the title “Jean Baptiste Auriol, The Birdman.” That English nickname — “L’Homme Oiseau” — matches, independently, an AI-assisted career summary the researcher gathered separately, which credits Auriol with a springboard flip over twenty soldiers and a double somersault over eight horses, a signature “Bottle Dance” performed on the rims of twenty upright bottles, and major engagements at the Franconi Circus and the Cirque des Champs-Élysées in Paris, plus international appearances including Drury Lane, London.

None of these specific feats — the twenty soldiers, the eight horses, the named Paris venues — has yet been independently verified against a primary source; they are recorded here as a secondary summary, not established fact. What can now be said with more confidence is that the nickname and the bottle-dance image are genuine period material: a separate illustration, held in the family archive, shows a clown-costumed figure balancing on the rims of a row of upright bottles, closely matching the described act. Whether these images depict Jean-Baptiste Auriol specifically, rather than a generic clown-and-bottles trope common in period ephemera, remains an attribution by strong circumstantial match rather than a captioned certainty.

On January 7th, 1858, at St John the Evangelist, Lambeth, Jean-Baptiste Auriol married. The original certificate, No. 448, viewed directly, gives real detail: the groom, “Jean Baptiste Auriol,” full age, “Bachelor,” occupation “Artist,” residence Waterloo Road, father named as “Louis Auriol, Artist” (deceased); the bride, “Anna Belling,” “Spinster,” father named as “Jean Belling, Artist.” Waterloo Road sits a short walk from Hercules Buildings, where his daughter Francisca and son-in-law Richard were then living.

This is where the record becomes genuinely tangled. The certificate itself names the bride plainly as “Anna Belling.” This research’s own family tree records her under two further, longer names — “Amélie Jeanne Georgine Christine Bellinge” and, separately, “Marie Antoinette Bellinge” — and, remarkably, treats them as two different women: an auto-generated life-story summary states plainly that Jean-Baptiste “had one son with Marie Antoinette Bellinge” (that son being Jean Baptiste Guillaume, born 1834) and then, separately, “married Amélie Jeanne Georgine Christine Bellinge and they had four children together” — despite the fact that all four of the children in question (Francisca, Clotilde, Jean Baptiste Guillaume again, and Jean Paul) were born between 1829 and 1835, decades before the 1858 marriage the same summary describes.

On May 5th, 1860, The Era reported a bail-court case, told in full on Richard Flexmore Geatter’s own page above: Jean-Baptiste Auriol, his circus short a first-rate clown, engaged a replacement through Richard, his son-in-law, on terms of twelve pounds a week plus benefit and travelling expenses — only for the man to renege for a better offer. Auriol sued and won, one hundred and seventy-nine pounds awarded with immediate execution. It is the clearest surviving evidence of Jean-Baptiste Auriol’s own working business as a circus proprietor, not merely a famous name, and of Richard’s own practical role inside it.

There is a nice irony worth noting in the defendant’s own stage name. “Macaire” — the professional name the real Mr Clarke performed under — was borrowed from Robert Macaire, the archetypal swindler and confidence man of nineteenth-century French popular culture: a stock villain originated on the Paris stage by the actor Frédérick Lemaître in 1823, and satirised in hundreds of lithographs by the caricaturist Honoré Daumier, who used him to lampoon greedy business schemes and corrupt officials of every kind. By 1860, the name Macaire was, in short, a byword for exactly the sort of smooth-talking reneging Clarke was found guilty of in court. Whether Clarke chose the name knowingly, or simply borrowed a popular stock character’s name as performers of the period often did, is not established — but the coincidence is hard to resist.

Jean-Baptiste Auriol outlived three of the people closest to him. His son Jean Baptiste Guillaume Auriol, an equestrian performer in his own right, died on February 3rd, 1857, in Passy, aged only twenty-two. His daughter Francisca died on September 7th, 1862, in Paris, within days of childbirth — her own full story is told above. His wife, recorded on her own death record as “Amélie Jeanne Georgine Christine Bellinge,” died on February 21st, 1870, at her home in Paris’s 16th arrondissement, twelve years into their marriage.

Jean-Baptiste Auriol died on August 29th, 1881, in the City of Paris, aged seventy-five — a primary, sourced record that independently confirms the death year given in the AI-assisted career summary the researcher gathered separately, which further states he was buried at Passy Cemetery, the same Paris district where his son had died in 1857. That burial detail has not yet been independently verified against a primary record of its own, and is recorded here as reported rather than established.

Sophia was born on 22 December 1864, in Edinburgh Parish, Edinburgh, Midlothian, Scotland — her own Ancestry profile gives this date directly, against a slightly later 18 January 1865 carried in this research’s earlier GEDCOM-derived note; the two have not yet been reconciled to a single certainty, though they agree to within a matter of weeks. Her father, William Henry Gilleno Giles, performed as “Funny Frisk”; her mother was Janet Lockhart. By the time Sophia was born, “Gilleno” was already an established professional surname within the family — an 1871 advertisement for a Sheffield gala at Sheaf House Gardens billed “the celebrated GILLENO TROUPE, Male and Female Artistes, from the Alhambra Palace, London,” naming “HARRY and NELLY GILLENO, the celebrated Comic Duettists,” alongside a “Miss Marie Gilleno” and a “Miss Lilian Gilleno.” Sophia would have been not yet seven when that bill ran, so she cannot be one of the performers named on it — but it shows the stage name already carried by a working troupe of adults and near-adults, and it is not yet established which of her father’s generation “Harry” and “Nelly” actually were.

Sophia had at least nine siblings, considerably more than this research had previously traced: William Giles (b.1845), Charlotte Taylor Giles (1850–1928, later “Mademoiselle Carlotta Fabian”), Ellen Gilleno Giles (b.1856), Henry William Gilleno Giles (1857–1932), Juliet Gilleno Giles (b.1858), Thomas Charles Giles (1860–1905), Albert Edward Gilleno Giles (1862–1899), Alfred Gilleno Giles (b.1864), and Louisa Lorne Gilleno Giles (b. 30 July 1870, Bury, Lancashire). Three of these — Juliet, Thomas Charles, and Alfred — are new to this research as of 17 August 2026, and none of the three has yet been given a close look of their own.

On the evening of 3 September 1874, at a booth pitched on waste ground in Lodge Road, Birmingham, William Henry Giles — on door duty, taking admission money — was struck on the head by a brick thrown by a young man named Edward Bates, who had refused to pay for entry and had been asked to leave. A witness's cry survives in the coroner's report: “Oh, Mr Gilleno, there's a brick coming.” He was treated at hospital repeatedly over the following weeks; his face began to swell and his eyes closed up, and he died on 20 September 1874, at 165 Newtown Row, Birmingham — the same case already documented in full on his own page (see Related below). Sophia was nine years old.

Janet Lockhart, Sophia's mother, testified at the inquest that her husband had been in poor health for some years but had nonetheless assisted with the performance that evening — a small, human detail about a family that kept working even as its patriarch's strength was failing. The jury returned a verdict of manslaughter against Bates.

By 1881, twice over in the same year's records, Sophia is described as an “Equestrienne.” One entry has her lodging at Sutton, Surrey, in that occupation; a second has her resident at Edinburgh St Cuthberts, Midlothian — also recorded as an equestrienne, with her brother Albert Gilleno Giles also present. The two records have not yet been reconciled into a single clear year in Sophia's life, but together they place her, at sixteen or seventeen, already working the same trade her later interview would describe: performing on horseback, on the road, before she had married or had children of her own.

On 1 December 1883, Sophia married Edward Knight — son of Thomas “Flexible Flexmore” Knight — at the Church of All Saints, Chorlton-upon-Medlock, Lancashire. The certificate gives Edward's own occupation as “Actor,” and her father's as “William Gilleno, deceased, Actor” — direct primary confirmation, at the time of her own marriage, that her father had already been dead nine years. Their daughter Eva Matilda was born 6 September 1884, at Atcham, Shrewsbury; their son Albert Edward was born 1 October 1885, at Lambeth — his baptismal register giving Edward's own occupation, more specifically than the marriage certificate had, as “Clown.” From this marriage onward, Sophia performed as an equestrienne under the name “Marie Flexmore” — confirmed directly by her own signature on the 1911 Irish census, where she appears as household head, a widowed “Travelling Bazaar and Show Owner.” She was also known publicly, in the more casual form the press generally used, simply as “Mrs Flexmore” — a form her own death notice preserves, sixty-five years later, as “Mrs M. Flexmore.”

Janet Lockhart Gilleno died on 9 July 1894, at Lucas Villa, Coventry Road, Birmingham. Her death notice in The Era, 14 July 1894, does more than record a death — it names, in a single line, six of her surviving children by the names they were then known by: “the beloved mother of Mrs Charlotte Fabian, Mrs E. Lucas, Little Friskey, Brothers Gilleno, Marie Flexmore, and Miss Louisa Gilleno.” Read for years as naming a previously undocumented sister, “Marie Flexmore” here is Sophia herself — listed by her own performing name exactly as her sister Charlotte is listed as “Mrs Charlotte Fabian.” That correction only became possible once a 1911 Irish census return turned up naming Sophia's own children, Eva Matilda and Albert Edward, alongside a “Marie Flexmore” head of household (see Documents, below) — the touring equestrienne performer this research had traced across newspaper advertisements from 1895 to 1900 without ever finding her maiden name stated outright was Sophia all along, not a separate sister. The notice does still confirm Louisa as a real, named sister, independently of the later, separately-sourced “aunt Louisa” this research had already found in Canada through Eva's own story — the same woman, on the evidence assembled so far, though the link has not yet been drawn certificate to certificate.

“Little Friskey” is left unidentified by name in the notice itself, but the nickname unmistakably echoes their father's own stage name, “Funny Frisk” — and a clown billed as “Funny Frisky (Giles Gilleno)” is independently documented performing at Tudor's New Circus, Cambridge, in 1896, two years after this notice and twenty-two years after their father's own death. The likeliest candidate, on age and family position, remains Sophia's brother Henry William Gilleno Giles — not proven, but a stage name evidently kept working within the family for at least two generations.

In 1934, by then in her late sixties, Sophia gave an interview to the Thanet Advertiser & Echo, found by a reporter who noticed smoke rising from a caravan chimney on the steep incline of Trinity Place, Ramsgate, and turned back on impulse. She spoke about caravan life, about her own circus childhood, and about a trade she felt was already disappearing:

She went on to describe herself as “a bare-back rider with the late Lord George Sanger's circus,” travelling with that show through “the British Isles, Canada, South America, Africa, and France” — one of the great names of Victorian and Edwardian circus, and, on Sophia's own account, a show she toured with across four continents. She also spoke, with evident feeling, about circus families' own commitment to educating their children on the road, at a time when it would have been easy not to do so.

Sophia herself emigrated to Canada in 1920 — the same year as her daughter Eva. By 1 June 1921, the Canadian census records her at 627 Hamilton Road, London, Ontario, as “Sub-tenant Head,” a 54-year-old widow. This is the first record anywhere in this research to establish that Edward Knight had died by this date — his own death has still not been directly located, only inferred from his wife's recorded status here. Eva appears on the very same census page, at the very same address, listed as “Niece,” not “Daughter” — an unresolved oddity given her own mother's presence in the same household, addressed more fully on Eva's own page below.

Sophia returned to England at some point after 1921 — the crossing itself has not yet been found — and by 1939 was recorded in the National Register. She died on 1 March 1949, at 18 Bethesda Street, Ramsgate, Kent — her own daughter Eva's home. Her death notice, published under the name she had performed and lived by for sixty-five years, reads simply: “Flexmore. — On March 1st, 1949, at her daughter's home, 18, Bethesda-street, Ramsgate, Mrs M. Flexmore, after a short but painful illness, aged 84 years. Deeply mourned by her sorrowing daughter and grandson.” The grandson named there, unnamed in the notice itself, was almost certainly Jack Barry, Eva's own son — who would himself die at the same address not quite two years later.

Eva Matilda Knight was born 6 September 1884, at 17 Meadow Terrace, Smithfield Road, Atcham, Shrewsbury, Shropshire — the daughter of Edward Knight and Sophia Gilleno Giles (“Marie Flexmore,” above), and granddaughter, through her father, of Thomas “Flexible Flexmore” Knight. Her younger brother, Albert Edward Flexmore Knight, was born the following year, and carried “Flexmore” as his own legal middle name for life. Eva performed under the family name too: her own 1913 marriage certificate gives her occupation as “Travelling Theatre Artiste.”

On 4 November 1913, at the Church of St Mary, Edenderry, Co. Offaly, Ireland, Eva married Matthew Mooney — the researcher's own grand-uncle. The register (Vol. 3, Page 348) names the priest, Paul Murphy, and the witnesses, Peter Mooney and Marion G. Lord. It is the single thread connecting this entire circus dynasty, documented across three continents, to the researcher's own family in Ireland.

On 26 June 1920, Eva was committed to Mountjoy Prison, Dublin, charged with “Attempt Suicide.” The prison's General Register of Prisoners, viewed directly, records her release on “Own Bail in £10” — that is, bailed on her own recognizance — and separately lists Matthew Mooney as her husband and next of kin, at their shared address, 80 Seville Place. This is the earliest surviving record of the crisis that would recur, in a final and fatal form, at the very end of her life, thirty-one years later.

Five months later, on 21 November 1920, Eva sailed for Canada aboard the SS Metagama, travelling under her own maiden name, Flexmore, rather than as Mrs Mooney. She went to stay with her aunt, Louisa (Gilleno) Giles Howard, at 627 Hamilton Road, London, Ontario, and took work as a dressmaker with Howard's of Hamilton Road. By 1 June 1921, the Canadian census records her at that same address — but her relationship to the household head is given as “Niece,” and, remarkably, her own mother Sophia appears on the very same census page, at the very same address, recorded separately as a widowed “Sub-tenant Head” who had also arrived that year. Mother and daughter, in other words, both crossed the Atlantic to the same house in the same year, and the record keeps them formally apart rather than together as parent and child — a genuine puzzle this research has not resolved.

Eva's own age is given, on this census, as 34; she was in fact around 37. The same understatement recurs, by a similar margin, on her 1931 census entry — consistent enough across a decade to look like her own doing rather than an enumerator's error, though this too is unconfirmed.

On 24 June 1922, in Detroit, Michigan, Eva married a second time, to John Michael Barry (1889–1955) — a marriage the researcher's own long-standing research judges, on the balance of the evidence, to have probably been bigamous, since Matthew Mooney was still living. Eva's own death certificate, thirty years later, would still record her as “Widow of…Mooney,” not Barry — a small, telling detail that this research treats as supporting evidence rather than proof either way.

The couple settled for a time in Winthrop, Massachusetts, and had two children: a son, Jack Barry (1924–1951), and a daughter, Mary Jean (18 April – 18 September 1929), who died in infancy in Ontario, Canada, and whose family-tree entry carries the surname “Baker” rather than “Barry” — unexplained, and possibly a simple transcription slip.

On 19 December 1936, Eva returned to England aboard the Duchess of Richmond, sailing from Saint John, New Brunswick, via Halifax, with her eleven-year-old son Jack. Her stated destination was Montefiore Villa, Trinity Place, Ramsgate — her own mother Sophia's home, the very caravan where the 1934 newspaper interview above had found Sophia two years earlier. By 1939, the National Register records Eva, married, living at Wayside Valley Road, Margate, Kent.

The years that followed brought a run of deaths close around her. Her first husband, Matthew Mooney, died 13 July 1942, at Bohernabreena, Dublin. Her brother, Albert Edward Flexmore Knight, died four months later, on 12 November 1942, at Workington, Cumberland. Her mother, Sophia, died 1 March 1949, at 18 Bethesda Street, Ramsgate — the address that had by then become Eva's own home. And on 20 February 1951, Eva's son Jack Barry died at the same address, aged just 27, of bronchopneumonia and influenza.

Within a month of her son's death, on the night of 20 March 1951 (one of the two surviving newspaper reports gives 30 March instead; the discrepancy is not resolved), Eva attempted suicide by inhaling coal gas at 18 Bethesda Street. She was found by a friend, Mrs Childs, and a Mr Hoyle, and taken to Ramsgate Hospital by P.C. Humphries, who found a coat placed by the gas oven and several letters addressed to various people. She appeared before Ramsgate Magistrates on 1–2 April 1951; the case was adjourned four weeks, and she was allowed to remain at home under a probation officer's supervision, having asked not to be sent to “Hill House,” Minster. At a second appearance on 1 May 1951, she was bound over to be of good behaviour for twelve months, and again allowed home.

Eva died nine days later, on 10 May 1951, at 18 Bethesda Street, Ramsgate, of a cerebral haemorrhage. Her civil death certificate, viewed directly, records her as “Eva Matilda Barry otherwise Mooney,” widow, certified by Dr Patricia Crawford. The certificate is a medical record, not an inquest finding, and it does not itself state whether the haemorrhage was connected to the crisis of six weeks before. The researcher's own words on this, from his years of research into his own family, are preserved here rather than resolved either way: “I don't know if this was due to Eva's third attempt at suicide or a genuine bleed.”

Per an 1895 history of the variety stage (Stuart & Park, The Variety Stage), Henry William “Harry” Wieland controlled engagements at the Crystal Palace from 1868, managing the acrobatic troupe the Hanlons, the act Brothers Volta, and Zaeo. He 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. Adelaide’s own 1906 death certificate confirms he was still working as “a Music Hall Agent” that year, and the 1921 census below confirms he was still an active “Theatrical & Variety Agent” fifteen years after that — a working life of at least fifty-three years, on the documented span alone.

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. Her death places him specifically 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.

His second wife was Adelaide “Zaeo” Wieland, the celebrated aerialist whose own full story follows on this page. 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 — the single firmest document in the entire Wieland puzzle, confirming both the marriage and his exact name: Henry William, not William Henry. Since Elizabeth was still his wife in November 1890, the marriage to Adelaide must date from sometime after that; the exact marriage record has not yet been located.

A separate civil death certificate records a William Henry Wieland — the names reversed — a Vocalist, aged thirty-five, who died of Phthisis (consumption, the same disease that killed Richard Flexmore Geatter six years earlier) on September 7th, 1866, at 316 Walworth Road. The researcher's own research paper, “The Wieland–Flexmore Connection,” describes the two 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 sentence would tie a Wieland directly to Richard’s own street within his own lifetime — but it is not chronologically possible as the dates have stood. William Henry Wieland was born around 1831; the 1921 census below now gives Harry’s own birth year as roughly 1846–47, which still makes the twelve-to-fifteen-year gap workable as father and son (unlike the previously-used, unsourced 1842 estimate, which would have made William Henry only eleven at Harry’s birth). This softens, without fully resolving, a contradiction this research has carried since 14 August 2026: the gap is no longer chronologically impossible, but no birth, baptism, or marriage record has yet confirmed the two men were in fact related at all, rather than two unconnected Wielands sharing a near-mirror name.

A separate, older thread names a third possible figure: George Wieland (1810–1847), a comic actor known for playing Diavolo in The Devil’s Opera — a surviving costume plate of the role is now in this research's hands (see Documents below). Two earlier draft documents disagreed on whether George Wieland or William Henry Wieland was the right pairing for Richard Flexmore; the 1866 death certificate makes William Henry very likely real and distinct, but does not rule George out as a separate, unconnected figure from an earlier generation. Not reconciled.

If the 1867 Morning Post phrase “a gymnast of the Wieland and Flexmore school” refers to William Henry Wieland rather than Harry, it post-dates that man’s death by a year — meaning either the phrase describes a reputation that outlived him, or it means Harry after all, or the 1867 date itself needs rechecking. Not resolved.

A newly found 1891 census schedule, taken thirty years before the one below, at 46 Hercules Road, Lambeth, records a household that already reads as a family in all but name. Adelaide is returned as Head in her own right, age 25, “Artiste Gymnastic”; Harry himself is recorded as her Foster Father, Widowed, age 44, “Agent and Impresario”; and Clara Wieland appears as Adelaide’s Foster Sister, age 11, Scholar, born Hoxton — the same relationship this page’s companion pages for Adelaide and Clara have described from secondary and family sources, now confirmed on an actual census return. Two servants complete the household: Alice Farrer, 19, and Tribbiani Astori, 28, a General Servant born in Perugia, Italy. Age 44 in 1891 puts Harry’s own birth at roughly the same c.1846–47 the 1921 census below independently calculates — two primary documents, thirty years apart, agreeing with each other and sitting against the “1848” the secondary source ninjin.co.uk gives. And “Tribbiani Astori” already living in this household is a full year ahead of the 1892 Era court case over an unpaid Italian assistant described on Adelaide’s own page below — very likely the same man, though the 1891 return itself calls him only a general servant, not a performer.

A previously unreviewed 1921 census schedule, found in the researcher's Wieland Family folder, resolves several open questions at once. Taken at 16 St Martin’s Street — the same address given on Adelaide’s own 1906 death certificate, fifteen years earlier — it records:

• Henry William Wieland, Head, age 74, Widowed, born London (Somers Town), occupation “Theatrical & Variety Agent,” Employer.
• Henry William Wieland, Son, age 25, Single, born New York, USA, occupation “Agent,” employed by his father.
• Olga Alexandra Wieland, Daughter, age 24, Single, born London (Stockwell), “Home Duties.”
• A visitor, name not fully legible in this copy but reading approximately as “Eilian Richards,” 28, married, born Steventon, Berkshire, a theatrical actress employed at the Lyceum Theatre.

This is a genuinely important find. Age 74 on the 1921 census (taken 19 June 1921) puts Harry’s birth at roughly 1846–47 — the first sourced figure this research has had, replacing the unsourced “1842” working estimate this vault carried since 14 August 2026. “Widowed” confirms he had not remarried after Adelaide’s 1906 death. And the two adult children living with him — a son born in New York around 1896, and a daughter born in Stockwell around 1897 — directly confirm two of the three children this research had previously only been able to describe as “reported” and “probable” from indirect sources: Adelaide’s own vault note had flagged a son “Henry William, reported b. New York 1896” and a daughter “Olga,” both unconfirmed by any document. They are Harry and Adelaide’s children, still living together fifteen years after her death, both unmarried, the son already following his father into the agency business.

A detailed career timeline for Harry Wieland, compiled independently by the UK music-hall genealogy research site ninjin.co.uk, has since been checked against this page. It gives his birth as 1848 — close enough to the 1921 census’s own c.1846–47 calculation to be broadly consistent, the kind of year-or-two drift common between an official census return and independently reconstructed dates, rather than a contradiction. It traces his career in far finer detail than this research had managed alone: clerking in Mile End by April 1871; into theatrical work by June 1872 as an agent at the Royal Surrey Gardens; managing a gala department at 55 Waterloo Road from September 1872; touring “Japanese” novelty troupes (a Kioto Exhibition Troupe, a Royal Tycoon Troupe) through Calcutta, Birmingham, Edinburgh, and Glasgow between 1873 and 1876; a short-lived partnership, “Wieland & Holmes,” from 1874; and management of the Hanlon Volta troupe from 1877, ending in a dispute. It also gives a death year of 1922 — one year after the 1921 census above, and the first end-date this research has had for him at all. As with the birth year, this is recorded as a well-sourced secondary account pending an original civil death certificate, rather than treated as settled beyond question.

A closer look at the ninjin.co.uk chronology already cited above turns up detail this page had only summarised in passing. In August 1873, still working from 55 Waterloo Road, Harry was associated with Professor Leon’s Japanese entertainments; by November 1873 he was managing the Royal Victoria Circus’s own Japanese performers on tour in Calcutta. The following month, December 1873, he was made a Freemason at The Era lodge. His 1874 partnership, “Wieland & Holmes,” operated from an address at 29 Waterloo Bridge Road. And in 1877, alongside managing the Hanlon Volta troupe, he kept an office at Tavistock Street, Covent Garden, with his attention turning increasingly to acts at Alexandra Palace itself.

“Wieland’s Crystal Palace Combination” — a further lead of the researcher's own, still being assembled as this page was written. A surviving poster, catalogued through the Victorian Popular Culture collection and held by the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, advertises this touring company at the Operetta House, Waterloo Place, Edinburgh, “every evening at eight.” The catalogue entry the researcher consulted dates it to 1860 — which cannot be right, since Harry would have been about twelve. A second source, describing an Operetta House programme from the same address, instead dates the item to 1874, which fits Harry perfectly: by then in his mid-twenties, already working as a theatrical agent, and, per the ninjin.co.uk timeline above, touring Japanese troupes through Edinburgh only two years later, in 1876. the researcher's own reading is that this “Combination” — the Victorian term for a self-contained touring company of acrobats, gymnasts, dancers, comedians and novelty acts under one manager — was Harry’s, assembled from performers trading on the Crystal Palace’s name. This page has not been able to independently verify the poster’s own wording against either catalogue source directly, so it is recorded here as the researcher's own considered analysis, not yet confirmed by primary inspection of the item itself — but if correct, it would be good supporting evidence that Harry ran an organised, multi-performer touring enterprise well before either Adelaide or Clara joined his household.

Two threads this research has not been able to close, mentioned here rather than built into full entries of their own. 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. Whether she was Harry’s daughter by his first marriage, by Adelaide, or an unconnected Wieland entirely, is not established. A second, more speculative lead surfaced in the same folder: a signed studio photograph, filed by the researcher as “Elizabeth Adelaide Davies, 1910–1955,” alongside a 1910 US immigration record for an “Elizabeth A. Wieland,” born England 1882, resident in Philadelphia. The dates on the two items do not obviously agree with one another, and no document yet ties either to Harry’s own family. Recorded as an open lead, not a finding.

According to her own obituary (“Death of Zaeo,” Music Hall and Theatre Review, April 6th, 1906), Adelaide was “still a child” when Harry Wieland — already established as a trainer and presenter of gymnasts, and owner of a travelling circus — first noticed her. He taught her riding, animal work (including, per the obituary, complete fearlessness in approaching wild lions), the high wire, and, eventually, the aerial dive act that made her famous.

A modern secondary account (Layers of London, drawing on London Metropolitan Archives material) gives this more precisely: Harry took her in at around age ten, after she was left orphaned, and described himself as her foster father — consistent with, and sharper than, her own obituary’s vaguer “still a child.” This detail is now confirmed by a primary record, found 12 Sep 2026: the 1891 census at 46 Hercules Road lists Harry explicitly, in the schedule’s own relationship column, as “Foster Father” to Adelaide, herself returned as Head of the household — with Clara Wieland in the same household as her Foster Sister.

Her first great dive came at Alexandra Palace in 1879, from a platform fifty feet above the ground, before an audience of twelve thousand. Her obituary quotes her own account of the moment at length — a rare thing on this entire site, a performer’s words about her own most famous act, in her own voice:

The obituary goes on to describe finishing the wire performance, mounting the trapeze, and then, for the dive itself: taking her distance, keeping her body straight and rigid through a descent that “seemed to last minutes rather than seconds,” landing on her feet, and rebounding high from the net into “an uproar of excited voices.” The act was later developed with an “antique catapult”-style launch mechanism, which Harry refined after early safety problems; it was eventually abandoned.

A Continental tour followed, and Adelaide was noted for both her fluency in languages and her generosity: 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, an overexcited gallery boy dislodged a piece of decorative iron, and Adelaide, standing on her trapeze, tried to divert it from the audience below. It struck her, leaving her “prostrate for three months.” Among those who showed her kindness during that recovery, per her obituary: Sir Richard and Lady Isabel Burton — the explorer and his wife, a striking and checkable detail to anchor the episode. An Italian broadside from around 1885–86, for “Circo Proprietà Zæo,” presents her not merely as one act among many but as the enterprise’s named proprietor and defining attraction, on a bill combining aerial “funambulism,” trapeze and rope work, equestrian displays, human pyramids, clowns, pantomime and strongman turns — a full touring circus built around her name. A digitised copy of a related poster, “Circo Zaeo de Wieland,” survives at the Bibliothèque nationale de France; not yet captured into this site’s own Documents section, but a clear next step.

Back in England, she became a controversial figure as well as a celebrated one. A large advertising poster made from her studio photograph — “a shapely and beautiful woman” wearing, per her obituary, “the customary costume of a gymnast, perfectly modest and entirely inoffensive” — was denounced as indecent by the National Vigilance Association, feeding into a London County Council licensing controversy over the Royal Aquarium. Captain Molesworth conducted the Aquarium’s defence; the obituary notes drily that “the humorous alterations made to the poster only increased its value as an advertisement.” Her performances themselves were later denounced as dangerous, with “absurd stories” circulated about her supposed suffering after each descent. The same surname turns up again, separately, as the author of an 1891 publicity pamphlet, The Life of Zaeo, discussed further below — very possibly the same Molesworth, which would mean the Aquarium’s own courtroom defender had also written her promotional biography, a detail that colours how much weight that pamphlet’s claims should carry.

Between 1892 and 1899, Adelaide and Harry are recorded at 12 Stockwell Park Crescent, Lambeth — a home address that sits neatly between the 1891 Hercules Road census and the St Martin’s Street address given on her 1906 death certificate, filling in a stretch of her London life this research had not previously placed. The same period produced a specific, dateable episode: in 1892, a court case reported in The Era concerned a non-payment dispute with a live-in assistant, Mr Tribbiani, an Italian performer Adelaide and Harry had met in Cairo. It is a small case, but a genuine one, and it independently corroborates the wider Continental and Egyptian touring already described above — and, in passing, puts an actual Italian name into her own household at exactly the period Captain Molesworth’s pamphlet was already claiming an Italian heritage for Adelaide herself. The coincidence is worth noting without treating it as evidence either way; a promoter’s employee sharing a nationality with a promoter’s claim about his star is not the same thing as the claim being true.

Found, 12 Sep 2026: a “Tribbiani Astori” — single, 28, born in Perugia and returned as an Italian Subject — was already living in the Wieland household a full year earlier, on the 1891 census at 46 Hercules Road, listed there as a General Servant (Domestic). The surname is distinctive, and the household the same, which makes this very likely the man described the following year as her “live-in assistant met in Cairo” — but the 1891 return itself calls him only a servant, not a performer, so the identification is recorded as probable rather than certain.

Her last public appearances were at the Oxford Music Hall, and around 1898–99 at the Palace Theatre:

Her husband is credited, in her own obituary, with devising the routine that closed out her career — a small, specific detail of a working partnership that outlasted her most famous, most dangerous act by close to two decades.

Adelaide’s civil death certificate, dated April 2nd, 1906, at 16 St Martin’s Street, records her as “Wife of Henry William Wieland, a Music Hall Agent,” with the informant given as “H. W. Wieland, Widower of deceased, present at the death.” This confirms both the marriage itself and her husband’s exact name — Henry William, not William Henry — meaning this is unambiguously Harry Wieland of this site’s 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 states she “died on Monday last… of heart disease following typhoid fever.” Her actual civil death certificate gives a different cause: “Hepatic Cirrhosis, Cerebral Haemorrhage,” certified by A. A. C. Grant, M.B. This is recorded as a genuine discrepancy, not resolved either way — period press obituaries routinely softened or generalised a cause of death, and the certificate is treated here as the more reliable document. She died aged 43, consistent with a c.1863 birth year; 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.

This research had previously been able to describe Adelaide and Harry’s children only as “reported” and “probable”: an Elizabeth/Lizzie (b. c.1887), a Henry William (reported born New York, 1896), and an Olga — none independently documented. A 1921 census schedule, found this session in Harry’s own household record (told in full on his page above), directly confirms two of the three: Henry William Wieland, 25 in 1921, born New York, following his father into the agency business, who died in 1933 per the researcher’s own family tree research; and Olga Alexandra Wieland, 24 in 1921, born Stockwell, London, still unmarried and living at home, who died in 1981 by the same source. Both were living with their widowed father, fifteen years after Adelaide’s own death, at the same St Martin’s Street address given on her 1906 death certificate. The third child, Elizabeth/Lizzie, is discussed in her own beat below — the secondary source ninjin.co.uk records that Adelaide’s funeral in 1906 was “attended by her children Henry, Lizzie and Olga, and Henry her husband,” and the researcher’s own family tree research gives her death year as 1969. Two separate 1890 death certificates for other, unrelated “Elizabeth Wieland” women found in the same archive folder have both been checked and ruled out as belonging to a different family entirely.

Elizabeth — the one child of the three this research had never placed on a document of her own — has one now. A 1911 census schedule, headed by her husband John Leslie Davies at 2 Brandon Mansions, Queen’s Club Gardens, London, records: John Leslie Davies, Head, 23, a “Music Hall Agent”; Elizabeth Davies, Wife, 23, married three years, an “Actress,” born in Marseilles, France; and their daughter, three months old, named Betty Adelaide Davies — her middle name a small, striking echo of her own grandmother. Both husband and wife working in the music hall trade sits neatly alongside Harry’s own career as an agent, and a birth in Marseilles fits a touring theatrical family far better than a settled London one.

The ages recorded here — both spouses 23 in April 1911 — calculate to a birth for Elizabeth around 1887–88, matching both this page’s own earlier working estimate of “b. c.1887” and her husband John Leslie Davies’s own family-tree year of 1888. Neither is a birth certificate of her own, but the census and the family tree research now agree. Elizabeth herself died in 1969, per the researcher’s own family tree research.

Elizabeth and John Leslie Davies had at least two children: Elizabeth A. Davies (1910–1955) — the three-month-old “Betty Adelaide Davies” already named on the 1911 census above, and now a face as well as a name, in a surviving portrait (see Documents below) — and John Davies (1913–1994). Elizabeth A. Davies married twice: first to Leslie Hugh Price (1906–1973), then to Alexander Blackford (1902–1985), with a son by her second marriage, Brook M. Blackford (1945–2021) — Adelaide and Harry’s own great-grandson. Recorded here per the researcher’s own family tree research, three generations past Adelaide and Harry themselves, and not yet checked against birth, marriage, or death certificates of their own.

The “Betty Adelaide Davies” of the 1911 census, and the “Elizabeth A. Davies” of the family tree, is a genuinely well-known actress under a shortened stage name: Betty Ann Davies, born 24 December 1910 in London and died 14 May 1955 in Manchester. The identification, first made from the matching birth and death years and from her son’s and second husband’s names (Brook Blackford and Alexander Blackford, identical to the family tree’s own record), is now settled beyond doubt: her own civil death certificate, obtained directly from the GRO, names her “Betty Ann DAVIES otherwise Elizabeth Adelaide BLACKFORD” — family name and stage name joined on a single primary record (see Documents below). “Adelaide” shortened to the stage name “Ann” remains the only unexplained substitution.

Adelaide Zaeo Wieland’s own granddaughter had a substantial West End and film career: a chorus debut in the revue Life (1926); musical theatre roles including Mr Cinders and This Year of Grace; a turn to drama with Wanda Baring in Morning Star (1942), Olivia in Night Must Fall, and Elvira in Blithe Spirit; and, most strikingly, succeeding Vivien Leigh as Blanche DuBois in the original West End production of A Streetcar Named Desire. Her film credits include Kipps, The History of Mr Polly, Now Barabbas, Meet Me Tonight, Alias John Preston, and The Belles of St Trinian’s (1954) — thirty-eight films in total, by one count.

Her death certificate confirms the cause of death reported by secondary sources in full: pulmonary embolus following an appendicectomy for acute appendicitis, at the Royal Infirmary, Manchester, aged 44. She was by then the wife of Alexander Blackford, of Wildfields Farm, Wood Street, Guildford, described there as a musician; he is recorded as the informant, “widower of the deceased,” present at the death two days before registration.

Two American newspaper profiles, both filed by the researcher as “Clara Wieland in America” (The Gazette, Stevens Point, Wisconsin, December 25th, 1895; Waterloo Daily Courier, Waterloo, Iowa, June 4th, 1896), describe her as “the celebrated serpentine dancer,” “associated with the stage from the time she began to think”:

Both profiles call her travelling father-figure “W. H. Wieland,” one annotated (likely by the researcher) with a third, unreconciled set of dates: “1852?–1922” — distinct from both William Henry Wieland (1831–1866) and Henry William “Harry” Wieland (c.1846–after 1921) documented elsewhere on this site. She also became an accomplished equestrienne (“haute école”) from circus life, before her love of singing prevailed and her father “indulged her fancies and carefully instructed her.”

Clara’s first public appearance was at the Empire, Leicester Square, in June 1893, debuting “a new prismatic serpentine dance.” She spent five years at the Aquarium, Westminster, performing her “mirror dance,” and was later engaged as a vocalist at the Empire — the two American profiles don’t quite agree on how long (69 weeks, per one; “prolonged… for 68 weeks uninterruptedly,” per the other — both recorded here rather than harmonised). Her final London engagement, before sailing for America, was at the Palace Theatre, Cambridge Circus. A firm of American managers brought her to the United States, where she duplicated her London success in vaudeville and burlesque, including a production of Gentleman Joe, with a comic-opera booking rumoured to follow.

Two contemporary English court reports, found in the same archive folder, concern this same performer under legal names. In December 1900, the Morning Leader reported “Clara Wieland Wins” at Westminster County Court — an interpleader case in which “Mme. Parette, professionally known as Clara Wieland,” and a man named Hewitt each claimed £40 paid into court by the proprietors of Gatti’s Music Hall, a fortnight’s salary Clara had earned there, which Hewitt claimed against her over an assigned loan. Judgment went to Mme Parette.

The following May, The Star reported “Miss Clara Wieland Gets Damages” at the King’s Bench: “Miss Clara Wieland, the well-known music hall artist, suing through her husband, Mr. William Henry Perette Thring,” sought £60 in damages from the proprietor of the Bedford Palace of Varieties, Camden Town, for breach of a four-week engagement at £15 a week. The defence argued she had no standing to sue — she had already assigned 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 within the space of a single year — a specific, evidenced financial strain, not speculation. Her husband’s first two names, “William Henry,” echo the wider Wieland naming pattern on this site, but the surnames are entirely different, and this should not be read as a family connection without further evidence.

The researcher's own working theory, set out in more detail in his research paper “The Wieland–Flexmore Connection,” held that Clara’s father was John Frederick Wieland (b.1830), and that Harry Wieland’s role was “mentor, manager and family guardian” rather than literal father — a hypothesis explicitly framed there as an alternative reading, not a finding. A modern chronology compiled by the genealogy research site ninjin.co.uk now gives this theory direct, independent support, naming Clara’s parents as “John Frederick Wieland (retired major) and Clara Emma Rishworth,” with a birth date of October 1877 — matching the researcher's own father figure by name almost exactly, and resolving the mother’s name (previously carried in this research only as an unsourced “Clara Rishworth”) with a full middle name attached. This is recorded as a secondary source’s account, not yet checked against an original birth or baptism certificate, but its precise agreement with the researcher's own independently-formed theory is a meaningful cross-confirmation. One inconsistency is worth flagging rather than smoothing over: the same chronology gives Clara’s age on the 1891 census as 11, which fits a birth nearer 1879–80 than October 1877 — not yet reconciled.

The American press profiles, for their part, still complicate the picture by calling her travelling father figure only “W. H. Wieland” — a different first name from “John Frederick” entirely, and, per one annotation, a third, unreconciled set of dates (1852?–1922). Three names for the same man, if he is the same man, and three sets of dates — not fully harmonised even now, though the ninjin.co.uk finding gives this research its clearest single answer yet.

The same modern chronology fills in the years after the two court cases above with real precision. Clara married William Henry Perette Thring (b.1863) in February 1899 — matching the “married identity” the two court reports had already established, and giving it, for the first time, an exact date. That November, Clara and William Henry had a daughter, Clara Adelaide Thring. The 1901 census records the small family together in Liverpool. Then, in November 1902, Clara petitioned for divorce from Thring “on the grounds of cruelty” — a serious allegation, recorded here exactly as the source states it, without further detail about what followed or whether the petition succeeded. Read against the two 1900–01 court cases already on this page, in which Clara sued and was sued while “suing through her husband,” a picture emerges of a marriage under real strain well before the divorce petition was filed.

This is, on its own, worth a beat to itself. Since this research first split Adelaide and Clara apart, an alternative name — “Mary Ann Brown” — has been carried on Clara’s own record, flagged every time as genuinely uncertain: it appeared in neither of the two primary research reports this page draws on, and its origin was unknown. The ninjin.co.uk chronology supplied a first answer: in 1907, “Clara Wieland changed her name to Mary Ann Brown, a mimic, and gave up the serpentine dancing.” The same chronology adds two further, later sightings: an operation in London for a tumour in 1911, and a run performing in the United States as part of an act billed “Taylor & Brown,” from 1911 to 1917.

The researcher’s own family knowledge now ties these sightings together into a single, coherent sequence rather than a scatter of separate name changes: Clara emigrated to the United States, and it was there, on the American stage, that she performed as Mary Ann Brown — the identity behind the “Taylor & Brown” act above. She carried that name back across the Atlantic with her: Mary Ann Brown is the name she used when she returned to the UK, not a passing American stage alias she set aside on landing. Read this way, her later reinvention was not a quiet change of billing on the London circuit in 1907 and a separate, unrelated American turn afterward, but one identity, taken up in America and kept for the rest of her life once she was home. This is recorded as the researcher’s own family knowledge, not yet checked against a primary immigration, marriage, or death record of its own — but it gives Clara’s later years a clearer shape than the ninjin.co.uk chronology alone could supply.

Ellen Mary Ann Dunn was born on Tuesday, February 25th, 1879, at 56 Peerless Street, Islington, St. Luke’s — the site now occupied by Moorfields Eye Hospital. She was the second of eleven children born to John Dunn, a shoemaker and whip maker, and his wife Ellen Mary Dunnell, who had married on June 3rd, 1876. Ellen was enrolled at Hammond Square Primary School, Hoxton Street, on November 18th, 1884, aged five; by the 1891 census the family had moved to 108 Royston Street, Bethnal Green, and it was around this time that Ellen very likely began attending a dance and gymnastics school — training that would make her, in time, a professional contortionist of real ability, alongside ten siblings born across twenty-three years.

At just sixteen, Ellen took part in the inaugural match of the British Ladies Football Club, playing under the pseudonym Ruth Coupland for North London at Crouch End Athletic Ground on March 23rd, 1895, before a crowd of some ten thousand. North London won 7–1. She toured with the club to Belfast that June, named in the Belfast News-Letter’s published lineup, and stayed with the Original Ladies rather than Mrs Graham’s breakaway club after the September 1895 split, before leaving the BLFC in the summer of 1897 to pursue her stage career full-time. The identification of Ellen Dunn as Ruth Coupland is credited to football historian Stuart Gibbs, of Manchester Metropolitan University; a second football pseudonym, Compton, has separately been identified by researcher Patrick Brennan of donmouth.co.uk, appearing in a team photograph caption and a Bury lineup from April 1895. Its origin — possibly the Compton Arms public house in her native Islington — is the researcher's own conjecture, not a documented fact.

From 1895, Ellen built a long and genuinely remarkable music hall career as Lily Flexmore — dancer, acrobatic contortionist, singer, and comedienne, celebrated above all for her signature “Toe-In-Mouth” dance, which she was still performing at forty-six in 1925. She and her husband, the comedian George Ambrose White, shared the Flexmore name between them on the bill — he as George Flexmore, she as Lily Flexmore — making her, alongside George, one of the unrelated performers who carried the name forward a generation after Richard Flexmore Geatter’s own death, in the pattern this site’s Chapter III sets out at length. Which of the two of them adopted the name first is not documented.

Richard Flexmore’s own art lived at the edge of what a trained body could do without injury. So does this. In keeping with the excellence Richard himself set the standard for a generation earlier, here — at the very apex of her art — is Lily. It is one thing to say she carried the name forward; it is another to see her performing at the same level of physical risk and mastery the name itself was built on — one mistake, and the neck is broken. The full photograph and description below were first written for lilyflexmore.co.uk, and belong here too, on the page where her fellow disciples of the art are kept.

Lily Flexmore · The Back Bend · Colourised promotional photograph. Colourisation by the researcher.
Original photograph courtesy of Paul Duffett, Ellen’s own great-great-nephew and Karen Wall’s cousin.

What you see in her photographs is not a trick of the camera, nor a posture available to the merely flexible. It is the result of years — almost certainly a decade or more — of relentless daily training that would have begun in childhood, when the connective tissues of the spine, hips and shoulders are still sufficiently pliable to be shaped by disciplined, progressive work.

In her back-bend pose, all of Ellen’s weight is borne by two points alone — her forehead and her heels. We might expect to see her palms flattened on the floor of the stage, supporting her. Yet her hands are turned gracefully upwards, her wrists barely grazing the stage, her fingers loose and open, as though she were simply resting. Those upturned palms are not an accident. They are placed deliberately so in order to show that Ellen has reached a point of perfection in her art.

Ellen Dunn performed positions of this difficulty on stages from London to Johannesburg, from New York to Berlin, for nearly thirty years.

— text first set out in full on lilyflexmore.co.uk

At just eighteen, Ellen sailed for South Africa aboard the RMS Briton in December 1897, to appear at the Empire Theatre, Johannesburg — her first international engagement — returning aboard the RMS Moor in March 1898. It was the first of a working life spent almost constantly in transit: in a typical year, by her own reckoning, Ellen covered some four thousand miles across the United Kingdom alone fulfilling theatre engagements, a pattern she and George sustained for more than thirty years.

Ellen married George Ambrose White — a fellow performer, professionally George Flexmore, and by day a newspaper representative for Associated Newspapers and The Evening News at Carmelite House, Blackfriars — at Bethnal Green Register Office on February 27th, 1899, two days after her twentieth birthday. Five months later, on July 28th, 1899, while the couple were performing in Birmingham and staying at 24 Coleshill Street, Ellen gave birth prematurely to a daughter. The infant survived only an hour and was never named; her birth certificate records her simply as “Female Flexmore,” daughter of George Ambrose Flexmore, Comedian, and Lily Flexmore, formerly Dunn. Ellen’s career record shows no return engagement in Birmingham for nearly two years — and when she did return, in 1901 and again in 1902, she went back twice to the city that held her most private grief.

Ellen and George sailed for New York aboard the White Star liner RMS Adriatic, departing Southampton on 18th December 1907 and arriving on 27th December — spending Christmas Day at sea. Their crossing was captained by Edward John Smith, who would take command of the ill-fated RMS Titanic less than five years later. Also aboard, bound for the same city, was the British “lion comique” Whit Cunliffe — one year older than George, four years older than Ellen.

The contract Ellen and George carried was issued by the powerful theatrical firm of Klaw & Erlanger — prestigious on paper, punishing in practice: a “No Fares” contract, under which the couple were required to meet all their own travel costs across the Orpheum Circuit’s forty-five theatres in thirty-six American cities.

After an engagement in Chicago, Ellen returned to New York to open at the New York Theatre, Broadway and 45th Street — delayed a day by a train wreck — sharing the bill that January with George Evans, Collins & Hart, Whit Cunliffe, Lucy Weston, and May Belfort. Then, on 4th January 1908, Variety Magazine (Vol. 9, No. 4) reported that her Klaw & Erlanger contract had been torn up and a new one issued in its place. The terms of the replacement are not recorded, and neither is who — or what — prompted it.

The researcher's own considered, explicitly unproven view is that Whit Cunliffe is the most plausible candidate: a performer earning some £450 a week in January 1908 — in the region of £70,000 a week in today’s money — sharing both Ellen and George’s Atlantic crossing and their New York billing, with more than enough standing in the American theatrical world for a quiet word said on their behalf to have carried real weight. It is recorded here, as on lilyflexmore.co.uk, exactly as that: a plausible theory built from proximity and timing, not a documented fact. No letter, no witness, and no direct evidence connects Cunliffe to the torn-up contract.

Sources: Variety Magazine, Vol. 9, No. 4, 4th January 1908 · New York Theatre advertisement, Sunday 12th January 1908 · White Star Line passenger manifest, SS Adriatic, December 1907

From at least 1918 to the end of their lives, George and Ellen made their home at 28 Colebrooke Row, Islington, a Georgian terrace overlooking the New River Walk — the house still stands. On the 1921 census, which George signed himself, he added beside his own signature the words “Trading as George Flexmore” — a small, quietly deliberate insistence, even on an official government form, on the name the couple had made their own. That phrase, “trading as,” is exact rather than incidental: George used “Flexmore” extensively and consistently — on the bill, on that census return, on his own infant daughter’s 1899 birth certificate, which names him “George Ambrose Flexmore, Comedian,” and, most tellingly, on her death certificate the same day, which he signed as informant in his own hand: “G. A. Flexmore, Father.” But he never took the further step of legally changing his name; no deed poll or formal name-change record has yet been found. It remained, throughout his life, a professional identity worn in earnest — used even at the registrar’s desk, on the worst day of his life — but never a registered one.

George Ambrose White died suddenly at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital on September 26th, 1933, aged fifty-five, of mesenteric thrombosis. His funeral at Islington Cemetery, Finchley, drew forty newspaper vans from Associated Newspapers and its affiliated trades — the Islington and Holloway Press reported the occasion under the headline “40 Newspaper Vans Follow Funeral.” He left an estate of £125 to Ellen. She survived him by less than four months, dying at St. Mary’s Hospital, Highgate Hill (now the Whittington Hospital), on January 19th, 1934, aged fifty-four.

When Ellen was interred alongside George, the family moved the headstone — a large cross, carved with ivy and a descending dove — from the head of the grave to lie across it, and mortared the surface, sealing it so that no one else would ever be buried there. The single-word inscription is Re-united. The grave lay unvisited by family for decades until it was rediscovered in December 2023 by Karen Wall, Ellen’s great-great-niece, and her husband Ian, working from research conducted in County Kildare, Ireland. On January 19th, 2024 — the ninetieth anniversary of Ellen’s death — the researcher flew to London and walked with Karen to the grave, leaving a white alabaster lily for the daughter Ellen and George never got to keep, and a slate plaque bearing their photograph, inscribed simply: The Fabulous Flexmores.

The three sisters were daughters of George Prodger (1834–1898) and Elizabeth Griffin (1834–1919), who married on 26th December 1853 at the parish church of St Clement, Hastings, Sussex — George a 21-year-old carpenter of 7 George Street, son of William Prodger, a painter; Elizabeth a 20-year-old of the Fish-market, daughter of Thomas Griffin, a stationer. They went on to have seven children. The eldest, George Henry Prodger (1855–1912), was not part of the act; he married Frances Manning in 1879 and had three children of his own — William, Albert Guy, and Sidney E. Prodger. Three more, Agnes, Clarence (a son), and Eveline, were likewise not part of the “Sisters Flexmore” act. Unlike so many of the performers elsewhere in this research, all three performing sisters were long-lived: Elizabeth “Bessie” Prodger (1857–1949) reached ninety-two; Florence Prodger (1864–1945) reached eighty-one; and Lydia Prodger (1870–1960) reached ninety. Between them, the three sisters span more than a century of English life, from a decade before Richard Flexmore Geatter’s own death to well within living memory.

The earliest documented mention of the act 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.

Elizabeth “Bessie” Prodger (1857–1949), the eldest of the three, married Robert L. Roberts (b.1856) of Liverpool at St Mark’s Church, Kennington, on 29th June 1891 — the same marriage the notice quoted above records. She lived to ninety-two, outliving both her younger sisters. No further biographical detail beyond her marriage and dates has yet been developed for her individually — a candidate for further GRO and census research in a future session.

Florence Prodger (1864–1945) married Arthur Seymore Bull (1866–1927). Arthur’s own parents came with a family history worth setting down in full. They 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, 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 — an unexpected line from one branch of the Sisters Flexmore’s own family into the world of Victorian and Edwardian fine art.

Arthur built a substantial career of his own. By the 1921 census, he was Chief Passenger Agent, representing the Office of the European Traffic Manager for the Sudan Government Railways & Steamers out of the company’s London branch — issuing official promotional material, timetables, and driving international tourism to the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. He negotiated directly with archaeologists such as John Garstang, turning ongoing excavations, Meroe among them, into tourist attractions aimed at a wealthy, scientifically-minded European clientele, and organised all-inclusive “Combined Circular Tours” from Cairo to Khartoum, combining railway itineraries with Nile steamer connections and overnight stays at dedicated station camps such as Kabushia. His office published the Handbook of the Sudan Government Railways and Steamers in 1921, a key administrative and traveller’s reference documenting the network’s routes, tariffs, and timetables. By the time of his death he was recorded more simply as a ‘Company Director’ — presumably a continuation of, or promotion from, this same career, though his death certificate does not name the company.

His civil death certificate records that he died of angina pectoris (“many years”) and acute dilatation syncope at 76a Streatham Hill on 15th February 1927, aged sixty, with Florence — named as his widow — present at the death. She outlived him by eighteen years, dying at 72 Cricklade Avenue, Streatham Hill, on 4th May 1945; her probate, sworn at Llandudno, was granted to the National Provincial Bank, her effects valued at £3,106 8s. Florence kept performing solo well into her thirties: a February 1898 Johannesburg review, from the same South African tour the Sisters Flexmore made together, singled her out by name — “Miss Florrie Flexmore is a fine contortionist, and also does a good song and dance” — the same acrobatic speciality, as it happens, that would make Lily Flexmore’s own name a generation later.

Lydia Prodger (1870–1960), the youngest of the three and the one whose own genealogical record carries “Flexmore” formally alongside her birth surname, married Samuel G. Tattersall (1868–1950). They had three children: Florence L. Tattersall (1905–1985), Jack Tattersall (b.1909), and Edward M. Tattersall (1912–1972). Lydia lived to ninety — the second-longest-lived of the three sisters, behind Bessie’s ninety-two.