Leah Leichner (1890 – 1957) & Pollard’s last tour of India

Above: 13 year old Leah Leichner (centre) and unidentified girls, and a US soldier, while on the 1903-4 Pollard tour. This photo is enlarged from a group photo taken in Manila in 1903, held in the Australian Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne.

The 5 second version
Born in Melbourne Australia, Leah Leichner became a leading actor with Pollard’s Lilliputian Opera Company, a juvenile troupe that performed light opera through South East Asia, India and North America in the first decade of the twentieth century. Her story isn’t simply one of a child performer, but is also the tale of an adventurous and unusually confident woman for her era, who determined her own destiny, and overcame significant obstacles. And she appears to be the only Pollards performer to return and make her home in Asia.

She is also significant because in March 1910, reports of the mistreatment of children (and in particular, her) reached Australia, and legislation banning child performers being taken out of the country followed soon after. Thirty years later, Leah was serving as a nurse when Japanese forces overran Hong Kong in late 1941 and she endured more than three and a half years of internment. She died there in 1957.

Her step-sister Belle Leichner also appeared on stage in Australia, India and China.

Left: Leah Constance Johnstone in 1915, aged 25. [1]Enlargement of photo from Johnstone divorce papers. Museum of History, NSW, Formerly NSW Archives

Leah’s birth and childhood

Leah Caroline Cohen was born on 9 July 1890 in the inner Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy, and her profile closely resembles that of other children enlisted in Pollard’s Lilliputian Opera Company.[2]Victoria, Births Deaths & Marriages Leah Cohen birth certificate, 9 July 1900, 22895 / 1890 Her mother was Minnie nee Grant, from a rural family in Mount Gambier, South Australia, while her father was English-born tailor Samuel Harris Cohen.

Only a few years after her birth her parents separated, and in December 1900 Minnie married Isaac Leichner, a Rumanian born fruiterer based at Melbourne’s Queen Victoria Market. The marriage was performed by the well known and slightly unorthodox Reverend Albert Abbott,[3]See Gerry Brody (24 May 2021) Shonky celebrants and wonky marriages ….. Holt’s matrimonial agency and the Free Christian Church at the State Library of Victoria Blog at the Free Christian Church in Queen Street, with James and Annie Holt from Holt’s Matrimonial Agency as witnesses.[4]Victoria, Births Deaths & Marriages Leichner and Grant Marriage certificate, 22 December 1900, 8251 / 1900 Together they settled down in nearby Little Lonsdale Street and Leah took her step-father’s surname for her own.

A few weeks after the marriage a daughter, Bella, was born.[5]Victoria, Births Deaths & Marriages Bella Leichner birth certificate, 9 January 1901, 5176 / 1901 In time, Bella or Belle, would also end up on the stage.

Perhaps they were friends:14 year old Leah (centre right) on her second Pollard’s tour with Irene Finlay (centre left) University of Washington, Special Collections, JWS21402 (Enlargement)

Of Leah’s childhood we know little. Like most Australian children she learned to read and write, but at the beginning of the twentieth century, secondary education was only available for those who could afford a private education – a very small portion of the population.[6]Robert Murray (2020) The Confident Years, Australia in the 1920s. P16. Australian Scholarly Publishing For Leah, and the other working class children who joined Pollard’s Lilliputian Opera Company, fame, fortune and the chance to travel must have made life as a performer a very attractive alternative to inner Melbourne factory work or an apprenticeship.

Left: Leah was born in Victoria St, Fitzroy, in a now demolished building at Number 73. Right: It is likely she attended the school in nearby Bell Street, Fitzroy, as did other Pollard performers. Author’s collection.

Pollard’s Lilliputian Opera Company

It is worth pausing and looking past the nationalist sentiment we might attach to these pioneer Australian performers today, to recognize that this was really a form of genteel child exploitation. Talented they may have been, but almost all of the Pollard’s child performers were underage and some were even under 10 when they travelled overseas for two years or more. Signing their child’s guardianship to Charles Pollard and Nellie Chester, or in 1909 to Arthur Pollard, meant parents received payment for their child’s performances, sometimes in advance.

Pollard’s advertises for new child performers at Ford’s Hall, 130 Brunswick St, Fitzroy, in February 1907. [7]The Age, 16 Feb, 1907. Via the National Library of Australia’s Trove

Not everyone approved of the Pollard’s performance model. Fellow performer Irene Goulding recalled that her teacher at Bell Street Primary School in Fitzroy thought it was awful that children would go overseas on a performance tour.[8]Irene Smith nee Goulding interview. Interviewed by Sally Dawes in 1985. Australian Performing Arts Collection, Melbourne But her father Frank Goulding, a widowed ex-performer and now bootmaker, signed Irene up with Pollards, together with her brothers Alf and Frank.[9]Even after Frank’s death from smallpox while on tour in Calcutta in 1897, Alf and Irene Goulding kept performing with Pollards

Pollards in Manilla poss 1905 full screen
University of Washington, Special Collections, JWS24555This photo of the Pollard’s Lilliputian Opera Company was taken in the Philippines sometime in late 1904. Leah stands at the front, on the left. Close examination of the original (here) suggests the children are posing with chained prisoners. Reproduced with permission.

Leah on tour, 1903-1904, 1904-1907

In late 1902, at the age of 12, Leah auditioned for a Pollard’s tour, managed by Nellie Chester and her brother Charles Pollard. Shipping manifests show she joined the troupe and in January 1903 departed on SS Changsa,, bound for the “far east” – Manila, Hong Kong and Shanghai and then on to North America. She was in company with other familiar names, including Daphne Pollard (Trott) and her sister Ivy TrottTeddie McNamaraAlf Goulding and his sister Irene Loftus (Goulding)Willie Thomas and Irene Finlay. They were back in Australia 15 months later, in April 1904.

Three months after their return, in July 1904, Leah joined a second Pollard’s Lilliputian Opera Company tour, first travelling to Queensland, where they tested out their repertoire of musical comedies. In September 1904 the company departed Australia to again travel through ports in South East Asia and China before arriving in the USA in March 1905. This group of child performers stayed away from Australia for an extraordinary two and a half years – not returning until late February, 1907. Leah can be traced through some of the positive publicity given by the Canadian and US press, but the Pollards also made sure particular performers were profiled, most notably Daphne Pollard.

The repertoire included such popular musicals as A Runaway Girl, The Belle of New York, The Lady Slavey and HMS Pinafore, usually regularly rotated during a week of performances.

University of Washington, Special Collections, JWS24603. Daphne Pollard and Leah Leichner re-creating a scene from The Geisha. The photo is credited to Ying Cheong, a photographer and painter in Canton Road Shanghai. It was taken in either 1903 or 1904, on Leah’s first or second tour. Reproduced with permission.

Fibs by Pollards Montreal 1905
Above: This is the cast from A Gaiety Girl being performed in Montreal, Canada, in November 1905. The ages in this  program are all incorrect despite the Pollard company assurances. For example, Daphne Pollard was 14, Leah Leichner 15.[10]Extracts from a program in the author’s collection.

Today we might wonder about the impact of this enterprise on a young person, so far from family and for so long, in these formative years. It should also be noted that the Pollards performers were playing adult roles on stage, a fact that even some contemporary commentators found confronting, given the adult content of the musicals they performed. One correspondent for the Hong Kong Daily Press on December 27, 1907 reminded readers “Pollard’s Lilliputians are children, but their performance is anything but childish… That shrimp of a maiden …who portrays a woman many times divorced, how are we to regard her?” And as Gillian Arrighi notes in her 2017 article, “the authors of these musical comedies never intended them for performance by children.”[11]Gillian Arrighi, The Controversial “Case of the Opera Children in the East”: Political conflict between popular demand for child actors and modernizing cultural policy on the … Continue reading

Audiences on the US east coast never got to see Pollard’s perform during Leah’s tours, or at any other time. The New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (the “Gerry Society”) were particularly active over the issue of child performance on stage and they appear to have kept Pollard’s Lilliputians away from the big cities on the US east coast, where the society was most active.[12]This was reported in North America at the time – see for example The Chicago Tribune, 19 May 1902, P12 (a highly fanciful account but one that acknowledges the concept of child performers to be … Continue reading But there was enough interest in other towns and cities of North America to keep the Pollard’s troupes going. They returned home on the SS Moama in early 1907.

Above; Company managers Charles Pollard, Nellie Chester (nee Pollard) and Arthur Hayden Pollard in about 1902 (See a 1910 image of Arthur here). These enlargements are from a Pollards group photo via Vancouver As It Was: A Photo-Historical Journey and is used with their kind permission.

Leah on stage in Australia 1907-1908

The next Pollard tour to North America departed in June 1907, but Leah did not join it. Instead, in 1907 and early 1908 she appeared with troupes in eastern Australia. Perhaps she decided it was time to try out on her own – or maybe she was thought to look too mature. She spent much of her time performing at the Adelaide Tivoli Theatre. According to some reviewers she was “dainty”, “sang well”, and was “the brightest item on the bill.” But she did not appeal to all Australians – whose taste in theatre could still be conservative. According to Adelaide’s Gadfly, she made the mistake of appearing on stage in trousers as a “soldier boy”, as she had previously looked “much better in skirts”.[13]The Gadfly (SA), 27 Nov 1907, P8, via National Library of Australia’s Trove

SMH 17 OCT 1908
An advertisement for the Tivoli Theatre in 1908. Leah appears in company with May Dalberg ( the same Mae Dahlberg who was later associated with Stan Laurel) Soon after this, Leah disappeared from the stage. [14]Sydney Morning Herald , 17 October, 1908 Via Newspapers.com

Leah and her secret, 1908

Then in late 1908 Leah discovered she was pregnant and soon after, she ceased appearing on stage. We know nothing of the context of her pregnancy and the birth certificate for her son Claude, born in May 1909, is rather sad and stark. The baby was born at the family home in Little Lonsdale Street, with Leah’s mother Minnie assisting at the birth.[15]Victoria, Births Deaths & Marriages Claude Leichner birth certificate, 18 May 1909, 12829 /1909 No father is named, the responsibility for parenting an illegitimate child then rested entirely with the mother, who also faced extraordinary social stigma. But it is now clear that Minnie took over the parenting of grandson Claude, and 6 weeks later, Leah joined the next Pollard’s tour – that might take her away for an extended period of time.

Leah and the 1909 – 1910 Pollard tour of India

The Arthur Pollard troupe together, with children dressed for a performance. The date or location is unknown but this photo appeared in an Australian newspaper in May 1910, by which time they were home.[16]Leader (Vic) 21 May 1910, P24, via State Library of Victoria

In April 1909 Charles Pollard announced he was retiring from running the Pollard’s tours.[17]The Telegraph (Qld.) 17 Apr 1909, P8, via National Library of Australia’s Trove The youngest member of the Pollard family, Arthur, would take over as manager. (Nellie Chester chose not to join him). The next troupe was partly made up of new faces, but there were some former Pollard players, including Leah Leichner, Irene Finlay, Willie Howard, and the twins Johnnie and Freddie Heintz. Perhaps Arthur Pollard wanted some experienced players in the group and approached seasoned performers such as these to join. (He knew these performers well – he had been on all of the previous Charles Pollard-Nellie Chester tours). About thirty young people and various adults departed on 3 July 1909 on the SS Gracchus, bound for Java and Singapore.[18]The Daily Telegraph (Syd) 7 July 1909, P12, via National Library of Australia’s Trove At 19 years of age, Leah was the oldest performer in the troupe.

Arthur Pollard’s assault on Leah apparently took place in Malaya. Australian newspapers reported that Leah had been beaten with a heavy stick, “inflicting a severe wound over the eye, because she went out with a man in a motor car, which was against the rules[19]The West Australian (WA) 21 Apr 1910, P3, Via National Library of Australia’s Trove Leah was then reportedly sent home to Australia from Calcutta in mid December 1909, because she was “unruly.” Other child performers had reportedly been roughly treated, or confined to bread and water, or had their hair cut, or were punished in other ways. But later reports confirm that the problems on the tour started very early on – and demonstrate that Arthur Pollard clearly had a temperament completely unsuited to managing children.

Although legally guardian of the children, Pollard had also started an intimate relationship with 18 year old Irene Finlay while on the trip, or possibly before. He attempted to defend himself in a letter to The Madras Times but this only seems to have made things worse, as he denied mistreating the children, but then admitted he had. Pollard also brought “charges” against an unspecified girl in the troupe, which newspapers refused to publicise. [20]The Daily News (WA) 9 Mar 1910, P7, Via National Library of Australia’s Trove This writer feels it was the news of Leah’s baby at home – her secret had got out somehow. Pollard claimed that several of the main complainants “are telling falsehoods and so is Fred Heintz. I have boxed Fred’s ears, and I smacked him on the proper place several times, but never without good cause…Yes it has been a rule in this company to cut a girl’s hair off…” He also said that he had done the right thing by paying salaries to some parents in advance and he had also paid for some of the children’s clothes.

But the Pollard tour was already collapsing by that time, and within a matter of weeks almost all the performers announced they wanted to go home, and more dramatically still, members of the Madras Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children had become involved and had removed the children from Pollard’s care.[21]The Daily News (WA) 9 March, 1910, P7, Via National Library of Australia’s Trove

Above: The company, without Leah, Arthur Pollard or Irene Finlay, on Sunday 26 February 1910, two days after breaking up, photographed on the estate of Mr Scovell, near Bangalore. [22]The Leader, 20 April, 1910. Via the State Library of Victoria

By April 1910, Australian newspapers were regularly reporting all of the claims and counter claims that had been made in the Madras High Court.[23]The West Australian (WA) 21 Apr 1910, P3, via National Library of Australia’s Trove The Melbourne Herald cited a letter from Alice Cartlege to her mother which gave a 12 year old’s simple but indignant perspective: “Dearest Mother, A few lines to tell you everything at last… The company is broken up. Mr Pollard and — (a member of the company) are getting away to America. Pollard has been a pig to us…”[24]The Herald (Vic) 23 Mar 1910, P6, via National Library of Australia’s Trove It seems Arthur Pollard, unwilling to face a court outcome, then made a run for French Pondicherry, taking with him the proceeds of the performances to date, and Irene Finlay, but abandoning the rest of his charges in the process.[25]Barrier Miner (Broken Hill, NSW), 29 Apr 1910, P2, via National Library of Australia’s Trove A few months later, in May 1910, the child performers were returned home to Melbourne on the SS Scharnhorst and the French steamer SS CaledonianThe disastrous Pollard tour of 1909 was over.[26]The Herald (Vic.) 17 May 1910, P5, via National Library of Australia’s Trove

There was a consequence at the highest level. The Australian Emigration Act of 1910, written and passed by Federal parliament within 10 months of the tour, prohibited any child being taken out of Australia to perform “theatrical, operatic or other work.” The bad publicity brought the days of Pollard’s extended overseas tours for child actors to an end. But while the Pollard’s popular reputation had been damaged, it was not so badly that Nellie Chester could not run a final North American tour in 1912, this time with older players.

Leah after Pollards

Leah Leichner appeared again on the Australian stage in early March 1910. She made one short public comment to correct details of events of the tour – the motor car incident. It had been a group of Pollard performers in the car going for a picnic, not just her. And it was she and her family who had arranged her return to Australia, not Pollard. In fact, her stepfather had sought advice from the well known Melbourne lawyer and former state premier, Sir George Turner, about her situation, and it was with his encouragement that she was returned home.[27]The Age (Vic) 25 Apr 1910, P9 Via National Library of Australia’s Trove

Leah continued performing in Australia until she married actor-turned electrician Frederick Johnstone, in 1914.[28]Victoria, Births Deaths & Marriages Leah Leichner and Frederick Johnstone Marriage certificate, 22 August 1914, 8536 /1914 Johnstone joined the Army in late 1915, in the great surge of enlistments following the Australian landings at Gallipoli. Leah appears to have taken over parenting Claude by this time – and her mother Minnie and step-father Isaac both died in 1916.

Unfortunately, Fred Johnstone launched divorce proceedings against Leah in 1918. In a detailed divorce case, he complained she had been living with another man, while he was away in Europe, pretending he had been killed at Gallipoli. After his discharge as medically unfit in early 1918, he made strenuous attempts to tail Leah and find the co-respondent – unusual steps even for the time. Leah refused to take Johnstone’s complaint seriously or to defend herself in court, and a divorce was finally granted in 1920. Reading the divorce documents today one gains the impression she was determined not to be intimidated by the process.[29]Museums of History, NSW, NRS-13495-13-[13/12942]-628/1918 | Divorce papers Frederick Alexander Johnstone – Leah Constance Johnstone, Maurice Costello

Above: Leah and Fred Johnstone in 1915, at the time he joined the AIF. [30]Johnstone divorce papers, Museum of History, NSW. (Formerly NSW Archives)

Leah’s movements after the divorce are less clear, but there is compelling evidence that in the early 1920s she took Claude and moved to Calcutta, India. What her circumstances were, is still not clear.

Belle Leichner c 1920
“Bella Lichner”, Leah’s step sister is known to have performed at the Tivoli in Adelaide in the early 1920s. [31]Via the National Library of Australia. Prompt Collection Scrapbook

In the post-war period her sister Bella also appeared as a performer in Australia. In 1925, Bella was performing with Anona Winn in the London Musical Comedy Company in Calcutta.[32]The Times of India, 25 Nov, 1925, P7, ProQuest Historical Newspapers The company’s repertoire included the ever familiar and popular light operas that Pollards had once performed. By 1928, Bella was entertaining expats in a revue at Shanghai’s Little Club, situated just near the Nanjing Road.[33]The China Press, 5 June, 1928, P3, ProQuest Historical Newspapers It was while in Shanghai that Bella married Joseph Vella, an engineer.

Leah Constance Hawkett in Hong Kong

There is no evidence Leah returned to the stage at any time, but by the 1930s she had found a home in Hong Kong, and married James Henry Hawkett, a Royal Navy port official.[34]His formal title was Pier Master. In February 1940 James was awarded a Humane Society medal for saving three Chinese from drowning off Stonecutter’s Island, Hong Kong Leah was now known to all as “Connie,” a nickname apparently based on her adopted middle name of Constance.[35]Her middle name at birth had been Caroline

Left – James Hawkett in 1939. Right Leah, now known to all as “Connie” Hawkett late in life. Other surviving photos from this era show her broad smile. Private Collection.

Despite a significant age difference with James – she was 14 years his senior – the couple enjoyed a happy and lasting relationship.

Unfortunately, their happy life was interrupted for three years and eight months, following the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong in December 1941. Leah’s friend Mabel Redwood (1895-1975) wrote her memoirs of internment in Hong Kong under Japanese occupation, and her book It Was Like This opens with a joke made by ‘Connie,’ “an irrepressible Australian.” The women were both in the Auxiliary Nursing Service (ANS), working in a casualty clearing station set up in the Hong Kong Jockey Club. On Christmas Eve 1941, Mabel recounted that as the 24 British nurses crawled into their cold camp beds, ‘Connie’ joked “Whose going to hang up their stockings tonight?Connie’s joke helped, for we felt the situation could hardly have been grimmer.” [36]Mabel Winifred Redwood (2003) It was like this, P1, ISIS Books Both Leah and James survived Japanese internment.

Leah Constance Hawkett died in Hong Kong in May 1957. Her well constructed and cared for grave in Hong Kong cemetery speaks of great affection from James Hawkett, who also arranged for a photo of a smiling Leah to be placed on the headstone. It has faded in the Hong Kong climate, but can still be seen at her Find a Grave entry, here. James Hawkett remarried and raised three children. He died in England in 1999, but a family member has told this writer that James regularly visited her grave whilst living in Hong Kong.

What happened to everyone else

  • Arthur Pollard was 37 when he eloped with 18 year old Irene, abandoning the Pollard troupe, and his wife Mary and two children in Charters Towers, Queensland. He and Irene ran cinemas and lived as man and wife in southern England before moving to New Zealand in the early 1920s. He married Irene in 1925. More on their professional and personal lives can be found here. He died in New Zealand in 1940. Irene Pollard died in 1962.
  • Some of the children continued performing after the Arthur Pollard tour. Florrie Allen, the youngest of Arthur Pollard’s tour, continued performing on stage in Australia and then turned to running her own dancing school. Elsie Morris had some success with a male impersonation act, while Freddie Heintz moved to the US and attempted a stage career – without much success, probably because his brother Johnnie had given up the stage and become a baker. Like Johnnie, most of the young Pollard’s performers disappeared from the historical record.

NOTE 1 – The participants on Arthur Pollard’s Tour

  • While making their way home in April 1910, Truth newspaper listed some of the members of this company. It is reproduced here to give some idea of the group’s strong inner suburban Melbourne profile. However, the list is missing some names, including Leah Leichner’s and Irene Finlay’s, and the author has corrected some spellings.[37] Truth (WA) 2 Apr 1910, P8, Via National Library of Australia’s Trove
    • Alma Young, 12 years, 28 Fitzroy Street, Fitzroy;
    • Ruby Ford, 17 years, 368 Cardigan Street. Carlton;
      [Note – Officially, Ruby was the troupe’s teacher.
      Leah’s maternal grandmother Sarah Grant lived a few doors away at 324 Cardigan St]
    • Florrie Allen, 8 years, 437 Cardigan Street, Carlton;
    • Rita Bennett, 12 years, 58 Osborne Street, South Yarra:
    • Dora Isaacs, 16 years, 280 Lygon Street, Carlton;
    • Millie 17 years, Rose 15 years, Clara 12 years, McGorlick, 81 Rokeby Street, Collingwood;
    • Lottie Parry, 9 years, 74 Rupert Street, Collingwood;
    • Violet Jones, 15 years, “Waratah,” 26 Moore Street, South Yarra;
    • Ella 13 years, Pat 12 years, Nugent, 95 Rowena Parade, Richmond;
    • Elsie Morris, 13 years, 5 Greeves Street, Fitzroy;
    • Ethel 14 years, Nellie 18 years, Naylor, c/o Lucas’s Cafe, Swanston Street, Melbourne;
    • Ivy Ferguson, 12 years, 104 Grey Street, East Melbourne;
    • Alice Cartlege, 15 years, 322 Lygon Street, Carlton;
    • Willie Howard, 11 years, 46 King William Street, Fitzroy;
    • Mary [Myra] Finlay, 16 years, Sydney;
      [Note – Not listed here but also on tour was Myra’s older sister Nellie Quealy as well as Irene]
    • Fred and John Heintz, 14 years, 84 Kerr Street Fitzroy
    • Charlie, 13 years, LeslieDonaghey, 14 years, Sydney,
    • Arthur Austin [no address]
    • Walter Byrne [no address]
Florrie Allen performing after the tour.[38]Table Talk (Melb) 24 Nov, 1910 via State Library of Victoria She had complained that Arthur Pollard had pushed her under a seat on a train to avoid having to pay for her ticket. [39]The Bendigo Independent (Vic)18 May 1910
P6 via National Library of Australia’s Trove

Nick Murphy
Revised January 2023

Thanks

  • To John and Joan Grant of Brisbane, for their kind assistance.
    John, who is Leah’s grandson, was able to confirm many details.
  • University of Washington Special Collections, for permission to use their photos from the J Willis Sayre Collection of Theatrical Photos.
  • Australian Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne. Their collection – donated by Irene Goulding in the 1980s, is invaluable, and to Claudia Funder, Research Service Coordinator,  Arts Centre Melbourne
  • To Jean Ritsema, my friend in Michigan, for her ongoing research efforts in North America..

Further Reading

Museums of History, New South Wales.

  • NSW State Archives, Johnstone Divorce papers

Gwulo Old Hong Kong History Site

Text

Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University

Federal Register of Legislation (Australia)

Vancouver As It Was: A Photo-Historical Journey

This site has been selected for archiving and preservation in the National Library of Australia’s Pandora archive

Footnotes

Footnotes
1 Enlargement of photo from Johnstone divorce papers. Museum of History, NSW, Formerly NSW Archives
2 Victoria, Births Deaths & Marriages Leah Cohen birth certificate, 9 July 1900, 22895 / 1890
3 See Gerry Brody (24 May 2021) Shonky celebrants and wonky marriages ….. Holt’s matrimonial agency and the Free Christian Church at the State Library of Victoria Blog
4 Victoria, Births Deaths & Marriages Leichner and Grant Marriage certificate, 22 December 1900, 8251 / 1900
5 Victoria, Births Deaths & Marriages Bella Leichner birth certificate, 9 January 1901, 5176 / 1901
6 Robert Murray (2020) The Confident Years, Australia in the 1920s. P16. Australian Scholarly Publishing
7 The Age, 16 Feb, 1907. Via the National Library of Australia’s Trove
8 Irene Smith nee Goulding interview. Interviewed by Sally Dawes in 1985. Australian Performing Arts Collection, Melbourne
9 Even after Frank’s death from smallpox while on tour in Calcutta in 1897, Alf and Irene Goulding kept performing with Pollards
10 Extracts from a program in the author’s collection.
11 Gillian Arrighi, The Controversial “Case of the Opera Children in the East”: Political conflict between popular demand for child actors and modernizing cultural policy on the child”. Theatre Journal 69, (2017) John Hopkins University Press
12 This was reported in North America at the time – see for example The Chicago Tribune, 19 May 1902, P12 (a highly fanciful account but one that acknowledges the concept of child performers to be repugnant to Americans) and The Montreal Star, 2 Sept 1905, P1
13 The Gadfly (SA), 27 Nov 1907, P8, via National Library of Australia’s Trove
14 Sydney Morning Herald , 17 October, 1908 Via Newspapers.com
15 Victoria, Births Deaths & Marriages Claude Leichner birth certificate, 18 May 1909, 12829 /1909
16 Leader (Vic) 21 May 1910, P24, via State Library of Victoria
17 The Telegraph (Qld.) 17 Apr 1909, P8, via National Library of Australia’s Trove
18 The Daily Telegraph (Syd) 7 July 1909, P12, via National Library of Australia’s Trove
19 The West Australian (WA) 21 Apr 1910, P3, Via National Library of Australia’s Trove
20 The Daily News (WA) 9 Mar 1910, P7, Via National Library of Australia’s Trove
21 The Daily News (WA) 9 March, 1910, P7, Via National Library of Australia’s Trove
22 The Leader, 20 April, 1910. Via the State Library of Victoria
23 The West Australian (WA) 21 Apr 1910, P3, via National Library of Australia’s Trove
24 The Herald (Vic) 23 Mar 1910, P6, via National Library of Australia’s Trove
25 Barrier Miner (Broken Hill, NSW), 29 Apr 1910, P2, via National Library of Australia’s Trove
26 The Herald (Vic.) 17 May 1910, P5, via National Library of Australia’s Trove
27 The Age (Vic) 25 Apr 1910, P9 Via National Library of Australia’s Trove
28 Victoria, Births Deaths & Marriages Leah Leichner and Frederick Johnstone Marriage certificate, 22 August 1914, 8536 /1914
29 Museums of History, NSW, NRS-13495-13-[13/12942]-628/1918 | Divorce papers Frederick Alexander Johnstone – Leah Constance Johnstone, Maurice Costello
30 Johnstone divorce papers, Museum of History, NSW. (Formerly NSW Archives)
31 Via the National Library of Australia. Prompt Collection Scrapbook
32 The Times of India, 25 Nov, 1925, P7, ProQuest Historical Newspapers
33 The China Press, 5 June, 1928, P3, ProQuest Historical Newspapers
34 His formal title was Pier Master. In February 1940 James was awarded a Humane Society medal for saving three Chinese from drowning off Stonecutter’s Island, Hong Kong
35 Her middle name at birth had been Caroline
36 Mabel Winifred Redwood (2003) It was like this, P1, ISIS Books
37 Truth (WA) 2 Apr 1910, P8, Via National Library of Australia’s Trove
38 Table Talk (Melb) 24 Nov, 1910 via State Library of Victoria
39 The Bendigo Independent (Vic)18 May 1910
P6 via National Library of Australia’s Trove

Daphne Pollard (1891-1978) – I had to know 36 operas!

Above and below: Daphne Pollard inscribed this photo to former Pollards performer Willie Thomas and his brother Albert, while they were on leave in London from fighting in France, in 1918. Daphne was appearing in Albert De Courville‘s review, Box o’ Tricks. It was a joyful reunion Thomas recalled. Courtesy Robert Maynard.

The author’s more recent (2022) article on Daphne Pollard can be read here at Theatre Heritage Australia online


The 5 second version
Born Daphne Trott in Fitzroy, Victoria, Australia, 19 October 1891, she died in Los Angeles, California, USA on 22 February 1978. A child performer with the Pollard’s Lilliputian Opera Company from about 1900 to 1907, she travelled through South East Asia, Canada and the United States on at least four extended tours. She moved permanently to the US in 1907, becoming a very popular variety and comedy performer on stage in the US and Britain in her own right. She was busy appearing in films in Hollywood quite late in her career – 1927-36.
Most of her family moved to the US with her in 1908. She never performed in Melbourne, Australia – her place of birth. Her sister Ivy also performed with Pollards, also briefly in the US before retiring in 1908.

The talented actress Daphne Pollard was born Daphne Trott at 56 Kerr Street, Fitzroy, Melbourne, in October 1891 to Walter Trott and Annie nee Daniels. She was one of those rare gifts to the stage – she could sing and dance and became an expert in slapstick – the physical comedy so popular at the start of the twentieth century. Standing a little over 1.40 metres tall (or 4 foot eight and a half inches) as an adult, she was on stage from the age from an early age. She was a good-looking child performer, with great confidence for her age. She was to become the star attraction of the Pollard’s Lilliputian Opera Company, an Australian troupe (or more accurately – series of troupes) featuring talented children usually from the inner Melbourne suburbs of Fitzroy and Collingwood, who took on the adult roles in musical comedies. However, Gillian Arrighi has reminded us that the musical comedies performed by Pollard’s, such as their perennial favourite, A Gaiety Girl, were suggestive, with plots preoccupied with sexual relationships – or “playful gambolling on the verge of indecency” as Edwardian theatre critic William Archer wrote (see Arrighi p.154).

Daphne photographed in Shanghai
Photo attributed to Ying Cheong, a photographer and painter in Canton Road Shanghai, Source -National library of Australia.
Daphne_Pollard_and_Leah_Lirchner_in__The_Geisha__(SAYRE_13291)
Daphne Pollard and Leah Leichner re-creating a scene from The Geisha. Likely by Ying Cheong, Shanghai Courtesy University of Washington, Special Collections, JWS24603.

As an example, consider the lyrics of the song “Baby Baby” from The Lady Slavey:
“Lovers are silly young things you know and I am as silly as any.
I’ve worn two engagement rings you know, but two, you’ll agree are not many”

It is interesting to reflect on the impact of a childhood spent growing up “on stage” – as Daphne and some of the Pollard’s children experienced. There is little evidence to help us – although Willie Thomas’ and Leah Leichner’s stories may contain some clues. Daphne spoke briefly about the experience shortly after she married in 1911, when she told the Los Angeles Herald  “I’m off for good now; no more acting for me. I’ve had enough. Twelve years on the stage is really long enough, and It’s not my fault that I had all that twelve years before I was 20 years of age. I used to like it, of course, and when I was a kiddie and we traveled about a lot and had nice times with the other children. It was lots of fun, but for two years now I have known that this glamour was gone and I have wanted to leave.” But in spite of these sentiments, she did not leave the stage.

In time, Daphne Trott was to become an outstanding vaudevillian in her own right. The headline photo on the top of this page shows her in 1920, at the height of her popularity on the London stage. Like Harry Fraser (Snub Pollard), she took the stage name Pollard, partly as convenience but also because many of the company performers liked to maintain the pretence of belonging to a family troupe. Later in careers it was a familiar and easy remembrance of times past.

In Melbourne, Daphne Trott’s father Walter and an uncle ran a furniture upholstery and French polishing business, although the Melbourne depression of the 1890s hit the family’s fortunes hard. We don’t know what attracted Daphne to the stage – perhaps as a child she saw other well-known Fitzroy girls, like Florrie Forde, perform at the Melbourne Opera House or the Theatre Royal. Daphne joined Pollard’s troupe in about 1900, with older sisters Ivy and Myrtle. The family lived in nearby, later moving to a similarly modest dwelling at 96 King William Street, Fitzroy and finally to another cottage at 45 Westbank Terrace in Richmond.

About the time of Daphne’s departure for the US, the Trott family business operated on the corner of King William St and Brunswick St, Fitzroy (site now occupied by the orange and white supermarket in the distance). Author’s Collection. 
54-56 Kerr St Fitzroy
56 Kerr St, Fitzroy, was listed as Daphne Trott’s October 1891 birthplace and the family home for most of the 1890s. It is hard to believe this very modest single story terrace house had room for a baby and five older siblings! Only a few houses away in this street lived the Heintz family, whose twin boys Freddie and Johnnie also travelled on tour with Daphne.

In June 1900 Daphne and two older sisters Hilda and Ivy joined a Pollard Lilliputian Opera Company tour through South East Asia – Singapore, Penang, Rangoon and Calcutta. They followed this with another tour, departing in early September 1901 – this time to include Canada and the United States. 

Only a few days before Daphne’s departure on her second tour, the Trott’s much loved youngest child, four year old Wally, died as a result of typhoid fever. He had lingered in the Children’s Hospital for several weeks. (The story that he broke his neck doing somersaults on the bed on the eve of Daphne’s departure seems to be just that, another showbiz story). Although Wally’s headstone lies broken and forgotten at Kew cemetery, the surviving inscription reveals the depth of the family’s grief. It must have taken great strength for Daphne and her sisters to leave Australia. Twelve months later, in October 1902, the company arrived home, having won positive reviews up and down the North American west coast.

Wally Trott
So dearly loved, so deeply mourned.”  Wally Trott’s headstone at Kew Cemetery. Author’s Collection.

Performing for the Pollard opera companies was not for the faint-hearted. Their Australasian and overseas tours involved rigorous preparatory training and took child performers away from home for months, sometimes a year or more. The company were on yet another tour between January 1903 and April 1904.

In May 1904, before departing yet again, an effort by Ernest Wolffe, the Pollard’s ex-musical director, to entice the child performers away to form a new breakaway group, led to a messy court case in Melbourne’s Supreme Court. It also revealed some of the Company’s workings – that the parents of Pollard’s child performers would be paid via a trust fund – generally 10 shillings a month in the first 6 months, followed by £1 per month thereafter. Charles Pollard and Nellie Chester provided a tutor and paid for all the travel costs and accommodation. The child performers made pocket money by selling autographed souvenir photos after each show. Operating outside Australia, laws regarding education did not apply.

Not withstanding his offers of higher pay, Wolffe’s efforts failed. The court apparently found the children’s existing contracts with Pollard’s were still valid. Daphne and Ivy Trott resumed their arrangements with the company. Following a short season in July – September 1904, testing and refining their repertoire for Queensland audiences, the Pollard Lilliputians arrived in North America in March 1905. Their stops along the way had included 5 months performing for enthusiastic colonial audiences in the “Far East”, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Japan.

Pollard’s advertising-already picking out its most popular stars during its third tour of North America. The Calgary Herald, 3 January 1906 via Newspapers.com

One surviving photo from this tour shows some of the performers and supervising adults sitting on the steps of the Badminton hotel in Vancouver. At the front, sitting slightly apart and wearing a large hat, is young Daphne, her poise and confidence unmistakable. Her 17 year old sister Ivy, an accomplished performer who also performed on this tour, stands on the left at the back. Also in the back row stand Alf Goulding and Harry Fraser – both of whom, like Daphne, would eventually find their way to Hollywood.

Ivy and Daphne c 1905
Above:  Ivy Trott (14) and Daphne Trott or Pollard (11) in Vancouver in c1901-2. Enlarged from a group photo via Vancouver As It Was: A Photo-Historical Journey and used with their kind permission.

Program notes from performances in Montreal, Canada in 1905 reveal a typical Pollard’s schedule, which included six different popular musical comedies delivered across a week of performances – A Runaway Girl; The Belle of New York; A Gaiety Girl; The Geisha; HMS Pinafore and The Lady Slavey. It was no leisurely tour. Years later Daphne told a reporter;
“As a child actress in the Pollard Lilliputian Opera Company… I had to know thirty six operas by heart. (In) one I played the part of an old sheriff with side-whiskers, although I was only twelve at the time. One of the side-whiskers came off before the audience, but that, of course, made it all the funnier. We were all children, but we included grand opera in our repertoire.”

Part of a Pollard program from Montreal during their marathon 1904-07 North American tour. The ages are obviously wrong. Author’s Collection.

In February 1907, the Pollard marathon two + year tour finally ended, and most of the Company returned home on the SS Moana. It must have become obvious by this time that Daphne’s future was not just performing with Pollard’s. By mid-1907, Daphne and Ivy had accepted contracts with Frank W. Healy’s San Francisco Opera Company and they began performances later that year. For the next nine years Daphne performed in vaudeville throughout the United States, more or less continuously, developing her skills and attracting widespread acclaim. (Ivy married and left the stage in 1908.)

In 1908, the Trott parents and all but one of Daphne’s siblings followed her to North America, settling permanently in Seattle. It was a dramatic move, one that must have taken some deliberation by the whole family. And now, aged 19, Daphne felt more confident than ever to express her views. In April 1910 she announced that she supported a woman’s right to vote – a right enjoyed by most women in her native Australia but not yet granted to women in the United States. “Votes for Women. I’m going to march in the streets and carry a banner” she told a Seattle Star journalist. Her renown and popularity was such that she was chosen as Seattle’s first ever Queen of the Golden Potlatch Festival (now known as the Seafair Festival) the following year. Soon after, in a joyful and rather theatrical elopement, she married journalist Ellington Strother Bunch.

Above: Daphne Pollard c1915, at the time she appeared in The Passing Show of 1915. Author’s collection.

If Daphne really did intend to retire after her 1911 marriage, she changed her mind soon after. By mid – 1916, Daphne was a seasoned enough performer to know the ways audiences in different US cities responded. She was also deeply immersed in her stagecraft and most unusually for the time, she was prepared to pause and publicly reflect on it. In a lengthy expose of the art of a typical review performance, for The Green Book Magazine, she wrote;

“The principal first out does her scene, usually not an important one so early in the evening, and exits after a song or dance number, marking the time for applause. The audience speaks then, and—believe me—there is not one of us who has not learned to judge its tone…If the applause is liberal and pretty much from all parts of the house, hopes soar high…

Next out may be the second comedian. He notches up the pace, sets the whole show a pitch higher and works like a fiend, all the time trying to gauge results and get bearings… By the time the first act is on its feet, we’ve got that audience so well sized up that each of us knows to a nicety the impression he or she will make.”


Pollard
Program for Albert De Courville’s “Zig-Zag!” 1917. Author’s Collection.
Zig Zag France023
Program for De Courville’s 1917 Folies Bergere production, showing Shirley Kellogg on the cover. It also starred Daphne. The Australian war memorial holds an identical program, except with Daphne Pollard on the cover. Author’s collection.

Following the success of another review The Passing Show of 1915 and at the height of the Great War, she traveled to London. There she appeared in a string of very popular revues at the Hippodrome for Albert De Courville. Zig-Zag! opened in January 1917 and was followed by Box o’ Tricks in 1918. (De Courville’s company also performed at the Folies-Bergere in Paris.) In 1919 she appeared in Joy Bells with another experienced Australian-born, US-based comedian, Leon Errol in the cast. In all, she spent almost ten years in London, taking a break for the birth of her only child – Ellington Walter Bunch in 1922 and several returns to New York, including one to appear in the Greenwich Village Follies in late 1923. Daphne Pollard is jointly credited as composer of several of the pieces performed in these shows. Reviews of her work continued to be enthusiastic and she easily managed both US and British cultural contexts. Friend Stan Laurel recalled one of her stage acts, as a “Cockney dame” (‘Arriet ‘Emmingway from Huntershire County “Hingland”), who struggled to manage the transition to living in the US. This character was later recycled as the theme of the short films America or Bust (1930) and Help wanted, Female (1931).

Filmstars002
London Sunday Pictorial. 25 February 1917. Daphne Pollard is in the centre. Author’s collection

By 1927 Daphne Pollard had been active on stage for thirty years, almost continuously, when Mack Sennett finally convinced her to appear in Hollywood films. Sennett had apparently made a few approaches to her earlier in her career. It’s quite likely that the astute Daphne Pollard also saw vaudeville and music theatre as under siege from the booming cinema industry, and decided to jump ship for purely practical reasons. Her surviving movies often mislead the casual reader today to think these were the sum of her working life. In fact, her 60 Hollywood films, made for Sennett and later RKO and then Universal were merely a footnote – most of them made in a period of just five years.

Sennett was a prolific producer, director and actor, who churned out over 1400 titles during his career. His fondness for slapstick and physical comedy was firmly rooted in vaudeville and of course, for him, Daphne Pollard was another actress trained in this tradition. One of Sennett’s former editors, William Hornbeck, interviewed by writer Kevin Brownlow years later, commented on how unsophisticated Sennett’s films often were, even for the time. Many of the films Daphne appeared in were made during the transition of silent to sound films, and as filmmakers like Sennett struggled to adapt to what worked in this new dimension, the humour often fell flat. And seen today, audiences may find the humour tasteless and some of the story-lines weak. The blackface ending to Two Smoked Hams (1934) and the burning building rescue in His First Flame (1935) are two obvious examples of seriously outdated humour.

DP1916
Above- Daphne Pollard as an everyday adult, on a passport application, in about 1916. Via Ancestry, via US National Archives 

Daphne Pollard’s first film for Sennett was The Girl from Everywhere (1927), a 20 minute comedy with Carole Lombard. She appeared in several more with Lombard, including Run Girl, Run and The Campus Carmen, both made in 1928. Several of these were directed by her friend and one time neighbour from inner Melbourne, and an old Pollard Lilliputian Opera associate, Alf Goulding.

As a consequence of Sennett’s prolific approach, her roles over the next few years were varied and while she sometimes appeared as one of the leading players, character roles, especially the fussy mother or the English servant, had become her stock in trade. In the otherwise dull 1930 sound musical Bright Lights, Daphne and Tom Dugan provide the comic relief playing a feuding married couple. In 1931’s The Lady Refuses she plays the eccentric maid.

Daphne sings!

This is Daphne singing a comic song about being “in the market” (meaning the stock market) in Mack Sennett’s Bulls and Bears (1930).

Here she is the drunken Aunt Agnes in Sennett’s Honeymoon Zeppelin (1930).


Only occasionally in her films do we see flashes of her skills as an extraordinarily energetic and highly experienced vaudeville performer– as when she demonstrates her admirable comic timing by snapping her teeth at Oliver Hardy in Thicker Than Water in 1935, or when she dances for the leading juveniles with such confidence and ease in Kid Dynamite made in 1943. But we can see her skills at their best when she takes the coquette role, one she had performed so often on the stage, wooing fireman “Smokey Mo” (Shemp Howard) in His First Flame, made in 1935. When she throws her handkerchief in front of him to gain his attention, and then wrestles him onto a park bench, it is a sequence straight from the vaudeville tradition. “I love you, I love you, I love you” she says aggressively, with her foot in Howard’s face.

his first flame
Above: Screen grab of Daphne Pollard and Shemp Howard in His First Flame (1935). Author’s collection. Howard’s pre-3 Stooges films are currently available to collectors on DVD.

Her well known straight role, as Oliver Hardy’s shrewish wife in the Hal Roach studio films Our Relations and Thicker than Water marked the end of her intensive Hollywood career. When she appeared in her last brief and un-credited role in Laurel and Hardy’s very silly The Dancing Masters, in 1943, she had been performing for 46 years.

She died in Los Angeles in 1978, her passing reported in the US but completely unnoticed in Australia. In time, the usual nonsense was written about her by eager fans – that she was sister of “Snub Pollard” or that her “Australian accent” got in the way of a career in sound films. Even the most perfunctory research shows neither proposition to be true.

Back home in Australia, Daphne’s older sister Hilda, having married Percy Wood, a Melbourne plumber, enjoyed a happy but childless marriage. She spent her last years living a few hundred metres from the Hoyts Merri Theatre in North Fitzroy, where presumably, she went to watch her sister’s movies. The descendants of Daphne Trott and her family now all live in the US.

Daphne Pollard the Passing Show
Above: Daphne with George Munroe in The Passing Show of 1915. The Pittsburg Press, 27 June 1915. Via Newspapers.com.

What sort of person was she? Unfortunately we only have sketchy evidence to make a conclusion. Historian Bill Egan has pointed out to this writer that Daphne led a threatened walkout when African-American performer Florence Mills shared the stage and the advertising for the Greenwich Village Follies in New York in late 1923. It is difficult to see this as anything other than professional jealousy and race prejudice, a point that was made even at the time. 

Stan Laurel’s correspondence seems to suggest she was a feisty and forceful personality. Yet we also know that she maintained an affection for all her old friends into later life. When Teddy McNamara died of pneumonia in Hollywood in 1928, she attended his funeral with all the old Pollard Company performers. Willie Thomas, another performer from Pollard’s caught up with her in London in 1918, while he was on leave from the Australian forces on the Western Front. Meeting her backstage at the London Hippodrome was, Willie always said, a joyful reunion.

Nick Murphy,
Updated June 2021


Note 1: The origin of the story that the “Emperor of China” wanted to buy her apparently has its origins in the following story. Zhang Zhidong was a high ranking Chinese official in the Qing Dynasty. The offensive comment attributed to Daphne may be true but as the contemporary journalist noted, the entire story is likely an exaggeration.

hong kong daily press daphne pollard story 1905 05 27
Hong Kong Daily Press, May 27, 1905. Via Hong Kong Public Library Multimedia System

References:

Special Thanks

Collections

  • Australian Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne.
  • Public Record Office, Melbourne. Supreme Court Civil cases 1904/329 Pollard and Chester v Wolffe.

Publications

  • Gillian Arrighi (2017) The Controversial “Case of the Opera Children in the East”: Political Conflict between Popular Demand for Child Actors and Modernizing Cultural Policy on the Child.
    “Theatre Journal” No 69, 2017. Johns Hopkins University Press.
  • Peter Downes (2002) The Pollards, a family and its child and adult opera companies in New Zealand and Australia, 1880-1910. Steele Roberts, New Zealand.
  • Bill Egan (2004) Florence Mills : Harlem jazz queen. Scarecrow Press.
  • Kirsty Murray (2010) “India Dark.” Allen & Unwin Australia.
    See also https://insideadog.com.au/blog/incredible-india (India Dark is a fictional retelling of the disastrous Pollard tour of India in 1909 – but none of the Trott children performed in this)
  • Brent Walker (2013) “Mack Sennett’s Fun Factory: A History and Filmography of his Studio and His Keystone and Mack Sennett Comedies, with Biographies of Players and Personnel” McFarland & Co
  • Various (1888) “Victoria and its Metropolis, Past and Present. The Colony and its people in 1888.” Volume 11B. McCarron Bird and Co, Melbourne. P. 621. (See Trott family)
  • Trav S.D (Donald Travis Stewart), (2006) No Applause – Just throw Money. The book that made Vaudeville Famous. Faber and Faber, New York
  • Daphne Pollard 1916.Rehearsing the Audience”, The Green Book magazine, Pages 737-740
  • Kevin Brownlow (1968) The Parade’s Gone By… University of California Press.
  • Angela Woollacott (2001) To Try her Fortune in London. Oxford University Press.

Websites

Original US archival documents sourced from

National Library of Australia – Trove Newspaper Collection

  • The Age, 13 July 1901, P2 Advertising.
  • The Register, 4 July 1908, “Dramatic Notes”. Page 10
  • The World’s News, 4 Dec 1920, “Daphne Pollard”. Page 5

Newspapers.com

  • The San Francisco Call, 4 March 1906, P23. “Australian children…”
  • Los Angeles Herald, 30 March 1906, P9 “Little actress has ambition…”
  • Calgary Herald (Canada) 5 Aug 1907, P5 “Daphne and Ivy back”
  • Los Angeles Herald, 2 Sept 1907. P3 “Quintette of Principals from San Francisco Opera Co…”
  • The Winnipeg Tribune (Canada) 17 Dec 1906, P8 “Music and Drama”
  • The Seattle Star, 29 April, 1910. P14 “Marion Lowe has a… talk with tiny Daphne Pollard”.
  • The Lincoln Sunday Star, 11 July 1915. P7. “In the New York Theatres”
  • The Seattle Star, 6 June 1916, P.1
  • Pittsburg Courier, 3 Nov 1923. “White actress jealous of success of Florence Mills…”

Hong Kong Public Library Multimedia System

  • Hong Kong Daily Press, May 27, 1905. “Chang Chi-Tung and Daphne Pollard”

California Digital Newspaper Collection

  • Los Angeles Herald, Volume XXXVII, Number 310, 7 August 1911

British Library Newspaper Archive

  • The Bystander, 31 January 1917. P203, “Hands across the sea”.
  • The Graphic, 10 March, 1917. P292 “Zig Zag”
  • The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, 24 March 1917, P90. “Round The theatres”
  • The Sketch, 17 April 1918. P64-65. “Lost to the Grenadiers…”
  • The Era, 20 April 1921. P13. “Why I like to look ugly”
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