Genealogy Chat

was there a production of uncle toms cabin in Birmingham round about 1910

(one below)

Chris :)

19 March 1910 - The Era - London, London, England

BORDESLEY PALACE, Birmingham.
Rehearsal at 1 p.m. for Chas. Harrington’s Co. in "Uncle Tom’s Cabin".

Re Charles Harrington's company - though not in 1910:


Charles Harrington’s company which presented The Octoroon as well as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, advertised in The Era (18 July 1891) seeking ‘coloured vocalists and specialities to augment’ the company. Tom was played by George Walmer, and Topsy by ‘Miss Nellie Shannon, a coloured girl’ when in Edinburgh in August 1891. In Birmingham in June 1892 Walmer was ‘himself a negro and an admirable actor … The company contains many negroes’ (Birmingham Daily Post 7 June 1892) and one month later Harrington claimed his was ‘the largest troupe of real negroes that has ever travelled in this country’ and the show was planned to tour into 1894. A Glasgow manager wanted ‘Negro Comedians, Vocalists, and Specialty Acts’ for his Cabin show in Bristol (The Era 9 January 1892).

A Cabin show in central London had a lengthy review in The Era of 5 November 1892, naming Tom as Mr M. Drew and having six women and eight men (plus Drew?) who seem to have been black. There was a vocal sextet, a banjo player, and a choral group. The reviewer thought the show would attract an audience to the lower prices seats but it was not up to date enough to meet West End standards. Other papers regarded it as stale: and some that it could not fail.

Black performers were sought – ‘coloured people and specialities for plantation scene. Sobriety indispensible’ (The Era 31 December 1892). Actress Amy Height ‘a plantation songstress’ worked in pantomime in London in the winter of 1897, and was in a Cabin show in Hammersmith, west London in 1903 when Uncle Tom was played by a man from North Carolina who said he had lived in Britain for 20 years. Josh Hybert advertised ‘real minstrels from the cotton fields’ in the Hampshire Telegraph in November 1898, advertised for a ‘few good coloured singers and dancers’ in The Era in September 1899, and had a commercial postcard taken in Falmouth in 1904 (see above) which shows four black males, one black female, two females with dark complexions, and nine whites.


http://www.jeffreygreen.co.uk/074-uncle-toms-cabin-shows

Poster from Birmingham 1910:

http://tinyurl.com/zc4cuo3