Three months not enough for family at the heart of British theatrical life
THE people of Ormskirk were used to various travelling shows passing through the town on the way to and from Southport.
Buffalo Bill had passed through in 1904 and Wombwell’s Menagerie had been through, stopping for just a few days.
The Ormskirk Theatre had closed in April 1839 and the town’s entertainment was decidedly amateur.
In the August of 1906, a touring theatre company pulled into the fields off Hants Lane, parking their caravans next to Scarisbrick Street and erecting their portable stage.
The Pavilion Theatre Company, owned by Douglas Newell and his wife Lilla, came from three generations of a touring theatre family.
They were constantly moving, taking their performances from town to town, up and down the country.
The law demanded that the theatre could not put on a performance without first obtaining a licence from the local magistrates’ court.
Lilla had successfully applied for a three-month licence in late August but by early November, the attendance figures were still high after almost three months.
In early November of 1906, she applied to the magistrates for an extension to the three-month licence, however, the magistrates had seemingly not had such an application previously and were unsure as to whether they had the option of granting an extension.
At the suggestion of the solicitor acting for the Newell Theatre, Mr Brighouse, the gentlemen magistrates agreed to issue a new licence at a special court session after the existing licence expired. There was no objection from the Superintendent of Police, Richard Jervis, in his 57th year with the Lancashire Constabulary.
He supported the application and commented that: “I have no objection, the business has been concluded in proper lines.”
In fact Supt Jervis was quite happy for the theatre to remain open.
The theatres were cheap and warm and audiences would most likely go straight home after a performance rather than frequent the pubs.
The theatre may well have remained in Ormskirk on the Hants Lane site for at least a further year.
Patients and inmates of the workhouse would be included in free performances to secure the goodwill of the townsfolk and the authorities.
Among the company of actors there was a young man named Harold Holloway, whose parents had also been with a touring company.
Harold’s father, Thomas, had run the Holloway Portable Theatre company, based in Warwickshire, and before Harold was born in 1887 the family lost his three older sisters, Rosa aged nine, Leah, six and Catherine, three, when they were suffocated by fumes from a stove in their caravan in October 1878.
In December 1907, Harold married Ann Elizabeth Newell, actress and daughter of Douglas and Lilla.
The marriage took place in Ormskirk Parish Church. It did not last however, but Harold changed his professional name to Harold Dayne and with his brother-in-law, Tom Douglas Newell, had a successful career as a comedy sketchwriting team.
The plays staged in the travelling theatre ranged from Shakespeare to pantomime.
Douglas Newell and Frances (Lilla) Williams both came from acting families and their son, Tom Douglas Newell, born in 1890, went on to become one of the most successful theatre dames in British pantomime, appearing on the London stage with Fay Compton.
His first appearance on stage was as a baby and so he was with the troupe for the Ormskirk shows in 1906.
Tom was a nationally famous theatre comedian when, in 1935, he accidentally shot himself dead with his shotgun while on a shoot near his pub in Kirkby Lonsdale.
Lilla also acted under the stage name Lilla LeClerque, and Douglas Newell was the orchestra leader as well as theatre manager.
He was so well known for his music that he is noted for giving the first violin lesson to British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912).
Weekly takings were good, possibly £14 a week, and this helped the Newell family buy property in the Harrogate area, where they normally wintered rather than travelled, but for maybe financial reasons, audiences being consistently good, or family reasons, they seem to have planned to winter in Ormskirk in 1906/07, going to the expense and trouble of securing a second licence.
WWI brought the end of the portable theatre, with many managers going over to the bioscope, the travelling cinema shows popular in rural communities, – although Ormskirk had its own permanent picture palace at the Pavilion, Moorgate before the war.