Sarah A reputation as a leading lady
Two hundred and forty years ago this week one of Victorian Bristol’s most remarkable women was born. Not only was Sarah Macready an accomplished actress, but she had a shrewd business head as well. And she would need it for the challenges she overcame
IN the early 19th century, the profession of actress was not a respectable one, and Sarah Desmond would indeed have horrified the middle classes.
Actresses were regarded as little better than prostitutes, and indeed some were. But that was hardly surprising given that the theatre was not exactly a secure career option for anyone.
Sarah ended her days living in some comfort; she appears in the 1851 census living at a salubrious address in Bath with three servants in the household.
Her son-in-law would go on to make theatre-going in Bristol a reputable pastime for the middle classes.
When she died, the local papers were effusive in their praise for her, particularly her concern for the welfare of her actors and stagehands. She had successfully managed the Bristol Theatre Royal through some of the lowest fortunes in its history, and at the end of a bad week she would see to it that everyone was paid, even if that meant going home empty-handed herself.
Her generosity was surely the consequence of her own experience. She knew exactly how hard life on the stage could be, and her life story is one of the most remarkable in all of Victorian Bristol – a period in which women were largely excluded from business life.
But then, Sarah Desmond, later Sarah Macready, was not a Victorian woman. She was really a product of the Georgian age, a time when society and morals had been somewhat more flexible.
Some things in showbiz do not change. Just as nowadays actors and TV personalities lie about their ages, or go under stage names, we’re not absolutely certain about Sarah’s origins.
She was born in Newcastle-uponTyne (or Newcastle under Lyme) on, we think, February 16 1790, and in early life went under the names Sarah Ashton Desmond and Kathleen Desmond.
We know nothing about her parents and next to nothing about her childhood.
The first we know of her career is that she was part of a company run by William Macready (often spelled M’cready), touring around the north of England, with occasional forays into Scotland as well. She joined the company at the age of 16 or earlier.
She was not married to Macready when her first child, George William Macready, was born in Dumfriesshire in 1814. Historians who have studied the matter add, that although Macready recognised the boy as his son, Macready was 45 years older than Sarah, and had already had six children by his marriage to actress Christina Birch. The oldest of them were Sarah’s age, and one, William Charles Macready, was already a famous actor in his own right.
Christina Birch had died in 1803 and Sarah Desmond and William Macready had some sort of longterm relationship that would not be formalised in marriage until 1821. The relationship also seems to have caused friction with Macready’s children. William Charles and his father had a major falling-out.
Sarah learned her trade on the job. The job required her to play a very wide range of different roles on different days and the earliest reviews we have of her performances were not good.
But she improved, and by the time the Battle of Waterloo was being fought, she had something of a reputation as a leading lady in stage adaptations of the hugely popular novels of Sir Walter Scott.
Her husband’s fortunes improved, too. Back in 1809 he had actually been declared bankrupt, but by 1820 he was leasing a number of theatres, including the Bristol Theatre Royal.
Here she was in her prime as a
African-American actor Ira Aldridge, a popular figure in Shakespearean roles, as Othello. Sarah Macready brought him to Bristol. performer, effortlessly switching between comic and tragic roles. The Bristol Mercury was lavish in its acclaim for her Lady Macbeth, saying she was even better than the great Sarah Siddons.
She had not yet settled in Bristol, though. Life remained a gruelling process of travel between engagements, as far north as Cumbria, as well as frequent forays to South Wales. Macready was leasing another theatre in Swansea, which is where her first (legitimate) child with William Macready, Mazzarina Emily Macready, was born in 1824.
William Macready died five years later, leaving everything to Sarah and their two children. The six children by his previous marriage did not get anything.
After some years of legal wrangling she took over her husband’s lease on the Bristol Theatre Royal. In time she would also take over the running of the Cardiff Theatre Royal and the Bath Theatre Royal.
The Bristol theatre would have been a challenging undertaking at the best of times, and for a woman in Victorian Bristol was even more daunting. Bristol had the reputation of a very philistine place, not at all interested in the arts or even in entertainment.
Added to this, the theatre’s neighbourhood was on its way down. Wealthy Bristolians were fleeing Queen Square and the central parts of the city for the fresh air and sunlight of Clifton.
While we tend to think of the port of Bristol in the 19th century as being in decline, the quantity of trade it handled increased hugely, partly thanks to steam-powered shipping.
With more and more goods and raw materials coming in, the waterfront areas around King Street were increasingly taken over by warehousing.
In between these places of busi
❝ When she died, the local papers were effusive in their praise for her
ness were some of the roughest pubs and slums in town.
But Sarah Macready had years of hardwon experience and commercial acumen behind her, and she turned the theatre’s fortunes round. Not every season made a profit, but many of them did well enough to put the theatre comfortably back into the black.
This was done through a programme of renovations to make the place more comfortable for actors and audiences, but her eye for a crowd-pleasing act or performers was also essential. She regularly went to the capital to see the rising stars of the London stage and engage them for Bristol.
These included the African-American actor Ira Aldridge, who was hugely popular, particularly in Shakespearian roles.
Aside from actors she was also looking for other novelties which would pull in paying punters, including acrobats and animal acts. She famously also visited the dockside pubs on King Street and Welsh Back to find sailors willing to dance hornpipes on stage.
Her reputation for management and showmanship helped when she took over running the Cardiff and Bath theatres, both of which had also been struggling.
She does not seem to have minded that her son did not follow her into acting but entered the medical profession instead. Unfortunately, he died in 1846 while serving as an army surgeon in India.
She was certainly determined that her daughter should not go onto the stage, but
Mazzarina caught the bug and in 1844 eloped with her lover, another actor named James Henry Chute.
Any anger she may have felt at this rapidly dissipated and she, her daughter and sonin-law formed a formidable partnership that dictated much of the entertainment in both Bristol and Bath. The Chutes would go on to build what became the Princes Theatre on Park Row, a very popular local institution until it was lost in the Blitz.
Sarah Macready died in March 1853 and was buried at Bristol Cathedral alongside her husband.
She “contributed so much to the amusement and … to the enlightenment and morality of the age,” said a long and effusive obituary in the Bristol Mercury.
But yet, according to some, she lives on. The Theatre Royal/Old Vic famously is haunted by a ghost long since named Sarah.
It’s often said that this is the spirit of actress Sarah Siddons, but why wouldn’t it be Sarah Macready? Siddons only appeared there a few times, while Macready was there for two decades. And furthermore Macready patrolled the place as part of her job – finding and throwing out sleeping punters and drunks before locking up for the night.
Dr Catherine Hindson of Bristol University, who has researched and written about Sarah, including her entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, wrote: “accounts of [Sarah’s] presence are restricted to the footprint of the early nineteenth-century building and are marked by her wide silk dress and the scent of lavender.”