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D’Arc’s Marionettes leave their mark on Tientsin - China’s Ford of Heaven

And what a mark it was, impresario George Lambert D’Arc giving that city an early look at true motion pictures.

Peking and Tientsin Times July 1899

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Act for act, scene for scene, even the show’s name, D’Arc’s Fantoches Françaises, was the creation of George’s father, the late Lambert D’Arc of Rheims, France. He had gone to England at the invitation of the Tussaud people, but he soon took off on his own as disclosed by the ad he placed in Manchester’s press in 1863 in which he sold himself as a waxwork modeller from Paris who had worked for a year with Springthorpes of Hull. As it turned out, the ad paid off, for soon he was exhibiting his wonderfully crafted wax fi gures and exotic cosmoramas in Cheltenham, Worcester, Cardiff.

In 1865 he married Ann Jane North, the daughter of a Bath publican, and she soon began bearing him children (eight all told but losing two infancy) in whichever town they hap-pened to be showing, as can be seen in this extract from the 1881 National Census.

And when Lambert introduced his “mechanical automatical waxen fi gures in lavish Ori-ental costumes” at the Rotunda in Dublin, he was an instant success, a success that was to keep him in that city for the next four years.

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Through the 1870s, Mons D’Arc’s Marionettes enjoyed large public patronage at the exhibitions he put on across the north. Tributes poured in. To quote what was said after the Edinburgh Operetta House showing: A more pleasing entertainment for children has never previously been given in our city, and at Dundee’s Thistle Hall, The undiminished patronage over fi ve weeks says much for the popularity of Mons D’Arc’s Marionettes, and at Liverpool’s Queen’s Hall, The beautiful costumes dress the best made dolls ever to be shown, and the comic acts of the Pantomime fi ll the hall with uproarious laughter. Needing a permanent location suitable not only for his still fi gures, but also for the pre-sentation of concerts and cosmoramas, he settled on Cardiff. And so it was there in 1884, at 90 St Mary Street, that he and Ann Jane opened the doors to Mons. D’Arc’s Grand Waxworks Exhibition.

A success from the start, the Exhibition was to become a Cardff showpiece over the next four decades. And it remains very much alive in people’s memories even to this day.

His brilliant marionette shows caught on to an even wider audience when he took them across the Channel to Belgium and France. His troupe was now being acclaimed by marionette theatre pundits as one of the most outstanding ever to be seen. The world also noticed. Organizers of the 1889 Paris Exhibition invited him to participate, and agents for big producers in the USA, Australia, and South Africa sought him out with contracts to tour their country. The latter course appealed to him, and he chose South Africa. But he was going to do it with a difference; his children, all six of them: George, Emily, Nellie, Mary, Willie, and Ethel were going to take principal roles in the show’s productions.

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The 1881 Census shows blank for George’s occupation, but it is easy to guess that he was apprenticed to his father, working in wax and mastering the intricate manipulations of a puppet’s multiple strings. His fi ve siblings followed right behind, some of them even while still at school. All six had to learn the voice parts of the various acts, their voices needing to be forceful enough to reach the back of a theatre hall. And they must know all the songs and dances and musical accompaniment.

Their big test came in 1890 when they set sail for South Africa, their ship’s deck loaded with their huge cases of stage props and 350 marionettes. Happily, they earned their spurs playing for over a month to enthusiastic houses at Cape Town, after which, transported by multi-team bullock carts across the wide terrain, they were warmly received for weeks on end at Kimberly, Durban, Pietermaritzburg, Johannesburg, and Pretoria.

The tour over, they did not return to Britain, not even for a quick visit with their mother, Ann Jane, who had stayed behind in Cardiff to manage the Waxworks Exhibition. Their father had negotiated a tour of India and that’s where they performed for most of 1891. And having “done” India, they sailed directly to Australia, their arrival being reported on 8th May 1892 in The Sydney Mail’s shipping column:

“RMS Valetta, passengers from Calcutta: Mr Lambert D’Arc, Mr George and Mr William D’Arc, Misses Emily and Nellie D’Arc, Misses Mary and Ethel D’Arc.”

How must they have puffed with pride, the six siblings, to see trumpeted in Sydney’s press of their having played before Her Most Excellent Majesty Queen Victoria and their Royal Highnesses the Prince and Princess of Wales, and also that they had been specially selected to perform at Chicago’s 1893 Great World’s Fair! All the more should they give of their best when on 26 March 1892 their father opened the Australian tour with a perfor-mance at Sydney’s Royal Standard Theatre.

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But then how much must it have dismayed them when after only a fortnight of perfor-mances in Australia’s largest city, their father disclosed that he was hell bent on moving the show to Melbourne. Getting there by water was the only practical way and that meant hoisting aboard ship their enormous bullock wagon, which when packed with their 350 marionettes and props, weighed 6 tons.

And same again at Melbourne, after only three weeks at St George’s Hall under the aus-pices of the famed Coghill Brothers, and the press reviews highly favourable, their father decided to close and make for Brisbane, the start off point for a grand tour of Queen-sland’s coastal cities.

At Brisbane, just as at Sydney and Melbourne, D’Arcs’ enormous wagon caught the at-tention of the public and the press too. The siblings could hardly have missed the column in which Harry Coghill poked fun at that “most peculiar and whimsical Mons. D’Arc dragging round his monstrous and fantastically painted over wagon, that Noah’s Ark of his, with his whole show in it.”

But never mind their father’s eccentricities, his opening show at Brisbane’s Gaiety The-atre on September 12th was acclaimed by the press as an extravaganza that had the enthu-siastic audience shouting for encores. Though the show’s triumph was yet another feather in Lambert D’Arc’s cap, he was not to remain in the city to enjoy the accolades. He fell suddenly ill, and his illness was considered serious enough for him to be put aboard the fi rst ship heading back to Sydney.

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Lambert’s six offspring had now to live up to the faith he had placed in them. Engage-ments had been booked for Maryborough, Bundaberg, Rockhampton, Townsville, Charters Towers, Cairns, and Cooktown, and they must be performed without his guiding hand. True, they had been weaned in the theatre in England and Ireland, and had gained their spurs in South Africa and India, but how scary it must still have been for them to close Brisbane on their own and transport the stock of puppets, scenery, and props to Maryborough, their next stop.

They need not have worried; they played to packed houses at every stop. From Ma-ryborough to Cooktown their audiences marvelled at their repertoire: the life-like movement and speech of the marionettes in their magnifi cent Oriental costumes, the side-splitting antics of the Harlequinade clowns Joey and Pantaloon, the pantomime Blue Beard also Beauty and the Beast liv-ing out their dramas in their own spectacular world, the bouncing rhythm of the Court Minstrels giving out popular songs and dances of the day. One theatre reviewer told how he had been transported to fairyland when from behind the gossamer stage screen there ap-peared a lovely ocean cavern from whose shadowy blue depths shimmering fi sh magically emerged.

For the six D’Arc siblings the thrill of achievement received an added boost when word reached them that their father had left the hospital in Sydney and was aboard ship head-ing north to join them. He would soon be seeing for himself how they’d done him proud. But that was not to be. Disaster struck, disaster of catastrophic proportions, according to the local press.

On the night of December 12th, as the performance of Blue Beard drew to a close, an edge of the stage’s muslin drapery burst into fl ame. It spread rapidly, and in minutes the building was engulfed in fi re. Outside, vigilant bystanders smashed down doors and walls to allow the audience to escape. Not a life was lost, and there were only a few injuries.

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George D’Arc and a Mr MacDonald sustained “severe crushing” in their attempt to save what they could. However, nearly all the show’s 350 marionettes were destroyed along with the scenery and props. As a reporter described it, the loss of the marionettes dealt the severest blow to the D’Arcs, for in a matter of minutes, their labours of seven long years was reduced to em-bers. And more bad news, not a penny of their stock, valued at £3,000, was insured. How diffi cult must it have been for the siblings to look their father in the face when he fi -nally arrived in Cooktown. We have to conclude that he wasted no time in recrimination, rather he rallied the six round to his decision to rebuild the show from scratch. Perhaps the decision was made easier by the statement in the press that the townsfolk were orga-nizing a benefi t concert on their behalf, one that was sure to be well patronized so favour-ably were they regarded throughout the region.

The Cooktown where they made camp was not the Cooktown of today, the tourist desti-nation where one can stand on the very spot where in 1770 Captain Cook beached his En-deavour for repairs. The 1890s Cooktown was a typical gold rush town boasting of some sixty-fi ve pubs, a whole miscellany of trades, and a population of some 4,000, which is more than double today’s number.

Nothing is known of the living quarters and workshop the D’Arcs were able to obtain in those rough surroundings or how they managed to acquire the fi ne materials such as the wax and colourful cloth for costumes, but rebuild the show they did as will be seen from this note in the Cooktown Courier of June 9 1893, six months after the devastating fi re:

As it was, the family managed to create only a third of the 350 marionettes destroyed in the fi re, but they were of the high D’Arc standard, some of them ending up many years later in a Japanese museum. And the show itself seems to have lost little of its spark. The June 13 issue of the Cooktown Courier gave high praise to the “clever performers” who played to packed houses from June 10 to June 12, the last night being a benefi t concert for the local hospital which the D’Arcs put on jointly with the Salvation Army. Finally, the D’Arcs would be taking with them the heartfelt good wishes of many friends and sympathizers on their departure that evening for Thursday Island, where after a short season, they intended touring India, the Straits Settlements and China.

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On arrival at Thursday Island, the family set about the familiar task of unloading the stage sets and marionettes and transporting them to the hall booked for their perfor-mances. Opening in strange even exotic places was nothing new to them. All seemed to be proceeding normally when only a week into the season the bombshell, the worst that could happen happened. Mons Lambert D’Arc, master puppeteer and world renowned impresario, succumbed to the disease that had affl icted him back in Brisbane.

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To his daughters: Emily, Nellie, Mary, and Ethel, and his sons George and Willie not only had he been their source of livelihood, he was their mentor, comforter, inspiration. All now lost; their safest and easiest course would be to close the show and make for Cardiff where their mother had been left in sole charge of D’Arc’s Waxworks Exhibition.

The fi rst piece of information telling us that the siblings had not taken the easy course is this notice that appeared in the Singapore press:

That they were operating the show again only fi ve months after their father’s death tells us that the decision to do so must have been taken within days of his funeral, for surely they would have needed every day of those fi ve months to dismantle the stage settings on Thursday Island and load them up in a ship sailing for Singapore, and once there, unload and transport them to the Town Hall for sorting and assembling. It seems logical that William and Ethel, both minors, were not shown with the show’s directors, but the exclusion of George, the number one son, confi rms that he had other plans in mind - getting married for one, and performing back in the UK for another. His negotiating skills, derived from his father, would have been sorely missed by his sisters and brother had it not been for the presence of their new business manager, Ernest C Clitheroe. This fellow soon proved his worth dealing with theatre agents, for within a month the troupe was on its way to perform in Hong Kong, and by the following spring it was in Japan, opening at Shunpukan Hall, Tokyo.

To the Japanese who had never before seen Western puppets, the show created a stir. Some of the acts, especially the under water scenes, were received with incredulity, and others, such as the drunken Pierrot on stilts, with side-splitting laughter. Playing to packed houses right up to the end of their contract term the D’Arcs were asked to sign on for an extension.

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They agreed, though reluctantly, for it meant abandoning their tight itinerary and re-booking passages to Hong Kong and on from there to the UK. They kept to this new arrangement despite an earthquake that struck the city, forcing fi ve of the troupe to quit their hotel. Finally free to return to Hong Kong, the D’Arcs were stymied by the cholera plague that had placed the port in quarantine. And with Japan now at war with China, no ships were sailing there. Once again their business manager proved his worth. Vladivostok, Imperial Russia’s gateway to the Pacifi c, was open to them, and that’s where he booked the show.

The siblings had seen slums in their time, but what they saw in Vladi-vostok shocked them to the core. Filth and stench mired the streets. Conditions at their ramshackle hotel were appalling. The food was inedible; they had only coffee or beer to drink for which they were charged extortionate prices. Without heat they were obliged to wear sheep skins all day long. Worst was the belligerence of the authorities. During one show the prefect of police who was seated close to the piano ordered the show to stop and the piano moved to the opposite side of the stage before the show could proceed. The D’Arcs could not leave Vladivostok soon enough.

Soon as Hong Kong was declared plague free, the D’Arcs were back. And it was there in 1895 that Nellie married Ernest Clitheroe. Now the show’s general manager, he booked it at the Bijou Theatre in Cal-cutta where it ran to full houses for a whole season. And why not, led as it was by veterans of the puppet theatre: Nellie shining as designer and creator of the gorgeous and dazzling costumes and dresses, Emily in control of the elaborate wardrobe and properties which included eighty-seven of the puppets they had created back in Cooktown, tightfi sted Mary with her head for fi gures in charge of the box offi ce, William now a top-notch modeller and scenery painter, and Ethel with her silvery but if need be powerful voice leading the music and dancing.

Despite their efforts to hold on to their employees, they were always in need of fi gure workers, or vocalists, or musicians who could stay sober for more than a few nights on end. In 1895 they placed this ad for an expert pianist.

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From Calcutta they proceeded to Bombay where they brought their the audiences to their feet with every performance. Even while the D’Arc siblings were savouring the sweet taste of success, their manager Clitheroe had better things in store for them. He booked them for most of 1895 at theatres in Cape Town, Kimberly, and Johannesburg. Of all the countries they toured, South Africa was their favourite, the warmth and hospitality of its people and their readiness to dig deep into their pockets quite unmatched. In Johannes-burg the D’Arcs charged £3 for a box and they fi lled the gallery with Kaffi rs at 4 shillings a seat. Some weeks their box offi ce took in as much as £1,700.

Following their season in Cape Town, they were off, relaxing in lumbering bullock carts that travelled from city to city across the vast land. But perhaps not so relaxing for Nel-lie who was heavy with child. When they reached Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape that October, she gave birth to Norah Emmeline.

For some time the show was without the services of key operator Nellie, and that was no small loss. A stand-in fi gure worker might be found to manipulate the puppets, but who could fi ll in for her voice and singing parts of the dramas and comedy acts she knew by heart? The onus was on her to resume her full time duties to which now was added the burden of caring for an infant. If Norah Emmeline was to prove a burden for the rest of the South African tour, then how much greater the burden when Victor arrived eighteen months later in Delhi and Beatrice a year after that in Calcutta?

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Now back in the UK, George went ahead with his marriage plans. The ceremony took place on August 23 1894, at the Church of the Immaculate Heart of Mary and St Dominic in the London District of Hackney. His bride was the prize vocalist from his show, Agnes Mary Maney.

He would surely have presented Agnes to his mother to Cardiff, and just as surely he would have offered to lend a hand at the Exhibition. Stale exhibits needed replacing and new ones created for the most gruesome of recent murders. As for running the Exhibition she had done remarkably well on her own for the past fi ve years. For her it had not been a matter of sitting in the box offi ce counting the take; she had eagerly sought out new attractions. In 1893, the very year her husband died, she hosted the performance of the celebrated magician Professor Frederick Rendell Burnette (birth name Samuel Rendell). Given the opportunity she would have made something of the marionettes her husband had left with her at the Exhibition. Now with George and Agnes on hand, she had the op-portunity to present her own Madame D’Arc’s Theatre of Star Marionettes.

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What he did for his mother hardly deterred him from his task at hand which was to create puppets and settings and recruit and train sober puppet manipulators for the staging of a super elaborate pantomime. His big effort paid off, for we have it from the entertain-ments publication The Era (forerunner of today’s The Stage) that Mons George Lambert D’Arc’s Grand New Fantoches Françaises troupe was at the Rotunda in Dublin playing its spectacular Christmas pantomime Robinson Crusoe. Christmas came and went but the show proved so popular that George was obliged to extend the season into the new year. It fi nally closed in February 1896. What we next know of George is from the poster he ordered from a Hong Kong print shop to publicize his forthcoming tour of Japan and China. That poster is shown here by gracious permission of its owner, the noted puppeteer and author, Richard Bradshaw of Bowral NSW.

The publicity might have had something to do with the packed houses he played to in To-kyo, but more likely it was the remarkable presentation of Western puppetry by the earlier 1894 D’Arc’s tour that remained fresh in public memory.

From Japan George continued on to China, performing in Shanghai, Tientsin, and fi -nally, their last stop of the tour, in Peking, Imperial China’s ancient throne city. There, on November 21 1896, Agnes gave birth to their only child, Grace. It was diffi cult enough to be delivered safely in such alien surroundings, but to make it through the three month journey home by sea, exposed to shipboard diseases and long periods of fi erce tropical heat, the infant needed the intercession of Providence.

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As it happened, all three reached home safely, home meaning the residence of Agnes’s parents in Hackney. But then after fi nding their land feet, they were off to Cardiff where soon enough George was in the Exhibition workshop doing repairs and creating new stock.

Throughout their recent tour, agents had been at their door seeking renewal of their contracts, and George signed on with a promise to return as soon as he could re-equip the show. Half a year later, when sailed back the East he had Agnes with him but not Grace. Rather than risk her to the dangers of a long sea voyage, he placed her in the safe hands of the nuns at Mouline Convent in London’s Forest Gate.

On February 5th 1898, Mons George Lambert D’Arc’s Marionettes opened in Bombay. And that August it played in Singapore, and the following January at the Bijou Theatre in Hong Kong’s West Point. Now equipped with the newfangled Marionettoscope, George included several short length cinematographic fi lms in his program. From Hong Kong he moved to a welcoming Tokyo where his productions were remembered with admiration. Next he travelled to China’s fast developing treaty port of Tientsin where from July 19 to August 20 at the Bijou Theatre on Bruce Road in the British Concession, he treated his audience to an early look at true moving pictures.

We are now back full circle to where we started this story back on Page 1. So what little is left to tell about George is how he arrived at the profound decision to give up his life’s work in marionettes and move on to a career in hotels.

After his July 1899 performances at Peking’s Russian Legation, he brought the show back to Tientsin where he was given the honour to produce it for the rest of the season at the hallowed Gordon Hall in the British Concession.

These were troubled times for foreigners in China. Rumours were spreading of the mas-sacre of foreigners in the interior. We don’t know for sure why George and Agnes took the chance of heading back to Peking after their season ended at the Gordon Hall. We’ve heard it said that George was commissioned by the Imperial Court to create a wax effi gy of the Empress Dowager. But then we heard also that he had been invited there by his friend Auguste Chamot to discuss the sale of an interest in his hotel de Pékin. Whatever

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the reason, George and Agnes were in Peking on that fateful day in June when the Box-ers burst out into the open and swarmed into furious attack on the foreign legations. It is another story that will be told in a subsequent article how Agnes not only survived the 57 days of battle, but was awarded a medal of distinction by the British Government for her courage and devotion to the wounded, and how George succeeded in a suicidal run through Boxer lines to Tientsin to warn the garrisons there of the attack on Peking.

After the Boxers were defeated and an eight nation army of occupation was swarming about Peking and Tientsin, reconstruction of smashed buildings was the fi rst order of the day. Residents were in no mood for the theatre, least of all marionette shows, even if that were possible. One researcher has de-termined that George’s stage sets and marionettes were totally destroyed during the confl agration.

To start all over again from scratch was simply too much for George. Perhaps it was Mons Chamot, or it might have been his good friend, William Farmer, proprietor of the New Victoria Hotel in Hong Kong and shareholder of several other hotels in the Canton and Macao area, who pointed him to a career in hotel operation. George might not know much about running a hotel, but as a user his experience could hardly be matched. For more than a decade he had been continually on the road on four continents staying in hotels ranging from the ultra deluxe to the utterly primitive.

But fi rst, he and Agnes took advantage of the offer from the UK Government to repatriate all those who had been caught up in the Boxer siege. On arrival in the UK he alerted his mother of his decision to give up the puppet theatre and try his hand at running a hotel. This time when they boarded their ship bound for China he and Agnes had their daughter Grace with them.

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We have to wonder if it was just bad luck or the will of fate that George fell victim thrice to catastrophic fi re. There was Cooktown 1892, Tientsin 1900, and now Tientsin 1904 when his Grand Hotel burned to the ground. Following its account of the fi re, The China Times of Tuesday, January 19 1904 had this to day:

Luckily, the hotel was fully insured, and luckier still, no lives were lost. Encouraged by friends and associates on all sides, he decided to rebuild. And good that he did. For-tune now smiled on him. His new, somewhat less ostentatious D’Arc’s Hotel at 61 Race Course Road was to become a Tientsin landmark for over half a century.

Round about the time that George allowed his Fantoches Françaises to die a quiet death, his trio of sisters sold out their interests in D’Arc’s Marionettes to the Australian theatre entrepreneur Frank T Barrass. So when the show opened at Singapore Town Hall on Jan-uary 14th 1901, it was billed under the sole proprietorship and personal management of Barrass. But the man took every opportunity to exploit the D’Arc name. He proclaimed that the show’s fi gures were made by the late Mons Lambert D’Arc, that the gorgeous and dazzling costumes and dresses were created by Miss Nellie D’Arc, that the wardrobe and properties were under the direction of Miss Emily D’Arc, and that the ballets and dances were choreographed by Miss Ethel D’Arc.

We wonder why Clitheroe received no mention, and that for Business Manager, Barrass named a certain J Wilson Gonsalves.

This press report shows that even though the show had been interrupted by bad weather, it was as popular as ever. But now Barrass had a problem on his hands. Emily and Ethel had bowed out, and were on their way to the UK where both were to appear in the Na-tional Census of April 1901 as staying with their mother in Cardiff.

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After Singapore, Barrass moved the show to Bangkok, where to the stunning shock of all who knew her, Nellie died. It was horrifi c enough that Nellie had contracted cholera whose victims almost always suffer unendurable torture until they mercifully succumb, but to learn that she had her fourth child with her, a son named Willie, and that he went through that same hell as she did, was too anguishing to contemplate. The fact that Ernest Clitheroe was still very much on the scene comes from his grand-daughter Nori Mann (Norah Emmeline’s daughter) who tells us that he arrived in South Africa with his three children, Norah Emmeline, Victor, and Beatrice, and when the two older ones caught the measles he placed them in Nazareth House, an orphanage in Cape Town. He subsequently married a local girl Florence Wright and sailed off with her to his native Australia, taking Beatrice with him but leaving behind Norah and Victor.

And it was in Australia in 1902 that he reconnected with D’Arc’s Marionettes. Frank Bar-rass who had undertaken a wide ranging tour of Australia hired Clitheroe as the show’s Advance Manager. He must have impressed for by the time the tour reached Adelaide he was named, along with Barrass and D’Arc, as a Co-Proprietor. (We wonder if the other Co-Proprietor named D’Arc could have been William, last mentioned back in 1895 when his sisters opened the show in Calcutta?)

A year later, when Barrass took his D’Arc’s Marionettes on an extensive tour of New Zealand, Clitheroe had no part in it. At home in Australia, his proven talents and experi-ence as a theatrical agent and producer kept him busy enough. And thankfully so, for he had many mouths to feed, he and Florence having raised a family of seven. When he died in Broken Hill on September 5 1921, he was highly praised in the press for his popularity and successful career in the theatre world.

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Back to Emily, we don’t know how long she stayed with her mother in Cardiff after she arrived there in 1901, nor do we know if she was ever again active in D’Arc’s Mario-nettes. What we do know is that she was employed by and was to become the wife of the celebrated showman magician Frederick Rendell Burnette (birth name Samuel J Rendell), the very one who had called himself “Professor Burnette” when back in 1893 he put on a show D’Arc’s Waxworks Exhibition in Cardiff.

She accompanied Burnette when he moved his base of operations up to Glasgow. There his activities expanded into running a chain of cinemas and photographic studios and even a waxworks, but his main endeavour still centered on the world of magic. He found-ed and for many years was president of the exclusive magical society the Mystic Twelve. A society of the highest repute, Mystic Twelve’s members numbered among Britain’s leading spiritualists and conjurers.

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Emily stuck with Frederick till death did them part, he in June 1940 and she in Novem-ber 1948. In this photograph of the two in their later years, he is the one in the white coat with Emily close alongside him. Their classy roadster tells how well they had done for themselves.

And now we come to Mary, Mons Lambert D’Arc’s fourth oldest, who by 1892 was a veteran trouper having taken active part in the tours of South Africa and India. Early on in the Australia tour, her father had suffi cient confi dence in her to despatch her to Melbourne to talk Emily into rejoining the show ready to embark for Brisbane. He had had “words” with her and she wasn’t going to take it. Mary succeeded in her mission and family peace was restored. Except for that episode and the trip she made to London in 1896 to recruit sober puppet theatre workers for the show, what little we know of her comes from the pen of J Bowles Daly LL.D, a fervent admirer of the puppet theatre, especially D’Arc’s Marionettes. When Daly requested an interview with the proprietors, Emily and Nellie put forward Mary as their spokesperson. And what he gleaned from her, Daly recorded verbatim in his book Indian Sketches and Rambles, Patrick Press, Calcutta, 1896.

First off, he told of how he found Mary to be vivacious, eloquent, affable, and someone who possessed a fi ne knowledge of the workings of the puppet theatre as well as an ex-traordinary understanding of audience reactions in such widely differing backgrounds as Mauritius (where the natives insisted on believing that the puppets were real live beings) South Africa, Australia, New Caledonia, India, the Straits Settlements, Siberia, China, and Japan.

We hope one day to fi nd out more about Mary, whether she ever married and raised a family, or even where she lived after D’Arc’s Marionettes disbanded.

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We are left with the two youngest of the six, William and Ethel. Only seventeen when the troupe made it’s fi rst South African tour, William developed into a top of the line wax modeller and scenic painter, his depiction of Fairyland with its golden lattices and daz-zling jewels, and of Elfl and’s silvery waters making a profound impression on Dr Daly. Ethel, a mere twelve-year-old on her fi rst tour, was to turn into the troupe’s leader of song and dance. Her powerful voice that reached the back of a hall with ease could turn silvery enough to charm an audience such as the one in Tokyo which rose to its feet at her rendi-tion of the Japanese National Anthem in its native tongue.

Now home in Cardiff, and showing every intention of continuing on with the puppet the-atre, the two teamed up. They were resourceful and innovative enough to create a whole new approach to D’Arc’s Marionettes. Instead of performing acts in the fantoccini tradi-tion, they would introduce puppet charactertures of prominent music hall stars such as Harry Lauder, Marie Lloyd, and Victoria Monks and show them poking fun at each other and at the audience. Taking their show on the road in 1905, their hilarious D’Arc’s Mari-onettes Empire Of Stars won them the acclaim of theatre critics. Their fame spread, and in 1908 they were invited to cross the Atlantic to play at the Fulton Theatre in New York.

All seemed to be going well with their partnership until 1910 when William placed an ad in The Era for a “refi ned lady mimic with a strong powerful voice to understudy my sister Ethel D’Arc.” Was he concerned that Ethel who was about to marry might leave the show? Ethel did indeed become Mrs Charles Simmonds on 20th June 1911 at St Joseph’s Catholic Church in Aldershot, Hampshire. Though she no longer needed to work

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for a living, her husband being an established miller whose parents were of independent means, she wasn’t about to quit the stage. In August of 1912 she and Charles and her brother William boarded the Orsova bound for Australia. Six weeks later, D’Arc’s Mari-onettes Of All The Stars was top billing of a variety show at Rickard’s Opera House, Melbourne. Following the fi rst night, theatre critics, even fellow show people, lavished praise on them for their tour de force performance. And the press too. In its September 12 1912 issue, Table Talk featured a full length picture of Ethel joyfully manipulating two of her marionettes.

Ten months later they were back in the UK. The strenuous tour behind them, William could look forward to a well earned break to rest and recoup. Ethel had a more permanent break in mind. Their partnership had lasted eight long years, the fi nal one surely hard on her married life. It was time for her to call it quits. What little we know of Ethel after she gave up the marionette theatre comes to us from her sister Nellie’s granddaughter Nori Mann of Thakeham, West Sussex, and great grand-daughters Margaret MacIver of Cape Town and Noelle Fitzgerald of Southport QLD. Nori tells us that she knew her Aunt Ethel as Mrs Simmonds, a very correct, very formal, but amiable lady in her 80s with whom she took tea in London in 1960. Margaret tells us that Aunt Ethel kept in touch for many years with Nellie’s offspring in South Africa and Australia. Noelle tells us that her great aunt Ethel dearly loved Nellie’s daughter Beatrice (Noelle’s grandmother) and would have taken her back to England with her but for the foster family scaring her off.

Ethel might have had her fi ll of marionettes, but not William who kept himself busy enough in the Exhibition’s workshop for a visitor to take note of the partly completed wax fi gures and bits and pieces of wax anatomy that were strewn about the place. In time, it was only natural for William to be drawn into contact with a local resident, Frederick Fox, who was a scenic artist like himself. But before long he was even more strongly drawn to Fox’s younger daughter, Edith. In 1916 he and Edith were married. He’d made a good choice, for when he went on to produce his marionette show, D’Arc’s Marvelettes, Edith, with her own sets of skills, played an important role dressing the puppets he’d cre-ated and manipulating them on stage.

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Came the Twenties, the Roaring Twenties, when the explosive success of cinema posed a dire threat to all forms of stage entertainment. Undeterred, William organized a tour of South Africa. In September 1922 he and Edith embarked from Southampton aboard the SS Saxon bound for Cape Town. The tour lasted a good four months, which tells us it was well received.

Any plans for a repeat tour had to be put on the back burner when Cardiff again beck-oned. His mother who in her 76th year was fi nding it hard enough to cope with the Exhibition’s everyday problems was hit by one so bizarre that she would have found it overwhelming even in her prime. A certain Harold Greenwood was suing her for gross libel. He was that same Harold Greenwood who had been tried for the murder of his wife in one of Britain’s most sensational murder cases, and for whom a not guilty verdict was won by the celebrated attorney Edward Marshall Hall. Greenwood’s case against Ann Jane centered on her placement of an effi gy of him alongside that of the arch criminal Charles Peace in the Waxwork’s Chamber of Horrors. Forbid the thought that public opinion can sway the feelings of a judge, but it must be said that there had been such a public outcry against the innocent verdict won by Greenwood that in the case against Ann Jane, the judge awarded Greenwood the paltry sum of £150.

A reprieve for Ann Jane perhaps, but not enough to win her total peace of mind. She had run the Exhibition on her own for 32 long years; it was time for her to retire. William happened to be hard by. William could pick up the reins. He did, and as his father and mother before him he assumed the title: Proprietor, D’Arc’s Waxworks Exhibition.

Only two years into her retirement, Ann Jane received a short visit from her son George whom she last saw back in 1901 when he came to make his farewells before returning to China. He was now in the UK seeking medical help for his asthma condition. Any help he managed to get could not have amounted to much, for in less than three months he was dead.

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William could not have picked a worse time to run the Waxworks Exhibition. Britain had sacrifi ced not only her youth in the Great War, but her wealth too. Her economy was in tatters. Wholesale layoffs in mining, manufacture, and agriculture intensifi ed labour unrest until it exploded into the 1926 General Strike.

Even though Wales was particularly hard hit, William managed to keep the show afl oat. In 1928, to earn some hard cash he and Edith undertook a tour of Mediterranean ports. The passenger list of their returning ship gave both their occupations as “Music Hall Artistes.” Whether successful or not, big events were soon to overtake them: The Stock Market Crash and World Wide Depression. William could see no other course than to put the Exhibition up for sale. And so the enterprise, so avant-garde when founded in 1866 and so much the talk of the town in when it moved to Cardiff eighteen years later, passed out of the family’s hands.

William and Edith carried on, giving occasional performances of their D’Arc’s Mar-velettes right up until 1938 when at the Stratford Empire he made his last public appear-ance. And so for the fi rst time since way back when Disraeli took offi ce as Prime Minis-ter, the world’s marionette theatre operated without the services of the D’Arc family.

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Her Cardiff residence sold with the Exhibition, Ann Jane moved to a care home in Bath, Somerset, the city of her birth and marriage. And there she lived on for another six years before dying at the grand age of 90. We trust that during her fi nal years she was able to visit her bridal homestead at No 3 Church Street.

It was from No 3 that Lambert and Ann Jane started off on their lifelong journey into a world of make believe where the gorgeously costumed waxen fi gures they created fi red the imagination, especially of the young, to an extent beyond the capability of live stage or fi lm. Today, the D’Arcs and their achievements are largely unknown, their superb effi -gies of the famous long gone, their few surviving puppets languishing in shadowy muse-ums. But perhaps as a legacy they played some part in the advancement of the art form to the sublime heights it has reached today as can be viewed in programs played across cyberspace.

A legacy of the D’Arc’s which we do know of for certain is their progeny. Six genera-tions of their direct descendants have lived and multiplied and continue to multiply across South Africa, Australia, England, Ireland, and Canada. Ninety-four is the number and still counting.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to record here my profound appreciation for the courtesy and generous use of their time and material of all those who over the years provided me with information on the D’Arcs. And I earnestly hope that I have not through inadvertence omitted anyone. If so, I offer my sincere apologies.

If I included all the items of help given me, it would fi ll a book. So, regrettably, I am obliged to skip mention here of many fi ne contributions.

Frank Bren of Melbourne, VIC, noted researcher of stage and cinema, co-author (with Law Kar and Sam Ho) of Hong Kong Cinema - A Cross Cultural View (Scarecrow Press, US 2004) for his discoveries on how motion pictures were fi rst introduced into China in 1897. The late John Phillips of London N1 who provided me with typed copies of the D’Arc’s Waxworks Exhibition Guide together with a timeline history of D’Arc’s Marionettes.

Daphne and the late John Rendell of Gower, Glamorgan for their treasure of birth, marriage, and death certifi cates, as well as census records on the D’Arc’s family, and for her fi ndings as thorough as that of a professional researcher on the connection between Emily D’Arc and Frederick Rendell Burnette.

Liz Saunders of West Berkshire (John and Daphne’s daughter), for her extensive fi ndings from the Cambrian of D’Arc’s performances across the UK, and for her detec-tion through tracking possible of misspelling of Emily’s and Ethel’s names in the 1901 UK Census, of their presence in the UK during that year and so no longer with the show.

Ron and Margie Rendell of Palm Beach, QLD, for forwarding and graciously permit-ting use from Ron’s collection of a rare photo of Emily and Frederick Burnette in their later years.

Richard Bradshaw of Bowral, NSW, master puppeteer, actively engaged in presenting puppets in Europe and Asia, and who is an author of published works such as D’Arc’s Marionettes in Australia, for providing me with extensive information on the D’Arc’s 1892 Australian tour, for granting me permission to show his treasured artifact George D’Arc’s colourful 1896 poster, and for putting me in contact with Nellie D’Arc’s de-scendants in South Africa and Australia, whose existence he discovered through dogged research.

Nori Mann of Thakeham, West Sussex and her daughter Helen and niece Margaret McIver of Cape Town, South Africa, direct descendants of Lambert D’Arc through Nellie D’Arc Clitheroe, for details they provided on how their line came to be in South Africa in the fi rst place, and how their forebears had kept contact with Ethel D’Arc whom they knew as Mrs Simmonds, that information leading to the acquisition of Ethel’s 1911 marriage certifi cate naming Charles Simmonds at Aldershot, Hants as her husband.

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Noelle Fitzgerald of Southport, QLD, another direct descendant of Lambert D’Arc through Nellie who provided prodigious birth, marriage, and death information on the extended family of the Clitheroe D’Arc line.

Peter Boyle of Sanderstead, Surrey, and his wife Gay, a direct descendant of Lambert D’Arc, for discovering and passing on to me the fascinating chapter on D’Arc’s Mari-onettes in a book by J. Bowles Daly LLD and also for the press report on Harold Green-wood’s gross libel suit against Ann Jane D’Arc.

Geoff Boyle of Dublin, Ireland, Gay and Peter’s son, also a direct descendant of Lam-bert D’Arc, for his exhaustive research into passenger lists and birth marriage and death certifi cates that gave us the particulars of William D’Arc and Edith Fox’s marriage, and William’s death, and from the lead provided by Nori Mann, the discovery of the time and place of Ethel’s marriage to Charles Simmonds.

Dr Edwin Dawes MIMC of Anlaby, East Yorks, author of the Magic Circular articles such as A Rich Cabinet of Magical Curiosities written with such a sense of immediacy that the reader is turned into a contemporary eyewitness of the events described. And who of course gave gracious permission for use a rare photograph from his personal collection featuring Emily and Frederick Rendell Burnette.

John M Blundall of Glasgow, Lanarkshire, puppet master of high repute for giv-ing his gracious permission to use the photo entitled Madame D’Arc’s Theatre of Star Marionettes from his collection on the web, The World Through Wooden Eyes, and his colleague Stephen Foster, leading studio craftsman and puppet designer, for processing and emailing the image to me.

Douglas Hayward of Milford, Staffs who gave me his gracious permission back in 1996 for the use of D’Arc’s marionettes photos from his private collection.

John D Simmonds of Turner, ACT, Old China Hand from Tientsin, soldier of fortune and author of the historical novel Luddite, for his help in searching out George Lambert D’Arc’s 1899 correspondence with the Editor of Peking & Tientsin Times.

Mark St Leon of Penshurst, NSW, circus historian and researcher of circuses and other forms of travelling shows, who provided invaluable information on the presence of D’Arc’s Marionettes in Shanghai 1894, Tientsin 1899, and Kalgoorlie 1902.