Tracing past family members who were in the entertainment business is often particularly frustrating. After all, singing, acting, dancing and making people laugh are all aspects of a sadly transient profession. Most performers have their short period of celebrity and success, and then disappear. In my collection of theatrical postcards, for instance, I have one of a comical trio, and the card is signed by all three. I have not been able to find any trace of their work anywhere.

We usually rely on the archives of trade periodicals in this area of research, notably . In addition, there are the cultural surveys in Victorian publications such as The Graphic, Punch and Pall Mall Gazette. What about other sources for performers? One often overlooked documentation is in the publications of the agents. Material on these characters is difficult to find, and digging in local archives is the only way. When they produced illustrated brochures, that is meat and drink to the family historian, and I traced one such firm in Birkenhead.

There were two tatty, disintegrating hardback brochures, placed in the centre of a tall glass cabinet in one of the side rooms of a huge antiques shop; it would have been so easy to miss them, glance at them and then walk by.

But I took the first of these brochures and flicked to the first page. There was Mr William Alfred Jones, the proprietor of the Throaties company, looking out at me from the distant past, with his crew cut, white collar and silk tie. His firm were the sponsors and backers of the Premier Provincial Entertainment and Concert Bureau of Birkenhead, and on the next page, there was the head honcho of that outfit: Mr W.H. Elston, immaculate in frock coat and waistcoat, with his hair oiled and tamed, and his cuffs and collars starched. He was the ‘Director’ and he looks ready to walk out onto the podium and rattle a baton at the violins or the pianist. What did his company do? They provided ‘Bands for dances, receptions, fetes, bazaars etc&hellip’

Then, as I read on, there were his artistes, their portraits offered in black and white: ladies such as Evangeline Florence, soprano – and the lesser lights on the back pages. These were strange, wonderful, offbeat and fascinating performers, such as The Carmen Sylva Ladies Orchestra and the Albert Workman Concert Party. Mixed in with these were the shy lady with a squeezebox and the Dickens reciter, Mr Frank Speaight. What an endless source of theatrical and musical history was there in those faces, with their copious reviews and recommendations from concerts given across the land from Bangor to Bognor.

I had to know what had happened to these people. In their portraits, there was the brightness of a delightful, fulfilling professional life stretching out before them. But did that happen? Were they doomed to remain D-list celebrities, and did they fall into music hall and variety, or did they hold their place on the classical platform? They were on Mr Elston’s books at the height of the popularity of the British fascination with light popular music, just on the cusp of the arrival of radio but also firmly entrenched in the milieu of operetta and Gilbert and Sullivan. There were such potentialities for them. For a writer, the tantalising thought of perhaps knowing something of their futures was impossible to resist.

In the middle years of the reign of Edward VII, how did a musical or comedic artiste fashion a career? It was an age without television and radio; there were certainly no channels of communication in social media. How did you make your talents known? The answer is that you found an agent – or he found you. The agents working with actors in this era were notoriously fractious, and were generally adept at elbowing their way into the limelight. But that was in the world of popular theatre, and as is always the case, the actor’s life was champagne one day and orange juice the next.

The theatrical and musical agents’ activities are not so well known, so when I came across Mr W.H. Elston and his Birkenhead business of this time, The Premier Provincial Entertainment and Concert Bureau, I was intrigued. His portrait shows a dapper, confident businessman. He could be an impresario, or at least a dynamic conductor or choirmaster. He was probably both.

What follows is a sample of the clients represented by Mr Elston. I gave myself the challenge of doing some detective work on those clients. What did they achieve? What happened to them?

Miss Nellie Ganthony, comic entertainer/singer
Nellie Ganthony became known as ‘The Female Grossmith’, after the well-known performer and writer George Grossmith. Nellie was on Elston’s books in his brochure of c.1910 (the publication has no date). There she is described as offering ‘humorous, musical and emotional sketches’. It is hard to ascertain what the last adjective refers to of course, but Nellie was a hard worker, appearing from her first appearance in the mid-1890s in any kind of production she could find. In fact, she appeared on one occasion with George himself, near the start of her career. This was at the Birkbeck Institution in August 1898.

Nellie’s work, when she appeared in music hall in 1900, was reviewed as ‘touching on the lighter side of nature in a delineation of the peculiarities of bus passengers, during a pleasant quarter of an hour at the piano’. .In the last years of the 19th century she made appearances as diverse as Mrs Horton in a short play, The Kangaroo Girl, at the Folkestone Pleasure Gardens, and sang at The Putney Creche. She was also elected to the board of the Actors’ Association in 1897. She had learned that being seen was the main thing – as often as possible. She appeared in Marylebone to support the social work of the Church, in 1898, contributing a sketch called ‘The Bus Ride’; in a revival of a farcical romance a few years later, she provided an opener and The Times noted that she gave a ‘bright musical monologue’..

Nellie later toured America, and the tag ‘The Female Grossmith’ was a very bright and workable commercial ploy. One comment in the press summed her up: ‘She sings, she plays, she dances, and she does all with aplomb.’ She reached the popular status of the woman in the arts, successful and glamorous, who is asked by magazine editors for what we would now call ‘soundbites’ as in this ‘little story’ for an article on ‘The World of Women’ for a local paper in 1900:

Miss Nellie Ganthony the well-known musical sketch entertainer, tells this Story of the servant question: I was in the registry office the other day and overheard the following conversation between mistress and maid: Lady (exhausted) Ah then, you are Kate. So glad you can come to me. I hope we shall understand each other. Yes, mum. I’m really very glad you are coming for you know it is quite difficult to get nice servants now.
Yes I know mum, for your class is coming down and mine is going up!

Nellie was not the only ‘Female Grossmith’. Others were to follow, but she started the trend.

Elsa Riess, contralto
Sometimes in researching biographies of those people in the footnotes of cultural history, there comes a shock, and this was the case with Elsa Riess. In the 1905 brochure, her portrait photograph shows a young woman with a rounded and beautiful face, with one hand raised to touch her left cheek. On her head there is a massive hat with feathers and richly ornamented embroidery in layers around the rim.

She was born in Berlin, and by the time she was on Mr Elston’s books, she had studied in Rome ‘under Maestro Ricci, and made her debut in that city with a great concert given by the Italian Association of Journalists’. She studied later with the Hungarian soprano Etelker Gerster, and Elston takes pleasure in telling his readers that ‘She has been singing in Germany, and last winter had particular success in Paris, everywhere receiving much praise for her ability in mastering the four principal European languages.’

Her fate, as my research uncovered, was explained in a Nazi document issued at her death. She died in the Theresienstadt ghetto, and on the sad and shocking little document, Dr Otto Bermann has recorded the cause of death as Marasmus senilis, which has the usual dictionary definition of ‘progressive atrophy of the aged’.

Elsa was actually Elizabeth Dorothea Katherina Sara Riess. The majority of Mr Elston’s clients made a living in the provinces, and one or two became major stars (such as Edith Evans), but after my delving into these futures, my heart was heavy after the discovery of Elsa’s fate.

John Dunn, Violinist
John was born in Hull in 1866 and died in Harrogate in 1940. He studied at Leipzig, and made his London debut as violinist in 1882. He wrote a popular manual on violin-playing and also composed some pieces such as ‘Soliloquy and Berceuse’ and ‘Sonata for Solo Piano’.

In his theatrical agent’s brochure of 1900, John Dunn was given a very impressive blurb:

Mr Dunn is a native of Yorkshire, but at the age of twelve he went to Leipzig to study under the celebrated violinist and teacher, Schradiek&hellip On his return to England three years later he made his appearance at the Covent Garden Promenade Concerts, where he created a tremendous sensation&hellip He has since given concerts throughout the United Kingdom, and has besides a widespread reputation on the Continent.

Dunn became one of the leading experts on the violin in Britain, and he was praised by the music critics in the broadsheets for years. The Telegraph summed up, ‘Our English artiste, who supremely asserted a mastery of his instrument, such as few have gained, and fewer can now boast&hellip was the centre of the occasion&hellip’ He was the performer who first played Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in Britain, and people went to him for advice and tuition.

Finding the agents
If the researcher has searched the periodical archives, there are two more steps to tracing the agents. After all, they were ephemeral, often set up by someone taking a chance in a business dominated by contacts, circles of friends and wealthy patrons. The first step is to trawl the newspaper archives searching for ‘theatrical agents’. The result will be a succession of adverts in lines or sometimes boxed. That gives a name and an address, so there are leads there. Another port of call is a specific archive or museum. For instance, my material on Elsa Riess is partly from the Jewish Museum in Camden.

In the last few years, academics have taken more and more interest in theatre history, and the professional publications from these groups may well add more material for a search. But in the end, as Mr Elston’s brochure shows, the richest sources may well come from the richest people, in this profession at least.