Recently, while searching on TheGenealogist’s Image Archive, I was struck by a photograph of a woman with her child that had appeared on the gallery home page. Momentarily distracted from the reason that I had opened up this tool in the first place, the picture of the mother and child intrigued me.

The Image Archive is a collection of old photographs that can add a fascinating visual element to any ancestor research that we do. I use them for providing me with town scenes, places of work and so on where a person may have lived, as well as the churches they may have been baptised, married or had a funeral service within. The resource, however, also contains images of people and in this case the young mother with her child was the British actress Gladys Cooper and her son John Buckmaster, who also grew up to be an actor. There were more pictures of Gladys Cooper in the Image Archive including single portraits of her plus some with her daughter, Joan Buckmaster, as a child. Joan would also grow up to act and she would marry the famous actor Robert Morley. The Morleys’ eldest son and Gladys Cooper’s grandson was Sheridan Morley, the author and critic who died in 2007.

To discover more about the subject of the pictures I did a swift search of TheGenealogist and began with looking in the Occupational records for our actor. I was in luck as in the subsection for actors’ records I came across Gladys Cooper’s entry in Who’s Who in the Theatre 1922. From this I was able to discover that her first appearance on the stage was at Christmas 1905. At this time she toured with Messrs. Murray King and Clarke’s Company as Bluebell in Bluebell in Fairyland. After this Gladys gained more experience when she entered the chorus at the Gaiety and Daly’s Theatres under George Edwardes. Gladys played the part of Eva in the Girls of Gottenberg when it was put on at the Gaiety. The publication goes on to give a potted history of her acting career up until 1921.

Beginning as a 16-year-old in Edwardian musical comedy and pantomime, she starred in dramatic roles and silent films before the First World War. She Joined Frank Curzon in managing the Playhouse Theatre from 1917 to 1934, where she often starred in many roles. She would continue in the acting profession until 1971.

The Who’s Who in the Theatre 1922 record also points us in the direction of whom she married in the first instance. It tells us that Gladys Cooper’s husband had been H.J. Buckmaster and from this we can quickly find their marriage record in the Civil BMD records on TheGenealogist that shows us that they wed in the St George’s Hanover Square area in the last quarter of 1908.

Buck’s fizz
Searching for the groom provides us with an entry in the Sherborne School Register under Education Records. From this we see that his father was the Rev. J.N. Buckmaster of Ramsgate and also that the young Herbert had served in the Boer War as a trouper. In the First World War he became an officer in the prestigious Royal Horse Guards, rising from second lieutenant to major in the conflict and retiring as a captain. Searching in TheGenealogist’s Military records allows us to find the WW1 Campaign Medals for this soldier that shows us that he entered the theatre of war in France on 3 February 1916.

From other sources on the internet it is possible to find out that Herbert was usually known by the nickname of Buck. He had met his future wife when he was introduced to her at the time that she was appearing at the Gaiety Theatre in a production of The Girls of Gottenberg as one of the chorus girls. A search of the census records for 1911 records describes Gladys as an actress, while Buck’s occupation at this time is that of a commission agent and professional backer and layer of horses. This gives some credence to claims on the web that he had a love of horses and gambling.

Their address was 134 Clarence Gate Gardens in Marylebone, situated very near to Baker Street Station, as we can see by studying the large scale map that accompanies this record on TheGenealogist.

While serving in France during the First World War, Gladys’s husband had come up with the idea for a gentleman’s club that would be less stuffy than the other London clubs of the time. This dream materialised in 1919 as Buck’s Club at 18 Clifford Street London and when it opened it incorporated an American cocktail bar, an innovation abhorrent to the traditional gentlemen’s clubs in London. The founder not only gave his name to the new club but also to a drink that it made popular. The Buck’s Fizz cocktail owed its invention to something that Captain Buckmaster had sampled while in France, a cocktail made of champagne and peach juice and which he would later ask the bartender at Buck’s Club to recreate. Not able to find any peach juice, however, the bartender resorted to orange juice instead and so this has become the accepted ingredient for a Buck’s Fizz ever since.

The actress and the baronet
Having produced the two children, Joan and John, the married couple drifted apart until Gladys and Buck divorced in 1921 after 13 years of marriage. He went on to marry another actress, Nellie Taylor, before his final marriage to Grace Lowery Stanley in 1940. In 1928 Gladys Cooper wed Sir Neville Pearson, the son of the publishing empire established by Sir C. Arthur Pearson and this union produced a daughter, Sally Pearson, aka Sally Cooper, who we will come across later in the records. Searching the Education Records for Berkshire on TheGenealogist, we are able to find Sir Neville’s entry in Old Public School Boys Who’s Who for Eton 1933. This record gives the actual date of his marriage to Gladys Cooper which was 15 June 1928. As we can read, it was also Pearson’s second marriage, his first to Mary Angela Mond having been dissolved in 1928.

Sir Neville, Gladys’s second husband, had succeeded to the baronetage of his father in 1921 when the latter died. He also followed his father in the family business as publisher of a number of magazines, but actually working for the company George Newnes Ltd in London as they had acquired the Pearson’s company C. Arthur Pearson Ltd as an imprint for their firm.

His father had also founded the St Dunstan’s Hostel for the Blind, the home for blinded soldiers from World War I, having himself gone blind. Sir Neville became president in 1947, succeeding his mother. A search of TheGenealogist’s newspaper and magazine collection returns a page from The Great War Magazine for 24 November 1917 reporting on the work of the hostel.

Rather interestingly, an entry in the Peerage, Gentry and Royalty records on TheGenealogist lists Gladys’s second husband as a member of several gentlemen’s clubs including Buck’s Club, the very club that her former husband had founded. The information in this book published in 1930 just predates their daughter Sally’s birth in 1929. There are a number of other results within this section of TheGenealogist’s records including his entry in The Blood Royal of Britain – Plantagenet Roll – The Anne of Exeter Volume and in a Roll of Baronets 1611–1929 .

Broadway and movies
Although Gladys and Sir Neville married in 1928, he divorced her in 1936. The next year Gladys married Philip Merivale, a fellow actor from Britain who had been making a career in the USA. Gladys had been acting in both England and America in the 1930s, as can be seen by frequent entries in the passenger lists on TheGenealogist for that decade originally under the surname of Pearson and then afterwards as Merivale, where she crossed the ocean for work.

Her husband, Philip Merivale, according to his own entry in Who’s Who in the Theatre 1922, had been born in Rehutia in what was then British India, the son of an engineer. Schooled in Oxford he had at first been ‘engaged in commerce’. Aged 19, however, he made his first appearance on the stage in 1905 and continued performing in plays in England until 1914 when he accompanied Mrs Patrick Campbell to America playing the part of Henry Higgins in Pygmalion at the Park Theatre, New York. Between 1917 and 1918 he served in the Royal Canadian Air Force and after the war toured the USA as an actor.

As a couple they made their home in the United States, where there was work for them. A look at the 1940 US census that is available to subscribers of TheGenealogist finds the two of them recorded in Los Angeles, California. From this census we are able to see that it notes that in 1935 they had previously resided in New York. Also present in their household is Gladys’s daughter by her previous husband. Sally aged 10, is listed with her stepfather’s surname of Merivale in this census. She would grow up to be an actress and costume designer and would be married to the All Creatures Great and Small actor Robert Hardy from 1961 until 1986.

Philip Merivale died from heart problems in March 1946 at the age of 59 in Los Angeles. Gladys would then return and live mostly in England in her final years. In 1967, at the age of 79, she was appointed a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) as can be found in the Supplement to the London Gazette for 10 June 1967. Dame Gladys passed away from pneumonia in 1971 at the age of 82 in Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire.

From an enticing picture that can be downloaded from TheGenealogist’s Image Archive to biographical details that were gleaned from its Occupational records we have been able to discover more about the actress whose long career spanned from Edwardian musical comedy, to stage plays and then film and TV. We have seen her marriage to the man who gave his name to the Buck’s Fizz cocktail, as well as the London club where it was created. Her second marriage to a Baronet and third to an actor. We have noted that all her children seemed to become actors, with two out of the three also marrying thespians. From passenger lists we have been able to follow the actress back and forward across the Atlantic. We saw that she and her third husband were living in Los Angeles in 1940 by consulting the US census. TheGenealogist’s resources have provided valuable aid in this study. {