Henry Irving and Bram Stoker enjoyed a relationship which patently worked. Irving provided the star power and the driving force, Bram a bottomless well of loyalty and the administrative capability to keep the show on the road. Their comradeship was without friction or rancour and they remained on good terms for twenty-seven years until that final chilly night in Bradford. So let’s take a look at the two men, and see where and how they merged and converged.

HI was remote, sardonic, presenting a carapace of thespian gravitas. Bram was gregarious, genial, the ideal Front-of-House meeter and greeter. Some said that HI did not treat Bram well, that he could be offensive and even derisive towards his lieutenant. I find this unlikely. Bram was a sensitive, emotional soul who would not have lasted the course if he’d felt undervalued or disrespected. True, theirs was not an equal partnership for HI was unquestionably the Guv’nor, but together they made a matchless team.

Henry Irving was born John Brodribb on 6 February, 1838, in Keinton Mandeville, a Somerset village as unexceptional then as it is now. His father’s occupation is unknown – shopkeeper? traveller in menswear? – but we do know he lived frugally with his wife and son in two small rooms. While still a toddler Johnnie’s parents moved to Bristol, but he was sent for his health’s sake to live with his Aunt Sarah and family in Halsetown, Cornwall. Just imagine the despair of separation. ‘At first I was miserable enough; I parted from my mother as though my heart was breaking, but did not show half I felt, nor she either.’(1)

Yet another trauma lay in wait for the boy six years later: re-joining his parents in the City of London where his father had obtained employment, the nature of which also remains undetected. Again young Johnnie suffered bewildering disruption, this time exchanging the fresh open Cornish landscape for the smoky, alarming streets of the Metropolis. No wonder the gawky only child developed a speech defect.

Bram Stoker’s origins were altogether more genteel and settled. He was born in Clontarf, Dublin, on 8 November 1847, the third of seven children in a solidly respectable, middle-class Protestant family. His father was Senior Clerk in the Dublin Court of Petty Sessions and three of his brothers became doctors, one achieving eminence as President of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and a baronet to boot. But from his earliest years Bram suffered a mysterious ailment which prevented him from walking properly until he was seven, though by his teens he evinced no physical disabilities whatsoever. Quite the reverse, as we shall see.

Irving also seems to have suffered a childhood accident which left him with a dragging leg. To conquer the handicaps of gait and diction well enough to become recognised as the greatest actor of the age shows a transcendental strength of purpose, but the future Elevator of the Stage had to overcome a further impediment to his ambitions: Methodism. To assuage the family shame at his
choice of career John Brodribb chose the stage name of Henry Irving, Henry having been added to John at his christening and Irving perhaps after Washington Irving, an author he admired, or perhaps Edward Irving, a preacher who had himself briefly trodden the boards.

His very first professional engagement, at Sunderland in 1856, nearly ended in ignominious dismissal, when failure to study his lines on a Sunday resulted in a catastrophically ill-prepared Monday performance. The Sabbath, divinely ordained day of rest or not, was never again allowed to interfere with what he was to call ‘the work’; the ‘God Blesses’ with which his letters and farewells were sprinkled we can take as casual expressions of friendship, not full-blown benedictions. His occasional church-going was also, in my judgment, prompted by convention rather than conviction, for as we learn from Isabel Bateman, his first Lyceum leading lady who was eventually to abandon the stage for the cloister, ‘The man she loved was not a believer’.(2)

One notable similarity between HI and Bram was their height, for both were well above the 1870 average of 5ft 7ins. On the one occasion I met Laurence Irving, son of H B Irving, he told me that his grandfather’s court dress fitted him perfectly, and that he, Laurence, was 6′ 2″. In a letter to Walt Whitman written in 1872 Bram also states himself to be ‘six foot two inches high and twelve stone weight naked’.(3)

In this same letter Bram declared, ‘I am equal in temper and cool in disposition and have a large amount of self-control and am naturally secretive to the world.’ Such a temperament was to serve him well in his years of dealing with theatrical wheeler-dealers and rip-off suppliers on both sides of the Atlantic, though for ‘secretive’ I would read ‘tactful and discreet’. In contrast, according to Max Beerbohm, ‘Irving’s presence dominated even those who could not be enchanted by it. His magnetism was intense, and unceasing.’ (4)

Bram was full-bearded, HI clean-shaven, as were most actors of the period, leaving their faces a blank canvas on which to limn their characterisations. Bram’s hair was red and neatly trimmed, HI’s raven locks famously flowed. Bram never lost his light Dublin lilt; HI’s stage assumption of gentlemanly manners and speech were often remarked upon in reviews, so we can presume that he
successfully camouflaged his humble upbringing.

In 1864, at the age of sixteen, Bram entered Trinity College, Dublin, and in 1866 began his career in the Irish Civil Service. HI left school aged only thirteen, to work for a firm of solicitors and then for an East India merchant.

Despite Bram’s crippling illness in his early childhood, as mentioned above, he grew into an exceptionally versatile sportsman, winning prizes for, amongst other disciplines, walking, hurdles, vaulting, high jump, and long jump. He was a keen oarsman and rugby player, and even became a notable performer on rings and trapeze. But he also fully exercised his intellect, reading for a science degree while involving himself in the running of the University Historical and Philosophical Societies. HI, on the other hand, confined his leisure activities to nothing more strenuous than the occasional day’s fishing.

Nor was politics of much interest to the actor. Bram wrote that in 1880:

‘Those were early days in the Home Rule movement, and as I was a believer in it Irving was always chaffing me about it. It was not that he had any politics himself – certainly in a party sense; the nearest point to politics he ever got, so far as I know, was when he accepted his election to the Reform Club.’

So while HI’s political beliefs remain shadowy we can posit a vague Liberalism – Gladstone, for instance, had his own personal seat in the Lyceum wings. How Irving voted, if he voted at all, we don’t know. Both he and Bram were Freemasons, though HI’s involvement in the Craft was largely confined to supporting its charities. Membership was expected of a successful man in late-Victorian England and it would have given offence in high places had he declined. But it took him six years to achieve the basic degree of Master Mason, for learning arcane rituals and dressing-up in his spare time can not have appealed. He did that for a living.

* * *

Bram’s first sighting of Henry Irving was as Captain Absolute in The Rivals at the Theatre Royal, Dublin, in 1867. Bram would have been only nineteen; a fourpage paean of praise in his Reminiscences written nearly forty years after the event smacks more of novelistic indulgence than a reliable memoir. He next saw HI in 1871, as Digby Grant in Two Roses. Again in his Reminiscences Bram treats us to three and a half pages of hagiographical flatulence, contradicting his original review in the Dublin Evening Mail which had been sharply critical.

They finally met in 1876, when HI, now firmly established as Britain’s leading actor – though still an employee of Mrs Bateman – brought his much-lauded Hamlet to Dublin. Bram wrote a penetrating review in the Dublin Evening Mail and HI, never one to miss an opportunity to court the press, invited him to supper at the Shelbourne Hotel. Sensing easy prey, Irving invited Bram to dine again the following Sunday.

Here the host obliged with his party piece: Thomas Hood’s Dream of Eugene Aram. It was to prove a life-changing experience for the Irishman. There are many contemporary accounts of HI’s electrifying delivery of the poem, and at the conclusion as Aram was led away ‘With gyves upon his wrist’ Bram suddenly exploded into violent hysterics, an unexpected but gratifying reaction for the performer. ‘Then began the close friendship between us,’ recalled Bram, ‘which only terminated with his life – if indeed friendship, like any other form of love, can ever terminate…From that hour began a friendship as profound, as close, as lasting as can be between two men.’

At this time HI was laying plans to become his own master. Would Bram consider becoming his business manager? Bram, anxious to establish himself as a writer, agreed to respond when the call came, for London offered far richer literary opportunities than Dublin.

Two years later, in 1878, Mrs Bateman bowed to the inevitable and made over the lease of the Lyceum to her cuckoo-in-the-nest star actor. Having at last assumed the purple HI engaged as his leading lady Ellen Terry, replacing the worthy but uncharismatic Isabel Bateman who had perforce to trudge up Rosebery Avenue where her mother had leased Sadler’s Wells. Spurned as a
woman and as an actress, she learned the hard way that when it came to ‘the work’ Henry Irving was not just dedicated but ruthless.

* * *

December 1878, therefore, was a highly significant month for both men. On the 4th, a full year earlier than planned, Bram married Florence Balcombe, and ten days later he formally joined HI’s team at the Lyceum. What did the bride make of it all? I suspect she was as thrilled by the whirlwind of events as her new husband. She was an exceptionally pretty woman – Oscar Wilde was a
disappointed suitor – and the opportunity of making a mark in London salons was seductive. Certainly Bram had no doubts. Throwing in his lot with HI was like a second marriage; it was scarcely less profound a commitment.

Irving’s wife was also named Florence, but their life together was wretchedly unhappy. They had finally separated in 1871, though they never divorced – the risk of social obloquy was too great. Their sons, Harry Brodribb Irving and Laurence Irving (the latter named slightly inaccurately for HI’s bosom friend John Lawrence Toole) lived with their mother, a mean-minded woman totally unsuited to be an actor’s helpmeet.

The Stokers had one child, a boy christened Irving after his godfather, though he was always known by his second name Noel. Their union survived intact until Bram’s death over thirty years later.
Still in the momentous month of December, 1878, HI opened his eagerly anticipated first Lyceum season on the 30th with a revival of Hamlet. The acclaim was tumultuous, unprecedented in its fervour by press and public alike. The following day Bram also had cause to celebrate: the publication of The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions, a book whose text, I fancy, was not as lurid as
his later fiction.

Two months before Bram actually started working for HI he had received a letter which ended ‘With love, in great haste, Henry.’ The following week, writing from Sheffield, HI again signs off with ‘love’. But by August, 1879, less than a year later, HI was signing himself ‘Yours sincerely’. The reason for this apparent cooling must be ascribed to the change in Bram’s status, from personal friend to employee. HI was, after all, the Guv’nor.

In the Lyceum programmes ‘Mr Henry Irving’ was always on the front page as Sole Lessee and Manager. Bram would be listed, on page three or four, well down the pecking order as Acting Manager, after the likes of H J Loveday (Stage Manager) and Meredith Ball (Musical Director). With no standing in the creative hierarchy Bram was perhaps lucky to be mentioned at all. Nevertheless he threw himself into his new duties, writing some fifty to sixty letters a day.

The entire two volumes of his Reminiscences mention HI only in terms of reverential praise, the single instance of criticism is that he ‘could be secretive’, a word Bram had used to describe his own nature thirty-four years earlier. Bram may have possessed the less complex character, but his fictional oeuvre, which was to ripen in the 1890s, showed a darker and more ambivalent nature than his bluff, hail-fellow-well-met public persona would lead us to believe. His heroworship extended to florid panegyrics on the Guv’nor’s fitness and physique, noting that up to his sixtieth year HI was…

‘…compact of steel and whipcord. His energy and nervous power were such as only came from a great brain; and the muscular force of that lean, lithe body must have been extraordinary.’

This does seem a touch over-wrought, but let me here and now stamp firmly on the notion that Bram was a closet gay. Nor should any unwarranted inference be drawn from the intimacy which HI famously enjoyed with J L Toole, a hugely popular comic actor who had been something of a mentor to Irving in his early career. Mrs Aria, HI’s companion of his later years, wrote:

‘To the last day of Irving’s life the friendship of the two men each for the other never flagged or faltered…Each had, in his own way and of its own kind, a great sense of humour. Toole’s genial, ebullient, pronounced; Irving’s saturnine, keen, and suggestive.’ (5)

So did Bram ever really know HI? Or did he know only as much as HI wished to reveal? The artist and writer W Graham Robertson said ‘as an actor [HI] gave expression to everything; as himself he was careful to tell nothing’. Sir John Martin Harvey’s melancholy view was that HI was ‘the loneliest man he ever knew’. W L Courtney, critic, observed ‘In some undefined way, he conveyed the
impression that he stood apart – that his personality moved in a sphere of its own’. Novelist Horace Annersley Vachell said much the same: ‘Irving…appeared to soar above himself into an empyrean remote from ordinary criticism.’ Part of Bram’s value may be seen therefore as a conduit between HI’s supra-worldliness and the mundanities of management. But his contribution to the Guv’nor’s success did not go unnoticed. Here’s the Chicago Daily News in 1888:

‘Mr Irving’s great success in this country has been due to a very considerable extent to the shrewd management of Bram Stoker. We know of no manager more vigilant, more indefatigable, more audacious than he. He knows how to make friends, how to keep them, and how to utilize them. At all times he has an eye to business, yet he is always to all apparences a careless, cordial man of the world. In the manipulation of Mr Irving’s intricate and enormous business he exhibits a coolness, a shrewdness, and an enthusiasm that are simply masterful…Irving is fortunate in having so able and so loyal an associate.’

Fourteen years later Bram was still beavering away with undiminished vigour, leaving the Northern Echo to opine ‘One is led to wonder what Sir Henry would do without this Trojan whose ubiquity is astounding.’

Despite meticulous stewardship of HI’s finances Bram was not so shrewd with his own. In the early 1890s he lost heavily in a continental publishing venture and in an investment scheme promoted by Mark Twain. So disastrous were these speculations that by 1896, despite an income of £22 per week, he was obliged to borrow £600 from the writer Hall Caine. (6)

1896 was also catastrophic for Henry Irving. On 19 December, exhausted after a Lyceum opening night as Richard III, he slipped on the stairs at his Grafton Street apartments, badly injuring a knee. He was incapacitated for ten weeks, and the financial repercussions were dire. For several years the Lyceum had run at a loss, insolvency kept at bay only by regular and increasingly demanding tours of the UK and North America. The accident marked the beginning of a decline in the actor’s health and fortunes; the glory days were over.

* * *

For Irvingites the publication of Dracula is but a glancing incident. For Stokerites, however, this 1897 turgid tale of the Undead is the apex of their hero’s life’s work, with Henry Irving little more than a walk-on. To what extent the Count was based on HI is debatable. Both the actor and his alleged avatar were tall and compelling, and Bram’s entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography makes a further interesting comparison:

‘Complex and highly symbolic, the plot illustrated his fears about a world approaching a new century, about male insecurity and the dangers of subservience to another person. Dracula was also a shape-shifter. Is an actor not also a shape-shifter?’

Good point, but Paul Murray goes into overdrive with a racy run-down of the novel’s themes and subplots:

‘The powerful sexual charge which runs through Dracula has caught the attention of modern commentators, who see in it deviant and taboo forms of sexuality, including rape, incest, adultery, oral sex, group sex, sex during menstruation, bestiality, paedophilia, venereal disease and voyerism, among other things.’(7)

What ‘other things’, I wonder? This thesaurus of carnality surely tells us more about Mr Murray than it does about Bram Stoker.

Irving himself tapped into the rage for the supernatural with his colossally successful 1885 production of Faust, complete with devils, witches and red fire, but his opinion of Dracula after seeing a copyright reading was expressed in one word: ‘Dreadful!’ He would of course have been ideal casting for the sinister Count. The tall gaunt actor would also have been perfect as Sherlock Holmes,
though alas he turned down Conan Doyle’s offer of a play.

Perhaps Irving was wary of frock-coat parts, for the last of the Romantics had little sympathy for moderns like Ibsen, Chekhov, Gogol or Shaw. One must sympathise with the veteran actor/producer for his reluctance to move out of his comfort zone. We don’t castigate Elgar for not composing like Stravinsky or Sickert for not painting like Picasso, so let us admire Irving’s achievements for what they were and not berate him for what we think they should have been. His one essay at contemporary drama, The Medicine Man, produced in 1898, was a rank failure, to be withdrawn after twenty-four performances.

For HI 1898 was an annus horrendus. In February fire destroyed £30,000 worth of scenery stored in a railway arch. In the ferocity of the flames HI lost almost his entire stock-in-trade – the only sets left were those in the Lyceum at the time. That he had recently reduced his insurance from £10,000 to £6,000, against Bram’s advice, did little to soften the blow. Worse was to come. In October while on tour HI was struck down with pleurisy and pneumonia; without the actor-knight topping the bill takings plunged. The onset of emphysema further depleted his energies.

A significant newcomer to the Lyceum was Laurence Irving, HI’s actor dramatist younger son. His 1898 Peter the Great, despite providing his father with a suitably dominant role, failed to attract. Sardou’s Robespierre and Dante were also dated and hugely expensive to mount, but Laurence, who translated and adapted both pieces, had his father’s ear. Bram realised he was being sidelined.

‘In those last seven years of his life I was not able to see so much of him as I had been on the habit of doing throughout the previous twenty…my work became to save him all I could…But the opportunities were different. Seldom now were there the long meetings when occasion was full of chances for self-development, for self-illumination; when idea leads on
idea till presently the secret chambers of the soul are made manifest….The man, wearied by long toil and more or less deprived by age and health of the spurs of ambition, shrank somewhat into himself.’

The prose is flowery – what are ‘secret chambers of the soul’? – but Bram was obviously hurt by the withdrawal of the man to whom he had been so close for so long. Worse was to come in 1899 when, against Bram’s strongly expressed advice, HI relinquished his Lyceum lease to a limited company, though he did heed Bram’s warning not to join the board. Within three years the company was broke and Irving’s Lyceum fell dark, never to re-open.

In 1905 HI began his farewell tour, after which he intended to retire to Cornwall and write his memoirs. Ellen Terry had once asked him how he would like to go. ‘Like that!’ he said, snapping his fingers.(8) And so it turned out, for he died on 13 October in the foyer of the Midland Hotel, Bradford, having just played Tennyson’s Becket. The last thing he’d said to Bram was, ‘Take care of
yourself, old chap. Good-night. God bless you.’

In his will HI left Bram nothing. Apart from a small annuity to his valetdresser, Walter Collinson, HI’s sons and Mrs Aria got the lot. When Bram died on 12 April, 1912, Hall Caine, his friend and the dedicatee of Dracula, wrote: :

‘Much has been said of his relation to Henry Irving, but I wonder how many were really aware of the whole depth and significance of that association. Stoker seemed to give up his life to it. It was not only his time and his services that he gave to Irving – it was his heart, which never failed for one moment in loyalty, in enthusiasm, in affection, in the strongest love that man may feel for man…and I say without any hesitation that never have I seen such absorption of one man’s life in the life of another.’

From which we may conclude that however you view the relationship, it worked for them.

* * *

GENERAL REFERENCE

Irving, Laurence Henry Irving: The Actor and his World (Faber & Faber 1951)
Saintsbury, H A & Palmer, Cecil eds. We Saw Him Act (Hurst & Blackett 1939)
Stoker, Bram Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving 2 vols. (William Heinemann 1906)

FOOTNOTES

1. Brereton, Austin The Life of Henry Irving vol. 1 (Longmans 1908) p5
2. Bateman, Isabel & others From Theatre to Convent: Memories of Mother Isabel Mary CSMV (1936) p6
3. Miller, Elizabeth & Stoker, Dacre The Dublin Years: The Lost Journal of Bram Stoker (The Robson Press 2012) p125
4. Beerbohm, Max Around Theatres (Rupert Hart-Davis 1953) p399
5. Aria, Mrs My Sentimental Self (Chapman & Hall 1922)
6. Equivalent sums in 2012 are £2,000 and £56,000 respectively.
7. Murray, Paul From the Shadow of Dracula: A Life of Bram Stoker (Jonathan Cape 2004)
8. Terry, Ellen The Story of My Life (Hutchinson & Co) p337

Students of Henry Irving’s majestic reign at the Lyceum Theatre are, I think, prone to repeat three fallacies about him and his audience. First, that he was almost single-handedly responsible for, and indeed led, the theatrical boom of the late nineteenth century. Second, that he was a simple country boy with little interest in politics who was driven by a burning desire to make the theatre ‘respectable’ particularly in the eyes of the Royal family. And third that the relative decline in his fortunes later in life - the thirteenth season in 1891 was the last Lyceum season to make a profit - was simply down to the fickleness of the public, deserting the man whom they had once blindly adored, but who had now become ‘old fashioned’.

I disagree with all three assumptions. I think Irving was, in one important sense, a supremely political animal, very much aware of the murky power struggles of the mid-nineteenth century and that he pursued his own moral and political ends with dogged skill. I don’t think that the varying attention he attracted can be satisfactorily explained by fluctuating ‘fashions’, or by something so random as fickleness. Far from being at the forefront of the great theatrical boom tide of the eighteen-nineties I think he was cut off and isolated by the power of its surge, though appalled by its shallowness.

We talk of our own time as a time of great change, but I do not believe it can be a time of such change as Irving witnessed. From a boyhood spent walking the Somerset and Cornish lanes, he lived to see motor cars in the London streets. The first box of matches was just coming on the market at the time of Irving’s birth; by his last years virtually every leading theatre company except his was lit by electric light.

When he first arrived in the City as a boy of ten, Greater London had a population of just over two million; when he played his twelfth (interim) Lyceum season in 1889 it had grown to six and a half million. His potential audience was by then very much greater than that. The audience travelling into Central London each evening, by car, by tram, by omnibus and particularly by train was estimated at the turn of the century to be in excess of twenty-five thousand. The railways in particular had grown prodigiously, and the establishment of the day excursion greatly extended each London theatre manager’s potential catchment.

So we have immediately to confront one unavoidable fact. Irving’s ‘market share’ of the reachable London audience steadily declined throughout his Lyceum reign, and fell catastrophically in the 1890s when, as we shall see, he was faced with increasing difficulty in filling some parts of the Lyceum. Of course that was, in part, because of the unprecedented strength of the competition. For there has never been, before nor since, so large a provision in London for public entertainment as there was in the last decade of the nineteenth century. When the young Irving first arrived in the capital in 1848, there were in total just nineteen London houses. By 1900 there were sixty-one fully-fledged theatres, in addition to a further forty officially licensed music halls.

The theatres were by no means the whole of the London leisure scene at the end of the nineteenth century. The great art displays - including the recently opened Tate Gallery - took their place alongside the museums, the public lectures and the concert halls. The Crystal Palace, at Sydenham, was still going strong, as a choral venue, as were the panoramas and the dioramas alongside the new moving picture shows - such as the one at the Empire in 1896 - the skating rinks, the menageries, waxworks, circuses, magic shows, balloon ascents and ‘thrilling acrobatic displays’. It is estimated there were still more than five thousand street entertainers of various kinds on the London streets. There were also two hundred thousand prostitutes. Great crowds still gathered at holiday times in the public parks, the commercial pleasure gardens and on the river - and in London there was now an additional attraction, professional sport - which attracted huge new, largely male, crowds. Scarcely any account of London’s leisure life in the 1890s is complete without an account of a visit to a boxing match. Crowds of thirty thousand watched the cricket at Lords in summer, and in winter more than seventy thousand sometimes watched such well-known soccer teams as Woolwich Arsenal.

In the eighteen-nineties catering for leisure was already a full-scale business, or, as we might nowadays say, an ‘industry’. It was already linked with the business of tourism and in 1895 when the great new exhibition centre at Earls Court attracted more than four million visitors to its Festival of India and Ceylon it was held to be a triumph because a third of its attendees were visitors to the capital. Passing trade, on which the theatre managers had once largely relied dwindled to practically nothing. Now, visitors to London bought packages (train, hotel and theatre tickets combined) from the rapidly proliferating tourism agencies which, as Charles Dickens Jr. wrote in his London Guide of 1879, had already ‘assumed a rather important place in the economy of London’.

The combined results of the introduction of advance booking and the associated development of party booking meant that investment in London theatre was much less of a gamble than ever before. Popular theatre productions could settle into long runs. In the eighteen-forties only five plays had runs of more than a hundred performances. In the eighteen-nineties one hundred and sixty-nine played more than a hundred performances and twenty-four of these had a run of over three hundred. It was the bigger theatres that tended to house the blockbuster shows. Drury Lane, whose capacity during the eighteen-nineties never dropped below three thousand, had no fewer than fifteen runs of a hundred performances each in that period.

For some, investment in leisure provision was becoming hugely profitable. The bigger promoters were beginning to sell their branded products to an ever-expanding market. Everyone has seen photographs of several Fred Karno’s troupes setting out from London. The D’Oyly Carte Opera Company also subdivided into two, and sometimes three distinct companies. Even Wombwell’s Menagerie had a number one, number two and number three touring outfit! But a distinctive product such as the Lyceum Company could not subdivide itself into profitable touring parts, for it depended supremely upon one man. The occasional forays of the Lyceum Summer Company were always ‘By permission of Henry Irving’. That man, for reasons I shall suggest later, was resistant to being ‘rebranded’ as a consumable product and had little interest in the opportunistic capitalism of the new breed of turn-of-the-century theatre managers.

Irving’s comparative failure in the eighteen-nineties was, I think, less a matter of his acting being old-fashioned than of his managerial philosophy and methods being out of their time. The business climate rather than popular taste had swung against him. It was the age of such as Sir Augustus Harris an actor turned impresario, manager of the Palace Theatre, air-conditioned and with two thousand-odd electric lights was ‘the best-equipped theatre in the world’. The music-haIl, once owned by the working class, was now largely a capitalist enterprise. In the early eighteen-nineties London had its first music hall (or variety theatre) syndicate, a new organisation called Moss’s Empire Palaces, capitalised at £1,500,000, built its first provincial theatres and, by the end of the decade, Moss Empires had spread into the heart of London. Businessmen who had made a packet in other fields were being urged - for virtually the only time in British history - to put their money into the successful parts of theatre business where it would be safe! As early as 1887 the Financial News was recommending (15th February) that investors put their money into the music hall, remarking, prophetically enough:

‘… whenever it had been decently and prudently managed it had yielded large fortunes …if it continues to refine itself and heap novelty on novelty as it does, it will go on growing.’

It was plain where investors’ money would go. In 1902 Moss Empires were paying a 12½% dividend to their shareholders. In the same year Lyceum Ltd. finally went into liquidation, its £1 shares being valued at 7d

Let me give one further example of the way in which the rampant new theatrical commercialism undercut Irving’s company. We know that the Lyceum was, in commercial terms, over-reliant upon the drawing power of one man and that when in the late eighteen-nineties, Irving was out of the cast - as he was, following his fall after the opening night of Richard Ill - the box office fell alarmingly. We know that in a doomed attempt to cut costs Irving reduced insurance premiums and was almost put out of business following the mysterious fire, which destroyed the contents of his scenery store. But Irving had been losing money on his London seasons since 1892. And one reason – in addition to much else - was that, in an attempt to compete with the new commercialism and hold his market share, Irving had been forced to raise his advertising costs well beyond his means.

In the second half of the nineteenth century London was a billposter’s paradise. So extensive were all the building and rebuilding projects in Central London that there were then vast acres of fencing and exposed walls on which the official billposters and the more chancy flyposters could practise their art. The old charge of the billposters of Id. per double crown rose in the eighteen-nineties to 2d. or 3d. for prime sites, and the billposting costs per season rose from the £40 or £50 pounds annually of Irving’s early years to an annual expenditure of several hundred pounds. But that was nothing in comparison with the hugely increased costs of newspaper advertising. The removal first of Stamp Duty and then of Advertisement Taxes, the invention of the steam printing press, the growth in literacy and increased prosperity (and, it has to be said, the arrival of another group of profit-hungry entrepreneurs,) all combined to create an explosion of national and provincial newspapers without equal in our history. Irving’s expenditure on newspaper advertising rose annually from a few hundred pounds in the eighteen seventies to several thousands in the eighteen-nineties.

Irving could not afford to advertise in more than a tenth of the possible outlets and, compared with the music hall syndicates and the growing theatre circuits, the Lyceum’s expenditure on advertising was inadequate to the task. To stand any chance at all, the Lyceum then needed to advertise itself as a part of a package but it was on its own. Irving lacked the means to refresh his audience with young people and, although the audiences for the music halls and the new West End theatres in general grew younger, Irving’s Lyceum audience aged with him.

I believe Irving had much more political awareness than is normally granted to him. By the more usual account, Irving was a simple country boy, impatient at his lessons, fascinated by the magic of theatre and blind to everything else - a noble savage who after many hardships succeeded in conquering the sophisticated world of London and London high society.

It is noticeable that most people who write about Irving’s early life will write a brightly-lit, almost idyllic account of his West Country childhood, but will say little or nothing about his surroundings as a boy in London. Then the background is darkened. We are told a little about his schooling, his extra curricular drama lessons, his visits to see Phelps at Sadler’s Wells, his first amateur stage performances, but nothing about life on London’s streets. The implication is that the young Irving drifted through the city unaware of the political turmoil of the times.

One perennial problem is that Irving’s professional life more or less spans what we blandly call the Victorian Age. The term conjures up sanguine decades of prosperous formality. The Victorians are pictured as being, in general highly industrious, family-minded people who, like Gilbert’s pirates, all loved their Queen. Give or take a few technical changes, we generally assume that Victorian life in the eighteen-nineties was much the same as Victorian life had been in the eighteen-forties. As the historian G. M. Young rightly says:

‘If it had been the Queen and not Prince Albert who had died in 1861, the process of English history would have been far easier to apprehend. The long life of the sovereign, the long careers of her most famous subjects, created an illusion, which the word ‘Victorian’ enshrines.’

For the truth is that when the ten-year-old Irving arrived in 1848 London was, in Herman Melville’s words, a damned city, a ‘city of Dante’. Clouds of smoke darkened the skies all day, and neither homes nor streets were adequately lit. In 1849 the Illustrated London Newsremarked that the city around St. Paul’s was ‘blackened and encrusted with a hard mixture of cement of smoke, cobwebs and rain’. Children of the young Irving’s age were working in the brickfields north of the city, in the mines to the east of it and in the sweatshops of London for between eleven and sixteen hours a day. Many children were already hardened criminals. Of the sixty-two thousand persons taken into custody that year in London, some sixteen thousand were under the age of twenty.

The grim battle between law and lawlessness was played out in public. The young Irving will have seen the bodies left swinging from the gibbets outside London’s twelve prisons - public executions were not abolished until 1868 - and will have heard the prisoners begging from the open prison windows by the roadside. There was one notable window not far from his home, in the Fleet Prison on the Farringdon Road. He will have seen the soup kitchens in the East End, in Clerkenwell, and the beggars huddled under the stair-wells, even perhaps seen them down in the docks loading the hulks which were still transporting several thousand people a year to Australia.

The city was still grotesquely unsanitary. Irving’s arrival in London coincided with a dreadful outbreak of cholera, which continued to spread its ravages until the autumn of 1849. In the words of the rapidly commissioned Board of Health the cholera raged ‘wherever neglect, depression, vice or poverty’ pressed down upon the population’, which was almost everywhere, while in central London:

‘foul drains, overflowing cesspools, foetid waters, overcrowded lodging houses, damp cellars, and ill-ventilated rooms attracted the pestilence, which then spread to the houses of the better classes and to the mansions of the rich’.

In such a diseased and dangerous city, the theatre was more than a leisure indulgence for a bright young lad. However primitive, it was a place of light and warmth, and a more sanitary place than most domestic dwellings.

But the early Victorian theatre was much more than that. It was a popular forum for the most intense debates of the day - debates that seemed at the time of lrving’s arrival in the capital, to be leading inevitably to the overthrow of the Queen and the establishment of a British Republic. For perhaps the most startling fact about Henry Irving’s arrival in London was that it was the year of the second French Revolution and the establishment of the French Republic.

There was turmoil in every European capital, and London was no exception. In April 1848 the Chartists announced that they would rally in great numbers on Kennington Common and march from thence to the House of Commons, to present a monster petition, containing several million signatures, demanding a general male franchise. The idea got abroad that 10th April would be the day of revolution. The Queen, who had already survived three assassination attempts, was spirited from the capital. The Duke of Wellington took charge of the official defences. London was put under curfew. One hundred and seventy thousand special constables were sworn in to keep the peace. Regular troops were secretly stationed in houses on all main roads. All river shipping was in the hands of the police. Private vehicles were banned from the streets. The Tower guns were mounted. The Bank of England was sandbagged. Two thousand stands of arms were issued to the Custom House, Exchange and - strangely, to our eyes - to the officials of the General Post Office. On Kennington Common itself six hundred Household troops took up their positions.

There was no revolution - then. But tension remained high in the capital. Riots remained common, and the authorities’ fear of the mob is illustrated, as much as anything, by the fact that Trafalgar Square was actually built with pill boxes at each corner to fire upon the expected revolutionaries. London’s artists and intellectuals were right at the heart of the dangerous currents, which swirled around the capital, to the extent that for a decade or so the phrase ‘literary men’ was almost synonymous with ‘revolutionary’. London’s theatres had a pivotal political importance. It was in the capital’s theatres - particularly during Lent - that the Chartists, the Anti-Corn Law League and the Reform League habitually held their meetings. Even more importantly, in some theatres a play which read innocuously on the printed page could be given a revolutionary significance by the way the audience chose to read it. So some theatres - whose programme seemed above political reproach - nevertheless became known as radical theatres.

Such was Sadler’s Wells. The conventional reading of Samuel Phelps’ tenure at that theatre is that the actor tamed an uneducated North London audience disposed in their ignorance to be unruly. Reading contemporary accounts of the lively and highly partisan Sadler’s Wells audience suggests something rather different. Not that Phelps tamed them, but that he became their voice. For lslington, far from being a centre of Victorian yob culture, was a radical hotbed, and Phelps’ audience included, from the first, many of the leading artist/revolutionaries of London. In 1847 the Times described Phelps’ audience as ‘comprising a singular number of literary men - and ladies - of the present day.’ Dickens, for example, was a very frequent visitor. So the Shakespeare heroes that were most consistently successful in Phelps’ repertoire -Macbeth, Richard III, King John, Pericles - in addition to their other merits, took on a highly charged political significance.

It was that theatre, with its eager, highly politicised audience, which caught the young Irving’s imagination. In later life, it was to Phelps’ influence that he most often referred. So why then, in 1856, did he not accept Phelps’ offer and join his company at Sadler’s Wells?

The answer, I believe, lies in the young Irving’s political acumen, as well as in his cautious character. Irving was far from being a political hothead.

He was, I believe, torn between an innate sympathy with many of the radical causes of the time, and a terror of the carnage that would be unleashed if such causes were too blindly followed. At that time, it was far from clear whether the establishment or the radicals would prevail, and whether London would not witness a Terror as great as that of France. I think therefore that he turned down Phelps’ offer, not out of artistic prudence, but political caution.

I would call as evidence the fact that, in February 1856, after he had turned down Phelps’ offer but had nevertheless determined to go on to the stage, he wrote to his cousin Mrs. Wilkins:

‘Evangelical and political events of no common order are brewing. The great Evangelical question is with reference to the opening of public exhibitions such as the British Museum, National Gallery and Crystal Palace on Sundays. Dickens’ new work (the first number of which had a circulation of 35,000) is written in favour of the opening, and he puts forward in a very ingenious manner (though under a cloak) the advantages arising from such a step. Dickens is a moralist but nothing else’.

There speaks the young politician! ‘A moralist and nothing else…’ Irving pities the politically naïve… He goes on:

‘The great political question is the establishment of peace: much will depend on the issue of that. It is very interesting to watch the movements of the different bodies…’

He was then just eighteen. I think the political education he gained in those adolescent years, in a turbulent London, determined his political and managerial character, and determined which audience he wanted to speak to, and in what voice.

The similarities in the references, during the early years of Irving’s reign at the Lyceum, to the literary and artistic composition of his audience are quite striking. When we have reminded ourselves that, even in the eighteen-eighties, ‘leading artistic and literary figures’ is still code for ‘radical’, we can perhaps guess at a part, at least, of Irving’s intention. He wanted the Lyceum to have the same educational and intellectual force that Phelps’ theatre had enjoyed in lslington. We do him, I think, a disservice if we assume that his carefully composed first night receptions, his long suppers and conversations in the Beefsteak Room, his gruelling schedule of public lectures and debates, the carefully-contrived symposia in The Theatre, were simply a public relations exercise, or a convoluted attempt to achieve respectability for his profession. Cautious by nature, Irving wanted the Lyceum to generate and be in the forefront of political and intellectual debate.

That intellectuality does not accord with the picture sometimes presented of Irving as a theatrical hack, wasting his great talent on crude melodrama, whose only merit was to get a few ageing bums on seats and unable at the end to come to terms with the new theatre of ideas that George Bernard Shaw, in particular, was promoting. But I don’t believe in that picture. I think Irving’s choice of plays was always motivated by much more than financial expediency, was infused with a keen moral sense, and was often of high political importance.

Most people would agree with that view, if they consider it against his then revolutionary interpretation of The Merchant of Venice, and also when considering in its political context, The Bells. It is much more than a commercial war-horse. Much of the rest of his repertoire could benefit from being reconsidered in the light of the contemporary political situation. We might like for instance to reconsider his lifelong fascination with French history and the French Revolution. Perhaps we can now understand Ellen Terry’s incomprehension when, towards the end of his professional life, having refused her very practical suggestion that he should go on the road and cash in on his fame as a speaker of Shakespeare, saw him playing – ‘Just Henry and 200 extras - in Robespierre’. And we almost certainly underestimate just howdangerous were some of his choices, Faust for example, at a time of high religious passions. Almost every item in his programme becomes more interesting when it is considered in its immediate political context.

Let me focus just on one event in Irving’s stewardship when, in the early autumn of 1888. he surprisingly announced that he intended to discontinue the run of Faust, which was still doing good box office. At that time Irving will have looked like what he undoubtedly was - a well-established and successful London theatre manager, making plenty of money from a well-established and long-running production, and mixing easily with Britain’s literary and artistic élite. There was little outward sign remaining of the cagey young political animal who had turned down Phelps offer of work twenty-two years before.

An invitation to supper in the Beefsteak Room was still eagerly sought by London’s great and good. There they would meet leading artists, politicians and thinkers, probably Freemasons like Irving himself. A year previously, Irving had helped found the Savage Club Lodge, composed virtually exclusively of literary and theatrical leaders. They might even meet the Prince of Wales, who was not only a patron of the Lyceum but who had, for fifteen years, been Chief Mason, the Most Worshipful Grand Master of England.

With a commercial and critically acclaimed success on his hands, it seems the more surprising that Irving should have announced that he was replacing Faust with the Scottish play. Macbeth was to open on 29th December with Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth and Irving repeating a role in which he had hitherto been only partially successful. Had he been concerned simply with commercial success, it would have seemed strange at the least. Had he been concerned only with artistic quality - if such a thing were possible - it would have been an unnecessary risk. Considered as a piece of political theatre, it was a masterstroke.

As always, look at the context. Revolution was still bubbling beneath London’s surface - the previous autumn a hundred thousand unemployed had clashed with the army in Trafalgar Square in what was being called Bloody Sunday. London’s Masonic Lodges, far from being secure dining clubs for the privileged, had been buzzing again with rumours of the imminent collapse of the established order, and they had sent to their own Worshipful Grand Master a series of letters imploring him to behave as might become a future monarch worthy of the title.That summer there were new and terrifying rumours. A series of killings in the East End of London, seemingly at random, of poor, down-and-out young women in the Whitechapel district were being linked with one apparently deranged killer called Jack the Ripper. Worse, the killer was being linked by rumour to the Freemasons - another popular name for him was Old Leather Apron. Worse still, rumours about the murders also implicated the Royal Family, specifically the Prince of Wales. It was even said that the Worshipful Grand Master had ordered the killing because the girls had all at some time been engaged as staff to the prince’s son, Prince Eddy, after he had, illegally, married a Catholic girl and had a child by her. The girls, it was rumoured, had made a clumsy attempt at blackmail and now had to be silenced.

Whatever the truth, if any, of such stories, there is no doubt that the mood in London late that summer was one of near hysteria. And there can be no doubt that the significance of ‘the Ripper’ was debated in every salon in London, in every Masonic Lodge and of course in the Beefsteak Room at the Lyceum. There is no doubt that Irving heard much speculation about it and, perhaps, something of the truth behind the murders. Rumours about ‘the Ripper’ began to circulate early in summer, following the murder of Emma Elizabeth Smith on 3rd April. On the last night of his twelfth season, which was 7th July, Irving announced to a surprised audience that he would be discontinuing the run of Faust. Between 31st August and the 9th November the five undisputed victims of ‘the Ripper’ went to their deaths. Irving, on holiday in Paris, surprised his friends by the morbid pleasure he took in visiting the Paris morgue. He returned to rehearsals and on Saturday 29th December 1888, with the rumours of treachery in high places, Royal duplicity and bloody murder still bubbling in every pub in London, Irving opened Macbeth.

Very many people, including Ellen Terry, thought that to be the high point of the Lyceum story. After Macbeth, according to some accounts, Irving lost some of his mighty powers. Perhaps so, but that winter of 1888 was something of a watershed in British political life. In the eighteen-nineties the forces for liberal reform, economic growth and technical progress increasingly came together. The Reform Acts 1884/5 had given the vote to a great majority of adult males. Forster’s 1870 Act had introduced state education for all. The real value of the average wage had almost doubled since 1850.

The political agenda had moved on and Irving’s core London audience moved on with it. The average occupancy for the Lyceum performances fell steadily throughout the I890s, but it was in those areas of the house associated with the old literary intelligentsia - the pit and the boxes - that he suffered the greatest fall.

He continued to hold his audience in the provinces - particularly in such radical cities as Manchester - and of course there was still a substantial following in the circle and stalls. In addition to its increasing age, the Lyceum audience had one other unfortunate characteristic, which it shared with its parent. It was, like the Lyceum company, overwhelmingly male. As I have many times been reminded by my students, whom I have asked to read Bram Stoker’s memoirs of Irving’s Lyceum years, that most dutiful of chroniclers’ rate of droppage of male to female names is at a ratio of about thirty-five to one. And although artists loyally include a fair proportion of women in their drawings of the Lyceum audience, the number of reminiscences of Irving’s London performances written by women is suspiciously low. One has sometimes to remind oneself that the Theatre was not everywhere a male preserve, and that there were some great London managers - Sara Lane (Britannia Theatre) and Emma Cons (The Old Vic) for example - contemporary with Irving’s Lyceum management.

Irving never yielded to the new managerial commercialism, never doubted that the theatre had a higher purpose than making money – but his political focus remained rooted in the great concerns of the middle of the century. In later life he found new political issues shallow - it helps to explain his irritation with Shaw - and as a result one section at least of his contemporaries found him utterly insensitive to their concerns. One of the least-reported facts about his funeral was that the service took place against a highly audible background of jeering by the new Suffragettes, who picketed the Abbey. Ironic perhaps that his send-off should have been a hostile political demonstration.

For the last four years the Society has marked the anniversary of the birth of Sir Henry on 6 February 1838 with a ceremony at the foot of his statue on Charing Cross Road, London, incorporating in it an attempt to place a wreath at his feet some nine or ten feet off the ground - not it must be admitted entirely with altruistic intent but as an attempt (recently highly successful) to prevent the wreath being stolen instantly.

Society members know about Irving but what of this statue? Who was responsible for its erection? Who designed it and have its surroundings always been the same?

The statue was erected by the Irving Memorial Committee on land donated by the City of Westminster. The Committee, formed in December 1906 with Sir John Hare as Chairman and Charles Cruikshanks as Secretary decided straightaway that a subscription list would be opened - but (as the inscription on the base puts it) only to ‘English actors and actresses and…. others connected with the theatre in this country.’

Sir Thomas Brock R.A. was prevailed upon to take the commission but work was delayed for some time as the Committee and the sculptor differed in their views of how Sir Henry should be dressed.

The Committee generally favoured a costume associated with one of his famous parts, the sculptor favoured mufti. In the event the sculptor’s view prevailed - but interestingly enough (even though Brock might not have viewed it as such at the time) Sir Henry is still in costume his D. Litt.(Cantab) gown, for one of the parts he ‘played’ off-stage - the academically-minded actor. Underneath he is wearing a well-cut suit of the type he favoured when making personal appearances at the myriad civic lunches and statue-unveiling ceremonies with which he was regularly involved once he became ‘the leader of the English Stage and he has his right hand on his hip - another very characteristic gesture which either Brock knew from personal experience or which he picked up from the many caricatures and sketches in which it is featured. Sir Henry is hat-less (or rather mortar-board-less) so that his famous mound of long hair may be clearly seen. All in all it is one of the most successful portrait statues in central London and demonstrates clearly why Brock was one of the leading sculptors of his day.

Brock’s first major work was the Prince Consort for the Albert Memorial which he in fact completed following the sudden death of the original designer, John Foley, for whom he was working as an assistant. It was only natural, therefore, that Brock should be made responsible for the Victoria Memorial in front of Buckingham Palace. A commission for such a monument at such a time was obviously fraught with difficulty.

The Queen had died on 22 January 1901. Her son, Edward VII was due to be crowned on 26 June but due to his perityphlitis the coronation had to be postponed until 9 August. Thereafter he was kept busy with not only the social occasions with which his image is inextricably woven but also a whole range of important, very politically-charged, state visits until he was taken ill suddenly and died on 6 May 1910 - when work on the Victoria Memorial was reaching its conclusion and the casting of the Irving statue should have begun.

The Times published a series of letters and reports on the subject. Charles Cruikshanks wrote to the Editor (3 March 1910) ‘The work in connection with the above [i.e. the memorial] is nearing completion and it is anticipated the statue will be erected towards the end of June or the beginning of July.’ But by then The Times had had to report (11 June 1910) that ‘The sculptor finished the plaster model for the statue some months ago, but the casting of the figure in bronze has taken more time than was expected’.

Hare then sent a letter to the Editor of The Times on 15 July:

‘I have received a communication from Mr. Thomas Brock, R.A. to the effect that he finds it impossible to satisfactorily complete the Irving statue until August. As it would be most undesirable that the unveiling should take place at a season of the year when the majority of subscribers will be absent from London, the committee have decided not to fix the actual date for the ceremony until after the holidays.’

On 5 November the Committee inserted a notice in The Times’ Court Circular:

‘Sir John Hare will unveil the Irving Memorial … towards the end of the present month. The work of erecting the statue will be completed on November 16’.

On 17 November Hare was at last able to give precise details of the ceremony:

‘May I ask you kindly to let it be known to those interested in the unveiling of the statue of the late Sir Henry Irving, to be erected at the rear of the National Portrait Gallery, in the Charing Cross-road that the ceremony will take place on Monday, December 5, at 11.30 a.m. Accommodation for subscribers to the memorial fund and the Press will be provided; and in addition the committee have reserved a certain number of seats for special allotment.’ ( The Times 18 November.)

The ceremony eventually took place as arranged and was reported at length in both the national and the specialised press with interesting disparities between the transcriptions of the speeches - third person in The Times(6 December) and first person in The Era (10 December) with slight differences between the guest lists. Not unnaturally, however, The Era gives the better pen picture of the occasion.

‘The scene was one without parallel. On the platform, which had been erected under an awning, stood all the foremost actors of the day, many of whom had risen to fame under the standard of the great actor. Within the enclosure were faces familiar at the footlights, while beyond in the broad road at midday a cheering multitude throbbed in sympathy and responded enthusiastically to the noble words which fell from the lips of the chief personage in the memorable ceremony.’

The ‘chief personage in the memorable ceremony’ was presumably Sir John Hare, who gave a perfect model for such a speech on such an occasion, or it might have been H. B. Irving whose obviously genuinely heartfelt words included the following significant passage on Brock’s work:

‘There is one quality in my father’s character, known best perhaps to those closest to him in life which it seems to me the noble poise and grave dignity of this statue seem to me to finely express. I mean his steadfast courage, his calm continual self-control. He was fond of repeating Goethe’s saying that “self-possession is the art of life.” Certainly my father had, in a rare degree, that great quality of possessing his soul in patience and meeting fate with calmness and resolution.(Applause.) He had his share, especially in the last few years of his life, of the difficulties and anxieties, as well as the glories, of his art. And he bore all, storm or sunshine, fair weather or foul, with unflinching courage, steadfast endurance and faith in the truth of the cause he served. if ever a man was “master of his fate and captain of his soul,” it was my father. (Applause) And it seems to me that it is as “master of his fate and captain of his soul”, that the sculptor has graven his image today. (Hear, Hear.)’

The Lyceum Company was well-represented not only by ‘all the foremost actors of the day’ who had been associated with it in their younger days but also by Irving’s manager

Bram Stoker, Mrs Henry Loveday widow of H.J. Loveday the Lyceum stage manager; composers closely associated with the Lyceum e.g.: Sir Alexander Mackenzie, Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, and Edward German; friendly journalists such as A. B. Walkley and Austin Brereton; artists such as Harry Furniss, Sir Lawrence Alma Tadema and Sir Philip Burne-Jones; and Irving’s solicitor - the notorious Sir George Lewis. The Prime Minister (H. H. Asquith ) was represented by Mr. R. S. Meiklejohn and the ‘Proceedings were opened by the Mayor of Westminster (E.L. Somers-Cocks) but, somewhat surprisingly, there seems to have been no freemasonic presence. G. B. Shaw was, of course, not there at least not among the official guests but the most noticeable absentee was Ellen Terry who would obviously have taken a prominent position in the gathering had she not, at the age of sixty-three, been on an extensive tour of the USA with her Shakespeare lectures and was on 5 December somewhere en route between Portland, Oregon and Denver, Colorado. Her third husband, James Carew from whom she was judicially separated in 1909 was, however, present.

The statue, which is a marvellous piece of work, stands on a stone plinth. The full inscription on a raised plaque reads: ‘HENRY IRVING. ACTOR. Born 1838. Died 1906.(sic) Knight, B.Litt. Dublin. D.Litt. Cambridge. LL.D Glasgow. Erected by English actors and actresses and by others connected with the theatre in this country.’ This is on the plinth itself.

This site was in 1910 the junction of St. Martin’s Place, Charing Cross Road, Orange Street, and Green Street: named after the bowling greens occupying the area when it was originally developed in the 1670s. In 1938 the Irving Centenary Committee asked Westminster City Council to re-name Green Street as part of its celebrations. But again there was a delay and it was not until just before the outbreak of War in 1939 that the name was eventually changed to Irving Street - the wheels of local government turning as slowly then as now. Ironically, of course, the statue stands opposite, not the Lyceum, but the Garrick Theatre. It is not far from Wyndham’s, with the Gielgud and Olivier within walking distance. But there is now no Irving Theatre.

Intriguingly the ‘Irving’ was the proposed name for the theatre eventually opened as the St. Martins. But between 1951 and 1964 there was an Irving Theatre - a little club theatre just along Irving Street above the City Morgue. The premises are now occupied by Indian and Tibetan restaurants in the former morgue and theatre respectively.

When first unveiled the statue stood on the pavement, not within railed gardens as it does now. Having survived the German bombing in situ during the Second World War - Sir John Martin-Harvey paid for it to be enclosed in a brick box - Westminster City Council (whose City Hall was at the time just opposite next to the Garrick) decided to surround it with a small garden inside low railings containing the initials H.I. as one of its contributions to the Festival of Britain.

The ‘Irving Memorial Garden’ was opened on 19 July 1951 by Sir Laurence Olivier who was then appearing at the St. James’ Theatre in a play in which I feel Irving would have been even better - Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra. ‘In a tribute to Irving, Sir Laurence said that he brought dignity to the theatre and integrity to the actor. He insisted on discipline at work and decent accommodation for it; above all he was the actor’s friend’ (The Times. 20 July 1951) A very fitting epitaph indeed for Sir Henry’s life and career.

The author D.F. Cheshiregratefully acknowledges the assistance of the British Library in providing copies of source material for this feature.
Seen here at the Wreath laying at the Irving Memorial Febuary 2000