PHILANTHROPISTS 2

COUNTESS OF HUNTINGDON 2

Harriot Mellon 2

(VIOLET ELIZABETH) BETTY BAXTER 3

PIONEERS IN PROFESSIONS 4

Louisa Martindale 5Louisa Martindale 5

POLITICAL ACTIVISTS 6

Edith Lanchester 6

Minnie Turner 8

WRITERS 9

Dame Ivy Compton- Burnett 9

Elinor Glyn 9

ENTERTAINERS 10

ZOË E. BRIGDEN 10

The Moore sisters 10

Bertha Moore OBE 11

Eva Moore 11

Jessie Moore 11

Decima Moore 12

Violet and Daisy Hilton 13

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SLIDE 1

Good afternoon everyone and thank you for inviting me. My name is Helena, I was born in Southlands Hospital in Shoreham, grew up in Brighton then lived in London and now I live in Hastings. I have written six books, two of which are about Sussex women. A newspaper called these two books The Poor and the Posh because one is about the lives of ordinary working women; and the other is about the notable women who are connected with Sussex. Today’s talk is about some of the notable women that I found while researching that book. Instead of trotting out the usual suspects, I have deliberately chosen to present to you today some of the lesser known, but just as interesting, women of Brighton and Hove. I have here a couple of philanthropists, some pioneers, two authors, some politicos and some famous entertainers.

Starting with the philanthropists

COUNTESS OF HUNTINGDON

(TWO SLIDES)Born 1707 the daughter of Earl Ferrers, her maiden name Lady Selina Shirley. She married the 9th Earl of Huntingdon, how she got her title, settled into married life and had seven children in ten years. Only on her husband’s death in 1746 did she become a fervent, evangelical Methodist. SLIDEAmong her homes was a large estate in central Brighton, in the grounds of which she built a chapel in 1761. Seating 950 people. This upset the establishment, but she cited an ancient ruling that peeresses were allowed to build chapels and appoint ministers. The bishops opposed her and the Consistory Court ruled that she must register her chapels as dissenting meeting houses.

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When she built one in London they ordered its closure, but she outwitted them by buying the house next door and claiming it was a private chapel attached to that home — though it seated 2,000. Eventually she built a whole series of Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion chapels, plus a college in Wales to train their ministers (it has since moved and is now Cheshunt College). During her life she gave away £100,000, the equivalent of ten million pounds today. She died leaving debts of £3,000 and sixty chapels bearing her name (there was another in Sussex, at West Hoathly); by 2000 only twenty-three remained. The Brighton one, in North Street, was demolished in 1972 (an office block now covers the site). My next philanthropist is

Harriot Mellon

Seven slides. Slide 1Born in 1777 she was the daughter of an unmarried Irishwoman who was wardrobe-keeper to a company of strolling players. She first appeared on stage aged ten. By 1815 she was earning a massive £12 a week (worth about £1,200 today). That year she married her wealthy lover Thomas Coutts, within a week of his wife’s death. He was seventy-nine; she thirty-seven and she came in for bitter criticism for exchanging her “charms” for money. His daughters treated her badly, so Mr Coutts left his wife the whole of his fortune and his share of Coutts Bank. She rose above her step-daughters’ hostility and gave each £10,000 a year, but they still hated her and relished the public disdain she received as a working-class woman who had money but no breeding. SLIDE 2 paintingShe proved to be an outstanding businesswoman, insisting on being involved with managing the bank at a time when there were no women in the world of professional finance. SLIDE 3 Henry Fuseli created this drawing of her. The Greek words above read: “But a clever woman — that

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I loathe! May there never be in my house a woman with more intelligence than befits a woman!”SLIDE 4 cartoon. Aged forty-nine she married twenty-six-year-old William Beauclerk, 9th Duke of St Albans, and was again criticised, this time for ‘exchanging money for a title’. Caricaturist John Phillips produced this rather cruel cartoon of her, called Frankenstein Outdone, in 1827. It portrays her as an over-powering matriarch and she has a moustache as a symbol of her dominance. Here, the Duke is being measured for a new pair of trousers while his wife puts a feather in his cap. SLIDE 5 of house She had a ten-bedroomed mansion, called St Albans House (now 131 King’s Road), on the corner of Regency Square. She delighted the tradesmen and shopkeepers of Brighton with her profuse expenditure. There was a plaque on St Albans House in Brighton but it has been removed.She died in London and was buried at the St Albans family seat in Lincolnshire. She left about £1.8 million, that would be worth about 180 million today, to her step-granddaughter Angela Burdett, provided she took the surname Coutts and did not marry a foreigner. Baroness Burdett-Coutts is universally acknowledged as the greatest philanthropist of the Victorian era, yet Harriot Mellon, who endowed her with the means to do all her good works, slipped into obscurity, though Joan Perkin has self-published an enlightening biography.

(VIOLET ELIZABETH) BETTY BAXTER Two slidesBorn in 1901, she lived for sixty-five years between her family’s two homes in London and 1 Western Esplanade, Portslade.During the 1880s the Reverend Michael Paget Baxter, proprietor of the Christian Herald Newspaper, and his wife Lizzie started a charity for the hungry poor in the

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East End. In the early 1920s their daughter Elizabeth known as Betty developed a similar mission of her own. She pioneered the idea of a Travelling Van that would go out to the homeless instead of making them walk miles to obtain free food. Some say that Betty was called the Silver Lady because in the early days of her charity work she used to give homeless people silver-sixpence. Others say it was her silver hair. Either way, the Silver Lady All Night Travelling Café gave out hot drinks, bread and dripping, saveloys, milk, biscuits, cigarettes, boots and clothing to anyone who was in need. In the 1920s Betty came under threat of being taken to court for causing an obstruction whilst the van was stationary, so a special gearbox was fitted enabling the vehicle to trundle along at a quarter of a mile an hour while still handing out food and drink. In 1930 she founded the Elizabeth Baxter Hostel for Distressed Women and Girls at 52 Lambeth Road, London, and produced a film, The Night Patrol, showing how London’s homeless survived. A scene that showed how easy it was for girls to be tricked into prostitution was cut by the film censor, prompting George Bernard Shaw to publicly protest, because vulnerable girls ought to be warned about such matters. By the 1930s Miss Baxter was placing twice-weekly appeals in The Times for donations to her fund. Money and bequests flowed in (one woman left £10,000 in 1941, worth half a million today). Every Christmas she hired the basement of Central Hall, Westminster, where she gave a banquet followed by variety entertainments to 600 homeless people. On the death of her father in 1947, she became MD and life chairman of the Christian Herald. She died at 1 Western Esplanade, Portslade. The Silver Lady Fund carried on handing out free food at 6.30am daily from a white van on the Embankment until

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2008, though over that time the bread and dripping were replaced by pasties, pies and sausage rolls. Although that has ended, the Silver Lady Fund continues. Since 1970 it has been administered from Bexhill. It recently provided five MiPods (sleeping capsules) to Brighton’s St Patrick’s Night Shelter and supports the Seaview Centre in Hastings, Hastings Community Housing, and a Rural Apprenticeship Scheme on the South Downs, as well as the Oasis Youth Centre in south London. The hostel she founded has moved to Peckham and the Lambeth Road premises now houses the Elizabeth Baxter Centre, a walk-in medical centre for the homeless.

Pioneers in professions

Next I’d like to tell you about Dr Louisa Martindale, but first I would like to say a few words about her mother

Louisa Martindale

(THREE SLIDES)Born in 1839, she was a social activist. She founded a Mutual Improvement Association, Sunday schools and the Ray Lodge Mission Station, visited the East End Ragged Schools, became interested in women’s rights and campaigned for the vote. She married in 1871 and in 1874 her husband and her elder daughter died, leaving her to support his four children from his first marriage, her infant Louisa and the child she was then carrying, Hilda. She settled at 212 High Street, Lewes, for five years, moving to 2 Lancaster Road, Preston, in 1885 so that her daughters could attend Brighton & Hove High School for Girls. She became president of Brighton Women’s Liberal Association and of the Women’s Co-operative Movement. She co-founded, at 4 New Road, a local branch of the

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Pioneer Club (for women) and a dispensary for women and children, staffed and officered by women, which evolved into the New Sussex Hospital. SLIDE. By the turn of the century she was living at 13 Tamworth Road, Hove, and about 1903 she moved to Cheeley’s, a house at Horsted Keynes, where she built a Congregational church and installed one of Britain’s first female pastors. As a pacifist she believed that women should promote peace, and near the end of her life frowned upon the law-breaking suffragettes. She died at Cheeley’s and was buried nearby in the churchyard of St Giles. SLIDE The Martindale Centre is named for her.

Her daughter Louisa Martindale

Three slidesBorn in 1872 she moved to Sussex with her mother and sister when she was eight and attended Brighton & Hove High School, then Royal Holloway College and the LSMW, and qualified as a doctor in 1899.After five years as an assistant GP in Hull she gained her MD in London in 1906 and moved back to Brighton where she purchased 10 Marlborough Place, set up her surgery, and became the first female GP in town. In addition she was a visiting medical officer to the Dispensary for Women and Children in Islingword Road, physician to Brighton & Hove High School and to Roedean. Later she became senior surgeon and physician at the New Sussex Hospital for Women and Children. She was also a feminist and suffragist, and during WWI served for a short time with a hospital unit in France. (SLIDE NSH)In 1919 she moved her surgery to 11 Adelaide Crescent, Hove, but sold it two years later and moved to London as a consulting gynaecologist and surgeon, continuing to work with the New Sussex. During her long and

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distinguished career she pioneered the use of radiation to treat women’s cancers. As well as writing many learned articles she was the author of three books: The Woman Doctor and Her Future (1922), The Prevention of Venereal Disease (1945) and her autobiography, A Woman Surgeon (1951). (SLIDE painting)She lived with a woman friend, the Hon. Ismay Fitzgerald, for thirty-five years from 1911. Among their various homes were two in Sussex: Colin Godman’s, Perrymans Lane, Furners Green (1920s) and Little Rystwood, Forest Row (1930s). Dr Martindale served as a magistrate in Brighton and East Grinstead and was appointed CBE in 1931. She retired in 1947 and died in London. Val Brown who is sitting at the bookstall, has written much about Louisa’s life in her book Women’s Hospitals in Brighton & Hove and has some copies with her today.

Political activists

Edith Lanchester

(5 slides)Born in 1871 at 1 St John's Terrace, Hove she was the fifth child of a Henry, a prosperous architect whose sons produced the Lanchester motor car. She moved to London, attended Birkbeck Institution and Maria Grey teacher training college, then worked first as a teacher and then a secretary, and stood for election to the London School Board. At some point she was employed by Eleanor Marx to type Karl Marx’s notes.By the age of twenty-four she was a very high-principled woman. A feminist, atheist, socialist and vegetarian. The marriage laws in those days were very anti-woman. She felt the wife's vow to obey the husband was immoral. Therefore her imminent marriage to James Sullivan

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would be a private ceremony without church or the state involvement. SLIDE Her family tried everything to dissuade her but she would not relent. One day her brother, in the presence of a man he had introduced as a friend, asked Edith a series of questions about her forthcoming wedding and why she would not get married in the usual way. She answered honestly and intelligently. Turned out the man was not a friend at all, but Dr George Fielding Blandford, a leading mental specialist and author of the book “Insanity and its Treatment.” After the informal chat, he immediately signed emergency papers, under the Lunacy Act of 1890, to have her incarcerated in a lunatic asylum. His rationale was SEE SLIDEOn Friday 27th October 1895, the day before her wedding, Edith’s fathers and brothers bound her wrists and legs with rope and forced her into a carriage while she struggled and screamed, and had her locked up in The Priory Institution at Roehampton, a private lunatic asylum.Her boyfriend James Sullivan immediately sought legal advice; he told the newspapers, who called it the ‘Lanchester Kidnapping Case’ (it even made The New York Times). His MP became involved. He appealed to the Commissioners of Lunacy, who visited her and pronounced her sane but foolish. She was released after four days, leaving Dr Blandford in disgrace. Miss Lanchester engaged Herbert Asquith QC MP (later to be Prime Minister) to investigate whether she could take legal action against those concerned. The correct procedure was to complain to the Lunacy Commissioners, who held a tribunal, at which she spoke. They agreed that Dr Blandford had made an error but they took no action against him. SLIDEIn the aftermath the case was universally discussed, with people holding very strong views for and against. Even

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socialists were split: most supported Miss Lanchester other were worried at being tainted with immorality. The leader of the Independent Labour Party, Keir Hardie, thought her actions discredited socialism. SLIDE Marquis of QueensburyMiss Lanchester was disowned by her father, though her mother later bequeathed her £400. Her cohabition with Mr Sullivan lasted for fifty years and was ended only by his death. They had two children, Waldo and Elsa. After Waldo reacted badly to a vaccination, they moved lodgings more than once to avoid Elsa being vaccinated. They did not want Elsa to go to school, objecting to the sexist ways that girls were taught, but later accepted a place for her at her brother’s boys’ school, Mr Kettle's progressive school at Clapham Common.SLIDE 5 THE CHILDRENEdith was a pacifist during WWI and afterwards joined the Communist Party and worked alongside her son Waldo, a puppet-maker and weaver. (Her daughter, Elsa Lanchester married Charles Laughton; both became world famous Hollywood actors.) When James Sullivan died in 1945 Edith moved back to Brighton where she lived for the next twenty-one years, displaying communist posters outside her flat and attending political meetings. She died at her home, 18 Highcroft Villas, in 1966.

Minnie Turner

3 slidesc1867–1948 suffragette.A boarding-house owner, she was secretary of the Brighton Women’s Liberal Association (1896–1908), but when the Liberal Party refused to give women the vote she joined the militant suffragettes. She advertised her boarding house, Sea View, at 13 (and later 14) Victoria

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Road, in all the suffrage newspapers, offering rest-cures, home-made bread and meals in the garden. SLIDE 2 For several years it was the favourite seaside home, sanctuary and place of convalescence for countless numbers of exhausted or force-fed suffragettes. She later described those years as the happiest of her life and proudly boasted that more suffragette leaders, speakers and prisoners had stayed in hers than in any other house in Britain. SLIDE 3She created a library of books related to the women’s movement, and collected photographs and autographs of the suffragettes who visited; this priceless collection is now held at the Museum of London. She was arrested twice: once at the Black Friday deputation in 1910 (she was discharged) and once in 1911 for breaking a window at the Home Office (twenty-one days’ imprisonment). Her front bay window was smashed in retaliation, but no one was charged. In 1912, as a member of the TRL she withheld her tax as a political protest and the bailiff took her goods and sold them. Nothing is known about her earlier or later life, though she is still listed at Sea View in 1947.

Writers

Dame Ivy Compton- Burnett 3 SLIDES Dame Ivy was born in 1884, the seventh of thirteen children. When she was seven her family moved to 30 First Avenue in Hove and six years later to 20 The Drive. The family attended various churches including All Saints’, and St John’s, Palmeira Square, where they had a pew. She was educated by a governess and at

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Addiscombe College and Howard College, Bedford, then read classics at Royal Holloway College, graduating in 1906. After her father died her mother went into excessive mourning for a decade, using emotional blackmail she became something of a tyrant to the children. At the age of twenty-seven Ivy took over the household, becoming as despotic as her mother, and wrote her first novel. SLIDEAfter a series of family tragedies she moved to London in 1914 and lived with Margaret Jourdain, a writer and expert on Regency furniture, for thirty-two years. Her second novel emerged when she was forty-one, and she wrote another eighteen, all written in the form of dialogue and focussing on intense, difficult, tyrannical relationships between people within the closed circles of a dysfunctional family. SLIDE REVIEWS. She was appointed CBE in 1951 and DBE in 1967 and Brighton bus 621 is named for her.

Elinor Glyn

3 SLIDESBorn in 1864 in Jersey and raised in Canada and Jersey, her incompetent governesses obliged her to teach herself those few accomplishments needed to prepare her for marriage, which occurred when she was twenty-eight. On honeymoon in Brighton her husband hired Brill's Baths in Pool Valley to watch her swim naked. They had two daughters but as he drank and gambled away his fortune Mrs Glyn supported the family by writing; firstly magazine articles, then racy novels which, after being lambasted by the highbrow as ‘immoral’ and banned from public libraries, sold in their millions. In 1915 she sued the Western Film Company for infringement of copyright. But the judge refused to protect her copyright because her novel was ‘grossly immoral’ and the film ‘indescribably vulgar’. SLIDE 2

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The heroine of Three Weeks committed adultery on a tiger-skin rug, prompting the ditty: Would you like to Sin/With Elinor Glyn/On a tiger skin?/Or would you prefer/To err with her/On some other fur? SLIDE 3Mrs Glyn lived variously in London, New York, Paris, Russia and Brighton, and had many affairs with aristocratic men of the type featured in her books. In the twenties she wrote screenplays and was their production supervisor in Hollywood and later directed her own films in England. Her vast income was more than matched by her extravagant spending, and she was obliged to keep turning out saucy novels for the rest of her life. For many years she lived at 17a Curzon House, Saltdean, but during the war she moved to Chelsea where she died in 1943. Hardwick, J. (1994) Addicted to Romance: The Life and Adventures of Elinor Glyn.

Entertainers

ZOË E. BRIGDEN 2 SLIDESBorn in 1891 the daughter of a Brighton tailor, she lived for at least thirty-eight years in Mighell Street, firstly at no. 21 and from 1903 at no. 2. Between 1915 and 1924 she was famous for performing dare-devildiving exhibitions, launching herself from a highboard on the West Pier, swimming from pier to pier and performing a unique ‘wooden soldier’ dive, plunging headfirst into the sea with her arms straight by her sides. SLIDE 2She gave up performing when she became pregnant, and had a son in 1925. She opened a hairdressing salon in Whitehawk. In the late 1930s she heroically rescued a small girl who was being strangled in a murder attempt

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by her father on the Downs behind East Preston Park. In later years Miss Brigden lived awhile in Seaford, then with her younger sister Adelaide at 92 Roedale Road, Brighton.

The Moore sistersSLIDE 1Were all born in Brighton and raised at 21 Regency Square. They were the daughters of the county’s analytical chemist. Five became actresses or singers and five were decorated for war-work.

Bertha Moore OBE

Bertha, born in 1862, she became a well known singer in ballad, promenade and glee concerts and other choral performances, where she took the solo mezzo and soprano parts. By the 1890s she was an examiner for the Royal Academy of Music. She married woollen merchant Frank Huth in 1888 and had two children by 1892, but continued with her singing career. She was said to have an ‘exquisite refinement of manner’. Although hugely successful in her own area, she was never a pop celebrity like her younger sisters became. She generally played at provincial theatres, town halls, even on piers, and sometimes also produced the shows. She played both the Dome and the West Pier Pavilion.By the turn of the century she was giving lectures on the history of songs in the large music room of her mansion in Holland Park. She began to write and produce plays. In 1905 she was giving matinees of four short plays starring her three sisters Decima, Eva and Jessie at various venues including the Royal Albert Hall. Her son Harold Huth became a well known film actor and director.

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Jessie Moore Jessie, born in 1868, was a soprano who toured for thirty months with the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, playing lead roles in Gilbert & Sullivan operas. In Sussex in 1889 she married the principal baritone but did not give up her career. Until 1905 she appeared in a variety of comedy and light opera parts in West End theatres, then became ‘lady superintendent’ of her husband’s School of Musical and Dramatic Art.

Eva Moore2 SLIDES The eighth of the ten Moore children, Eva was born at 67 Preston Street, Brighton, in 1866 and was educated locally at Miss Pringle’s school. She went to Liverpool to study gymnastics and dancing and returned to Brighton as a dance teacher in a private school at 29–30 Brunswick Road, where one of her pupils was the young Winston Churchill, the future Prime Minister. Like her sisters she landed a job with the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company and left Sussex. She was also an ardent feminist and suffragist, and co-founded and served as vice-president of the Actresses Franchise League, becoming a familiar figure marching in suffrage processions in London with contingents of other well-known actresses; in addition she was called as a defence witness when Mrs Pankhurst stood trial. During WWI she helped her sister Decima organise the Women’s Emergency Corps.SLIDE 2One of the best-known actresses of her day, between 1887 and 1923 she acted in approximately ninety plays, thirteen of them written by her husband, Harry Esmond Jack. Between the wars she appeared in twenty-eight films. She turned her hand to stage direction, notably for a production of Robinson Crusoe in 1898. It was very unusual for women to be allowed to direct other

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performers. Her daughter Jill married Laurence Olivier and later divorced him for adultery with Vivien Leigh.

Decima Moore 3 SLIDESBorn Lilian Decima Moore in 1871. She was the youngest of ten children, hence her middle name. She sang in the church choir and was educated at Miss Pringle’s school and Boswell House College and left Brighton at age sixteen and continued her musical training in London. Joining the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company in 1889, she was the first person ever to play ‘Casilda’ in The Gondoliers, she performed the role 554 times, including a private performance for Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle. At the beginning her performances were conducted by Sir Arthur Sullivan himself. According to the Illustrated London News, she had a ‘sweet, light, bird-like voice and one day will know how to act’.SLIDEIn 1894 she married cast member Cecil Walker-Leigh, had a son and divorced in 1902. In 1905 she married diplomat Major Frederick Guggisberg and used the name Moore-Guggisberg. She campaigned with the militants for votes for women. While on tour she would leave the theatre between performances to give suffrage speeches. In 1911 she took part in an all-night entertainment as part of the suffragette census resistance.In 1914 she founded the Women’s Emergency Corps, the first organisation to replace men with women war workers. Attached to the French Army, she worked as a nurse at a military hospital and was director of a canteen. She established the British Navy, Army and Air Force Leave Clubs in Paris and Cologne. For her war work, she was appointed CBE in 1918.

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SLIDEHer husband became Governor of the Gold Coast, then of British Guiana and was knighted. She became Lady Moore-Guggisberg. They moved to the Gold Coast in Africa, and in 1927 it was reported that when he was stationed in Nigeria ‘she travelled to places far inland where no white woman had been before.’ During their eight years in Accra, the Prince of Wales stayed with them in 1925 while shooting big game, and Decima travelled around with Princess Marie Louise.Her husband died at Bexhill in 1930 and was buried there. In 1936 a burglar stole all her war decorations and souvenirs, as well as her CBE medal. During WWII she reopened her forces’ leave clubs and served on the Allies Welcome Committee. The last surviving creator of an original G & S role, in 1960 she became vice-president of the Gilbert & Sullivan Society. She died in a nursing home in London and was buried at Golders Green.

Violet and Daisy Hilton

6 SLIDESWere conjoined twins born in 1908 at 15 Riley Road, Brighton, to twenty-one-year-old Kate Skinner, a barmaid at the Queen’s Arms, 8 George Street. A former domestic servant, she became pregnant by the son of her wealthy employer (thought to be hairdresser Frederick Andress of 5 Brighton Place). Miss Skinner rejected the twins because they were conjoined; she believed she was being punished by God for having sex out of wedlock. Their baptism, which was reported in the Brighton Herald, took place at the Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion Chapel.SLIDE 2 census

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Miss Skinner’s midwife and employer, fifty-five-year-old Mary Hilton, adopted the twins when they were just a few weeks old. She publicised their birth and reports appeared not only in Brighton but in other towns. Soon she was charging customers tuppence to inspect the ‘Brighton United Twins’ intimately at the Queen’s Arms, and tuppence for a postcard of them, generating sufficient income to take a larger pub, the Evening Star in Surrey Street. She began to exhibit the twins at circuses and fairs, had them taught to perform and kept them in strict control with physical abuse. In 1911 Mrs Hilton, her husband Henry and their daughter Edith toured them across Germany and Australia. SLIDE 3When Mrs Hilton died when the twins were eleven. She ‘bequeathed’ them to another couple, who took them to the USA. They were trained to sing, dance and play piano, clarinet and saxophone, and were worked mercilessly; on Broadway for example 3,500 people came to see each of four daily shows. Among their famous friends were Bob Hope, with whom they formed a tap-dancing act, the Dancemedians; and escapologist Harry Houdini, who taught them how to mentally separate from one another. The huge income funded an architect-built mansion in San Antonio, Texas.When the wife of one of the twins’ many lovers filed for divorce and sued them for damages, their defence lawyer discovered that the twins had been ruthlessly exploited for years: they had generated over a million dollars, but were paid next-to-nothing and, despite being adults, were treated as the personal property of their second adoptive parents. In 1931 a judge awarded them £50,000 and emancipated them.Aged twenty-three the twins had no formal education, no family and no concept of life other than as public exhibits. They went into vaudeville as The Hilton Sisters’ Revue and appeared in a prurient film called Freaks. They attended wild parties, drank, smoked and spent extravagantly. During their UK tour in 1933, booked for

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four sell-out performances at the Brighton Hippodrome they sought their mother, but discovered that she had died an impoverished spinster in 1912 in the Steyning Union Workhouse Infirmary, after delivering her fourth baby, Ethel. SLIDE 4 Back in the USA, after more than twenty attempts to get a marriage licence (the husband would be committing bigamy) they managed a couple of brief marriages. Having squandered the £50,000, during the forties and fifties they worked as strippers and featured in a tacky film, Chained For Life, which was widely banned. They ran a hotdog stand in Miami (The Hilton Sisters’ Snack Bar) but it failed owing to rivals objecting to ‘freaks’ stealing their trade. Increasingly desperate, aged fifty-four they went on tour and, after a show at Charlotte, North Carolina, the promoter abandoned them there, penniless. They ended up working as cashiers in a grocer’s shop and living in a rented caravan. In 1969 first one, then the other, died of influenza during an epidemic. The 1997 musical, Side Show, was based on their lives. SLIDE 5 with video.Thank you very much ladies and gentleman. Val and I are having a bit of a sale today. I’m selling my books, which retail at £10 and £20, for just £7 each or two for £10. And I am happy to sign and dedicate them, so they would make fabulous Christmas presents. So do drop by and see Val at the bookstall.

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