MY MOTHER WAS MURDERED

Twice Nightly

SHEILA McLAUGHLIN (1900-70), my mother, in her artless way frequently recalled Noel Coward telling her that she was the only actress he knew who had graduated from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art to the Elephant and Castle, a Grand Guignol theatre in a rough area of London with a thrilling repertoire of mayhem and mutilation. Under the stage name of Anne Howard, she was murdered twice nightly by actor-manager Tod Slaughter (his real surname) during his lease on the theatre from 1924 until December 1927. Above right is graphic evidence that Miss Howard could register EMOTION!!

When I was ten months old my nurse and I traveled with her by train when she toured Cardiff, Blackpool and Portsmouth, among other places, with Iris Hoey's company. However she did not take me to the theatre until I was nearly three, when I enjoyed every moment of the children's play Buckie's Bears at the Royalty, Soho, which was destroyed in the blitz.

When her daughters were adults Ethel gave them allowances totaling less than she spent on perfume and beauty treatments. None the less Sheila always looked like a million. In this picture she warms her hands in a muff which I have donated to the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Sheila fell in love with ANTHONY LOUIS ELLIS (1873-1944), a married man who begat me. Anthony was a noted drama critic who was twice President of the Dramatic Debaters. He wrote for the Daily Dispatch, Manchester, The Star, London, and several magazines. He became joint manager of a literary agency, the International Copyright Bureau, in 1909, and later a playwright and theatrical producer.

The Times obituary declared: "Dramatic criticism was the loser when Ellis gave it up for theatrical management, in which his career was rather adventurous than successful. His one popular success was won in his least ambitious production when in partnership with Mr. J. Herbert Jay he produced Mr. W. W. Ellis's farce A Little Bit of Fluff, which from 1915 to 1918 filled the Criterion Theatre with hilarious fighting men on leave." William Barribal illustrated this rare postcard playbill.

Among Anthony's many productions were Our Mr. Hepplewhite (Criterion, April-September 1919), The Daisy (Kingsway Theatre, 1920), The Green Cord (of which he was part author, Royalty Theatre, 1922), the first staging of any play by William Douglas Home, Great Possesions (London, 1937), and Liliom (Duke of York's, 1926) starring Ivor Novello, Fay Compton and Charles Laughton. My father and Osmond Shillingford adapted Liliom from Ferenc Molnár’s classic play that inspired the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Carousel.

Anthony was chairman of the board of the Kingsway Theatre, Great Queen Street, Holborn. The theatre was badly damaged by a bomb in 1941. It has been replaced by the Kingsway Hall Hotel. In 1924 his office was at Putney's Grand Theatre (1897-1934) now replaced by The Tower at Putney Wharf.

My father's book Prisoner at the Bar: Story-studies of the criminal mind records juicy Old Bailey trials. Anthony adapted numerous novels for radio, and wrote the script for the 1929 film of Maurice Maeterlinck's The Burgomaster of Stilemonde.

Like Doctor Samuel Johnson, also a non-member of the Inner Temple, Anthony rented premises in that Inn of Court from 1904 until 1941. Although very fat, in Who's Who he listed walking as his hobby. After his wife, Ethel Solomon, died in 1936, he married an actress, not my mother, as he had promised, but Ella Milne, who sang in the D'Oyly Carte Company during the First World War and was still appearing on TV at the age of 83.

I made my acting debut aged six in London's Royal Albert Hall where the Church of England Waifs and Strays Society Pageant was held. I had to help a crippled girl in steel leg braces up an agonisingly high staircase at the top of which Charity enfolded us in her billowing blue cloak.

When I began work, with the Gloucestershire Echo,the Cheltenham Little Theatre type-cast me in The Doctor's Dilemma as the Newspaper Man, whom Bernard Shaw describes as "a cheerful, affable young man who is disabled for ordinary business pursuits by a congenital erroneousness which renders him incapable of describing accurately anything he sees, or understanding or reporting accurately anything he hears. As the only employment in which these defects do not matter is journalism, he has perforce become a journalist."

I stayed with the Little Theatre, largely out of lust for a curvaceous redhead: in Twelfth Night she took the role of Olivia, who is mistaken for her twin brother, played by me in wrinkled green tights.

Later I seriously considered being a comedian, but instead grew a beard and, through absence of mind, qualified as a professor. The picture shows me at Syracuse University giving a poetry reading in which one of my graduate students danced while I declaimed from Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. One may speculate whether that inspired Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical a decade later.

© 2006 G. Harry McLaughlin.
Reproduction or transmission, in whole or in part, for other than personal use is prohibited without advance permission from Dr. G. H. McLaughlin.