Who were the Grossmiths?

The Grossmiths were a family of actors and entertainers encompassing several generations. George Grossmith, born in 1847, worked as a police-court reporter and intended to move from there into the law. But his real talent, the one that was to make his fortune, was as an entertainer, giving what he called “recitals.” These were one-man shows made up of comic sketches and songs, jokes, parodies, and imitations, all of his own invention, given to a piano accompaniment. Grossmith was a virtuoso on the piano, and could produce from it almost any sound he wished, “except a sneer” as an admirer said.

In 1876 George toured with Florence Marryat, a seasoned actress some ten years older than he. Their show, Entre Nous, was a mini-revue of piano sketches, humorous anecdotes, and recitations in historical costume. This led in turn to the great breakthrough in George’s career: the offer of the title role in the new Gilbert and Sullivan opera The Sorcerer. Over the next eleven years George went on to star in many of the “G & S” comic operas such as Patience, The Mikado and The Yeoman of the Guard. These roles made him a household name.

George was so small and spare that the editor Frank Harris described him as looking like a gnat. He was pale, with a dead-pan, drily sarcastic manner accentuated by the pince-nez that he habitually wore. But he was also, as Harris said, “a sort of elf who could sing with extraordinary speed--the very quality needed to give the patter of Gilbert its full value.”[1] George worked enormously hard and throughout his eleven years of connection with D’Oyly Carte’s Savoy Opera Company he continued to give his humorous solo recitals at fashionable private parties, revelling in his reputation as a “society clown.” But his success was emotionally costly. He suffered from insomnia, and when he did sleep was “persecuted by the most awful nightmares. … My constant fear was that I should forget what I had to get through on the platform, or that some horrible mishap would occur to ruin the performance, and my own future.”[2] Later gossip had it that he calmed himself with drugs and in fact became an addict. Perhaps this is responsible for the fact that memoirs of the period record very different impressions of what he was like personally. Some people undoubtedly found him just as amusing as he was on stage, while others avoided him because of his air of self-importance, or simply because his endless buffoonery bored them stiff.[3]

Caricature of Weedon Grossmith

Meanwhile Weedon, six years younger than his brother, was also making his way after a shakier start as an artist. At the age of thirty, he too took to the stage and to playwriting. His first full-length comedy, The Night of the Party, enjoyed a six-month run in London in 1901, and he was a very familiar face in the theatrical world as an actor-manager right up to World War I.

Neither brother knew anything first-hand of the Holloway milieu in which the Diary is set. It is true that they were raised in North London, but that broad area stretching all the way between Islington and Hampstead contained, then as now, many social strata. When George was ten the Grossmiths moved to the Manor Lodge, Haverstock Hill, and the family clearly belonged to the artistic sub-species of the solid middle class. Their friends were theatrical folk and journalists such as Henry Irving, George Sala and Ellen Terry. George Grossmith senior was a journalist for The Times and a well-known lecturer on literary subjects; his father was an intimate of Dickens and is said to have been a model for Mr. Pickwick.

By the time the Diary was being written, the Grossmith brothers had, materially speaking, far outstripped their parents’ generation. Haverstock Hill, let alone Holloway, had been left behind. George and his family were now living in a townhouse with its own ballroom at 28 Dorset Square, near Regent’s Park, where they hobnobbed with the cream of London’s literary, theatrical, and legal society. His son described the family’s socialising at this time:

what a wonderful home and what wonderful people passed through its doors! Great singers, artists, actors, musicians, writers, judges, princes and poets … Occasionally my parents would specialize. It would be my mother’s evening--Scientists, Theologists, and … her special pets … Theosophists, as well as many charming people not in the public eye. Then it would be my father’s turn. Most of his nearest friends were at the Bar.[4]

“GG” could well afford such a lifestyle, for Richard D’Oyly Carte was paying him more than £2000 a year by the end of his eleven-year connection with the Savoy Opera Company. This was a huge salary in itself, but it was only part of his earnings. It is said that the royalties on his most popular song, See Me Dance the Polka, alone earned him more than a thousand pounds. Nor did he rest on his laurels after he left the Savoy for good in August 1889, which was just a few months after the first version of the Diary ended in Punch. His first provincial tour as a solo piano entertainer is said to have netted him £10,000 in the first seven months--probably more than a clerk like Pooter earned in his entire working life. His American tours, five in all, were very popular and even more remunerative.[5]

Though Weedon never attained this level of opulence, once he moved from art to the theatre his acting and playwriting proved lucrative too. As a bachelor he lived in an Elizabethan house in Canonbury Place and entertained a good deal. Later; after he married, he had a townhouse at 1 Bedford Square, where he lived from 1902 until his death in 1919.

For both brothers, then, it was a very long way indeed from the Pooters’ cramped, nervous little parties to private dinners with the Prince of Wales and, in George’s case, performing for Queen Victoria at Balmoral. It is astonishing how well the Diary captures in such convincingly minute detail the humdrum lower-middle-class life led at Brickfield Terrace. Nothing that the brothers wrote before May 1888 suggests that they were capable of such a remarkable feat of ventriloquism as we now perceive the Diary to be.

On the other hand, the Diary is suffused with its authors’ personalities. There was something more than a little Pooterish about both brothers, as their memoirs make clear. These volumes are full of long-winded anecdotes, interspersed with modest disavowals about their authors’ talents that are less than convincing. George in particular liked to drop the names of the titled great to an extent that some contemporaries found vulgar. Exactly like Pooter, he tells how he keeps all his letters, just as long as there is a “good name” at the foot. Indeed, he went further than Pooter by binding these letters into volumes for display to friends; and then he regales us with extracts from high-society nonentities who, strange to say, are all found to be paying fulsome tribute to his private performances. “This collection is the collection of a Snob, no doubt,” he says, with a frankness that is almost disarming. But not quite.[6]

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[1] Harris (1966), 645.

[2] Zedlitz (1897), 493.

[3] There are, for instance, contradictory pen-portraits in memoirs by St. Helier (1909), 207-8 and Shorter (1919), 72.

[4] Grossmith (1933), 14.

[5] Joseph (1982), 118, 135. Banfield (1896) was shown some original accounts during his interview with GG.

[6] Grossmith (1888), 157. An anonymous reviewer went so far as to say that this particular detail left a nasty taste in the mouth. “[Review of A Society Clown],” (1888).