The Pantomime Murders is set in December 1929. I had laid the foundation for it in the previous book in the Miss Clara Vale Mysteries, The Picture House Murders, when Clara meets her new friends the costumiers Juju and Jonny Levine, who were making costumes for an upcoming production of Cinderella. I wanted to use Cinderella as there were themes of family dysfunction and women’s ambition and emancipation that I wanted to draw on. However, I also like to have a historic underpinning for my books, so I searched the archives of The Stage to find out where and when Cinderella might have been performed in 1929. As mentioned in my acknowledgements at the beginning of the book I had already found an original script of a 1929 Cinderella – a Pantomime in Four Acts by K. O. Samuel (Samuel French, 1930) but I wasn’t clear as to where it had been performed. To my delight, I came across a series of articles, notices and advertisements in The Stage about a tour of Cinderella in the north of England in the 1929–30 season.
Cinderella (although I have no evidence that it was this version) was performed not at the Newcastle Theatre Royal but at the Palace Theatre of Varieties on Percy Street. The Palace was built in 1895 on the corner of Percy Street and St Thomas’ Street, Haymarket, Newcastle. According to ArthurLloyd.co.uk – the music hall and theatre history site – in its heyday the Palace seated up to four thousand people. Its final curtain was in 1958 and sadly it was demolished in 1961. Today, there is an Oxfam shop on the site (which has a fabulous second-hand book section). Interested readers can check out the location of the Palace on the historic map at the front of this book. However, for the purposes of this story, I decided to move the panto to the Theatre Royal as it was further away from Clara’s house and also a visual marker for readers today who may be familiar with the beautiful building.
Speaking of the Theatre Royal, I must mention a little titbit I came across during my research. According to Vanessa Histon’s The Theatre Royal, Newcastle – a new short history (Tyne Bridge Publishing, 2012) the Grand Circle Bar did not serve ladies until 1930. Although, according to Miss Nelly Curless, who worked in the bar between 1912 and 1946, she had one female patron who flaunted the ban and was quietly served a whisky during the interval. I have alluded to the ban in Chapter 23 of this book, and wrote it in honour of that lady who, like Clara, would not be put in her place. Cheers, madam, here’s to you!