The Death of the Devil’s Disciple

 

 

THE DEATH OF THE DEVIL’S DISCIPLE

Due to circumstances beyond anyone’s control, the ruthless theatrical tradition that the show must go on was broken on 16 December 1897 at the Adelphi Theatre, London, where William Terriss, the most idolized of matinee idols, was starring as Captain Thorne, alias Lewis Dumont, in an American melodrama called Secret Service.¹

The play was utter hokum (Bernard Shaw, reviewing the first production, had pointed to any number of incredible plot contrivances, noting in particular that “before half an hour has elapsed the heroine quite forgets … an act of fratricide on the part of the hero”); but still, the show was as great a hit as any of William Terriss’s earlier ones at the Adelphi—a theatre that, though owned by the Italian restaurateurs, the Gatti brothers, had become known over the past several years as “Terriss’s domain.”

Terriss, whose real name was William Charles James Lewin, was born at St. John’s Wood, North London, in 1847. His father, a barrister, claimed kindredship with the Earl of Zetland; his mother was a niece of George Grote—so noted an historian of Greece that his remains were buried in Westminster Abbey and a bust of him placed in a proximate niche. At the age of seven, Terriss became a Bluecoat boy at Christ’s Hospital; three or four years later, he moved to another school, then to another. He was already stagestruck; but, his parents refusing to countenance the idea of any son of theirs being a vulgar thespian, his first job was as a midshipman in the Royal Navy. While he was on leave in March 1865, an elderly aunt took him, wearing his uniform, to the Somerset seaside town of Weston-super-Mare.² The visit had to be cut short because he was mistaken for Victoria and Albert’s second son, Prince Arthur, Duke of Edinburgh, who was a lieutenant in the navy and attracted cheering and national-anthem-singing crowds wherever he went; according to a report in the Bristol Times and Mirror, the vicarious prince’s smiling acceptance of the rowdy homage during his walkabouts greatly increased royalism in Weston. When William’s aunt decided that they must leave and ordered a cab to take them to the railway station, the vehicle that eventually arrived was a beribboned carriage and pair, guided by postillions.

Receiving a small bequest on his eighteenth birthday, Terriss left the Royal Navy and took passage on a merchant vessel bound for Bengal, in northeastern India, where he meant to become a tea planter. Owing to a shipwreck, the journey took longer than he had expected; once there, he soon grew bored with planting tea at Chittagong, and so, after dabbling in the wine and tobacco trades in Calcutta, he returned to England within a few months of his departure. He tried banking, then went abroad again, this time to Louisiana, where he worked on a cotton plantation—briefly, because almost as soon as he arrived there, he decided that he had to be an actor. In New Orleans, he joined the crew of a cargo ship that was collecting bales of cotton from Southern ports before sailing for Liverpool. He afterward recalled that while scrubbing the deck, he dreamed of treading the boards.

In the summer of 1867 (he was now twenty), he found cheap digs in London and set about earning his living on the stage. Easier said than done. The theatrical profession was almost as overcrowded then as it is today; and there was no Actors’ Equity Association to set minimum rates of pay. Terriss’s first stage appearances—fleeting ones—were during a season of plays starring Madame Celeste at the Prince of Wales Theatre, Birmingham; he was paid eighteen shillings a week. Toward the end of 1868, he played a minor role in a London revival of T. W. Robertson’s comedy Society. After two years—two years in which he was more often “resting” than working, and in which the parts he did get were of the cough-and-a-spit variety—he came to the conclusion that an actor’s life was not for him. However, he had one thing to be happy about: he had fallen in love with an actress named Amy Fellowes, and she had agreed to marry him—even though he had told her that he intended to emigrate to the Falkland Islands.

The young couple’s honeymoon, if one can call it that, was spent on board a small ship travelling the 8,000 miles to the South Atlantic. Arriving at Port Stanley, they took a room at the Ship Hotel, and Terriss at once began working from dawn until dusk as a sheep breeder and tamer of wild horses. About a year later, in April 1871, Amy gave birth to a daughter, named Ellaline. The child was only a couple of months old when her parents decided to return to England. The reason for the decision is not clear: it may be that William and Amy had simply grown tired of eking out a meagre existence in the bleak Falklands … or perhaps William’s yearning for a stage career had become strong again, to the extent that, when recalling his first attempt, the many periods of despair were misted in his memory, while the few good times were dazzlingly limelit.

In any event, on the very first day he got back to London, he bought a copy of a theatrical newspaper, scanned the audition advertisements and the reports of shows that were being cast, and then started a tour of producers’ offices. A short tour, as it turned out. After making only a few calls, he found himself in the right place at the right time. A producer seeking a young (and inexpensive) actor took one look at Terriss and was so impressed by his handsome face and fine physique—both attributes enhanced by the stay in the Falklands—that he engaged him on the spot for a show that was just going into rehearsal. When the play opened, Terriss received excellent notices; talent-spotters for other producers admired his gusto and charm: his name spread through the theatrical grapevine.

Before the end of the run, he had offers of parts in forthcoming productions. He was able to pick and choose. And, with advice from Amy, he chose well, resisting the temptation to accept the highest-paid job and instead taking a part that truly suited him. So it went on. In a remarkably short time—a matter of a year or so, for in those days any production that notched up more than a couple of hundred performances was reckoned to have had a long run—William Terriss was being talked of as a rising star. Subsequently, a reporter for the stage weekly, The Era, noted:

During an extended engagement at the Strand Theatre³ in 1873–4, Mr Terriss played Doricourt, in The Belle’s Strategem,⁴ 250 times, winning golden opinions. He was then in the Drury Lane production of Richard Coeur De Lion,⁵ playing Sir Kenneth. On the withdrawal of this play, Mr Terriss appeared as Romeo to the Juliet of Miss Wallis, and when in September, 1875, The Shaughraun was produced, Mr Terriss was the Molyneux, both Dion⁶ and Mrs Boucicault appearing in the production. Mr Terriss’s Molyneux suggested to the late Henry S. Leigh a charming set of verses, in which a pretty miss from the country, seeing Molyneux from her seat in the pit, is moved to a pretty confession of love for the handsome officer and jealousy of fortunate Claire. The Shaughraun was transferred to the Adelphi, and with it Mr Terriss. Here, and at the Princess’s, he appeared in several revivals.

Terriss’s really big chance came in March 1878, when he played opposite Ellen Terry, the most distinguished member of the famous theatrical family that was subsequently represented in the person of John Gielgud (Ellen Terry’s great-nephew).

Terry…Terriss. The similarity between the names must have caused confusion to some readers of the playbill. More to the point of this story, the similarity would create a motive for murder.

The play, presented by the actor-manager John Hare, was Olivia, an adaptation of Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield by W. G. Wills (who was an extraordinarily industrious turner of novels into plays; a few years before, Terriss had played Julian Peveril in a short-lived Drury Lane production of Wills’s version of Scott’s Peveril of the Peak). In The Story of My Life (published in 1908), Ellen Terry remembered:

Like all Hare’s plays, Olivia was perfectly cast. Where all were good, it will be admitted, I think, by everyone who saw the production, that Terriss was the best. “As you stand there, whipping your boot, you look the very picture of vain indifference,” Olivia says to Squire Thornhill in the first act, and never did I say it without thinking how absolutely to the life Terriss realized that description!

As I look back, I remember no figure in the theatre more remarkable than Terriss. He was one of those heaven-born actors who, like kings by divine right, can, up to a certain point, do no wrong. Very often, like Dr Johnson’s “inspired idiot,” Mrs Pritchard, he did not know what he was talking about. Yet he “got there,” while many cleverer men stayed behind. He had unbounded impudence, yet so much charm that no one could ever be angry with him. Sometimes he reminded me of a butcher-boy flashing past, whistling, on the high seat of his cart, or of Phaethon driving the chariot of the sun—pretty much the same thing, I imagine! When he was “dressed up,” Terriss was spoiled by fine feathers; when he was in rough clothes, he looked like a prince. He always commanded the love of his intimates as well as that of the outside public. To the end he was “sailor Bill”—a sort of grown-up midshipmite, whose weaknesses provoked no more condemnation than the weaknesses of a child. …

Terriss had had every sort of adventure by land and sea before I acted with him at the Court Theatre. … He had, to use his own words, “hobnobbed with every kind of queer folk, and found himself in extremely queer predicaments.” The adventurous, dare-devil spirit of the roamer, the incarnate gipsy, always looked out of his insolent eyes. Yet, audacious as he seemed, no man was ever more nervous on the stage. On a first night he was shaking all over with fright, in spite of his confident and dashing appearance. …

When he had presents from the front, which happened every night, he gave them at once to the call-boy or the gas-man. To the women-folk, especially the plainer ones, he was always delightful. Never was any man more adored by the theatre staff. And children, my own Edy included, were simply daft about him. A little American girl, daughter of William Winter, the famous critic, when staying with me in England, announced gravely when we were out driving:

“I’ve gone a mash on Terriss.”

There was much laughter. When it had subsided, the child said gravely:

“Oh, you can laugh, but it’s true. I wish I was hammered to him!”

… His conversation was extremely entertaining—and, let me add, ingenuous. One of his favourite reflections was:

“Tempus fugit! So make the most of it. While you’re alive, gather roses; for when you’re dead, you’re dead a d—d long time.”

Soon after Ellen Terry’s first appearance with Terriss, she became the leading lady of Henry Irving’s company at the Lyceum. Terriss accepted an engagement at the Haymarket, where he played a number of leading roles, including that of Captain Absolute in The Rivals, and then, in the winter of 1879, rejoined John Hare for a season at the St. James’s.

In 1880, seemingly at Ellen Terry’s insistence, Henry Irving invited Terriss to join the Lyceum company to play the villain, Château-Renaud, in a revival of The Corsican Brothers (adapted from the French by Dion Boucicault). Terriss stayed with the company for five years, appearing most notably as Cassio in the production of Othello (May 1881) in which Irving and the American actor Edwin Booth (an elder brother of John Wilkes Booth, assassinator of Lincoln) alternated as Othello and Iago; as Mercutio to Irving’s Romeo and Ellen Terry’s Juliet (most critics felt that the production would have been improved if Irving and Terriss had swapped roles; a play-going politician commented. “As Romeo, Irving reminds me of a pig who has been taught to play the fiddle. He does it cleverly, but he would be better employed in squealing. He cannot shine in the part like the fiddler. Terriss in this case is the fiddler”); as Don Pedro in the production of Much Ado About Nothing which the dramatist Arthur Wing Pinero considered “as perfect a representation of a Shakespearian play as is possible” (the production ran for 212 performances and would have continued but for the fact that arrangements had been made for the company, including Terriss, to tour America, starting in the autumn of 1883).

In her autobiography, Ellen Terry cited Terriss’s performance as Don Pedro to support her conviction that, when playing Shakespeare, “he often did not know what he was talking about”:

One morning [during rehearsals] we went over and over one scene in “Much Ado”—at least a dozen times, I should think—and each time when Terriss came to the speech beginning: “What needs the bridge much broader than the flood,” he managed to give a different emphasis. First it would be:

“What! Needs the bridge much broader than the flood.” Then:

“What needs the bridge much broader than the flood.”

After he had been floundering about for some time, Henry said:

“Terriss, what’s the meaning of that?”

“Oh, get along, Guv’nor, you know!”

Henry laughed. He never could be angry with Terriss, not even when he came to rehearsal full of absurd excuses. One day, however, he was so late that it was past a joke, and Henry spoke to him sharply.

“I think you’ll be sorry you’ve spoken to me like this, Guv’nor,” said Terriss, casting down his eyes.

“Now, no hanky-panky tricks, Terriss.”

“Tricks, Guv’nor! I think you’ll regret having said that when you hear that my poor mother passed away early this morning.”

And Terriss wept.

Henry promptly gave him the day off. A few weeks later, when Terriss and I were looking through the curtain at the audience just before the play began, he said to me gaily:

“See that dear old woman sitting in the fourth row of the stalls—that’s my dear old mother.”

The wretch had quite forgotten that he had killed her!

He was the only person who ever ventured to “cheek” Henry, yet he never gave offence, not even when he wrote a letter of this kind:

“My Dear Guv.,

“I hope you are enjoying yourself, and in the best of health. I very much want to play “Othello” with you next year (don’t laugh). Shall I study it up, and will you do it with me on tour if possible? Say yes, and lighten the drooping heart of yours sincerely,

“WILL TERRISS.”

I have never seen anyone at all like Terriss. … One night he came into the theatre soaked from head to foot.

“Is it raining, Terriss?” said someone who noticed that he was wet.

“Looks like it, doesn’t it?” said Terriss carelessly.

Later it came out that he had jumped off a penny steamboat into the Thames and saved a little girl’s life. It was pretty brave, I think.⁷

Terriss left the Lyceum at Christmas 1885; the company gave him a silver loving cup, but he treasured more the gift of a gold-mounted riding whip from the stagehands. During the following three years, he starred in a string of melodramas at the Adelphi Theatre in the Strand, just round the corner from the Lyceum: The Harbour Lights, The Bells of Haslemere, The Union Jack, and—lastly, opening on 29 December 1888—The Silver Falls. In most of these productions, the female lead was played by the strikingly beautiful actress Miss [Jessie] Millward, whom Terriss had enticed from Irving. Naturally, and perhaps with some foundation, there was tittle-tattle that the stage love-scenes between Terriss and Miss Millward were instances of art imitating nature; tongues continued to wag, and the tongue-waggers tended to be more reckless with rumour when, for some eight months from the autumn of 1889, the couple toured America, most often playing the Haymarket success A Man’s Shadow (which for some reason was billed as Roger La Honte in the States).

After his first American tour, with Irving and Ellen Terry, Terriss had been instrumental in arranging for Augustin Daly’s company to visit England. As soon as he returned from the second tour, he went into partnership with Sir Augustus Harris to present an American drama called Paul Kauvar at Dairy Lane; without his presence in the cast, the production was a costly failure (as was another American play, The Great Metropolis, which he, having helped in its anglicization, put on at the Princess’s two years later). Straightway, he rejoined the Lyceum company and remained with it for some two years, playing Hayston of Bucklaw in Ravenswood, Herman Merivale’s adaptation of Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor, the respective Kings in Henry VIII and Becket,⁸ and the eponymous hero of W. G. Wills’s adaptation of Goethe’s Faust.

In the summer of 1894, Terriss accepted the Gatti brothers’ invitation to star in melodramas of his choosing at the Adelphi. The project was successful from the start (that being on 6 September, with a production of The Fatal Card); the House Full board was more often on display before the curtain went up than was the Standing Room Only one for shows like The Girl I Left Behind Me (almost as great a hit in the West End as it had been, natively, in New York), The Swordsman’s Daughter (by Clement Scott, the Ibsen-loathing drama critic of the Daily Telegraph, and Brandon Thomas, whose Charley’s Aunt had first appeared in London in 1892), and One of the Best (which Shaw reviewed under the heading of “One of the Worst”; it was written by George Edwardes, manager of the Gaiety Theatre, at the eastern end of the Strand, and the young comedy-actor Seymour Hicks, husband of Terriss’s daughter Ellaline, who had begun her own stage career in 1888, when she was sixteen). Terriss, always the hero, rescued distressed damsels (usually depicted by Jessie Millward), foiled dastardly villains, and declaimed yard-long speeches about chivalry, honour, and suchlike.

He became known to the public by several affectionate sobriquets: “Sailor Bill” was one, “Breezy Bill” another. People who had never met him felt that they knew him well; they would wave to him in the street—and he would wave back. There was nothing false about his affability. He had a wide circle of friends, not just stage people, and on Sundays he and Amy often gave parties at their house—far grander than its name, “The Cottage,” suggested—in Bedford Road, Turnham Green, on the western hem of London. Years later, a journalist who presumably had visited The Cottage wrote,

Some of Mr Terriss’s happiest hours were spent at his pretty house. The home life of the hero of so many melodramas was a model of comfort and good taste. Ferns and flowers, music and art, pleasant society, long rides upon a favourite mare, lawn tennis and quoits, much smoking and more reading went to make up the daily round from year’s end to year’s end. Picture-books, curios in every corner of the house, evidenced the artistic feeling of its tenant. Mr Terriss … welcomed his pleasant and quiet life in Turnham Green after the artificial surroundings of the stage, the more so, perhaps, that his earlier years were full of stir and vicissitude.

Terriss, as well as owning The Cottage, leased an apartment in Princes Street, off Hanover Square. On weekdays, if he was not rehearsing or playing, he could usually be found either at the apartment or at the Green Room Club in Bedford Street, close to the Adelphi Theatre. Perhaps because he didn’t relish travelling the seven or so miles to Turnham Green after evening performances, which rarely ended much before eleven o’clock, he often slept at the apartment; gossip that he sometimes shared his bed with Jessie Millward seems to have started off as a guess from the fact that she also had an apartment in Princes Street, and it flourished without the aid of evidence.

Either because he was innately kind or because of memories of his own adversities when he had started in the theatre, he was very generous toward members of his profession who were down on their luck. As well as donating to and appearing in charity matinees for the Actors’ Benevolent Fund, the offices of which were in Adam Street, diagonally across the Strand from the Adelphi Theatre, he always listened sympathetically to hard-luck stories from actors with whom he had worked, and almost always gave them money.

One recipient of Terriss’s handouts was a man called Richard Archer Prince, a native of Dundee who had acquired the nickname—never used to his face, of course—of “Mad Archer.” He was short of stature, and his most conspicuous facial distinctions were a heavy black moustache with waxed tips, and a squinting left eye. The squint doesn’t seem to have diminished his belief that he was exquisitely good-looking, for he frequently bragged, “I am a member of the handsomest family in Scotland.”

His stage appearances hardly entitled him to call the stage his career: subordinate roles in touring productions—from which he was often sacked for hamming or quite forgetting his one or two speeches—and nonspeaking or one-line parts in London shows, so particularly at the Adelphi that he had calling cards printed:

Mr Richard Archer Prince

Adelphi Theatre, Strand, London.

Since he sometimes used other names, and was sometimes denied acknowledgment in the programmes of shows in which he did little more than “dress the set,” it would not be possible, even if considered worthwhile, to make up a full catalogue of his slight contributions to productions in the West End. So far as the Adelphi is concerned, it seems that he first worked there in October 1880 (when he was twenty-two, just down from Dundee), playing the taciturn role of Sligo Dan in The O’Dowd, which was written by, and on this occasion starred, Dion Boucicault. Five months later, he was the First Traveller in Michael Strogoff, a drama adapted from the French by H. J. Byron,⁹ and in the autumn of that same year, 1881, he was the Groom in a revival of Charles Reade’s It’s Never Too Late to Mend. From October 1883—for more than a year, if he did not leave or was not replaced before the end of the extremely successful run—he was O’Flanigan in the large cast of In the Ranks by the prolific collaborators George R. Sims and Henry Pettitt. Prince’s ever-tenuous association with the Adelphi continued during William Terriss’s first spell at the theatre, starting in December 1885; he was a supernumerary in a couple of the early productions and had a little to say as Diego, one of half a dozen Miners, in the final play, The Silver Falls, which was also by Sims and Pettitt. It is likely that he played some small role in the penultimate production, The Union Jack by Pettitt and Sydney Grundy—though not that of Tim O’Grady, the minor character he portrayed when the patriotic drama was taken on tour in 1889, at about the time that Terriss and Jessie Millward were embarking for America.

If Prince got any work at the Adelphi in the years between the closure of The Silver Falls and Terriss’s return, his contribution was not such as to warrant being mentioned in a programme. There seems no doubt that he augmented crowds in at least two productions during Terriss’s second spell at the theatre, but which productions these were is a matter for conjecture.

The longer “Mad Archer” remained a failure as an actor, the more certain he became that he was God’s gift to the stage. So as to keep his egotism intact, he had to assume that his signal lack of success was due to a conspiracy among the male stars: they feared that, if he were given the chance, he would outshine them. It was obvious, wasn’t it?—well, wasn’t it?—that the stars had noted, and been frightened by, the fact that though he had never been allowed to declaim anything more dramatic than “the carriage awaits, m’lord,” his ability to make a little go a long way caused audiences to gape and to gasp at the realization that they were glimpsing genius. The stars—all for one and one for all—were determined that he should never reign as the Prince of Players, showing up their second-rate talents.

During an engagement at the Adelphi, Prince’s jealous hatred of the stars was turned into enmity against one in particular. The crowd-players in the communal dressing room, sick and tired of his conceited chatter, pretended to agree that he, not William Terriss, should be playing the leading role in the play—and added that he might be were it not that Terriss had informed the Gatti brothers that he would walk out if Prince was given a speaking part. It never occurred to Prince that he was being “sent up,” and from then on he regarded Terriss as his implacable enemy.

Actually, Terriss felt sorry for Prince. On several of the occasions when Prince had applied to the Actors’ Benevolent Fund for financial assistance, Terriss had spoken up for him; once, when the emergency committee had voted against providing help, he had given money to the secretary, Charles Coltson, to pass on to Prince.

In December of 1897, the year of Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee, both men, the matinee idol and the nonentity, were deeply disturbed.

William Terriss was worried about his daughter Ellaline, who at the end of November, undisguisably pregnant, had needed to leave the Gaiety, where for the past two and a half years she had been playing leading roles, usually opposite her husband Seymour Hicks, in George Edwardes’s Girl series of musical comedies (The Shop Girl, My Girl, The Circus Girl). Following a miscarriage, she had spent a week or so in a rest home at Eastbourne; but, her condition having deterioriated to the extent that she needed to fight for breath, she had been brought back to London to be admitted to the Charing Cross Hospital. There, the doctors expressed concern that she might not recover. Wanting to be with her as often as possible, Terriss had cancelled many daytime engagements, including activities associated with the Actors’ Benevolent Fund.

Prince’s worries were to do with finance—or rather, his lack of it. Having been unemployed for months, he had pawned virtually all of his belongings apart from a single set of indoor clothes, a grey Inverness cloak and a black slouch hat. He was in arrears with the four-shillings-a-week rent for his bed-sitter in the home of a bus driver at 16 Ebury Court, near Victoria Station, and the only food he could afford was bread dipped in milk; the bus driver’s wife had threatened to turn him out, not just because he was behind with the rent but also because his small back room was “like a pig-sty,” littered with theatrical newspapers, religious tracts, and notices of services at Westminster Abbey.

Since 1890, Prince had occasionally received small sums, never more than a pound, from the Actors’ Benevolent Fund, but from early in November 1897 he had become “a weekly applicant for relief.” When making the first of the weekly applications, he had produced a note from William Terriss: “I know the bearer, Richard A. Prince, as a hardworking actor.” Terriss’s “reference” had persuaded the emergency committee to grant Prince thirty shillings, and he had at once written to Charles Coltson:

Dear Sir,

I don’t know how to thank you and the gentlemen of the Committee for your great kindness. It’s worth ten years of one’s life to receive such favours from one in the poor position I have always had at my art. But I hope to Almighty God my luck will change in the week to pay back such kindness. Thanking you, Sir, for the way in which you have received me at the Actors’ Benevolent Fund. You do it the greatest honour. If it’s ever in my power, with the help of God, to do it any good, I will.

Yours very faithfully,

With thanks,

RICHARD A. PRINCE

Apart from the use of pale-violet ink, that communication was very different from one that Charles Coltson received on 4 December—a card, posted in Paddington at 12:15 A.M. that day. The sender’s address began, “8 War St,” but then straggled into illegibility; though the message looked as if it had been dashed off, an attempt seemed to have been made to disguise the writing. It read:

I am coming up to town next week, and I shall wait on your coming out, and you will have to go through with it. Odd man out you will be. After next Monday shall kill you.

Yours,

FIND OUT

Mr. Coltson—who was addressed as “John Colman” on the card—was sure that the anonymous correspondent was Prince, who, only the day before, had made a scene in the Fund’s offices after being told that his latest plea had resulted in an award of only five shillings.

Apparently, Mr. Coltson did not worry about the threat. And he did not mention it when, on Wednesday, 15 December, Prince again turned up at the Fund’s offices—only to be told that, for the time being, at any rate, he was to receive no further aid. Prince, who seemed to take the decision stoically, asked who had chaired the emergency committee that day. “One of the Terrys,” he was told.

If Prince heard the first three words of that reply, he ignored them. It was a name that crowded his mind: not the plural “Terrys” that had been spoken but the singular “Terriss” that he had desperately wanted to hear. Once again, he had been victimized by the idol of the Adelphi.

As it happened, a few hours later William Terriss saw Prince in the street. He stopped to speak to him, and before saying good luck and goodbye, pressed some money into his hand.

Prince spent part of the gift—one shilling and ninepence, to be exact—at a shop in Victoria Street which specialized in butchering equipment. His purchase was a filleting knife, its handle fashioned from red teakwood, its blade, of Sheffield steel, honed on both edges and dwindling to a needle-sharp point.

Thursday, 16 December 1897, was a cold but harshly bright day. The Strand was crowded with Christmas shoppers. And long before the box office opened at the Adelphi Theatre, the foyer was jam-packed with people hoping to acquire the few remaining seats for that evening’s performance of one of the biggest hits in town, the American melodrama Secret Service, starring William Terriss and—her name less prominent than his on the playbill—Miss Millward. By half past ten or so, the House Full board was being displayed.

The ticket holders, nigh on a thousand of them, would be disappointed, for the Adelphi’s scarlet-and-gold curtain would not rise that evening. A few minutes after eight o’clock, when the performance was due to start, the slit in the centre of the curtain would be opened, and the assistant manager, George Budd, resplendent in tails but grey-faced and looking as if he had been crying, would make an announcement:

“Ladies and gentlemen, I am deeply grieved and pained to inform you that because of a serious—nay, terrible—accident, it is impossible for the performance of Secret Service to take place. I will ask you to be good enough to pass out into the street as quietly as possible. It is hardly necessary for me to add that your money will be returned on application at the pay-box.”

During the morning of that fateful Thursday, William Terriss, with his son-in-law Seymour Hicks, had visited Ellaline at the Charing Cross Hospital. By midday, he was back at his apartment in Princes Street, keeping an appointment with an old and elderly friend, a surveyor named John Graves, who was giving him advice, presumably on a business footing, concerning his intention to enlarge or replace the fern-filled conservatory attached to his house in Turnham Green. In the early afternoon, he and Graves went by hansom cab to the Green Room Club. Having lunched—Graves with gusto; Terriss, as was his custom, but lightly—they both took a nap in the library, a room with almost as many green leather armchairs as books, and then joined in a card game of nap with three other members of the club, one of whom was Herbert Waring, a rising actor whom some critics had compared to Terriss in terms of personableness and panache. Terriss was a keen gambler (Seymour Hicks subsequently recalled seeing him lose or win hundreds of pounds during an afternoon or late-night card-playing session); but this afternoon his mind was not on the game. Every so often, he would leave the table to make a telephone call to the hospital or to The Cottage.

As the brass clock chimed 7:15, he finished off his pre-performance tumbler of whisky and water, donned his tweed overcoat and brown soft hat, and left for the theatre, intending to be in his dressing-room just in time to answer the callboy’s knock and shout of “half an hour” at 7:25. He was accompanied by Graves—whose name would soon, very soon, be construed as ill-omened by superstitious stage-folk.

Graves had been one of Terriss’s guests at the first night of Secret Service and had afterward complained to his friend that some members of the audience seemed to have come along more to be seen and heard than to see and hear. Now, strolling with Terriss down Bedford Street, he said that he hoped that tonight’s audience, of which he would be a complementary part, would be less participative than the first one. Terriss told Graves that, a few years before, a controversy about first-nighters had blown up in the correspondence columns of a stage paper, and he had put his spoke in, declaring that while he much preferred to be applauded, he freely admitted the right of first-nighters to hiss or otherwise indicate their displeasure. Recalling part of what he had written, he quoted it to Graves: “It is all very well to claim the indulgence due to ladies and gentlemen, but artists should remember that they are actors and actresses when they are on the boards, and if they wish to be treated as ladies and gentlemen only, they had better remain in that privacy with which the public will not interfere, and where they will be free alike from public applause and public censure.” By the end of the recitation, the two men had turned left and were entering Maiden Lane; Terriss was feeling in his pocket for a silver key

Little is known of how Richard Archer Prince spent the daylight hours and then the first hours of darkness of that Thursday. Subsequently, several people, most of them actors as derelict as Prince, claimed to have observed him walking—or, to stick to their words, “lurching,” “shambling,” or “wandering sightlessly”—in different parts of the West End; none had spoken to him, and he had not spoken to any of them. In the morning, at about eleven o’clock, he was close to the Adelphi Theatre—on the other side of the Strand, in the offices of the Actors’ Benevolent Fund, where he pleaded with Charles Coltson for his case to be reconsidered and was told to come back next day, when the emergency committee would be meeting.

By seven in the evening, he was closer still to the Adelphi: standing in a shadowed side-doorway of Rule’s Restaurant in Maiden Lane, at the rear of the theatre.¹⁰

The Adelphi had two stage doors. Over the years since 1880, whenever Prince was working at the theatre, supernumerarily or with a couple of lines to speak, he had used the main stage door, which was in Bull Inn Court, running down the eastern side of the building from Maiden Lane to the Strand. The other door, diagonally across from Rule’s, was known as the Royal Entrance—more on account of the Sovereign’s crest carved in stone above it than because it had occasionally been used by subjects-eschewing regal theatregoers. There were only two keys, both cut from silver, to this door—one was retained, but rarely used, by Arthur Latham, the manager of the theatre, and the other had been presented to William Terriss by the Gatti brothers, thus allowing him to treat the Royal Entrance virtually as his alone. Who knows? … perhaps the fact that there were two doors—“Gentleman” and “Players”—aggravated Prince’s jealous hatred of the star.

7:23 Cold from standing so long in the shadows, his hunger made painful by the sounds from the crowded restaurant—the customers’ chatter, the clatter of crockery, the chinking of glasses—and by the smells wafting through the grille of the basement kitchen, Prince slipped the brand-new filleting knife from the pocket of his cloak as, to his right, William Terriss and a man he did not know turned the corner from Bedford Street into Maiden Lane.

It seems likely that Terriss, quoting from a letter that he himself had written, spoke with more resonance than was his offstage wont; that Prince heard the end of what, because of his action, now just a few seconds away, would be Terriss’s final sustained speech: “free alike from public applause and public censure.”

As Terriss inserted the key in the lock of the private door, Prince lurched across the lane. He plunged the knife obliquely downward into Terriss’s back. Withdrew it. Struck again. Again withdrew it. If, preparing for the act, he had thought up something dramatic to exclaim—something impeccably iambic, short and to the points of explanation and exculpation—he quite forgot the line.

The only sound from Terriss—uttered twice—was a ragged expulsion of breath: “not unlike the blowing-out of birthday candles,” it seemed to John Graves, who, for the moment, felt no alarm. He “thought that the strokes were merely hearty slaps, given in friendship.”

Still clutching the silver key, Terriss turned away from the door, staggered back against it. Did he have time to recognize his attacker? Probably not. As he staggered—as he cried out “My God, I have …”—Prince rammed the knife into his breast.

“… been stabbed,” Terriss whispered. He fell untidily, his body jerking as he fell: a marionette whose strings were being snipped one by one. Prince kept hold of the knife—he did not let the falling body pull it from his grasp, and as Terriss collapsed on the pavement, the tarnished blade gradually slid back into sight. Carefully, as if stowing a personal prop that would be needed at further performances, Prince replaced the knife in his pocket.

Graves stared at him, saw that he was smiling, and—perhaps because inconsequential details tend to assume a sham importance in times of stress—noticed that the light filtering through the red gas-globe fixed to the wall above the door gave an auburn tint to the waxed tips of his moustache. Only afterward did it occur to Graves that it was odd that Terriss’s attacker did not run away. And then, one may surmise, he also wondered at, and was quietly proud of, the courage he himself showed by gripping Prince’s arm and shouting, not screaming, for help.

Among those who responded to Graves’s shouts of “Murder!” of “Police!” was a member of the Corps of Commissionaires who was making his way via the back-doubles from his headquarters in the Strand to a post office near Leicester Square. He broke into a run and was the first to arrive; but rather than tendering assistance to either Terriss or Graves, he stationed himself in the middle of the lane, ready to exert his uniformed authority in keeping spectators at bay. The first of those emerged from Rule’s—among them, a journalist who the following morning would thrill readers with his “eyewitness” account of the attack.

Inside the theatre, Terriss’s dresser, William Algar, dashed to the window of the first-floor dressing room to see what the commotion was about. Like the journalist, he would profess to have seen the entire incident; but for the moment all he knew was that someone—it looked very much like his master—was spread-eagled on the ground, and two other men, one making all the noise, were standing close by, seemingly hand in hand. Just to be on the safe side, Algar grabbed a dress sword, addendum to a costume that Terriss was due to wear on stage that night, before running out of the room and down the stone steps toward the Royal Entrance. His progress was sufficiently noisy to excite the attention of other dressers, of stagehands—to bring actors and actresses, various in their preparation for the performance, from the dressing rooms. And so he was one of several men who put their shoulders or hands to the door, forcing it wide and, in so doing, pushing William Terriss toward the gutter.

The murder of William Terriss (from The Illustrated Police Budget, 25 December 1897)

Assassination of William Terriss (from The Illustrated Police Budget, 25 December 1897)

It was as if the scene had been rehearsed. The people from the theatre fanned out around the fallen star. Those nearest the door shuffled aside, letting Jessie Millward come through. She was wearing a many-coloured kimono, a present from Ellen Terry. For a moment she stared down at Terriss. Then, falling beside him, she cradled his head, lifted it toward her own. She was weeping now. Her tears glistened on Terriss’s cheeks. With her free hand, she loosened the knot in his tie, tried to undo his collar.

But the tableau came to an unsatisfactory end. Terriss, hardly able to breathe, muttered, “Get away … get away.” An elderly woman—probably Mrs. Briggs, the wardrobe mistress—pulled Jessie to her feet. Some stagehands carried Terriss through the Royal Entrance and up the steps to his dressing room. Blood dropped lavishly from him. Though he was barely conscious, he still gripped the silver key.

Before following, Jessie demonstrated that she was not so overcome that she was unable to behave sensibly. As well as sending the stage manager through to the stalls bar for ice, she despatched William Algar to the Charing Cross Hospital to fetch medical aid; and she told the callboy to run to the Gaiety Theatre and inform Seymour Hicks, playing there in The Circus Girl, that his father-in-law had been seriously wounded. If she thought at all of Mrs. Terriss, perhaps she decided that Hicks should break the news to her.

In the dressing room, the death scene—for so it was—suffered, dramatically speaking, from the fact that the sofa of crimson velvet on which Terriss had been lain was shorter than his body, thus necessitating an unartistic lolling of his legs over an end; and from the fact that he was too far gone to speak dying words.

Down in the lane, it seemed that Richard Archer Prince had muffed his big chance of a sort of stardom. He had cast himself in the leading role of Murderer but failed to impress anyone other than John Graves, who was still clutching his sleeve. By the time Police Constable 272E John Bragg inserted himself into the half-circle of people at the Royal Entrance, having run from his traffic-directing post at the convergence of Bedford, Garrick, and King Streets, Prince, with Graves in tow, had wandered a hundred yards east along Maiden Lane, almost as far as the Bedford Head pub, on the left-hand side. After getting the gist of what had happened, the constable went in pursuit. Graves, who must have been mightily relieved to see him, called out, “I give this man in custody for stabbing.” As soon as Bragg had hold of Prince, Graves let him go. “What’s the matter?” Prince enquired. “You know what,” Bragg replied, and straightway nudged him onward, in the general direction of the Lyceum, the Theatres Royal of Drury Lane and Covent Garden, and, of peculiar significance, Bow Street Police Station.

It appears that Graves and Prince had not spoken to each other while they were, so to say, attached; but now they entered into conversation.

In reply to Graves’s question, “What could have induced you to do such a cruel deed as that?” Prince explained, “Terriss would not employ me, and I was determined to be revenged. He kept me out of work for ten years.” When Graves hummed dubiously, Prince snapped, “I should have had either to die in the streets or else have my revenge.”

At the police station, Constable Bragg handed his prisoner over to Inspector George Wood; John Graves made a brief statement and was then allowed to return to the Adelphi. Perhaps because Bragg had been intent on listening to and trying to remember Prince’s remarks, it had not occurred to him that Prince might still be in possession of the knife he had used on William Terriss. But that thought struck Inspector Wood at once, and he ordered Prince to turn out his pockets. As Prince produced the bloodstained knife, he murmured to Bragg (whether or not jestingly, one cannot tell), “It is a good job for you that you didn’t get it.” Handing the knife to the inspector, he said, “I gave Terriss due warning, and if he is dead he knew what he had to expect from me. He prevented me getting assistance from the Actors’ Benevolent Fund, and I stabbed him.”

The only other items in his pockets were a pair of black woolen gloves, so far beyond repair that they looked as much like mittens, and a bundle of letters, all from well-known people, most either acknowledging the receipt of verses or expressing sympathy, or both; of the rest, one was from the Duke and Duchess of York, thanking Prince for his congratulations on the birth of their son; one, on black-edged paper, was from the Princess Henry of Battenberg, saying that she was touched by his sentiments concerning her late husband, and one was from William Gladstone, noting that he was as pleased as was Prince that the River Dee was now spanned by the Victoria Jubilee Bridge.

Since Inspector Wood was unsure of the gravity of Prince’s crime, he did not charge him before telling Constable Bragg to take him to a cell. As Prince was being led away, he burst into tears. The inspector asked him what ailed him, expecting the answer to be contrition for his act or fear of the consequences. Prince said that he couldn’t help crying, he was so hungry. He begged for food. Once he had been assured that he would be given some, he wiped his eyes on his sleeve and apologized for having made a scene.

At five minutes to eight—the time for the call of “Act One, beginners” on any ordinary night—the silver key fell from William Terriss’s hand, signifying his death. (Or so it is said. The trouble with stories that have a theatrical background is that the first tellers of them are apt to be lured into sacrificing exactness to dramatic unity: they speak of what should have happened as if it actually had. None of the three doctors who had hurried from the Charing Cross Hospital took a note, to the minute, of when, as a reporter would put it, “the light of the star was extinguished for ever.”)

As has been mentioned, shortly after eight o’clock the Adelphi’s assistant manager made an announcement from the stage; resultantly, the auditorium was soon empty save for its attendants.

By nine, special editions of newspapers, reporting Terriss’s death, were being hawked in the West End. There was no special edition of the Daily Telegraph, but next morning the paper made news of the spreading of the news—

At first most people were incredulous, for tragedies of this kind are fortunately rare in the annals of our stage life, but when the fatal tidings were confirmed there was only one topic of discussion in the district occupied by the playhouses and throughout London, for the sad intelligence reached the clubs and other places where people foregather in an amazingly short time. All kinds of rumours—most of them contradictory, and some obviously absurd—were afloat as to the exact circumstances of the terrible crime, a fact which need excite no surprise when it is recollected that for some time after Mr. Terriss had been attacked the greatest consternation prevailed in the theatre, and the immediate neighbourhood was in a state of ferment. A vast crowd of the curious and sympathetic flocked to the various entrances of the theatre, in the vain hope of learning details from the officials, and at one time the Strand was impassable. Neighbouring thoroughfares whence access may be had to the Adelphi were also filled by the multitude, whose faces, it was easy to see, expressed surprise and horror. …

Only the briefest interval elapsed before the dreadful news extended to the general public in the neighbourhood of the Strand. Of course, among the members of the profession it travelled apace, and general regrets and expressions of horror at the act were heard. The actors and actresses of the Adelphi company, as they came out of the theatre, passed away in twos and threes, talking in subdued tones of the distressing occurrence. It was evident that the remark of one actor to another as they came into the street: “Good-night, old chap; I feel quite upset,” voiced the feelings of them all.

Mingling with the throng, one could easily see that, but for the corroboration given by the darkened theatre itself, the news would hardly have been credited. To the public, Mr. Terriss’s figure was associated with deeds of bravery; so often had he portrayed before them the dashing, manly hero that there is no doubt that, as chance scraps of conversation showed, they saw him with the glamour of the stage upon him. To think of him, therefore, as dead by the cowardly hand of the assassin gave an intensified shock. “Poor old Bill Terriss!” said a soldier in the crowd, “if only he’d ‘ad a chance, it wouldn’t have been so bad. But it do seem a miserable death for ’im.”

At ten, Prince was roused from a sound sleep to be charged “that he, about 7:20 P.M. on Thursday, the 16th of December, 1897, did kill and slay one William Terriss with a knife, in Maiden Lane, in the Parish of St Margaret’s.” He nodded and said, “All right.” Asked if he had a relative or friend living in London whom he wished to be informed of his plight, he spoke of a married half-sister named Maggie. He said that he had chanced upon her only a few hours before, in the Strand, and had pleaded with her to give him ten shillings: “If she had not refused me, this thing would never have happened.” A policeman was sent to her home. Upon his return, he told Prince that she wanted nothing to do with him. “I didn’t think she would,” Prince said. “It is now clear that she was in league with Terriss.”

Shortly after midnight, Terriss’s body, concealed in a basketwork shell, was carried from the Adelphi, through the main stage door, and transported on a covered dray to the mortuary beneath the church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. There, an autopsy showed that the two stab wounds in the back were severe, and might themselves have proved fatal, but that the wound in the breast was the cause of death. A cut on the left wrist indicated that Terriss had tried to deflect the frontal blow—which, the surgeon believed, had been struck with “almost super-human force,” for the weapon had pierced Terriss’s coat, jacket, waistcoat, and chest-protector, then almost severed the fifth rib before penetrating the heart.

Throughout the night, the telephone and telegraph lines from Fleet Street were engrossed by questions, orders, and requests, all in aid of adding to the bare details of the crime. As soon as it was known that Prince hailed from Dundee, “stringers” of that city were alerted; and one of them, early from bed, learned the address of Prince’s mother, Margaret Archer, and called there.

Mrs Archer evidently knew nothing of the fearful event which had taken place in London, for she was anxious to learn the cause of so early a visit.

“Oh, it was about Dick?” and a happy smile played upon her features as she mentioned the name. “He’s in London, is Dick—an actor. Have I heard anything about him lately? Of course I have. My daughter had a letter from him only a day or two ago. Here it is,” and she drew the envelope from a rack near the fireplace.

The missive was written in a bold, clear hand—the letter of a man who could put a sentence together. But there seemed evidence of something being amiss with the writer. After a kindly query as to his mother’s health, he relapsed into a desponding tone. He referred to the difficulty of getting work in London, and went on to say that he supposed there would be little use of him looking forward to visiting Dundee at Christmas. “Just as well die in London” was the bitter observation with which he concluded.

Meantime, Mrs Archer had asked if anything was wrong with Dick, to which the only reply that could be given was that the young man had got into serious trouble in London. Intuitively, she seemed to conclude that to ask more would be to learn too much. However, she very courteously, if at times huskily, continued to answer questions regarding her son.

Dick, as she called him, had always been a curious boy. When he was quite young he evinced a passion for the play, and night after night he spent within the walls of the old Theatre Royal in Castle Street. It was a happy night when he came home and confided to his parents that he had been taken on as a supernumerary at the theatre. This situation he kept for four years, working in a shipyard during the day and carrying out his stage duties in the evening. For the latter work he was paid at the rate of nine shillings a week, and that he was neither of a wild nor spendthrift disposition his mother testified. Richard’s education had not been elaborate, but he was anxious to improve his mind, and with this in view he underwent a course of study, and gradually came to be regarded as a promising young fellow. The temporary removal of the household to London was the cause of Dick’s throwing up his situation in Dundee, and he went to the metropolis a short time after his father and mother. “He’s a grand actor, our Dick,” said the old woman, and while under less depressing circumstances one could have admired the exhibition of maternal pride, it was terribly pathetic to listen to the mother’s words of praise.

Previous to leaving Dundee on the last occasion, he had been idle for a considerable time, but he was hopeful of securing a post in some of the London theatres. The engagement which he looked for never came, however, hence the despairing nature of his last letter.

Replying to a question as to whether her son had ever spoken in a threatening manner of any person, Mrs Archer declared that she was not aware of his having the slightest animosity toward anyone in theatrical circles out of Dundee, although she remembered him once saying that he would like to do for one of the local officials. She never paid any attention to this threat.

“Now,” at last said Mrs Archer, “I have told you all about Dick. Tell me what they have done to him. Is he locked up?” I answered that he was in the custody of the police. She covered her face with her hands and sobbed.

The public gallery of Bow Street Police Court was packed, in the main by actors and actresses, when, at half past eleven on Friday morning, the door from the police station swung open and Richard Archer Prince made his entrance. No doubt he would have liked to pause, posing, in the doorway, but the two following constables marched inexorably, forcing him into the dock. The reception he got was uncertain at first, for hardly anyone in the audience knew him, not even by sight; however, the moment he entered the dock, there to stand pencil-straight, his Inverness buttoned to the throat and with the collar turned up, one hand holding his black slouch hat, the fingers of the other preening his moustache, a chorus of boos, hisses, and shouts of detestation filled the court. To his delight. He didn’t mind being the villain; no, not at all. The important thing was that he was at last a star, standing centrestage, playing to a full house. According to the reporter for the Daily Telegraph:

During the hearing of the evidence the prisoner paid the closest possible attention to every detail, and watched the witnesses or Mr Wilson, who conducted the prosecution, with eyes that grew almost beadlike with the intensity of their concentration. Prince is said to be a Scotsman, but he possesses none of the outward characteristics of that race. On the contrary, his general appearance, his accent, and manner of speech are distinctly Italian, and the style in which the hair is worn in particular gives him a foreign look. One could not avoid the thought as one watched the man’s movements in the dock that he was very self-conscious, and felt throughout that he was acting a part which must command the eyes and ears of his audience. It may have been entirely unpremeditated on the part of the prisoner, but his every action appeared calculated for effect. He leant over the dock rail in a dramatic attitude for some time. When a statement was made by any of the witnesses to which he took exception, he shook his head slowly and smiled. No incident of the hearing disturbed his cool self-possession. At one point he turned round in the dock and took a comprehensive survey of the spectators, as if seeking for some familiar faces. Even the very dramatic moment when Inspector Wood slowly unfolded the fatal knife from its wrappings of paper and displayed it to the court had no effect upon him, though a perceptible shudder ran through everyone in court. A lethal weapon the knife looked. The blade had its bright steel reddened near the handle with an ominous stain.

In the prisoner’s demeanour, after the cruel and terrible crime had been committed, as described by the witnesses, he showed no remorse for the deed or any desire to palliate or excuse it. Neither did he in court appear in the slightest to flinch from the consequences of it. He contradicted, in clear and unwavering tones, some of the statements of Mr Graves and Inspector Wood, and seemed to particularly resent the use of the word “revenge” that was attributed to him. He denied that he had ever used that word, and said that “blackmail” was the proper expression.… He was quick to profit by the warning from Sir John Bridge [the magistrate] not to make statements. He evinced no lack of nerve or courage.

William Terriss’s murderer as seen in court (from The Illustrated Police Budget, 25 December 1897)

At the close of the proceedings, when the magistrate decided to remand him, the prisoner exhibited the first symptom of concern, and complained that he had no solicitor. On being told that he might consult one before the next occasion when he would be brought before the Court, he bowed to the magistrate, and walked from the dock unmoved by the unprecedented display of disgust and abhorrence of the foul crime which followed his retreating figure. Altogether the scene in court was a remarkable one. The intense eagerness of the spectators, and the sangfroid of the central figure, as the facts and circumstances of the crime were being narrated, formed a contrast not often seen in the courts, and one which must add, if possible, to the extraordinary feeling which has been excited by a dramatic crime.

In the nineteenth century, sensational murders often had commercial side effects. The potters of Staffordshire turned out presentments of culprits and of the scenes of their crimes, printers rolled off catchpenny broadsheets, trial transcripts, and victim-commemorative cards that were suitable for framing (in February 1897, a London printer made, it might be said, a killing with unofficially consecrated slices of pasteboard, Sacred to the Memory of Elizabeth Camp, a murdered barmaid, late of a pub called the Good Intent), and until the summer of 1868, when hangings in a good, legal cause were first carried out unpublicly, executioners and their reps made capital from the sale of cuttings of uniquely used hemp—at half a crown per inch if the association was reckoned to justify that top rate—to sufferers from warts or the goiter or to people who were merely acquisitive of morbid mementoes. (Subsequent to public hangings—and to the public snipping of the respective means—the market was for a while glutted with chunks of hemp described as ex-executional; but then suspicion grew, demanding of the hawkers forgery of provenance prior to the spiel, and this additional chore caused most of them to revert to three-card trickery or to the offering of acceptedly controversial splinters from the Cross.) Some murders had a depressing effect on trade: in 1871, a national partiality to chocolate creams was diminished by the news that Miss Christiana Edmunds, who could hardly have been more genteel, had injected several of such confections with strychnine, her object being to bereave the doctor she adored of his sweet-toothed wife, leaving the coast of Brighton clear for her own pursuance of matrimony; and, if one believes the legend, Mrs. Marie Manning’s choice of material for her going-away gown, remarked upon by thousands, Charles Dickens among them, who craned their necks as she was hanged on the roof of Horsemonger Lane Gaol in 1849 for the murder of a one-time beau, had an adverse effect on the fashionableness of black satin.

So far as I can tell, there is no footnote to the annals of crime, no aside from a stage person’s memoirs, no parentheses in a history of the retailing of textiles, observing that on Friday, 17 December 1897, the haberdashers of the West End and its environs experienced a rush for slight offcuts of black crepe that all but the oldest of them, at least forty-five years in the business and so theoretically capable of recalling a similar rush following the demise of the Iron Duke thought unprecedented; or that, during the remaining fortnight of the year, any man noticeable in the street in any event but made more so by his wearing of an armband of mourning was, ten to one, a member of the theatrical profession. Each phenomenon, the first contributing to the second, certainly occurred. Of course, much as some people today wear sweatshirts publicizing causes that they do not support, some of the ostensible mourners of William Terriss felt no pang at his passing but had black tacked to their sleeves because they liked the idea of being labelled, albeit temporarily, as thespians.

But, no doubt of it, the counterfeit mourners were vastly outnumbered by the genuine. Headlines such as “A Profession Grieves” told a truth. The stage weekly, The Era, spoke for as well as to its readers in the issue hastened from the press for sale on the Friday night:

The excitement, the agitation, have subsided; and all that remains is a deep, benumbing sorrow. … In all circles of society, from the mansions of the West End to the slums of the East, there are faithful friends and honest admirers mourning for the dead actor and execrating his cowardly assassin. The first feeling must have been one of awe, for it is an awesome thought that this actor, young at least in virile energy, manly spirit, and the enjoyment of life, should have been cut down in the full bloom and flower of his popularity and prosperity. We can hardly realize, even yet, that Terriss—the hearty, honest, buoyant, breezy Terriss—lies a mere mass of still, cold clay; that the mobile features are fixed and waxen, the eloquent eyes are glazed and stony, and the strong, active body is stiffened into a spiritless corpse. And when it comes home to us as a cruel, wretched reality, the truth is too terrible and the bitterness is greater than we can bear.

The Adelphi was dark (and would remain so until the morning after Christmas Day, when Secret Service would be revived, with Herbert Waring playing Terriss’s part and May Whitty replacing Jessie Millward, still inconsolable, as Miss Varney); but that is not to say that the theatre was a forsaken place.¹¹

From early on Friday, Henry Spratt, custodian at the stage door, hardly had a minute to himself, was rarely upright between bows, as one important person after another entered, dishevelled from contact with the crowds of reporters and spectators at one end or the other of Bull Inn Court, which was kept clear by cordoning constables, to express sorrow to the Gatti brothers and, through them, to the Terriss family. Most of the visitors were connected with the stage (these included the three actor-knights Henry Irving, Squire Bancroft, and Charles Wyndham), but some were hereditarily noble, and at least one (Sir Henry Hawkins, who refused to tether his terrier outside, snapping magisterially that “Jack” accompanied him in all unecclesiastic places) was a member of the Queen’s Bench.

Hundreds of telegrams, thousands of letters and cards, were delivered to the Adelphi; on some, the address was scanty or inventive, or both—to “Terriss’s Playhouse, London,” for instance—and nearly all were meant to be read by Terriss’s widow. The latter fact turned out to contain a complication. Early on, the clerk assigned by Arthur Latham, the manager of the theatre, to sort the missives into piles, the eventually largest of these to be tidied away into sacks and transported by hansom to The Cottage at Turnham Green, noticed that the writer of one card, oblivious of Amy Terriss, had assumed that the widow was Jessie Millward: a pardonable error considering that husband-and-maiden-named-wife stage partnerships were common and that during the last few years of William Terriss’s celebrity, Amy had become almost reclusive, rarely venturing from the house, not even to attend her husband’s first nights, and never, but never, aiding the concoctors of Green-Room Gossip columns (who, quite likely, relished her reticence, which allowed them to be venturesome with innuendo about an offstage—or rather, behind-the-scenes—relationship between the male and female stars of the Adelphi).

Apprised of the card-writer’s misapprehension, Arthur Latham ordered the clerk to add censorship to the sorting task; to winkle away from the Turnham Green–intended pile any condolences to the widow that might distress her by their faulty guesswork as to who she was. As it turned out, the carefulness was unnecessary: after one consignment of mail had been delivered to The Cottage, Amy wrote to Arthur Latham, thanking him all the same, but saying that she could not bring herself to read any of the countless messages she was receiving direct, let alone forwarded ones; a day or so later, her son Tom (Ellaline’s younger brother, himself a stage performer, though without distinguishment) spoke on her behalf to the press, explaining “the impossibility of replying individually to the great number of manifestations of affection and sympathy, and trusting that a general acknowledgment would suffice.” It seems probable that Amy made an exception to her nonreading, nonreplying decisions—that being in the case of a message from Queen Victoria, the Widow of Windsor, who asserted that her sorrow was shared by all her subjects, in Great Britain and far-flung throughout the world: an extent of emotion that, what with the suffusion of Empire Pink on the globe, left relatively few people untouched.

Within a short while of Terriss’s death, the Adelphi management had telegraphed the news to William Gillette, who was in Pittsburgh, heading a Secret Service road company. Gillette’s immediate, wired response augmented, and confirmed a part of, the Queen’s generalization: Unspeakably Shocked. We Mourn Death of Terriss with All Who Loved Him, Which Means All England.

The press-requested comments of Terriss’s native fellows tended to be quietly recollective: more in keeping with the new “natural” style of drama, leaving the audience to worry for meanings between the lines, than with the declamatory sort. But George Alexander, the actor manager who had made himself as much at home at the St. James’s as had Terriss at the Adelphi (though, two years before, he had been forced to cut short the inaugural run of The Importance of Being Earnest owing to the tribulations and trials of the play’s author—who had once complained of him that he did not act on the stage: he behaved), came up with a speech that would have satisfied any of the Adelphi melodramatists:

Will Terriss was a man to the finger-tips. Nature stood up and said it to all the world; and by his death the modem stage loses some of its virile force.

Lie lightly on him, Earth.

George Edwardes, of the Gaiety, recalled Terriss as “one of the most generous men I knew. About two months ago, he was in my office when an application was brought to me for help from a poor actor. I showed it to him. ‘Well,’ he remarked with a smile, ‘if you give to every one in this way, you will finish up in the workhouse.’ Afterwards I had a conversation with the applicant, who admitted that only a week before, Terriss had sent him £10.”

The vocalist and actress Florence St. John exclaimed, “Poor old Willie!” and went on: “The last time I saw him was when he called on me on the night of last Saturday week, after the production of The Grand Duchess.¹² I was feeling a bit depressed, but he cheered me up with these words, which I little dreamed would be the last I should ever hear from him: ‘Never mind, Jack; so long as you have a few pals and your health, you’re all right.’”¹³

Henry Irving’s business manager, Bram Stoker, whose tale of vampirism, Dracula, had been published earlier in the year, thought back to 1883, “when the Lyceum company were crossing to America on the SS City of Rome. A rather bragging man, seeing so many landmen present, not like himself in yachting rig, pulled out a ten-pound note, and openly offered to bet that not one of the passengers would take his cap off the top of the mast. Terriss instantly covered the note, and, throwing off his coat, tightened his belt. ‘Done,’ he said; ‘up with you and put it on. I will follow and take it off.’ The offer was withdrawn.”

During the week in which Terriss was murdered, the Lyceum company was at the Grand Theatre, Wolverhampton. Of course, Stoker was not the only person associated with the company to be asked for a quote. The entry for 16 December in Ellen Terry’s diary records: “Willie Terriss was murdered this evening. Newspapers sent me a wire for ‘expressions of sympathy’!!”

As will appear, her shock at the news may have been accompanied by a worry concerning a practical effect of Terriss’s death on a friend. For the present, all she would tell the reporters was that she could not tell them anything: “The whole affair is so terrible, and I feel it so deeply, as all who knew him must, that I really cannot talk of it.”

Irving—called “guv’nor” by Terriss, even when he was no longer a Lyceumite—was more forthcoming: “Some of us have his words—confident, cheery words—still ringing in our ears. Only two days ago he was with me, arranging for the production of The Corsican Brothers at the Adelphi—a play with which he had intimate associations in his Lyceum days—and it is strange that, with that grim drama in his mind, he should have been struck down by a murderous hand.”

One of Terriss’s friends at the Green Room Club must have been surprised, perhaps saddened, to learn that he had planned yet another revival of The Corsican Brothers. Three weeks before, just after the opening of Secret Service, Terriss had confided in the man: “I’m longing to appear in a new style of drama. I’m tired of being accused of murder every night, and being proved innocent about eleven o’clock.”

It seems that that last comment was spoken tongue-in-cheek, because Terriss was thinking of surprising the theatrical world, not once but twice: first with the announcement that he was to star in a new play by the foremost new-style dramatist, George Bernard Shaw, who as a drama critic had lambasted Irving at the Lyceum, Terriss at the Adelphi, for squandering their talents on tosh—and then with the play itself, which would mock those melodramas, staple of the Adelphi, in which the hero made a series of mighty bounds between predicaments, at last coming to rest, clutching the girl of his dreams, and with sufficient breath left to utter a speech on some worthy topic, just before the curtain fell.

Ellen Terry was one of the few people who knew of Terriss’s intention and of Shaw’s play, which was called The Devil’s Disciple. Not until more than thirty years later—in 1931, when the correspondence between Shaw and Ellen Terry, by then dead, was published—was it possible to piece together an account of the making of the play that, but for Richard Archer Prince’s intervention, William Terriss might have presented in London, not only starring as Dick Dudgeon, a copy of his stage-self, but also amending the script here and there, perhaps saliently in some of the scenes. Though futile, it is fascinating to wonder how different the play would be from its published form if the actor who bespoke it had lived to trim it, Shaw approving and assisting, toward a perfect fit.

The first Ellen Terry heard of the project was from a letter that Shaw (whom she had never met) wrote to her on 26 March 1896:

Terriss (this is a secret) wants me to collaborate with him in a play, the scenario of which includes every situation in the Lyceum repertory or the Adelphi record. The best act is The Bells.¹⁴ He is arrested either for forgery or murder at every curtain, and goes on as fresh as paint and free as air when it goes up again. I talked it over with him whilst he was dressing for a matinee at the Adelphi. I noticed that his chest was black and blue. He caught the expression of pity and horror in my eyes as I caught sight of the bruise, and said, with a melancholy smile, “Ah yes, Ellen Terry! You remember the third act of Olivia at the old Court? I was Thornhill. The marks have never come off. I shall carry them to my grave.”¹⁵ I did not tell him that I also had received heart wounds in those days which I shall carry to my grave. Neither, by the way, did I decide in favour of the collaboration. But I seriously think I shall write a play for him. A good melodrama is a more difficult thing to write than all this clever-clever comedy: one must go straight to the core of humanity to get it, and if it is only good enough, there you have Lear or Macbeth.

Shaw to Ellen Terry, 30 November 1896:

I finished my play today. What do you think of that? Does that look like wasting my time? Three acts, six scenes, a masterpiece, all completed in a few weeks, with a trip to Paris and those Ibsen articles thrown in—articles which were so over-written that I cut out and threw away columns.

What did I want so particularly to say? Oh yes, it was this. I have written to Terriss to tell him that I have kept my promise to him and have “a strong drama” with a part for him; but I want your opinion; for I have never tried melodrama before; and this thing, with its heroic sacrifice, its impossible court martial, its execution (imagine W.T. hanged before the eyes of the Adelphi!), its sobbings and speeches and declamations, may possibly be the most farcical absurdity that ever made an audience shriek with laughter. And yet I have honestly tried for dramatic effect. I think you could give me a really dry opinion on it; for it will not tickle you, like Arms and the Man and You Never Can Tell, not get at your sympathetic side like Candida (the heroine is not the hero of the piece this time); and you will have to drudge conscientiously through it like a stage carpenter and tell me whether it is a burlesque or not.

But now that I think of it, all this is premature. The play only exists as a tiny scrawl in my note books—things I carry about in my pockets. I shall have to revise it and work out all the stage business, besides reading up the history of the American War of Independence before I can send it to the typist to be readably copied. Meanwhile I can read it to Terriss, and to other people, but not to—well, no matter: I dont ask that the veil of the temple shall be rent: on the contrary, I am afraid, in my very soul, to come stumping in my thickbooted, coarse, discordant reality, into that realm where a magic Shaw, a phantasm, a thing who looks delicate and a boy (twelve stalls and a bittock off) poses fantastically before a really lovely Ellen. …

Now I have finished my play, nothing remains but to kiss my Ellen once and die.

The reading of the play to Terriss did not go as Shaw would have wished, he told an Observer journalist in 1930: Terriss heard little of it as he could not keep awake. However, Ellen Terry drudged remarkably conscientiously through the copy of the script that Shaw had sent to her. On 7 March 1897, she wrote,

Yes, the 2nd Act was so tremendous, it “took it out of me” as they say. So I tried to wait for Act III and lay flat on the dining room table for a while! Fidgeted, then got up and went at it again. “You’ll rewrite it?” Oh now do like a pet. No softening. No, no. Nothing of that kind.

“Tell you how? Why, you have been working on it for months! How could I tell you “how” all in a minute? … I’ll get someone to read it to me over and over again, and then I’ll tell you what I think. And if a lot of my “thinks” could be of a wee bit of use to you, should not I be a proud lady! It struck me at once that those scenes between Burgoyne and Swindon (although they are excellent scenes as scenes and for acting) are irritating as interruptions, like Lovers talking of Ships or Icebergs that pass in the night when they dont feel quite like that. Then too 3 scenes in one act (and that the last act) is clumsy (Oh, excuse me! Ignorant and rude!), unfortunate. I think I’ve turned the corner and am getting better. But this ghastly weather is frustrating. Cant write. Oh, that 2nd Act! There has never been anything in the least like it. You are a Dear. …

People are so odd that I’m certain no one could compete with T. as Dick. The neat head and figure, and the charm, the arrogant manner. “Taking.” Act II will find but the woman.

Another copy of the script had been sent, or would soon be sent, to the American actor-manager Richard Mansfield, who had produced and starred in two of Shaw’s plays, Arms and the Man and Candida, in that country. In Shaw’s letter of 26 March 1896 to Ellen Terry, letting her into the secret of what had passed between himself and Terriss in the star’s dressing room, he had referred to his short play The Man of Destiny (in which the character of the Strange Lady was modelled on Ellen Terry), saying that he was thinking of allowing it to “be done … in America by Mansfield, who has had the audacity to ask me for another play, after heaping villainy on me over my Candida.” And Ellen Terry had added a postscript to her letter of 3 September 1896: “One word about the little play (and breathe it to a living creature, and ugh! what is there I won’t do to you?). If you let the little man [Mansfield] play it, it will be of little count, for he’s rather clever, but not enough clever. In the first place he’d play it as it is, uncut, and Lord help you both then! For, although I love every word of it, it is too long in certain places to play-act as it now stands. All well, as it stands, to read, but not to play-act.” Mansfield presented The Devil’s Disciple (presumably, as it was), he himself as Dick Dudgeon, at Albany on 1 October 1897, and the following week at the Fifth Avenue Theatre, Manhattan; despite poor reviews, the production became Shaw’s first great box-office success, enabling him to give up regular journalism so as to concentrate on the writing of plays.

But as for a London production, Shaw told Ellen Terry on 24 December 1897:

My calculations are quite put out by the unforeseen extinction of Terriss. I was scheming to get the D.’s D. produced with him in the part and Jessie Millward as Judith. The alternative was a [Herbert] Waring and [Arthur] Bourchier combination—Bourchier to play Burgoyne. And now Terriss is only a name and a batch of lies in the newspapers, and Waring goes to the Adelphi in his place. However, Waring may need stronger plays than Terriss, who was a play in himself; so perhaps Jessie may play Judith yet.

In her reply, written two days later, Ellen Terry remarked that “the D.D. would be best now I think with [Charles] Wyndham who would I should say revel in the part,” and went on: “Poor Willie Terriss, I’ll miss him. That calling him ‘Breezy Bill’ always annoyed me. So vulgar and so very stupid to call him that. Poor Jessie M.!”

Shaw, unable to believe his eyes when he saw the suggestion that Wyndham should play Dick Dudgeon, wrote back at once: “It would be impossible: he’s too old; and he has not the peculiar fascination.” After allowing that the sixty-year-old Wyndham “would be admirable as the husband: it would suit him to a hair’s breadth,” and musing on other casting possibilities, Shaw concluded, “I should like to get the piece on at the Adelphi with Waring in order to secure Jessie’s part for her.”

What actually happened was not at all to Shaw’s liking. The Devil’s Disciple was not presented in England until 26 September 1899—and then tattily, without benefit of stars, at the Princess of Wales’s Theatre in that drab part of London called Kennington, where it lasted only a fortnight. Eight more years elapsed before it was seen in the West End, as a component of Harley Granville-Barker’s repertory season, retrospectively reckoned epoch-making for presentational style, at the Savoy, across the Strand from the Adelphi; Matheson Lang played the part of Dick Dudgeon—of William Terriss.

Richard Archer Prince—he, too, had written a play: Countess Otto, it was called. Penned in pale-violet ink in penny exercise-books, those sewn together at their top left-hand corners, the script had grown dog-eared from many submissions by the autumn of 1896, when Prince, saving on postage so as to afford his fare home to Dundee, delivered it, in a broken envelope marked “For the Kind Attention of Mr Fred Terry,” at the stage door of the Royalty Theatre in Dean Street, off Shaftesbury Avenue. Weeks passed; and then Prince, having received only an acknowledgment from Fred Terry, began to inundate the actor with correspondence, on some days—damn the expense to his mother—posting three or four letters or cards. Terry returned the script; but, trying to soften the accompanying note of rejection, said that the play had no part suitable for himself or for his wife Julia Neilson—a comment that Prince twisted into meaning that Terry had been henpecked into turning down Countess Otto. The next thing was that Julia Neilson—playing Princess Flavia in The Prisoner of Zenda at the St. James’s—started receiving missives from Dundee. However, by Christmas, Prince had run out of steam—or his mother of stamps—and Fred and Julia Terry were forgetting their pesterer.

But months later, and then for weeks to come, Fred Terry was made aware that Prince was back in town. Terry, you see, often chaired meetings of the emergency committee of the Actors’ Benevolent Fund. He was the “one of the Terrys” mentioned to Prince, the denied applicant, on Wednesday, 15 December 1897.

The following night, he, like his elder sister Ellen, heard from reporters what had happened by the Adelphi and was asked for an “expression of sympathy.” Off the cuff, he supplied, “Will Terriss has left us, mourned by many, regretted by all.” He was now working with his wife at the St. James’s. After the performance, while driving to their home on Primrose Hill, they spoke more of Prince than of Terriss; and next morning they rummaged through box files of old letters in search of evidences of the long-running Countess Otto correspondence. All that remained were a couple of cards, both postmarked “9:30 P.M., 23 Nov 96,” and an undated letter. One of the cards read:

68 Hill Street, Dundee
Sir—Please return play “Countess Otto” at once. If you are hard up for money will send it. Terriss, the Pope and Scotland Yard, I will answer in a week.—RICHARD A. PRINCE

The message on the other card, presumably written following receipt of the script, contained another mysterious allusion:

68 Hill Street, Dundee
Sir—Favour to hand this morning at ten o’clock. The old story about King Charles and the two hundred thousand pounds. They sold him for a King. I’m only a Prince. But a woman, mon Dieu, a woman.—RICHARD A. PRINCE

The letter read:

51 William Street, Vic Road, Dundee
Late Union Jack Tours
To Mrs. Fred Terry

Madam—I thank you as a “Highlander and a gentleman,” and in the name of the Almighty God, our Queen, and my rights for play “Countess of Otto.” I am, Madam, yours faithfully, RICHARD A. PRINCE

On the reverse of the sheet was a wonderfully irrelevant postscript, something to do with the troubles besetting the “Godly” King of Greece.

Though it must have struck Fred Terry that the dropping of Terriss’s name, among those of more illustrious others, would intrigue the police, he chose to show the communications to a journalist on the Daily Telegraph, thus enabling that paper—as carefree with comment on cases that were sub judice as were its rivals—to speak most authoritatively about Prince, “a monomaniac who has gradually developed the homicidal tendency.”

Following Fred Terry’s lead, less-renowned members of his profession who had had dealings with Prince decided to help the press, rather than the police, with their inquiries. For instance, Ralph Croyden, manager of Miss Lena Develrey’s London Theatrical Company—“presently delighting audiences at the Princess Theatre, Leith”—spoke “exclusively” to several special correspondents about his encounters with Prince, the first on the evening of Saturday, 23 October 1897, at the Amphitheatre, Newcastle-upon-Tyne. (One cannot be sure, but it seems that Prince, having heard or read of a vacancy in Miss Develrey’s company, was so desperate for work that he had travelled the three hundred miles or so to Newcastle on the off chance of getting the job.) Mr. Croyden recalled that

Prince detailed his experiences as an actor, and explained that he had played important parts at the Adelphi, London, most especially in The Union Jack. He had, he said, been wronged—deadly wronged—by one of the leading lights of the stage, and there was only one man in the world whom he hated, and he was Mr Terriss. In reply to a question why he left the Adelphi, Prince said that it was because Mr Terriss was a man whom he could not stand. Mr Terriss had got on purely through influence, while he, a poor dog, had to work his way up. Although suspicious of Prince on account of certain peculiarities which he presented, I engaged him.

It had been arranged that the company were to appear at the theatre in Hetton-le-Hole, twelve or fourteen miles out of Newcastle, on Monday evening, the pieces to be played being Nurse Charity and Parson Thorne, and the parts—they were minor parts—assigned to Prince being Sir Leycester Lightfoot in the former and Sir Geoffrey Dashwood in the latter. Prince received copies of his parts for the purpose of studying them, and before he left I invited him to tea on the Sunday afternoon. My wife belongs to Scotland, and when Prince arrived I told her that a Scotsman had come to see her. She expressed delight, whereupon Prince, assuming a melodramatic attitude and waving his right arm, exclaimed, to the surprise of everyone present, “My name’s MacGregor, and I’ll smoke a clay-pipe if I like.” He had, he subsequently explained, been with another theatrical company, and had been discharged because he smoked a clay-pipe instead of a cigar. He scarcely ever ceased speaking of and vowing vengeance on Mr Terriss, and the party came to the conclusion that he was mentally deranged.

We had reserved five compartments of the train that was to take us from Newcastle to Hetton. Prince duly turned up and joined the party at the station, but he declined to travel with any of us and occupied a compartment to himself. On reaching our destination, we at once proceeded to the theatre for a rehearsal. Then it appeared that Prince was utterly incompetent to speak anything. He, in turn, tugged at the hair of his head, rolled his eyes in a wild fashion, and pressed his temples.

In the circumstances, I found myself in a rather awkward predicament. At length, I told Prince that he had better go away. On this, Prince raved over his experiences at the Adelphi, declared what a fine actor he was, and pleaded that the performance might be postponed until the following evening. This, of course, was out of the question, and eventually I and some associates got rid for the time being of our disagreeable companion.

Next morning, Prince was early astir. He called at the house where my wife and I were staying no less than five times before I found it convenient to see him. When admitted into the room, he demanded some money. The fact of the matter was, he said, that his head went wrong at times, and he could not think what he was doing, thinking of his vengeance. Naturally enough, I declined to give him any money. Thereupon he became more excited than before, and used threatening language. He remarked that he was “Not strong enough to fight with you now, but tomorrow I will come and have my vengeance.” I ordered him out of the house as a madman, and he retaliated by raising his walking-stick, and saying:

“Mad, mad, mad! You will hear of my madness. The world will ring with it.”

By the time twilight fell on Monday, 20 December, the eve of the funeral, the conservatory of The Cottage was unseasonably floral, crammed with tributes in many forms and from all sorts of people.¹⁶ Nosegays from Terriss’s humble friends, admirers, and servants drooped in the crevices between ingenious creations ordered by those who could afford to express themselves extravagantly: ladders, globes, masks of Tragedy, lyres, haloes (one from the Prince of Wales), hearts, prosceniums, and books (or were they playscripts?), both open and closed. Not all of the tributes were waiting there; some had gone straight to Brompton Cemetery—among those, Jessie Millward’s, which was a cushion of white chrysanthemums with the words “To My Dear Comrade” spelt out in purple anemones.

Ellen Terry kept company with Jessie that night. She afterward wrote to Shaw: “Poor little Jessie … seemed so wee and crumpled up. I hope she will get good work. She will need help now.”¹⁷

The cortege set off on its five-mile journey, timed by Terriss’s stage manager to take an hour, at noon. Right at the start, something happened that one of the dozens of reporters scribbled down as “an incident unrehearsed by Man that yet seemed too perfectly theatrical to be ascribed to coincidence.” As the head of the cortege was passing beneath the railway bridge by Turnham Green Station, a train was passing, just as slowly, overhead. “It was filled with soldiers, and the redcoats, bent upon adding their tribute to the rest, gave three lusty cheers for the actor upon whose words and deeds they had so often hung.”

The Daily Mail:

Few could have anticipated the remarkable demonstration of interest and respect which imparted to the funeral the dignity of a public ceremonial. Throughout the route to the cemetery the streets were lined with people who silently watched the procession pass, while in the cemetery it is computed that the sorrowing assembly numbered many thousands.

Long before the cemetery was reached, dense crowds lined and blocked the streets. And the multitude which thronged the avenues and was dispersed over the vast burial ground was

AN ORDERLY MASS,

patient and silent in the eager east wind; not deeply moved, perhaps. Indeed, it would be misleading to assert that any such wave of emotion was perceptible as often sways a multitude when one of its idols goes untimely to his death.

But its deep respect was shown in many striking ways. There was a kindliness abroad. Not even the biting cold and the long hours of weary waiting could affect that. The people were mostly drawn from the lowlier ranks to whom the dead actor’s art specially appealed. They had come to be present at the final scene, to see his last part played in deathly silence.

And when the open hearse drawn by four horses had passed, and the long string of mourning coaches and carriages had filed slowly by, many thousands quietly re-covered their bared heads and sadly wended their way home.

Around the oak coffin, as it stood within the chapel, upon a catafalque draped with purple velvet, as around the open grave, well-known faces were to be seen on every side. Actors, managers, singers, playwrights—the London stage had sent all the most famous of its favourites to discharge the last debt of comradeship to their dear friend. They went

FOR THE MOST PART UNRECOGNIZED

by the huge concourse which gazed across the large roped-in enclosure around the grave, but many eyes were centred on the tall, stately figure of Sir Henry Irving escorting Miss Millward, both stricken with grief.

Some people had dreaded, and others had looked forward to, a confrontation between Terriss’s widow and his “dear comrade”; but this did not take place, because Amy was not among the visible mourners. Though, of course, her absence gave rise to unkind rumours, it is probable that she was either too ill to attend or ordered not to by a doctor: eight months later, she died from cancer. One gathers that Shaw, himself an absentee, read an account of the funeral but was too taken by the vignette of Irving and Jessie to observe the omission of Amy’s name from the columns-long list of mourners. He wrote to Ellen Terry:

H.I. scored nobly by standing by Jessie at the funeral: had it been his funeral, Lady Irving would have been in the position of Mrs Terriss; and you would have been—probably taking a nice drive through Richmond Park with me, or perhaps with that villain you persuaded me you were going to marry the other day. Jessie must have been consoled a little; for she adores H.I. and always reserved his claims, as an intellectual prince, before Terriss’s, greatly to William’s indignation; for he knew that Henry was intellectually an imposter, nothing like so hardheaded as himself.

One of the lyre wreaths was from Ellaline Terriss; the attached card read, “To darling old father, from his devoted, heart-broken daughter, Ellie.” Directly after the murder, Seymour Hicks had considered keeping it secret from her for the time being, fearing that the shock might cause a relapse; still undecided when he next went to the hospital, he was left with no alternative but to tell her by the sight of a pack of reporters roaming near her ward.

The last card to her father was written from the hospital, but shortly afterward she was deemed well enough to leave. By the following August, when her mother died, she was touring as the Girl in a Gaiety musical. Her share of the estate amounted to a substantial sum (William Terriss’s will was proved at £18,809, the equivalent, roughly speaking, of over half a million present-day pounds), and this, added to over the next few years from her increasingly high earnings as a stage performer and from those of her husband as both playwright and actor, enabled Hicks to team up with Charles Frohman to build two theatres in the West End: first, the Aldwych, near the Gaiety and intended to be its competitor as a musical-comedy house, which opened in December 1905 with a revival of Bluebell in Fairyland, Hicks’s “musical dream-play,” starring himself and Ellaline (and with a girl called Gladys Cooper, just seventeen, playing a small role), and second, the Hicks, in Shaftesbury Avenue, which opened almost exactly a year later, the first production being The Beauty of Bath, partly written by Hicks and with his wife starring, which was transferred from the Aldwych; in 1909, the Hicks was rechristened the Globe, and then, very recently, the Gielgud.

The husband-and-wife stage partnership lasted for half a century, until 1949, when Hicks died; he had been knighted fourteen years before, and then it had been said that the honour was actually a joint tribute, earned equally by “Lady Ellie.” As if making up for the curtailment of her parents’ lives, she lived to be a hundred, qualifying for a congratulatory telegram from the Queen. Upon her death in June 1971, obituarists mentioned that she was the daughter of an actor known as William Terriss, and felt the need to explain that he too had been a star.

The last act of what most of the papers entitled “The Adelphi Tragedy” was played out at the Theatre Royal, Old Bailey—correctly called the Central Criminal Court—on Thursday, 13 January 1898. No; that date, four weeks from that of the commission of the crime, is not a misprint. Nor is there error in the indication that the proceedings were completed within a day. If you are surprised or, being liberal, shocked by such speeds, then you have been taken in by the legal profession, which has only since the 1950s made an ersatz virtue of both dilatoriness in the preparation of criminal cases for trial and elongation of the proceedings, thereby profiting many of its members at the expense of, inter alia, Justice.

Following the tryout at Bow Street, Richard Archer Prince had been lodged, with other prisoners on custodial remand, in the hospital wing of Holloway Gaol. There, he had eaten, if not well, with unaccustomed frequency and regularity, and so had put on weight. He had received a variation on fan mail: correspondence from clergymen, autograph collectors, admiring maniacs, and people who were just plain puzzled by what he had done. (One of the last-mentioned category was Mr. George Astley, proprietor of the toff’s tobacco shop in Burlington Arcade, to whom Prince responded, “Had Mr Terriss only spoken to me, he should have been alive now, and the poor Prince would have been in Scotland. He asked for it, and he got it. That’s why I killed the cur who could only fight a gay woman and a starving man.¹⁸ Sent on tour to ruin my character. … I must see a doctor. I should like one of the best in London. If you can do this for me God will reward you. My soul is all right. … Bring or send a white shirt and collars, 15½ or 16, a tie, and handkerchief, and one stud. I would ask my sister Maggie again. She sent the last, but I don’t think she is in London. She sent me a lot of under-things last week and ten shillings.”) As well as giving consideration to his costume in the dock, he had decided, early on, to assist his characterization with a beard of the Mephistophelean kind. If it had occurred to him that he could, on account of local prejudice, request a change of venue for the trial, from the West End to some provincial place, he had, one may safely assume, given no second thought to an option that, if taken, might result in his appearing in a forensic equivalent of the Bijou Pavilion, Hetton-le-Hole.

On the morning of the trial, London was smothered by a pea-souper. The yellow-grey fog cloaked the tall windows lining the wall to the left of the bench in the principal court of the Old Bailey; intruding within, it dwindled to a mist that, from the gallery, crowded with people who had queued since the early hours, detrimentally to their lungs, and gave the impression of a stage scene viewed through gauze.

Adding minutely to the feeling of theatricality, the judge, Mr. Justice Channell, sported a sparkling monocle and treated as a versatile prop—baton, italiciser, toothbrush, ear probe, itch resister—the quill pen that he seemed rarely to use for its intended purpose. There was nothing stagey about the leading prosecutor, Charles Gill, senior counsel to the Treasury, who spoke with an Irish brogue but often stumblingly, never with eloquence or wit; epitomic of civil servants, he appeared to wear wig and gown unwillingly, as if he felt that they constituted a practical joke that tradition should have known better than to play in a serious place like a court of law.¹⁹ Gill was assisted by Horace Avory: twig-thin, his gown drooping from his shoulders as if from a wire hanger, his features pursed to assemble an expression that in later years, when he was a judge, would help toward earning him the nickname of “the acid-drop.” Avory’s father had been clerk of the court at the Old Bailey, and his elder brother was the clerk of arraigns for the trial of Prince.

A Mr. Sands and a Mr. Kyd had been assigned to defend Prince. Neither of these barristers was (or ever would be) eminent. There was equality of numbers between the sides, prosecution and defence, but the imbalance of skills, of experience, was extreme. If any of the stage people in the gallery whispered among themselves about the opposing castings, perhaps there was recollection of the brief tale of two actors, one famed for a tour de force, the other unknown and forced to tour.

Waiting for his call, Prince fretted that, as he had been so often in the past, he was going to be let down by inadequate supporting players. Having made his escorted entrance through the trap in the floor of the dock, he gazed around the court, satisfying himself that he had drawn the town, and paid attention as Horace Avory’s brother Kemp read the indictment and gave him his first cue, the question, “Are you guilty or not guilty?”

“I am guilty—with provocation,” he replied. Then, turning his gaze toward the judge, he continued: “I have to ask a favour. I believe the law of England allows an accused person the right to a Queen’s Counsel. I have counsel, but I should like a Queen’s Counsel to watch the case on my behalf.”

MR. SANDS (rising from his seat below the dock): I am instructed, with my friend Mr. Kyd, to defend the prisoner.

PRINCE (affecting not to have noticed the interruption): I understand that by the law of England I can have a Queen’s Counsel. (He lowers his head, his voice.) I have no friends. My mother cannot help me with a penny for the defence. If you will not allow me to have it, I insist on saying that it must be paid by the people who drove me to do this crime.

MR. JUSTICE CHANNELL (quietly but firmly; dotting the air with his pen at full stops): You are not entitled by law to the services of a QC. On the contrary, if you desire the services of a QC, he would have to take out a licence to appear for you. You are entitled to have the benefit of counsel if you desire it. You are, of course, also entitled to defend yourself.

PRINCE: Thank you, my Lord.

MR. JUSTICE CHANNELL (indicating by his tone that he doubts the prisoner’s ability to make wise decisions): Assuming you are in a condition to indicate what you will do. (He points his quill towards MR. SANDS.) There is a gentleman here who is prepared to conduct your case. I should advise you to accept his services.

PRINCE (having had his attention distracted by the thought that it is some time since he groomed his rudimentary beard): So long as I am allowed to defend myself, that is all I wish.

MR. JUSTICE CHANNELL (trying to be patient): You cannot be allowed to defend yourself in a general way as well as being defended by counsel. You may be allowed to make a statement to the jury in addition to being defended by counsel. I shall allow that, but nothing more. You may suggest anything to counsel.

PRINCE: That is all I wish.

MR. JUSTICE CHANNELL (just to make sure): Then you will be defended by counsel?

PRINCE (certainly): Certainly.

MR. JUSTICE CHANNELL taps the writing end of his quill on the bench to attract the notice of THE CLERK OF ARRAIGNS and mutters at him to repeat the question regarding PRINCE’s plea. This THE CLERK OF ARRAIGNS does.

PRINCE: I plead guilty—with the greatest provocation.

MR. JUSTICE CHANNELL (less patiently): You have told me you will be defended by counsel.

PRINCE: Yes.

MR. JUSTICE CHANNELL: Then you had better take their advice before you plead.

MR. SANDS and MR. KYD rise and slant towards PRINCE; he leans over the wooden shelf of the dock toward them. There is a sotto-voce conversation, PRINCE waving his Invernessed arms the while. Ultimately, MR. SANDS and MR. KYD subside, while PRINCE returns to an upright stance and addresses MR. JUSTICE CHANNELL.

PRINCE: I have been advised to plead “not guilty”—so I plead “not guilty.”

The curtain-raiser over, Charles Gill took little more time to outline the case for the Crown. The first prosecution witness was Tom Terriss. Examined by Horace Avory, he said that he had last seen his father alive on 15 December. The following night, shortly before eleven o’clock, he had seen him lying dead at the Adelphi. He did not know the prisoner.

PRINCE: I saw you once during The Harbour Lights, in the dressing room. Perhaps you will remember that.

Ralph Croyden, manager of Miss Lena Develrey’s London Theatrical Company, was called next. The reporter for the Daily Telegraph noted that when he came into the court,

the unfortunate man in the dock squared his shoulders and assumed a histrionic smile, which was clearly intended to convey how little he thought of his quondam employer. This facial byplay was continued through the witness’s evidence. His statement that the accused described himself when he applied for employment as having played big parts at the Adelphi was the occasion for a confident glance at the jury. The sequel that Mr. Croyden found that he could not play any part was met with a reproachful smile directed at the speaker. All this time the prisoner was busy with memoranda for his counsel, and he changed his position as the whim took him, now standing, now sitting. He had not tired yet of his miserable attempts to make an impression. The recall of his statement that “the world would ring with his madness” was the signal for another quiet display of self-satisfaction, strangely incongruous with the awful position in which the verification of that prophesy had placed him.

Among the following witnesses were Charles Coltson (who, incidentally, had arranged for the briefing of a barrister to watch the proceedings on behalf of the Actors’ Benevolent Fund); Charlotte Darby, Prince’s landlady at Eaton Court; John Graves; and Constable Bragg.

At noon—by then, the fog had cleared from the streets, the mist from the court—Charles Gill announced that the case for the Crown was closed. After an adjournment, Mr. Sands asked the jury “to disabuse their minds of all that had been said outside, and to pretend ignorance of the sympathy that was felt at the loss of one whose name had become almost a household word”; having explained how, as it seemed to him, madness was defined by the law, he said that he was confident that the forthcoming evidence would convince the jury that Prince was insane.

The Telegraph’s man again:

For an hour and more the cultivated and polished accents of counsel and the rugged Doric of Dundonian witnesses were interwoven in comical medley. It was far from plain sailing for either side, differences of dialect leading to constant misunderstanding.

As Mrs. Archer, the prisoner’s mother, passed slowly toward the witness box and climbed laboriously up its steps—she was old and frail—the fixed smile faded for a time from her son’s face, his eyes shone brighter, and one was fain to hope that natural affection was not entirely gone from that strange mind.

The idea received a shock a few moments later. The poor old lady, who, it may be mentioned, suffered from extreme deafness, spoke in a very low voice, and on counsel complaining that they could not catch her words, her son shouted from the dock, “Speak louder, Mother, they can’t hear you.”

She was very Scotch, and very canny, referring counsel on one or two points to other witnesses with the remark, “She’ll tell you that,” but withal was ready to sacrifice her mother tongue to the vocabulary of the “southern English.” Prince was “never right” from his birth, she said, and swiftly terminated a pause of puzzlement with the addendum, “He was born mad.” When he was a baby, she had occasion to leave him in the harvest field. When she came to him she found him blue in the face. He had received a sunstroke. Her son was “dour to learn”; then she tried again with “bad in the uptake,” and finally achieved success with “slow at learning.” Her next problem in Scotch was more difficult. Speaking of the accused’s bursts of rage, she said, “They pit him rang in his mind, his passions,” Two jurymen by her side could not understand her, though she repeated the phrase more than once, and then the prisoner interposed, “She said they put me wrong in the mind, my passions. That is the “English of it.”

Speaking of times when he was unemployed and living with her, she said that he was sometimes not very well pleased; he used to think she doctored his food. He had told her a Mr. Arthur had kept him from getting work in the Dundee Theatre, and in saying so he used the word “blackmailing.” This was eight years ago. He had told her he himself was the Lord Jesus Christ and that she was the Virgin Mary, and had charged her with adulterating his tea. When he was affected with what she described as “his turns,” he would sing songs and hymns, and his eyes would stare out of his head. He had left Dundee for the last time five months ago. His father was formerly married, and a son by that marriage was mad from his birth but never locked up: he was silly.

Other Dundonians spoke of Prince’s oddities of behaviour. And so did Arthur Ellison, the manager of a theatre at Southport, in Lancashire, who recalled, “While in my employ, and afterwards, I received postcards from him which spoke of blackmailing and horse-whipping. He charged me with thwarting him in getting an engagement, and called me a hell-hound.”

PRINCE: Shut up! Shut up!!

WITNESS: If I am not mistaken, I discharged him.

PRINCE: If I am not mistaken, you are wrong.

MR. GILL: He had a very exalted opinion of his powers?

WITNESS: Actors in his position usually have.

MR. GILL: Can you remember a particular part he played?

WITNESS: The sergeant who led on the soldiers.

PRINCE: (provoked by sniggers from the gallery): It was a very good part.

The final witnesses were doctors: the medical officer at Holloway Gaol, who said that he had paid close attention to Prince during his stay, and two “experts in lunacy,” both of whom admitted to Charles Gill that their evidence was based chiefly on their observations of the prisoner’s demeanour in the dock. The three were unanimous in the opinion that Prince had been mad when he murdered, and was still. When one of the specialists remarked that “a person of sound mind would display, or at least feign, remorse at having committed such a dreadful deed,” Prince cried out, “Why should I? Terriss blackmailed me for ten years.”

After the closing speeches, the first for the defence, neither lasting more than a quarter of an hour, Mr. Justice Channell summed up, and at 6:30 the jury retired to consider their verdict.

Shortly before the trial, Henry Irving had told a friend, “They will find some excuse to get Prince off—mad or something” and had added what he considered an explanation: “Terriss was an actor, so his murderer will not be executed.”

Whatever Irving meant by that last comment, his prophesies were made true at seven o’clock, when the foreman of the jury announced that “although the prisoner knew what he was doing and whom he was doing it to, upon the medical evidence he was not responsible for his actions.”

Prince’s look of puzzlement was replaced by a broad smile as the judge explained the import of the verdict: “That the prisoner shall be confined in a criminal lunatic asylum until Her Majesty’s pleasure be known.”

“Shall I be allowed to make any thanks to the Court for that?” Prince asked—and, without waiting for a reply, went on: “I should like to thank the gentlemen who have assisted me in the case. Of course, I did not bring my defence properly forward after the medical evidence, because I did not think it necessary. I will only say that I have had a very fair trial.”

“I cannot allow any statement,” Mr. Justice Channell snapped. “You had better not make any.”

“Well, the only thing I can say, my Lord, is that I thank you very much.”

“That is all.” Without further ado, Mr. Justice Channell turned his pen into a magic wand, and Richard Archer Prince was made to disappear.

He spent the next thirty-nine years, the rest of his life, in the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. There, he was accorded celebrity status. Not because of the act that had resulted in his confinement. And not, as you might have thought, because he filched all the star parts in productions by the Broadmoor dramatic society. Giving up acting in favour of musicianship, he appointed himself conductor of the inmates’ orchestra. He had a fine time, waving his baton with great panache, gesticulating, shouting things like apassionato and agitato, and every so often looking over his shoulder to see how the audience was responding to his performance. Marringly for many, the concerts lacked concertedness. Each of the instrumentalists played a different tune, and none took the slightest notice of the man who had once dreamed of being the Prince of Players.

1. By the actor William Gillette. The play was first presented in London by an American cast headed by Gillette, and including Ethel Barrymore in a small role, on 15 May 1897; the production ran for three months. The revival starring William Terriss opened at the Adelphi on 24 November. Gillette is best remembered as the author (with help by W. G. Postance) of the play Sherlock Holmes, mainly derived from Conan Doyle’s tales “A Scandal in Bohemia” and “The Final Problem.” He himself played the Master Detective in the original production, which opened at the Garrick Theatre, New York, on 6 November 1899, and in the first London production, at the Lyceum from 9 September 1901. While the play was still at the Lyceum, four companies were formed to take it around the provinces; the twelve-year-old Charles Chaplin played the part of Billy on one of the tours. Gillette continued to play Holmes—on stage, in a silent film, and on radio—until 1935, two years before his death. Conan Doyle commented in his autobiography: “I was charmed both with the play, the acting and the pecuniary result.” Sherlock Holmes was successfully revived by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych Theatre, London, on New Year’s Day, 1974, with John Wood as Holmes and Philip Locke as Professor Moriarty.

2. If you persevere, you will come across this place later in this collection, as the setting for a dreadful coincidence.

3. Renamed the Novello in December 2005. The composer and matinee idol Ivor Novello occupied the apartment above the theatre for many years, until his death in 1951.

4. The Restoration-style comedy by Hannah Cowley, first produced in 1780 at Covent Garden.

5. Adapted by James Burgoyne from a French romance; first produced in 1786 at Drury Lane.

6. Not to be confused with his same-named and even more successful son.

7. Terriss was less modest about another brave deed, going in person to the Royal Humane Society’s office, which was then in Trafalgar Square, to report it. In the early evening of 6 August 1885, he and a companion were sailing off South Foreland, near the town of Deal, in Kent, when one of three boys who were swimming nearby developed a cramp. Terriss lowered his lugsail, jumped overboard fully clothed, and kept the boy afloat until the other yachtsman had thrown a line and hauled him to safety. The Royal Humane Society decided that Terriss’s act merited the award of a Bronze Medal. Having recovered his modesty, he was absent from the Lyceum on 29 September, when a representative of the Society called to present him with the medal, and so it was accepted on his behalf by Henry Irving.

8. Lord Tennyson’s play, arranged for the stage by Irving—who died after playing the title role at Bradford, Yorkshire, on 13 October 1905. (Ten years before, he had become the first actor-knight.)

9. Author of many stage offerings, the most lastingly influential being a burlesque, performed in the 1860s, from which the pantomime Aladdin is derived.

10. Still the second-oldest eating house in London; the oldest is the Cheshire Cheese, just to the east, off Fleet Street. Dr. Thomas Neill Cream—graduate of M’Gill College, Montreal, 1876; poisoner of four Waterloo-based prostitutes, 1891–92; one of the many, too many, people blamed by Ripperologists for the Whitechapel Murders of 1888 (when, but never mind, he was in a Chicago prison, serving a life sentence for murder)—was a regular customer at Rule’s until 3 June 1892, when he was arrested, eventually to be charged with the murder of the aforementioned prostitutes. And, later, Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen patronized Rule’s and became friendly with Harry Davis, who was then the manager.

11. Now best remembered as the Lady Who Vanished in the film that Alfred Hitchcock made in 1938 of Ethel Una White’s novel The Wheel Spins. In 1918, she became the first actress to be a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire—though for services in connection with the Great War rather than for her stage work; the American-born Genevieve Ward was the first actress to be honoured as such, by being made a dame in 1921; four years later, Ellen Terry, who most people considered should have been the first actress-Dame (the general suspicion was that she was passed over on account of her having been thrice married), became the second.

12. The English libretto of this comic opera, with music by Offenbach, was written by Charles Brookfield, who, in 1895, when he was playing the small part of Phipps, the butler, in the first production of An Ideal Husband, moonlighted industriously as a seeker of evidence in support of the Marquess of Queensberry’s assertion that the play’s author, Oscar Wilde, was “Posing as Somdomite [sic].”

13. Terriss’s words indicate that he was unaware that a probable reason why Miss St. John was “feeling a bit depressed” was that an actor named Francis Carroll, who was as unsuccessful as Prince, was threatening to murder her. In the following February, Carroll—of Buckingham Road, Brighton—was convicted of having sent threatening letters to her and to his father, a retired army officer. In default of finding sureties in the sum of £100 for his good behaviour for one year, he was given a prison sentence of six months. His first action when he was returned to his cell was to pick up a plate of food intended as his dinner and hurl it at the jailer. However, subsequent disciplining seems to have mellowed him: I can find no indication that, following his release, he used the Royal Mail objectionably.

14. Irving’s first season at the Lyceum, in 1871, was unsuccessful until his appearance as Mathias, the unapprehended murderer who suffers from ringing in the ears, in The Bells, adapted by Leopold Lewis, a solicitor, from Le Juif Polonais by M. M. Erckmann-Chatrian. When Lewis died, in February 1890, the editor of The Stage wrote, “Poor fellow, at one time it was said of him that The Bells had made him, as he was wont to boast that the same play had made Irving. As a matter of fact, I think The Bells ruined him. His success was too much for him, and ever since its production he has been steadily going down the hill. One of his most faithful friends was Mr. Irving, and it is from the Lyceum manager that Mr. Lewis received many little acts of thoughtful kindness of which the world will. I suppose, forever remain in ignorance.”

15. If Shaw’s anecdote is true, then Terriss had already carried the marks for nearly eighteen years, an extraordinary time for bruises to remain visible. Admittedly, accounts of the Court production of Olivia indicate that Ellen Terry did not pull her punches. One cannot say whether Shaw was more or less impressed by the breast-beating “business,” witnessed by him from the stalls in 1878, than by the lingering effects of it on Terriss’s person; but, either way. he borrowed the business for a stage direction in You Never Can Tell, which he appears to have completed in June 1896.

16. Financial contributions toward a Terriss Memorial poured in to the organizer’s office at the Daily Telegraph: £1,126 in all (roughly the equivalent of 60,000 present-day pounds, close to $100,000).

Ellaline Terriss wrote in Just a Little Bit of String (London 1955), “There was no thought of a statue or something which would do little or no good. Instead of that, to the memory of the man who had loved the sea, and sailed it, who had saved life from its clutch, who had been a hero of Harbour Lights, they erected a lifeboat house at Eastbourne, bearing his name. And from that house his lifeboat saved many lives. My father would have been overjoyed at that.”

From the Eastbourne Local History Society Newsletter, No. 26 (ca. 1975): “The foundation stone of the William Terriss Lifeboat House was laid by the Duchess of Devonshire … on 16 July 1898. … The new lifeboat house was to be built at the foot of the eastern slopes of the Wish Tower Hill, and a marquee was erected over the spot where the foundation stone was to be laid. Gaily decked with bunting, the lifeboat, with the crew aboard, was drawn by horses from the old boathouse at the rear of the Wish Tower grounds. The band of the Sussex Artillery Militia played and the Eastbourne Cadet Corps formed a guard of honour. After the Duchess arrived in her carriage, the ceremonies began. Many letters and telegrams were read from friends and associates of William Terriss. … After a brief religious service, the Duchess tapped the stone with a mallet and declared the stone well and truly laid. …

“Until 1924 the William Terriss Memorial Lifeboat House housed an active boat. For thirteen years after that, it only held a boat for demonstration purposes. On 22 March 1937 it was opened as a lifeboat museum, the first of its kind in the country. It was opened by Sir Godfrey Baring, chairman of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. Ellaline Terriss attended and made a short speech.” The museum still exists.

17. Reporting her death, at the age of 71, in July 1932, the Times noted that “after the murder, it needed a great force to compel or cajole Miss Millward to enter a theatre again. That force was at hand in [the American impresario] Charles Frohman. In 1898 he persuaded her to go to the United States of America, and there she stayed until 1913, with only one short break in 1906. After her return, she played a little in suburban theatres and on tour.”

18. A reference that may have seeded a story that, with artistic deletions and additions, was told as if it were true for many years. In 1930, Harry Davis, the recently retired manager of Rule’s, gave his version of the story to the Daily Herald: “At the Adelphi was a very charming and pretty girl, the daughter of an assistant stage carpenter named Prince. She used to tidy up the dressing-rooms every morning. One day when Terriss came in earlier than usual to collect his letters he found her in his room. Her freshness, charm and vivacity made an immediate appeal to the somewhat jaded senses of the actor. He began to make love to her—violent, passionate love that left the girl dazed and bewildered. His grace and gestures, his art, his voice, the commanding presence that was his, carried her off her feet. A few months later the girl had to leave the theatre. In her despair, she told her parents that the actor was to blame. … That night Prince, the girl’s father, tackled Terriss in the theatre. Burning rage against the betrayer of his daughter filled his heart and he reviled Terriss as no one had ever dared to revile the actor before. There was a violent quarrel. Terriss, in a fury, his vanity wounded and his conceit shaken, went to W. Brumsden, who was in charge of the stage hands, and demanded the dismissal of Prince that very minute. Prince was popular at the theatre. And he had justice on his side. But such was the power of Terriss, such was his voice in the affairs of the Adelphi, that Prince had to go. The Princes had suffered. The daughter had lost her good name; and the father had lost his job.” As the continuation of the story is tamely proximate to the real denouement, it can be left to moulder.

19. Four weeks later, Gill was the prosecutor of Francis Carroll: see note 13, on page 268.