Edgar Wallace

2

THE STORY OF POLLY RICHARDS

Holbrook had no illusions about the theatrical profession; he knew something of their lives, knew something of their terrific struggle for existence which went on all the time, except for a few favourites of the public .

Edgar Wallace, The Hand of Power, 1927

Polly Richards, Edgar Wallace's mother, was literally a woman of many parts. She was born Mary Jane Blair, in White Street, in the St Thomas sub-district of Liverpool in March 1843. Her father was James Blair, whose occupation was recorded as 'mariner' on her birth certificate, and her mother, Charlotte Blair, nee Duffye.

Polly worked as a small-part actress and dancer, and in 1867 married a merchant service skipper named Captain Richards. But the marriage was ill-fated, and in January 1868, on his first voyage after his marriage, Captain Richards became ill and died, leaving Polly a widow and eight months pregnant at the age of 24. Polly had no option but to return to the stage (she changed her first name to 'Marie'), but life was a terrible struggle. 'How she weathered those first years of widowhood, living precariously on the fringes of the theatre, depositing her baby first with one lodging house keeper and then another while she worked, one can only guess; but with no beauty and no outstanding talent to recommend her she must have had a tedious and embittering struggle,' suggests Margaret Lane, Edgar's biographer.1

Nietzsche's adage that 'that which does not kill us makes us stronger' comes to mind when we consider how Polly got through those years. She did survive; showing the same sort of perseverance demonstrated by her celebrated son whenever he met with what looked like insurmountable setbacks.

Polly's lucky break came in 1872, when she met her saviour, the remarkable Alice Marriott, one of the mid-Victorian era's best known Shakespearean actresses, and owner of a travelling theatre company. At the time Polly, in the words of Margaret Lane, 'had reached the lowest ebb of disillusion and poverty, and was almost starving'.2 Aged 29, she was living with her child, Josephine, as a lodger in a cottage behind a public house which was next door to the Theatre Royal in Williamson Square, Liverpool. Miss Marriott and her company had come to play at the Theatre Royal which, in 1872, was celebrating its centenary. We don't know the exact circumstances of the meeting between Marriott and Polly, but we do know that the kindly older woman took pity on the out-of-work and out-of-luck actress, and took her to her own lodgings and offered her work in her own company. Polly acted small parts in plays and also worked as a dresser.

There was, of course, the problem of what was to become of Polly's little girl, Josephine, who was aged just 6 years. Miss Marriott suggested that she be put into the Sailors' Infant Orphan Asylum in Snaresbrook and, when a vacancy occurred there, 'Joey' was duly sent off. Unsurprisingly, she was unhappy in her new environment and went on a hunger strike, causing great alarm to the orphanage authorities, who wrote to Polly requesting that she remove her child. Polly went to the orphanage by train and brought Joey back. Now, it wasn't just Polly Richards who became part of Miss Marriott's company, but her daughter too, and they both proved popular additions to the troupe. Lane quoted the testimony of Adeline, one of Miss Marriott's two grown-up daughters, who told how the new recruit, 'for all her sardonic reserve of manner, somehow contrived to be the life and soul of dressing-room parties, keeping them all in a roar with funny and improbable stories which she told with a disarming air of gravity and truth, watching her audience from under heavy eyelids, her face impassive.'3 It was later said of Polly's son that he was the best raconteur in London, another quality he seems to have inherited from his mother.

The other two members of the Marriott company requiring mention are her husband, Robert Edgar, and her son, Richard Horatio Edgar. Like many husbands of strong, determined women, Robert Edgar seems to have been something of a waster. Given the formal title of 'manager', he blew much of the money his wife had earned on foolish financial speculations; thereby preventing his spouse from living out her final years in the comfortable retirement her hard work and her talent deserved.

Richard Edgar was handsome and charming; a talented actor in comedy roles, but also rather lazy and something of a lothario. His devoted mother was keen for her son to settle down, and decided to use Polly as a matchmaker. In the autumn of 1873, Polly presented a pretty young actress called Jenny Taylor, whom she had befriended on a trip to Scotland. Jenny passed Miss Marriott and her son's seal of approval and was taken on as member of the company. The script should have continued with Richard Edgar and Jenny getting engaged, marrying and living happily ever after but, if that had happened, we would have no story. Richard and Jenny did get engaged and did get married4 but, before that, something else happened. The circumstances are unclear, but what we do know is that sometime in the spring or early summer of 1874 Richard Edgar had a sexual encounter with Polly Richards. So that, at the very time that Richard and her friend Jenny were announcing their engagement, Polly found herself pregnant - with the child of her patron's son.

It is easy for us to imagine what might have been going on in Polly's mind at this moment. She could tell Miss Marriott everything about the child and who the father was, but that would surely have sabotaged the wedding between Richard and Jenny. She might also have invoked the ire of Miss Marriott, even though that kindly woman would probably have shown her forgiveness. Polly decided the wisest course of action was to keep schtum, even though that would almost certainly mean her having to discard her child after it was born.

At Christmas, she absented herself from the company and took lodgings in Greenwich. Heavily pregnant, she not unsurprisingly failed to attend Richard and Jenny's wedding, which took place in late March. Just a week after his marriage on 1 April 1875, Richard's son, and the subject of our story, was born. Polly and Richard's little boy was baptised by a curate named V.P. Hobson in St Alfeges Church, Greenwich, on 11 April. He was given the name 'Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace' with Walter Wallace, comedian, recorded as his father and 'Mary Jane Wallace' as his mother.

So, who was Walter Wallace? 'No amount of research has yielded a clue to the mysterious "Walter Wallace, comedian" in the Greenwich Register, and it is more than probable that he never existed,' wrote Margaret Lane,5 who noted that no one still living at the time of writing her book (1938), and who was associated with the Greenwich Theatre or Polly Richards, could remember such a person. Today, we have computer technology and websites like FreeBMD6 to help us search for people born after 1837.

Records show that ten people named simply 'Walter Wallace' were born between June 1838 and December 1854, with a further five having their second names given. It is perfectly possible that Polly Richards could have come across one of these 'Walter Wallaces' in her life and decided to make him the father of her child, but the likeliest explanation is that she simply made the name up, giving her son a fictitious father who could never be traced.

Having had her child baptised, Polly now had to place him with foster parents. Lane tells us that Polly's midwife had recommended a fish porter and his wife, George and Clara Freeman, who had already brought up ten children of their own and who lived about a mile away in a four-roomed cottage in Norway Court, Deptford. Lane tells us that Polly went round to 'interview' Clara Freeman. 'The cottage, though overcrowded, was spotlessly clean, and Polly was received in a dark but proudly kept front parlour with plants in the window and a fringed cloth on the table.'7 Payment of 5s a week for the child's upkeep was agreed, and the deal was done.

In Edgar Wallace's own version, though, it was the Freemans who made the first move:

Happily, there was a philanthropist who heard of my plight, and having for the workhouse the loathing which is the proper possession of the proud poor, he dispatched Clara to fetch me. 'She's adopted', said Mr Freeman, an autocrat in his way. Nor when he discovered that he had been mistaken as to my sex did he vary his humane decision.8

Why is there a discrepancy between the accounts of Margaret Lane and Wallace, on how he came to be adopted? It is revealing that Wallace's mother gets no mention at all in his autobiography, written in 1926, and it is likely that he still felt hurt over her actions. For Wallace, it was the Freemans who came to the rescue of a discarded child, while from Lane's point of view, Polly Richards comes over as dutiful for making sure her son had a good home.

Whatever the precise steps were, after the agreement was made between Polly and the Freemans, Milly, one of the Freeman children, visited Ashburnham Grove the following morning to take little Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace away to his new home. What Polly must have felt at bidding farewell to her baby we can only imagine, but she had little time to feel sorry for herself as she desperately needed to earn money. She left Greenwich for Huddersfield to rejoin Miss Marriott's company, playing at...