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J. R. C. Hamilton

The birth-date of actor and author John Richard Claude Hamilton remains a bit of a mystery. He was born 5 April 1886 according to army records created in 1918 and on 5 April 1888 according to the 1939 Register. However, he claimed he was 28 years old when the 1911 census was taken, implying he was born in 1882/83 and his short service army record of 1915 gives his age as 36 years 240 days in December 1915, meaning he must have been born in 1879.

Hamilton claimed that his family was from Ayr, Scotland—although he also claimed to have been born in Hackney, London—where his father, grandfather and great-grandfather all practised medicine. This was intended to be his profession, but Hamilton ran away from home to be an actor, his ambition fired by success in a school production of Shakespeare.

He gave actor as his occupation in the 1911 census, at which time he had been reputedly married to actress Annie Perks Hamilton for six years, with whom he had two children. This is almost certainly false information. Annie Perks, born 11 October 1867, was the daughter of William George Perks and his wife Ann (née Holloway) and had married her cousin, the comedian and musician Henry William Holloway (1863-1902) in 1885. They had three children before Holloway’s death, aged 38.

Annie married Frank Brocklehurst in May 1904 and that same year had a daughter, Nellie Queenie Brocklehurst. The 1911 census implies that this was the marriage with Hamilton, although it is likely they did not meet until a couple of years later.

Hamilton and Annie Brocklehurst—legally she retained that name until her death on 26 November 1944, but probably used Annie Perks professionally—had a daughter, Viola Mimi Hamilton, in 1910.

For a time, Hamilton had played with Henry Chattle in fit-up dramas, playing every conceivable character. Afterwards, he was associated with Sir Frank Benson and Ernest Lodge—brother of Sir Oliver Lodge—who subsequently became curator of the library at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre.

He played twin brothers in the 1913 production of “The Scarlet Clue” at the Derby Grand Theatre, which was to become a regular venue for the actor. He continued to act during the war until he was mobilised in September 1916 and posted as a cadet with the Royal Flying Corps. at Farnborough. He was given the probationary rank of temp. 2nd Lieutenant and discharged on 22 November 1917.

Already separated from his wife when he joined up, he met Edith Rutland (b. 4 March 1894), the daughter of actress Miss Ellen Beverley. Edith had been on the stage since the age of nine and had been touring for many years since. She first met Hamilton in Oldham on the night that he bid goodbye to his company before joining up. They were married in 1917 and lived at 60 Wellington Street, Oldham, Lancs., when Hamilton was discharged from the R.F.C. In April 1918 he joined the A.R.P. and became a 2nd Lieutenant in May 1918, serving until 27 February 1919.

Hamilton was Manchester area delegate of the Actors’ Association and in 1921 gave his address as 23 Dulcie-street, Oxford-road, Manchester. Their son, John Rutland Hamilton, born 20 June 1922.

In 1923 Hamilton was a member of the Sember Stock co., appearing at the Grand Theatre, Hartlepool, who made memorable appearances in “Ignorance” and “From Mill to Mansion”.

Along with his wife, he was producer of the Graham Roberts’ Repertory Company, appearing at the Victoria Theatre, Burnley, for the summer of 1924 and starring in “A Bunch of Violets” as Sir Philip Marchant, “The Middleman”, playing the distasteful Joseph Chandler, “Walls of Jericho”, as Hanky Bannister, “Facing the Music” and taking the lead in “The Profligate”. He was stage manager an actor (as the Emperor) for “Sinbad” during winter of 1924-25 at the Grand, Derby.

In March 1925, Hamilton and “Miss Edith Rutland” were again with the Graham Roberts’ company in Burnley for a new season which began with “A Woman of No Importance”.

The pair returned to the Grand, Derby, the following summer as leads for Oswald Cray’s The Popular Players, the season beginning with “The Silver King”. Hamilton was also the producer of the various shows at the Royal, Oldham, Sunderland, Edinburgh, Halifax and Middlesbrough and two seasons of 32 and 34 weeks at the Gaiety, Douglas, Isle of Man.

Towards the end of this period he concentrated on producing and directing, although he still enjoyed the occasional appearance on stage, his favourite parts being the Counsel for the Prosecution in “The Butterfly on the Wheel” and Sykes in “Oliver Twist”.

He put on a play of his own, “The Black Moth”, on 16 August 1926, a creepy tale set in an old Yorkshire manor house, around which an eerie legend grows. That week also featured a benefit night for Miss Edith Rutland. The singer was a hit as The Fairy Queen in “Rip Van Winkle” at the Grand, Douglas, during panto season in 1927-28. Around that time, Brother Hamilton was K.O.M. of the Isle of Man Province.

Hamilton’s play “The Black Moth” was revived in August 1928 and was followed by another mystery play “The Mist” (first produced at the Grand, Grantham, 8 August 1929) and “Murder in Number Four” (1934). A novelette, The Travers Hall Mystery, was published by Gramol in their Mystery Novels series in 1936.

In 1939, Hamilton was working as a qualified optician and living at 35 Parliament Drive, Bury, Lancashire, with his wife and son. It would seem he moved to the Isle of Man after the war, and was working as an accountant there in 1952; he was subsequently a member of the clergy for Foxton parish, Isle of Man, 1964-66.

Hamilton died on the Isle of Man in 1967, reported as aged 79. It is thought that Edith predeceased him, dying in 1955, aged 50. John Rutland Hamilton died in Manchester, Lancashire, in 1969.

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Comic Cuts - 4 March 2016

I've reached the conclusion that I really need to sort out my office. I mean it REALLY needs sorting out. The reason is simply that a dozen-or-so books have gone missing and I haven't a clue where they might be.

It started last weekend when I was trying to do a little more research on Ray Theobald, the artist I mentioned last week. I know he contributed to Digit Books and have recently spotted an unsigned western that was clearly his work. It sent me scurrying to my little collection of Digits in the hope of finding more... only to find that books I know I own weren't where I expected to find them.

I know I have them: the missing books include the Luan Ranzetta SF novels, various other SF novels by Tom Wade, Terence Haile, Vern Hanson and others and a few war titles.  I'm also missing a couple of Badger Books that I need to refer to.

You need to understand that my office is the corner of a former garage that I've filled with shelves, two deep with paperbacks throughout. Piles of comics, magazines and more books have built up alongside the shelves over the five years we've lived here. These ebb and flow as I create teetering piles of books that are boxed-up just before the pile collapses. (Sometimes shortly after.) Some of the books haven't moved since we arrived here back in August 2010, although a rough system developed over the next couple of years, so I knew (or thought I knew) roughly where everything was.

Over the past few days I've dismantled all the piles, pulled all the books off the shelves to see what's behind them and unstacked boxes to see what was in them—and I still can't find those damned books. I haven't a clue what has happened to them.

Mel is away at a convention for the weekend and I'm thinking that it might be an opportunity to pull everything out of the office and maybe put it back in a way that means I'll be able to find everything, or at least have a better idea where the various books might be.

I had to spend some time catching up with some of the unanswered work e-mail left over from last week as it was approaching 300. Some of the junk is easy to spot and just needs to be deleted, but it's surprising how much time can be eaten up just opening e-mails, scanning them for anything interesting and responding to them either with a follow-up message asking for more details, or closing it and deleting it. One in maybe every twenty is a message asking if I'd received a message earlier that day / that week / that month. They, too, get deleted.

Slowly the total has dropped: 227 on Tuesday, 216 on Wednesday (my mum was visiting on Tuesday, so I didn't get as far), but only 66 by the end of Wednesday. I'm taking some time off to write this and clean up a couple of covers, but another blitz on mail on Friday should clear the decks. [Update: I'm back up to 118 at 8 o'clock Friday morning.]  Unfortunately, on Monday I'm posting information about the next issue which always generates a ton of enquiries, so the whole process will begin again.

I promised to do a bit more digging into the career of Ray Theobald. I've compiled a little checklist of publishers I know he worked for, but I've yet to complete a checklist, so that will have to wait for another occasion.

Theobald started in 1949—although I speculated last week that there may have been working for Gramol earlier. Let's put that to one side as I'm still not certain that the artwork was his. In roughly chronological order, he worked for Curtis Warren (1949-53), C.M. & Co. (1950), Modern Fiction (1951, 1953-57), Pan Books (1951-52), Barrington Gray (1952), Brown Watson (1952), John Spencer (1953-59), Gannet Press (1953-54), Edwin Self (1954), R. S. Gray (1954), Castle Books (1954), Digit Books (1955-57), Robert Hale (1957-60), Four Square (1959-60), Arrow Books (1959), Frederick Muller (1960).

The scans below are from either end of Theobald's known work. The Cup-Tie Challengers dates from 1949 and might be his first cover for Curtis Warren. I believe he did all the 'Aero Fiction' titles under the pen-names Glen Allen and Ken Ford, and did some of the later SF covers despite CW also employing the far better Gordon Davies.

At the other end of the decade, we have titles from Four Square, Arrow Books (one of their Grey Arrow series) and a dust-jacket from Frederick Muller (nabbed from the Existential Ennui website here), dating from 1959-60. You can see that Theobald could do better work than some of the hack stuff he produced in the early- and mid-1950s; the Four Square especially makes me wonder whether he would be more respected as a cover artist these days if he had been given the time and money to produce more consistently better artwork.

The curious thing is that there's no other sign of him beyond these book covers. I've not found any illustrations or paintings signed by Theobald and no sign of him in any official records, either working as an artist or in birth and death records. Ray or Raymond Theobald isn't that common a name... could it be a pen-name? 

 

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