Ada Delroy – Australian Serpentine Dancer and Vaudeville Actress

MISS ADA DELROY

Ada Delroy, the adopted sister of Music Hall comedian James Bell, was born in Halifax, Yorkshire England. Taught dancing by Bell, and taken in by the theatrical family at the age of 12, she made her first ever stage appearance as Fatima in a professional production of Bluebeard - a big feature being her "Cobra di Capello" dance.

Often described in his day as a "Senegambian" comedian or a “blackface” comic, James Bell was raised in Lancashire, England, and went on to become a specialist on the Ethiopian castanets ("bones") while being equally adept at singing, dancing, banjo  playing  and  comedy sketch work.

James Bell and Ada Delroy toured Australia for two years with Harry Rickards Company in 1888 to 1890, before undertaking a two year world tour with Baldwin's Butterfly Company travelling through the USA, Middle-East, Far East, China, Japan, South Africa and Europe.  

ADA'S SISTER-IN-LAW

They returned to Australia in February 1895 under Rickards management, this time with Bells wife, Alice who went under the stage name of the "White Mahatma".  Madame Bell had been performing professionally for over 16 years. Her act was believed to have been advertised as "Somnomistic Dream Visions" and involved audience participation, whereby selected  individuals would write  down questions on folded  paper earlier in the evening  (which  they  retained).  She would then answer them later in the evening.  

By then a specialist Serpentine dancer, Ada Delroy was routinely billed as the world's greatest Terpsichorean artist when she established the Ada Delroy Company which made its debut in Singleton, New South Wales, in June in 1885. The initial line-up comprised of 12 artists including James Opie, Gertie McLeod, Tom Bergin and mesmerist Dr Richard Rowe. 

The troupe toured Australia and New Zealand in late 1897, then did a two and a half year world tour, returning to Australia in mid-1900. The company then remained in the Antipodes until around 1909, with its principals also appearing with Harry Rickards, James Brennan and the Conrad Power Company.

James Bell's last known engagement was at Brennan's National Amphitheatre, Sydney in December 1908. The following year he was appointed manager of the Melbourne Opera House by Harry Rickards. Ada Delroy's last known performance is believed to have been with Carroll's Vaudeville Entertainment in Melbourne in 1915. 

 A keen cyclist, Ada Delroy was often featured in cycling news during her Australian tours, and claimed to be the first lady cyclist in both Australia and Ireland. James Bell was a member of both  the NSW and Victorian cycling leagues and the theatre the company reportedly toured with 9 bikes during the 1890s.

Delroy and Bell married in 1908 following the death of Alice Bell the previous year.

Ada Delroy was also a land speculator in real estate in Perth in the mid to late-1890s, selling a parcel of land at Cottesloe known as the Ada Delroy Estate.

AUTHOR KAZ COOKE

Ada’s forgotten life story has now been brilliantly re-imagined and fictionalized by Australian author, Kaz Cooke. Read her new boook Ada and you’ll enter an all-but forgotten world of clairvoyants, greasepaint and curtain calls, where the glamour of the stage and the pull of touring on the road will instantly enthrall you. 

It all started when she came across a photo of a woman in a theatre scrapbook while researching a project at the State Library of Victoria on objects people wear to say who they are.

Kaz says:  In it, she’s wearing ‘everything but the kitchen sink’ – a giant hat, ostrich feathers, bows, braid, butterfly brooches, a giant diamond pendant and her name spelled out in diamonds. It was captioned ‘Ada Delroy’.

I found out she had been a dancer, singer and comedian with her own troupe, the Ada Delroy Company, and I began making a timeline of Ada’s travels and reviews of her shows, using the Australian newspaper archives the National Library of Australia’s digital collection, and the sister archive for New Zealand . Often it took scores of ‘reviews’ to piece together a whole act, sentence-by-sentence; here a name of the song, there a tiny description of part of a comedy sketch costume.

The plan evolved that I would write a novel about Ada’s life – and that everyone in the book, including Ada, would be a real person. I visited the family archivist of a branch of the Bell family troupe’s descendants. Joy Bell from NSW generously shared information on the Bell family, whom had adopted Ada after she was orphaned at 12 in a Lancashire mill town and put her in the family troupe. Joy had wonderful photos of the Ada Delroy Company on tour in India. Other photos were found at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, the State Library picture collections, and on one miraculous occasion, on Pinterest.

At the Library I could ‘order in’ from the collection and look at objects from Ada’s era: a 19th century wedding gown (mauve) in two pieces, jewellery, an actress’s back-stage travel iron  (heated by a reservoir of methylated spirits that you would light with a ‘vesta’ match or a flaming twist of paper transferred from a dressing-room fireplace). No wonder so many theatres burned down in those days!

I was amazed to see online all the digitized pages of a scrapbook kept by Ada’s rather bonkers boss during the early 1890s, Professor Baldwin. This was a record of the Baldwin tour with the Bells when Ada debuted her signature Serpentine dance in England. Ada stole all her dances from Loïe Fuller, who became a famous star at the Folies Bergères. The scrapbook is part of the Houdini collection at the Harry Ransom Centre, at the University of Texas in Austin. More ferreting in the State Library of Victoria turned up the gas bill for the backstage and stage lights from the same year Ada performed at the Bourke St Opera House Tivoli theatre in 1895.

Official archivists in Auckland helped me decipher a relevant, scandalous 1912 divorce case’s exhibit letters, written in a dreadful hand, in purple, soluble pencil and smudged with tears (or whiskey). I consulted modern experts on genealogy, tuberculosis, larrikins, tin-silk frocks and sea slugs. That was all part of the fun for me, flexing my old journalism muscles and just satisfying my own curiosity. 

I read novels of the time, and histories of clairvoyants, spiritualists and ‘black-face’ minstrel entertainers, and consulted slang dictionaries for Lancashire and 19th century theatre, Australianisms of the day, and the theatre history books by Aussie experts Frank van Straten and Mimi Colligan.  

I looked at photos and read accounts of steam ship and carriage travel, and Melbourne places, faces and vaudevillians from 1888 to 1910. My nephew George was dispatched to the State Library of WA to find the original brochure advertising the auction of land called the Ada Delroy estate; that’s how we found out Jimbell St in Perth, which still survives, is named after Ada’s husband, Jim Bell.

I was lucky enough to jump a discount flight to New York with 12 hours to spare so I could watch a performance by choreographer and dancer Jody Sperling, who interprets the dances of Loïe Fuller, wearing re-created and constructed Serpentine costumes. I was able to speak with her about how Ada might have felt performing those original dances in the costume made from 100 yards of silk. Later, I visited the dressing room under the Theatre Royal in Hobart where Ada once changed into that costume.

I convinced a shopkeeper at the Block Arcade in Melbourne to let me down into the catacombs underneath to explore, so I could set a scene there. I didn’t want to stop researching, but with a head full of images and facts and ideas, after two years of research, it was time to write.

I didn’t use every photo or reference everything I’d read or investigated, but it all combined to help me imagine my way into Ada’s life and give her a voice. I hope I’ve done her proud.

 

Ada is a show girl and a storyteller with a sense of humour and a lot of things to say. Ada is a funny, yet poignant novel about an extraordinary woman who made the very best of everything life threw at her. 

You soon fall in love with her for speaking the way she does:

‘It’s not every day a handsome young man appears on your doorstep to ask if you’re a respectable woman…’

Kaz Cooke brings Ada Delroy and her famous vaudeville troupe back to life while telling us the backstage tales of how she entertained royalty, and the general public alike with her witty jokes, illusions, and breath-taking dances.

‘I had a diamond pendant near as big as an emu egg off the Maharajah of What's-His-Name. They named a racehorse after me, and a pigeon and a potato soup on an Orient steamship.'

‘I’ll tell you what I loved about being a theatrical. You’re a custodian of magic, a purveyor of glamour, a repository of mystery. You’re someone.’

'I was enchanting, and indefatigable, and dainty, and all the other words they find to avoid saying 'beautiful'. The word they used the most was 'piquant'. Makes you feel like chutney.' - Ada Delroy

A former reporter and cartoonist, Kaz Cooke is also the author of the bestselling books Up The Duff, Kidwrangling, Girl Stuff, Girl Stuff 8–12, Women’s Stuff, and the children's picture books Wanda Linda Goes Berserk and The Terrible Underpants

Find out more  www.kazcooke.com.au

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