The Descendents of Richard Edward Poole
Having become convinced that the Richard Edward Poole whom Leonard had located living in Halifax in 1864 was indeed our great grandfather, we set about the task of attempting to learn all we could about his children with his first wife, Eliza Poole (nee Dodd).
Richard Edward Poole and Eliza Dodd married in 1849, and immediately began having children. By looking in the U.K. census, Leonard discovered the following eleven offspring:
Elizabeth Ann Poole, born 1850
Richard Edward (Ted) Poole, born 1852
Maria Poole, born 1854
Thomas Poole, born 1856
William James Poole, born 1858
Elizabeth Poole, born 1860
Harry Poole, born 1864
Charles Poole, born 1865
John Henry Poole, born 1868
Eliza Poole, 1870
Harriet Emma Poole, born 1873
Notice that some of the names repeat – We have two Elizabeths and an Eliza, as well as a Thomas Poole, even though we know that was our grandfather’s name. But wait – it gets worse. Soon I will be introducing you to another Thomas, two Flora’s, and two more Olives.
Although all of these children were born (and in some cases died) before our grandfather was born in 1899, they were his half brothers and sisters, and therefore our parents’ uncles, and our great uncles. Not so distantly related, in other words.
But who were these people? Were there any traces of them left? Any descendents who could be traced? Had there been any contact between Richard Edward Poole’s family with Eliza Dodd and his family with Eliza Jane Bird, which included our grandfather?
We knew the chances were remote, but we wanted to try. Since we had a name, Richard Edward Poole, which was at least slightly distinctive, we started by putting those words, in quotation marks, into the internet search engine Google.
The Google search provided us with a “Googlebook”, one of those out of copyright books which have been digitized by Google. This one is entitled “Report of Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia, January Term, 1875, to the September Term, 1876, inclusive”. If you want, you can see that case by following this link: Googlebook .
At first it seems like there cannot possibly be a link to our Richard Edward Poole. Beginning on Page 583 this book describes an American Court Case in which two brothers named Poole are accused of employing their 7 year old brother “Zanlo” Poole in their acrobatic show to the detriment of his physical and moral health. But further reading yields the following nuggets of information:
1. The two older brothers are Richard Edward Poole and Thomas Poole, the same as the two eldest sons of Richard Edward Poole Senior and Eliza Dodd.
2. “Zanlo” Poole’s real name is John Henry Poole, which matches the name of another brother.
3. John Henry Poole is described as being 7 years old (“in his 8th year”) which matches the age of “our” John Henry Poole.
4. The brothers are described as being subjects of “Her Majesty Victoria”, and natives of “the County of Lancashire” (which was true – we knew they were born in Lancashire, but were now living in Halifax, which is in Yorkshire).
None of these things are conclusive – after all, Poole is a fairly common name, and coincidences do happen - but we began to look more closely at this trio. Searching for “Zanlo Poole” and “Zaulo Poole” (the typesetting of early books makes it difficult to tell which name was really being used), allowed us to discover that the court case was notorious in its day, including coverage in the New York Times and the Baltimore Sun. We also found another Googlebook about the history of tap dancing which indicates that the Poole Brothers were the first to introduce acrobatic clog dancing, as well as a reference in the famous London magazine "Punch" to “Poole, Zanlo, and Poole.” All this information was sufficient to make us want to investigate further.
Since the New York Times had indicated that the case had “attracted so much attention in this city and abroad,” we began to look in British newspapers of the period to see if we could learn enough about the Poole family of acrobats to prove or disprove the idea that they were our relatives. We thought one way of doing so was to discover if the Pooles of the court case were their origins in Halifax, Yorkshire, where we knew “our” family was living in the 1880’s. Even today Halifax only has a population of about 80,000, so the idea that there could have been a second family named Poole in the Halifax Yorkshire of 1889 who had sons named Richard Edward, Thomas and a John Henry born in 1882, had to be unlikely in the extreme.
In the newspapers we hit the motherlode of information, although not exactly in the way we had anticipated. We have found little information about the court case thus far, but a great deal about the Poole family, starting with “Poole, Zanlo and Poole”. We have now recorded over 800 references (and viewed and not recorded hundreds more) in contemporary newspapers. These references span over a hundred years, all the way from 1872 to 1977.
To end any remaining suspense, I’ll let you know right now: We believe that the American court case about Zanlo Poole concerns our great uncles being prosecuted for child abuse.
Here’s the evidence which convinced us:
1. We found an 1889 review of a show in which the reviewer gushed, “The reappearance of Poole’s Minstrels in their native town of Halifax after a long absence has caused great enthusiasm”.
2. When placing advertisements looking for work, the acrobat Pooles sometimes gave their address as “E. Poole, Halifax”.
3. The official documents Leonard uncovered show that Eliza, our great grandfather’s first wife, died in the fourth quarter of 1883; A December 15, 1883 newspaper indicated that “the mother of Edward Poole, of Poole, Zanlo and Poole” had died on December 9, 1883.
4. While there were numerous John Pooles in the 1881 census, there was only one who gave his age as 13 and his birthplace as Halifax – and he gave his profession as “acrobat.” He is recorded as a brother to the head of the household, Thomas Poole, born in 1857 in Manchester. He also is an acrobat.
That was all too much to be coincidence. We just had to conclude that the people in the 1875 American Court case were indeed our great uncles performed in England and America as acrobats.
So what did we learn about our relatives, the Pooles from Halifax? A tremendous amount and the rest of this lengthy narrative tells you what we found and how we found it.
The newspapers we looked at contained a great deal of information, but it required a lot of sifting through. I should note that these are original 19th and early 20th century newspapers which have been scanned and run through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software, which makes them searchable, much like Google allows searching. However, we are dealing with newsprint over a hundred years old. The slightest smudge or other imperfection in the original ink or a spot on the paper can turn “Poole” into “Pode” or “Poule”, which means it isn’t returned to us in the list of articles when we search. Searching for “E.Poole” brings a different set of results than “E. Poole” or “E Poole”. Searching for Poole Brothers sometimes brings up a sentence containing a list of entertainers such as, “Smith Sisters, Poole and May.” Add to that we have to remember that there is a large town in England called “Poole”. All of this is to say that it is certainly possible that something definitive was missed, but we’ll probably never know.
Our searches found that our Poole family was mentioned in advertisements for upcoming shows, advertisements placed by the various Pooles seeking work, birth, death and marriage announcements, the occasional gossip column, and, as I noted above, reviews of various shows they were in. I should tell you that the “reviews” were not as we think of them today; they were essentially “puff” pieces in which everyone was wonderful. I think it likely that the “reviewers” were actually paid by the performers or the theatre managers. Sometimes the same “review” can be found word for word in more than one newspaper or in the same newspaper in consecutive weeks. In addition, often the various Poole groups were simply listed at the bottom of the article, under “also appeared”.
We were fortunate that there were two newspapers which catered almost exclusively to the theatre industry, called “The Stage” (which continues publication to this day) and “The Era”. Unfortunately archives of “The Era” are only available on line up until the end of the year 1900, so virtually all 20th century references are from “The Stage”.
To understand some of the following discussion, it is important to place some of the information in context. For example, it should be remembered that in the days before the internet, radio, television, movies or even electricity use, theatrical shows were the popular entertainment of the day. An evening at the theatre would include a number of acts of various kinds – ranging from serious plays to low comedy, from brass bands to solo vocalists, from clowns to, yes, acrobats. Those of us old enough to remember the Ed Sullivan television show in the 1950’s and 1960’s can probably easily get the idea, except that the entertainment went on for four hours! Some of these shows had very cheap admission of sixpence or less. Every small town appears to have had several theatres.
To fulfil the need for cheap entertainment, there seem to have been literally thousands, if not tens of thousands of performers of various kinds. Since they were travelling constantly they couldn’t rely on the mails to reach them so it seems they used advertisements placed in one or both of these two newspapers to communicate with each other, with their agents, theatre operators, etc. Theatres would place advertisements indicating the various people for whom they were holding letters; rehearsals were organized by advertisements; we found one example of a theatre placing an ad to tell the Pooles “contract off”.
Using these newspaper clippings we learned that the “Brothers Poole” weren’t the only performers in the family. Indeed, we believe that the family, including at least two or three generations, were part of as many as sixteen different groups over the period from about 1870 all the way to 1930 or so. Some of this is speculative, of course; there were no formal written records, or at least none that can be found from this side of the Atlantic, so all of this has been inferred from secondary sources. It becomes like one of those logic puzzles you hated in high school: “John, Louisa and Mary are siblings. One is older than John by three years. John was born in 1962 ... which of them...” you get the idea.
I think a useful way of thinking of these various performing groups is to think of them like modern day rock bands. Think about someone like Eric Clapton; at different times he played guitar with the Yardbirds, Cream and the Travelling Wilburys. Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck both played guitar for the Yardbirds as well at different times, so it really isn’t possible to answer the questions who the guitarist of the Yardbirds was, or what group Eric Clapton played guitar for. Like the rock bands of today, troupes of entertainers in Victorian England seem to have formed, disbanded, reformed, and replaced one member with another and so on, all while keeping the same name or changing the name only slightly.
It also seems there was no copyright on the names of the groups. Groups sometimes placed advertisements indicating that they were the ORIGINAL group and all others calling themselves that were frauds. Combine that with the fact that our family seems to have a chronic shortage of names (ie. Richard’s son was named Thomas, and there were three Olive Pooles and two Florence Pooles in the family) and it is difficult to be certain about which members were performing in which groups when.
However, having been convinced that our great uncles were entertainers, specifically acrobats, we can make reasonable inferences. We can see the “Brothers Poole”, whom we know were for the most part Richard Edward (Ted) and Thomas, (although the ad I’ve shown above shows Edward and John) performing around the same time as “Poole, Zanlo and Poole”, whom we know to be Richard Edward, Thomas and John Henry. Sometimes the Poole Minstrels, whom we know included Richard and a Thomas, performed in the same show as the Poole Brothers. Did Richard and Thomas simply put on different clothes and makeup and perform in a different act in the same show (hopefully getting paid twice) or was the “Poole Brothers” act taken over by other members of the family? We simply can’t know for certain at this point.
Regardless, to the best of our ability and subject to change as further information becomes available, we believe the following were the main groups the members of our family were part of.
The Poole Brothers; Brothers Poole; Poole, Zanlo and Poole; Poole, Zanlo, Poole and Zala; Three Marvellous Pooles
These first five groups are taken together, for reasons which hopefully will soon become apparent.
The very first mention of this group that I can find is January 14, 1872. Richard Edward would have been almost 20, and Thomas 16. John Henry would have been just 4 years old, so I have to think it unlikely he would have been appearing with them at that time. In various advertisements and reviews over the next two years, they were described as “clog dancers, Tumbling Clowns &c”, “Acrobats and French Clowns” (I still don’t know what French Clowns are) and “Champion Acrobatic Boot and Clog Dancers”. While I think we should be careful not to take the puffery too seriously (after all, some of these descriptions were advertisements placed by the brothers, while others were descriptions written by reviewers apparently paid by the theatres) it can be seen from some of the notations that the Brothers Poole were excellent performers. An apparently more serious review of the brothers’ act includes the following:
“Undoubtedly the principal attraction of a program that was excellent throughout was the performance of the Poole Brothers, a pair of acrobats whose equal we do not remember to have seen on any stage. They seem to be made of India rubber, so elastic and recoverable are they. Starting out on a sixteen inch pedestal, they do the ordinary double dance business in concert, supplemented by somersaults that are marvels of precision and celebrity. The old business of turning a somersault on a handkerchief is here outdone with the addition that it is outdone (sic) on a pedestal, a fall from which would probably break the neck of the acrobat. Last night the Poole Brothers were received with rapturous applause and fairly earned it.” (Brooklyn Eagle, September 14, 1875, pg. 4)
In an advertisement on May 30, 1875, it is seen that the Poole Brothers have agreed to go to America for 12 months. In November of that year there is an advertisement which includes Zanlo for the first time; in early January of 1876 Reynold’s newspaper tells the story of the Brother’s arrest in Washington on charges of absconding with Zanlo, whom the court had placed under someone else’s custody for his safety. This confirms what we learned from the New York Times of that era, and the report of the Washington court case.
The farther in time we get from the certainty of that U.S. court case, the harder it is to be sure about the membership of the “Brothers Poole”. After the brothers’ return from the States there is the occasional mention of the same three by name. By the end of 1877 they are often referring to themselves as Poole, Zanlo and Poole, with just a couple of mentions as to which Pooles were accompanying Zanlo. In 1882 they appear to have gone their separate ways: an ad was placed, I suspect by Thomas, indicating that “the Marvellous Pooles (Thomas, John and Willie) (emphasis added) late Poole, Zanlo and Poole” had just completed a run at the People’s Music Hall, Manchester, and were now at Queen’s Palace. It appears likely that Thomas and John Henry, now aged 14, were joined by their brother William (Willie) who was about 24 at the time. Again, this is only reasonable speculation, not fact. It is also impossible to know whether their split with their brother Richard Edward (Ted) was amicable or not.
In September of 1882 there is a notice that the Three Marvellous Pooles would be relocating to Spain. By June of 1883, “Poole, Zanlo Poole and Zala” were back in England performing at the Star in Liverpool. Does this mean that the brothers were back together, with Willie assuming the stage name Zala? Could be. Or had Willie assumed Ted’s role and Zala was another member of the family or someone completely unrelated? No way to know.
The Three Marvellous Pooles appear to have done some serious travelling. On August 18, 1883, the announcements sections carried this: “in Bucharest Romania, August 7, (born to) the wife of Thom. Poole, of the Three Marvellous Pooles, a daughter” In February of 1884 there was a notice placed that they had just completed two months at the Smassy Orpheum, Budapest, Hungary and were now in Breslau (a city in south-western Poland now known as Wroclaw). Presumably they knew they would be returning soon, because the reason for the ad was to advise of their new London address.
The brothers Thomas and Richard Edward seem to have had a spat in August of 1885, when an ad was placed in The Era which stated “Wanted, Proprietors and Managers to know that we have no connection with the parties styling themselves as Poole Brothers as we are the original POOLE, ZANLO, AND POOLE, Lightning acrobats and Double Somersault Throws”. This was followed by an ad the following week “…I, Thomas Poole, for Ten Years late Director Correspondence and Artist of the Original Poole, Zanlo, and Poole, thank my brother Ted for his kind notice last week. This is brotherly love after my ten months illness….” Of course, this could all have been a publicity stunt to get people talking about the Brothers Poole.
By the late 1880’s the references are to the “Brothers Poole” are getting less common, but in June of 1887 the manager of a show placed an ad indicating that both “Poole, Zanlo and Poole” and the “Poole Brothers” were to appear. Whether that was wishful thinking by a theatre manager, an attempt by the brothers to get back together, or simply a mistake (either by the newspaper running an old ad, or by my being able to find other references to the Poole Brothers) it is impossible to know.
Regardless, at some point around 1887, the Brothers Poole in all their permutations stopped performing. Unless one of them wrote a book we haven’t found yet, we will never know why. The two brothers appeared to have had some disagreements, so perhaps they just decided to split the act up. I think one contributing factor might have been that by the late 1880’s, both Ted and Tom were married with children, and, as we will see shortly, both had brought their children into the family business. Remember too, that by 1887 the original brothers were 35 and 31, a little old for acrobatics. I should also mention that perhaps Ted’s zeal for his chosen profession may have been reduced somewhat by a tragic event which took place in 1884, in which a performer, fortunately not one of our relatives – leaped from his shoulder to perform a somersault, lost his balance and broke his neck on landing. This inquest laid no blame on Ted, but obviously it must have been upsetting, even in those more violent times.
Regardless, I can find no evidence that the brothers ever performed together again, although there are numerous places where the acts they were in appeared in the same show. Both brothers, and their families, continued to perform on the London and regional stages for many years to come.
Because the brothers seem to have split up after about 1887, this narrative now has to divide between the Ted side of the family and the Tom side. I’m going to start with what happened to Ted and his children first.
But wait! What happened to Zala and Zanlo? Sad to say, we simply don’t know. As I will relate shortly, there were a myriad of groups in which it is possible John Henry and / or Willie performed with their cousins, nieces and nephews, but we really don’t know.
Before moving on to the various groups formed by Ted Poole and his family, however, I should add a footnote that the Brothers Poole did have a revival in the late 1890’s; Several reports of shows are seen where the Brothers Poole are performing as “eccentric comedians”, “acrobatic clog dancers” and “acrobatic comedians”. Were these the original Brothers Poole, coming back for one last kick? Not likely, particularly since by then they were in their mid to late 40’s, hardly a prime age for acrobats. Perhaps the mystery has been solved: in January of 1896 can be seen an ad by the Brothers Poole “Sons of Ted Poole” looking for work. Since Richard Edward (Ted) Poole had sons Thomas Henry Poole (born in 1872) and Robert James Poole (born 1880) it is quite possible they were reprising the act their father and uncle had made famous.
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