And Mabel's brother writes a letter to the State Children's Council accusing Mabel of being a prostitute and saying that she's living in a brothel just off Hindley Street, and that she has hidden her daughter away and that if someone goes in checks they'll find that Mabel is being very bad. Indeed.
I'm Jen Kelly from The Herald Son and this is in Black and White, a podcast about some of Australia's forgotten characters. Today we're returning to the late eighteen hundreds and the dramatic tale of a vaudeville performer called Mabel Warling. Mabel gave birth in a destitute asylum after falling pregnant in scandalous circumstances. Then she ran away, joined a circus and rubbed shoulders with star entertainers of her day, before
she lapsed into a life of crime. To tell us the remarkable tale, we're chatting today with Carin Ball, Senior curator at the History Trust of South Australia. Karin has written a book called Three Ring Circuits, The dramatic, mysterious and tragic life of Mabel Wallely, a gestitute asylum girl and you can find a link in the show notes to this episode. Welcome to the podcast, Karin, Hello, thank you for having me.
Now.
I love the evocative title of your book. It says so much. It's called Three Ring Circus. The dramatic, mysterious and tragic Life of Mabel Wally, a destitute asylum girl. Mabel really did pack a lot into her seven decades of life, didn't she.
She really did. Yes, yes, So she gives birth to a daughter in the destitute asylum. She gets married, domestic life never really works out for her, so she quite literally runs away and joins a circus. This leads into a tale of love and loss. She rubs shoulders with some of the big star entertainers per day, but then
it all goes wrong. The wheels fall off, and lapses into a life of crime and spends the last thirty years of her life living rough on the streets of Adelaide and Melbourne, and spends a lot of time in prison for being drunken, disorderly and a vagrant. So she has a very sensational tale, but things go wrong. I like to say, up, roll up for this tale of sex, stardom, betrayal and secrets.
Such a tragic story. Where does the whole tale begin? Korean?
So it begins in little Adelaide, little old Adelaide, sleepy Adelaide, at the far edges of the British Empire. So she's born into this very volatile world of people coming and going, high traffic area. There's theaters, there's brothels, there's prostitutes, there's politicians. So she's born into this very vibrant world where the European population of South Australia is surging past one hundred thousand.
And she from very early on, as many working class girls of her situation, she gets typified as a bad girl very early on. So when she's fourteen, she's surrendered by her mother to the care of the South Australian government as an uncontrollable girl. And in that context, uncontrollability usually means sexual activity. Boys are surrendered much less for uncontrollability, usually for things like petty theft, disorderly behavior like throwing
stones at trains, all that kind of thing. For girls, it's much more associated with bad behavior and bad sexual behavior. But you know, Mabel's a teenager. She's doing what teenagers have always done. But she's yes, So she's surrendered by her mother as uncontrollable and she ends up at the girl's reformatory.
And Karin, would she have been at school at all?
Yes, I don't have any schooling records for her, but the records from that period of the late eighteen seventies early eighteen eighties are quite patchy. But we can tell from later letters that are on file with government records that she has a very good, very good hand, She's got good and writing, and she composes her thoughts well.
The research I've done into the family seems to indicate that one of her sisters might have been a student teacher for a while, so I think that's where she gets her good handwriting and way of composing herself on paper. But I don't have any firm information about her education because she's just in this very early period of compulsory education in South Australia.
And was she actually working as a prostitute? Do you think at some stage?
Well, she certainly gets accused as such by her brother later down the track, but I might get to that in a moment when she's you know, when she's an uncontrollable girl being sent to the reformatory. It's probably much less serious. You know, it might be talking about but she might have a boyfriend, she might be engaging in sexual exploration, that sort of thing. But you know, she's really just a teenager being a teenager and doing what
teenagers do. So at the reformatory, she's given basic training on household tasks. She didn't already know those things from being in her parents' boarding house. And then she is sent out into service. So she's fifteen or so, and she's sent to work as a domestic at a house in Norton Summit, so up in the Adelaide Hills, a million miles away in many ways from the wild west end of Adelaide. So she's sent to this house called Grove Hill, which is owned by the Giles family. We
are a very wealthy family. And yeah, so she's at this lovely property in the hills which is surrounded by orchards and gardens and has all this beautiful architecture. And while she's there, she becomes pregnant to the young man of the house. Ah.
Interesting, So the young man of the house as in a sort of the one of the children of the house, one of the teenagers.
So yes, yes, he's nineteen nineteen sixteen by that point just about we know, you know from later descriptions of her that she's you know, she's tallish, she's five for three five four, she's slim, she's got Hayes lies and being mable. She has a wild streak a mile wide, and she attracts the attention of this young man, Charles Giles, who's the young man of the house. And what's key to their relationship is that when he's twenty one, he
will inherit the entire estate from his grandfather. So yes, so she is returned to the to the State Children's Council from Grove Hill. She's initially returned as unwell, but it's rapidly discovered that she's pregnant.
Ah, and she was obviously just working as a maid while she was at this amazing home.
Yes, yes, so she's just a house stage, she's just a domestic servant. And this is what you know, this is what happens to girls in service. They go out and they work as domestics, or they work for small businesses, that sort of thing. Boys tend to be sent to farms for agricultural labor, that sort of stuff. Or into apprenticeships.
So what happens to this baby, given it's illegitimate, does it stand to inherit this fortune?
Probably not, I think that's probably quite unlikely. But for some reason, and we don't know exactly why the Giles family pays the State Children's Council one hundred and fifty pounds in consideration of all demands. Now, I have spent a lot of time going through the correspondence books for various of these institutions, and I can't find any correspondence that tells us why they paid this one hundred and
fifty pounds. But it's a very very unusual tacit admission of paternity on behalf of the Giles.
Family, and it's also a huge amount of money at that time.
I'm assuming it really is. Yes, we did the maths and it's twelve years dipend for a state child. So it's what the family is basically paying off the government for having to look after this child for the twelve years that is the minimum that they would be that she would be in care. So Mabel has this baby at the lying in home of the Destitute Asylum. So if anybody's been to the migration museum in Adelaide, my form alma mata. The two story building in the courtyard,
that's the lying in home. So Mabel would have had her daughter in one of the upper upstairs labor wards. And so that's the twenty sixth of November eighteen eighty eight, and she has a little girl that she calls Hillgrove. So Hillgrove is not usually a girl's name, it's a boy's name, and it is significantly the name of Charles Giles's deceased little brother, who died about five years before
Mabel goes to work at the house. So I suspect that this is a potentially loving and consensual relationship between Mabel and the young man of the house. It might not have been. She wouldn't be the first maid to be despoiled by a man of the house, and she certainly wouldn't be the last. But the fact that she calls her child this family name, it could be a big middle finger from Mabel to the Giles's But it could also be a much more loving and consensual relationship. Yeah.
Well, even the fact that she knows the name of the deceased little brother.
Yes, yes, actually, that's an excellent point. I had never thought about that, so thank you for that wonderful detail. So yes, so she named this child Hillgrove and that does not go down very well at all.
How do you know that?
Because the State Children's Council make her change the child's name.
Oh my goodness.
So it happens at some point in the baby's first few months, but her birth is registered as Hillgrove Warley, and then by the time she's six months to a year old, she's now being referred to in the official documentation as Eleanor Giles Worley. So she's had her name changed from Hillgrove, but she still retains the Giles. So really interesting speculation. I don't have any firm answers, but that and the payment, the one hundred and fifty pounds payment,
does make me wonder if it's genuinely loving relationship. It could also be, you know, an aion of a tacit admission of guilt. It could be payoff to the authorities for keeping is quiet. It could be all sorts of things. But yes, there's lots to speculate about, maybe of costumesities, any of that money. You know that undred and fifty pounds doesn't go to her, it goes to the government. She may not even know that one hundred and fifty
pounds ever existed, but yes, it certainly. As a researcher, that really kind of caught my attention and made me think, oh, what's going on here. There's all interesting stuff going on in the background.
Amazing, there's so much intrigue in her life and she's not even yet an adult.
Yes, yes, she's only a teenager at this point.
We'll be back shortly to find out what happened next, So stay with us. So what happens once she becomes so she's able to stay there until she's eighteen, and then what happens then?
So what happens next is Mabel turns eighteen, and she collects her daughter from the industrial Score and she goes about her way. But things don't go smoothly. And we
talked earlier about whether she's accused of prostitution. Her daughter is probably about a year and a half, yes, she said Toddler and Mabel's brother writes a letter to the State Children's Council accusing Mabel of being a prostitute and saying that she's living in a brothel just off Hindley Street, and that she has hidden her daughter away and that if someone goes and checks, they'll find that Mabel is being very bad indeed, and this causes a great flurry
at the State Children's Counsel, who send an inspector round to do a check, and they find Mabel in bed in the middle of the day with a young man partially clothed, and of course this doesn't look good at all, and they go and pick up her daughter from the foster mother that Mabel has secreted her with, and they take the child into care, and poor Mabel, she really
suffers from this decision. She writes several letters to the State Children's Council asking for her child back, but of course she's been judged of being of low repute and poor character, and they're not going to release the child to her. So Mabel's about eighteen and a half, she's nearly nineteen at this point, and what's she going to do? She has no legal recourse to get her child back.
The State Children's Counsel is her baby's legal guardian because she's been found of living in a brothel and her mother is a poor character. So she thinks about it for a little while, and Mabel being Mabel, she's always got a wily solution to these sorts of problems. And she gets married in July eighteen ninety one. She marries a young man called Henry Hawkins, and he is very slightly higher than her in the social scale. He has
quite a whiff of drama about him. He was born in colonial Fiji and came to Australia when he was a very small child, and his father very dramatically dies or died in eighteen seventy two on one of the Northern Telegraph the Overland telegraph Line expeditions. So Henry has this little kind of cachet of colonial drama, and he's born overseas, and he's a printer. He's only young, he's in his early twenties. He's two or three years older than her, and he works at a the Christian Colonist newspaper.
And so the day after the wedding he starts writing to the State Children's Council saying I would like to take charge of my stepdaughter please. Actually those letters aren't very successful, and you can see the letters at State Records at Cavern. It was an utter delight to be able to go to State records. Wonderful colleagues, and they got the letters out for us, so we could read Henry's letters to the State Children's Council and Mabel's letters
to the State Children's Council, and it's really wonderful. It puts you over their shoulder, just really looking at how they feel where they're trying to get this child that means so much to both of them, trying to get her return to them and.
Finding it had to understand why they were still refused. If there were two loving parents that wanted to adopt or to take back this child.
Well, Henry apparently has reputation for being a drinker, so there's a note on the bottom of the file that says that he has a poor reputation as well, and that initially it's not thought that it's in the interest of the child, but something changes. They eventually managed to persuade the State Children's counsel to give it a try, and so little toddler Eleanor she's called Eleanor at that point, and we think her nickname is probably nell Or Nellie, and she is returned to Mabel and Hawkins.
Amazing, and what happens next. So for a little while they're a happy family. They're a happy family, and that's the early few years of the eighteen nineties. They pass in wonderful serenity. Nothing happens.
They're inspected regularly that the household is doing well and that the child is being well cared for. And then in eighteen ninety four, Henry requests permission to take eleanor baby Eleanor out of South Australia. They're planning a trip to New South Wales and they're going to take this child out of the state, out of the colony, sorry as it was at the time, And they get permissioned to do that, and nothing has heard of them for
two years, and they come back in eighteen ninety six. Now, from the point of view of the State Children's Council, this is all fine. She's been traveling with her stepfather, that's all well and good. But what it's happening behind the scenes, what is happening behind the scenes, is much much more interesting. So it turns out that Mabel has a career as a vaudeville singer, and her daughter has also been singing on the stage as a small child.
So as four and five year old. She's performing at the races because Mabel's brothers are jockeys and she's performing on the stage. And when this news hits the State Children's Council they go ballistic threat to take the child away again.
So were they traveling in New South Wales and performing on stages around New South Wales or was that all just a bit of a furfee.
It's very hard to tell because there's lots of changes of names, and it's across multiple colonial lines. Before nineteen hundred, all of these colonies have entirely separate administrations. So from what I've been able to piece together, Mabel travels to New Zealand, she begins performing as her stage name is Triscy Darcy, and her little daughter is also performing with Mabel's brothers who have a small kind of traveling show
at this point. And then so when Mabel comes back in early eighteen ninety six, her daughter is also performing with this traveling show, and that's when the State Children's Council gets wind of it. They've managed to keep its secret while they've been into state. They've probably been further than New South Wales. They may have even gone as far as Fiji to go and see Henry Hawkins family.
But I haven't found any definitive proof of that. But yes, they're desperate to keep this performance aspect quiet from the State Children's Council because obviously vaudeville and the theater and circus they're all considered to be quite low forms of entertainment, some lower than others, and it's not felt to be in the best interests of the child. So they're trying to keep the secret. But somebody spots them and it all goes to.
Pooh, have you been able to come? Have you come across any more descriptions of the show and what Mabel and her daughter were doing. Was it singing and dancing and so forth? Yes, there's lots of singing. Mabel is described as a serio comic, which means that she's doing.
You know, kind of light operetta, that sort of thing. Apparently she has a really nice voice. Her daughter is quite the stage sensation. So she's by eighteen ninety six, she's seven or eight, she's eight, and she is causing a real flurry when she's performing. She's probably doing sentimental ballads, plantation songs, that sort of thing is very popular in the eighteen nineties. What is also happening on stage is around Australia and around the anglophone world, is that people
are doing a lot of work in blackface. So I don't know if you remember things like the Black and White minstrel show that used to be on TV in the seventies and eighties. That sort of blackface performance has a long, long history. It's got hundreds of years of history of white folks blacking up to perform, and in the late the latter part of the nineteenth century, it's everywhere everybody is performing, So it's unlikely that Mabel her daughter did, but they would be on stage with male
actors and singers who were performing in blackface. There was also quite a bit of cross dressing on stage, which was very titillating to audiences, but also causes a lot of tension that these gender roles can be dispensed with so easily. It's all the sort of stuff that you know is swirling around us now with this people on the right getting upset about drag and all that sort
of thing and seen as destabilizing in many ways. So the vaudeville and live performance world and circus world of the late nineteenth centuries is a much more interesting place we might think these days. It's very it's very international. All of these troops know each other, all of the performers are interconnected in many ways. They're either related, or they've worked with each other, or they owe each other money,
or they've got their big break together. So this is how Mabel and her daughter start performing on stages in particularly in Adelaide on Hindy Street with some of the really quite upcoming names of the day, who will then go on to perform around Australia and internationally.
And was it always a mother and daughter act? Were they always performing together?
I don't think so. No. I think that Mabel often is traveling on her own, and I think that that means that her daughter is with either with her father or with one of Mabel's brothers and their families. So Mabel has three brothers. The oldest one, Walter, is the one who accuses her of being a prostitute, and they obviously have quite a difficult relationship. Her middle brother, Frank, is her favorite brother, and then her youngest brother, Alfred,
is the baby of the family. So Frank has a small traveling show, which they end up calling Barton's Circus. Barton is the family stage name, and that's one of the reasons why it's so difficult to track all these people because they're using Barton, they're using Darcy, they're never using Walley or Hawkins, but they're using lots of other pseudonyms. Throughout her long life, Mabel understands the power of crafting a new identity by sliding on the new name. You know,
she changes names like she's changing her dress. She puts on accents to pretend to be from elsewhere. She's clearly drawing on this huge family performance vein of you know, the family has been performing for several decades. It actually turns out, and that's one of the things that happens in the book is that I uncover the history of this family performance gene you might say, which turns out to have its genesis right in the eighteen seventies. I get to that later.
And did Henry ever perform or was he more of a backstage manager.
I think he does do some performing. There's a couple of reports that he is traveling with a fox. So this is when Edison has developed the phonograph of the wax cylinders. People might be familiar. You can always google it, so that it's a way of recording sound that's very new and very exciting. And so he is traveling as
mister Darcy with a phonograph. And then the brothers, Mabel's brothers have this small performing circus and they're doing all the side shows and playing at the races again and doing all these little venues around South Australia, Country, South Australia and Victoria. And really that's how they kind of
keep going until the end of the eighteen nineties. And then in eighteen ninety nine they notify the State Children's Council that they're moving to Melbourne and Mabel and her daughter disappear out of the historical record.
We'll be back shortly to hear more about Mabel's life, so stay with us so before they disappear. Just from the records that you do have, do you get any impression about whether Mabel's daughter enjoyed being on the vaudeville circuit or whether she was forced into this.
Well, no, I think she really enjoyed it. I've read quite a few biographies of circus families from the period and the general consensus seemed to be because this is the golden age of Australian circus, so the eighteen eighties to the nineteen teens really once moving pictures come along in a serious way. In the nineteen teens, it kind
of starts to fall off. But these last couple of decades and first decade of the New century are really considered a golden age of Australian circus, and family troops would travel the length and breadth of the country. It was a very free world for children in some ways. You know, they didn't do a lot of schooling. They got to be with friends who were having lots of adventures. They were, you know, seeing parts of the country that most of their school friends would never have seen and
having experiences that they would never have had. But it does come at a cost. You know. It's a very physically hard world, traveling by wagon almost exclusively, sleeping under wagons, camping, and there's reports of babies being born in tents on
the road, all that kind of stuff. But I think for a kid, you know, you're growing up with your cousins, So Ellenor's cousins, so Mabel's brothers have got a couple of children by that point, so you know there's a kind of built in family unit and they're having fun. You know, they get to do all this really interesting stuff from a very young age. You know, children were put on the stage and in the script in the circus ring from three or four.
And we're Mabel and Henry actually breaking any laws by putting Mabel's daughter on the stage in this way and taking her on tour or was it more that this was just something that was frowned upon.
Yeah, it's not illegal, but it's, as I said, it's not considered to be entirely proper. There's always the whiff of the disreptible to the traveling shows, particularly the smaller ones. We're not talking about the big you know, the big international circuses and the big outfits like Burdens and It's Geralds, who are quite well, quite well respected, but these small jobbing family shows, you know, they're really just kind of
at the very bottom of that scale. But yes, all indications seem to suggest that the children enjoyed doing it. They weren't really paid to do it, but you know, they are having experiences that children would never have had normally, and it becomes it becomes a way of life for them. It's natural for them. All their family and friends are doing it, So why would you want to sit down in one place and go to school?
So true, So take us now to Melbourne. So this is where we lose part of the timeline. I guess we don't really know what happened for a period there.
No, no, This is one of the frustrations of doing this sort of research. So without going into too much detail and giving too much away, they moved to Melbourne and it would appear that Mabel and Henry split. He goes off to Western Australia to become a minor and she is with her daughter, and her daughter then goes to South Africa as part of a traveling show at the height of the Boer War. This really blew my
mind when I found out about this. So your listener's probably familiar with the Second Boer War, which was fought from eighteen ninety nine to nineteen oh two, I think from memory. So it's between the South African Boers and the British authorities who want to secure rights to all
the gold that's coming out of the ground. And the early ones about Diamonds in the eighteen seventies, and so it's an active war zone in the northern parts of the Southern African continent, and so the idea that you would take a troop of children performing children to this
sort of environment seemed completely unhinged to me. But the general feeling seems to have been that so long as the performing theatricals kept to the southern parts, so kept to the coastline, that they would be fine, although there are certainly reports of theatrical troops having some quite hair raising escapes from the fighting areas in the early nineteen one,
in nineteen oh two. So yeah, it's a completely bizarre thing to do to take these little children, you know that anything from seven or eight up to about thirteen or fourteen, and they go to South Africa. And so her daughter spends two years touring South Africa as a performing theatrical.
And who were they performing for. They weren't performing for soldiers on breaks or anything like that.
Yeah, so they do, they do do some performances for military, but mostly it's just performing the same vaudeville traveling circuit. So all of these, you know, all the anglophone colonies are obsessed with live performance and they're desperate to get performers from overseas because it's exciting and new and it's all about, you know, keeping the market share interested. So traveling troops from Australia to South Africa or you know, British troops would go to South Africa, or they would
come to Australia. It's a very interconnected and very very mobile world. And so yes, you would think that, you know, a little kid that was born in Adelaide at the destitute Asylum is not going to end up on the stages of at least three continents, but she does. It's a very very exciting story to have been able to uncover.
How did you and first come across this story?
So Mabel came to my attention when I was a curator at the Migration Museum and in twenty fifteen we were redoing the gallery. There's a permanent gallery at the museum that talks about the history of the site. So, as I mentioned, the two story building at Migration Museum is the former lying in home and the whole courtyard is all that's left off Adelaide's Destitute Asylum. So Adelaide's Poorhouse's workhouse, and so we've always had a gallery that
tells that story. And in twenty fifteen I was one of a team of three with my wonderful former colleague, Nikky Sullivan and then director of Migration Museum who's now Head of Collections, Mandy Paul, and we did the research to revitalize and bring new stories into this gallery, and
Mabel was one of the stories that we found. So Nicky and I were State records at Cavin looking through the registers and we found that detail of the one hundred and fifty pounds being paid to the State Children's Council, and that really was what pequed our interest. It was like Maybel kind of reached up out of the archive and tugged on shold on our sleeve and said, you know, there's something really interesting here if you dig, and so
we did. And so if you go to Migration Museum, there are four story boxes in that gallery which tell four different family stories from the asylum, and Maybel is number three of four, and so we did some research. We did know the research about her daughter being born in the building and then her having to ask for her back, so we knew her story up to eighteen ninety nine, and something about it after we delivered the
gallery opened in twenty sixteen. Something about her story just kind of stuck with me and I had to find out what happened, because at that point we didn't know anything about the theatrical performances, because Mabel had been very successful about hiding that. We didn't know anything about South Africa. We didn't know anything about the family circus. We had been in touch with some of Mabel's brother's descendants who told us a bit more about the circus stuff, but
they also didn't know a lot of this detail. They didn't know what had happened to Mabel's daughter, They didn't know about any of the performing aspects. So gradually I just unpicked it. Over five years or so, she just wouldn't leave me alone. She was very insistent that all of this come to light.
We'll leave part one here and we'll return on Thursday to hear about Mabel's thrilling life as a vaudeville performer, the challenges she faced, and her lapse into a life of crime. Thanks for listening. This has been in Black and White, a podcast about some of Australia's Forgotten Characters, written and hosted by me Jen Kelly, edited by Nina Young, and produced by John Ti Burton. You can find all the stories and photos associated with their episodes at Heraldsun
dot com dot au slash I be a Double. If you've enjoyed this podcast, we'd love you to leave a five star rating on Apple Podcasts. Even better, leave a review. Any comments or questions please email me at in black and white at Heroldsun dot com dot au. Any clarifications or updates will appear in the show notes for each episode, and to get notified when each new episode comes out, make sure you subscribe to the podcast feed