Arthur Prince, with his dummy Sailor Jim, was the most famous ventriloquist of his era. Arthur was married three times, all to actresses and singers who had been partners in his stage act. When he died in 1948, he was buried locally in the Hampstead Cemetery in Fortune Green Road. This is the most detailed account of his life.
Most sources say Arthur Prince was born in 1881, but he gives his date of birth as 17 November 1880 in the 1939 Government Register used to record everyone in England and Wales when registration cards were issued just before the War.
In interviews he said he was born in Marylebone, and started by performing conjuring tricks in public at the age of 13. A few years later he began his professional career with another comedian as the Elrabi Brothers, an act with humorous songs, card tricks and magical illusions.
Arthur took up ventriloquism after seeing the well-known Fred Russell’s act with his dummy Coster Joe. Fred gave 17-year-old Arthur advice, and introduced him to the model maker Alfred LeMare in Manchester, who made Sailor Jim for him.
In 1898 Arthur was working with Joseph Blascheck who travelled around the country demonstrating the Velograph, which displayed animated photographs. In the breaks between the showing of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, performers entertained the audiences. Arthur was still with the group in March 1900 when they appeared in Leamington, and he was billed as a ventriloquist, mimic, and conjuror.
Interviewed in 1904, Arthur said he started performing in music halls on 29 December 1899 with a contract for the London Pavilion and the Victoria Palace theatres.
In Arthur’s most famous act he was dressed as an admiral and Jim was a cheeky able-bodied seaman. The curtain rose on the deck of ‘HMS Seaworthy’ while the band played ‘Life on the Ocean Waves’. They had a routine where Arthur played the straight man and smoked a cigar, while Jim had all the jokes and poked fun at authority.
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Llandridnod Pierrots
Beginning in the summer season of 1899, his friends George Sinclair, a baritone singer, and Fred Parr a tenor, were running a Pierriot Troupe of entertainers in the Welsh spa town of Llandridnod Wells. This type of variety show was very popular at the time, particularly at seaside piers. Arthur joined them for his two-week summer holiday, and he enjoyed it so much he returned to work with them each year.
On 9 September 1900 there was a double wedding of the troupe in Llandridnod Wells. Victor Stewart married Clare Russell, and Arthur Joseph Prince, aged 21, married Kathleen (Kitty) Bowles who was 19. At the time their address was given as 7 Nelson Street Llandridnod Wells.
Arthur and Kitty’s son, Arthur Richard Prince, was born in the town in 1901. But he died aged just eight months old on 26 April 1902 at 109 Hargwyne Street in Stockwell. They had a second son, William Arthur Donald (known as Don) also born in Llandridnod Wells, on 20 October 1904. But Kitty was ill, and sadly died on 14 December 1904 at 16 Cavendish Gardens Clapham Park, in South London.
In October 1900 the group were named as; Arthur Prince, ventriloquist, conjurer and entertainer, Fred Parr, tenor singer, Kitty Bowles, singer, trained at the Guildhall School of Music, George Sinclair, baritone singer, Maud Howarth, principal singer from the Gilbert and Sullivan company, Maud Percy, short skirt dancer from Daly’s and the Gaiety and Palace theatres, Victor ‘Tiny’ Stewart, comedian and trick pianist. The group was managed by Sinclair and Parr, and by August 1901 it was run by Prince, Parr and Sinclair.
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The summer season began in May, when the Pierrots performed in Rock Park in the mornings and afternoons, and at other venues in the town in the evenings. In the middle of June 1902 Parr, Sinclair and Maude Howarth left to form their own group in Aberdeen. With their departure, Arthur took charge of the company.
He immediately encountered a problem as Parr and Sinclair had signed a contract with the Llandridnod Wells town clerk on the 8 May 1902, but had not paid the fee. In August the clerk wrote to Parr and Sinclair who replied that Prince was now in sole charge of the company. The clerk asked Prince to pay the £25 owing but received no reply. Eventually the town council decided that Parr and Sinclair were responsible as they had signed, but resolved not to spend money to enforce the decision.
At a benefit performance by Arthur Prince and Jim at the beginning of September 1902, the audience were fascinated and greatly amused by Jim who said, ‘he had gone to London to have his wires and internal arrangements repaired in Waterloo Road’. The troupe continued their pattern of annual summer appearances at Llandridnod Wells, and winter engagements in London and other parts of the country.
Music Halls
Arthur also worked independently of the Pierrot troupe. By 1901 he was on the large Moss Empire circuit and his agent was George Egbert. The following year Prince was still touring the Moss theatres appearing alongside various variety acts, and in November he was on the same bill with Diavolero, a baboon who looped the loop on a bicycle.
From 1902 Arthur began a four-year contract to appear in London at the Palace Theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue and the Victoria Palace. He was incredibly popular, and the contract was continually renewed.
That year, Arthur and Jim were appearing at the London Pavilion when he met the singer and dancer Ida Rene. She was born as Louisa Ida Booth in 1882 in Streatham. Arthur and Ida appeared in theatres with major stars such as the famous comedians Harry Tate, George Robey, and Dan Leno.
In August 1905 Arthur Prince and the Pierrot troupe performed again in Llandridnod Wells and by now Ida Rene had joined them. They married in April 1908 in Seacombe Cheshire, and on the certificate Ida said she was Louise Ida Welsh a widow, and her father was Joseph Booth a deceased electrical engineer. Their daughter Mary was born in Maidenhead on 2 September 1911.
Arthur Prince in America
Arthur and Ida had a contract with the Keith vaudeville circuit and first appeared in September 1905 at the Orpheum in Minneapolis. The act was very successful, and Arthur appeared many times in America. In 1907 August he was at Hammerstein’s Roof Garden in New York, and there were also American tours in October 1909, and 1914 – 1915 when he appeared at Keith’s Colonial Theatre on Broadway in February. On another tour, Arthur and his son Donald travelled to New York in September 1926.
Arthur rented a flat at 20 Cavendish Mansions, Mill Lane West Hampstead, from 1906 to 1908. In December 1907 he was sued in Cardiff by his pianist Frank Harold Victor Hooper, who claimed Arthur had not paid him for his season’s work with the Pierrots when they played at Weston and Redcar. Hooper won the case and was awarded £21.
In April 1910 Arthur and Jim were invited by Prince Edward and the Princess of Wales to perform at Marlborough House for Princess Mary’s 13th birthday party.
World War One
Arthur and Ida returned from another American tour on 28 March 1915. He joined up at the end of April as a Lieutenant in the Royal Field Artillery and did his last show at the Victoria Palace at the end of May before beginning training. In April 1916 Arthur was still appearing at the Alhambra before he was sent to France. While Arthur was in the Army, Ida continued to perform in London.
During the Somme offensive of July to November 1916, a shell blew off half of Jim’s head. Arthur’s division was next sent to Macedonia in Northern Greece where he was wounded. In September 1917 he was recovering in a hospital in Salonika before being sent to Malta to recuperate. While he was there, at the end of November and December 1917, Arthur entertained 3,000 troops. Jim was given the rank of an ‘unpaid supernumerary acting bombardier’. In the act Jim talked about his problems of working with mules, which the troops found very funny. Arthur used this story when he returned the music halls.
In 1918 Arthur was granted six months exemption from military service at the beginning of May. He used the time to work on the stage, and in May and June he toured in Manchester and Newcastle. In July and August he was back at the Victoria Palace.
From 1920 to 1927 Arthur, Ida and their daughter Mary, lived at Tudor House, Tenderden Grove in Hendon.
Tudor House today
On 22 December 1922, Arthur took part in the star-studded first Royal Command Performance, appearing before King George V and Queen Mary at the London Hippodrome.
In March 1924 he travelled to Sydney for a tour in Australia.
John Logie Baird and Stooky Bill
In 1924 John Logie Baird was experimenting with television in his laboratory at 22 Frith Street, but the system required powerful lights which were too hot for human faces. Arthur Prince gave Baird a dummy head, which he called Stooky Bill (a Scots word for plaster), and this was used in the experiments. The recent Doctor Who TV story called ‘The Giggle’ (2023), is loosely based on Stooky Bill.
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John Logie Baird with Stooky Bill (right) and a second dummy called James.
‘Ourselves’
In 1926 Arthur hired the Garrick Theatre in Charing Cross Road for three months, where he produced a variety show which was similar to his old Pierrot act. It was called ‘Ourselves’ and was written and performed by the cast of young singers, dancers, comedians, and even included a Russian ballet dancer. It was designed as a showcase for the new performers.
Arthur was dressed as the Jester and introduced the acts who were called Pierrot Rose, Pierrot Mauve etc. He worked with a new life-size dummy called Monty, instead of Jim, for his ventriloquism act. In addition, with heavy makeup, he became a bizarre man-ape who killed a girl and an elderly professor, in a strange Grand Guignol act. This mystified the audience and the critics and was soon dropped. Arthur also sang, danced, and performed as a ‘siffleur’ comedy whistler. The show opened on 31 May to mixed, but generally negative reviews. While Arthur was praised, the critics found the other acts too much like a seaside concert party rather than a West End show. It closed after a few weeks and Arthur lost a lot of money.
The 1930s
By 1930 Ida and Arthur had moved to 9 Wish Road in Hove.
On 12 June 1931 Arthur again traveled to Australia this time accompanied by his assistant, a young actress and singer called Julie Hartley Milburn. She was born as Gertrude Hartley Milburn and used the stage name of Julie. Her younger sister Molly (Margaret) was also an actress. From 1920 to 1926 they lived at 22a Belsize Park Gardens, where their father James Hartley Milburn was a theatrical agent. Julie appeared in the films Sonia (1921), A Woman of No Importance (1921) and The Loves of Mary, Queen of Scots (1923). People queued to see her stage performance in The Street Singer (1924).
During the tour Arthur had an affair with Julie. Ida sued for divorce on the grounds of adultery and was granted an order of judicial separation on 23 October 1933. At the time she was living with daughter Mary at 6 Elmwood Crecent, in Kingsbury NW9. Arthur did not defend the divorce which was finalised in October 1934.
In 1937 and 1939, Ida and Mary were living at The Worth, 79 Mile Oak Road, Portslade, Brighton. Ida, aged 62, died on 9 July 1944 in Shoreham by the Sea, and a month later Arthur married Julie on 8 August 1944 in St James’s Spanish Place, Marylebone.
Bankruptcy
On 26 November 1932 a bankruptcy order was served on Arthur Prince. At the time he was living in Abercorn Mansions Abercorn Place, in St John’s Wood. The creditors met on 8 December, and Arthur’s liabilities were about £5,000 of which £4,000 was for unpaid income tax and £1,000 were loans from friends. His assets were less than £500. He said his income over the last three years had not exceeded £500.
Arthur had cumulative debts. Unfortunately, he had made no provision to pay tax on his considerable earnings from 1919 to 1922. In 1922 he had been confronted with a demand for income tax and super tax which he said came as a ‘bombshell’. The claim was eventually agreed at £2,500. His contract for the 1931 Australian ten-week tour was for a salary of £275 a week. But owing to labour disputes he only received this for one week, and then he received £175 for four weeks. There was no engagement at all for the last five weeks. Then an American tour had failed because of adverse conditions.
At the hearing on 14 March 1933, Arthur also said he had lost £5,000 on the production of ‘Ourselves’. He was discharged from bankruptcy on 11 July 1933.
In the 1939 register, Arthur and Julie were still living at 23 Abbey Court, Abbey Road (not far from the Abbey Road Studios). In 1941 Gertrude Hartley Milburn changed her name by deed poll to Julie Arthur Prince.
After several weeks of illness, Arthur Prince died at Abbey Court on 14 April 1948 of liver cancer. He was buried with his dummy Jim, in Hampstead Cemetery. A large number of friends and performers, including fellow ventriloquist Arthur Brough, Bud Flanagan and Tessie O’Shea, attended the funeral of the man they called ‘The Master’.
The following year Julie died aged 45, and was buried in the same grave as Arthur.
Films
Arthur appeared in three silent films which are not easily available now. The first, ‘Spiritualism Exposed’ (1926), sometimes called ‘False Spiritualism Exposed’, was the most controversial as spiritualism had become very popular after the death of so many people during the Great War. The film concerns a woman who has tried repeatedly, but unsuccessfully, to speak with her dead mother through a number of mediums and has become mentally unbalanced. Arthur played the part of a Harley Street psychologist who accompanies her to a séance and shows how the mediums used tricks to achieve the effects.
In January Prince gave a talk and demonstration at The Magicians Club when he said all mediums were fakes. But he did not know that Dennis Bradley, a well-known spiritualist and author, was in the audience. When the room was darkened for a mock séance, Bradley protested loudly calling out ‘You don’t know what you are talking about!’ A row broke out between Bradley and the audience of professional magicians.
To publicise the film, in March Arthur gave a similar demonstration to journalists at the Pavilion Studios in Esher who made the film which was directed by A.E. Coleby. Arthur produced a number of ingenious devices he had obtained while undertaking an investigation for the American Government into fake mediums. He showed how the mediums produced floating trumpets, table rapping, and wrote spirit messages on slates.
Not surprisingly, spiritualist groups strongly attacked the film. Its critics included Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the most famous advocate of spiritualism. He said that in his 30-years’ experience he had only come across four dishonest mediums and just two people who had become mentally unbalanced by spiritualism.
Prince also appeared as a lawyer in ‘Account Rendered’ (1932), and as himself with Jim in the film ‘In Town Tonight’ (1935) which showed several acts from the London stage.
Monty
Monty was a life-size robot dummy which Arthur constructed and first used in his 1926 show ‘Ourselves’. He improved it over the next five years and in a sketch called ‘A Night in New York’ he and Monty appear as drunken revellers in evening dress, holding balloons and emerging from a bar or speakeasy. They talk to each other and then meet a lady and a New York cop. The dummy was so life-like that some critics believed it was a real person. Arthur used Monty at the Shepherds Bush Empire in February 1931 and on his Australian tour later that year. He also had Monty in a naval uniform for a show in February 1944 in Streatham Hill.
Don Prince
When he grew up, Don Prince first worked with his father and did some acting. In 1927 he moved to America where he became the publicity manager for RKO Films at the Rockefeller Centre in New York. RKO stands for Radio Keith Orpheum and was formed at the end of the 1920s after several mergers from the original chain of theatres. So, it is possible that Don used his contacts made during Arthur’s American tours to start work in RKO.
He was very successful as a publicity manager, popular with both the movie stars and the staff at RKO. When America entered the War, he served in the American Army. After the War, in 1946 Don was sent to England as the foreign publicity manager for RKO. He returned to America with his wife Jeanne, and he died in 1983 in Los Angeles. In 1960 he wrote an autobiographical novel called ‘Reflections in a Glass Eye’, as seen through the eyes of a ventriloquist dummy.
Arthur’s technique
Arthur Prince was a member of the Magicians Club of London, formed by his friend Will Goldston in 1911 as a rival of the Magic Circle. Arthur was also prominent in the Water Rats, variety’s own benevolent society. In 1921 he wrote a book called ‘The Whole Art of Ventriloquism’.
Prince was the first ventriloquist to drink a glass of beer while his dummy continued to speak. Jim Steinmeyer, the leading authority on the history of magic, told us this was probably achieved by using a trick glass. Jim contacted the well-known American ventriloquist Jay Johnson on our behalf. Jay who greatly admired Arthur Prince, pointed out that the dummy said, ‘Going…, Going…, Gone’ while Arthur drinks. Jay found that with practice he could repeat the effect using three glottal stops as he gulped the drink. Jay is convinced that although other ventriloquists may have used a trick glass, Arthur was really drinking.
There are several short films of Arthur and Jim on YouTube. Here is one.
Who was Arthur Prince?
Despite considerable research, we have not been able to find a birth record for Arthur Prince around 1880. On his three marriage certificates Arthur consistently says his father was Louis Le Prince, and on the first certificate he gives his occupation as a hairdresser.
There was a Louis Le Prince from Metz in France, who in October 1888 made what is claimed to be the first moving picture film of his family when he lived in Leeds. Louis planned to unveil his invention and was due to catch a train from Dijon to Paris in September 1890, but he mysteriously disappeared and was never seen again. The were various rumours of suicide or murder about his death. But we do not believe he was Arthur’s father.
We found a French-born hairdresser called Eugene Louis Le Prince at 46 Carnaby Street in the 1891 census. On the previous 1881 census, there is a Joseph Le Prince aged 4 months, who is shown as the grandchild of William Reynolds, a widowed pensioner aged 57, at 30 Great Barlow Street in Marylebone. His daughter is Arabella aged 24 and unmarried, born in India. (William had been a soldier with the British Army in India). We now think that Joseph was the illegitimate son of Eugene Louis Le Prince and Arabella Reynolds, who assumed the name Arthur Prince to hide his illegitimacy.
We would like to thank Dr Tony Lidington for permission to use the Llandridnod Wells photo from his collection. Here is a short film about Pierrot troupes made by Tony.
We are very grateful to Jim Steinmeyer and Jay Johnson for their help and technical knowledge.
Jim Steinmeyer is the author of several books on the history of magic, including ‘Hiding the Elephant’, 2005.
Jay appeared for many years as the ventriloquist Chuck Campbell with his dummy Bob in the America TV comedy ‘Soap’. He also had a very successful one man show on Broadway with his puppet monkey Darwin. Here is a clip of his act from YouTube.
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