VOtes for Children & A staircase matinee - Ernest hutchinson and italia conti

More archive fun!

Ernest Hutchinson's 1913 short play Votes for Children has intrigued me since I first read the manuscript in the LCP Collection at the British Library.  Described with some glee in the LCO Readers Report as "a lively skit upon the agitation of female militants for votes", the piece is set in the offices of the fictional CSPU - the Children's Social and Political Union - and requires a mixed cast of children and adults. Hutchinson subtitles the play "A Comedy of the Future", and in this futuristic world children are campaigning for the right to vote at age six, the Prime Minister is a woman, and her husband who is the Home Secretary has been kidnapped by the leader of the CSPU, their daughter Rosabel. ​

I would describe it as a gently pointed pastiche of the WSPU and popular tropes surrounding militants. The children in the play stage photographs of the arrest of one of their peers, send two children with terrible colds to a classical music concert to disrupt it by sneezing and coughing, and organise a parade of motorised prams outside a jail where child suffrage prisoners are being held. While it could be seen to be mocking the suffrage movement, the performance conditions surrounding that make it seem unlikely to have been considered anti-suffrage propaganda. The play was performed at a special event held by Actresses' Franchise League member Italia Conti's students at the Little Theatre, a venue managed by League member Gertrude Kingston and situated opposite the League offices in central London. Kingston opened the theatre in 1910 with a production of Lysistrata that had been given a suffragist twist by Laurence Housman. Bernard Shaw’s Fanny’s First Play opened at the Little Theatre in April 1911 with Actresses' Franchise League members Lillah McCarthy and Cicely Hamilton in the cast. The play ran for 622 performances, the longest run of any of Shaw’s plays.

But who was Ernest Hutchinson? In April Italia Conti created a competition for a short play to be produced on the staircase at Stafford House in London, the residence of the Duke of Sutherland and originally built for Frederick Duke of York in the 1820s. The conditions of the competition were that the play should be able to be produced "anywhere, at any time; that no scenery should be required, the play to stand or fall entirely on its merits and the art of the actors. Three characters only were allowed, and the scene was to take not more than thirty minutes to perform." (Morning Leader, 28 April 1911)

According to theatrical newspaper The Era there were 158 entries to the competition. 28 year old Ernest Hutchinson won with The Fulfilment,  narrowly beating an entry by an Irish female playwright.

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"Manchester Man Wins Competition in Connection with Stafford House Matinee"
​(Daily Mirror, 11 May 1911)
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Hutchinson was born in 1884 to a wealthy family in Bury who owned and ran a cotton spinning mill. Educated at Dover College where he was also editor of the school journal, he studied at the University of Manchester's Faculty of Technology from 1903-6 and then got a qualification in Cotton Spinning from City and Guilds of London before going into the family business (Dover College Register, 1871-1910). He subsequently left to work as a secretary to Montague Barlow, a barrister who became Conservative Party MP for South Shields in 1910. Hutchinson was also clearly interested in theatre - his obituary later stated that he was an original member of the Manchester Playgoers' Club and that he was a friend of Stanley Houghton - but appears not to have written any professionally produced plays before The Fulfilment.

Hutchinson's play was produced as part of a mixed bill on the stairs and landing that also included a recitation by suffragist actor Henry Ainley, an overture by the Herr Elderhust String Band, a musical extravaganza written by Rutland Barrington, singing by the boys of the Chapel Royal Savoy, and some dances by Conti's students including Phyllis Bourke making her debut appearance, a young Esmé Wynne, and Mavis Yorke who had made her professional debut aged 9 at the Savoy Theatre six months earlier.

The basic plot of The Fulfilment seems to revolve around a military officer who aged 25 has returned injured from deployment in India having been given only a few months to live. He meets his fiancee at a social event, informs her that he can no longer marry her and urges her to forget him and move on, but she refuses. 

The performance of The Fulfilment was described as "a simple and well-told little story" (The Sphere, 20 May 1911)  and "well-received" (The Era, 13 May 1911) with the Daily News noting that as the piece was about "meeting and parting... if anything, the setting enhanced that effect." (Daily News, 12 May 1911)

Harold Deacon, Italia Conti, and Arthur Wontner during the performance of Hutchinson's play 'The Fulfilment'. Daily Mirror - Friday 12 May 1911. From www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk Image © Reach PLC. Image created courtesy of THE BRITISH LIBRARY BOARD.

Hutchinson's next play was Votes for Children, produced by Conti at the Little Theatre on the 18th November 1913, reviewed in The Queen, The Lady's Newspaper as "very amusing, and smartly written and acted." (The Queen, 6 December 1913). The play was given as one of three afternoon charity matinees produced by Conti to showcase her pupils, and under the patronage of Princess Louise with proceeds given to the Victoria Hospital for Children (Globe, 24 November 1913, London Evening Standard, 25 November 1913). By taking a playful approach to political issues and activism for an audience that not only included the young performers but also their friends and families supporting in the audience, Conti’s decision to stage Votes for Children shows that she was unafraid bring her suffragist sympathies into her professional work as an educator. She was also introducing her students to the stage as a place to engage directly and confidently with political ideas. 

​Children were regular participants in suffrage entertainments, and suffrage societies specifically for children and young people included the Drummers Union, founded in 1909 by four members of the WSPU Drum and Fife Band, which welcomed girls and boys from ages 6 to 21 "to join with others in doing something, however small, towards breaking down sex and class prejudice" (Drummers Union pamphlet, 1909). Children performed as dancers, as musicians, as newspaper sellers, and performances of new suffrage plays were written and staged for and by the members of the Drummers Union and the Young Purple, White and Green Club, which were both affiliated with the WSPU. ​

We recorded an extract from his 1913 play as part of my collaboration with feminist production hub Scary Little Girls for the fourth season of their Salon de la Vie project in June and July 2021.
The first Salon was entitled Votes for Children and explored the young people who supported the suffrage movement and found their own voice in the process.

The full episode is below - with performances by Gemma Bond, Maroussia Frank, Sajeela Kershi, and Jamie Newall.

Hutchinson's next play was produced at by Annie Horniman at the Gaiety in Manchester in October 1914, another short piece called Complaints described as " a one-act Lancashire comedy" (Manchester Courier, 24 October 1914) about the cotton trade. It was written in Lancashire dialect. War service followed in France and Belguim with the Royal Field Artillery and the Royal Horse Artillery until he was invalided home from the front in 1916. He then worked in the War Office contract department where his expertise in the cotton industry was useful. (https://www.apigintime.net/post/put-your-pig-in-his-place)

After the war Hutchinson moved to live near the Little Theatre on Adam Street. He had two more plays produced - The Home Wind (1917) in Bolton and The Right to Strike (1920) at the Garrick Theatre in the West End. The play was a success, and working with writer and adaptor George Goodchild, Hutchinson turned it into a novel of the same name, published in 1921.

Hutchinson died in November 1921 at the age of 36 from heart failure after an operation. His obituaries stated that The Right to Strike had had a successful production in New York in October 1921, and that when he died he had a full length play in pre-production with a London management (The Stage, 10 November 1921; Nottingham Journal, 8 November 1921). The Right to Strike was produced as a silent film in 1923.

It's clear that Hutchinson had a passion for playwriting, the financial means to support himself, and an interest and close connection with politics and industry. Italia Conti gave him his first break into the theatre industry and nurtured his talent - enabling his work to go from a staircase in London to professional stages in London, Manchester, and on Broadway. Curiously enough and in a neat coincidence with the Little Theatre in London, the Comedy Theatre in New York where his play was produced in 1921 had been the venue for a run of Shaw's Fanny's First Play from 1912-1913, as well as Scottish suffragist playwright Graham Moffat's Bunty Pulls The Strings in 1911. I do hope he was a supporter of Votes for Women, given his connections!