Since first finding and falling in love with Liza Lehmann's musical settings of some of the Behind the Nightlight stories in June this year, it's been an adventure bringing them to the stage! 

So some thanks are in order:

• to Edward Picton-Turbervill for meeting with me after the Radio 3 recording and going through the pieces, and Tom Carradine for recording some backing tracks to experiment with
• ​to the Alternative Comedy Memorial Society and Lose Your Marbles Comedy for allowing me to experiment with The Blue Gueeze at their new material nights
• to Sarah Rose and Dusty Limits for saying yes to the idea of the Being Human Festival event
• to the Being Human Festival, and the CAA, RCSSD, Muriel Matters Society, and Francis Routh Trust for making the BH event possible
• to Janie Dee for her creative directing
• to Melinda Hughes for inviting us to Chelsea Arts Club
• to Brydges Place and David at the Museum of Comedy 
• to my agent Georgi at Gag Reflex Management 
• to the many friends who have been supportive and enthusiastic! Thank you all.

The whole show continues to evolve and I'm thrilled to have been able to include research as well as other music by Liza Lehmann in the show, including a piece from her score for the 1904 West End hit "Sergeant Brue" and one of the songs from her "Nonsense Songs from Alice in Wonderland" series from 1911. 

The next performance is on the 29th January at Crazy Coqs in Piccadilly Circus - here's the link: www.brasseriezedel.com/events/ada-campe-behind-the-nightlight-quaint-beasts-in-an-edwardian-nursery/?instance_id=1855088

I was thrilled to be asked to present a BBC Radio 3 Sunday Feature about Actresses' Franchise League member and composer Liza Lehmann in June 2025. Here's a link to the programme, and some of my research that didn't make it into the edit.

 That's the first verse of The Awakening by American poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox, set to music in January 1911 by composer Teresa del Riego.
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​I discovered del Riego’s name when looking for histories of women composers at the Proms and cross-referencing the names with my research into the work of Edwardian theatre and entertainment professionals who supported the Votes for Women campaign. 

Part of the joy of research is finding surprises in archives, newspapers, autobiographies and ephemera.
Often these stories don't fit the narrative of whatever writing task is at hand at that moment and so get forgotten, but since 2017 I've been thrilled to give many of them a wider audience  on BBC Radio 3's Time Traveller series - broadcast every morning just after 10am as part of the live Essential Classics programme on Radio 3 and then subsequently collated into themes for the Time Traveller podcast. Through this series I've been able to tell over twenty stories from the past about magic, art, sport, theatre, music, dance, and of course the suffrage campaign.

My Time Traveller piece broadcast on BBC Radio 3's Essential Classics on Thursday 8th February 2018, was entitled 'Suffragettes on the Run' - and you can listen to it here (it's 1hr and 12 minutes into the programme)

Music Hall star and Actresses' Franchise League member Marie Lloyd, no stranger to campaigning for the rights of performers within the theatrical profession, lent her support to suffrage societies by singing at the WFL’s Old World Fair at Caxton Hall in 1909 as part of a series of concerts to raise funds, and appearing in How The Vote Was Won in the same year, presumably as the character of Maudie Spark, the music hall comedienne. As an influential, wealthy and famous performer, she was able to support the sisterhood of suffragists in unique ways. One such gesture involved her allowing her theatrical hamper to be used to smuggle a militant speaker into a meeting at the London Pavilion in 1913. Marked ‘Marie Lloyd, Pavilion. Luggage in advance,’ the hamper contained the WSPU speaker Annie Kenney, who was out of prison on licence after a period of hunger-striking and subject to immediate re-arrest under the ‘Cat and Mouse’ Act if she appeared in public.

Kenney wrote about the incident in her autobiography, Memories of a Militant, recalling the workmen who unknowingly delivered her to the theatre in the hamper making ‘growls…about the weight, about actresses having no consideration for the poor men who had to carry their baggage, and so on. I was turned, toppled, banged, dropped, before one of them got me (in my hamper, of course) on to his back.’ 

The ruse worked, and despite the police officers stationed around the entrances to the theatre, Kenney made it inside unnoticed. 

The London Pavilion was a regular site for WSPU meetings in 1913, and the building that housed the theatre is still a prominent part of Piccadilly Circus. I remember it housing waxworks music show 'Rock Circus' when I was a child and it most recently was the site of Ripley's Believe it or Not. Built in 1885, it functioned as a music hall and variety venue until 1912, when it became the home of a string of musicals. as well as mixed bills. You can see a London Pavilion programme from 1913 here - and on the bill is a performance by Graham Moffat's company of Scottish Players. Moffat was a suffragist and the author of suffrage play 'The Maid and the Magistrate', published by the AFL. His wife, actress Maggie Moffat, was the second Scottish suffragist to be imprisoned for campaigning, when she was arrested in 1907. The Glasgow WSPU delegate for the Women's Parliament in Caxton Hall, Maggie Moffat was one of fifty-three women arrested when mounted police broke up a group of women marching peacefully to the House of Commons with a resolution for the Prime Minister. She was subsequently imprisoned in the second division in Holloway. 

But back to the story in question!