"Cinderella" - Doris Lytton's soft shoe Side hustle

"I am energetic. I must do something in addition to play-acting...
Artists ought certainly to do something besides acting... they should have something to fall back on... they must remember that it is unusual nowadays for a play to run for a year. We cannot afford to be out of work in these days."
​Doris Lytton quoted inThe Era, 7th December 1921

As a drama student, between acting jobs, as a PhD student, between academic jobs, and now as a freelancer I've had lots of short term, part-time jobs - things that keep the bills paid but also allow flexibility. These have predominantly been in and around West End theatres - from front of house to stage door, box office, follow spot, and as a dresser for over 25 West End shows - along with other "resting" jobs include role play for student lawyers and for trainee psychiatrists, and puppeteer for a princess's birthday party (yes, really!)  So I was seriously impressed by the initiative and ambition of actress Doris Lytton who set up and publicised her own much more permanent side hustle in 1920.

Doris was born in 1893, and was moving in suffrage and feminist theatre networks from a young age - she appeared in both Cicely Hamilton's play Diana of Dobson's in 1908 and Netta Syrett's Might is Right in 1909 while she was still as a teenager, grabbing the attention of the public and press in Inconstant George at the Prince of Wales's Theatre in 1910. Not only a successful young stage actress, she also appeared in silent films, including The Blue Bird (1910) and The Brass Bottle (1914) and on tour in the USA in 1912/13. During WW1 she helped support the AFL's Woman's Theatre project as a programme seller for the Woman's Theatre War Relief Matinees at the Pavilion Theatre in June 1915. I was cross-checking the names of those programme sellers with my other suffrage theatre research, and became curious about Doris' life and career. 

Doris Lytton as Miss Delafield, secretary to the Secret Suffrage Society and dressed as a chauffeur in "Might is Right" by Netta Syrett, produced at the Haymarket Theatre, 1909

In 1915 she married composer and musician Geoffrey Toye, who was also well connected with suffragist networks - he had worked with Mary Neal and her Espérance Girls Club collecting and arranging music for Morris and country dances. 

However it was her impressive side hustle whilst still maintaining her acting career after the First World War that really caught my attention. In 1920 she opened Cinderella, a shop in which she repaired and re-covered ladies shoes, at 28 Sackville Street, which runs between Piccadilly and Vigo Street.

Sackville Street in 1968. Number 28 is nearest the camera on the right hand side of the picture, with the brown frontage. “London - Sackville Street” by Roger W, CC BY-SA 2.0

​The 1963 Survey of London records number 28 as being the largest house on Sackville Street, with two shop fronts on the ground floor. Most of the houses were built in the 1730s as residential properties, but some were used as commercial buildings from the mid eighteenth century onwards. In the 1730s there was a cheesemonger at no. 25, an apothecary at no. 17, a coffee house at no.23 , and The Sunderland Arms tavern at no. 25 - and by 1830 the street had 32 tradesmen listed in the Post Office directory, including 13 tailors. 

Close to the Royal Academy of Arts, Sackville Street was home to many creatives including the actor Charles Kemble at no. 6, and author, artist, and sculptor Anne Damer at no. 30. In Jane Austen's 1811 novel Sense and Sensibility the Dashwood sisters visit a jeweller called "Gray's" there, a reference to real goldsmith and jeweller Thomas Gray who sold his wares from no. 41.

However it was also home to solicitors, tailors, and medical professionals. There is a green plaque on no. 32 commemorating aural surgeon James Yearley who founded the Metropolitan Ear Institute there in 1838, and  Anaesthetist Dr John Snow, probably best remembered for his pioneering work on cholera in Soho,  lived and worked from no. 18 from 1852 until his death in 1858.

Number 28 was a hive of activity across the 19th and early 20th centuries. The research for this blog post was thoroughly derailed by looking into the many businesses at the house and imagining the variety of people going in and out - for example, on any Friday in 1844 and 1845 between 11 and 4 you could visit Dr Joseph Weiss to discuss the benefits of the Cold Water Cure offered at his Hydropathic Establishment near Richmond in Surrey.  In March 1846 a Rev. Henry Butterfield MA offered treatments for "Stammering, and all Cases of Defective Speech", with his training system that "combining a Classical and Mathematical Course" ran on Tuesdays from 11-2 and Thursdays and Saturdays from 2-4pm. [Morning Herald, 2 March 1846]

Part or all of the building may have been turned into the Draper's Hotel c. 1866-1869, which seems to have become The Sackville Hotel by the late 1890s. Women entrepreneurs are active in the early twentieth century - in March 1905 you could visit the house daily for "Electric Vibration Treatment" from an L. Hichens, in April 1908 you could purchase Eridon Soap for a clear complexion from Mrs Maurice Wilson, and in May 1908 you could visit The Sackville Mechano-Therapeutic Institute for "Radiant-Heat, Light, and Nauheim Treatments, Electric Vibration, General Massage, Pine and Electric Baths" which was run by a former nurse. [For more details and a photo see the Christmas edition of Truth from 25 December 1909]

The Sackville Gallery opened in 1908 at no. 28, famously held a  Futurists exhibition in 1912,  and was probably still active when Doris Lytton opened her venture in 1920.  In 1911 you could inspect an Atlas Motor car in a showroom run by the Atlas Motor Syndicate. The Œuvre du Vêtement des Soldats Belges was founded in 1915 to provide clothing, food, and comforts for the Belgian Army, the Mayor of Westminster and the War Savings Committee opened a Bureau of Information there in 1919, and in the same year tailor and breeches maker D. S. Morris moved into number 28 from next door to sell his wares, advertising his business in the London newspapers at that address until the early 1930s.

When "Cinderella" opened in 1920 the venture was covered widely in the press. Many articles mentioned the genteel appearance of the shop, designed to attract society ladies, theatricals, and dancers wishing to discreetly economise by prolonging the life of their shoes with new velvet, satin, or brocade.

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"Cinderella could hardly have prized her glass slippers more than some of our clients prize their old ballroom friends"
Doris Lytton quoted in the Washington Times, 24 July 1920

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The Weekly Dispatch reported in May 1920 that the shop on Sackville Street was "furnished with treasures collected by Miss Lytton during her travels" including a Burmese cabinet, Chippendale chairs and a carved Spanish dressing table, and decorative elements such as a panel of Chinese embroidery, and some coloured glass Italian bottle stoppers. 

There are some images of the interior of 28 Sackville Street taken in 1969 on the London Picture Archive website.  Here's one of a decorative panel in the ground floor front room www.londonpicturearchive.org.uk/view-item?i=140924 - of the decorative ceiling in the first floor front room www.londonpicturearchive.org.uk/view-item?i=140927 - and of the fireplace in the first floor rear room www.londonpicturearchive.org.uk/view-item?i=140928

American trade magazine The Shoe Repairer and Dealer reported that the shop was charging up to $10 for recovering a pair of evening dress shoes, noting that "when it is remembered that prices reach as high as $50.00, and their life is invariably brief, there should be a promising future for this interesting business." (1 October, 1920)

The venture certainly seems to have been successful. By June 1921 Doris was advertising that bags could also be recovered, and hats repainted. The interest in Doris as an actress as well as an entrepreneur meant that little anecdotes about the shop were also shared in the press - invaluable publicity for a small business owner:​

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Last week an old lady came in and asked if Miss Lytton could recover her shoes.
"Certainly," she replied. "Where are they?"
"That's what I want to know," replied the old lady. "I lost them in the Bakerloo Tube on Tuesday evening"

'Re-covery and Recovery', Liverpool Echo, 19th December 1921

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Her listing in Who's Who in the Theatre reveals that Doris was still busy working as an actress at the same time as she was running her shop. She told The Era "I spend all my off-time at the shop. When I have to play at a matinée my partner carries on herself, as the business cannot be left alone." She appeared in Gertrude Jennings' play Husbands for All at the Little Theatre in 1920, French Leave at the Globe Theatre in 1921, The Fulfilling of the Law at the Garrick and A Matter of Fact at the Comedy in 1921, Thank you, Phillips! at the Aldwych in 1922, Trespasses at the Duke of York's in 1923, and in 1924 alongside Flora Robson and a 20 year old John Gielgud in Mr Pim Passes By at Oxford Playhouse. 

In 1925 she would appear in the silent film Mutiny, and return to the West End that same year in The Madras House at the Ambassadors Theatre, and continue working as a performer well into the 1930s. It appears that Cinderella closed a couple of years after it opened, although Doris may have sold the business on to someone who changed the name and the location. In the late 1920s and early 1930s she also featured often in the press for her sporting interests as a keen golfer, tennis player, and traveller.

During WWII she joined the BBC repertory drama company, and took to cookery writing publishing United We Cook with the Wine and Food Society in 1943, described as "An ingenious shopping and cooking lesson conducted by two amateurs in the form of a dialogue, with an appendix containing some thirty recipes" (The Queen, 11 August 1943) She divorced her husband but kept his surname in her new venture as a writer of a cookery column for Vogue magazine from 1945-1947, publishing a book of her recipes in 1947 as Doris Lytton Toye.  Sadly she died just six years later in 1953 after a period of depression and illness.

I admire her boldness with her Cinderella venture - as an actress in her late twenties she clearly found a small but lucrative gap in the market that showed she was business minded outside of the theatre and could use her public profile to her advantage. She was prepared to prioritise her venture over her theatre networking too:

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"There is more leisure in the acting profession than in business. But instead of spending my mornings in bed... I go to work in Sackville-street... Nor do I go to dances and suppers after my night's work at the theatre. I go home so I can be more or less fresh next morning. I conserve a little bit of energy for my business; we cannot work all day and be out at night.

I love my business; I love acting, too." 

Doris Lytton in The Era, 7 December 1921

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​Perhaps she was inspired by working with so many suffragist and feminist writers and performers so early in her career to see herself as a business woman as well as an artist. Good for her!