Frank Travis

Photo: Ventriloquist Central Blog

Folks, I love a performer who names himself into being. He was born Francis Henry Thackeray in Scarborough, on the Yorkshire coast, the eldest of four, on January 18, 1854.^[3][1] By the time he was through, he had turned that name into “Lieutenant Frank Travis, The Society Ventriloquist,” a billing so good that royalty asked for it by name.^[2] He worked seven figures at once. He taught his own wife the trade and gave her equal billing. He got run out of a French city by a mob of angry students. And he never once wrote down the one thing everybody actually wanted to know. Pull up a chair. This one has everything.

A painted hand and a lucky door

He did not start with a figure at all. Barnstorming small halls around Yorkshire as a young man (a clubroom stage built out of tables at Wombwell, the whole orchestra a single cornet, no more and no less), Travis worked solo with what he called the Talking Hand: he painted his own hand to look like an old lady’s face and worked it close enough that nobody could catch the movement.^[2] No figure. No maker. No mechanism. Just paint and nerve.

He billed himself Lieutenant Frank Travis at his first proper hall, Ben Lang’s in Manchester, then worked the Grecian, the Polytechnic at Salford (run at the time by the Sisters Byron), and Pitney Weston’s in Bolton, where the boss, in Travis’s own words, was as much at home playing a clown as he was playing Hamlet.^[2] His first week in a London hall was at the Raglan on Theobalds Road: booked for one week, held for three months.^[2]

At the Theatre Royal in Chesterfield he was booked for one week and stayed seven, and that is where he met his wife. She was playing walking-lady parts at the same house, sister-in-law to the man who ran it.^[2] He would go on to teach her the whole art.

Seven at the table

His signature was seven figures seated round a table, singing and talking with each one in turn, and he proved the count by accident, in his own memoir. On a Continental tour, house staff handed each performer a drink ticket per night. Travis kept getting seven. He thought it was an error until another act explained it: the attendant was counting his figures as members of his own “company,” and billing him for each one.^[2] Nobody set out to verify the number. A confused bartender did it for free, twice, on two separate nights.

He never gave up the smaller act either. A boy figure sat on his knee from nearly the start of his career, and Travis worked both formats his whole life: the big table spectacle and one figure up close, at the same time, for decades.^[2] That boy figure had a name, and on at least one surviving photograph the figure’s name comes before Travis’s own: “Littledon & Frank Travis, Entertainers.” Read that again. The wooden partner got top billing. That is the whole art in one line of print, and I never get tired of pointing it out.

The boy’s best line changed over the years, which is its own kind of evidence. For a while the figure hollered “He’ll throw me down.” Around the early 1890s Travis swapped in “Sticking here all night,” and by his own account it became “one of the greatest hits in my entertainment.”^[2] Travis also claimed to have originated smoking and drinking while a figure sang, timed to a song called “True Till Death,” and said it took him months of practice before he could do it in public.^[2]

The mouths themselves stayed his. He described the effect and refused to describe the mechanism: “the lips open and close in the exact relation to the words I utter,” and past that, in his own words, “the mouth movement I use is my own secret.”^[2] Stranger yet, he wrote that he worked his figures by electricity rather than pneumatic tubes, a claim nothing else from that era in this whole archive makes.^[2] He never said how it was wired or powered. And here is a detail worth sitting with: the figures were not entirely his own work. “The figures are made for me according to my instructions but are sent to me in the rough state and I add all the finishing touches myself,” he wrote. One figure alone cost him sixty pounds, its hair and mustache set in one strand at a time.^[2] The carving came from somebody else’s hands. Every surface anyone would ever examine, the paint, the hair, the finish, was Travis’s own.

The society ventriloquist

That billing was not just a slogan. Five years before he wrote his memoir, he had performed before the Prince of Wales, weaving English, French, and German songs into the same show.^[2] In Paris he played private drawing rooms for Princess Mathilde, the Duke and Duchess of Hohenlohe, Grand Duke Alexei of Russia, and the Baroness Erlanger, whose household nearly stole the whole scene. The Baroness insisted on examining the figures herself to rule out a trick, so Travis picked a page boy out of the room, a boy who spoke no English at all, took the boy’s lips between his fingers, and made him sing an English song in English, live, with no figure involved.^[2] That is the strangest paragraph in his whole book, and there is no other witness to it but him.

Before he sailed for America, the profession gave him a proper send-off: a banquet at the Fox & Hounds in Putney and a gold medal engraved with his initials, inscribed “presented to Lieut. Travis by a few friends at the Canterbury Theatre of Varieties, London, previous to his departure for America.”^[2] He was an early member of the Grand Order of Water Rats, card number 026, and of the Variety Artistes’ Federation.^[2] Royalty, Water Rats, and a full season book all ran through one man: his agent, Richard Warner, whom Travis credited with talking him back onto the stage and keeping him working steadily for years.^[2]

Believed too much, and not enough

Travis spent his career being accused of the very thing he was trying to do. In towns that had never seen a ventriloquist before, audiences decided the figures were real and that giving them a voice was a swindle. His answer was to take a figure apart in front of everyone and pass the heads around for inspection.^[2] At a fair in Leipzig the crowd hissed him off the stage, convinced he was hiding speaking tubes in the figures’ mouths, until the house manager, worried about a riot, seated a committee of local dignitaries behind him on stage mid-performance. They examined his apparatus and cleared him. From then on he closed to cheers.^[2]

And when the illusion worked, it worked the other way too. In Liverpool, during the bit where he swats the boy figure, a sailor in the gallery pulled a knife on him, certain he was watching a real child get hurt.^[2] In Brighton an older woman stood up mid-show and shouted that no Christian mother should watch such cruelty, then marched out shaking her fist.^[2] Nobody in either room forgot the boy figure. That is not a flaw in the act. That is this whole art doing exactly what it is built to do: the audience cared about the character in the chair every bit as much as the man standing over him.

His worst night on any stage had nothing to do with any of that. At the Folies Bergère in Bordeaux, Travis swore in front of the orchestra while waiting to be paid. A French musician who understood a little English took it as an insult to the nation, and the story ran round the town overnight. The next night a crowd of students marched in with red caps and sticks, demanding an apology. Travis stood center stage with his arms folded and refused: “I would never apologise to a Frenchman.” The audience answered by throwing everything they could reach onto the stage, and, in his own words, “all my figures and stage fittings were smashed to atoms.”^[2] Seventeen students were arrested in the street fighting that followed, and the chief of police came to his lodgings that night and told him to catch the six o’clock train or he would not answer for his life. Travis was on that train. He never played Bordeaux again, though he said he had good offers. If a genuine Frank Travis figure ever turns up, that riot is the first thing to check against. An entire set of his stage figures ended that night, and it may be the whole reason so few, if any, survive.

Madeline Rosa

Travis did not just marry a performer. He built one. He taught his wife the whole art of ventriloquism, and she made her debut at the Folies Bergère in Paris, billing herself Madeline Rosa, “the world’s first lady ventriloquist,” working six figures of her own.^[3] A Sacramento critic who watched them work America together gave both of them equal credit in the same sentence, writing that “Rosa and Travis have studied the nicety of these distinctions” that make an ear believe a voice is coming from somewhere it is not.^[7] They billed as a working ventriloquial couple in England from around 1881.^[4] Travis performed with other partners too. In 1910 he returned to Australia with the music-hall dancer Miss Marjorie Dean, born Margaret Daniels, in an act called The Tramp Ventriloquist at the Tivoli in Melbourne.^[3] But Madeline Rosa was the one he built from nothing, in a trade that gave women almost no room at all.

Frank Travis

A formal studio portrait, the “Society Ventriloquist” off the music-hall stage and out of costume.

Photo via FamousFix

Madeline Rosa

Billed “Ventriloquiste Anglaise, Tout Seul au Monde” on this poster from around 1881, the pupil Travis made into a headline act of her own.

Photo via Ventriloquist Central

Across the water

Travis crossed the Atlantic enough times that even he lost count in his own memoir, writing only of “two trips, each thirty-six weeks.” The American papers now show a third. In January 1889 he played the Grand Opera House in Wheeling, West Virginia, and the local paper called him “about the finest ventriloquist ever seen in Wheeling.”^[6] Two months later, at the Clunie Opera House in Sacramento, a critic wrote the fullest assessment of his act on record anywhere: “Travis… is unquestionably the finest ventriloquial performer who has ever appeared here, better, even, than the famous Blitz, and judging from historic accounts, superior to Houdin.”^[7] The same review explained, correctly, why the trick works at all: the ear locates a sound by its character, not its direction, and a performer who masters that fools people every time.^[7]

By the fall of 1890, Washington billed him as “Europe’s premier ventriloquist,” then it was on to St. Paul and a full night at the New Park Theatre in Brooklyn, sharing a bill with jugglers from Portugal, acrobats from Portugal, xylophone players from Moscow, and a skirt dancer from England.^[8] In 1896 he played twelve weeks at Hammerstein’s new house in New York. Out west, at the Orpheum in San Francisco, an old, half-blind ventriloquist of the previous generation, a man Travis calls Professor James, handled his figures and came away, in Travis’s own words, “thunderstruck at the mechanical arrangements.”^[2] One professional examining another professional’s work is about as good a review as this trade has to offer.

The record that almost went missing

Nearly everything we know about Frank Travis in his own words survives because one family kept it and one researcher pushed. In 2010 a woman signing herself Justine wrote to Ventriloquist Central asking what the site knew about her great-grandfather. Told that was all the information they had, she sent back everything she had found.^[5] Years later the fuller story surfaced: her name is Justine Sara, and her family had held twenty-seven typewritten pages of his memoirs the whole time, which she transcribed and gave away for free.^[2]

Even the memoir’s own age is a small piece of detective work. Travis mentions his voice regimen, lemon water each morning, cocoa with no milk or sugar, nothing after four in the afternoon, and credits it to “the late Sir Morrell Mackenzie,” a leading throat specialist in Europe who had treated the German Emperor Frederick III.^[2] Mackenzie died in February 1892. Calling him “the late” means the memoir was written after that, and other details inside it (a New York booking “in ’96,” a trip to America still ahead of him) narrow it to around 1897, years before the Australian tour that made him famous.

And the memoir breaks off mid-sentence. Travis promises to explain “the art called ventriloquism” and give any reader “practical hints” on how to learn it, writes a few hundred words of history about the Oracle at Delphi, and simply stops. His transcriber says she does not know if the rest was lost or if that was all he ever wrote.^[2] The one thing he promised to teach, the thing everybody actually wanted, never made it to the page.

He kept working long past the years his obituary remembered him for. A poster from the Royal Standard Music Hall, Easter Monday 1903, is held in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s own collection, and it puts “Lieut. Travis, Ventriloquist” on the same bill as Florrie Forde, one of the biggest names in British music hall.^[9] That is a decade past his first Australian tour and years past the memoir. He did not fade out as a Victorian curiosity. He kept booking first-class London halls well into the Edwardian years.

Frank Travis died at Lambeth on June 28, 1931, after a long illness, and was cremated at West Norwood.^[3] Seventy-seven years old, and to the very end, the mouth movement stayed his own secret.

The circle

Seven figures at the table and seven drink tickets a night, folks. I've been in this business a long time and never once got my own round. Mr. Travis kept his mouth movement secret to the grave, which is more than I can say for my own mouth, which he never let me shut.— Freddy Fiddlesticks, spokesdummy