Walter Lambert

Lydia Dreams at work: the nurse's uniform, the bedside patient, and the whole trick a minute from its reveal. Photo via Trav S.D., Travalanche.

Folks, picture a hospital ward on a music hall stage, somewhere in Britain, around 1920. A nurse leans over a patient moaning in his bed, feeding him medicine, calming him down, working a three way comic bit alongside a page boy. The nurse is entirely convincing. Then, near the end of the act, off comes the wig. Underneath is a middle aged Englishman named Walter Lambert, and the patient in the bed was never a man at all. He was a figure, worked from concealment by Lambert's own daughter, hidden under the bed the whole time.^[1] This was Lydia Dreams, and Walter Lambert built a whole career, and a second one besides, out of convincing rooms full of people that what they were watching was real. Pull up a chair.

The nurse who wasn't

Walter H. Lambert worked British music hall for most of his life under the stage name Lydia Dreams, playing a female impersonator ventriloquist. His usual turf was home ground, but he crossed the Atlantic for a U.S. vaudeville tour in 1906.^[2] His signature routine had Dreams appear as a nurse tending a "patient," the audience convinced it was watching a real accident victim right up until the reveal.^[3] Vent Haven's own catalog of his surviving figure calls him Sammy: a face modeled on the real child of a friend of Lambert's, right down to a set of actual human teeth, with moving eyes, eyelashes, a leather mouth, and natural hair.^[4] Whatever name was on the bill that week, the illusion was the point, and Lambert built the figure to sell it completely.

His own obituary, written by W.S. Berger, founder of the International Brotherhood of Ventriloquists, doesn't call him just a ventriloquist. It calls him "a character actor, a portrait painter, a cartoonist, a mechanic and a dress maker," and says he built his own figures, costumes, scenery, and props for every one of his many presentations.^[1] That's not a résumé line. That's a man who refused to hand off a single piece of his own act to somebody else.

Lucky Nutty Jones

His best documented routine ran a full twenty minutes, built as two reveals stacked on top of each other. It opened with a motion picture: old man Jones out joyriding with a gorgeous blonde beside him, speeding along until he met with an accident and the picture dimmed out. The stage picked up right where the film left off: a hospital ward, Jones in bed in agony, and Lydia Dreams entering in a nurse's uniform to feed him and settle him down.^[1]

Then it turns. Jones's wife shows up at the bedside, insists that Jones is hers, the nurse insists otherwise, the two of them argue over him, and the nurse finally pulls the figure's head clean off. The wife collapses. Up to that exact point, nobody in the house suspects a ventriloquial act is even happening. Then Dreams walks down to the footlights holding the decapitated head, starts talking to it, and the room roars. To finish the job, off comes the lady's wig, and the room roars again.^[1] Lambert spent over a year perfecting that one figure's mechanism before it ever saw a stage, and the whole time, his own young daughter lay hidden under the stage bed, working Jones's controls by hand.^[1]

He kept a rotation of other bits going too: a bucking donkey hitched to a four wheel cart with a figure driving it in a monocle, "The Artistic Artist" (Lambert in a dress, with a figure that appeared to read its own newspaper), and two grandfather routines, one with Walter himself aged up and his wife playing maidservant, the other with Walter as an old man about to swat a mischievous vent boy figure.^[1] The man clearly never got tired of building new ways to fool a room.

Popularity

Here's the part of Lambert's life that has nothing to do with a stage. He was a serious painter, and his own obituary called "Popularity," a group portrait of the music hall generation, his masterpiece. The canvas ran roughly thirteen feet by five and a half feet, and by different counts held well over two hundred performers of the era, Lambert included. He started it in 1901 and finished it in 1903, two years of work on one picture.^[1] That same obituary claims the first artist's proof went by Royal Command to Buckingham Palace, accepted personally on behalf of King Edward VII, June 20, 1903. True or embellished by the time it reached print thirty five years later, that's the story the ventriloquist community told about him at his death, and I think that tells you plenty about how the trade saw him.^[1]

The painting hung for years at the corner of Lower Marsh and Waterloo Road in London, a spot performers nicknamed "Poverty Corner" because it's where the out of work ones gathered. It went on exhibit at the Vaudeville Club in 1908, and sold for £140 in 1914 when its owner died.^[7] Named ventriloquists identifiable in the crowd of faces include Lambert himself, Fred Russell, and several others of their generation.^[1] The original hangs in London's national museum, alongside a second Lambert figure the museum catalogs as "Old Hewitt," a plaster and wood dummy from around 1910 that he built and worked as Lydia Dreams.^[6] One man, one national collection, holding both halves of his work side by side.

He wasn't done there, either. While touring America he witnessed the Chelsea Fire, went home, and painted the whole conflagration on canvas. He donated it, and it sold for the benefit of the fire's own sufferers.^[1] A ventriloquist who paints disaster relief pieces on the side is not a hobbyist. That's a second full career, running quietly underneath the first.

What survived him

Walter Lambert died at his home in Camberwell, England, on August 2, 1950. Had he lived three more weeks, he'd have turned eighty.^[1] He was survived by his daughter, the one hidden under the stage bed years earlier, working Jones's strings while her father worked the room from above.^[1]

What he left behind kept traveling long after he did. Sammy, the figure with the real teeth, made it through the London Blitz intact, and in 2004 Lambert's grandson and great-granddaughter came to Vent Haven to see him.^[4] The London Museum holds both Old Hewitt and the original "Popularity" in its permanent collection, cataloged for anyone in this family to go find.^[6] Vent Haven holds an autographed copy of the painting too, plus one of Lambert's own vent heads.^[5]

Human teeth, real hair, and a hidden daughter under the bed doing the acting. I'm just saying, Sammy had more cast members than some music halls.— Freddy Fiddlesticks, spokesdummy