Samuel Butler (1750-1812)

Samuel Butler’s company catered to the county towns of the North Riding, perfromed for the sumer season at the fashionable spa-town Harrogate and every other year travelled across the Pennines to perform in Kendal in Westmoreland and Ulverston in Northern Lancashire. Thomas Bates was described as  “almost a father” to his company of performers in the Durham Company by George Garbutt,  but Samuel Butler, a twenty-three year old former stay-maker from York, quite literally became the father of a number of his company’s performers when he married the forty-six year old, Tryphosa Brockell in 1773 to became the manager of a company which developed one of the most successful northern circuits of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Tryphosa Brockell, the daughter of a Reverend from Barnard Castle in County Durham, had been married to two actors previously. She married her first husband, Henry Miller, in 1749 with whom she had two actress daughters. Then she married the Yorkshire actor-manager J. Wright with whom she also had children who became actors. Wright died in 1771 and Tryphosa inherited the theatrical real estate. At least two of her children remained with the company and married actors, which meant that the company, like many others in this period, formed a complex family web. When he was strolling with Stanton’s company, Thomas Holcroft recorded in his memoirs the attraction for provincial manager to employ family members as it increased their share of the profits:

Our manager, has five sons and daughters all ranked as performers; so that he sweeps eleven shares, that is, near half the profits of the theatre, into his pocket every night. This is a continual subject of discontent to the rest of the actors, who are all, to a man, disaffected to the higher powers.[1]

Sybil Rosenfeld noted the complex web of family and professional connections at the start of her study of North Yorkshire’s Richmond Theatre which was established by Samuel Butler in September 1788. When the Irish actor Fielding Wallis joined the company at Ripon in 1773 and married one of Tryphosa’s daughters Jane Wright, Butler became Wallis’s step father-in-law. The family connections continued when Fielding and Jane Wallis’ actress daughter, Margaret, then married the Headmaster of Richmond School, James Tate, which meant that Butler became Tate’s great-father-in-law.

As a respected member of the clergy, Tate’s association with the company helped to maintain its reputation. Rosenfeld stresses the Butler company’s “strong reputation for respectability” which was enhanced by the family’s connections with the church.[2] The Barnard Castle born Tryphosa Brockell came from three generations of clergymen as the daughter of the Rev. Christopher Brockell, granddaughter of the Rev. John Brockell, and great-grand-daughter of the Rev. John Brockell. Fielding Wallis was the son of the protestant Rector of Boho and Templecare in County Fermanagh. Wallis’ friend and fellow company member James Field Stanfield had attended a Roman Catholic seminary school in France and was a well-known philanthropist, being a prominent abolitionist and respected figure in freemasonry. Coincidentally, Jeremy Black has also noted the disproportionate number of members of the clergy from James Cawdell’s hometown area of Baldock on the subscription list of the Durham Company manager’s Miscellaneous Poems.

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[1] Thomas Holcroft, Memoirs of the Late Thomas Holcroft, Written by Himself, and Continued to the Time of his Death, from his Diary, Notes and Other Papers, ed. William Hazlitt, 3 vols. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1816), 1:228-29.

[2] Sybil Rosenfeld, The Georgian Theatre of Richmond, Yorkshire, and its Circuit: Beverley, Harrogate, Kendal, Northallerton, Ulverston and Whitby (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1984), 2.