Roamer column: Pantomime dame and principle boy fund nun’s art

In 1920 they visited Shaun’s cousin - Lily Lynch - a Dominican nun who’d taken the name Sister Concepta. She was painting a little oratory, or chapel, in the grounds of her Convent in Dún Laoghaire, then called Kingstown.

The oratory was built in 1918 to house a statue of the Sacred Heart sent from Flanders to commemorate almost 500 Kingstown men who’d fought and died there in WWI. Sister Concepta’s intricate painting, similar to the Book of Kells, stirred Shaun and Dorothy to finance her work.

Thus bankrolled she spent 16 years, on her own, adorning virtually every square inch of the oratory’s interior with breath-takingly beautiful artwork. Her benefactors weren’t short of a penny or two!

Their shared success on the boards easily financed their comfortable home in London’s exclusive Hamstead area, Dorothy’s Rolls-Royce and Shaun’s notorious love of booze. He once needed a vital prompt from the rear-end of a pantomime horse and Roy Hudd told of his late arrival for a London matinee in 1936 ‘in a drunken stupor, smelling like a brewery, slurring his words, with his flies undone’!

He was born John Browne on 16 May 1884 in Dublin’s Little Denmark Street. His father Henry was an accountant and his mother, Mary Browne (née Lynch) was a theatre manager. John’s first ‘stage appearance’ was as a two-week-old baby in an Irish play in Birmingham’s Theatre Royal. By 1907 he was performing in America as Shaun Glenville with a variety troupe called ‘The Six Brothers Luck’.

A year later the 17-year-old Dorothy Ward was making a name for herself performing in Belfast’s Grand Opera House, known then as the Palace of Varieties. She was born in Aston, Birmingham, on 26 April 1890 to wholesale bottler Edwin Ward and Eliza (née Millichamp). Aged 14 Dorothy was taken to Jack and the Beanstalk and decided there and then on a career in pantomime. She made her stage début aged 15 in Birmingham’s Alexandra Theatre in 1905 and was soon full-time in panto.

Meanwhile Shaun Glenville was in America, working with slapstick comedian Fred Karno who popularised the custard-pie-in-the-face gag and who famously recruited and trained Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel.

By 1909 Glenville was appearing in pantomimes across Britain and in 1910, playing the Dame in Little Jack Horner in Newcastle, he shared the stage with principal boy Dorothy Ward. They married in 1911 in a registry office. She converted to Catholicism and a year later they had a Catholic marriage ceremony in Dublin.

Their son Peter Glenville, born in 1913, became a hugely successful actor and director working with the leading superstars of his era like Olivia de Havilland, Laurence Olivier, Gina Lollobrigida, Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole. After their marriage Shaun and Dorothy toured British and Irish theatres, more often appearing together than apart.

She was celebrated as a leading Principal Boy of pantomime and he was hailed by the press as ‘a pantomime Dame without equal.’

After they visited Sister Concepta in Dún Laoghaire they worked for a year in New York where Dorothy was rarely off-stage and they appeared together in the Shubert Theatre.

At the outbreak of World War II Dorothy was one of the first entertainers in ENSA, touring France entertaining troops. But panto was her forte.

Music hall historian W. Macqueen-Pope called her “a handsome and striking woman, with auburn hair, wonderful carriage and fine figure….tights become her, they are second nature to her and she understands pantomime and its topsy-turviness.”

She and Shaun had an enormously successful half-century on the stage, give or take a year or two. In a pre-performance interview in 1954 Dorothy wouldn’t mention her age. “I want audiences to enjoy the pantomime” she said, “not to wonder if I’ve got my own teeth!”

They both died in London, Shaun in 1968 aged 84 and Dorothy aged 96 in 1987, bequeathing a unique legacy to the world of panto and thanks to Sister Concepta, an astonishingly beautiful oratory to Dún Laoghaire.