Lily Flexmore — Ellen Mary Ann Dunn · Victorian Music Hall Artiste

Lily Flexmore — The Signature Toe-In-Mouth Dance

Lily Flexmore

The Signature “Toe-In-Mouth” Dance  ·  Image courtesy of Ms Karen Wall

✦

Ladies & Gentlemen

— Presenting —

Lily Flexmore

✦

Stage of the Empire Palace Theatre, Dame Street, Dublin
Lily Flexmore performed here · December 1911 · Now The Olympia Theatre

Scroll

✦   Read This First   ✦

The Story of Lily Flexmore

A five-minute read  ·  The complete story

①   Who She Was

Her real name was Ellen Mary Ann Dunn. She was born on February 25th, 1879 in Peerless Street, Islington — the second of eleven children born to John Dunn, a shoemaker, and his wife Ellen Mary Dunnell. She grew up in Bethnal Green, in the East End of London, in a working-class household that could not have predicted what she would become.

The world knew her by two other names. On stage, she was Lily Flexmore — one of the most celebrated acrobatic contortionists and dancers on the Victorian and Edwardian music hall circuit, performing for thirty years on stages from London to New York, Berlin to Johannesburg. On the football pitch, she was Ruth Coupland — a pseudonym adopted to protect her identity when she took to the field at just sixteen years of age.

One woman. Three names. An extraordinary life.

“She was sixteen when she walked onto a football pitch before ten thousand spectators. She was forty-six when she last performed her signature dance on a London stage.”

Lily Flexmore — The Back Bend — Colourised stage photograph

Lily Flexmore  ·  The Back Bend  ·  Colourised

②   Why She Matters

In 1895, when women were expected to be invisible, Ellen Dunn stepped onto the pitch at Crouch End Athletic Ground as a founding player of the British Ladies Football Club — one of the very first organised women's football clubs in Britain. Her team, North London, won 7–1. The crowd of ten thousand people had come partly out of curiosity, partly out of mockery — and left having witnessed something genuinely historic.

That same year, she began her professional stage career under the name Lily Flexmore. Over the next thirty years she would perform in hundreds of theatres — bending her body into shapes that audiences found impossible to believe, dancing with a precision and athleticism that earned her billing alongside the greatest names of the music hall era.

She was not merely a performer. She was a pioneer — in sport, in stagecraft, and in the sheer audacity of building an international career as a working-class woman from the East End of London in the Victorian age.

1895

First football match & stage debut

1899

Married George Ambrose White — became Ellen White

1907

American tour — New York to Winnipeg

1925

Final known performance, aged 46

③   The Mystery

Ellen Mary Ann Dunn died on January 19th, 1934, at 5 Highgate Hill, Islington. She was fifty-four years old. She was buried at Islington Cemetery, in Plot L/3/14781/P — a grave that went unmarked and unvisited for decades.

After her death, she vanished. The name Lily Flexmore faded from the playbills and the newspapers. The woman behind the name — Ellen Dunn, then Ellen White — disappeared entirely from the historical record. For nearly ninety years, nobody knew what had become of her. Her family knew she had been a performer. They knew her name had been in lights. But the details were lost.

There is one more detail that makes her story extraordinary. When Ellen Dunn married George Ambrose White in 1899, she became Ellen White. In 2022, one hundred and twenty-seven years later, a woman named Ellen White MBE lifted the European Championship trophy as England’s record goalscorer — the greatest name in the modern history of women’s football. The connection is coincidental. It is also, somehow, perfect.

✦   Two Women   One Name   ✦

One Ellen White stood at the beginning of women’s football in 1895.
Another stood at its greatest moment in 2022.

④   The Rediscovery

The search for Ellen began with her great-great-niece, Karen Wall, who had heard as a child that her auntie Ellen’s name had once been in lights. That memory — passed down through the family across three generations — was the spark that set off a search spanning more than twenty-five years.

The identification of Ellen Dunn as the footballer Ruth Coupland was made by football historian Stuart Gibbs, a leading authority on the pioneering women of the British Ladies Football Club. His scholarship unlocked the connection between the performer and the player — two names for the same remarkable woman.

Six years of independent research followed — tracing Ellen through over two thousand newspaper records, census returns, shipping manifests, and theatre archives across Britain, Ireland, Europe, and the United States. Her grave was found. Her photograph was identified. The only known image of her husband was discovered, by chance, in a family wedding photograph taken in 1910.

She was lost. Now she is found. This website is her memorial.

✦   Explore Her Full Story Her Life in a Timeline → The Football Club →

✦   Why She Matters   ✦

One woman. Three names. Football pioneer, international artiste, working-class Londoner who defied every expectation her era placed upon her — and was then forgotten for nearly a century.

⚽

A Football Pioneer

One of the very first women to play organised football in Britain — stepping out before ten thousand spectators at Crouch End in 1895, at just sixteen years of age.

🎭

A Global Performer

As Lily Flexmore, she performed across three continents for thirty years — a working-class woman from Islington who built an international career entirely on her own terms.

⚡

A Victorian Radical

In an era when women were expected to remain invisible, Ellen Dunn played football, performed internationally, and challenged every expectation society placed upon her.

🔍

A Recovered Voice

Forgotten for nearly a century, Ellen was brought back through six years of painstaking research — two thousand newspaper records, a found grave, and an identified photograph.

⚽   The Football Club 🎭   The Stage Career 👨‍👩‍👧   Her Family 📅   Her Timeline 🗺️   Her World 📷   Gallery
Read the full case — Why Lily Flexmore Matters Today   →

✦   One Woman, Three Names   ✦

Who Was Lily Flexmore?

Ellen Mary Ann Dunn · Acrobatic Contortionist · Dancer · Footballer

✦   Born: February 25th, 1879, Peerless Street, Islington   ✦   Died: January 19th, 1934, Highgate Hill   ✦

1895

Aged 16

She walked onto a football pitch at Crouch End before ten thousand spectators — one of the first women to play organised football in Britain.

30

Years on Stage

As Lily Flexmore she performed as a dancer, contortionist, singer and comedienne on stages from New York to Berlin to Johannesburg.

92

Years Forgotten

She died in 1934 and was lost entirely to history — until six years of painstaking research brought her back.

She married a man named George Ambrose White in 1899.
She became Ellen White — 127 years before England’s record goalscorer carried the same name.

Born Ellen · Performed as Lily · Played football as Ruth

Born As

Ellen Mary Ann
Dunn

Her true name — born in Peerless Street, Islington, on February 25th, 1879. Daughter of John Dunn, shoemaker, and Ellen Mary Dunnell. Second of eleven children. The name that appears on her baptism record, her marriage certificate, and her grave.

On Stage

Lily
Flexmore

The name under which she became famous. From 1895 onwards, Lily Flexmore was one of the most celebrated acrobatic contortionists and dancers on the Victorian and Edwardian music hall circuit — performing in London, New York, Paris, Berlin, Johannesburg and beyond.

On the Football Pitch

Ruth
Coupland

The pseudonym under which she played in the inaugural match of the British Ladies Football Club in 1895. The identification of Ruth Coupland as Lily Flexmore is credited to football historian Stuart Gibbs. The identification of Lily Flexmore as Ellen Mary Ann Dunn is credited to Karen Wall, her great-great-niece.

She was sixteen when she walked onto a football pitch before ten thousand spectators. She was forty-six when she last performed her signature dance on a London stage. For nearly thirty years, as Lily Flexmore, she bent the limits of the human body on stages from Johannesburg to New York — and was returned, in death, to the city that made her.

✦   The Woman Behind the Three Names   ✦

From an early age, Ellen was a single-minded woman. The whole arc of her life confirms it. Consider the household she came from: her elder brother John Joseph, at fourteen years of age, was already apprenticed as a tinsmith — the normal, entirely honourable trajectory for the son of a Peerless Street leather craftsman in 1890s Islington. You learned a trade, you earned your keep, and you stayed within the world you knew. Ellen, two years younger, chose something else entirely. At sixteen she was on a football pitch before ten thousand strangers under a false name, and within two years she was on a ship bound for South Africa as a professional performer. John Joseph did not need a pseudonym. Ellen needed three — because the life she had chosen existed in a different world from anything her family's Islington had mapped out for her. The pseudonyms were not merely protection. They were the price of the life she had decided to live.

She understood the business in which she worked — not merely as a performer, but as a professional who knew how the circuits operated, how bookings were secured, how reputations were built and protected. The Stoll and Moss circuits did not carry passengers. To remain on them across three decades required excellence, reliability, and the kind of commercial self-awareness that most performers never acquired.

Her husband George was her partner in every sense — a gifted comedian and a valued colleague in the theatrical world. But the headline act was Ellen. She was the one the press reviewed, the one caricatured in the Newcastle Daily Chronicle, the one whose name appeared on bills from Johannesburg to New York. And yet theirs was a marriage of equals, built on shared knowledge of the same world, sustained from Colebrooke Row across thirty years.

The three names tell the same story. Ellen Mary Ann Dunn for her family and the civil record. Lily Flexmore for the stage. Ruth Coupland for the football pitch. Each identity precisely fitted to its purpose. Each one protecting the others. That is not a girl who fell into things. That is a woman who knew exactly who she was — and exactly who she needed the world to think she was — and kept the two in perfect order for fifty-four years.

✦   Discover Her Full Story Her Life in a Timeline →
Life & Origins   →
📖

Chapter 1

Life & Origins

✦   Footballer · Dancer · Contortionist · Comedienne   ✦

Ellen Mary Ann Dunn

Born in Peerless Street · She died in Islington · She lives in history

Origins — A London Family

Ellen Mary Ann Dunn was born on Tuesday, February 25th, 1879, at 56 Peerless Street, Islington, St. Luke's, London. The site is now occupied by Moorfields Eye Hospital. She was the second of eleven children born to John Dunn, a shoemaker, and his wife Ellen Mary Dunnell.

Her parents had married on 3rd June 1876, their address at the time being White Lion Yard, Spitalfields, London (renamed Folgate Street in 1938).

Ellen Mary Ann Dunn — Lily Flexmore — Chin on Hands Portrait · Colourised

Ellen Mary Ann Dunn · Lily Flexmore · Stage portrait · Colourised

Together John and Ellen Dunnell raised eleven children over twenty-three years, including John Joseph (1877–1946), Frederick (1881–1964), George William (1883–1943), Charles Joshua (1885–1957), Mary Ann Ada (1888–1953), Alice Maud (1891–1979), Ethel (1894–1987), Percy James (1896–1974), Albert H (1898–1964), and Henry Ambrose (1900–1995).

Childhood & Schooling

On 18th November 1884, five-year-old Ellen was enrolled at Hammond Square Primary School, Hoxton Street, London. By the time of the 1891 Census the family had moved to 108 Royston Street, Bethnal Green. It is very likely that Ellen was by this time attending a dance and gymnastics school. As well as dancing and gymnastics, she was also to become a professional contortionist of exceptional ability.

A Remarkable Life

From the streets of her birth in Clerkenwell to the stages of three continents — the biography of Ellen Mary Ann Dunn is one of the most astonishing recovered from the Victorian and Edwardian music halls and theatres. She played football before thousands and performed her stunning act including dance, contortion, song and comedy in theatres worldwide.

She married a fellow performer. She lost a child. She crossed oceans. She was admired by young women in a small town on the shores of Lake Michigan, USA, who had never met her. She and her husband lived very full lives.

In a typical year, in the UK alone, Ellen clocked up in the region of four thousand miles, travelling to fulfil her theatre engagements. She did this for more than thirty years. But both Ellen and George's lives were cut tragically short. George died suddenly, on September 26th, 1933, and Ellen passed away barely four months later, on January 19th, 1934.

This website is a tribute to both of these remarkable people.

←   Who Was She Her Family   →
👨‍👩‍👧

Chapter 2

Her Family

✦   The Dunns of Islington   ✦

Her Family

The parents, brothers, and children who shaped her world

Her Parents Brothers & Siblings Karen Wall

✦   Her Parents   ✦

John Dunn & Ellen Mary Dunnell

Married June 3rd, 1876  ·  White Lion Yard, Spitalfields, London (renamed Folgate Street in 1938)

Ellen Mary Ann Dunn's father, John Dunn, was born on April 11th, 1857 at 22 Playhouse Yard, St. Luke's, Islington — a shoemaker's son from the working heart of Victorian London. Her mother, Ellen Mary Dunnell, was born on September 24th, 1857 at 49 Queen's Head Walk, Hoxton, Shoreditch, the daughter of Joseph Dunnell, a blacksmith, and Ellen Piper. Joseph and Ellen Piper had themselves married on April 30th, 1843 at the Bethnal Parish Church, Shoreditch — a union recorded in a certificate that survives to this day, with Ellen Piper's signature marked simply as her mark.

John and Ellen Mary married on June 3rd, 1876. They were both nineteen years old. Their address at the time was given as White Lion Yard, Spitalfields, London (renamed Folgate Street in 1938). The marriage was witnessed by Ellen's older sister, Frances Dunnell, who was married to William Loe.

Over the next twenty-three years they had eleven children, moving from Islington through Shoreditch to Bethnal Green as the family grew. The 1891 Census finds the whole household — John, Ellen Mary, and seven of their children — crowded into 108 Royston Street, Bethnal Green. John is recorded as a shoemaker; the eldest boy, John Joseph, aged fourteen, is already working as a ribbon worker. Ellen Mary Ann, their second child, is twelve.

✦   A Family of Leather   ✦

John Dunn, Craftsman

Ellen's father, John Dunn, worked throughout his life in the leather trades — one of the great craft traditions of Victorian working-class London. His occupation shifts slightly in form across the official records as the years pass: on Ellen's own birth certificate of 1879 he is recorded as a Whip Maker; on the earlier birth certificate of his son John Joseph in 1876 he appears as a Shoe Repairer. These were not separate careers but facets of the same ancient trade — the working and shaping of leather into objects that Victorian life depended upon entirely, from the harnesses and driving whips of the carriage trade to the boots and shoes worn by every soul in the city.

In the 1890s, football boots were not the lightweight, mass-produced articles of a later age. They were substantial leather constructions — heavy, ankle-high, close-stitched, built to withstand the demands of a muddy pitch. And the boots were only part of it. Look closely at the Barrass team photograph: most of the players are wearing shin guards on top of their stockings. By 1895, the standard football shin guard was made of chamois or buff leather, stiffened with cane reed inserts, and secured with leather straps — descended directly from the cricket pads that had inspired their invention twenty years earlier. Chamois and buff leather were precisely the materials a whip maker and shoe repairer like John Dunn would have handled every working day of his life. The women of the British Ladies Football Club required footwear and protection that would carry them safely through a match before ten thousand spectators, on grounds that bore little resemblance to a modern playing surface. Look at the photograph of Ellen, seated in her BLFC uniform, hands folded, composed and watchful — and look at her feet. The boots she wears are exactly what a craftsman of John Dunn's trade would have known how to make.

Detail of football boot — leather, close-stitched, laced to the ankle — BLFC 1895

✦   The Bootmaker’s Daughter   ✦

Detail · Her boots · Leather, close-stitched, laced to the ankle · 1895

One wonders, looking at those boots — stout, well-made, close-stitched, laced to the ankle — whether it was her father’s hands that made them.

Whether John Dunn made or repaired the boots his daughter wore on that March day at Crouch End, we cannot say for certain. But the connection is not merely poetic. In a household where leather was the daily material of a working life, where stitching and lasting and the shaping of soles was understood from childhood, it is entirely plausible that the boots a young woman needed for a very particular purpose — strong, supportive, fit for a football pitch — were sourced, adapted, or fashioned closer to home than most would imagine.

John Dunn  ·  Whip Maker & Shoe Repairer  ·  56 Peerless Street, Islington  ·  Father of eleven children, one of whom stepped onto a football pitch in 1895 and made history.

Ellen Mary Dunnell died on September 19th, 1919 at 76 Warner Road, Walthamstow, aged sixty-one — nine years before she would have seen her famous daughter reach the end of her performing career, and fifteen years before Ellen herself died. John Dunn outlived his wife by six years, dying on August 18th, 1925 at Whipps Cross Hospital, Walthamstow, aged sixty-eight. The 1921 Census shows him living as a widower at 76 Warner Road, Walthamstow — the same address where his wife had died two years earlier — working as a Waterside Labourer doing sewer repair work at Hambro Wharf, Upper Thames Street, for Henry Tate & Sons, sugar refiners. With him were his son Henry Ambrose and daughter Daisy Julia. He had been born at Playhouse Yard, St. Luke’s, and had spent his working life in the leather trades and waterside labour of Victorian and Edwardian London.

The census record required some detective work to interpret correctly. The transcriber who digitised John’s return rendered his handwriting as “Seywer Repairs Kenny Tate & Sons” for the employer, and “Kenry Yate & Sons Ambio Wharf Upper Thanes” for the place of work — an understandable struggle with a sixty-four-year-old working man’s pen. But the original census form, signed J. Dunn, tells a clearer story. John was recording two separate things: his occupation (Waterside Labourer, Sewer Repairs) and his employer (Henry Tate & Sons, Hambro Wharf). The transcriber conflated them into a single nonsensical entity. What John actually meant was that he was doing sewer repair work, contracted to or employed by Henry Tate & Sons at their Hambro Wharf premises.

This is confirmed by the London Wiki directory listing for Upper Thames Street South, which records the tenants of Hambro Wharf as including: Tate Henry & Sons Lim, sugar refiners — operating from Hambro Wharf alongside the London & South Western Railway Co’s Goods Receiving Office and Vintners Hall. Kennet Wharf, immediately to the west, was a separate wharf occupied by Thames Cold Storage and packing case makers. The identification is now as certain as it can be: John Dunn worked at Hambro Wharf, Upper Thames Street, for Henry Tate & Sons — the great Victorian sugar refining dynasty whose philanthropy would later endow the Tate galleries, and whose fortune began on this very stretch of the Thames waterfront.

There is a pleasing possibility in the nature of that final employment. The Victorian and Edwardian sewer system — and the water mains that ran alongside it — relied heavily on leather gaskets and washers to seal the joints between cast iron pipe flanges. Before rubber became widely available, leather was the standard material for pipe joint sealing: cut to the precise diameter of the flange, compressed between the mating faces, swelling slightly when wet to create a reliable seal. A man who had spent his entire working life cutting, shaping and working leather — as a whip maker, a shoe repairer, a general leather craftsman — would have been exactly the kind of skilled hand a sewer repair contractor needed. Not for the heavy excavation work, but for the precise, experienced labour of cutting gaskets to the right size, fitting them correctly between flanges, knowing instinctively how leather behaves under compression and moisture. At sixty-four, John Dunn was almost certainly the man who knew what to do once the pipe was exposed — the skilled pair of hands that made the joint good and kept the Tate sugar empire’s waterside infrastructure watertight. The same hands that had shaped leather into whips and boots throughout his working life may well have spent their final years cutting gaskets beneath the streets of the Upper Thames waterfront. A craftsman to the end.

River Thames Wharf Chart showing Hambro Wharf, Upper Thames Street, London — the workplace of John Dunn, 1921
Hambro Wharf — on the north bank of the Upper Thames, between Kennet Wharf and Three Cranes Wharf, just west of Southwark Bridge. The London Wiki directory confirms Henry Tate & Sons, sugar refiners, as tenants of Hambro Wharf. John Dunn recorded his place of work in his own hand as Ambro Wharf — a phonetic rendering of Hambro as heard daily on the waterfront. His employer, rendered by the census transcriber as Kenny Tate & Sons, was Henry Tate & Sons. · River Thames Wharf Chart, Showing Tiers, Moorings Etc., between Beckton & Vauxhall Bridge · Published by Imray, Laurie, Norie & Wilson Ltd. · Reproduced with thanks to the National Library of Scotland.
John Dunn and Ellen Mary Dunnell — Ellen's parents — colourised portrait

John Dunn & Ellen Mary Dunnell  ·  Ellen's parents  ·  Colourised portrait

Original records relating to John and Ellen Mary — birth, marriage, death, census and burial documents — are held in the Family Documents section below.

✦   Her Brothers   ✦

John Joseph & George William

The elder brother & the sailor

George William Dunn

1883–1943  ·  The sailor brother

George William Dunn in naval uniform with medals, with wife Margaret and five children — c.1919

George William Dunn in naval uniform, with wife Margaret and five of their children  ·  c. 1919  ·  He wears his service medals with pride

George William Dunn was born on August 12th, 1883 in Haggerston, Shoreditch — the fourth child of John and Ellen Mary (Dunnell) Dunn, and four years younger than his sister Ellen. He was baptised on August 26th, 1883, though the baptism record contains an error, giving his father's name as George rather than John. He grew up at 108 Royston Street, Bethnal Green, where the 1891 Census places the whole family together.

It is very likely that Ellen and George attended gymnastic training when quite young. In George's case, this stood him in good stead, because he went on to enjoy a stellar Naval career with responsibility for the physical training of the crews aboard a long list of British Naval vessels.

Where Ellen took to the stage, George took to the sea. He joined the Royal Navy as a boy, and by the night of the 1901 Census — March 31st, 1901 — he was listed aboard HMS Minerva, a second-class cruiser of the Training Squadron, docked at Gibraltar under the command of Captain Charles Home Cochran. He was seventeen years old. The crew list records him simply as George W. Dunn, Boy 1st Class, born Hoxton, Middlesex.

George William worked his way steadily through the ranks. By 1908 he had passed the educational requirements for the rating of Petty Officer under the New System. He married Margaret Elizabeth Doman on March 27th, 1910, at the Parish Church, Walthamstow — the wedding photograph shows a young man in naval uniform, sitting proudly beside his bride. Their first daughter, Elizabeth Florence Ellen, was born in January 1911. Within months, George was on the other side of the world.

From December 1910 until May 1912, he served aboard HMS Minotaur, the flagship of the China Station, based at Lui Kung Tas in Northern China. The 1911 Census records him there, far from Walthamstow, far from his young wife and infant daughter. It was during this China posting that he was initiated into the Daintree Freemason Lodge on May 22nd, 1911 — a lodge consecrated in China by Royal Navy members in 1903, with strong ties to the local Chinese community.

After transferring to HMS Spartiate in May 1912, George continued his naval service through the First World War, serving aboard HMS Shannon. On February 26th, 1916, he suffered a right inguinal hernia aboard HMS Shannon and was transferred to the Hospital Ship HMHS China for treatment, returning to duty on March 2nd, 1916. George's value to the Royal Navy was demonstrated with his postings to a large number of vessels, where he was tasked with whipping the crew into good physical shape. The war years saw him based largely at Chatham, where he would have had access to the largest number of staff for training purposes. It was during this period that several of his children were born — Florence Ada in 1914, George Jellicoe in 1915, and Irene Gladys — the grandmother of Ms Karen Wall — in 1918.

George's mother, Ellen Mary Dunnell, sadly passed away on September 19th, 1919, at 76 Warner Road, Walthamstow. By 1921, George had reached the pinnacle of his naval career: the Census records him as Chief Physical & Recreational Training Instructor at the Royal Naval Barracks, Chatham — HMS Pembroke. The family were living at 28 Dale Street, Chatham. A seventh child, Albert C., was born in 1922, and a daughter, Lillian Dorothy, had arrived in April 1921. His eighth and final child, Olive Rosina, was born in July 1924.

George was discharged from the Royal Navy in August of 1923, his pension ledger card dated October 2nd, 1923. He settled his family at 20 Luton Place, Greenwich, and in later years worked as an Admiralty Courier — recorded as such in the 1939 Register. He had also invested wisely in a tobacconist's shop at 24 Park Row, Greenwich.

George William Dunn died tragically on February 17th, 1943, aged fifty-nine — though the coroner's certificate incorrectly recorded his age as sixty-four, an error corrected on March 12th, 1943. George's shop had suffered damage to the roof from a German bomb. George, being incredibly fit, decided to survey the damage and perhaps make repairs himself.

While up on the roof, George lost his footing and fell, striking a lamp standard as he fell to the ground. He was transported to St. Alfege's Hospital, but was pronounced dead on arrival. His remains were cremated on February 24th, 1943, at Honour Oak Crematorium, Southwark, and his ashes were scattered in the garden of his home at 20 Luton Place. Probate, granted on July 8th, 1943, to his executors, daughters Florence Ada Sutherland and Elizabeth Florence Longmuir, recorded effects of £3,017 12s. 5d. — a very considerable sum for a man who had given his working life to the Navy and to his country.

George William Dunn was buried — in spirit, at least — in the garden of the Greenwich house where he had raised his family. A sailor, a Freemason, a father of seven, a Chief Petty Officer who had sailed from Gibraltar to China and back. And Ellen's brother.

Royal Navy Petty Officer insignia — the rank George William Dunn achieved

Royal Navy Petty Officer insignia  ·  George's rank

HMS Minerva, 1895

HMS Minerva  ·  Gibraltar, 1901

HMS Minotaur — China Station

HMS Minotaur  ·  China Station, 1910–1912

HMS President, Royal Victoria Yard, Deptford

HMS President  ·  Royal Victoria Yard, Deptford  ·  August 1923

Royal Naval Barracks Chatham — HMS Pembroke parade ground — where George William Dunn served as Chief Physical and Recreational Training Instructor

Royal Naval Barracks, Chatham  ·  HMS Pembroke parade ground  ·  Where George William Dunn served as Chief Physical & Recreational Training Instructor, 1921

George William Dunn and Margaret Elizabeth Doman, wedding day March 27th, 1910

George William Dunn & Margaret Elizabeth Doman  ·  Wedding day, March 27th, 1910

20 Luton Place, Greenwich — George's home, where his ashes were scattered

20 Luton Place, Greenwich  ·  His home  ·  His ashes scattered in this garden

John Joseph Dunn

1876–1946  ·  Elder brother

John Joseph Dunn — colourised formal portrait, by Gerlach & Co.

John Joseph Dunn  ·  Colourised formal portrait  ·  Photographer: Gerlach & Co.

John Joseph Dunn was born on December 16th, 1876 at 31 Norman's Buildings, Mitchell Street, St. Luke's, Clerkenwell — the first child of John and Ellen Mary Dunn, and Ellen's elder brother by two and a half years. He grew up alongside her through the family's years in Islington and Bethnal Green, one of the older children in a household that would eventually number eleven.

By the time of the 1891 Census, the family were living at 108 Royston Street, Bethnal Green. John Joseph, aged fourteen, was already working as a tin box fabricator — while his twelve-year-old sister Ellen was still at school. Ellen and her big brother John were always close, as evidenced by family photographs. Within a few years, Ellen would be on the music hall stage. John Joseph's path was a quieter one.

John married Louisa Magdalene Coulson on March 15th, 1896, at the Parish Church, Bethnal Green — the same year that Ellen, seventeen years old, was embarking on her performing career. Louisa, born in 1877, would prove to be a remarkable woman: she and John Joseph had fourteen children over twenty-two years, and she outlived her husband by more than two decades, dying in 1969 at the age of ninety-one.

By 1911, the family had settled in Barking, Essex, where John Joseph would spend the rest of his life. The 1921 Census records him at 18 Nelson Street, Barking, working as a solderer of tin boxes for H. Curtis, Tin Box Maker, of Swan Street, The Minories, London — steady, skilled work in the East End trades. By 1939, the family had moved to 22 Alfred's Gardens, Barking, the home where John Joseph would live out the rest of his life.

WW2 brought John and Louisa a level of grief that is almost beyond expression. In October 1940, they lost both their eldest and youngest sons, within ten days of each other. Both were submariners serving with the Royal Navy. John F. Dunn was lost with HM Submarine Rainbow, and Edward J. Dunn with HM Submarine Triad — in separate incidents, in separate waters, off the coast of Italy. To lose one son at sea would have been devastating. To lose two, almost simultaneously, is a sorrow that defies comprehension.

John Joseph lived for six more years after that October. He died on October 2nd, 1946, at his home at 22 Alfred's Gardens, Barking, at the age of sixty-nine. He is buried at Rippleside Cemetery, Barking — Plot R/S, Section E, Grave 1250.

John, it must be remembered, had lost his sister Ellen twelve years earlier, and his younger brother George William in 1943. The photograph of John and Ellen together — Ellen in her magnificent wide-brimmed hat, John Joseph solid and steady beside her — captures something of the bond between the eldest brother and the second child, the one who went on the stage while he went to work, but who remained, through everything, his little sister.

Ellen Mary Ann Dunn with her elder brother John Joseph Dunn — colourised portrait

Ellen Mary Ann Dunn with her elder brother John Joseph Dunn  ·  c. 1905–1910  ·  Note the cigar in John's hand — a man at ease with the world, out for the day with his little sister

✦   The Eleven Children of John Dunn & Ellen Mary Dunnell   ✦

John Joseph  1876–1946

Ellen Mary Ann  1879–1934

Frederick  1881–1964

George William  1883–1943

Charles Joshua  1885–1957

Mary Ann Ada  1888–1973

Alice Maud  1890–1907

Ethel  1894–1987

Percy James  1896–1974

Albert H  1898–1964

Henry Ambrose  1900–1995

Ellen Mary Ann is shown in italics. Alice Maud died aged sixteen.

✦   A Living Connection   ✦

Karen Wall

Great-great-niece of Ellen Mary Ann Dunn · The search that brought Lily home

✦   In Honour   ✦

“Her auntie Ellen’s name had once been in lights.”

Karen Wall is the great-great-niece of Ellen Mary Ann Dunn, and the person without whom this story would never have been told. It was Karen’s grandmother, Irene, who kept the memory alive — a photograph on a mantlepiece, a sentence passed from one generation to the next: her auntie Ellen’s name had once been in lights. Karen carried that sentence with her for more than twenty years, and she never let it go.

The search was long and often uncertain. It required patience, persistence, and a willingness to keep faith with a story that the world had entirely forgotten. Karen kept that faith. After more than twenty years of research, it was Karen who identified Lily Flexmore as Ellen Mary Ann Dunn — recovering the real name that even Ellen’s own family had lost. When football historian Stuart Gibbs posted on Twitter asking about Lily Flexmore, Karen found his post and replied: “I know who she is.” That moment of connection brought together Karen’s identification of Ellen and Stuart’s identification of Lily Flexmore as the footballer Ruth Coupland — and gave the world back a woman who had been entirely forgotten.

In December of 2023, Karen and her family went to Islington & St. Pancras Cemetery and, after an extraordinary search through overgrown ground, found the grave of Ellen and George. The names had been almost entirely hidden by decades of earth. But they found it. And on the stone, they uncovered the word that Ellen and George had chosen for themselves: Re-united.

This website — every photograph, every document, every word of this story — exists because Karen Wall did not forget. It is dedicated, with the deepest respect and affection, to her.

Karen Wall  ·  Great-great-niece of Ellen Mary Ann Dunn  ·  Greenwich, London
The search that brought Lily Flexmore home

The chart below traces Karen’s direct lineage from George William Dunn — Ellen’s younger brother and fellow gymnast — showing how the Wall and Dunn families connect across five generations.

Karen Wall — lineage from Ellen Mary Ann Dunn THROUGH GEORGE WILLIAM DUNN · ELLEN'S BROTHER GENERATION I Ellen Mary Ann Dunn Lily Flexmore · 1879–1934 siblings George William Dunn Ellen's brother · 1883–1943 GENERATION II George W. Dunn 1883–1943 m. Margaret Doman 1886–? daughter GENERATION III Irene G. Dunn 1918–2008 m. Richard Wall 1912–2004 son GENERATION IV Richard Wall m. Josephine Allen GENERATION V Karen Wall Karen's grandmother Irene G. Dunn was the daughter of George William Dunn, who was the brother of Ellen Mary Ann Dunn (Lily Flexmore). Ellen / Lily Flexmore Dunn family Wall family Karen Wall
←   Life & Origins The Football Club   →
⚽

Chapter 3

The Football Club

✦   British Ladies Football Club · 1895   ✦

Ruth Coupland

Playing for North London — March 23rd, 1895

The Inaugural Match

In 1895, at just sixteen years of age, Ellen Mary Ann Dunn took part in the inaugural football match of the British Ladies Football Club. Playing under the pseudonym Ruth Coupland, she took to the field at Crouch End Athletic Ground, North London, before a crowd of some ten thousand spectators.

Ellen's team, North London, won by seven goals to one. The choice of a pseudonym was not unusual amongst the players. To appear publicly on a football field was, for a young woman of the 1890s, an act of considerable social daring — though for Ellen, the anonymity was somewhat ironic, given that she was already building a public performing career under another assumed name entirely.

It is delightful to note that the worlds of football and performance were not entirely separate for Ellen and her fellow players. After a number of the matches, some of the ladies would put on a variety show for the crowd. Ellen had great memories of an exceptional evening at the Variety Hall in North London, following a fixture at Wembley Park Cricket Ground on 22nd January 1897. She performed alongside fellow BLFC players Phoebe Smith, Marie Ennis, Violet Clarence, and Blanche Foxcroft — and by all accounts, the show was not forgotten in a hurry.

Before that — in June 1895 — Ellen was part of the BLFC's Irish tour, confirmed by the Belfast News-Letter of Thursday 20th June 1895, which names her in the published team lineup as Miss Ruth Coupland, outside right, Reds. The match was played at Cliftonville before at least 6,000 spectators. Afterwards, some 2,000 people followed the ladies’ wagonette through the streets to the Hotel Shaftesbury, the horses were taken out and the carriage drawn by admirers, and the referee addressed the crowd from outside the hotel door. The Belfast News-Letter reported it as the best reception the club had received in any town during their four months on tour. The following morning they left for Dublin. Playing alongside Ellen on the Reds that evening was Phoebe Louisa Smith — right half-back, fourteen years old, fellow music hall performer, and future secretary of the BLFC. Belfast in June 1895 was a city with a thriving variety circuit, and the atmosphere that followed the match — 2,000 admirers in the streets, a hotel full of cheering well-wishers — would have been entirely familiar to two young women already at home on the stage.

16

Her age at the match

~10,000

Spectators at Crouch End

7–1

North London's victory

The Pseudonym

The identification of Ellen Dunn as the player known as Ruth Coupland is credited to the meticulous research of football historian Stuart Gibbs, a leading authority on the pioneering women of the British Ladies Football Club and on the early history of women's football in Britain and Ireland.

✦   Stuart Gibbs — Research Credit

His work — encompassing the art exhibition Moving the Goalposts, published academic articles, and sustained original research into the players, pseudonyms, and lives of the BLFC ladies — has been foundational to the recovery of these hidden stories.

The British Ladies Football Club was founded by Nettie Honeyball in 1894. Its inaugural match, held on March 23rd, 1895 at Crouch End, is recognised as a pivotal moment in the history of women's football. The players used pseudonyms both to protect their private identities and — in some cases — because they already had public professional personas they wished to keep separate from their sporting activities.

A Third Name on the Pitch

Ruth Coupland was not Ellen's only football pseudonym. Primary-source research by Patrick Brennan at donmouth.co.uk has identified a second name used by Ellen on the pitch: Compton. The name appears in two distinct records — first in the caption to the North team photograph taken at Crouch End on the day of the inaugural match itself, 23rd March 1895, where a seated player is named as Compton; and second in the team lineup for the match at Gigg Lane, Bury, on 13th April 1895, where Compton appears as a forward alongside Thiere and Allen. In the Lloyds Weekly Newspaper report of the Crouch End match, the same forward position is listed as Ruth Coupland — confirming that both names belonged to Ellen, deployed interchangeably as occasion demanded.

When the BLFC split in September 1895, Ellen stayed with the Original Ladies under Alfred Hewitt Smith — not with Mrs Graham’s breakaway club. This is confirmed by Patrick Brennan’s Donmouth research: the surviving lineup for Mrs Graham’s club at Wycombe on 11th November 1895 does not include Ruth Coupland. By that date, Ellen had separated from Mrs Graham’s group and was touring with the Original Ladies. She is subsequently confirmed on the 1896 Irish tour, at Belfast and very likely at Strabane, Newry, and Wexford — all Original Ladies fixtures. She left the BLFC in the summer of 1897 to pursue her Lily Flexmore career full-time. Source: Patrick Brennan, donmouth.co.uk · South Bucks Free Press, November 1895.

The origin of the name Compton is not documented. It is the personal conjecture of this researcher that Ellen may have drawn it from the Compton Arms — a public house on Compton Avenue, Canonbury, in her native Islington, where an alehouse has stood since the sixteenth century. The adoption of local landmark names as pseudonyms was consistent with music hall naming conventions of the period. By the spring of 1895, Ellen was already performing her celebrated acrobatic routines on the informal entertainment circuit of North London's pub and variety rooms — and it is not difficult to picture an evening at the Compton Arms following a day of football at nearby Crouch End. No programme placing her there has yet been found. The connection cannot be confirmed and is offered as conjecture only.

Ellen Mary Ann Dunn aged 16 — British Ladies Football Club 1895 — North London team kit — red blouse — Playing as Ruth Coupland

Ellen Mary Ann Dunn · Aged 16 · Playing as Ruth Coupland · British Ladies Football Club · 1895 · North London team kit · Colourised · Photo: Robert Barrass Studios, Newcastle

✦   Explore the Full BLFC Story

Ellen Dunn was one of the founding players of the British Ladies Football Club — the story that started this whole journey of discovery. The companion site, also built by this author, tells the complete BLFC story: every player, every match, every city they played in, and the remarkable women who made it happen.

326 individually sourced newspaper records  ·  Portraits of every known player  ·  Match by match across England, Ireland and Scotland

Rise of the Lionesses  ·  The British Ladies Football Club 1895   →
BLFC North London Team Portrait by Robert Barrass Newcastle 1895

British Ladies Football Club  ·  North London Team  ·  1895
Ellen Mary Ann Dunn (Ruth Coupland) is seated, first on the left  ·  Colourised
The North London team wore red  ·  Ellen’s team won 7–1 against South London
Photo: Robert Barrass Studios, Newcastle

Look closely at the stockings: most of the players are wearing shin guards on top of them — chamois leather stiffened with cane reeds, the standard protection of the age. The two exceptions are Little Tommy (Edith Richardson, seated on the ground at centre) and her mother Ellen Richardson, seated beside her. They are also the two smallest figures in the photograph.

←   Her Family The Stage Career   →
🎭

Chapter 4

The Stage Career

✦   Nearly Thirty Years on Stage   ✦

Lily Flexmore

Acrobatic contortionist, dancer, singer, comedienne

Lily Flexmore by Gerlach

Lily Flexmore · by Gerlach

Lily Flexmore Reverse Handstand

Lily Flexmore · Reverse Handstand

Her Career

From 1895 onwards, Ellen — performing under the stage name Lily Flexmore — embarked on what would become a long, successful, and genuinely remarkable career in the Victorian and Edwardian music hall. She was a professional dancer, contortionist, singer and comedienne, celebrated in particular for her signature “Toe-In-Mouth” dance, which she was still performing at the age of forty-six in 1925.

The press record is vivid. Contemporary reviewers document her as the best act of the evening — not simply a novelty turn, but a performer who commanded a room. Her act combined extreme physical virtuosity with comedy and deliberate theatrical provocation. She would raise her leg to an extraordinary height, then — to the uproar of the audience — seize her garter from her upraised thigh with her teeth. She sang songs calculated to drive the crowd to a pitch of delighted scandal, among them Wait Till I’m Married. The combination of contortion, comedy and cheek was entirely her own. She was not merely performing a trick — she was telling the audience exactly who she was.

The Southend Dispatch — April 14th, 1897

The most vivid surviving eyewitness account of Ellen performing appeared in the Barking, East Ham and Ilford Advertiser of Saturday 17th April 1897. It describes a performance on Wednesday 14th April 1897 at the Victoria Temperance Hotel, Southend — the evening after a rain-soaked football match against Southend Athletic. Ellen was eighteen years old. She had come off the pitch soaked to the skin, dried out at the hotel, and then taken the stage.

Five members of the British Ladies Football Club were on the programme — the Misses Lily Flexmore, Marie Ennis, Phoebe Smith, Violet Clarence, and Blanche Foxcroft. The first-named followed the opening overture, and gave a song and dance, for which she was encored.

Before long the audience grew tired of other turns, and called for “Number Three” — Miss Flexmore’s place on the programme. She sang a song with chorus which opened with “Wait till I’m married” and “Now boys!” — and the “boys” responded and added lustily to her threats of what would happen by and bye.

When she finished with a lively dance by turning on one leg, whilst she gripped the garter of the other between her teeth, the enthusiasm of the “boys” knew no bounds.

The reporter notes that thick clouds of smoke floated from the pipes and cigarettes of the onlookers, that some ladies climbed onto the refreshment counter for a better view, and that a gentleman near the door announced the performers amid a running fire of chaff and good-humoured badinage. The audience called her back for a second turn before the evening was finished. She was eighteen years old. Also on the bill that evening was Miss Phoebe Smith — fourteen years old — who five days later would write to the Secretary of the Enfield Football Club as Secretary of the British Ladies Football Club, offering a financial bond of ten pounds as a guarantee against cancellation.

Source: Barking, East Ham and Ilford Advertiser, Saturday 17th April 1897 · British Newspaper Archive

Early Career

1895 – 1906

From Crouch End to Johannesburg — the making of a music hall name

South Africa — 1897
Union-Castle Line Royal Mail Steamer RMS Briton

RMS Briton · Union-Castle Line · 10,248 Tons · Outward voyage: departed Southampton 4th December 1897 · Arrived Cape Town ~21st December 1897

RMS Moor — the ship aboard which Ellen Dunn returned from South Africa in March 1898

RMS Moor · Colourised · Return voyage: departed Cape Town, arrived Southampton 15th March 1898

At just eighteen years of age, Ellen sailed to South Africa aboard the Union-Castle Line Royal Mail Steamer RMS Briton, departing on 4th December 1897, travelling in the company of the Cassons to appear at the Empire Theatre, Johannesburg. The Briton was designed for speed, typically making the Southampton to Cape Town voyage in around fifteen to seventeen days — arriving in Cape Town on or around 21st December 1897, her maiden voyage. From Cape Town, Ellen would have faced a further four-day, three-night overland journey to Johannesburg. It is not known if Ellen spent Christmas in Cape Town or aboard a train bound for Johannesburg.

✦   Context   ✦

Travel in South Africa — 1897

Rail travel in South Africa 1897 — Cape Town to Johannesburg

By the late 1890s, a continuous railway line connected Cape Town to Johannesburg, completed in the early 1890s largely driven by the gold rush in the Witwatersrand. Trains were steam-powered and relatively slow. The journey typically took two to four days depending on stops and class of travel — with first-class carriages offering sleeping berths and dining cars, and lower classes offering crowded benches with minimal amenities. Frequent stops for water, coal and mechanical checks were a feature of the route. For Ellen, arriving in Cape Town just days before Christmas 1897, this was the only practical way to reach Johannesburg — and it was the fastest and most common way for performers, officials and travellers making the inland journey.

✦   A Moment to Imagine   ✦

Before the gangplank, before the Cape Town docks, before the long steam train rattling north through the South African veldt — there was a kitchen in Islington. Picture that conversation. Africa. Not Paris, not Berlin, not even New York — Africa. Wild animals. The other side of the world. A girl from Peerless Street, Islington, not yet nineteen years old, sitting across the table from her mother and father and telling them she was sailing to Johannesburg. What on earth must John and Ellen Dunnell have made of that? And yet she went. Of course she went.

Ellen did not return to the United Kingdom until 15th March 1898. Whether she performed elsewhere in South Africa during those months remains to be established — but the length of her stay suggests she may well have done. When she did sail for home, she did so aboard the RMS Moor, departing Cape Town and making once again the long voyage north to Southampton. It was the first of many international voyages — and the first proof that the name Lily Flexmore was already travelling well beyond the music halls of London.

White Star Line RMS Adriatic — the ship that carried Ellen and George to New York, December 1907

White Star Line · Twin-Screw R.M.S. Adriatic · 24,563 Tons · The ship aboard which Ellen and George sailed from Southampton on 18th December 1907, arriving in New York on 27th December — spending Christmas Day at sea · Captained by Edward John Smith, later Master of RMS Titanic

In December 1907 she and her husband George sailed from Southampton aboard the White Star Liner RMS Adriatic, departing on 18th December 1907 and arriving in New York on 27th December — which meant that Ellen and George spent Christmas Day at sea. Among their fellow passengers was the music hall comedian Whit Cunliffe, also travelling to perform in New York. The Adriatic on this voyage was captained by Edward John Smith — the very same captain who would later take command of the ill-fated RMS Titanic in April 1912. From New York, Ellen and George went on to Chicago for the Chicago Auditorium. Ellen subsequently toured the USA on the Orpheum Theatre Circuit — forty-five theatres across thirty-six American cities — and toured Canada to glowing reviews.

International Years

1907 – 1912

America, Paris, Berlin, Vienna — forty-five cities across three continents

International Tours

In 1909 she appeared at the Marigny Theatre in Paris, then at the Apollo Theatre, Berlin. In November 1910 she performed at the Union Theatre in Strassburg, and in March 1912 in Beausoleil, France, on the Côte d'Azur, just above Monaco.

✦   A Note from the Researcher   ✦

Pure Conjecture — But Is It?

What follows is informed speculation. It is not proven. But the evidence points somewhere, and this is where I believe it points.

On the passenger manifest, Ellen and George gave their destination address in New York as 270 West 39th Street & 8th Avenue — the Hotel Rossmore, one of the principal hotels of the New York theatrical district, favoured by visiting performers from Britain and Europe. They had stepped off the Adriatic and walked straight into the heart of Broadway.

✦   A Moment to Imagine   ✦

Before the gangplank, before the manifest, before the Hotel Rossmore and Broadway and the gaslit theatres of New York — there was a kitchen in 108 Royston Street, Bethnal Green.

Picture it. The range going, the smell of coal and something cooking. John Dunn — leather worker, waterside labourer, a man whose whole world was London’s streets, its docks, its yards — sitting at the table with his hands around a cup. His wife Ellen Dunnell, of staunch London stock, standing or sitting nearby, as London women of her generation did — composed, practical, not given to fuss, but listening. And across the table: their daughter Ellen — their Ellen — and her husband George, telling them about America.

For John and Ellen Dunnell, going outside London was already a remarkable thing. The idea of crossing to the Continent — to Paris, to Berlin, to the south of France, the places where their daughter had already performed — would have been almost incomprehensible. But this was different. This was America. A place that existed, for people of their world and generation, somewhere between legend and hearsay. A place you read about in the newspapers. A place people went to and sometimes never came back from. A place of impossible scale — cities larger than anything England had produced, distances that swallowed the whole of Britain like a stone dropped in a river.

And here was their daughter — the girl who had danced her way out of Peerless Street, who had played football before ten thousand people at sixteen, who had bent her body into shapes that defied description on stages across Britain and Europe — telling them she was going there. Sailing on a great liner. Arriving in New York. Performing at the Chicago Auditorium, at the New York Theatre, at forty-five stages across thirty-six American cities.

What did John say? Did he get up and stand by the window? Did Ellen’s mother ask about the crossing — how long, how rough, what would they eat? Did they talk about it for weeks beforehand, this thing that was coming — the great departure — going over it again and again in the evenings until it had worn itself into something almost ordinary, the way families do with the extraordinary things that happen to them?

I think John Dunn was proud beyond any word he would have used for it. A man who worked the docks and cut leather for a living, whose own world had been bounded by the streets of Bethnal Green and Clerkenwell, watching his daughter prepare to cross an ocean and perform in the greatest cities in the world. I think he didn’t say much. Men of his kind and generation rarely did. But I think he felt it — the sheer, staggering, improbable distance between 108 Royston Street and the Hotel Rossmore, Broadway, New York — and I think some part of him understood that his daughter had made that distance herself, with her own body and her own determination, one performance at a time.

The kitchen in Royston Street is gone now. The whole street is changed beyond recognition. But that conversation happened. On some winter evening in late 1907, in a house in Bethnal Green, a family sat around a table and talked about America — and the girl at the centre of it all would be on a ship before Christmas.

The manifest also records, with the dispassionate precision of an immigration official, exactly who Ellen was at that moment. She stood five feet four inches tall. She had a fair complexion, brown hair and blue eyes. She had £100 in her possession. It is a small portrait — four details on a government form — but it is the closest thing we have to standing beside her on the gangplank as she arrived in America for the first time, looking out at a city she had never seen, with a hundred pounds and a name that was already beginning to mean something.

Rossmore Hotel, Broadway, New York — colourised

The Hotel Rossmore, Broadway & West 39th Street, New York · Colourised · The Rossmore sign is visible on the building's flank, Broadway stretching away below · Ellen and George gave this address on the Adriatic passenger manifest, December 1907

Broadway and the Rossmore Hotel, New York, 1904 — coloured illustration

Broadway & West 39th Street · 1904 · Coloured illustration showing the Rossmore Hotel awning on the right-hand side of the street · Ellen and George arrived into this world on 27th December 1907

✦   Context   ✦

How the Tour Was Organised — From London

The organisation of Ellen’s American tour from London was, by the standards of the day, a remarkable logistical achievement — conducted almost entirely by correspondence and through agents, months or even years in advance, across an ocean.

The Agent. Ellen would almost certainly have had a theatrical agent in London — someone at one of the major booking agencies of the period, with established relationships in the American market. The Klaw & Erlanger connection almost certainly came through this channel. Ellen did not approach them directly; her agent knew their representatives, brokered the arrangement, and negotiated the terms on her behalf.

The American Circuit System. By 1907 the Orpheum Circuit was a highly organised machine, covering the West and Midwest of America across dozens of venues. Acts were booked in blocks — you negotiated with the circuit, and they slotted you into their schedule. This was both the appeal and the trap: enormous reach, enormous audiences, but the circuit held all the power. It was precisely this imbalance that made a No Fares contract possible.

The Mechanics. The practical sequence would have unfolded something like this. Ellen’s agent contacts the American representative, six to twelve months ahead. Letters cross the Atlantic — terms proposed, countered, agreed. The contract arrives in London by post. Ellen and George sign and return it. The circuit sends back a schedule: dates, cities, theatres, billing. Ellen and George book their passage on the Adriatic. They write ahead to the Hotel Rossmore to secure rooms. They pack their costumes, their props, their music — everything the act required.

The Show Itself. Ellen’s act was entirely self-contained. A contortionist-dancer-comedian needs music — she would have carried her own sheet music for the house orchestra at each theatre. Each theatre’s musicians would sight-read it on the day. No sound system, no lighting rig to ship — just the performer, her body, her costumes, and the score. This portability was precisely what made variety acts so well suited to circuit touring across a continent.

Communication on the Road. Once in America, the agent in London and the circuit booker in America were the points of contact for any changes. The train wreck that delayed Ellen’s New York opening by one day would have generated immediate telegrams to the theatre manager. Everything moved by letter and wire — fast by the standards of the age, agonisingly slow by ours.

What made this possible at all was one of the great engineering achievements of the Victorian era. The first durable transatlantic telegraph cable had been completed in 1866, and by 1907 a robust network of submarine cables — laid by British, French, German, and American companies — linked the two continents. A message that had once taken weeks to cross the Atlantic by ship could now cross in minutes. The nature of international business, performance booking, and diplomacy had been transformed entirely. And there was a further development, astonishing in its timing: on 17th October 1907 — just two months before Ellen and George sailed aboard the Adriatic — Guglielmo Marconi launched the first commercial transatlantic wireless telegraph service, connecting Clifden in County Galway to Glace Bay in Nova Scotia. Ellen’s American tour was organised, in other words, at the precise moment the world learned to speak across the Atlantic without wires at all.

Behind all of this machinery was a young woman from Islington who had somehow — through talent, determination, and the steadfast support of her husband — made herself known to the right people at the right time. The international touring circuit of 1907 was genuinely global, genuinely professional, and genuinely ruthless. Ellen navigated it for nearly thirty years. That is, in itself, an extraordinary achievement.

Ellen and George arrived in New York with a contract issued by the theatrical firm of Klaw & Erlanger. It was, on the face of it, a prestigious arrangement — Klaw & Erlanger were among the most powerful impresarios in America. But the contract contained a provision that was, in practical terms, punishing: it was what was known as a “No Fares” contract, meaning that Ellen and George would be required to meet all their own travel costs as they made their way across the Orpheum Circuit — forty-five theatres across thirty-six American cities. For a couple newly arrived from London, this was not merely inconvenient. It was a serious financial imposition on every engagement they played.

After Chicago, Ellen returned to New York and began an engagement at the New York Theatre, operated by Marc Klaw and Abraham Lincoln Erlanger. She started on a Tuesday — delayed one day by a train wreck — and played out most of January before embarking on the Orpheum tour.

What happened next is documented. On 4th January 1908, Variety Magazine — Vol. 9, No. 4 — carried an announcement reporting that the contract had been torn up and a new one issued in its place. The terms of the new contract are not recorded. But something — or someone — had intervened.

New York Theatre playbill Sunday January 12th, 1908 — Lily Flexmore billed

New York Theatre · Broadway & 45th Street · Advertisement, Sunday 12th January 1908 · Lily Flexmore is billed alongside George Evans, Collins & Hart, Whit Cunliffe, Lucy Weston and May Belfort · Beginning Monday Matinee, 13th January 1908

✦   A Note from the Researcher   ✦

Who Tore Up That Contract?

Whit Cunliffe — The Man in Brown — British lion comique — photograph c.1907

Whittaker “Whit” Cunliffe
1875–1966 · Lion comique
“The Man in Brown” · c.1907
One year older than George Ambrose White · Four years older than Ellen Dunn

The contract was torn up. A new one was issued. Variety reported it on 4th January 1908. But who intervened? Someone must have spoken to Klaw & Erlanger. Someone with enough standing in the American theatrical world to make those two powerful men think twice. I have spent considerable time wondering who that person might have been.

Whittaker “Whit” Cunliffe was one of the most celebrated British music hall performers of his generation — a “lion comique,” a singer of comic songs who had made the Atlantic crossing many times and was enormously popular on both sides of it. In January 1908, he was reported to be earning £450 per week — equivalent to something in the region of £70,000 per week in today's money. He was, by any measure, a very considerable figure in the theatrical world.

He was also a passenger on the Adriatic — sailing to New York on the same voyage as Ellen and George. Whether or not they met aboard ship, what is certain is that they performed together at the New York Theatre that January, billed on the same playbill. A week of performances. Backstage. The wings. The dressing room corridor. The kind of proximity that, in the theatre world, creates friendships very quickly.

George Flexmore was, I truly believe, a very outgoing and friendly man. He would have been in the wings at every performance, making sure that any costume changes Ellen needed were at the ready, keeping an eye on the stage. He would have spoken to all of the other performers. And Ellen — with her extraordinary abilities, her warmth, her sheer physical brilliance — would have charmed everyone in that building within days of arriving.

If Whit Cunliffe came to know Ellen and George even a little during that week — and it is very hard to imagine that he did not — and he came to learn of the punitive terms of their contract — then the rest follows naturally. A word from a performer earning £450 a week, spoken quietly to the right person at Klaw & Erlanger, would have carried very considerable weight. These things were done not through letters or legal challenges, but through relationships, through standing, through a quiet word from someone whose opinion could not easily be ignored.

I cannot prove it. But the documented facts — the shared voyage, the simultaneous billing at the New York Theatre, his enormous earning power and influence — make Whit Cunliffe a far more plausible candidate than anyone else I can identify. The contract was torn up. Someone spoke. And Whit Cunliffe was right there.

Sources: Variety Magazine, Vol. 9, No. 4, 4th January 1908 — announcement of the replacement of Ellen Flexmore’s Klaw & Erlanger contract · New York Theatre advertisement, Sunday 12th January 1908 · White Star Line passenger manifest, SS Adriatic, December 1907

✦   The Art Behind the Artiste   ✦

A Consummate Professional

A body trained to the limits of human possibility

Lily Flexmore · The Back Bend · Colourised promotional photograph

Lily Flexmore · The Back Bend · Colourised promotional photograph
Image courtesy of Paul Duffett

What you see in her photographs is not a trick of the camera, nor a posture available to the merely flexible. It is the result of years — almost certainly a decade or more — of relentless daily training that would have begun in childhood, when the connective tissues of the spine, hips and shoulders are still sufficiently pliable to be shaped by disciplined, progressive work.

In her back-bend pose, all of Ellen’s weight is borne by two points alone — her forehead and her heels. We might expect to see her palms flattened on the floor of the stage, supporting her. Yet her hands are turned gracefully upwards, her wrists barely grazing the stage, her fingers loose and open, as though she were simply resting. Those upturned palms are not an accident. They are placed deliberately so in order to show that Ellen has reached a point of perfection in her art.

Ellen Mary Ann Dunn, born in Peerless Street, Islington, 1879. Studied and perfected her craft year after year — until, as Lily Flexmore, she left her audiences gasping by doing the seemingly impossible.

Ellen Dunn performed positions of this difficulty on stages from London to Johannesburg, from New York to Berlin, for nearly thirty years.

✦   Newcastle Daily Chronicle · Tuesday, 13th March 1906   ✦

“Making Both Ends Meet”

Lily Flexmore in the press — caricatured alongside George Robey

Lily Flexmore — Making Both Ends Meet — Newcastle Daily Chronicle cartoon, 1906 — Posterised

Lily Flexmore  ·  Making Both Ends Meet
Newcastle Daily Chronicle  ·  Tuesday, 13th March 1906

By 1906, Lily Flexmore was famous enough to be caricatured in the press. This cartoon, drawn by McGowan for the Newcastle Daily Chronicle on Tuesday, 13th March 1906, captures her performing the signature toe-in-mouth pose that had made her name across three continents. The caption reads: “Uly Flexmore — Making Both Ends Meet.”

The headline is a play on words — the popular Victorian expression making both ends meet, meaning to manage one’s finances, reimagined as a literal description of what Ellen did on stage: bringing her foot to her mouth. It is exactly the kind of wit that music hall audiences would have appreciated, and it tells us something important: that Lily Flexmore was well-known enough for the joke to land without explanation.

She appears in the cartoon in distinguished company. Alongside her are George Robey — “The Prime Minister of Mirth,” one of the defining figures of Edwardian music hall — as well as Richardson Major, Molvey of Minnam, Dave O’Toole, and Daine of the Found, all performing at the Pavilion. To be caricatured in the same frame as George Robey was no small distinction.

Ellen was twenty-seven years old when this cartoon was published. She had already performed in South Africa, toured the British Isles from Brighton to Aberdeen, and was in the middle of what would become a thirty-year career. The cartoonist saw her as one of the faces of the Newcastle stage that season — recognisable enough to need no further introduction.

At the Pavilion — Newcastle Daily Chronicle cartoon by McGowan, Tuesday 13th March 1906 — featuring Lily Flexmore, George Robey, Richardson Major and others — Posterised

At the Pavilion  ·  Newcastle Daily Chronicle  ·  Tuesday, 13th March 1906  ·  Cartoon by McGowan  ·  Lily Flexmore appears top left

Later Career

1913 – 1925

Through two world wars — still bending the limits of the human body

✦   The Woman Behind the Artiste   ✦

Fearless

One word that defines Ellen Mary Ann Dunn

Lily Flexmore — The Back Bend — Embellished promotional photograph

Lily Flexmore · The Back Bend · Promotional photograph
Image courtesy of Paul Duffett

Look carefully at the dress Ellen is wearing in this photograph — the dark silk, the gold lace trim along the hem, the particular style of the collar. Now look at the splits photograph taken in the same studio session. It is, in all likelihood, the same costume. The same dress that pools around her on the stage floor in one image is folded beneath her in the other. The same gold bangles at her wrist. The same stage.

If these photographs were taken together — and the evidence strongly suggests they were — then we can make a reasonable estimate of Ellen's age at the time. Her stage career began in 1895, when she was sixteen. Promotional photographs of this quality were typically commissioned in the early years of a performer's career, to secure bookings and establish a name. That places these images somewhere around 1896 or 1897. Ellen Mary Ann Dunn, performing that back bend before paying audiences, was most likely seventeen years old.

To fold the spine that completely — arms flat on the stage floor, forehead touching the boards — requires years of training, extraordinary strength, and a fearlessness that most people never develop at any age. She was seventeen.

But fearlessness was not something Ellen reserved for the stage. It was, quite simply, who she was. In 1895, at sixteen, she walked onto a football pitch at Crouch End Athletic Ground before a crowd of more than ten thousand people — at a time when women were expected to be invisible in public life, let alone on a sports field. She played. Her team won 7–1.

Two years later, at eighteen, she sailed to South Africa. Alone, or nearly so, on a voyage of several weeks, to perform on stages in a country she had never seen, thousands of miles from Peerless Street, Islington. The girl who had grown up in a working-class household, the second of eleven children, was now an international artiste.

She would go on to tour Europe, to cross the Atlantic to the United States, to perform on stages from New York to Johannesburg, from Berlin to Dublin. She did all of this as a woman, largely alone, in the Victorian and Edwardian age.

Fearless is not a word chosen lightly. But for Ellen Mary Ann Dunn — Lily Flexmore — Ruth Coupland — it is the only word that fully fits.

✦   A Tribute from Across the Atlantic   ✦

A Tribute from Across the Atlantic

In early 1908, the young women of Saugatuck, Michigan — a small town on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan — were organising a Leap Year Ball. They sent anonymous invitations to the young men of the town, each signing not with her own name, but with that of a famous actress or artiste. The gentlemen would reply to a box number, addressed to the celebrity of their choice, hoping to be partnered with the young lady who most took their fancy.

The names chosen were among the most celebrated women on the English-speaking stage: Ms Fay Templeton, Ms Ellen Terry, Ms Dorothy Kenton, Ms Julia Marlowe, Ms Blanche Ring, Ms Rose Melville, Ms Anna Held, Ms Olive Vale, Ms Elsie Janis, Ms Maxine Elliott, Ms Edna Allen — and Ms Lily Flexmore.

While this was taking place, Ellen had been in the United States for barely two months. That the young women of Saugatuck, Michigan placed her name in such exalted company — alongside Ellen Terry, Anna Held and Maxine Elliott, women whose fame spanned two continents — is among the most eloquent testimonies to the heights of renown that Ellen had achieved. Thousands of miles from home, in a small lakeside town in Michigan, the name Lily Flexmore was one that young men were expected to recognise and with whom they would wish to dance.

✦   Saugatuck, Allegan County, Michigan, USA   ·   February 28th, 1908

✦   Saugatuck, Michigan   February 28th, 1908   ✦

The Company She Kept

These were the famous women whose names the young ladies of Saugatuck, Michigan, chose to use as their pseudonyms. The name of Lily Flexmore stands proudly among them.

Scroll to see all twelve  ·  Portraits sourced from picryl.com — a public domain media archive  ·  No images of Lily Flexmore were found there. Perhaps this website will change that.

←   The Football Club Press & Playbills   →
✦   A Name Earned, Not Inherited   ✦

Flexmore: The Stage Name That Stretched Across Generations

From Harlequin to Music Hall — the tradition behind the name

When Ellen Mary Ann Dunn took to the stage as Lily Flexmore, she was not simply adopting a professional alias. She was stepping into a name that already carried decades of weight — a name associated with physical brilliance, acrobatic mastery, and the finest traditions of British pantomime and music hall.

But the story of how she came to it is not simple, and it is not the story of a bloodline. Flexmore was never merely a family name. It was something closer to a performing tradition — a designation that circulated through the Victorian theatrical world, was earned through training and craft, and was carried by performers who had no blood connection to one another at all. Ellen was performing as Lily Flexmore from 1896. She did not marry George Ambrose White — who performed as George Flexmore — until February 1899. She came to the name in her own right, three years before the marriage. The question of how she came to it — and what the name truly signified — takes us deep into one of the most extraordinary theatrical dynasties of the Victorian era.

✦   Where the Name Began   ✦

Richard Flexmore
1824 – 1860

The name Flexmore as the world came to know it was made by Richard Flexmore (1824–1860) — but even he did not invent it. His real name was Richard Flexmore Geatter: Flexmore was the stage name of his own father, a well-known dancer who died young. Richard inherited it, made it legendary, and gave it a meaning that would outlast him by half a century.

Beginning his theatrical career at the age of eight at the Victoria Theatre, Richard rose to become one of the most celebrated clowns and Harlequins on the Victorian stage. He was especially noted for his close imitation of the great dancers of the day — Perrot, Taglioni, Cerito — and his physical gifts were something his contemporaries struggled to describe adequately. He appeared at the Olympic, the Princess’s, the Strand, the Adelphi, and Covent Garden, and married Francisca Christophosa, daughter of the great French clown Jean-Baptiste Auriol, with whom he performed across Europe.

He died of consumption on August 20th, 1860, aged thirty-six, at 66 Hercules Buildings, Lambeth — having, as contemporaries noted, overtaxed his extraordinary body in pursuit of the audience’s applause. He and Francisca had no children together. His widow returned to Paris and married a cousin, Achille Auriol. On September 1st, 1862 she gave birth to a daughter. The baby died that same day. Francisca herself died just six days later, on September 7th, 1862, aged thirty-three. Three lives — mother, child, and the hope of a line — extinguished within a single week. The Geatter bloodline was gone. But the name — Flexmore — lived on entirely independently of any family, carried forward by the performing world that had loved him.

He and Francisca had no children. After his death she returned to Paris, where she remarried. She became pregnant, but her infant passed away on the day she gave birth, September 1st, 1862. Francisca herself passed away six days later, on September 7th. The bloodline ended. But the name lived on.

Richard Flexmore The Clown — Victorian portrait

Richard Flexmore (real name Richard Flexmore Geatter) · The Clown · Victorian portrait. Celebrated for his physical grace and the mimicry of the era’s great dancers, he died aged thirty-six having overtaxed his body in pursuit of the crowd’s applause.

✦   The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, December 1874   ✦

“Some Famous Clowns”

Drawn by F. Trainer · Published December 19th, 1874 · Fourteen years after his death, Flexmore’s name endured

Some Famous Clowns — Drawn by F. Walters — Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, December 1874 — Colourised

“Some Famous Clowns” · Drawn by F. Walters · The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, December 19th, 1874 · Colourised · Portraits include: Charles Lauri, Tom Mathews, Little Whiting, Boleno, Richard Stilt JRSW, Paul Herring RST, Mr Joseph Grimaldi (born December 18th, 1779), Fred Evans (The Modern Clown, T.R. Drury Lane 1874–5), Joe Grimaldi as Clown in Troliffe, and Flexmore.

Joseph Grimaldi — Watercolour with frogs

Joseph Grimaldi (1778–1837) · Watercolour. Grimaldi, the father of modern clowning, cast a long shadow over every performer in the Victorian pantomime tradition — Flexmore included.

In the Christmas 1874 edition of the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, the artist F. Trainer assembled a commemorative page of portraits under the title “Some Famous Clowns” — gathering the legendary names of Victorian pantomime. Among them: Joseph Grimaldi, Charles Lauri, Tom Mathews, Paul Herring — and Flexmore. Fourteen years after his death, the name still commanded that company.

A second, larger and more fully captioned version of the same feature appeared under the heading “Waes-Hael!” — an ancient seasonal toast meaning Good Health — confirming each portrait by name. Both versions are reproduced here.

To be placed alongside Grimaldi, even posthumously, was the highest possible honour the Victorian stage could bestow.

✦   Grimaldi & Clerkenwell   ✦

“Little Italy” — The Streets Ellen Called Home

There is a further connection that makes Grimaldi’s presence in this story more than symbolic. From 1818 to 1829, Grimaldi lived at 56 Exmouth Market — formerly 8 Exmouth Street and 8 Braynes Row — in Clerkenwell. This was the very neighbourhood that, in the later Victorian era, became known as “Little Italy”, home to a large community of Italian immigrants and performers. It was also the homeplace of Ellen Mary Ann Dunn, who was born just streets away at 56 Peerless Street.

Charles Dickens, who edited Grimaldi’s voluminous memoirs, wrote that after 1820 his subject suffered “little or nothing but one constant succession of afflictions and calamities, the pressure of which nearly bowed him to the earth.” One of Grimaldi’s remaining pleasures was to drink with friends at the Myddleton’s Head, a pub close to Sadler’s Wells Theatre — his stamping ground for more than thirty years. When he retired in 1828, the ailing clown gave a farewell performance there on St Patrick’s Day, after which he wept, in the words of a witness, “with an intensity of suffering that it was painful to witness and impossible to alleviate.” The following day, his home in Exmouth Market was besieged by fans.

Number 56 Exmouth Market still stands — apart from the addition of a shop front, it is the only house on the eastern side of the street to have retained most of its 18th-century character. Grimaldi died in 1837 at 22 Calshot Street, Islington (formerly 33 Southampton Street; now demolished) — not far from the streets where, forty-two years later, Ellen Mary Ann Dunn would be born.

The greatest clown England ever produced lived and died in the same streets where the last bearer of a name he inspired would one day be born. Clerkenwell holds them both.

It was this reputation — this cultural weight — that the name Flexmore carried into the late Victorian and Edwardian music hall. And it was precisely because the name signified something — physical brilliance, acrobatic artistry, a particular tradition of the body on stage — that it could be worn by performers who bore no blood relation to Richard Flexmore Geatter at all.

✦   Original Research Hypothesis   ✦

Clerkenwell, Little Italy, and the Name in the Air

How a name may have passed from one performing world to another — not through blood, but through community

The question of how the name Flexmore came to be shared by so many unrelated performers — Thomas ‘Flexible Flexmore’ Knight, Marie Gilleno Flexmore, Eva Matilda Flexmore Knight, Lily Flexmore, George Flexmore, Fred Flexmore, the Sisters Flexmore — has a geographical answer that only becomes visible when you look at the map of Victorian London.

That answer is Clerkenwell.

In the mid-to-late nineteenth century, the streets around Clerkenwell, Saffron Hill, and Hatton Garden constituted one of the most remarkable communities in London — known colloquially as Little Italy. This was not merely a community of Italian immigrants. It was a community of European circus and acrobatic performers, street musicians, organ grinders, and travelling entertainers, many of Italian or Continental origin, who had gravitated to this part of the city because of its long association with popular entertainment, its proximity to Sadler’s Wells, and its traditions of street performance stretching back generations.

Joseph Grimaldi had lived and died in these same streets. Richard Flexmore Geatter had lived at Hercules Buildings, Lambeth — directly across the river. The name Flexmore was celebrated in the performing communities of this world for decades after his death. It appeared in the press, on playbills, in the memories of audiences. It was, in the fullest sense, in the air.

✦   Primary Source   ✦

The Wieland and Flexmore School

A significant line of research, pursued by Stuart Gibbs of Manchester Metropolitan University, has recently opened into the origin and meaning of the name Flexmore.

A review published in the Morning Post in 1867 describes the performer Charles Lauri as “a gymnast of the Wieland and Flexmore school” — a phrase used in passing, without explanation, as though every reader of a national newspaper would immediately understand the reference. By 1867, seven years after the death of Richard Flexmore Geatter, the pairing of Wieland and Flexmore already named an acknowledged tradition of acrobatic, gymnastic, and grotesque performance in Victorian entertainment.

Richard Flexmore Geatter had lived at 66 Hercules Buildings, Lambeth. Henry W. Wieland, the theatrical impresario with whom his name was paired, lived at 46 Hercules Road, Lambeth — the same street, renamed. Neighbours, colleagues, and, it appears, co-founders of a recognised school of physical performance.

It is very likely — though this remains under active research — that when Ellen Mary Ann Dunn chose the stage name Lily Flexmore for her acrobatic contortionist act around 1895, she was doing something more deliberate than borrowing a famous name. She was placing herself within a living tradition: the Wieland and Flexmore school of physical performance, already thirty years established, and still recognised as a lineage worth claiming.

This is primary source research by Stuart Gibbs. The work continues.

It is proposed here that the name Flexmore functioned, in the performing communities of Clerkenwell and the surrounding area, as something closer to a quality mark than a family name — a designation that signified physical brilliance, acrobatic mastery, and a particular tradition of the body on stage.

It is proposed here — as an original research hypothesis — that William Henry ‘Harry’ Gilleno Giles arrived in London from Scotland with his family and settled, at least for a period, in or around Clerkenwell. Finding himself in a community where Italian names carried commercial cachet — where audiences associated Continental names with acrobatic excellence and circus skill — he made the very professional (some might say — marketing) decision to Italianise his name from Giles to Gileno, giving it the flavour of the Little Italy world in which circus performers moved and traded.

This was not dishonesty. It was showmanship — the same instinct that led dozens of Victorian performers to adopt stage names, foreign-sounding aliases, and noble-sounding titles. Lord George Sanger himself styled himself a lord with no aristocratic claim whatsoever. The performing world understood and respected the tradition.

In this same environment, the name Flexmore would have been encountered, admired, and — for a performer of sufficient skill and ambition — aspirationally adopted. Thomas ‘Flexible Flexmore’ Knight did precisely this. Sophia Gilleno Giles, marrying into the Knight family and performing in the same world, took the name as her own. Their children also adopted the Flexmore name professionally — not a family name, but a performing tradition passed down as with an inheritance.

And Ellen Mary Ann Dunn, born in Peerless Street, Islington — a matter of streets from Clerkenwell, from Sadler’s Wells, from the world where all of this had been playing out for half a century — reached for the same name when she stepped onto the stage for the first time in 1895 or 1896. Whether she knew the Gilleno-Knight family directly, trained under someone connected to them, or simply knew the name as the most prestigious in the acrobatic tradition of her neighbourhood, we cannot say with certainty.

What we can say is this: the name Flexmore connected them all — not through blood, but through geography, community, and the shared culture of a performing world that flourished in the streets of North London for the better part of a century. It was a name that meant something. And every performer who wore it understood what it meant.

✦   Five Performers   One Name   No Blood Connection   ✦

Thomas Knight

‘Flexible Flexmore’

Sophia Gilleno Giles

Marie Flexmore

Ellen Mary Ann Dunn

Lily Flexmore

George Ambrose White

George Flexmore

Laurence Sidney May

Fred Flexmore

None of the above share a blood connection to Richard Flexmore Geatter (1824–1860), the man who made the name famous. The name passed through community, geography, and aspiration — not inheritance.

✦   Acknowledgement   ✦

Much of the knowledge of Clerkenwell drawn upon in this section was gathered through the work of John Rogers, whose YouTube channel features long, deeply informative walking tours of London. His exploration of Clerkenwell — its history, its streets, its Italian community, and its extraordinary place in the story of Victorian London — is warmly recommended to anyone who wishes to walk these streets in their imagination.

▶   John Rogers — Walking Clerkenwell   (YouTube)
✦   Victorian London   c.1870–1895   ✦

Clerkenwell & Little Italy

The neighbourhood where the Flexmore name circulated — and where Ellen Mary Ann Dunn was born

River Thames FARRINGDON ROAD CLERKENWELL ROAD ROSEBERY AVENUE GRAY'S INN ROAD SAFFRON HILL HATTON GARDEN PENTONVILLE ROAD LITTLE ITALY Clerkenwell & Saffron Hill Sadler's Wells Theatre Grimaldi's Home 56 Exmouth Market Peerless Street Ellen Dunn born here · 1879 St Peter's Italian Church · 1864 Saffron Hill Heart of Little Italy Mazzini-Garibaldi Club · Farringdon Rd Richard Flexmore Hercules Bldgs, Lambeth Clerkenwell Green ISLINGTON CLERKENWELL HOLBORN FINSBURY Regent's Canal N KEY LOCATIONS Ellen Dunn's birthplace Key performance venue Richard Flexmore Little Italy district Thames / Canal Major roads c. 1870 – 1895 Victorian Clerkenwell & Islington  ·  Illustrated map  ·  Not to scale

Victorian Clerkenwell & Islington, c.1870–1895  ·  Showing the key locations connected to the Flexmore name: Sadler’s Wells, Grimaldi’s home on Exmouth Market, the heart of Little Italy around Saffron Hill, St Peter’s Italian Church, and — marked in rose — Peerless Street, where Ellen Mary Ann Dunn was born in 1879. Richard Flexmore’s home at Hercules Buildings, Lambeth, lies just across the Thames.

✦   Islington & Clerkenwell   ✦

The Blue Plaques of Clerkenwell

A neighbourhood already rich with commemoration — and one name yet to be honoured

Map of Clerkenwell showing Blue Plaque locations including Joseph Grimaldi

Blue Plaque locations in the Clerkenwell and Islington area — the neighbourhood shared by Joseph Grimaldi and Ellen Mary Ann Dunn. Grimaldi’s plaque at 56 Exmouth Market lies within walking distance of 56 Peerless Street, where Ellen was born.

✦   A Campaign in the Making   ✦

A Blue Plaque for Lily Flexmore
Colebrooke Row, Islington

After nearly four decades performing across three continents, Ellen Mary Ann Dunn — known to the world as Lily Flexmore — retired with her husband George to Colebrooke Row, Islington. It was here, in the quiet streets above the Regent’s Canal, that they spent their final years together.

The case for a blue plaque is a strong one. Ellen was a pioneering woman of the Victorian and Edwardian stage — an acrobatic contortionist, dancer, singer and comedienne who performed from Johannesburg to New York to Berlin. She was also one of the founding members of the British Ladies Football Club in 1895 — among the first women to play association football professionally in Britain. Her story was lost for nearly a century. It deserves to be told, in stone, on the street where she came home.

Ms Karen Wall — Ellen’s great-great-niece, and the person whose twenty years of dedicated research brought Ellen’s story back to light — is already pursuing a Blue Plaque nomination on Ellen’s behalf. This website exists in support of that effort. If you share the view that Ellen Mary Ann Dunn merits a blue plaque on Colebrooke Row, please do get in touch using the contact form below — and help make the case.

The English Heritage Criteria

English Heritage blue plaques are awarded to individuals who were born, lived, or worked at a London address and who made an outstanding contribution to human welfare or happiness — and whose work was of a nature that future generations will value the commemoration. Ellen Mary Ann Dunn meets every one of those criteria.

Contact English Heritage

bluplaques@english-heritage.org.uk
Blue Plaques Team, English Heritage
6th Floor, 100 Wood Street, London EC2V 7AN

Nomination Form →

✦   A Name That Could Be Earned   ✦

The Flexmore World

The performers, the school, and the tradition that kept the name alive

After Richard’s death, the Flexmore name spread outward through the performing world in ways that had nothing to do with inheritance. Several distinct performers and families carried it — sometimes by blood connection to a secondary Flexmore line, sometimes simply by training and association. What emerges is a picture of Flexmore as something closer to a school or a tradition than a surname: a designation that could be worn by those who had mastered the particular physical art it represented.

✦   A Separate Line   ✦

Frederick Flexmore

1846–1892 · Decorative Artist & Soloist

A later bearer of the Flexmore name and a performer in his own right. His children — Florence, George, and Handel — performed together as The Flexmore Three, with Florence appearing at only nine years old. Florence later toured with her sisters as The Sisters Chester. Frederick’s son, also called Fred Flexmore (b. 1869), is one possible route by which Ellen encountered the name and its associated training.

✦   The Leg-Mania Specialist   ✦

Laurence Sidney May

1863–1928 · Also Known As Fred Flexmore

An exponent of Leg-Mania — a demanding performance style built around feats of extreme leg flexibility and control, entirely in keeping with the physical tradition the Flexmore name carried. He performed professionally as Fred Flexmore and was active on the music hall stage until a career-ending injury in 1906, after which he continued successfully as a pantomimist until his death in 1928. He is one of the most plausible figures through whom Ellen may have encountered the Flexmore tradition.

✦   A Possible Training Ground   ✦

The Flexmore School of Dance

South London · Possible Route to the Name

It is possible that a Flexmore School of Dance operated in South London during the period of Ellen’s training — run by one or more of the Flexmore-associated performers. If so, it would explain both Ellen’s adoption of the name and the fact that others adopted it too: the name may simply have been what graduates of that school performed under. This remains unconfirmed, but it is the most coherent explanation for the pattern of adoption that the historical record shows.

✦   Evidence That the Name Was Adoptable   ✦

The Sisters Flexmore — The Prodger Sisters

The clearest evidence that Flexmore was not a bloodline but a performing designation comes from Florence, Elizabeth and Lydia Prodger, who toured and performed as The Sisters Flexmore. The Prodgers had no family connection to Richard Flexmore Geatter, to Frederick Flexmore, or to any of the other Flexmore performers. They simply adopted the name — and the performing world accepted it, because the name meant something about what they did, not who they were born to. Ellen Mary Ann Dunn did exactly the same.

Detroit Free Press May 8th, 1892 — Tony Pastor's company featuring the Sisters Flexmore

Detroit Free Press · Sunday May 8th, 1892 · Tony Pastor’s company at Whitney’s — the Sisters Flexmore named on the bill alongside Maggie Cline, Weber and Fields

By 1892 the Flexmore name was known not only in Britain but in America. This notice from the Detroit Free Press places The Sisters Flexmore on a bill at Whitney’s Theatre with Tony Pastor’s celebrated company — alongside Maggie Cline, “the Irish Queen,” Weber and Fields, and John and James Russell.

Ellen Mary Ann Dunn was thirteen years old in May 1892. She would not begin performing professionally for another three or four years. But the name she would eventually take — Flexmore — was already crossing the Atlantic and appearing in American newspapers, carried by performers who, like her, had adopted it through craft rather than birth. When Ellen finally brought the name to America herself in December 1907, she was joining a tradition that had preceded her there by fifteen years.

Note · This is the Sisters Flexmore (the Prodger Sisters), not Lily Flexmore herself

✦   Before the Marriage   ✦

How Ellen Became Lily Flexmore

A name she earned — and only later shared

Ellen was performing as Lily Flexmore from 1896 — at the age of seventeen, beginning her full-time professional career. She did not marry George Ambrose White (who performed as George Flexmore) until February 1899. The name was hers before it was shared. George likely came to it by his own parallel route, as a comedian who had encountered the same tradition — whether through training, association, or the school — before he and Ellen met.

How precisely Ellen came to the name remains unconfirmed. She trained from childhood as a dancer, gymnast and contortionist — and it is possible she trained at a Flexmore School of Dance, or under one of the Flexmore-associated performers, perhaps Laurence Sidney May or the younger Fred Flexmore. What is clear is that she adopted the name as a tribute to, and identification with, a particular tradition of physical performance — and that she kept it for the rest of her life, long after any formal connection to its originators had faded.

Richard Flexmore

Geatter · 1824–1860

The originator. Inherited the name from his father, made it legendary, left no direct heirs.

Laurence Sidney May

Fred Flexmore · 1863–1928

Leg-Mania specialist. Performed as Fred Flexmore until injury in 1906, then as pantomimist. A possible tutor.

George Flexmore

George Ambrose White · 1877–1933

Ellen’s husband. Performed as a comedian under the Flexmore name. How he came to it is likewise unconfirmed.

Lily Flexmore

Ellen Mary Ann Dunn · 1879–1934

Performing as Lily Flexmore from 1896 — three years before her marriage. The name was hers in her own right.

When Ellen died in January 1934 — four months after George — the name Flexmore passed from the stage. But for nearly four decades she had carried it across three continents, from Johannesburg to New York to Berlin, performing to audiences who associated it with something rare: a body trained to the very limits of human possibility, and the artistry to make that training look effortless.

She did not come to the name through marriage. She came to it through her body, her training, and her craft — and she made it her own long before she made it shared.

✦   Further Research   ✦

Ancestry Trees

Public Ancestry trees for the key figures in the Flexmore story — open for contributions

Each of the trees below traces a different family who carried the Flexmore name professionally — despite having their own birth surnames. Some were leg-mania specialists, some circus performers, some music hall artistes. None are directly related to one another by blood. What connects them is the name itself — and the performing tradition it represented. The most likely explanation is a shared connection to the original Flexmore dynasty: through training, through association, or through the kind of informal apprenticeship that defined the Victorian entertainment world. These trees are offered as evidence of just how far that name reached, and how seriously it was taken.

A free Ancestry account is required to view full tree details

Richard Flexmore Geatter Family Tree

✦   Ancestry Tree

Richard Flexmore Geatter

1824 – 1860

Father Richard F Gatter (1781–1837) · Mother Ann F Pether · Sister Mary Ann Flexmore (1822–1830) · Wife Francisca C Auriol (1829–1862). After Richard’s death in 1860, Francisca returned to Paris and married her cousin Achille Auriol. Their daughter was born and died on September 1st, 1862. Francisca died six days later, aged 33. The line ended there.

View on Ancestry →

 Laurence Sidney May Family Tree

✦   Ancestry Tree

Laurence Sidney May

1863 – 1928 · Performed as Fred Flexmore

Parents: Frederick S May (1831–1909) & Emily S T Steele (1830–1903) · Grandparents: Enoch May & Elizabeth Knight · Siblings: Arthur, Vincent, Charlotte. Leg-Mania specialist; performed as Fred Flexmore until injured in 1906.

View on Ancestry →

 Prodger Family Tree — The Sisters Flexmore

✦   Ancestry Tree

The Prodger Sisters

The Sisters Flexmore

Parents: George Prodger (1834–1898) & Elizabeth Griffin (1834–1919) · Florence Prodger (1864–1945) · Elizabeth Prodger (1857–1949) · Lydia Prodger (1870–1960). No blood connection to the Flexmore family — the name was adopted through training and association.

View on Ancestry →

 Vokes Family Tree

✦   Ancestry Tree

The Vokes Family

Leg-Mania Performers

Parents: Frederick S Vokes (1816–1890) & Sarah Jane Godden (1816–1897) · Frederick M Vokes (1846–1888) · Jessie C B Vokes (1848–1884) · Victoria Vokes (1850–1894) · Theodosia Vokes (1854–1894). Fred Vokes was one of the most celebrated Leg-Mania performers of the Victorian era.

View on Ancestry →

✦   Ancestry Tree

Frederick W Flexmore

1846 – 1892 · The Flexmore Family Tree

Parents: John Flaxman (1810–1868) & Sarah Browne (1821–1876) · Wife: Mary Cary (1849–1914) · Children: George A, Arthur R, Florence E, Handel J, Maud Alice, Albert, Evelyn, Henry Bowler and Ethel M C Flexmore. A family who carried the Flexmore name across a generation of nine children — the name passed as a living inheritance into the late Victorian and Edwardian era.

View on Ancestry →

✦   Ancestry Tree

Frederick T Kitchen

1872 – 1951 · The Fred Kitchen Tree

Grandparents: Richard H Kitchen-Dunn (1830–1910) & Emma E Burry (1834–1915) · Parents: Frederick T Kitchen (1872–1951) & Eleanor A Ward (1876–1941). The Kitchen-Dunn line connects through Richard Henry Kitchen Dunn — a branch researched in connection with the broader network of Victorian performing families surrounding the Flexmore name.

View on Ancestry →

 Richard Henry Kitchen Dunn Family Tree

✦   Ancestry Tree

Richard Henry Kitchen Dunn

1830 – 1910

Parents: Richard H Kitchen (1790–1840) & Jane Dunn (1804–) · Wife: Emma E Burry (1834–1915) · Children: Caroline Dunn (1858–1935), Richard H K Dunn Jr (1860–1907), Harry W K Dunn (1862–1944), Emma E J Dunn (1863–), Frederick T Kitchen Dunn (1872–1951), Lizette Kitchen Dunn (1876–). A Dunn family branch connected to the broader network of Victorian performing families researched in relation to Ellen Mary Ann Dunn’s story.

View on Ancestry →

✦   The Circus Dynasty Behind the Name   ✦

The Gilleno · Giles · Knight · Flexmore Family

A Victorian circus dynasty — and the personal connection that led to this research

The Grandfather

Harry ‘Funny Frisk’ Gilleno Giles
1823 – 1874

William Henry Gilleno Giles — known on the circus circuit as Harry ‘Funny Frisk’ Gilleno — was a celebrated Victorian circus performer who ran his own travelling show. His daughter Sophia would carry the Flexmore name into the next generation. His son Harry Giles’s family tree is the branch through which this entire story connects to the researcher. He died in December 1874 in Warwickshire, aged 51 — the record noting his death as a murder. His wife Janet died in Birmingham in September 1894; her death notice in The Era names her as the beloved mother of Marie Flexmore and Little Friskey — both stage names carried by her children in the circus world.

The Father

Thomas ‘Flexible Flexmore’ Knight
c. 1820 – ?

Thomas Knight performed under the name ‘Flexible Flexmore’ — a direct echo of Richard Flexmore’s legacy. His son Edward Knight would marry Sophia Gilleno Giles in 1883, uniting two Flexmore performing lines in a single household. Their children were registered at birth with Flexmore as a middle name — a mark of the tradition they were born into.

The Mother

Sophia Matilda Gilleno Giles
1864 – 1949

Born in Edinburgh on December 22nd, 1864, Sophia performed as an equestrienne under the name Marie Flexmore — with her father’s travelling show and with Lord George Sanger’s Circus, one of the greatest circus enterprises of the Victorian era. She married Edward Knight — son of Thomas ‘Flexible Flexmore’ Knight — on December 1st, 1883 at the Church of All Saints, Chorlton upon Medlock, Lancashire; both their fathers were already deceased at the time of the marriage. In the Irish Census of 1911, she appears at 23 Pound Lane, Clogheen, Co. Tipperary as head of household, aged 45, occupation listed as Travelling Bazaar and Show Owner. She carried the Flexmore name for the rest of her life. In 1934, the Thanet Advertiser & Echo interviewed her under the headline “Seventy Years a Showwoman” — a nod to Sanger’s own memoir. She died on March 1st, 1949 at 18 Bethesda Street, Ramsgate, Kent, at the home of her daughter Eva, aged 84. Her death notice remembers her simply as Mrs M. Flexmore. George Sanger himself is buried in Margate, where Sophia spent her final years.

The Children

Eva & Albert Flexmore Knight
1884 – 1951  ·  1885 – 1942

Eva Matilda Flexmore Knight (1884–1951) and her brother Albert Edward Flexmore Knight (1885–1942) were born with Flexmore as a given middle name — children of two Flexmore lines, born into a travelling circus family. Albert served in the Royal Bucks Hussars in WWI. His obituary remembers him as “Mr Albert Edward Gilleno, of the Gilleno Brothers, circus artists.” Eva’s life took her from Tipperary to Ontario to Detroit to Margate; she died six weeks after her son Jack, aged sixty-six.

Circus Memories — Seventy Years in a Caravan — Thanet Advertiser & Echo, December 28th, 1934 — Interview with Mrs Sophia Flexmore

Thanet Advertiser & Echo  ·  December 28th, 1934

✦   A Primary Source   ✦

In December 1934, a reporter from the Thanet Advertiser & Echo called on Sophia at her home in Ramsgate. She was sixty-nine years old. The resulting article — headlined “Circus Memories · Seventy Years in a Caravan · Ramsgate Woman’s Life on the Road” — is one of the most remarkable documents in this entire story.

An accomplished equestrienne, she remembered the ring, the crowded big top, the horses, the caravans nestling out of sight of the road at night. She spoke of the attitude of the indigenous population towards circus dwellers as “not always having been the most kind.” She remembered touring the length and breadth of Ireland, of having known every backroad there.

The article title was a nod to ‘Lord’ George Sanger’s memoir, Seventy Years a Showman (1911) — with whom Sophia had herself toured as Marie Flexmore. Sanger is buried in Margate, the same town where Sophia spent her final years. The interview ends with a description of her as “a little caravan in the heart of Ramsgate.”

She died fifteen years later, on March 1st, 1949, still known to her neighbours and to the press as Mrs M. Flexmore. Not Mrs Knight. Not Mrs Giles. Not Mrs Gilleno. Flexmore.

✦   The Personal Connection   ✦

My interest in the Flexmore name began closer to home than I had anticipated. In November 1913, at the Church of St. Mary in Edenderry, Co. Offaly, Eva Matilda Flexmore Knight married Matthew Mooney — my great-uncle, and the brother of my grandfather William Mooney. Matthew’s occupation on the marriage certificate is given as Foreman; Eva’s as Travelling Theatre Artiste. The witnesses were Peter Mooney and Marion G. Ford — described on the certificate as Eva’s aunt. The priest was Father Paul Murphy.

Eva had been born on 6th September 1884 at 17 Meadow Terrace, Smithfield Road, Atcham, in the Parish of St. Mary, County of Salop — Shrewsbury, Shropshire. Her father was Frederick Edward Knight, aged twenty-four, listed on the birth certificate as Artiste. Her mother was Sophia Matilda Gilleno Giles, aged twenty-two. Her paternal grandfather — named directly in her Ancestry record — was Thomas ‘Flexible Flexmore’ Knight: the very man whose performing name had propagated outward through the Victorian entertainment world for half a century, and whose shadow falls, obliquely but unmistakably, across the question of how Ellen Mary Ann Dunn came to call herself Lily Flexmore.

By the time of the 1911 Irish Census, the whole Knight family was living at Pound Lane, Clogheen, County Tipperary — the dwelling recorded as a Bazaar. Sophia, then forty-five and widowed, appears as Head of Family with the occupation Travelling Bazaar and Show Owner, her birthplace given as Scotland. Eva, twenty-six, is listed as Assistant. Her brother Albert Edward Flexmore Knight, twenty-five, is Head of a second family unit at the same address, occupation Travelling Bazaar etc.; his wife Caroline, twenty-one, from Wales, is listed as Actress. Also present is their three-year-old daughter Marian. The whole family appears under the surname Flexmore — not Knight. It was a professional identity, worn collectively, and worn in public.

After the marriage to Matthew Mooney, Eva continued with the troupe. But the years that followed were hard. In June 1920, in Dublin, Eva suffered a personal crisis of the gravest kind. She sailed for Canada shortly afterwards, travelling under her maiden name aboard the Metagama, arriving in Ontario on 22nd November 1920. She and Sophia stayed at 627 Hamilton Road, London, Ontario — the home of William Fotherby Howard, whose wife Louisa Gilleno Giles was Sophia’s sister. Eva took work as a dressmaker and reverted to the surname Flexmore.

In June 1922, Eva crossed the border into the United States and married John Michael Barry in Detroit, Michigan. By 1924, they were living in Winthrop, Massachusetts. A son, Jack, was born that year. In December 1936, Eva sailed from Saint John, New Brunswick, aboard the Canadian Pacific’s Duchess of Richmond, arriving at Southampton on the 19th, with eleven-year-old Jack beside her. Her destination was Montefiore Villa, Trinity Place, Ramsgate — to be with her mother, who had settled on the Kent coast in her old age.

The years in Thanet brought grief in close succession. Sophia died on 1st March 1949 at 18 Bethesda Street, Ramsgate, aged eighty-four. Jack died there too, on 20th February 1951, aged twenty-seven, of bronchopneumonia and influenza. A newspaper death notice described him as the only and dearly beloved son of Mrs. Eva Barry. Nine days after appearing at Ramsgate Magistrate’s Court in the aftermath of her son’s death, Eva Matilda Flexmore Knight died at home — 18 Bethesda Street, Ramsgate — on 10th May 1951, from a cerebral haemorrhage. She was sixty-six years old. Her death certificate records her surname as Barry, otherwise Mooney.

It was searching for Eva — this woman who had crossed three oceans, worn three surnames, and carried the Flexmore name from a Shropshire birth certificate through the Tipperary census to the streets of Detroit — that I first encountered the name Lily Flexmore. The thread ran from Eva’s grandfather Thomas Knight to the music halls of Victorian London, and from the question of one woman’s identity to another’s entirely. Whether Ellen adopted the name through training, through association, or through some connection that still awaits discovery remains one of the open questions of this research. What is certain is that she wore it with distinction for thirty years — and that the name, once hers, became inseparable from her.

🌳   The Gilleno Giles & Knight — Flexmore Family Tree   →
←   Career Chronology Sources & Bibliography   →
✦   From the Archive   ✦

Press & Playbills

Newspaper clippings, playbills and posters from Lily Flexmore’s career · 1897–1917

Leaving for South Africa 1897

December 4th, 1897

Leaving for South Africa

Press notice of Lily’s departure for Johannesburg — her first international engagement, aged eighteen.

Variety Hall North London 1897

January 22nd, 1897

Variety Hall, North London

Five BLFC members on the programme. Lily performed a song and dance and was encored by the audience.

Alhambra Theatre Varieties Poster 1898

1898

Alhambra Theatre of Varieties

Programme cover for the Alhambra, General Manager Alfred Moul. Lily billed as “The Champion Acrobatic Dancer of the World.”

Alhambra Hull April 1898

April 1st, 1898

Alhambra, Hull

“Just returned from South Africa, and a tremendous success.” Agent: R. Voss.

Lily Flexmore R. Voss agent advert May 6th, 1898

May 6th, 1898

R. Voss — Agent’s Advertisement

“The Champion Acrobatic Dancer of the World.” Washington, Standard and Cambridge booked. Sole Agent: R. Voss.

Collins Music Hall Islington 1900

April 7th, 1900

Collins’s Music Hall, Islington

Lily on the bill with T.E. Dunville, Lily Morris and Mark Sheridan at the legendary Islington Green hall.

Shares Bill with Lily Langtry Blackpool 1900

1900

Sharing a Bill with Lily Langtry

Alhambra, Blackpool review: Lily Flexmore named alongside Lily Langtry as “serio, comedian and leg-mania artist.”

India Rubber Girl Bristol 1900

December 14th, 1900

“The India Rubber Girl” — Bristol

Bristol Music Hall review: “Lily Flexmore, the India rubber girl, gives a novel performance.”

Cork Opera House 1907

April 23rd, 1907

Cork Opera House

Programme for Lily Flexmore’s appearance at the Cork Opera House, part of her extensive Irish touring.

Paris Spectacles Officiel April 1908

5–April 11th, 1908

Officiel Paris-Spectacles

The official Paris entertainments listings for the week — from the Opéra to the Grand Guignol. Lily was performing in Paris that year.

Berlin Wintergarten June 1908

June 9th, 1908

Berlin Wintergarten

Programme listing Lily Flexmore as “Akrobat. Tänzer” alongside the Trapnell Family and Therese Renz.

Berliner Tageblatt 1909

September 5th, 1909

Berliner Tageblatt

Masthead of the Berliner Tageblatt — one of Berlin’s leading papers, in whose pages Lily’s engagements were advertised.

Orpheum Circuit Poster

1908

Orpheum Circuit of Theatres

The iconic Orpheum Circuit poster. Lily toured 45 theatres across 36 American cities, billed as “The Extraordinary Girl.”

Orpheum Memphis March 1908

March 22nd, 1908

Orpheum Theatre, Memphis

Memphis Orpheum advertisement: “Lily Flexmore — The Extraordinary Girl.” Performances twice daily.

Saugatuck Leap Year Ball 1908

February 1908

The Saugatuck Leap Year Ball

The young women of Saugatuck, Michigan chose Lily’s name alongside Ellen Terry and Anna Held for their anonymous invitations.

Marie Dressler Show Aldwych 1909

March 6th, 1909

Marie Dressler’s Show — Aldwych

“Lily Flexmore, the little dancer, was given special mention in the reviews” — singled out amid a major company.

Le Figaro Marigny Paris August 14th, 1909

August 14th, 1909

Le Figaro — Théâtre Marigny

Le Figaro: “A Marigny: Miss Lily Flexmore, the flexible girl” — listed alongside Ida Rubinstein at the Olympia.

Wounded Soldiers Palace Theatre 1917

October 1917

Wounded Soldiers — Palace Theatre

Benefit performance for 600–700 wounded soldiers from the Reading War Hospitals. Lily gave her services voluntarily.

Lily Flexmore — Reynolds's Newspaper, Stageland and Thereabouts, June 1911

June 26th, 1911

Reynolds’s Newspaper

“Stageland and Thereabouts” feature. Lily photographed at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire — a recognised face of the Edwardian halls.

Apollo Theater Vienna October 1st, 1907

October 1st, 1907

Apollo Theater, Vienna

Monstre-Oktoberprogramm — Lily Flexmore listed on the bill with Amylla, La Roy, Siegwart Gentes and the Wartenberg Brothers.

Hansa-Theater Hamburg June 1909

June 4th, 1909

Hansa-Theater, Hamburg

With Dorothy Kenton and Mizi Gizi — Lily Flexmore on the June programme at one of Hamburg’s leading variety houses.

Berliner Tageblatt review naming Lily Flexmore September 5th, 1909

September 5th, 1909

Berliner Tageblatt — Review

The paper describes Lily Flexmore as “die schlangengewandte amerikanische Excentrictänzerin” — the snake-limbed American eccentric dancer.

Le Journal de Paris Théâtres & Concerts 1909

1909

Le Journal — Théâtres & Concerts

Paris entertainment listings naming “Lily Flexmore, the flexible girl” alongside Fred Lindsey, champion of Australia.

Kentucky Irish American January 25th, 1908 — Lily Flexmore Louisville

January 25th, 1908

Kentucky Irish American — Louisville

Lily Flexmore listed as acrobatic dancer at the Hopkins Theatre, Louisville — one of forty-five American cities on her Orpheum tour.

Empire Theatre Newcastle-on-Tyne rehearsal call June 30th, 1910 — Lily Flexmore and George Formby

June 30th, 1910

Empire Theatre, Newcastle-on-Tyne

Rehearsal call listing Lily Flexmore alongside George Formby, Nina Wood, the Three Laurels and the Zigeuner Quartette.

Royal Opera House Covent Garden

c. 1810

Royal Opera House, Covent Garden

Interior view of the great theatre of the era in which Richard Flexmore performed — the world from which the Flexmore tradition emerged.

Empire Theatre Shepherd's Bush

Shepherd’s Bush, London

Empire Theatre, Shepherd’s Bush

Where Lily was photographed for Reynolds’s Newspaper in June 1911. The building still stands today.

Leaving for South Africa 1897

December 4th, 1897

Leaving for South Africa

Press notice of Lily’s departure for Johannesburg — her first international engagement, aged eighteen.

Variety Hall North London 1897

January 22nd, 1897

Variety Hall, North London

Five BLFC members on the programme. Lily performed a song and dance and was encored by the audience.

Alhambra Theatre Varieties Poster 1898

1898

Alhambra Theatre of Varieties

Programme cover for the Alhambra, General Manager Alfred Moul. Lily billed as “The Champion Acrobatic Dancer of the World.”

Alhambra Hull April 1898

April 1st, 1898

Alhambra, Hull

“Just returned from South Africa, and a tremendous success.” Agent: R. Voss.

Lily Flexmore R. Voss agent advert May 6th, 1898

May 6th, 1898

R. Voss — Agent’s Advertisement

“The Champion Acrobatic Dancer of the World.” Washington, Standard and Cambridge booked. Sole Agent: R. Voss.

Collins Music Hall Islington 1900

April 7th, 1900

Collins’s Music Hall, Islington

Lily on the bill with T.E. Dunville, Lily Morris and Mark Sheridan at the legendary Islington Green hall.

Shares Bill with Lily Langtry Blackpool 1900

1900

Sharing a Bill with Lily Langtry

Alhambra, Blackpool review: Lily Flexmore named alongside Lily Langtry as “serio, comedian and leg-mania artist.”

India Rubber Girl Bristol 1900

December 14th, 1900

“The India Rubber Girl” — Bristol

Bristol Music Hall review: “Lily Flexmore, the India rubber girl, gives a novel performance.”

Cork Opera House 1907

April 23rd, 1907

Cork Opera House

Programme for Lily Flexmore’s appearance at the Cork Opera House, part of her extensive Irish touring.

Paris Spectacles Officiel April 1908

5–April 11th, 1908

Officiel Paris-Spectacles

The official Paris entertainments listings for the week — from the Opéra to the Grand Guignol. Lily was performing in Paris that year.

Berlin Wintergarten June 1908

June 9th, 1908

Berlin Wintergarten

Programme listing Lily Flexmore as “Akrobat. Tänzer” alongside the Trapnell Family and Therese Renz.

Berliner Tageblatt 1909

September 5th, 1909

Berliner Tageblatt

Masthead of the Berliner Tageblatt — one of Berlin’s leading papers, in whose pages Lily’s engagements were advertised.

Orpheum Circuit Poster

1908

Orpheum Circuit of Theatres

The iconic Orpheum Circuit poster. Lily toured 45 theatres across 36 American cities, billed as “The Extraordinary Girl.”

Orpheum Memphis March 1908

March 22nd, 1908

Orpheum Theatre, Memphis

Memphis Orpheum advertisement: “Lily Flexmore — The Extraordinary Girl.” Performances twice daily.

Saugatuck Leap Year Ball 1908

February 1908

The Saugatuck Leap Year Ball

The young women of Saugatuck, Michigan chose Lily’s name alongside Ellen Terry and Anna Held for their anonymous invitations.

Marie Dressler Show Aldwych 1909

March 6th, 1909

Marie Dressler’s Show — Aldwych

“Lily Flexmore, the little dancer, was given special mention in the reviews” — singled out amid a major company.

Le Figaro Marigny Paris August 14th, 1909

August 14th, 1909

Le Figaro — Théâtre Marigny

Le Figaro: “A Marigny: Miss Lily Flexmore, the flexible girl” — listed alongside Ida Rubinstein at the Olympia.

Wounded Soldiers Palace Theatre 1917

October 1917

Wounded Soldiers — Palace Theatre

Benefit performance for 600–700 wounded soldiers from the Reading War Hospitals. Lily gave her services voluntarily.

Lily Flexmore — Reynolds's Newspaper, Stageland and Thereabouts, June 1911

June 26th, 1911

Reynolds’s Newspaper

“Stageland and Thereabouts” feature. Lily photographed at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire — a recognised face of the Edwardian halls.

Apollo Theater Vienna October 1st, 1907

October 1st, 1907

Apollo Theater, Vienna

Monstre-Oktoberprogramm — Lily Flexmore listed on the bill with Amylla, La Roy, Siegwart Gentes and the Wartenberg Brothers.

Hansa-Theater Hamburg June 1909

June 4th, 1909

Hansa-Theater, Hamburg

With Dorothy Kenton and Mizi Gizi — Lily Flexmore on the June programme at one of Hamburg’s leading variety houses.

Berliner Tageblatt review naming Lily Flexmore September 5th, 1909

September 5th, 1909

Berliner Tageblatt — Review

The paper describes Lily Flexmore as “die schlangengewandte amerikanische Excentrictänzerin” — the snake-limbed American eccentric dancer.

Le Journal de Paris Théâtres & Concerts 1909

1909

Le Journal — Théâtres & Concerts

Paris entertainment listings naming “Lily Flexmore, the flexible girl” alongside Fred Lindsey, champion of Australia.

Kentucky Irish American January 25th, 1908 — Lily Flexmore Louisville

January 25th, 1908

Kentucky Irish American — Louisville

Lily Flexmore listed as acrobatic dancer at the Hopkins Theatre, Louisville — one of forty-five American cities on her Orpheum tour.

Empire Theatre Newcastle-on-Tyne rehearsal call June 30th, 1910 — Lily Flexmore and George Formby

June 30th, 1910

Empire Theatre, Newcastle-on-Tyne

Rehearsal call listing Lily Flexmore alongside George Formby, Nina Wood, the Three Laurels and the Zigeuner Quartette.

Royal Opera House Covent Garden

c. 1810

Royal Opera House, Covent Garden

Interior view of the great theatre of the era in which Richard Flexmore performed — the world from which the Flexmore tradition emerged.

Empire Theatre Shepherd's Bush

Shepherd’s Bush, London

Empire Theatre, Shepherd’s Bush

Where Lily was photographed for Reynolds’s Newspaper in June 1911. The building still stands today.

💍

Chapter 5

George & Marriage

✦   January 1899 · Bethnal Green   ✦

George Ambrose White

The man behind the name Flexmore

George — Origins & Family

Ellen Dunn married George Ambrose White, a professional comedian, in Bethnal Green on 27th February 1899 — two days after Ellen's twentieth birthday. George was born on 14th March 1877 at 23 Goswell Terrace, Clerkenwell, the son of Robert William White, a porter, and Maria, formerly Ridley. He was baptised on 6th May 1877 at St. Thomas Charterhouse, Finsbury. He performed professionally as George Flexmore.

George had five younger siblings — a sister Eliza, and brothers Richard, Thomas, Alfred John and James Ernest — all born in Walthamstow, where the family moved after his early childhood in Clerkenwell. By 1891 the family was living at 11 Westbourne Terrace, Hackney, next door to the Ridley family — George's maternal grandparents, Joseph Ridley and Elizabeth Ann Eveleigh.

Alongside his stage career as George Flexmore, George built a successful professional life as a Newspaper Representative for Associated Newspapers and The Evening News, based at Carmelite House, Blackfriars, London EC4 — the grand headquarters of the Associated Newspapers group. He was, by all accounts, widely respected and personally popular in the newspaper world, as the extraordinary turnout at his funeral would later demonstrate.

A rare glimpse of George in his dual role survives in the Evening News of 30th April 1927. A concert was held at the Kingsway Hall in aid of the Lloyd Memorial Home — a convalescent home at Deal providing medical treatment for members of the printing trade. The Lord Mayor, Sir Rowland Blades, presided. The programme of twenty turns drew artistes from the leading music halls, including Jack Hylton and his band, the Houston Sisters, Ella Shields, Albert Whelan, Tex McLeod, Max Wall, and Elizabeth Nelvi. The concert was organised by Messrs. Stanley Cross and George Flexmore, of Carmelite House. It is a small but telling detail: George moving with equal ease between the world of the press and the world of the stage — a man at home in both.

Evening News April 30th, 1927 — Lloyd Memorial Home concert — George Flexmore named as organiser

Evening News (London) · Saturday April 30th, 1927 · George Flexmore of Carmelite House named as one of the organisers of the Lloyd Memorial Home concert at Kingsway Hall · Image © Daily Mail & General Trust · courtesy of The British Library Board

At the time of his marriage, George was living at 150 Glyn Road, Hackney. Ellen was at 106 Royston Street, Bethnal Green. The wedding took place at Bethnal Green Register Office on 27th February 1899. The witnesses were Ellen's parents, John and Ellen Dunn. The officiating officers were Joseph Jacobs, Registrar, and D. Thomas, Superintendent Registrar.

Civil Birth Record George Ambrose White 1877

Civil Birth Record · George Ambrose White · 14th March 1877

Baptism Record George Ambrose White 1877

Baptism Record · George Ambrose White · 6th May 1877 · St. Thomas Charterhouse, Finsbury

Civil Marriage Record Q1 1899 Bethnal Green

Civil Marriage Record · Q1 1899 · Bethnal Green

Civil Marriage Record Ellen Marian Dunn January 1899

Civil Marriage Record · Ellen Marian Dunn · January 1899

The Tragedy of Birmingham — July 1899

On 28th July 1899, while performing in Birmingham and staying at 24 Coleshill Street, Ellen gave birth to a premature baby girl. The infant survived for just one hour and did not receive a name. The birth certificate records the child simply as “Female Flexmore,” daughter of George Ambrose Flexmore, Comedian, and Lily Flexmore, formerly Dunn. This heartbreaking document is one of the most poignant records in Ellen's story.

Her career record shows no Birmingham engagement for nearly two years after July 1899. When she did return, it was to the Tivoli Theatre in 1901 — and then again to the New Tivoli in 1902. That she came back not once but twice, to the city that held the most private grief of her life, speaks to the quality that defined her throughout: an unshakeable, quietly extraordinary fearlessness.

Birth Certificate Female Flexmore 1899

Birth Certificate · Female Flexmore · 28th July 1899 · Birmingham · GRO

Death Certificate Female Flexmore 1899

Death Certificate · Female Flexmore · 28th July 1899 · Premature Birth · GRO

George Ambrose White Comedian

George Ambrose White · Comedian · known as George Flexmore

Ellen Mary Ann Dunn Colourised Portrait

Ellen Mary Ann Dunn · Colourised Portrait · Image courtesy of Ms Jill Adams

Colebrooke Row — Their Home

From at least 1918 through to the end of their lives, George and Ellen made their home at Colebrooke Row, Islington — a gracious Georgian terrace overlooking the New River Walk, a short stroll from the Regent's Canal. The street retains much of its original character to this day. On the 1921 Census, which George signed himself, he added the words ‘Trading as George Flexmore’ beside his signature — a quiet insistence, even on an official document, on the name he had made his own.

George's Family Tree

The image below shows the Ancestry.co.uk family tree for George Ambrose White, tracing his lineage from his grandparents — Robert C. White & Ann Heskins, and Joseph Ridley & Elizabeth Ann Eveleigh — through his parents Robert William White and Maria Ridley, and on to George himself, his wife Ellen Mary Ann Dunn, and their daughter Baby Girl Flexmore (1899–1899).

George Ambrose White Family Tree — Ancestry.co.uk

George Ambrose White · Ancestry.co.uk Family Tree · Showing grandparents, parents, siblings, wife Ellen Mary Ann Dunn, and Baby Girl Flexmore (1899–1899)

🌳   View George's Ancestry Family Tree   →
The Death of George

George Ambrose White died very suddenly at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, London, on Tuesday, 26th September 1933, aged fifty-five. The cause of death was mesenteric thrombosis, certified by post-mortem. A postmortem was carried out on the same day.

His funeral took place on Monday, 2nd October 1933, at Islington Cemetery, Finchley. The Islington and Holloway Press reported the occasion under the headline 40 Newspaper Vans Follow Funeral. George was described as a West End Representative of the Evening News (circulation department). Among the principal mourners were his widow Ellen, his mother Maria, and his brother Robert. Floral tributes came from Associated Newspapers Ltd., the West End Newsvendors’ Association, the Publishing Association, the Independence Club, and many colleagues and personal friends. The funeral was arranged by Messrs. H.M. Repuke of Islington Green.

He left his estate of £125 to Ellen. Administration was granted to Ellen Mary Ann White, widow, on 22nd November 1933.

📄 george_death_cert.jpg — Official Death Certificate · George Ambrose White · September 26th, 1933 · St. Bartholomew's Hospital · GRO

Official Death Certificate · George Ambrose White · 26th September 1933 · St. Bartholomew's Hospital, London · GRO Certified Copy

Re-united

Ellen survived George by less than four months. She died on 19th January 1934 at St. Mary’s Hospital, Highgate Hill, Islington — now the Whittington Hospital. She was fifty-four years old.

The death certificate records a cause. But those who knew them — and those who have spent years recovering their story — understand what happened. George had been beside Ellen for every performance for thirty years. In the wings with the costume changes. Stepping onstage himself when another act was late or failed to appear. Coaching her in comedy in the two rooms they shared at 28 Colebrook Row, so that as the years passed and the physical demands of contortion grew heavier, she could add laughter to her repertoire and carry the audience on her voice alone. On Sunday afternoons, a stroll down Colebrook Row to the Regent’s Canal. A Sunday lunch, perhaps at the Gerrard Arms. On Saturday evenings, around the corner to the York Tavern — where George might get to his feet and do a turn with a few jokes, and Ellen might sing one or two of her songs, and the landlord might slip them a few extra shillings for the trade they brought in, because the room always lifted when they were in it.

And then, on a Tuesday morning in late September 1933, George was gone. Suddenly, without warning. Ellen received an estate of £125. She was left with the two rooms, and the silence where he used to be.

It is the belief of this researcher that when George died, Ellen simply could not find a reason to remain. She may have knelt at his grave in Islington Cemetery. She may have sat in the Colebrook Row gardens as autumn turned to winter, as the weather closed in, as the city carried on without noticing. And she may, quite literally, have caught her death from grief.

When Ellen died, the family moved the cross down so that it stood directly over the grave rather than at its head — a deliberate act of finality. Then they mortared the surface, sealing it forever. No one else would lie there. Just the two of them.

The inscription is a single word: Re-united. The cross carries a garland of ivy and a dove in a descending position — coming down from heaven to carry the souls of the departed safely upwards. The family knew exactly what they were saying. The Fabulous Flexmores. Together again.

The grave of Ellen Mary Ann White (Lily Flexmore) and George Ambrose White, Islington Cemetery

The inscription clearly visible — George Ambrose White, who died 26th Sept. 1933, aged 55, and his wife Ellen Mary Ann, 19th Jan. 1934 — “Re-united.”

The grave of Ellen and George with tributes placed by Liam Mooney, January 2025

The grave as visited in January 2025 — with photographs of Ellen and George, the alabaster lily for Baby Girl Flexmore, and the slate plaque: The Fabulous Flexmores.

The grave at Islington Cemetery was discovered in December 2023 by Karen Wall — Ellen’s great-great-niece — and her husband Ian, guided by research conducted from County Kildare, Ireland. On 19th January 2024, the ninetieth anniversary of Ellen’s death, this researcher flew to London and walked with Karen to the grave. A white alabaster lily was placed there for Baby Girl Flexmore, born and lost in Birmingham in the summer of 1899 — the child Ellen and George never got to keep. A slate plaque bearing their photograph was left beside it, with the words: The Fabulous Flexmores.

←   Press & Playbills Timeline   →
📅

Chapter 6

A Life in Time

✦   A Life in Full   ✦

Timeline

From Peerless Street to Islington Cemetery · 1879–1934

February 25th, 1879

Born in Peerless Street, Islington

Ellen Mary Ann Dunn is born at 56 Peerless Street, Islington, St. Luke's — now the site of Moorfields Eye Hospital. Second of eleven children of John Dunn, shoemaker, and Ellen Mary Dunnell. Baptised March 23rd, 1879.

November 18th, 1884

Enrolled at Hammond Square Primary School

Five-year-old Ellen is enrolled at Hammond Square Primary School, Hoxton Street, London. She is thought soon after to have begun training in dance and gymnastics.

March 23rd, 1895

Plays for the British Ladies Football Club

Aged sixteen, playing as Ruth Coupland, Ellen takes to the field at Crouch End Athletic Ground before a crowd of approximately ten thousand spectators. North London wins 7–1 against South London.

c. 1895

Begins performing as Lily Flexmore

Ellen adopts the stage name Lily Flexmore and embarks on a professional career as a dancer, acrobatic contortionist, singer and comedienne that will span nearly three decades.

January 22nd, 1897

A Night to Remember — Wembley Park & the Variety Hall

Following a BLFC fixture at Wembley Park Cricket Ground, Ellen and several of her fellow players — Phoebe Smith, Marie Ennis, Violet Clarence, and Blanche Foxcroft — stage a variety show at a Variety Hall in North London. By all accounts it was an exceptional evening, not forgotten in a hurry.

c. 1897–1898

Performs in Johannesburg

At just eighteen years of age, Ellen travels to South Africa to appear at the Empire Theatre, Johannesburg — the beginning of an international career.

January 1899

Marries George Ambrose White, Bethnal Green

Ellen marries George Ambrose White, a professional comedian who performs as George Flexmore, in Bethnal Green. They will tour together and perform as a professional partnership.

July 28th, 1899

The Birmingham Tragedy

While performing in Birmingham and staying at 24 Coleshill Street, Ellen gives birth to a premature baby girl. The infant — recorded as “Female Flexmore” — lives for only one hour. The city would carry its grief with it.

1901

First Return to Birmingham — The Tivoli

Two years after the loss of her baby daughter at 24 Coleshill Street, Ellen returns to Birmingham to perform at the Tivoli Theatre. Whatever it costs her to walk back into that city, she does not show it. The show goes on.

1902

Returns Again — The New Tivoli, Birmingham

Ellen performs at the New Tivoli Theatre in Birmingham — her second return to the city since the tragedy of July 1899. That she came back not once but twice speaks to the same quality that had defined her from the beginning: an unshakeable fearlessness.

December 1907

Sails to New York aboard RMS Adriatic

Ellen and George sail from Southampton on 18th December 1907, arriving in New York on 27th December — spending Christmas Day at sea aboard the White Star Liner. Their fellow passenger included music hall comedian Whit Cunliffe, also bound for New York. The Adriatic's captain on this voyage was Edward John Smith — who would later command the RMS Titanic. From New York they travel on to Chicago for the Chicago Auditorium, before Ellen tours the USA on the Orpheum Theatre Circuit — 45 theatres across 36 American cities.

February 28th, 1908

Honoured at the Saugatuck Leap Year Ball

The young women of Saugatuck, Michigan choose Lily Flexmore's name — alongside Ellen Terry and Anna Held — as one of the famous artistes behind which they sign their anonymous invitations. Ellen has been in the USA barely a month.

1909

Paris and Berlin

Ellen appears at the Marigny Theatre in Paris, then at the Apollo Theatre, Berlin. Her international touring continues to expand.

November 1910

Strassburg and the Côte d'Azur

Ellen performs at the Union Theatre in Strassburg. In March 1912, she appears in Beausoleil, France, on the Côte d'Azur, just above Monaco.

1925

Final Known Performance

Ellen is documented performing her signature “Toe-In-Mouth” dance at the age of forty-six — the last known performance of a career spanning some thirty years.

September 26th, 1933

Death of George Ambrose White

George dies suddenly at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, London, aged 55, of mesenteric thrombosis. A procession of forty newspaper delivery vans follows his funeral cortege. He leaves £125 to Ellen.

January 19th, 1934

Death of Ellen Mary Ann Dunn

Just four months after the death of her husband, Ellen dies at St. Mary's Hospital (now Whittington Hospital), 77a Highgate Hill, Islington, aged 54. Cause of death: pneumococcal meningitis and acute primary pneumonia. Arrangements are handled by her brother Frederick Dunn.

January 25th, 1934

Buried at Islington Cemetery, Finchley

Ellen is interred at Islington Cemetery, Finchley, in the same plot as her husband: L/3/14781/P. The gravestone reads “Re-United.”

January 19th, 2023

In Memoriam, The Stage

The Stage magazine publishes an In Memoriam tribute to Ellen Mary Ann Dunn, finally giving her the public recognition she had long deserved.

←   George & Marriage At Rest   →
🕊️

Chapter 7

At Rest

✦   Islington Cemetery, Finchley   ✦

At Rest

Buried together · Re-United · Plot L/3/14781/P

The Death of Ellen

Just four months after the death of her husband, Ellen herself passed away. She died on Friday, 19th January 1934, at St. Mary's Hospital (now Whittington Hospital), 77a Highgate Hill, Islington, aged fifty-four. The cause of death was pneumococcal meningitis and acute primary pneumonia.

Arrangements were handled by Ellen's brother Frederick Dunn, of 70 Cyprus Street, Bethnal Green. Ellen was interred on 25th January 1934 at Islington Cemetery, Finchley, in the same plot as her husband — L/3/14781/P.

✦   A Personal Reflection   ✦

I speak here from my own experience of loss. When my wife Linda died, I felt that I had suffered a massive amputation — and I found it almost impossible to cross the threshold of our home, knowing that she would not be there. I believe Ellen felt exactly that.

George had left for work on an ordinary Tuesday morning — the 26th of September, 1933. He had done it a thousand times before. And he simply did not come back. There was no preparation, no farewell, no gradual letting go. One moment he was there — and then he was not, and the flat on Colebrooke Row, the little park by the Regent’s Canal, the whole quiet life they had built together in those final years, was suddenly unbearable. Ellen, I believe, could hardly bring herself to go inside — because George was not there, and would never be there again.

As autumn turned to winter and the weather grew colder, I believe that Ellen — who had loved her George completely and without reservation — sat beside his grave in Islington Cemetery, and wept. I believe she sat in the little park outside their home, unable to go back inside. Pneumococcal meningitis and acute primary pneumonia are conditions that take hold in the cold and the damp, in a body that has stopped fighting to stay warm — in a body that has, in some essential way, already decided.

Ellen died of a broken heart. And I believe that in her heart of hearts, she simply wanted to be reunited with her George. Four months after losing him, she was.

What a terribly sad — but beautiful — ending to such a rich and extraordinary life.

Civil Death Record Ellen Mary Ann Dunn White 1934

Civil Death Register · Ellen M.A. White · January 1934 · Islington District

Official Death Certificate Ellen Mary Ann Dunn White 1934

Official Death Certificate · Ellen Mary Ann White · January 19th, 1934 · GRO

Burial Register Islington Cemetery Ellen Mary Ann White 1934

Burial Register · Islington Cemetery, Finchley · No. 136205 · Ellen Mary Ann White · 77a Highgate Hill, Islington · Buried 25th January 1934 · Aged 54

Islington Cemetery, Finchley

George Ambrose White

March 14th, 1877   ·   September 26th, 1933

Ellen Mary Ann White

February 25th, 1879   ·   January 19th, 1934

Re-United

Plot L/3/14781/P

Grave of Ellen Mary Ann Dunn and George Ambrose White Islington Cemetery

George Ambrose White & Ellen Mary Ann · “Re-United” · Islington Cemetery, Finchley · Plot L/3/14781/P · Image courtesy of Ms Karen Wall

Grave of Ellen and George with tributes January 2025

The grave of Ellen & George with portraits and tributes laid in their memory · January 2025 · Image courtesy of Ms Karen Wall

✦   Finding the Grave   ✦

Directions to the Graveside

Ellen and George are interred in Islington Cemetery, High Road, East Finchley, London N2 9AG — Plot L/3/14781/P, located on Central Road. The distance from the High Road main gate to the grave is approximately 800 metres, along good flat tarmac surfaces throughout. There is a water tap at the junction of Upper Road and Quadrant Road, close to the grave — so only empty containers need be carried for flowers. Most of the roadways are wide enough to drive on; beware of almost silent electric vehicles.

Islington and St Pancras Cemetery map showing best route to grave

Islington & St. Pancras Cemetery — Map showing the recommended route to Plot L/3/14781/P

✦   Step by Step   ✦

Step 1

Enter from the High Road Main Gate, which leads directly onto Viaduct Road. Follow Viaduct Road straight into the cemetery.

Viaduct Road leading into Islington Cemetery

Viaduct Road leading into the cemetery

Step 2

Veer left from Viaduct Road onto Circular Road.

Junction where Viaduct Road meets Circular Road

Veer left from Viaduct Road onto Circular Road

Step 3

Follow Circular Road as it approaches St. Pancras Cemetery Chapel.

Circular Road approaching St Pancras Cemetery Chapel

Circular Road approaching St. Pancras Cemetery Chapel

Step 4

Passing the Chapel, take Church Road North — not North Road. Church Road North leads to the Administration Offices and on to Upper Road.

Church Road North leaving the Chapel

Church Road North leaving the Chapel — not North Road

Step 5

Church Road North ends at the Administration Offices, where Upper Road begins. Continue straight ahead.

Administration Offices where Upper Road begins

Church Road North ends at the Admin Offices — Upper Road begins here

Step 6

Continue along Upper Road, bypassing Mausoleum Road.

Upper Road bypassing Mausoleum Road

Continue along Upper Road, bypassing Mausoleum Road

Step 7

Follow Upper Road as it approaches Quadrant Road on the left. Almost there.

Upper Road approaching Quadrant Road

Upper Road approaching Quadrant Road on the left

Step 8

Turn left onto Quadrant Road. Note the water tap close to the signpost on the corner — useful for filling containers for flowers.

Quadrant Road with water tap near signpost

Quadrant Road begins — water supply close to signpost

Step 9

Turn left onto Central Road. The grave is on the right-hand side, approximately 10 metres along, set back from the path by about 5–6 metres.

Turn left onto Central Road

Turn left onto Central Road — the grave is 10 metres along on the right

✦   You have arrived   ✦

The grave of Ellen Mary Ann Dunn and George Ambrose White

Ellen & George — Re-United and Resting in Paradise.

←   Timeline In Memoriam   →
✦   The Stage Magazine · January 2023   ✦

In Memoriam

Remembering Ellen Mary Ann Dunn · 90 years on

In January of 2023, with the kind permission of Ms Karen Wall, I placed an In Memoriam tribute in The Stage magazine. I wanted it to coincide with the 90th anniversary of Ellen's passing. Ellen had featured many times in this magazine during her career.

✦   Ellen Mary Ann Dunn

February 25th, 1879 – January 19th, 1934

Peerless St, Islington  ·  Highgate Hill, Islington

Footballer · Dancer · Acrobatic Contortionist · Comedienne
Known on stage as Lily Flexmore
Beloved wife of George Ambrose White

The Stage was the leading weekly newspaper of the British entertainment industry, founded in 1880 — just one year after Ellen's birth. That she featured in its pages many times during her long career is a testament to the prominence she achieved on the Victorian and Edwardian music hall circuit.

In Memoriam Ellen Mary Ann Dunn The Stage January 2023

In Memoriam · Ellen Mary Ann Dunn · Published in The Stage magazine · January 19th, 2023 · 90th anniversary of her passing

✦   A Contemporary Tribute   ✦

Lily Flexmore — Women's Football Legends

A postcard by Nettie London · 2025

Lily Flexmore — Women's Football Legends postcard by Nettie London

Lily Flexmore · Women's Football Legends Series · Postcard by Nettie London · 2025 · One of a series of five postcards celebrating the pioneering women of the British Ladies Football Club, 1895

Nettie London is a fragrance brand inspired by the legacy of women’s football — named in honour of Nettie Honeyball, the founder of the British Ladies Football Club in 1895. Their products celebrate female athletes, support grassroots initiatives, and champion those creating real change in sport.

In 2025, Nettie London produced a series of five collector’s postcards celebrating the pioneering women of the BLFC — among them Lily Flexmore, Nettie Honeyball, Helen Matthew, Emma Clarke, and Lily Parr. Each card combines historical portraiture with modern design, printed on premium textured stock.

The research underpinning the Lily Flexmore card — and the wider Nettie London blog on the women of the BLFC — was compiled in collaboration with the author of this website. It is a source of great pride that Ellen’s story, recovered through years of patient research, has now inspired not only this tribute site but a piece of contemporary art that will find its way into homes, collections and hands that would never otherwise have heard the name Lily Flexmore.

Ellen Mary Ann Dunn was born in Islington in 1879. She died in Islington in 1934. For nearly ninety years she was forgotten. She is forgotten no longer.

“Lily Flexmore, the performer who turned football into art.”

Nettie London · Women’s Football Legends Series · 2025

←   In Memoriam Walking Her Street   →
✦   A Researcher's Pilgrimage   ✦

Walking Her Street

Colebrooke Row, Islington  ·  A personal reflection

The York Tavern, Islington

The York  ·  Islington High Street  ·  Perhaps Ellen's stage, of an evening

The Gerrard Arms, Islington

The Gerrard Arms, Gerrard Road  ·  Now a private home

Map of local pubs near Colebrooke Row

The York Tavern & The Gerrard Arms  ·  Their likely locals, a short walk from 28 Colebrooke Row

The Gerrard Arms (now a private home) — perhaps for a lovely Sunday lunch. The York — for a drink and a bit of a sing-song. And perhaps George would get up and tell a few jokes, with Ellen as his accomplice, or perhaps she would sing a song or two. They would have been the life of the place. They might even have earned a few shillings from the landlord for the custom they brought. It is not hard to imagine.

H.M. Repuke Funeral Directors, Upper Street, Islington

H.M. Repuke  ·  333 Upper Street, Islington  ·  Funeral directors to George White, and probably to Ellen too

The funeral of George Ambrose White was conducted by H.M. Repuke, funeral directors, of 333 Upper Street, Islington Green. It is more than likely that when Ellen herself died — just four months later, on January 19th, 1934 — the same firm was called upon again. Upper Street, the high road of Islington, was the spine of their world.

✦   A Personal Reflection   ✦

I have personally visited Colebrooke Row. I went simply to say that I was there — to stand in the same street where Ellen and George had lived, and to feel, for a moment, the nearness of them.

I bowed my head as I walked slowly past number 28.

I had a glass of sparkling water in the York Tavern, and I looked around that lovely pub — hoping, in vain, to spot an old photograph of Ellen and George on one of its walls.

I walked the full length of the lovely narrow park that runs along Colebrooke Row — the same park that Ellen and George may have enjoyed on a late spring or summer evening. And I walked down a little pathway leading from Colebrooke Row down to the Regent's Canal — a path I have no doubt that Ellen and George would have strolled, many, many times.

It is my personal belief that after the sudden death of her husband in late September of 1933, Ellen, in deep shock and unbearable grief, may have sat out in those Colebrooke Row gardens and knelt at the side of George’s grave as the weeks ran into winter, growing colder and colder — that she may have, quite literally, caught her death there, as her grief grew heavier, until the pneumonia took hold that would claim her life in January 1934.

There are two little squirrels living in Colebrooke Row Gardens. They are very friendly. They accepted a drink of water from me — from a bottle I had in my backpack.

I have named them Ellen and George.

✦   A Life Written in London Streets   ✦

Walking Her London

Five stops across the city — from the street where she was born to the ground where she rests

The whole of Ellen Mary Ann Dunn’s London life can be walked in a single day. From the ground in Hornsey where she first stepped onto a football pitch, to the spring-fed street of her birth, east through the lanes of Bethnal Green, back west to the Angel, north to what was then known as St. Mary’s hospital on Highgate Hill, and finally to the quiet ground of East Finchley where she has rested since January 1934 — it is seven miles, and a whole life, from beginning to end. This was Ellen’s London. To follow her full life as Lily Flexmore, a map of the world would be required.

The
Match

Prologue  ·  March 23rd, 1895  ·  The moment it all began

Crouch End Athletic Ground, Hornsey

Nightingale Lane, N8  ·  Adjacent to Alexandra Park racecourse  ·  Now Highgate Wood School, Montenotte Road

This is where everything began. On Saturday 23rd March 1895, before a crowd of ten thousand spectators, a sixteen-year-old girl from Peerless Street, Islington, stepped onto a muddy football pitch in Hornsey and changed the course of women's sport. Ellen Mary Ann Dunn — playing as Ruth Coupland — was a member of the North London team of the newly formed British Ladies Football Club, organised by Nettie Honeyball and coached by J.W. Julian of Tottenham Hotspur. The ground lay at Nightingale Lane, just below the Alexandra Park racecourse — described interchangeably in the press as Crouch End and Hornsey. The match was preceded by a game between Crouch End FC and the 3rd Grenadier Guards. North London won 7–1. The crowd came partly out of curiosity, partly out of mockery — and left having witnessed something genuinely historic. The ground no longer exists. The site is now believed to be occupied by Highgate Wood School in Montenotte Road, N8.

Montenotte Road, N8  ·  Nearest station: Hornsey or Crouch End (Overground)  ·  Note: the original ground no longer exists

1

Stop 1  ·  February 25th, 1879

56 Peerless Street, Islington

EC1V  ·  Near Old Street  ·  Her Birthplace

Ellen Mary Ann Dunn was born here on Tuesday, 25th February 1879, the second of eleven children born to John Dunn, a shoemaker, and Ellen Mary Dunnell. The street itself has a curious history — it takes its name from the Peerless Pool, a Georgian swimming bath created in 1743 from what had long been known as the Perilous Pond, a spring-fed bathing place notorious for drownings. When Ellen arrived in the world, Peerless Street was a working-class terrace off the City Road, close to the printing trades and small workshops of Clerkenwell. The original houses at number 56 are gone. The site today is part of the Moorfields Eye Hospital complex.

EC1V 9NU  ·  Nearest station: Old Street  ·  0.3 miles

2

Stop 2  ·  1877 – c.1899

108 Royston Street, Bethnal Green

E2  ·  Bethnal Green  ·  George’s Family Home

George Ambrose White was born on 14th March 1877 in Clerkenwell, the son of Robert William White, a porter, and Maria, formerly Ridley. The family subsequently settled at 108 Royston Street, Bethnal Green — a Victorian terraced street in the heart of the East End. It was the world into which George was growing up while Ellen was growing up just two miles to the west. Their paths would cross on 27th February 1899, when they married at Bethnal Green Register Office — two days after Ellen’s twentieth birthday. The marriage certificate gives this street as the White family’s address.

E2 0QP  ·  Nearest station: Bethnal Green  ·  0.4 miles  ·  Walking from Stop 1: approx. 45 mins east via Hackney Road

3

Stop 3  ·  c.1910 – 1934

28 Colebrooke Row, Angel

N1  ·  Islington  ·  Their Home  ·  The house still stands

This is the house that can still be visited today — the most tangible surviving connection to Ellen and George’s life together. Colebrooke Row is a handsome Georgian terrace running alongside the New River Walk, a linear park that follows the course of the old New River aqueduct. Number 28 is a mid-terrace house overlooking the gardens. Ellen and George lived here through the later years of her career, through the Great War, and into the quiet years that followed. George died suddenly at this address on 26th September 1933. Ellen survived him by barely four months. Read the full account of walking this street  →

N1 8AA  ·  Nearest station: Angel  ·  0.4 miles  ·  Walking from Stop 2: approx. 50 mins west via City Road

4

Stop 4  ·  January 19th, 1934

Whittington Hospital, Highgate Hill

N19  ·  Archway  ·  Where She Died

Ellen died here on 19th January 1934, aged fifty-four. She was registered as Ellen White, formerly Dunn. The cause of death was pneumonia. In 1934 the hospital was known as St Mary’s Hospital (it had been the Islington Infirmary until 1930, when the London County Council took control and renamed it). It would not become the Whittington Hospital until 1948. The building on Highgate Hill — an Italianate pavilion-plan infirmary built 1848–1900 — is still partly standing and is a Grade II listed structure. In the folklore of Highgate Hill, it was here that Dick Whittington, thrice Lord Mayor of London, heard the bells of Bow calling him to turn again — the Whittington Stone marking the spot still stands outside the hospital gates.

N19 5NF  ·  Nearest station: Archway  ·  0.5 miles  ·  Walking from Stop 3: approx. 40 mins north via Holloway Road

5

Stop 5  ·  January 1934 – present

Islington & St Pancras Cemetery, East Finchley

N2  ·  East Finchley  ·  Plot L/3/14781/P  ·  Her Grave

London’s first municipal cemetery, opened in 1854 on sloping farmland in East Finchley, received Ellen White in January 1934. She was buried in Plot L/3/14781/P — a grave that went unmarked and unvisited for nearly ninety years. The cemetery is a remarkable place: thirty-five acres of Victorian and Edwardian monuments, overgrown in parts, peaceful and unhurried. Among those buried here are Enid Blyton, Peter Sellers, and — largely unrecorded until 2023 — Ellen Mary Ann Dunn, the girl from Peerless Street. The grave was rediscovered through this research. It is our intention that it should one day be properly marked.

N2 9AG  ·  Nearest station: East Finchley  ·  0.3 miles  ·  Opening hours: Mon–Sat 8:30am–5:00pm

The walk from Peerless Street to Islington Cemetery covers approximately seven miles. Allow a full day. Take the route slowly. She did not live it quickly.

Read the full account of the cemetery and the found grave  →
✦   A Life in Motion   ✦

The World of Lily Flexmore

From Bethnal Green to three continents — the extraordinary reach of Ellen’s career

LONDON NEW YORK CHICAGO DES MOINES ST. LOUIS KANSAS INDIANAPOLIS LOUISVILLE MEMPHIS WINNIPEG PARIS BERLIN JOHANNESBURG DUBLIN MONACO The World of Lily Flexmore · Ellen Mary Ann Dunn · 1879–1934

Hover over or tap each location to learn more  ·  Dashed lines indicate known touring routes

3

Continents

2,000+

Documented Performances

30

Years on Stage

1895

First Appearance

✦   From London to Johannesburg · Paris to Chicago   ✦

The Stages of Lily Flexmore

Some of the theatres and venues where Ellen Mary Ann Dunn performed.

Aldwych Theatre London

Aldwych Theatre

London, England

✦   UK Performances · 1898–1925

Apollo Theatre London

Apollo Theatre

London, England

✦   UK Performances · 1898–1925

Casino Municipal Beausoleil

Casino Municipal

Beausoleil, Côte d'Azur, France

✦   March 1912

Chicago Auditorium

Chicago Auditorium

Chicago, Illinois, USA

✦   January 1908

Cirque d'Hiver Paris

Cirque d'Hiver

Paris, France

✦   French Engagements

Empire Theatre Liverpool

Empire Theatre

Liverpool, England

✦   UK Performances · 1898–1925

Empire Theatre Johannesburg

Empire Theatre

Johannesburg, South Africa

✦   c. 1897–1898

Empire Theatre Shepherd's Bush

Empire Theatre

Shepherd's Bush, London

✦   UK Performances · 1898–1925

Hansa Theatre Hamburg

Hansa Theatre

Hamburg, Germany

✦   European Tour · c.1909–1912

His Majesty's Theatre London

His Majesty's Theatre

London, England

✦   UK Performances · 1898–1925

London Coliseum

London Coliseum

London, England

✦   UK Performances · 1898–1925

London Palladium

London Palladium

London, England

✦   UK Performances · 1898–1925

Majestic Theatre Chicago

Majestic Theatre

Chicago, Illinois, USA

✦   Orpheum Circuit · 1908

Majestic Theatre Des Moines

Majestic Theatre

Des Moines, Iowa, USA

✦   Orpheum Circuit · 1908

Théâtre Marigny Paris

Théâtre Marigny

Paris, France

✦   1909

Theatre Royal Barnsley

Theatre Royal

Barnsley, England

✦   UK Performances · 1898–1925

Theatre Royal Drury Lane

Theatre Royal, Drury Lane

London, England

✦   UK Performances · 1898–1925

Aldwych Theatre London

Aldwych Theatre

London, England

✦   UK Performances · 1898–1925

Apollo Theatre London

Apollo Theatre

London, England

✦   UK Performances · 1898–1925

Casino Municipal Beausoleil

Casino Municipal

Beausoleil, Côte d'Azur, France

✦   March 1912

Chicago Auditorium

Chicago Auditorium

Chicago, Illinois, USA

✦   January 1908

Cirque d'Hiver Paris

Cirque d'Hiver

Paris, France

✦   French Engagements

Empire Theatre Liverpool

Empire Theatre

Liverpool, England

✦   UK Performances · 1898–1925

Empire Theatre Johannesburg

Empire Theatre

Johannesburg, South Africa

✦   c. 1897–1898

Empire Theatre Shepherd's Bush

Empire Theatre

Shepherd's Bush, London

✦   UK Performances · 1898–1925

Hansa Theatre Hamburg

Hansa Theatre

Hamburg, Germany

✦   European Tour · c.1909–1912

His Majesty's Theatre London

His Majesty's Theatre

London, England

✦   UK Performances · 1898–1925

London Coliseum

London Coliseum

London, England

✦   UK Performances · 1898–1925

London Palladium

London Palladium

London, England

✦   UK Performances · 1898–1925

Majestic Theatre Chicago

Majestic Theatre

Chicago, Illinois, USA

✦   Orpheum Circuit · 1908

Majestic Theatre Des Moines

Majestic Theatre

Des Moines, Iowa, USA

✦   Orpheum Circuit · 1908

Théâtre Marigny Paris

Théâtre Marigny

Paris, France

✦   1909

Theatre Royal Barnsley

Theatre Royal

Barnsley, England

✦   UK Performances · 1898–1925

Theatre Royal Drury Lane

Theatre Royal, Drury Lane

London, England

✦   UK Performances · 1898–1925

📷

Chapter 8

Gallery

✦   Primary Sources & Records   ✦

Documents: Ellen & George

The paper trail of a remarkable life

📄 PDF

22 Pages

✦   Featured Document   ✦

The Life Story of Ellen Mary Ann Dunn

Ancestry.co.uk  ·  Complete Genealogical Record  ·  2026

The complete Ancestry life story document for Ellen Mary Ann Dunn — tracing her life from birth in Islington in 1879 through to her death in 1934. This remarkable 22-page document brings together certified copies of original records: birth and baptism, residence, marriage, the tragedy of Baby Girl Flexmore, census returns of 1901, 1911 and 1921, the deaths of Ellen and George, burial register, probate, and the rediscovery of the grave in 2023. Each entry is accompanied by scanned images of the original documents.

▶ Open Full Document

✦   Individual Records   ✦

Births

GRO Birth Certificate · 1879

Birth Certificate — Ellen Mary Ann Dunn

February 25th, 1879 · 56 Peerless Street, Islington · Father: John Dunn, Whip Maker · Mother: Ellen, formerly Dunnell · GRO certified copy · Application No. 13847112-1

View document →

Civil Birth Record · 1877

Birth Record — George Ambrose White

March 14th, 1877 · 23 Goswell Terrace, Clerkenwell · Father: Robert William White · Mother: Maria, formerly Ridley · Civil register entry

View document →

GRO Birth Certificate · 1899

Birth Certificate — Baby Girl Flexmore

July 28th, 1899 · 24 Coleshill Street, Birmingham · Father: George Ambrose Flexmore, Comedian · Mother: Lily Flexmore, formerly Dunn · Premature birth · GRO certified copy · Application No. 14291181-1

View document →

Civil Birth Index · 1899

Civil Birth Index — Baby Girl Flexmore

Q3 1899 · Birmingham, Warwickshire · Last name: Flexmore · Mother's maiden name: Dunn · England & Wales Births 1837–2006 · Volume 6D, Page 60

View document →
Marriages

Civil Marriage Index · 1899 · George's Entry

Marriage Index — George White & Ellen Marian Dunn

Q1 1899 · Bethnal Green, London · England & Wales Marriages 1837–2005 · Volume 1C, Page 292 · George White married Ellen Marian Dunn

View document →

Civil Marriage Index · 1899 · Ellen's Entry

Marriage Index — Ellen Marian Dunn & George White

Q1 1899 · Bethnal Green, London · England & Wales Marriages 1837–2005 · Volume 1C, Page 292 · Ellen Marian Dunn married George White

View document →
Deaths

GRO Death Certificate · 1899

Death Certificate — Baby Girl Flexmore

July 28th, 1899 · 24 Coleshill Street, Birmingham · Cause: premature birth · Lived one hour · Father in attendance · GRO certified copy · Application No. 14409877-1

View document →

Civil Death Index · 1899

Civil Death Index — Baby Girl Flexmore

Q3 1899 · Birmingham, Warwickshire · Last name: Flexmore · Age: 0 · England & Wales Deaths 1837–2007 · Volume 6D, Page 41

View document →

GRO Death Certificate · 1933

Death Certificate — George Ambrose White

September 26th, 1933 · St. Bartholomew's Hospital, London City · Cause: mesenteric thrombosis · Aged 55 · Informant: Ellen White, widow · GRO certified copy · Application No. 14437479-1

View document →

Civil Death Record · 1933

Civil Death Register — George Ambrose White

September 26th, 1933 · St. Bartholomew's Hospital · 28 Colebrooke Row, Islington · Newspaper Inspector · Civil register entry

View document →

GRO Death Certificate · 1934

Death Certificate — Ellen Mary Ann Dunn White

January 19th, 1934 · 77a Highgate Hill, Islington · Cause: pneumococcal meningitis & acute primary pneumonia · Aged 54 · Informant: F. Dunn, brother · GRO certified copy · Application No. 14415487-1

View document →

Civil Death Record · 1934

Civil Death Register — Ellen Mary Ann Dunn White

January 19th, 1934 · 77a Highgate Hill, Islington · Widow of George Ambrose White · 28 Colebrooke Row, Islington · Civil register entry

View document →
Probate

Probate · 1933

Probate — George Ambrose White

November 22nd, 1933 · London · Administration granted to Ellen Mary Ann White, widow · Effects: £125

View document →

Probate Notice · 1934

Probate Notice — Ellen Mary Ann White

June 12th, 1934 · London · Of 28 Colebrooke Row, Islington · Probate granted to Joseph Thomas Clark, shop assistant · Effects: £236 14s. 11d.

View document →

Probate Transcript · 1934

Probate Transcript — Ellen Mary Ann White

January 19th, 1934 · England & Wales Government Probate Death Index 1858–2019 · Probate date: June 12th, 1934 · Probate registry: London · Linked person: Joseph Thomas Clark

View document →
Burial & Interment

Interment Record · 1933–1934

Interment Details — George & Ellen White

Islington Cemetery · Grave reference: L/3/14781/P · George Ambrose White, interred October 2nd, 1933 · Ellen Mary Ann White, interred January 25th, 1934 · London Borough of Islington

View document →

Cemetery Map

Plot Location — Islington & St. Pancras Cemetery

Islington & St. Pancras Cemetery · East Finchley, London · Showing the location of Plot L/3/14781/P · Circular Road section

View document →
Electoral Registers

Electoral Register · 1918

Electoral Register — George Ambrose White

1918 · 28 Colebrooke Row, Islington · South Division, Polling District H · St. Peter Ward · Entry No. 3777

View document →

Electoral Register · 1919

Electoral Register — George Ambrose White

1919 · 28 Colebrooke Row, Islington · Colebrooke Row (N.1) · Entry No. 4300

View document →

Electoral Register · 1931

Electoral Register — Ellen & George White

1931 · 28 Colebrooke Row, Islington · South Division, Polling District H · Ellen Marian White (No. 1786) · George Ambrose White (No. 1787)

View document →
Other Records

Family Tree · Ancestry.co.uk

George Ambrose White — Family Tree

Ancestry.co.uk family tree for George Ambrose White · Grandparents, parents, siblings, wife Ellen Mary Ann Dunn, and Baby Girl Flexmore (1899–1899)

View document →

Life Story · Ancestry.co.uk

George Ambrose White — Full Life Story

The complete Ancestry life story document for George Ambrose White · Birth, baptism, census records 1881–1921, marriage, the Birmingham tragedy, the USA voyage, Colebrooke Row, death, burial, and obituary · Opens as PDF

View document →

Family Tree · Ancestry.co.uk

Ellen Mary Ann Dunn — Full Family Tree

The complete Ancestry.co.uk family tree for Ellen Mary Ann Dunn · Grandparents, parents, all ten siblings, husband George Ambrose White, and Baby Girl Flexmore (1899–1899) · Opens on Ancestry.co.uk

View on Ancestry →

Passenger Manifest · 1907

RMS Adriatic — Passenger Manifest, December 1907

S.S. Adriatic · Sailing from Southampton · December 18th, 1907 · George Flexmore and Lily (wife) listed · Destination address: Hotel Rossmore, 270 West 39th Street & 8th Avenue, New York · Occupation: Artist · Captain: Edward John Smith, later Master of RMS Titanic

View document →

In Memoriam · 2023

The Stage Magazine — In Memoriam

Published January 19th, 2023 · Marking the 89th anniversary of Ellen's passing · Placed with the kind permission of Ms Karen Wall

View document →
✦   Primary Sources & Records   ✦

Family Documents

Original records relating to Ellen's parents, brothers, and the Dunn family

The documents below are primary sources relating to the Dunn family — Ellen's parents John and Ellen Mary, her elder brother John Joseph, and her sailor brother George William. This section will grow as further certificates and records are added.

John Dunn & Ellen Mary Dunnell — Parents

Civil Birth Record · 1857

Birth Record — John Dunn Senior

1857 · St. Luke, London · Mother's maiden name: Martin · Volume 1B, Page 555 · England & Wales Births 1837–2006

View document →

Church Baptism Record · 1857

Baptism — John Dunn Senior

May 3rd, 1857 · Parish of St. Thomas Charterhouse, Middlesex · Father: John Dunn · Mother: Mary Ann Martin · Profession: Shoemaker

View document →

Civil Birth Record · 1857

Birth Record — Ellen Mary Dunnell

September 24th, 1857 · 49 Queens Head Walk, Hoxton, Shoreditch · Father: Joseph Dunnell, Blacksmith Journeyman · Mother: Ellen formerly Piper · Mother signed with her mark

View document →

Church Marriage Record · 1876

Marriage — John Dunn & Ellen Dunnell

June 3rd, 1876 · Parish of Lower Mitton, Worcester · John Dunn, 20, Shoemaker · Ellen Dunnell, 18, Factory Operative · Both resident: White Lion Yard, Spitalfields · John signed with his mark · Witnessed by Frances Loe

View document →

GRO Marriage Certificate · 1843

Marriage — Joseph Dunnell & Ellen Piper

April 30th, 1843 · Bethnal Parish Church, Shoreditch · Ellen's maternal grandparents · Ellen Piper signed with her mark · Joseph Dunnell: Blacksmith

View document →

Location Map

Parish of St. Luke, London

The parish of St. Luke, between Clerkenwell and Shoreditch · The neighbourhood where John Dunn was born and the family grew up · Bordered by Old Street and City Road

View document →

Location Record

Playhouse Yard, St. Luke's

Birthplace of John Dunn, 1857 · St. Luke's, Islington · Now largely redeveloped but the yard survives as Playhouse Yard, EC4

View document →

Location Record · 1876

White Lion Yard Mural

Address of John Dunn & Ellen Mary Dunnell at time of marriage, June 3rd, 1876 · White Lion Yard, Spitalfields, London (renamed Folgate Street in 1938)

View document →

Census Return · 1921

1921 Census — John Dunn Senior

76 Warner Road, Walthamstow · Widower, aged 64 · Waterside Labourer, Sewer Repairs · Henry Tate & Sons, sugar refiners · Hambro Wharf, Upper Thames Street · With son Henry Ambrose and daughter Daisy Julia · Signed: J. Dunn

View document →

Civil Death Record · 1919

Death Record — Ellen Mary Dunnell

September 19th, 1919 · 46 Warner Road, Walthamstow · Aged 62 · Wife of John Dunn, Waterside Labourer · Cause: (1) Apoplexy (2) Heart failure · Informant: M.A. Summers, daughter

View document →

Burial Register · 1919

Burial Register — Ellen Mary Dunnell

Entry 30400 · September 27th, 1919 · 76 Warner Road, Walthamstow · Aged 61 · Walthamstow Cemetery · Plot 60

View document →

Location Record · 1919

76 Warner Road, Walthamstow

Where Ellen Mary Dunnell died on September 19th, 1919, aged 61 · Ellen's mother · Nine years before Lily Flexmore left the stage

View document →

Civil Death Record · 1925

Death Record — John Dunn Senior

August 18th, 1925 · Whipps Cross Hospital, Walthamstow · Aged 68 · Sugar Wharf Labourer · Cause: (1) Chronic Granular Kidneys (2) Uraemia · Informant: Frederick Dunn, son, 70 Cyprus Street, Bethnal Green

View document →

Burial Register · 1925

Burial Register — John Dunn Senior

August 1925 · Grave 1341D · Aged 65, from Walthamstow · Purchased by Frederick Dunn · Depth: 6 feet

View document →
John Joseph Dunn — Elder Brother (1876–1946)

GRO Birth Certificate · 1876

Birth Certificate — John Joseph Dunn

December 16th, 1876 · 31 Norman's Buildings, St. Luke's, Clerkenwell · Father: John Dunn, Shoe Repairer · Mother: Ellen Dunnell · Registered January 26th, 1877 · GRO Ref: BXCE 517778

View document →

Census Return · 1911

1911 Census — John Joseph Dunn

Barking, Essex · Head of household, Tin Box Maker · With wife Louisa Magdalene and eight children · Four rooms · Signed: John Joseph Dunn

View document →

Census Return · 1921

1921 Census — John Joseph Dunn

18 Nelson Street, Barking · Solderer Tin Boxes, H. Curtis, Swan Street, The Minories · With Louisa and ten children · Signed: John Joseph Dunn

View document →

National Register · 1939

1939 Register — John Joseph Dunn

22 Alfred's Gardens, Barking · Tin Box Maker · Born December 16th, 1876 · With wife Louisa and daughter Hilda

View document →

Census Return · 1921

1921 Census — Louisa Magdalene Coulson Dunn

Wife of John Joseph Dunn · 1877–1969 · Household census return

View document →

Census Return · 1921

1921 Census — John Dunn Senior

76 Warner Road, Walthamstow · Widower, aged 64 · Waterside Labourer, Sewer Repairs · Henry Tate & Sons, sugar refiners · Hambro Wharf, Upper Thames Street · With son Henry Ambrose and daughter Daisy Julia

View document →
George William Dunn — The Sailor Brother (1883–1943)

Church Baptism Record · 1883

Baptism — George William Dunn

August 26th, 1883 · No. 185 · Note: father's name erroneously entered as George rather than John · All other details correct

View document →

Royal Navy Census · 1901

1901 Census — HMS Minerva, Gibraltar

March 31st, 1901 · HMS Minerva, 2nd Class Cruiser, Training Squadron · Captain: Charles Home Cochran · Station: Gibraltar

View document →

Royal Navy Census · 1901

Crew List — HMS Minerva

George W. Dunn listed 5th · Boy 1st Class · Single, aged 17 · Born Hoxton, Middlesex

View document →

Naval Service Record

Full Naval Service Record — No. 203752

George William Dunn · All ships and postings · Born August 12th, 1883, Hoxton, London · Complexion: Fresh · Eyes: Blue

View document →

Naval Service Record · Page 2

Naval Record Page 2 — Postings & Gratuity

Full list of ship postings · Paid War Gratuity · Discharged August 1923 · HMS Pembroke, Chatham

View document →

Royal Navy Medical Record · 1916

Medical Record — HMS Shannon

February 26th, 1916 · Right inguinal hernia · Petty Officer 1st Class · Discharged to Hospital Ship HMHS China · Returned to duty March 2nd, 1916 · Archive Ref: ADM101/395

View document →

Freemason Membership Record · 1911

Daintree Lodge — Grand Lodge of England

May 22nd, 1911 · Liu Kung Tao, Northern China · Consecrated by Royal Navy members in 1903 · Coincided with George's posting aboard HMS Minotaur

View document →

National Register · 1939

1939 Register — George William Dunn

20 Luton Place, Greenwich · Government Messenger · Born August 14th, 1883

View document →

Civil Death Record · 1943

Death Record — George William Dunn

February 17th, 1943 · On arrival at St. Alfege's Hospital, Greenwich · Cause: Multiple injuries from a fall from a roof · Accidental · Age corrected from 64 to 59, March 12th, 1943

View document →

Cremation Register · 1943

Cremation Register — George William Dunn

Entry 1283 · February 24th, 1943 · Honour Oak Crematorium, Southwark · Ashes scattered in garden of 20 Luton Place, Greenwich · Applied for by wife Elizabeth Dunn

View document →

Probate Notice · 1943

Probate — George William Dunn

July 8th, 1943 · Probate Llandudno · To Elizabeth Florence Longmuir and Florence Ada Sutherland · Effects: £3,017 12s. 5d.

View document →
🔍

Chapter 9

The Search

✦   Her Legacy   ✦

Why Lily Flexmore Matters Today

A Victorian woman whose story speaks directly to 2026

⚽   Women’s Football

She was there at the very beginning.

In 1895, when Ellen Dunn stepped onto the pitch at Crouch End, women’s football was an act of defiance. The Lionesses who won Euro 2022 are her direct heirs — and England’s record goalscorer carries her married name. The line from 1895 to today is unbroken.

✦   127 Years Apart   ✦

The Same Pose. The Same Pride.

The British Ladies Football Club, 1895  ·  The England Lionesses, 2022

The British Ladies Football Club, 1895 — including Miss Ruth Coupland (Ellen Mary Ann Dunn)

1895

The British Ladies Football Club — including Miss Ruth Coupland (Ellen Mary Ann Dunn, aged 16) — and fourteen of her fellow pioneers

The England Lionesses, 2022

2022

The England Lionesses — European Champions — her direct heirs. Ellen White MBE, England’s record goalscorer, kneels second from the right.

They posed. They faced the camera. They stood together.
One team stood before a crowd that had come partly to mock them.
The other stood before a nation that was ready to worship them.
The distance between those two moments is the story of women’s football.

🎭   Women in Performance

She built an international career on her own terms.

At a time when women were expected to remain invisible, Ellen Dunn performed before thousands on stages across three continents. She was her own manager, her own brand, her own story — for thirty years without pause.

🔍   Recovered History

She was lost. Now she is found.

Ellen’s story was entirely lost for nearly a century. Her recovery — through genealogical research, newspaper archives, and the dedication of her family — is a testament to what patient, loving scholarship can rescue from oblivion.

🏅   A Blue Plaque

She deserves a permanent marker.

A woman who pioneered women’s football, performed internationally for thirty years, and lived her entire life in and around Islington and Bethnal Green deserves to be remembered in stone on the streets she called home.

✦   An Extraordinary Coincidence   ✦

One Ellen White stood at the beginning of women’s football in 1895.
Another Ellen White stood at its greatest moment in 2022.

Ellen Mary Ann Dunn married George Ambrose White in 1899 and became Ellen White — 127 years before England’s record goalscorer, Ellen White MBE, helped the Lionesses win their first major trophy. The connection is entirely coincidental. It is also entirely extraordinary.

←   Why She Matters Career Chronology   →
✦   Primary Research Document   ✦

Career Chronology

Ellen Mary Ann Dunn · A life traced through newspaper advertisements, reports & records

This research document traces Ellen’s professional career year by year, up to and including her final known performance in 1925. It follows Ellen through the newspaper and magazine advertisements which both promoted her upcoming appearances and published reviews of many of those performances. It was compiled from over two thousand actual and factual instances of promotional material, advertisements, playbills and press reports discovered primarily in the British Newspaper Archives and also in archives from the United States, Ireland and Europe. The extra data shown in the year 1905 was used randomly in order to illustrate just how busy Ellen’s career actually was. The second data sheet contains 326 direct links to original newspaper records.

✦   Searchable Record   ✦

Career Record — Year by Year

Filter by year or search by venue & city

—

Career engagements recorded

30

Years on stage

—

Cities & towns

Date
Engagement
✦   Open Full Interactive Spreadsheet ↓   Download as Excel

Scroll within the document to explore  ·  Use the tabs below to switch between the Career Chronology, UK Publicity, European Performances, USA Performances and South African Performances sheets  ·  Click “Open Full Interactive Spreadsheet” to access all 326 newspaper archive links

✦   Research Methods   ✦

Sources & Bibliography

Records consulted & works referenced in this research

✦   Research Acknowledgements

This story rests on two distinct and equally essential discoveries, made independently and brought together by a remarkable moment of connection.

Karen Wall — great-great-niece of Ellen Mary Ann Dunn — identified Lily Flexmore as Ellen Mary Ann Dunn. This was the result of more than twenty years of quiet, determined family research. Ellen's family had always known that a relative had once been in lights. They knew her as Lily. They did not know her real name was Ellen, and that knowledge had been lost across the generations. Karen recovered it. When the football historian Stuart Gibbs posted on Twitter asking about Lily Flexmore, it was Karen who found his post and said: “I know who she is.”

Stuart Gibbs of Manchester Metropolitan University identified Ruth Coupland as Lily Flexmore — the connection between the footballer on the pitch at Crouch End in 1895 and the acrobatic contortionist whose name had been in lights across three continents. Stuart is a leading authority on the pioneering women of the British Ladies Football Club and on the early history of women's football in Britain and Ireland. His work — which encompasses the art exhibition Moving the Goalposts, published academic articles, and sustained original research into the players, pseudonyms, and lives of the BLFC ladies — has been foundational to the recovery of these hidden stories. This website is deeply indebted to his scholarship.

Together, Karen's identification and Stuart's identification gave the world back a woman who had been entirely lost: Ellen Mary Ann Dunn — Ruth Coupland on the pitch, Lily Flexmore on the stage — one of the most remarkable women of the Victorian and Edwardian era.

✦   Photograph Acknowledgements

Several of the photographs on this site are held by members of Ellen's family and have been shared with great generosity. Sincere thanks are due to the following for permitting their use:

Ms Karen Wall

Great-great-niece of Ellen Mary Ann Dunn

Karen has been the driving force behind the search for Ellen for over twenty years, and without her sustained efforts Ellen's story would have remained lost. Her generosity in sharing family photographs has been invaluable to this site.

Paul Duffett

Whose great-great-uncle was Ellen's brother, John Joseph Dunn (1876–1946)

Paul has shared photographs from the family collection, including stage portraits of Lily Flexmore that might otherwise have been lost. He visited the grave in January 2025 and placed a portrait of Ellen at the graveside.

Ms Jill Adams

Family relative of Ellen Mary Ann Dunn

Jill has kindly shared photographs from her family collection which have contributed to our picture of Ellen's stage career and professional life.

Ms Cathy McBrearty

Family relative of Ellen Mary Ann Dunn

Cathy generously shared the beautiful colourised portrait of Ellen — one of the finest images of her on this site — from the family's personal collection.

✦   Genealogical Databases

✦   Newspaper Archives

✦   Published Works

  • A History of Women's Football — Jean Williams
  • Unsuitable for Females — Carrie Dunn
  • When Women's Football Came to the Island — Stuart Gibbs
  • Playing Pasts — Stuart Gibbs
  • The Captain and the Contortionist — Stuart Gibbs
  • Following the History of Women's Football in Glasgow — Stuart Gibbs
  • The British Ladies' Football Club — Patrick Brennan (donmouth.co.uk)

✦   Companion Research

  • Rise of the Lionesses The Original Lady Footballers of 1895 — the companion research site that contains the full biography of Ellen Dunn alongside the stories of all the British Ladies Football Club players.

✦   Video & Walking Resources

  • John Rogers — Mysteries on the City Fringe: Clerkenwell Walk (4K) Published January 2022  ·  The Lost Byway channel  ·  A deeply informative walking tour of Clerkenwell, covering Charterhouse Square, Smithfield Market, St John’s Street, St John’s Gate, the Jerusalem Tavern, Clerkenwell Green, St James’s Church, and the site of the Clerk’s Well. An invaluable resource for understanding the neighbourhood in which the Flexmore name circulated. John Rogers is also the author of This Other London — a wonderful companion to the hidden byways of the city.
  • John Rogers — London’s Little Italy & the Legends of Islington The Lost Byway channel  ·  A walking tour through the streets of Islington — the neighbourhood where Ellen Mary Ann Dunn lived at 28 Colebrooke Row, and where she made her home for much of her adult life. An essential companion to the ‘Walking Her Street’ section of this site.
✦   The Search Continues   ✦

Write to Lily

She is still receiving correspondence — ninety-two years on

Ellen Mary Ann Dunn — Lily Flexmore

Ellen Mary Ann Dunn
1879–1934

The research into the life of Ellen Mary Ann Dunn — Lily Flexmore — is ongoing. New records are being digitised all the time, and new discoveries continue to emerge. If you have information, a photograph, a family connection, or simply a wish to say hello, Lily would be delighted to hear from you.

Perhaps you have encountered the Flexmore name in your own family history research. Perhaps you have found a playbill, a newspaper cutting, or a theatre programme that mentions Lily. Perhaps you are descended from one of Ellen’s brothers or sisters, or from the White family of Clerkenwell and Walthamstow. Perhaps you simply want to share your thoughts on this remarkable woman’s story.

Whatever brings you to write — you are most welcome.

✦   General Enquiries   ✦

Research & Family History

For questions about Ellen’s story, the search, family connections, or the Flexmore name in your own research

✉   cefiroman1@gmail.com

✦   The Researcher   ✦

Direct Correspondence

To contact the researcher directly with documents, photographs, or information that may assist in the ongoing search

✉   lilyflexmore@gmail.com

✦   Ancestry.co.uk   ✦

The public Ancestry tree for Ellen Mary Ann Dunn is open for contributions. If you have information to add, or if you believe you may share a family connection, you are warmly invited to visit and make contact through the tree.

🌳   Visit the Ancestry Tree for Ellen Mary Ann Dunn   →

“We will continue to search.”

Ellen Mary Ann Dunn   ·   1879–1934