Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Grossmith, George
GROSSMITH, GEORGE (1847–1912), entertainer and singer in light opera, was born in London 9 December 1847, the elder son of George Grossmith, a lecturer and police-court reporter to The Times and other journals, by his wife, Emmeline Weedon. His uncle, William Robert Grossmith, of Reading, had been a well-known child-actor. At seventeen, while still a pupil at the North London Collegiate School, Grossmith began to act as deputy for his father at the Bow Street police court, and from 1866 to 1869 this was his only profession. He gave it up for a time in 1877, on being engaged at the Opera Comique, but resumed it for a short period on his father’s death in 1880. In boyhood he had entertained his friends by singing comic songs to his own accompaniment on the piano. Modelling his work on that of John Orlando Parry [q.v.], he began in 1864 to give performances at ‘penny readings’ of songs and sketches of contemporary life, most of which he composed and wrote. In 1870 he was engaged by John Henry Pepper [q.v.] to perform in his entertainment at the Polytechnic in Regent Street. Other engagements of this kind followed; and until 1877 he was much occupied in touring with his father, with Mrs. Howard Paul [q.v.], with Florence Marryat [q.v.], oralone. For performance with Miss Marryat he wrote and composed in 1876 the satirical sketch Cups and Saucers.
In the autumn of 1877 he was engaged by Richard D’Oyly Carte [q.v.] to take the part of John Wellington Wells in Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera, The Sorcerer, produced at the Opera Comique 17 November 1877; and for the next twelve years he was regularly employed in this series of operas. He ‘created’ the parts of Sir Joseph Porter in H.M.S. Pinafore (Opera Comique, 28 May 1878), Major- General Stanley in The Pirates of Penzance (Opera Comique, 3 April 1880), Reginald Bunthorne in Patience (Opera Comique, 23 April 1881, transferred to the newly built Savoy Theatre, 10 October 1881), the Lord Chancellor in Iolanthe (Savoy, 25 November 1882), King Gama in Princess Ida (Savoy, 5 January 1884), Ko-ko in The Mikado (Savoy, 14 March 1885), Robin Oakapple in Ruddigore (Savoy, 22 January 1887), and Jack Point in The Yeomen of the Guard (Savoy, 3 October 1888). The agility and droll dignity of his small frame, his dry humour, his pleasant voice, and the skill in rapid enunciation which caused his ‘patter-songs’ to be made a regular feature of these operas, suited Grossmith perfectly to this form of dramatic and musical art.
Meanwhile he had not wholly given up his ‘humorous and musical recitals’, which were more remunerative than the opera; and in 1889 he left the Savoy to devote himself to them. But for three appearances on the stage in comedy, this work fully occupied him, in private houses and public buildings far and wide over the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States, until his retirement in 1909. He would fill by himself an hour and a half with words and music of his own making; and his shrewd, superficial satire and such songs as ‘The Muddle-Puddle Porter’, ‘The Happy Fatherland’, and ‘See Me Dance the Polka’, with their accompanying chat, made him, perhaps, more popular even than his friend, Richard Corney Grain [q.v.]. He composed the music to Gilbert's opera, Haste to the Wedding, and the incidental music to several plays; he also wrote two books of reminiscences, A Society Clown (1888) and Piano and I (1910), and, with his brother Walter Weedon Grossmith [q.v.], a well-known humorous book, The Diary of a Nobody (1894), which first appeared serially in Punch. In 1873 he married Emmeline Rosa (died 1905), only daughter of E. Noyce, M.D., and left two sons (George and Lawrence, both of whom became actors) and two daughters. He died at Folkestone 1 March 1912.
Walter Weedon Grossmith (1854–1919), comedian, younger brother of the preceding, was born in London 9 June 1854. Having studied at the Royal Academy schools and the Slade School he became a painter, and exhibited at the Royal Academy and Grosvenor Gallery. In 1885 he went on the stage, and soon made a hit as Lord Arthur Pomeroy in Cecil Clay's A Pantomime Rehearsal. In 1888 (Sir) Henry Irving [q.v.] engaged him to play Jacques Strop in Robert Macaire at the Lyceum. In 1907 he appeared with (Sir) H. Beerbohm Tree [q.v.] in The Van Dyk. His successful career was mainly occupied, under his own management or that of others, in acting ‘dudes’ and small, underbred, unhappy men, in which parts he excelled. Among the plays that he wrote, The Night of the Party, which he produced at the Avenue Theatre in 1901, was the most successful. His artistic taste showed itself best in his flair for old furniture. He married in 1895 May Lever Palfrey, actress, a descendant of Charles Lever [q.v.], who, with one daughter, survived him. He died in London 14 June 1919.
[G. Grossmith, A Society Clown, 1888; W. Grossmith, From Studio to Stage, 1913; P. FitzGerald, The Savoy Opera, 1894; Memoir of George and Weedon Grossmith, by B. W. Findon, in The Diary of a Nobody, 5th edition, 1920; The Times, 2 March 1912, 16 June 1919; private information.]