The Secret Garden was my first Broadway musical.
I had been working as a stage manager off-Broadway for a decade and barely scraping by. Debt was piling up. The work was great – I was in the room with some fantastic people, but the older I got, the harder it was to make ends meet. Backstage at the American premiere of a Harold Pinter’s play called Mountain Language, which we did together with his The Birthday Party, I remember having a conversation with Jean Stapleton who was starring in both about how little we were being paid. “I think of it as my car fare,” she told me. Car fare? It was my rent, food, medical, and emergency money all rolled up into one. A taxi ride was well out of my budget.
Things didn’t change for so long that I made a deal with myself. If I didn’t get a regular Broadway paycheck by my thirtieth birthday, I was going to find something else to do. Time ticked along with nothing on the horizon but then The Secret Garden came along. It completely changed the trajectory of my working life. I turned thirty a week after I started learning the show.
The main character in The Secret Garden is 10-year-old Mary Lennox. Her parents have died of cholera in India, so she has been sent to live with her only relative, her brooding, reclusive uncle in a big, gloomy old house on the Yorkshire moors. The first scenes of the musical are set in India following the epidemic. After that, the ghosts of her parents and their friends follow her to England and serve as a Greek chorus throughout the story.
Theoni V. Aldredge designed the costumes and I remember being amazed at how much they looked like the dresses my great-grandmother wore in the studio portraits of hers that I had. I brought the photographs to the theatre one day to show to everybody. Theoni had done her research. What I didn’t notice at the time was how closely Mary Lennox’s story followed that of my grandfather.
Geoffrey was brought over to England by his father and left with relatives when he was six. His mother had died of Blackwater fever soon after he was born and his father was at a loss. I am sure Mac did his best to raise him, but a soldier’s life is not the ideal environment for a young child. Even having an Ayah, or local governess, to tend to him, Mac had to travel a lot. While Mac’s family were hard-working Irish Canadians, Nora’s family were land-owning upper-middle-class Brits, so it made far more sense to take him to them.
Both William and Mary Ann, Nora’s father, and mother, had been born in England and then traveled to India where Nora and most of their other children had been born. William put in his twenty-five years of service to the Crown and then retired. They moved back to England and settled in Bedford, a market town north of London, where Nora’s youngest brother Frederick was born. William died eight years later which left Mary Ann on her own. When Mac brought Geoffrey over, Frederick was already about seventeen.
Rottingdean Preparatory School was founded in 1892 by a man named George Mason. George and his brother Thomas served as the school’s co-headmasters. Rottingdean is far to the south on the coast just east of Brighton. That’s where Grandfather was sent off to school.
He may have had a year or so of living at home with his grandmother, but probably by the time he was eight, he was spending the school year in Rottingdean and only coming home for the holidays. He would go years at a time without ever seeing his father.
It was common practice then for the monied class to send their kids off to boarding school. I suppose, in some circles, it still is. There were many more such places a century ago than there are now. Rottingdean closed sometime between the wars and was eventually demolished. All that remains of it now is their alumni war memorial and their playing fields.
Why Rottingdean and not somewhere else? Was there a connection between the family and the Masons? I wonder what Geoffrey thought of it. At such a young age, the life you are living is the one that you know. Maybe he didn’t question it. He must have been lonely. My grandfather was always a rather quiet and solitary man. I have watched my niece and nephew grow up and even as infants they were acting exactly like the people they have grown into. It seems to me that we are born with everything we end up being. The experiences we have growing up either support and encourage those parts that rule us or they fight against them. Academically, Geoffrey thrived living a solitary life at boarding school. Maybe, emotionally, he did too.
In 1910, his father Mac retired and in 1911 came to England where he settled in Kent in Folkstone which in 2023 is about a two-and-a-half-hour-long drive away from Rottingdean. I can follow where Geoffrey spent his holidays based on where the studios were that took his portraits. The one I have of him from 1910 was in Bedford where his grandmother was, then another one where he is slightly older was taken in Folkstone.
When he was fourteen, Geoffrey was enrolled in Rugby. Rugby School is a prestigious boarding school in Warwickshire. It was founded in 1567 and is still in operation today. It has an impressive list of famous alumni from Lewis Carroll to Salman Rushdie. The war poet Rupert Brooke went there. And yes, it is where Rugby football was invented.
Thomas Mason, one of the headmasters at Rottingdean had gone to Rugby, so it was possible that he had something to do with Geoffrey going as well.
He entered the school with two scholarships, one for classical and the other for general studies. He was placed in the Lower Fifth Form on the classical side where he studied scripture, Latin, Greek, English, French, Mathematics, and History. He did very well and was awarded prizes in everything except Greek. That seems to have set the tone for the rest of his time there. He excelled.
He was appointed as a Levee, which was like a student prefect, and he even played Rugby. There is a description of how he did in one game in the Meteor, the school paper. “McElhinny kicked off for Hardwich’s, but the School House scrum succeeded in getting the ball, which a good forward rush carried into Hardwich’s twenty-five. After a short struggle Lloyd scored near the touch line. (3—0). The School House then pressed the attack, and tries were scored by Lyon, Skinner and Somervell, before a deplorable mistake on the part of the School House allowed Colbeck to score a fine try. This was converted by McElhinny. (16—5)… Hardwich’s, who put up a good defense, were well led by Colbeck, Bathgate and Gulland ; while McElhinny kicked well. G. S. Charlesworth kindly refereed.”
In 1917 he was awarded a certificate for Oxford and Cambridge Schools. This meant that he had proven that he was bright enough to be able to apply to a college in one of those schools.
The draft age in England during World War 1 was eighteen. Three weeks after Germany signed the Armistice at Compiègne on November 11, 1918, was when Geoffrey turned eighteen. He just missed it. In 1917, while still at Rugby and underage, he started having to go through exercises connected to the war effort. He spent some time working on a farm that summer that was helping to supply the troops with food. He would graduate from Rugby by Easter in 1919. His father, who had been promoted to Colonel that same year, had come out of retirement at the start of the war and had been serving with the Horse Guards in London.
Before graduating, Geoffrey found out that he had been awarded a scholarship to study Classics at Corpus Christi College at Oxford. He was one of four from Rugby to go there. He seemed to have done just as well at Oxford as he did at Rugby. He would study there for five years. In 1923, he was awarded something called the Haigh Scholarship. In 1924 he came in second in the exam for the Indian Civil Service. He joined the service on October 24th. On December 5, 1924, eleven days shy of his twenty-fourth birthday, he arrived in Bombay. The following year, he passed first in the Final examination for the ICS.
I don’t have the slightest idea what I would have done had I not gotten the job on The Secret Garden. As my thirtieth birthday got closer, I remember trying to think about what other options there might be. I didn’t really come up with anything. Things had to change, but how?
Francis Hodgson Burnett wrote her book in installments that were published in book form in 1910. Little Mary Lennox was ten years old meaning that she and my grandfather were exactly the same age. It was the perfect musical for me to work on.
Audra MacDonald was one of the last replacement actors to join the show. She hadn’t finished Julliard yet when she started. Audra was cast to play the Ayah, Mary’s governess. I remember laughing with her a lot backstage. For a benefit, I rewrote the lyrics to the Mad Tea Party song from Dear World about three crazy ladies. I rewrote it to be about the three women who had created the show. I can’t for my life remember who Audra played, but she gave it her all. She was my Secret Santa that year and I still have the cards she left for me as hints. There was no decade of toiling away in tiny off-Broadway theatres for her. Six Tony awards later, nobody can touch her. That was her path.
I don’t for a moment regret any of the low-paying work that I did before The Secret Garden. It would turn out that my having all that experience leading smaller shows would mean that I would advance that much quicker once I finally broke into the Broadway world. I was also able to work with some of the people that made me want to be a part of the theatre community in the first place.
Perry Cline was the Production Stage Manager who gave me the shot. He would hire me again to work on a brand-new musical called The Red Shoes which, while a remarkable experience, would fail completely and close right after opening night. Perry just recently passed away. I will forever be grateful to him for opening that door for me. It changed my life. May he rest in peace.
Whatever my grandfather may have felt about his situation, he seems to have accepted it and done his best to excel in what he was presented with. Our journeys are our journeys. I can’t say that I’ve guided mine, I have, instead, done my best to listen to what was on offer and pick the available option that inspired me the most at the time. It’s turned out to be a pretty good system. It may not be for everyone, but it seems to have worked for Geoffrey, and, so far anyway, it seems to have worked for me.
Haven’t commented in awhile, but absolutely enjoying the ride. Your stories guide me to think back on my forebears journeys and has stimulated some questions and discussions with family. I am the oldest of 8 and one of 60 some grandchildren. My mother was one of 15, my dad was one 2. His only brother married one of my mother’s sisters so that has at least eliminated one complexity. 😂 I hope your family is enjoying these stories as much as I am.