Gelatin silver print

This photo by Rita Martin shows the musical comedy star Gertie Millar (1879-1952) in a scene from 'Our Miss Gibbs', one of her greatest triumphs. This photo is one of 36 showing the actress, which are gathered in an album. Like some of the other images, this one was also published by J Beagles & Co, a company that speciliased in royalty and celbrities.

On 25 January 1909 'The Times published' a lengthy review of a ‘New Musical Play, in Two Acts’, which had premiered at the Gaiety Theatre two days earlier. Part of the reason why the article was so long was the comedy’s complicated, if not very original, plot. When the play moved to the Knickerbocker Theatre in New York the following year, one critic described it as the ‘familiar he-fell-in-love-with-one-who-was-beneath-him-in-station type’ ('The New York Times', 30 August 1910). Similarly, Richard Traubner in his guide to operetta (Routledge 2003) thought it was a show of the ‘typical department-store-salesgirl-meets-disguised-rich-earl-spurns-and-finally-accepts-him variety’.

Gertie Millar played Mary Gibbs, a girl from Yorkshire, like the actress herself, who works as a shop assistant selling sweets at the extremely thinly disguised Garrods department store. Miss Gibbs has many admirers, an entire chorus of ‘dudes’. The main dude, Lord Eynsford, the son of the millionaire Earl of St. Ives, pretends to be a humble bank clerk so as not to frighten off Mary. When she finds out the truth she decides to leave London, but not before making a last visit to White City. The Great White City had been erected the previous year to the north of Shepherds Bush as the venue for the 1908 Olympics and to house an exhibition to celebrate French-British relations. The ground’s name derived from the cladding of its temporary structures, which was made of gleaming white marble.

To make the plot even more complicated, during a visit to Garrods the bag of Mary’s cousin Timothy had been mixed up with that of Hughie Pierrepoint, an ‘amateur criminal’. Timothy finds himself in the possession of the Ascot Gold Cup, which Hughie happens to have stolen from the country house of no other than Lord St. Ives. Timothy also makes his way to White City where he disguises himself as a marathon runner, ends up the first to enter the stadium and is hailed as the winner of the race. Needles to say, in the end, somehow, all turns out well and Mary gets to marry her Lord.

It was in the second act, in the Court of Honour of the Franco-British Exhibition, that Gertie donned her dark blue Pierrot costume and performed one of her most famous numbers, Moonstruck, supported by a chorus of no less than eight similarly clad girls. Like many of her famous tunes, 'Moonstruck' was written by the star's husband Lionel Monckton and contained the lyrics:

‘I’m such a silly when the moon comes out; / I hardly seem to know what I’m about;
Skipping, hopping, never never stopping, / I can’t keep still, although I try.
I’m all a-quiver when the moonbeams glance; / That is the moment when I long to dance.
I can never close a sleepy eye / When the moon comes creeping up the sky!’

Gertie Millar is holding a tickling stick, an accessory which should be in more general use.