In 1982 I was given a photo to add to my collection of family photos. It is titled “Les’s daughters”, and the three girls are labelled Eileen, Joyce, and another name, hard to make out, but that I always thought might be Miriam.
Les is Leicester Alfred Cooke (1867–1954), my father’s maternal grandfather and the son of John Henry Cooke, proprietor of Cooke’s Royal Circus. Les was born in Paris in 1867 and travelled with the circus extensively as a child. At age 14 he was performing as an equestrian with the circus in Edinburgh. He married Annie Turner, a Cooke cousin, in 1890 and divorced her in 1902.
In 1904, aged 37, he married 18-year-old Mary Alice Crump (1886-1919), a dancer from Manchester. Mary was born there in 1886. Her father was a baker. In 1901, at the age of 14, she was living in a boarding house in Lambeth, London and listed on the census as a professional dancer. Leicester and Mary had three daughters. First-born was Joyce Emily, my father’s mother, in 1905 in Morningside, Edinburgh.
In 1907, Madison Olitzka Cooke was born in Edinburgh. The name on the photo must be an abbreviation of Madison, perhaps Maddie. The only reference I can find for this exotic name is a Dutch impressionist and dancer called Olitzka Madison, whose theatrical career seems to have flourished from about 1910 to 1917 and who is recorded as performing in Paisley in that time. While that is a bit later than our Madison’s birth, because both Mary and Les were in “show business”, I suspect they may have known her or at least known of her. Later in life our Madison was often recorded as Olitzka.
Eileen, was born in Belfast in 1909. In 1911, the three sisters were registered in Great Yarmouth on Census night, as visitors of the Trapp family, who appeared to run a boarding house. They were aged five, four and two. Les and Mary, on the other hand, were registered in Linlithgow with other circus members. They were staying in a caravan while some of the other performers were recorded as in tents.
In January 1919, the girls’ mother Mary died in Thornton Hall, Glasgow of tuberculosis which she had had for 6 years. In 1921 we find Madison and Eileen in Milton Glasgow, aged 14 and 12, boarding with a Margaret Twigg. In 1926 Joyce married George Myles, a clerk, in Glasgow and in 1927 my father, George Ronald, was born.
In June 1932, George and Joyce were living in a tenement in Hickman St, Govan, Glasgow. George was at work and wee George was at home with his mother who was both pregnant and suffering from tuberculosis. Joyce who was unwell in bed wrote a note and asked George to throw it out the window. In a short while a policeman arrived at the door with a doctor. George couldn’t reach the door handle and he had to stand on a chair to open the door. In George’s own words, “then my brother Eric was born and I went to stay with my grandparents. I never saw my mother again.” On 13 December, Eric died at the Children’s Homeopathic Hospital in Glasgow. The cause of death was noted as marasmus, which is defined as severe malnutrition, and it was noted there was a family history of tuberculosis. On 26 December Joyce died aged 27, at the Robroyston Hospital in Glasgow.
On 22 February 1936, Olitzka died aged 29, in the Lennox Hospital in Glasgow. She had had tuberculosis for six years. Her occupation was listed as boot and shoe salesperson. Until she was admitted to the hospital she had been living with her father, Les, and sister, Eileen, in King’s Park Glasgow. On 10 July 1937 Eileen died, aged 28, at the Victoria Infirmary, of tuberculosis. Her occupation was listed as commission agent’s clerk.
The story has a happier ending. On 8 December 1934, George married 26-year-old Jessie Buchanan and they relocated to Edinburgh with wee George. The birth of his sister, Patricia, in 1939 completed the family.
While Joyce was my father’s mother, Jessie, whom we knew as Netta, was my grandmother. She was the person who raised my father, who introduced him to the library and reading, who encouraged him to stay at school. She was the one who organised the exciting Christmas box that arrived in New Zealand from Scotland every year. When I met her and spent time with her in the early 1980s, she told me about my father’s childhood. And Netta was the one who gave me the photo of “Les’s daughters”.
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