Two picture postcards ... two operas ........ and two young singers .......

Now I am indebted to Tony Goulding for finding these two picture postcards and sending them over to me.

Aileen Davies, circa 1920s

They are of singers in the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, which my Wikipedia tells me "is a professional British light opera company that, from the 1870s until 1982, staged Gilbert and Sullivan's Savoy operas nearly year-round in the UK and sometimes toured in Europe, North America and elsewhere. The company was revived for short seasons and tours from 1988 to 2003, and with Scottish Opera it later co-produced two productions”*.

And apart from their names and the company that published the cards that is about it.

But a trawl of the internet offered up the biographical details for one of the singers and I travel in hope that I will find out something about the other.

So as yet Aileen Davies remains in the shadows.  

I know she was born in Cornwall in 1902, and died in Edinburgh in 1981, that her father was listed as a Master Mariner and she was married and had a daughter. She appears on several picture postcards, is in National Portrait Gallery and has a brief biography on the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company which records she joined the company in 1923 and performed with them till 1928.**

Aileen Davies, in The Gondoliers 1920s

Ms Winifred Lawson has left more in the way of a digital footprint, including a Wikipedia entry and another in D’Oyly Carte Opera Company.***

Winifred Lawson in Patience, 1920s

She too was active with the company in the 1920s, and again in the 1930s, went on to become Vice President of the Gilbert & Sulivan Society in 1944, and published her autobiography "A Song to Sing-O!," with foreword by Sir Malcolm Sargent, 1955.

I could write more about both of them, but that would only be by lifting my research from other people’s work, so if you want more follow the links.

I am off to search for the post card company, secure now in the knowledge that they date from the mid 1920s.****

Location; 1920s

Pictures; Aileen Davies , and Winifred Lawson from Parksle Pictures, 1920s, courtesy of Tony Goulding

* D’Oyly Carte Opera Company,  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%27Oyly_Carte_Opera_Company

** Aileen Davies, D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, https://www.gsarchive.net/whowaswho/D/DaviesAileen.htm

***Winifred Lawson, D’Oyly Carte Opera Company https://www.gsarchive.net/whowaswho/L/LawsonWinifred.htm

****Parkslee Postcards, https://www.gsarchive.net/postcards/pksle151.htm