Ella Shields

Ella Shields, born Ella Catherine Buscher on September 26, 1879, in Baltimore, Maryland, was a music hall singer and male impersonator who became one of the most recognizable performers of her era. She was educated in South Bend, Indiana, and adopted her stage name around 1898, the same year she began her career performing a vaudeville song-and-dance act alongside her sisters.

Shields made her Broadway appearance in 1903, performing in the musical Zig-Zag Alley. The following year, a talent scout brought her to London, where she was promoted under the billing "Southern Nightingale." Although American-born, Shields built the majority of her career in England. A turning point came in 1910, when she appeared at the opening night of the London Palladium and, during a party that same year, stepped in for an ailing performer by donning trousers to complete a two-man musical act. That impromptu appearance marked the beginning of her identity as a male impersonator, and she rarely performed in women's clothing on stage again.

Her signature role grew out of a song written by her third husband, composer William Hargreaves, whom she married in 1906 in Lambeth, London. In 1915, Hargreaves wrote "Burlington Bertie from Bow," a comic piece about a penniless Londoner who mimics the manner of a wealthy gentleman. The song was a parody of the earlier "Burlington Bertie," written by Harry B. Norris and associated with Vesta Tilley. Shields performed the number dressed in a battered top hat and tails, inhabiting the character of Burlington Bertie himself, and the song became immediately successful. She toured the world in the role, including performances at Baltimore's Maryland Theatre in 1924 and 1926. The persona of Bertie remained so closely associated with her that she was known by that name as frequently as her own.

Shields's personal life included four marriages. Her first, to John Thomas Keaveney, took place on November 24, 1895, in Manhattan and ended in divorce. Her second husband was Theodore Darwin Middaugh, a theatrical tour manager and musician from Friendship, New York. Their daughter, Susan Catherine Middaugh, was born on September 15, 1899, in Friendship, and was raised there after Shields and Middaugh divorced on April 13, 1904. Shields made regular return visits to Buffalo, New York, to perform and see her daughter throughout her life. Her marriage to Hargreaves, which produced her most celebrated material, ended in separation in 1916 and divorce in 1923. On March 7, 1924, she married Frederick S. Buck, who was more than twenty years her junior, in New York, during a short tour that also included Philadelphia and Buffalo.

The economic pressures of the Depression led Shields to announce her retirement in 1929, and she spent a period working at a jewelry counter at Macy's in New York. Her return to prominence came through a music hall reunion production called Thanks for the Memory, which ran throughout England for more than three years between 1947 and 1952 and restored Burlington Bertie to public attention. During this period she shared a bill at a Royal Command Performance with a young Julie Andrews, who later paid tribute to Shields in her own one-woman show and recorded "Burlington Bertie from Bow."

Shields died on August 5, 1952, in Lancaster, Lancashire, three days after collapsing on stage at the conclusion of a performance in northern England. In what proved to be her final show, she altered the song's traditional opening line from "I'm Burlington Bertie" to "I was Burlington Bertie" before finishing the number and losing consciousness. She was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium in London, where she shares a memorial plaque in the courtyard with music hall performer Nellie Wallace.