Lena Ashwell

Lena Margaret Ashwell, born Lena Margaret Pocock on 28 September 1872 and known professionally as Lena Ashwell, was a British actress, theatre manager, and producer who performed on Broadway between 1906 and 1911. She died on 13 March 1957. Her birth took place aboard the Wellesley, a vessel anchored in the River Tyne at North Shields that her father, Commander Charles Ashwell Boteler Pocock of the Royal Navy, oversaw as a home for boys suspected of crime but not yet convicted. Her mother, Sarah Margaret Stevens, died following an accident in Canada. The second youngest of seven siblings, Ashwell had two brothers and four sisters, one of whom died in childhood during the family's time in New Zealand.

Ashwell grew up in Canada and pursued musical training in Lausanne and at the Royal Academy of Music in London. Finding her voice inadequate for performance, she turned to acting and adopted the stage name Lena Ashwell. Her professional debut came in 1891 in The Pharisee. By 1895 she was appearing in King Arthur, a production by J. Comyns Carr that featured Ellen Terry, Genevieve Ward, and Henry Irving, with costumes created by Ada Nettleship. She subsequently appeared in Shakespeare productions, in Quo Vadis in 1900, and took leading roles in Mrs Dane's Defence and Leah Kleschna, both in 1900 and 1905 respectively.

In 1906, Ashwell starred in The Shulamite, a melodrama centered on a South African woman in an unhappy marriage who falls in love with a visiting Englishman. The production ran for 45 performances at the Savoy Theatre in London between 12 May and 26 June 1906, after which Ashwell brought it to Broadway, where it ran for 25 performances at the Lyric Theatre. A critic for the New York Times remarked that Ashwell had been handicapped on her first Broadway visit by a weak play. Ashwell also starred in Judith Zaraine during her Broadway years. Also in 1906, she entered theatre management, beginning at the Savoy Theatre before establishing her own venue, the Kingsway Theatre, in 1907.

In February 1914, Ashwell was among the founding members of the United Suffragists, a group led by Frederick and Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence and the Harbens. The organization broke from both the moderate National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies and the militant Women's Social and Political Union, while welcoming former members of each as well as men who supported women's rights. The group disbanded following the passage of the Representation of the People Act 1918, which granted the vote to some women.

During World War I, Ashwell organized large-scale entertainment for British troops at the front, becoming the first person to do so on such a scale. Her acquaintance Princess Helena Victoria and her connections to the YWCA helped her secure permission to bring entertainers to the Western Front. Beginning in 1915, she assembled companies of actors, singers, and other performers to travel to France; by the war's end, 25 such companies were operating in small groups across the country. Ashwell traveled to the front herself and took on fundraising and logistical responsibilities, believing in the uplifting and therapeutic power of music. She also organized all-male concert parties to perform near the front line and later wrote that ordinary soldiers had shown enthusiasm for high culture, including Shakespeare. Her efforts earned her appointment as an Officer of the Order of the British Empire.

After the war, Ashwell sought funding from the Carnegie Trust and the British Drama League to bring theatre to London. Following a survey of local councils that produced favorable results, the Carnegie trustees awarded her a £500 capital grant. The Drama League agreed to underwrite losses of up to £100 in areas considered financially risky, such as Canning Town. By 1923 a Friends of the Players membership organization had formed, with members receiving the Lena Ashwell Players Magazine. Ashwell formally incorporated the Lena Ashwell Players Ltd in April 1923, with directors including Ashwell herself, Esme Church, Marion Fawcett, and Cicely Hamilton; the first three served as theatre managers and Fawcett also acted as the company's first manager. In 1924, Ashwell took over the old Bijou Theatre in Bayswater, London, renaming it the Century Theatre and making it the company's headquarters. There she produced new plays including her own adaptations of Crime and Punishment and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Laurence Olivier later became a member of the Lena Ashwell Players.

Ashwell married actor Arthur Playfair in 1896. Playfair was an alcoholic who committed adultery and domestic violence and transmitted venereal disease to Ashwell. He initiated divorce proceedings in 1903 following her adultery with Robert Taber, the former husband of actress Julia Marlowe, and the divorce was finalized in 1908. That same year Ashwell married Sir Henry John Forbes Simson, a royal obstetrician who delivered both the future Queen Elizabeth II and Princess Margaret. Ashwell met Simson through her cousin, Sir Alfred Fripp, surgeon to the King.

Ashwell authored four books: Modern Troubadours, published in London by Gyldendal in 1922, which recounts the work of her wartime concert parties; Reflections from Shakespeare, published by Hutchinson in 1926 and edited from lectures she delivered to raise funds for the Lena Ashwell Players; The Stage, published by Geoffrey Bles in 1929, addressing the state of theatre and the role of the actor; and her autobiography, Myself A Player, published by Michael Joseph in 1936. In her final years she embraced the Moral Re-Armament movement. Her ashes are interred with her husband at Dean Cemetery in Edinburgh, in the Victorian north extension near the grave of Elsie Maud Inglis.