This caricature is of Nellie Wallace when she was performing at Collins’ Hippodrome, Stoke-on-Trent, during the week of 30 May 1904. She topped the bill as ‘the Great Low Comedienne’. It is one of the many superb caricatures of Edwardian music hall performers that were drawn by the artist George Cooke when he was based at the Grand Theatre. He compiled them in a series of albums. Wallace’s act at Stoke comprised comic patter and the three songs ‘Down by the River Side’, ‘I was Born on a Friday’ and ‘Three Times a Day’. A reviewer noted her ‘grotesque get-up’, which started the audience laughing the moment she appeared on stage, her cleverness, vivacity and facial expressions.

Born in Glasgow in 1870, Nellie Wallace first appeared on stage as a clog dancer in Birmingham, and as a dancer in pantomime. She made her first London appearance in 1903. By 1910 she was billed at the London Palladium as ‘The Essence of Eccentricity’ with her ‘trademark’ frustrated spinster character who wore elastic-sided boots and a hat with a feather. She was one of the few successful female pantomime Dames, replacing George Robey as Dame Trot in Jack and the Beanstalk at the London Hippodrome in 1922. She died in 1948.