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Caricature
Cooke, George - Enlarge image
Caricature
- Date:
April 1907 (drawn)
- Artist/Maker:
Cooke, George (artist)
- Materials and Techniques:
Pen and ink and wash on paper
- Museum number:
S.393:43-2002
- Gallery location:
In Storage
This caricature is of Fred Conquest performing in The Freak’s Revenge at the Grand Theatre of Varieties, Hanley, during the week of 22 April 1907. It is one of the many superb caricatures of Edwardian music hall performers that were drawn by the artist George Cooke and compiled in a series of albums.
Actor, gymnast and pantomime performer, Fred Conquest was born in London in 1870. He made his first pantomime appearance at the age of four at the Grecian Theatre, when it was managed by his father, George Conquest. His first adult appearance was at the Surrey Theatre in 1889. His greatest success was in his father’s famous role of Zacky the Monkey in For Ever. In 1901 he managed the Surrey Theatre briefly on the death of his father. Subsequently he appeared in pantomime and music hall sketches. The Freak’s Revenge was the story of the revenge of a ‘freak, or man-monkey’ upon the captain who ran away with his wife and daughter. Its climax was ‘the struggle to death’ between the man-monkey and the savage gorilla, which he had mistakenly sent into the room of his own daughter. Conquest died in 1941.
