This caricature is of the minstrel, singer, dancer and black-faced performer Eugene Stratton. He was then starring at Collins’ Hippodrome, Stoke-on-Trent, during the week of 31 October 1904. 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 of Varieties, Hanley. He compiled them in a series of albums. Stratton is seen without stage make-up, and below in character for one of the four songs he sang during that engagement. He received £200 for the week, apparently twice the fee ever paid for any other act in the Potteries.

Stratton was born Eugene Augustus Ruhlmann in Buffalo, New York, in 1861. He appeared in the USA and Canada as a black-faced performer. He made his first appearance in Great Britain with Haveley’s Minstrels at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London in 1881, and then in Piccadilly with the Moore and Burgess Minstrels, as a comedian, singer, dancer and principal tambourine man. His first success was as ‘The Whistling Coon’, an act that he bought from the veteran minstrel Sam Raeburn. He made his music hall debut in 1892 at the Royal Holborn with a soft-shoe and song and dance routine. He made his name with songs that included ‘Lily of Laguna’. He was a member of the Grand Order of Water Rats from 1893 and became its King Rat in 1896. He gave his last appearance at the Queen’s Theatre, Poplar in 1914, and died in 1918.