Peter Walters explores the life of a Coventry comedian, a star of the Music Hall stage, who died one hundred years ago tomorrow. Peter writes…..
The signs of suicide were all too plain when police recovered the body of TE Dunville from the River Thames near Reading.
Knife wounds to the throat confirmed the contents of a farewell letter, read out at the inquest in March 1924.
It was a tragic end for one of the stars of the English Music Hall, a performer who had spent twenty years at the top, and for one of Coventry’s most successful Victorians.
Thomas Edward Wallen (Dunville was a stage name, taken from a popular brand of whisky) was born in New Street in Coventry on 29 July 1867, the son of a tailor who wished his son, disabled from birth with a withered arm, to find a respectable job in trade.
To that end he secured a place for him at Bablake School, then offering two years’ education to boys heading for apprenticeships. But young Thomas was already infatuated with the stage, setting up his own impromptu theatre company and paying little heed to the idea of an apprenticeship.
After his father had found him a job with a silk merchant in the city, Thomas, with two friends, ran away to seek theatrical fame and fortune in London. But they only made it to Northamptonshire before hunger drove them home.
Once more, Wallen senior found his son a job, this time as a clerk with the Rudge Whitworth cycle company, but he was sacked after greasing the floor of the office so that he could practise the splits.
Free at last to pursue a stage career, he set up a dancing act, The Merry Men, with a friend to tour small halls and public houses in the Midlands.
It was hard going; they didn’t get paid if they didn’t please the audience. And one night disaster struck when Thomas, always cripplingly nervous on stage, got stuck in a barrel and then repeatedly kicked his partner in the head as they performed an acrobatic trick together.
The outraged venue manager was about to lower the curtain on them when he realised that the audience was helpless with laughter. Thomas had noticed too and within months he’d gone solo, as TE Dunville, an eccentric comedian and contortionist.
By 1890 he was a rising star of the London music halls, the main rival in the public’s affection to the legendary Dan Leno. In stage garb of tight black wig, loose black jacket, tight black trousers and big boots, Dunville’s tall, thin figure was an unsettling sight. His act combined a strange kind of contorted ‘leg mania’ dancing with quick-fire delivery of poems, stories and homilies.
One of his best known – ‘little boy – pair of skates – broken ice – heaven’s gates’ – gives a flavour of his style.
He toured widely, appearing in Coventry a number of times over the years, but at his peak was spending ten months of the year in London, appearing in variety shows and pantomimes.
By 1913, after two decades at the top, he was earning a princely £100 a week, but his style of eccentric comedy was already beginning to give way to sophisticated review and the first glimmerings of cinema. The Great War and its immediate aftermath gave his career a final boost but as the Twenties began dates became harder and harder to get. Always a worrier, Dunville sank into repeated episodes of depression.
In March 1924, while appearing at the Grand Theatre in Clapham, he apparently overheard a casual remark in a bar, describing him as a ‘has-been’.
Next morning, the 21st of March, he went missing, after leaving a note for his wife.
TE Dunville is long forgotten now, but a young Charlie Chaplin saw him perform and later described him as ‘an excellent funny man’ and his act strongly influenced comedians of a later age like Max Wall and Billy Dainty.
