Ella Shields

Ella Shields (born Ella Catherine Buscher; 27 September 1879 – 5 August 1952) was a music hall singer and male-impersonator. Her famous signature song, "Burlington Bertie from Bow", a parody of Vesta Tilley's "Burlington Bertie", written by her third husband, William Hargreaves, was an immediate hit. Though American-born, Shields achieved her greatest success in England.

Ella Catherine Buscher was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on September 26, 1879. She was educated in South Bend, Indiana. She adopted the stage name, "Ella Shields," around 1898.

She married John Thomas Keaveney on November 24, 1895 in Manhattan. That marriage ended in divorce. Her second marriage was to Theodore Darwin Middaugh, a theatrical tour manager and musician from Friendship, NY. She gave birth to a daughter, Susan Catherine Middaugh on September 15, 1899 in Friendship, NY. She and Middaugh divorced on April 13, 1904. Susan Middaugh was raised in Friendship. Ella made fairly regular trips back to Buffalo, NY to perform and visit her throughout her life. Ella's third marriage, to composer William Hargreaves, was in 1906 after she moved to England. She divorced Hargreaves in 1923. Her fourth marriage, on March 7, 1924, was to a man 20+ years her junior, Frederick S. Buck, in New York, during a short 3 city tour of Philadelphia, New York and Buffalo. She may have still been married to Buck at the time of her death in 1952. There are two other marriages mentioned in newspaper articles (Army Officer Archibald Christie, Chandler Andrew Sharpe) but they are in error.

Shields began her career in 1898, doing a vaudeville song-and-dance act with her sisters. In 1904 a talent scout lured her to London, where she was billed as the "Southern Nightingale". In 1906 she married the songwriter William Joseph Hargreaves in Lambeth, London. In 1910 she appeared at the opening night of the London Palladium. It was at this time that she became a male impersonator. The story goes that one night in 1910 Shields was attending a party at which music-hall performers did their acts for one another. Half of a two-man musical act was out sick, and Shields put on trousers to fill in for him. This impromptu turn in trousers proved to be the turning point of her career and she rarely wore dresses on stage again.

With wavy auburn hair and dressed as a young man in evening dress, nervously fingering his white tie, she made a very charming and gay figure ... and though she adopted the tattered clothes and worn top hat of the traditional "broken down swell" act she did so with a difference, making of what might have been ordinary broad comedy something delicate and, in its way, almost moving.

— Obituary, The Times

In 1915 Hargreaves wrote "Burlington Bertie from Bow", a comic ditty about a penniless Londoner who affects the manner of a well-heeled gentleman. It was a parody of an earlier song, simply called "Burlington Bertie", written by Harry B. Norris and made famous by Vesta Tilley. Shields sang the song, dressed up in slightly battered top hat and tails, in the role of Burlington Bertie "himself". She toured the world in this role, including appearances at Baltimore's now-demolished Maryland Theatre in 1924 and 1926. The persona of Bertie haunted the rest of her life and she was known as Bertie as much as Ella. She and Hargreaves had separated in 1916 and they divorced in 1923.

The Depression brought difficult times for many entertainers, and Shields announced her retirement in 1929. She spent time working at a Macy's jewellery counter in New York. After a period of performing in obscurity, a music-hall reunion show called Thanks for the Memory put "Bertie" back in the spotlight. This show ran throughout England for over three years from 1947 to 1952.