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General First nameFrancis Robert (Frank)
LastnameBenson
GenderMale
CountryEngland
Date of birth1858-11-04
Place of birthTunbridge Wells, Kent, England
Date of death1939-12-31
Place of deathKensington, London, England


About

From The Times, 1 January 1940:

Obituary – Sir Frank Benson – A Great Theatrical Personality

Sir Frank Benson, one of the most eminent Shakespearian actors of his day, and the founder of a company which has trained large numbers of actors and actresses who have achieved success on the West End stage, died in London yesterday at the age of 81. Francis Robert Benson was the second son of William Benson, J.P., of Langtons, Alresford, Hampshire. His elder brother was William A.S. Benson, the architect and designer in metal-work; his younger, Godfrey, is Lord Cnarnwood, who sat for some time in the House of Commons, and is the biographer of Abraham Lincoln,

Frank Benson, like his brothers, went to Winchester College, where he came to know a master, the Reverend Charles Halford Hawkins, who perhaps inspired and certainly fostered that passion for Shakespeare which was the master-passion of Benson’s life. In after years Benson, on bringing his company to Winchester, used to come to Hawkins for advice and criticism; and strange sounds of shouting and stamping were heard now and then in the small hours by the boys of Hawkins’s House, as the actor-manager was sternly “put through” this scene or that by his old friend and mentor.

From Winchester he went to New College, and at Oxford his work and his triumphs lay in two capacities which, combined, were to become the distinctive features of the Benson Company – athletics and acting. In athletics his great achievement was winning the three miles against Cambridge. Acting was not so easy in Oxford University then as now, for the Oxford Union Dramatic Society (O.U.D.S.) was not yet founded. But the Agamemnon was given, with the present Lord Selborne and the late Lord Curzon in the cast, and Benson played Clytemnestra.

Miss Ellen Terry had seen him act at Oxford (“What a supremely beautiful girl,” she exclaimed, forgetting that there were no women in the company), and it is said to have been at her instigation that he made the stage his profession. In July, 1882, we find Benson taking Don Pedro to the Benedick of Henry Irving and the Beatrice of Helen [????], one of those Shakespeare readings at Sir Theodore Martin’s house, and two months later, when the Lyceum’s Romeo and Juliet was resumed after the summer holiday, Sir Henry Irving gave to Benson the part of Paris, just vacated by George Alexander.

The Benson Company

At the end of the run of Romeo and Juliet Irving and Miss Ellen Terry advised him to join a touring company where lie could get more experience and better parts than in London. He joined first Miss Alleyne’s company, and then the company of Walter Bentley. One night the manager was missing, and so were the salaries. A quick interchange of telegrams between Benson and his father; the necessary money was received; and the company (including that fine actor, George R. Weir) became not Bentley’s but Benson’s.

Fate was at work, and Fate was in a hurry. Benson was young and inexperienced; his father was a cautious man, of Quaker stock, to whom the stage was a doubtful profession and theatrical management a dangerous risk. Yet there and then, on the spur of a crisis, what may have been intended merely as a little help to a few poor strollers, founded one of the greatest achievements and organizations in the history of the English stage.

To realize its greatness we have to think of the times. No matter what the Bancrofts and Irving had done for the credit of the London stage, in the provincial towns for the most part the theatre and the profession of acting were still glanced at sidelong. And here was a young man, well born, well off, well educated handsome, charming, athletic, wholly a stranger to the Bohemia of the pot-house, at the head of a theatrical company which grew to be unlike any other theatrical company: a company of education and intelligence above the average of the stroller; a company full of young spirits and energy, always playing cricket or hockey or swimming or running, when they were not rehearsing, even the most active members of it trying in vain to keep pace with the devouring energies of “Pa” himself.

And here we may say that when, in 1886, Frank Benson married a member of his company, Miss Constance Fetherstonhaugh (Gertrude Constance, daughter of Captain Morshead Samwell), the Bensonian spirit was enriched by a very strong and a very Bensonian influence for good sense and good fellowship in hard work and play.

By degrees the Benson company became the nursery for the English stage. On the eve of Benson’s Canadian and American tours of 1913-14 The Times drew up a rough list of the well-known actors and actresses who had been members of the Benson Company. There were more than 90 names, every one of them familiar to London playgoers, and not a few of them famous. Continually the company was being drained by London, continually it was filled up again, and new tyros were turned into actors.

Stratford-upon-Avon

These were the very people to carry Shakespeare far and wide over the United Kingdom, to dissolve, in cathedral city, in dingy manufacturing town, and in centres of agricultural life, the lingering prejudice against the stage play, to rescue Shakespeare from death in school examinations, and the never-opened gift-book on parlour tables, and to give a glimpse of the meaning and the value of art. Old comedy and now and then a modern play were in the repertory; but Shakespeare was Benson’s master-passion; and, as time went on, he came to see in Shakespeare much more than the beauty of drama and of poetry.

By the eve of the War Shakespeare had come to stand in Benson’s mind for the spirit of England. And the spirit of England was to regenerate the world. Stratford-upon-Avon became for him the world’s centre: and at Stratford-upon-Avon, where for 30 years he and his company gave the annual Shakespeare Festival performances, his views on old England and old English life found practical expression (with the loyal support of the governors of the Memorial Theatre and others), not only in the theatre but also in many “side-shows”, such as folk-dance and song, folk-art, and the formation of leagues for the propagation, through the arts, of the English idea.

Stratford-upon-Avon made no secret of its gratitude for what it owed him. During the summer Shakespeare Festival of 1910. the borough presented him with its freedom; and the only man to receive that honour before him had been David Garrick during the Jubilee year of 1769. But the time came when it was felt that the attendance at the Festival was becoming too closely confined to the regular devotees of Benson. And it would be idle to pretend that finance had not always been a difficulty. To this idealist money meant nothing but a means of spreading Shakespeare; and he had cheerfully spent his own fortune, reputed to be large, upon his life’s work.

But Stratford-upon-Avon and the Memorial Theatre by no means wanted to lose him. It was suggested that younger men with more “draw” in them should act the principal parts, while he stayed on, in control of the theatre. to inspire the Festival with his imagination and enthusiasm, to exercise his genius in the training of the actors and the staging of the plays, and to make now and then a very special “star” appearance in a great part. The prospect did not allure him. His passion for acting was unabated. He declined the offer, found a new backer, and resumed his touring, while Stratford-upon-Avon went afield for a new company.

All this is more or less mixed up with the North American tour of 1913-14 and with the Great War. In September, 1913, under the auspices of the governors of the Memorial Theatre, Benson and his company, called for the occasion the Stratford-upon-Avon Players, started on a long tour of Canada and the United States. The return to England took place on the eve of the War. The summer festival opened on Saturday, August 1. It was the last of which Benson was to be in control, though not the last at which he was to appear. In the following week he was already making speeches in which all his passion for the English spirit found white-hot expression. His company evaporated into khaki. He himself was nearly 55; but he was eager to fight with his still athletic body, as well as with his mind and tongue.

We would repeat here a true story, which has already been told in The Times and was heard from his own lips. Early in the War he walked into a recruiting office. When asked his age, he said, “Thirty-five”. “Surely you are more than that?” said the officer. “Are you here,” came Benson’s reply, “to get soldiers or to ask silly questions?”

Knighthood

The Army would not have him, so he came co London and kept high the hearts of the people by giving performances of King Henry V. In 1916 came the lean and shrunken celebrations of the tercentenary of the death of Shakespeare; and at a great performance given at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, on May 2. in aid of the Red Cross. Benson acted the part of Julius Caesar. The King and Queen were present; and at the conclusion of this part of the programme the King sent for Benson to the royal box, and with a “property” sword borrowed for the purpose from a costumier’s shop conferred on him the honour of knighthood.

This was the first time that any actor had been knighted within the walls of a theatre. Sir Frank and Lady Benson went off to France, where he drove French wounded in a motor-ambulance, worked in a canteen, exercised his knightly spirit in any service that came to hand, and won the Croix de Guerre. After the War he returned to England, to be taken to its heart by Stratford-upon-Avon, where, on Shakespeare’s birthday in 1919, a public presentation was made to Lady Benson and himself, and they gave a performance in the theatre. In 1920 he brought his new company to London; and thereafter he had been still touring, still acting, still spreading the love of Shakespeare and the love of England.,

He was not a great actor. He was himself (as he admitted) inadequately trained; and he worked so hard at all the many duties of an actor-manager that he seldom did himself justice in his own performance. “The more difficult the part, the better he acts,” said Miss Ellen Terry; and when his mind was on his acting and the part was one that suited him – Richard II, for instance, which was the best of all his performances – he was, at least, a very good actor.

His mind, however, was almost always on the production as a whole; and so eager was he, so passionately fond of the stage, that it was no rare thing, during some scene in which he was not wanted as principal, to detect him, completely (as he thought) disguised, moving about among one of his own stage crowds, of which he instantly became the life and soul.

In the end, the crown of his achievement was not his acting (beautiful though much of it was), nor his creation of a company which loved its “blessed Pa” and worked and played hard with him and “fed” London with good players for 30 years; but his obedience, through more labour and disappointment and difficulty than fell to the lot of most men, to the noble passion which bade him carry as far as he could reach over the English-speaking world the glory and the fun of Shakespeare and his own high vision of the English spirit.

Sir Frank and Lady Benson had two children. Their son, Eric William, went into the Army before the War and, as a lieutenant-colonel in The King’s Royal Rifles, was killed in action on September 15, 1916. Their daughter, Brynhild, after some strenuous social and athletic work among the women of big factories in the North of England, married in 1917 Mr Hugh Chalmers, F.S.A., of Avochie and Horsted Keynes. He died in 1928.

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Archive statistics Career1880 - 1882
Tournament wins1
Matches12
Match wins10


Tournament wins 1880 - Bournemouth (Open)


Tournaments Wimbledon - 1882 Cirencester Park Tournament - 1882 Bournemouth - 1880