I’m very pleased to have found out a little more about the life of Marie Levison/Kate Toole who featured in the previous post. Thanks to the help of @heathertweed my enthusiasm was renewed for more research. Marie/Kate was born in 1859 in Worcester and her original name was Catherine Lee. She was one of nine sisters which included my friend’s Great Grandmother, Jane Lee. It seems the family cast her adrift when she went on the stage. This story had come down through the family but was still not really talked about. According to her obituary, Catherine started her career under the stage name Marie Levison, singing and acting with various companies until she was engaged by the D’Oyley Carte company. It seems she spent some years there and then as Kate Toole took to the music halls and pantomime where, for a time, she enjoyed success. She was said to have an excellent stage presence and a rich sympathetic voice.

While my friend found out about Catherine’s beginnings I looked into her death and burial guided by @heathertweed. Kate Toole, as she was still known, died of alcohol poisoning and had been found in bed by her landlady. She was living in Bermondsey and was buried on March 5th 1903 in Nunhead Cemetery. She was 44 years old when she died. Kate was buried in consecrated ground but in a public or communal grave along with twenty-one other people. This usually happened when the deceased had no resources to pay for a private grave or no relatives prepared to pay the costs. As Catherine had changed her name twice it’s possible her family had lost track of her – a better thought than that they refused to help. The site of the grave is now a nature reserve.

The obituary states that, in her day, Kate Toole was a popular and much appreciated artiste but that in later years her name had entirely disappeared from the London programmes. We will probably never know if her star faded and she took to drink or if alcohol was the cause of her downfall, as it was with so many music hall performers. I’m glad we could give her some recognition and I feel moved by her story and grateful to have had the chance to get to know her in a small way.

Thanks to @heathertweed, British Newspaper Archive, Nunhead Cemetery