Our great grandparents, Harry and Mary Anne Deverill, moved out of the Borough to Lambeth around the time that Mary Anne’s sister Jennie and her husband Richard Vanson did the same. Richard and Jennie and their three girls lived just north of Harry and Mary Anne, in a block of artisans’ dwellings on Burdett Street off Westminster Bridge Road. You could follow the road west and travel across the Thames to a different world: the Houses of Parliament and the Clock Tower were there, with Westminster Abbey and Buckingham Palace just beyond. Like Harry and his brother Jack, who’d been in trade together, Richard disappeared from commercial directories around this time, so it seems he’d lost or given up his business as a boot repairer. But his new home in Burdett Chambers was very close to H & M Rayne, shoemakers to the theatrical crowd and, according to The Stage Year Book, “manufacturers and outfitters of every requisite for the stage.”

H & M Rayne opened for business in London in the mid-1880s, a collaboration between Henry Ryan and his wife Mary Clarke. Born in 1863 in Devonport, the son of an Irishman who’d joined the British Army, Henry lived for a time in India, then as a young man larked about the United States and France before returning to England. Mary was a Chelsea lass, and when she and Henry married, it was at the height of the Victorian fascination with all things theatrical. The advent of gas lighting, improved modes of transportation affordable to the average citizen, and a working class with a spare penny meant music halls flourished, packing all sorts of customers into venues such as the Alhambra in Leicester Square, or The Borough Music Hall on Union Street in Southwark. Henry and Mary saw an opportunity, and opened their doors at 115 Waterloo Road, selling “high-class stage boots and shoes” to music hall performers.

Henry was an astute businessman, and was surely well aware that anti-Irish sentiment was running high around this time, as the Irish nationalist Fenians had begun a “dynamite campaign,” targeting tube stations, the offices of Scotland Yard, and Westminster Abbey. Henry took an approach that would be copied by king and commoner decades later when England went to war against Germany, and changed his name from the Irish Ryan to Rayne, which he thought sounded French and would appeal to prospective customers. Presumably he also believed people would not frequent a shop co-owned by a woman, for although the ‘M’ in H & M Rayne was Mary, they prefaced the company name with Messrs, suggesting this was a partnership of men. They placed notices in publications like The Music Hall and Theatre Review, claiming to have received orders “from all parts of the world, the latest one coming from so distant a land as sunny Roumania.” They advertised in newspapers and trade journals touting their costumes and wigs, and exclusive products like their Manx perfume, and mona powder, “guaranteed to give the skin a velvety softness, and the velvety bloom of youth. Not too young, you know, but about eighteen.”

Before too long the stars of the music hall and theatrical world were H & M Rayne’s devoted customers, among them actresses like Gertie Millar, one of the most photographed women of her time, and Lillie Langtry, once mistress of the Prince of Wales. Russian prima ballerina Anna Pavlova bought Rayne’s dancing shoes, and the company featured her compliment in one of their advertisements: “Your shoes are beautiful.”

It’s possible our Richard Vanson worked for Rayne’s, hunched over a bench fixing shapely heels onto embroidered satin uppers, or attaching buttons to smooth leather shanks. But any record suggesting such a detail is long gone, and Richard died in 1911, just before the census that confirmed his niece Olive was employed at Rayne’s as an “apprentice theatrical costumer,” while his daughter Alice tried her hand there at “apprentice perruquier,” learning to create hairpieces and elaborate wigs, and, indirectly at least, receiving the accolade from renowned Scottish vaudevillian Harry Lauder that “the wigs are champion.”

Nineteen-eleven spelled the end for Mary Rayne too. She died on the 17^th of February, an inmate of the Banstead Lunatic Asylum. Whether Mary had succumbed to the pressures of a successful business or there’d been other factors at play isn’t known, but in 1915, 52-year-old Henry followed her to the grave, passing the mantle of H & M Rayne to their son, Joseph. From humble beginnings, Mary and Henry’s company went on to earn three royal warrants, confirming that “Mdlle Adeline Genee, the world’s greatest dancer [was correct when she said] ‘The Boots and Shoes are Perfect.'”

♦

Sources

The Stage Year Book, 1912

Music Hall Stars of the Nineties, George Le Roy. British Technical and General Press, 1952

Rayne Shoes for Stars, Michael Pick. ACC Art Books, 2015

A Manual of Shoemaking, William H. Dooley. Brown, Little & Co., 1912

Victoria and Albert Museum, The Story of Music Halls

Turtle Bunbury, The Irish Family Who Founded Rayne’s Shoes

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