Alice ‘Lavender’ Lee, ‘The Pictures Girl’: A ‘Star Search’ Competition of the Late 1910s

Abstract

This article examines the ‘The Pictures Girl’ star search competition, run by the film fan magazine Pictures and Picturegoer from late 1918 to early 1919. It charts the stages of the competition, demonstrates the gap between the promised prize and the actual outcome for the winner, one Alice ‘Lavender’ Lee, and shows what motives underpinned talent competitions and continue to underpin them now. It also cuts through a body of myth that emerged around Alice Lee in her later life, and shows how and why this body of myth emerged.

This article examines one person’s encounter, from its start to its finish, and over a period of less than two years, with the film industry of the late 1910s. It identifies both the purpose of ‘star search’ competitions and the effect of such competitions on the life of one real-world ‘screen-struck’ woman. Though these ‘star search’ competitions may appear to have been components of the early film star system on which one of this article’s co-authors has written extensively, we will show that such competitions were purposed not to produce stars but to generate copy, publicity and advertising revenue for their holders, and that in spite of efforts by the people caught up in such competitions to adapt them to other purposes, to win such a competition was to become subject to a set of economic and cultural forces amongst which the winner’s own career ambitions had little chance of prevailing.¹ Indeed this article demonstrates not how the film industry operated to welcome new personnel, but how economic and cultural forces operated through the film industry to keep the vast majority of potential new personnel out.

“An English Mary Pickford”

In late 1918 Pictures and Picturegoer, one of a stable of magazines published by the fast-growing magazine publisher Odhams Brothers, was the UK’s longest-standing film fan magazine, and probably its widest-circulating too. Formed in February 1914 from the amalgamation of The Pictures (launched October 1911) and Picturegoer (launched October 1913), the magazine initially used the title Pictures and the Picturegoer, adopting the shorter title in mid-June 1917. By September/October 1918 it circulated amongst at least 70,000–80,000 readers per week.² At this point the initial purpose of film fan magazines – advertisements for films in the form of prose versions of films that were soon to be released – had been almost entirely replaced by a varied editorial discourse on the many aspects of film-making and film-watching. Though the magazine’s contents reflected the fact that by this time ‘native’ film production was dwarfed by American film production, UK production companies whose activities they nevertheless enthusiastically publicised included Broadwest, formed by George Broadbridge and Walter West in October 1914 to make multi-reel fiction films.³ By late 1918 Broadwest’s output was sufficient to put it on a par with the UK’s most prolific filmmaking company, Hepworth, in the amount of copy that the magazine devoted to it.

Between late August 1918 and early March 1919, Fred Dangerfield, editor of Pictures and Picturegoer, and Walter West, manager of Broadwest, collaborated to hold a competition to find ‘The Pictures Girl’, sometimes called ‘The Pictures Girl’ or ‘The “Pictures” Girl’ or ‘The Pictures’ Girl’. That is, this ‘girl’ was to be selected to personify both the medium ‘the pictures’ and the publication Pictures and Picturegoer, which was often called simply Pictures for short (in part because this was the title of one of its two forerunners).⁴ The magazine framed the competition as resulting from a shower of letters that they had received from readers in response to a letter from a reader that they had printed in the 22–29 June 1918 issue, a letter about the potential for English ‘Mary Pickfords’ to go unnoticed given the UK’s relative lack of equivalents for the USA’s mechanisms for discovering film stars.⁵ The magazine spent over a month fostering interest in the prospect by printing sets of responses from readers both to the original letter and to the editor Fred Dangerfield’s tentative promises to hold a competition.⁶ Dangerfield then formally launched the competition in the 24–31 August 1918 issue: entry to the competition was limited to those who were “well educated”, “British born”, “between the ages of 15 and 25”, who were “possessed of good looks”, and who had no previous experience of professional film acting or stage acting. To enter a woman should send in a coupon cut from the magazine along with a photograph, on the back of which she should state “her name and address, her age, complexion, colour of hair and eyes, height and measurements” plus “a statement that she is British born, and has had no experience so far as stage and film work is concerned.”⁷ The promised prize was “a part in support of the leading lady and on a full salary basis in a forthcoming Broadwest photo-play, and if her anticipated success deserves it, a contract for future work in the same company will follow.”⁸ That is, the prize was an opportunity to become a film star. Tellingly, though, the writer of this announcement also added that “[s]he will, moreover, be advertised on the screen and elsewhere as “The Pictures Girl” and prior to release of the photo-play in which she appears, her portrait will be published on our front cover.”⁹ We will return to both of these elements of the prize below.

The Pictures and Picturegoer staff clearly designed the competition to last for as long as possible; at its outset they did not even state a closing date for entries, eventually stating a closing date only a month after they launched the competition.¹⁰ After this date (7 October 1918), Pictures and Picturegoer printed reports on the progress of the judging, including the one reproduced in Figure 1.¹¹ Various sources reported that around 8,000 women entered.¹² Some claimed that some women had brought their entries in person to the offices of the magazine at Odhams Press at 85 Long Acre in London.¹³

Figure 1 Anon., ‘The Pictures’ Girl Competition’, Pictures and Picturegoer 15.246 (26 Oct - 2 Nov 1918), 420. Courtesy of the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, University of Exeter.

In early December 1918 Pictures and Picturegoer announced a shortlist of 14 women. They were:

Biddy Cook, London, N.; Esme Davies, Twickenham; Greta Davy, Whitley Bay; Joyce Evelyn, London, W.C.; Maureen Moore, Leigh-on-Sea; Molly Morgan, London, W.; Annie Nelson, London, W.; Dorothy Saffery, London, N.W.; Stella Shand, Dundee; Lorela Stevens, London, W.C.; Kathleen Tyers, Leicester; Kathleen Wright[,] Kenley; Alice Lee, Mexborough; and Aileen Birch, London, S.E.¹⁴

Photographs of 12 of the 14 women were reproduced in the same issue (see Figure 2; the eventual winner was amongst the two women not pictured).¹⁵ According to a later article this shortlist was chosen by Walter West from the Pictures and Picturegoer staff’s own longlist of 300 entrants.¹⁶ The 14 shortlisted women were invited to Broadwest’s studio in Walthamstow for “test by camera”,¹⁷ i.e. ‘screen tests’, which took place on 15 January 1919.¹⁸ The 16 January 1919 issue of the film trade paper Kinematograph & Lantern Weekly, printed roughly a week before the cover date, explained that

Figure 2 Anon., ‘The Chosen Few’, Pictures and Picturegoer 15.252 (7–14 Dec 1918), 589. Courtesy of the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, University of Exeter.

Broadwest has arranged to hold the Camera Test for the fourteen girls chosen in the Pictures competition on Wednesday [i.e. 15 January 1919]. If all goes well, the girls will be present at the Trade show of the latest Broadwest production, “A Soul’s Crucifixion,” at the West End Cinema in the morning, after which they will be entertained to lunch by the directors of Broadwest Films, Ltd. Then will come the test at the studio, followed by tea and an evening’s entertainment at the Stoll Picture Theatre. A very busy day, but typical of Broadwest.¹⁹

This was indeed how the day unfolded, according to a write-up in Pictures and Picturegoer in late January 1919, which added that “[t]he “tests” were short but efficient, the reading of a letter specially written for the occasion being deemed sufficient to enable the camera to register the face of each girl in a range of expressions”; this article included a group photograph of 12 of the 14 shortlistees (see Figure 3).²⁰ In early February 1919, after viewing these 14 screen tests, the Broadwest staff asked a final shortlist of three to return to their Walthamstow studio for “a second and more severe test before the camera in order to decide who is the winner”.²¹ Kinematograph & Lantern Weekly gave their names as “Lavender Lee, of Mexborough, Esme Davies, of Twickenham, and Joyce Evelyn, of London”.²² This second screen test, the trade paper later mentioned, had required the last three competitors to perform “a little scene specially prepared for them.”²³ Notice that Alice Lee is now Lavender Lee; more on this below.

Figure 3 Photograph included in Anon., ‘Star Hunting at Walthamstow’, Pictures and Picturegoer 16.259 (25 Jan – 1 Feb 1919), 117. © British Library Board (General Reference Collection LOU.LON 416).

In their 1–8 March 1919 issue Pictures and Picturegoer briefly announced that “[t]he Winner is Miss Alice (Lavender) Lee, of Mexboro’”, with a promise of full particulars the following week.²⁴ The 8–15 March dutifully included an article on Lee (see Figure 4), which described her thus:

Figure 4 Anon., ‘The “Pictures Girl”’, Pictures and Picturegoer 16.265 (8–15 March 1919), 247. © British Library Board (General Reference Collection LOU.LON 416).

A Yorkshire Girl

Miss Lee, who is nineteen years of age[,] was born at Doncaster and educated in London, and for some years past her home has been in Yorkshire. She is an expert swimmer and diver, and, besides winning the Schoolgirl Championship of London, she gained many medals and certificates and was one of the team that won the Kimber Shield. She is essentially a sports girl, and rowing, punting and motor cycling are some of her chief recreations.

* * * *

On receiving the good news by telegram Miss Lee wrote to us: “I wanted to laugh, cry and sing all at the same time. Although I had been full of hope and confidence, I must admit the news came as a grand climax to a period of extreme tension; and, further, after a week’s severe illness, it acted as a tonic more efficacious than the doctor’s physic.

‘My reason for entering the competition,’ she says, “may be summed up in one word, ‘Ambition.’ I had a feeling that if given the opportunity of playing for pictures I could justify myself, and that I possessed the necessary artistic temperament. When the opportunity came I grasped it with both hands, so to speak, and faced the ordeals of the tests determined to win. Now that I have won I mean to work to earn the reputation of, and gain distinction for, the British “Pictures Girl.”²⁵

Some of this, of course, may have been invented (though it was true that Lee was born in Doncaster, grew up in London and had recently moved back to Yorkshire, which we will discuss below), either by Lee or by the magazine’s staff; even Lee’s own letter could have been entirely contrived by the magazine’s staff.

Kinematograph & Lantern Weekly also reported the result of the competition in their 6 March 1919 issue:

Lavender Lee, a dark-eyed, curly-haired, vivacious young lady, of nineteen summers, has been selected as the winner of the competition opened in August last, through Pictures and the Picturegoer, in order to find a “British Mary Pickford.” […] Lavender Lee’s aspirations have never taken her further than the amateur stages of the Thespian art; but Walter West is pleased with the player he has discovered through the medium of Pictures, and he assures us that she has the right temperament for screen work. She also possesses wonderful facial expressions, and her enthusiasm knows no bounds.

[…]

Besides her undoubted yet hitherto undiscovered talent, this ambitious little lady is an adept at all healthy outdoor sports which form such an important part of the life of the typical British country girl, and she can as easily ride a wild moorland pony as she can sit cosily ensconced in the cushions of the driving-seat of a Rolls-Royce car.²⁶

The article also mentioned that

The Pictures Girl will commence her training at the Broadwest Studio as soon as arrangements for her reception are completed. After undergoing a short course of instruction in what not to do when before the camera, she will be cast for a small part in a forthcoming Broadwest production.

Miss Lee will have every opportunity of making a name for herself, for after the small part will follow a contract for further work with Broadwest, if she proves to be the success which is anticipated by all who have seen her first attempts at film playing on the screen. She has determination and ambition, which, together with the encouragement and assistance on the part of Broadwest, should go far to enable her to rise quickly to fame.²⁷

Later in March 1919 the entertainments trade paper The Era gave an even more effusive account of Alice Lee’s abilities: “Walter West, the managing director of Broadwest Films, tells us that this dark-eyed Yorkshire lassie has the right temperament necessary for film playing, and, although she has spent the greater part of her young life ‘midst the heather-clad moors, she is an expert rider, can drive a car, ride a motor cycle, and is a fine swimmer and high diver.”²⁸ The Era also claimed that “Miss Lee will shortly commence her course of training at the Broadwest Walthamstow Studio. As soon as the “Pictures” girl has grasped the essential factors of film acting, she will be given a small part in a forthcoming production in support of Miss Violet Hopson, and if she proves to be the big success which is anticipated, a contract for further work with this all-British firm will be offered her.”²⁹ Notice the invention in both Kinematograph & Lantern Weekly and The Era of a childhood spent in Yorkshire, where even Pictures and Picturegoer had acknowledged that she had grown up in London.

In line with Lee’s advertised status as a Yorkshire native, various local newspapers in the North West devoted column inches to announcing her success in the competition, most re-using at least some text from the above articles in Pictures and Picturegoer and Kinematograph & Lantern Weekly. These included the Liverpool Echo on 8 March, the Derby Daily Telegraph on 10 March, the Barnsley Independent on 15 March, the Leeds Mercury on 15 March (an article that presented elements of the Pictures and Picturegoer article as if Lee had given the Leeds Mercury an interview, a practice that was common at the time), the Mexborough and Swinton Times on 15 March, and the Lincolnshire Chronicle on 22 March.³⁰

“We shall all look forward with extraordinary interest to the first public appearance on the screen of “the Pictures Girl.””³¹

Broadwest do initially seem to have intended to honour their commitment to give Lee a small part in one of their films. Pictures and Picturegoer announced in their 19–26 April 1919 issue that she had just arrived in London.³² The 17 April 1919 issue of Kinematograph & Lantern Weekly included an article stating that “Lavender Lee […] will commence work at the Broadwest Studio next Monday”, which, as the paper was printed a week before its cover date, would have been Monday 14 April 1919.³³ Plans were announced even before she arrived that the Broadwest film in which she would play a small part would concern horse-racing. For example, an article in the 20 March 1919 issue of Kinematograph & Lantern Weekly stated that “Miss Lee will commence her training at the Broadwest Studio within the next fortnight, and she will then be cast for a small part in a forthcoming racing film.”³⁴ Probably echoing this or another contemporary such announcement, the Daily Mail remarked on 14 April 1919 that “[t]he popularity of horse-racing films still continues, and Miss Violet Hopson is hard at work on her new picture of this type, in which Mr Gregory Scott appears with her. Miss Lavender Lee starts in this film at the Broadwest Studio in Walthamstow to-day.”³⁵ An early May 1919 article in the film trade paper the Bioscope stated that “Lavender Lee, the “Pictures” girl, is now busy taking lessons in make-up and technicalities of film-acting at the Broadwest Studio. She will shortly commence work on her first film dealing with the Turf. Should she prove to be what is hoped Lavender will be retained as a member of the Broadwest Stock Company.”³⁶ What happened next, though, must be deduced.

Some contemporary sources claim that the specific film in which Broadwest cast Alice/Lavender Lee was A Great Coup, an adaptation of the author Nathaniel ‘Nat’ Gould’s 1910 novel (of the same name) about horse-racing, directed by George Dewhurst and released in June 1920. For example, the 24 July 1919 issue of Kinematograph & Lantern Weekly reported that “at Walthamstow Walter West is supervising another Nat Gould story, entitled “The Great Coup,” [sic] in which Stewart Rome, Gregory Scott, and Lavender Lee will appear.”³⁷ Lee seems to have claimed in the competition that she could ride a horse (as reported in several of the sources mentioned above), so Walter West may have sought to utilise this skill in using her in a ‘Turf’ film (notice the use of this specific instance of metonymy in the early May 1919 article in Bioscope).³⁸ In July 1919 A Great Coup was listed by its distributor Walturdaw with a release date of 7 June 1920.³⁹ Walturdaw organised trade showings of A Great Coup around the country between October 1919 and February 1920, including in London on 8 October 1919.⁴⁰ The film may have had an initial release in late January 1920: it appears in local newspaper advertising for some cinemas from 23 January 1920.⁴¹ The film definitely went on general release on 7 June 1920, with advance notices appearing in local newspapers from early June.⁴² As no copy of the film is known to have survived, it is only possible to tell whether Alice/Lavender Lee was actually in it from its surviving publicity.⁴³ A small pressbook for the film held by the British Film Institute does not mention her, and none of the stills from the film included in the pressbook show anyone who even might be her.⁴⁴ Publicity for A Great Coup that appeared in national and local newspapers made a lot of the film’s star, Poppy Wyndham (whose real name was Elsie Mackay), but no publicity for the film that we can find mentions Alice/Lavender Lee.⁴⁵ If Lee was in the film, even though her part would have been a minor one, for Broadwest not to have mentioned her in the pressbook or in any nationally distributed publicity would have been very unlikely, as her name would have offered a prospective method of inducing regular readers of Pictures and Picturegoer to patronise the film. No mentions of the finished film in the trade press mention Lee in connection with the film either.⁴⁶ While trade press items such as reports on a film’s trade showing could not be expected to state the names of people playing small parts, both Bioscope and Kinematograph & Lantern Weekly had followed the 'The Pictures Girl' competition, so their omission of her name too also hints that Lee probably was not in the finished version of A Great Coup. Conspicuously, Pictures and Picturegoer does not mention her name in connection with any Broadwest films at all, including in their multiple mentions of A Great Coup.⁴⁷ This, in spite of the fact that they had an occasional ‘Behind the Scenes with Broadwest’ column at the time, from which she conspicuously disappeared after just two mentions, both in connection with the competition, the last in the 12–19 April 1919 issue.⁴⁸ Broadwest’s filmmaking work, that is, continued without her.

This all implies that during May 1919 Broadwest decided not to actually give Lee the film role that was the competition’s prize. Pictures and Picturegoer also did not feature Lee on their front cover at any point, as they had originally committed to do when ‘The Pictures Girl’ appeared in her first film. Indeed, we have found no evidence that Lee appeared in the finished version of any films at any point during the rest of her life, even as an extra.⁴⁹ The name “Alice Lee” or “Lavender Lee” does not appear at all in the National catalogue of the BFI National Archive or Rachael Low’s The History of the British Film 1918–1929 (1971), and mentions of this particular Alice Lee disappear from the British Newspaper Archive between June 1920 and 1978 (the beginning of a spate of articles about Alice in her later life that we will discuss below). In September 1919 the Penistone, Stocksbridge and Hoyland Express reported that “Miss Lavender Lee, the Mexboro’ cinema girl, paid a flying visit to Mexboro’ on Thursday [i.e. 18 September 1919]. Earlier in the day, with other members of the London Film Co., she had taken part in a scene which was “shot” on the moors just beyond Chesterfield”.⁵⁰ But this account of filming is probably untrue, as the newspaper got the name of the company wrong and Chesterfield is over 140 miles away from both Broadwest’s Walthamstow studio and from such locations used for their racing films as the Epsom Downs.⁵¹ If Broadwest needed moor scenery the Kent Downs and the South Downs were much closer.

Though the story so far looks grim for Alice Lee, she did make a conspicuous effort to become a film professional. Lee definitely had at least some understanding of how the profession of film performer worked. As the first use of the name ‘Lavender Lee’ in the list of the final shortlist of three women in the 13 February 1919 issue of Kinematograph & Lantern Weekly indicates, even before winning the competition Lee was aware of the importance of strong prosodic characteristics to becoming memorable amongst the public: prosody was already typical amongst pseudonyms in the film industry (including the first US film star, Florence Lawrence (born Florence Bridgwood) and recent stars like Samuel L. Jackson – whose name is often pronounced as if his first name is ‘Samuelelle’), as well as in many successful brands such as Rolls Royce, Kit Kat, Piggly Wiggly, GiffGaff and Lean Cuisine.⁵² Whether the brand is person-based or product-based, prosody increases notability. And as the various post-February-1919 mentions of her in both the trade press and popular press (see above) indicate, even though Pictures and Picturegoer had printed her real first name too, this pseudonym did briefly become her public name. Lee also seems to have understood that regardless of whether Broadwest did give her a film part, she had a brief opportunity to participate in the social life of the British film industry, and she did so, with the help of the staff of Pictures and Picturegoer. For example, on Friday 9 May 1919, members of the film trade held a combined pageant and fancy-dress ball, called the Kinematograph Peace Pageant and Costume Ball, at St. Andrew’s Hall (in Newman Street, which adjoins Oxford Street) in London.⁵³ Lee accompanied the Pictures and Picturegoer staff to the Ball, costumed as ‘The Pictures Girl’, wearing headgear bearing this name; she even stopped off, along with the senior staff, at the Claude Harris photographic studio on the way to have photographs taken (see Figure 5). In August 1919 she socialised with British film stars at a film trade gymkhana.⁵⁴ Later in August 1919 she attended a dinner at the Great Eastern Hotel held by the British & Colonial Kinematograph company.⁵⁵

Figure 5 Claude Harris Studios, Alice ‘Lavender’ Lee and staff of Pictures and Picturegoer on their way to the Kinematograph Peace Pageant and Costume Ball, 9 May 1919, reproduced in “Long Shots”, Kinematograph & Lantern Weekly 32.629 (15 May 1919), 64–5, 64. © British Library Board (General Reference Collection LOU.LD94). From left to right: Elsie Cohen (assistant editor), Cissie Chrust (contributor and head of the magazine’s postcard department), Edmund Southwood ('Answers’ man), Alice ‘Lavender’ Lee and Fred Dangerfield (editor). See also Figure 6. Dangerfield and Cohen wear sashes with the names ‘Pictures’ and ‘Mrs Pictures’ respectively, and Chrust wears a sash with the name ‘Miss Pictures’, a persona that she used in her articles for the magazine.

Pictures and Picturegoer also made efforts to nudge Lee to fame; the magazine had, after all, promised that she would “be advertised on the screen and elsewhere as “The Pictures Girl”” (see above). For example, while most of the copy in the local newspaper articles about Lee in March and April 1919 was taken from Pictures and Picturegoer’s own articles, some of it was not, including that she had been working as a secretary to a Mr C. Baker at Kilver’s Steel Works in Mexborough, and that her father was a chauffeur to W.H. St. Quintin at Scampston Hall near Malton in East Yorkshire, all of which was true – George Lee was an estate manager for Scampston manor, the estate of the St Quintin family, with duties that involved chauffeuring.⁵⁶ This indicates that the staff at the magazine had sat down with Lee to produce at least a rudimentary press release about her. Even before she moved to London, the magazine mentioned her often: they included editorial matter about her being overwhelmed by readers’ letters of congratulations in the 22–29 March 1919 issue and in the 5–12 April 1919 issue they printed an article, presented as written by a friend of Lee, which narrated a visit to Lee’s cottage in the village of Scampston.⁵⁷ The latter applied the customary mystification of the subject’s personality applied thus far in the magazine’s many interviews with film stars: “Can I give you a picture of Lavender? She is petite, she is pretty, a winsome, merry-hearted soul, with ringlets of gold just touched with auburn, tumbling about her face. Yes, she is just a wave of summer sunshine. Her smile? Do you know, it runs up the whole gamut of fascination. I could write a lot about that smile.”⁵⁸ The magazine also featured Lee repeatedly in their lengthy account of the 9 May 1919 Kinematograph Peace Pageant and Costume Ball, calling her “the most angelic of fairies” and always using the name ‘Lavender’ (and just ‘Lavender’), employing a common contemporary technique of referring to the most famous stars using just their given names (see also Figure 6).⁵⁹ The magazine’s staff also added a photograph of Lee in costume as ‘The ‘Pictures’ Girl’ to their line of postcards (see Figure 7a & b), a line almost entirely made up of images of film stars, and made the photographs of the visit to the Claude Harris studios available to at least the film trade press (see Figure 5). Later, in a July 1919 issue, they included Lee’s photograph in a spread of established British film stars who purportedly all had praiseworthy hair. The accompanying text claimed that “Lavender Lee (the Pictures Girl) has a crowning glory of bronze curls with the added beauty of delightful natural waves”.⁶⁰ Without appearances in any films to feed into their various discourse-production mechanisms, however, the magazine staff’s power to maintain a public profile for Lee as a film performer (as distinct from the person allocated the role of personifying the magazine/medium ‘The Pictures’) was limited. The September 1919 article in the Penistone, Stocksbridge and Hoyland Express suggests that Lee was attempting, by this point somewhat desperately, to do the same for herself, with the same chances of success. Even the persona of ‘The Pictures Girl’ had little potential to serve a purpose for more than a few months after the competition was over. Indeed, Lee disappeared from the pages of Pictures and Picturegoer after July 1919; it seems that there were no films featuring Lee, at any point, which might be used to keep up a public profile for her.

Figure 6 Tom Aitken, ‘Some impressions of the “Pictures” staff at the Ball’. Anon., ‘“Pictures” at the Ball’, Pictures and Picturegoer 16.276 (24–31 May 1919), 542. © British Library Board (General Reference Collection LOU.LON 416).

Figures 7. (a & b) Claude Harris Studios/Pictures Ltd., postcard showing [Alice] Lavender Lee at the Kinematograph Peace Pageant and Costume Ball, 9 May 1919. Note that the reverse shows that the postcard was produced by Pictures and Picturegoer. Courtesy of the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, University of Exeter. EXEBD87334.

After mentions of Lee petered out in Pictures and Picturegoer in July 1919 and in the trade press in August 1919, just one more contemporary print source mentions Lee’s film career. A June 1920 article in the Yorkshire Telegraph and Star stated that Lee had left – or was in the process of leaving – the profession of film performer:

Miss Lavender Lee, of Mexborough, who was introduced to the film world some time ago when she won the all-England Broadwest beauty competition, is shortly to be married. She has decided to bid goodbye to the picture studio and will settle abroad for a year or two. Since she proceeded to London last year Miss Lee has been engaged almost continuously in film work and has fulfilled many contracts. “Being a film artist is not so easy as it looks,” she told the writer of these notes, “and it certainly has the effect of disposing of all interest and delight in watching the pictures you have seen “shot,” or, for that matter, in watching any pictures at all. Cinema theatres do not attract me now. In the pictures themselves I cannot help but see that artificiality which other people miss. Whenever I see the pitiful and fear-compelling ‘death’ episodes, or the heart-clasping ‘love-scenes,’ there is in my mind’s eye the sight of the gesticulating stage director, and ringing in my ears his hoarse voice as he bawls instructions to the ‘dying’ and the ‘lovesick’: Making, and acting for, films are so different to what the popular imagination make them.”⁶¹

There is more than a hint of invention in this article: Lee had not “fulfilled many contracts” during the past year. There is no evidence that Lee signed any contract with Broadwest (or indeed any other company), most likely – given that she probably did not appear in A Great Coup – because he is unlikely to have even offered her one. Indeed, as a small part in a Broadwest film was the one concrete prize for winning the competition, it seems that something had happened in May 1919 that prompted Walter West to decide not to honour even this commitment. Though the publicity for the competition that described the prize of a minor role in a Broadwest film would have served as a legal contract, Broadwest may well have had the shortlisted contestants sign formal contracts that included the caveat that even the minor role in one film was contingent on the winner’s performance meeting with the approval of the Broadwest staff. While Lee did indeed soon get married (on 18 June 1921 she married one Charles Edwin Hyde), meaning that in the middle of 1920 her then fiancé may have insisted that she left the profession of film performer against her will (the “Rank or Profession” box for her on their 1921 marriage certificate contains only a stroke, while Charles Hyde’s says “Advertising contractor”), there is no indication that there was any work for her to leave at this point.⁶²

Whatever happened either before or during the production of A Great Coup in the middle of 1919 that resulted in Lee not appearing in the film seems to have been kept very quiet. Lee may have found herself overshadowed by the star of A Great Coup, Poppy Wyndham, who was as much a newcomer as Lee to the profession of film performer but who had found work at Broadwest merely by sending photographs to them rather than by winning a competition, and therefore accrued resentment which motivated her to walk away from her small part in the film, or she may have, as claimed in the article above, found the work artificial, or she may have refused insistences that she make herself sexually available to one or more of the Broadwest staff, or she may simply have not have sufficiently impressed enough of the Broadwest staff with her work for them to put any footage of her in the finished film.⁶³ Indeed, a similar situation arose in December 1922 following the ‘Daily Sketch Girl’ star search competition run jointly by the Daily Sketch, the newsreel Topical Budget and the Hollywood studio First National Pictures from September to November 1922: even though the prize was a film role alongside Norma Talmadge in her next feature film for First National (Within the Law (released on 29 April 1923)), the winner, Margaret Leahy from Marble Arch, was ultimately not permitted to perform alongside Talmadge because Frank Lloyd, the director in charge of Within the Law, did not deem her have sufficient acting talent.⁶⁴ Joseph Schenck, chairman of First National, did persuade Buster Keaton to give Leahy a lead comedy role in The Three Ages (dir. Buster Keaton; released 24 September 1923), but this was her only film role and in 1966 Rudi Blesh, Keaton’s biographer, quoted a conversation with Keaton in which Keaton recalled that the process of making The Three Ages was exasperating: “He still shakes his head recalling what they went through. “The scenes we threw in the ash can!” he says. “Easy scenes! We got a good picture – we could have had a fine one. But, my God, we previewed it eight times! Went back and reshot scenes like mad.””⁶⁵ Indeed the fact that the Daily Sketch published a regular column of Leahy’s diary entries (sent by Leahy to the publication by telegram once a week) between mid-December 1922 and late February 1923, even though Leahy only had this one film role, while Alice Lee disappears from the pages of Pictures and Picturegoer in particular from late July 1919 and from UK-based newspapers in general after the June 1920 Yorkshire Telegraph and Star article, is a strong indication that Lee did not receive any film roles, at least during the period when anyone might remember her winning the competition.⁶⁶ If Broadwest did use her in any film, the magazine would probably have provided at least some updates on the progress of the work, either in the occasional ‘Behind the Scenes at Broadwest’ column or in feature articles.

There is at least one other alternative: Walter West considered Lee to be in breach of contract. He had two potential reasons: (1) her age and (2) her parental status. First, although Pictures and Picturegoer reported that she was 19 at the time of winning the competition, as did Kinematograph & Lantern Weekly (see above), an age that was repeated in the local newspaper stories about her mentioned above, Lee was actually 24 when she entered the competition.⁶⁷ Alice Lee (she had no middle name) was born on 18 July 1894, a date given by both her birth certificate (her birth was recorded in Doncaster) and a note in the margin of the Chelsea register in which her baptism was recorded (on 6 December 1894).⁶⁸ On 1 April 1901, at the time of the 1901 Census, when her family was living in Fulham, her age was given as 6.⁶⁹ On 2 April 1911, at the time of the 1911 Census, when her family was living in Wandsworth, her age was given as 16.⁷⁰ Thus although she would have been within the ‘The Pictures Girl’ competition’s stated age range when she applied, and would be so for another year, she was due to turn 25 in July 1919, would have deemed herself unlikely to win if she was truthful about her age, and so may have lied about her age in her application. This is also implied by the fact that in various accounts of the competition that Lee provided much later in life (discussed below) she stated that it took place in 1911 or 1912, i.e. when she would have been 16–18. Conceivably Lee was truthful about her age in her application to the competition, with Pictures and Picturegoer and Broadwest instead conspiring to exaggerate her youth in their publicity. But if it was Lee who lied about her age, then if the Broadwest staff then found out during the time when they were trying to use her in the filming of A Great Coup that she was actually now 25, they may well have considered their contract with her to be void.

Second, and more significantly for her contemporaries’ judgements of her suitability for a career in film performance, when Lee entered the competition she was the mother of a roughly 20-month-old daughter called Sheila, born in early 1917, when Lee seems to have been unmarried.⁷¹ Sheila was referred to as Sheila Lee in the 1921 Census (conducted on 19 June).⁷² Shortly after Lee’s 18 June 1921 marriage to Charles Hyde (see above) Sheila would take his surname.⁷³ Lee’s surviving descendants report that Lee never divulged the name of the father of ‘Aunt Sheila’, which further indicates that Lee was not married to her father, as concealing the name of a child’s father when one is or has been married to him is impractical. Indeed, Lee’s descendants surmise that the reason why Lee was living in Mexborough at the time she entered the ‘The Pictures Girl’ competition in spite of being raised in London was that she moved there to live with a relative when she became pregnant with Sheila; the 1921 Census stated that Sheila was born in nearby York.⁷⁴ As the social taboo around being a single parent would have motivated Lee to conceal her status as a mother from everyone involved in running the ‘The Pictures Girl’ competition, if she let her parental status slip in the period when Broadwest were trying to include her in a film then they would have, sadly, felt little reluctance about dismissing her.

Conclusion

Of course, one further reason why Alice Lee did not appear in any films other than her screen tests was that the purpose of the ‘The Pictures Girl’ competition was never to create a new professional film performer. Instead, the ‘The Pictures Girl’ competition was a formalised long-term talent contest, forms of which were already common at the time (local versions were often known as ‘come-as-you-please’ contests), and whose primary purpose has always been to function as a form of entertainment in itself; the ‘The Pictures Girl’ story, with its distinct stages and promise of a climax, was a structured process lasting roughly six months that provided the UK’s longest-established film fan magazine with both ample content (from August 1918 to April 1919 inclusive, only a minority of issues featured no editorial matter related to the competition) and an increased public profile, just as Britain’s Got Talent is a structured process lasting several months that provides television broadcasters with both ample content and increased viewership to use to justify higher-than-average advertising rates.⁷⁵ Such processes, of course, tell no-one anything about the process of becoming a professional entertainer. In announcing in early March 1919 that Lee had won the competition, the staff of Pictures and Picturegoer referred to “the great question that for months had been on the lips of thousands of our readers”.⁷⁶ This remark tacitly acknowledged that the competition had been purposed, as far as they were concerned, to create an event in discourse that would increase both the size of their readership and the degree of commitment felt by its existing readers. Just the fact that to enter the competition one had to cut a coupon from the magazine was on its own a way of stimulating sales, and elements such as the magazine not stating the closing date for the competition until over a month after it was formally launched were devised to stretch out this discursive event as much as possible.⁷⁷ Indeed, just as one of the principal reasons why filmmaking companies had first branched out from making factual films into making some fiction films during the late 1890s and 1900s was that the latter form of filmmaking promised to provide a more easily generated and more easily controlled supply of content than the content generated by real-world events, so press-sponsored stardom competitions were a way for various print publications to produce their own content without having to rely on the whims of their respective cultural industries to provide them with enough events to fill their pages. The competition did indeed coincide with an increase in the magazine’s readership and its resulting potential to attract advertising revenue: citing what they claimed were net weekly sales averaging 110,000 per week (as distinct from weekly circulation, which, such sales figures implied, would be higher than this) in the seven weeks ending 1 March 1919, Odhams increased the charge for advertising in Pictures and Picturegoer from £16 per page to £20 per page from 22 March 1919.⁷⁸ By May 1919 the publisher was claiming a circulation of 150,000.⁷⁹

As Chris O’Rourke observes, ‘star search’ competitions were also very similar to the beauty contests of the era.⁸⁰ This points to overlaps between their purposes. When Fred Dangerfield insisted that the ‘The Pictures Girl’ competition was not a beauty contest, he betrayed his readers’ tacit recognition of this significant overlap: both had the purposes of (1) keeping the vast majority of people in the position of consumers and (2) stimulating desire amongst these consumers for the activity/activities concerned: buying and using beauty products in the one case and, in the other, a combination of magazine readership and viewing films as an informal class in film acting.⁸¹ Indeed, an image that accompanied one Pictures and Picturegoer article on the ongoing competition was clearly purposed to stimulate the average female reader’s fear of even attempting to become a film performer (see Figure 8). The ‘The Pictures Girl’ competition was only one offer of a vague chance at a bid for film stardom away from being identical to the many competitions that Pictures and Picturegoer ran at the time to stimulate consumer participation. Thus, although the magazine described the competition as giving “any lady reader in the United Kingdom […] a fair chance of being tested and turned into a film star”,⁸² the moment that Alice Lee won the competition, she was effectively an unemployed film professional, and no-one but Lee would be harmed in any way if she had no involvement in the film industry whatsoever from that moment onwards. As Jenny Hammerton has pointed out, Phyllis Nadel, winner of the 1920 Pathé Frères/Daily Express/Sunday Express competition, also did not appear in any films other than her screen test.⁸³ Even if the staff at Broadwest were contractually obliged to provide Lee with a minor film role, and even if they did not consider her age or parental status as voiding that contract, they were liable to ignore that obligation if they were confident that she would either not bother or not be financially able to take legal action against them. Though Lee’s selection of a pseudonym during the competition indicates that she had some professional acumen, and though she did involve herself in those aspects of the life of a film performer to which she could gain access, her attempts to make the phenomenon of winning the competition have a function other than its designed purpose had little chance of success.

Figure 8 Illustration for ‘X’, ‘Finding the Girl of Girls’, Pictures and Picturegoer 15.252 (7–14 Dec 1918), 588. Courtesy of the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, University of Exeter.

Indeed, there is evidence that Lee herself realised the implicit nature of the competition: notice that the writer of the June 1920 article in the Yorkshire Telegraph and Star quoted above calls the competition a “beauty competition”, probably repeating a term used by Lee herself. Much later in her life, aged 84, and now Alice Hyde, she told a journalist for the Truro edition of the West Briton about the competition, and on the basis of this interview the journalist referred to her being “selected in a film magazine’s contest to become something very like the first-ever “Miss World”.”⁸⁴ This ‘Miss World’ association later got out of hand: on 27 July 1988, shortly after her 94^th birthday, she was the subject of an article in the Daily Mail whose author, though accurately stating that the competition was “run by a cinema magazine called Pictures”, claimed that this competition was “the first Miss World contest” and that Alice “took the title in 1912”.⁸⁵ This article then seems to have caught the eye of a producer at the BBC because, later that year, on 18 November 1988 Alice appeared as a guest, wearing a ‘Miss World’ sash, on BBC Children in Need. Terry Wogan, after concluding an interview with Linda Pétursdóttir (‘Miss Iceland’), winner of the 1988 Miss World competition that had been held in London the previous day, introduced Alice as the winner of the 1912 Miss World competition, and Alice joined Pétursdóttir, Wogan and the co-host Joanna Lumley on the couch to discuss the ‘original’ competition. Wogan asked Alice questions that were clearly designed primarily to solicit the ‘information’ already provided in the Daily Mail article.⁸⁶ This indicates the absence of any fact-checking by both the Daily Mail contributor and the BBC’s producers, given that the Miss World competition was actually first held in July 1951 as part of the Festival of Britain (it was initially called the Festival Bikini Contest or the Miss Festival of Britain Contest), 39 years after the mistaken date of 1912 given by the Daily Mail contributor and by Terry Wogan and mentioned by Alice in her responses to his questions.⁸⁷ That is, Alice was now stuck with exaggerations that were either her own or were contrived by the Daily Mail contributor (exaggerations that journalists continued to amplify yet further in newspaper articles on her during the last few years of her life).⁸⁸ But at the core of these initial exaggerations, whoever had applied them, was that in 1919 Alice had recognised that the implicit purpose of the competition was functionally identical to that of a beauty pageant, involving little to no opportunity to become a film professional.

That the primary purpose of the competition was not to produce a new film star is indicated by the fact that it was only when costumed as ‘The Pictures Girl’ that Lee had the most significant event of her brief involvement in the film industry: the 9 May 1919 evening out at the Kinematograph Peace Pageant and Costume Ball (see Figures 5, 6 & 7). That is, the competition’s purported main prize, the opportunity to become a film performer, was deliberately very meagre even when compared to its ‘secondary’ prize: the already rather meagre and short-term opportunity to personify the magazine (and the medium).

In spite of the help that the Pictures and Picturegoer staff provided to Alice Lee in her attempt to become a member of the British film industry, and in spite of her own efforts at creating a public profile for herself with her use of a prosodic pseudonym (a pseudonym repeated even in the June 1920 article in the Yorkshire Telegraph and Star that reported on her having left the profession) and her participation in some public events, the net benefit of the ‘Pictures Girl’ competition for Lee seems to have been nothing: no appearances in any films from which she might launch a career in the profession, and no long-term duties on the staff of Pictures and Picturegoer. This might not be entirely true though: the 27 July 1988 Daily Mail article, which was clearly based on an interview with her, stated that she won £500 in the competition, and in her 1988 appearance on BBC Children in Need (see above) she told Terry Wogan that she had won £250 in the competition.⁸⁹ Even the lesser of these two payments would have been equivalent in 2021 to a payment of at least £12,000.⁹⁰ While Pictures and Picturegoer’s announcement of the competition did state that the supporting part would be remunerated “on a full salary basis”, this would have been much less than £250. This money may have been an invention or part of a false memory of the whole episode, but if Lee did acquire a lump sum as a result of her participation in the competition, this may have been in the form of Broadwest buying her out of their minor contractual obligations to her.

Postscript

What happened to Alice Hyde née Lee in later life? During the 1920s Alice and Charles lived in Scarborough, where they had several children (Charles Michael Hyde in June 1922 and Brian Hyde in October 1924).⁹¹ By the time of the birth of their next child, Karl Henry E. Hyde, in 1930 they were living in Esher in South-West London, and they were still living there at the time of the birth of their next child, Ivan Patrick Hyde, in 1933 (both births were registered in nearby Kingston-upon-Thames).⁹² The 1939 Register, conducted on 29 September 1939, likewise records Alice living with her daughter Sheila in Esher.⁹³ Ivan would work as a child actor, both on stage and in the co-lead role of Hubert Lane in Just William’s Luck (dir. Val Guest, 1947). While this story doesn’t seem to fit with the Yorkshire Telegraph & Star article’s remark that Alice would “settle abroad for a year or two”, her descendants report that during these decades Alice and Charles also lived in Spain, specifically in Menorca, and that Alice pursued a career as a writer (although if she did author any publications while living there, none can be identified under the names Alice/Lavender Lee/Hyde; she may have used a different pseudonym). Alice had family ties to Spain through her maternal grandparents, the Butlers; a contingent of the Butler family had been located in Jaén in Andalusia since the early nineteenth century; one Rosa Butler y Mendieta (1821-?) was a celebrated Spanish poet, and the UK Butlers and the Spanish Butlers maintain links today. This time in Spain may have been very brief, sandwiched between their marriage in June 1921 and the birth of their first son in Scarborough in June 1922: neither Alice nor Charles are recorded in the 1921 Census at all (under either the name Alice Lee or Alice Hyde), but this is not significant, as the Census took place the day after their wedding, and the couple may have been travelling within the UK at that point and so easily been mistakenly omitted from a census return. Or they may have travelled back and forth between the UK and Spain/Menorca, or they may have lived in Spain/Menorca much later in their lives. Later, in the 1950s and 1960s, Alice and Charles divided their time between London and Penzance, where her son Ivan was living. Charles died in January 1976, and Alice later moved in with her daughter Sheila and Sheila’s daughter Caroline in Leominster, where they ran a small antiques business. Alice became increasingly frail and suffered from Alzheimer’s during the last years of her life, signs of which can be seen in her 1988 BBC Children in Need appearance. Alice died peacefully in her sleep surrounded by her family in July 1993.

Dedication

To – of course – the memory of Alice Lee.

Acknowledgements

Thanks for help with various elements of this research are due to Mike Rickard at the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum at the University of Exeter, to Julia Ashby and colleagues at the Mexborough & District Heritage Society, to Nicholas Hiley and to Christine Saunders.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andrew Shail

Andrew Shail is a Senior Lecturer Film at Newcastle University. His body of work on early cinema includes his books The Origins of the Film Star System: Persona, Publicity and Economics in Early Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2019) and The Cinema and the Origins of Literary Modernism (Routledge, 2012), his edited collection Reading the Cinematograph: The Cinema in British Short Fiction 1896–1912 (University of Exeter Press, 2011), five special issues of journals, contributions to edited collections such as the Blackwell Companion to Early Cinema (2012) and articles in Screen, Early Popular Visual Culture, Film History, The Senses & Society and Critical Quarterly. He was co-editor of Early Popular Visual Culture from the beginning of 2011 to the end of 2022.

Marie-Claire Rackham-Mann

Marie-Claire Rackham-Mann gained her master’s degree in Practical Archaeology in 2018 from the University of the Highlands and Islands. She was involved in winning an £80,000 grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund in 2020 for renovation of facilities around the Stones of Stenness in Orkney. Marie-Claire is the owner and director of Aegis-Scot Archaeology Ltd., based in Kirkwall. She is an accredited member of the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists and an accredited unmanned aerial vehicle pilot with the Civil Aviation Authority. She is currently preparing several archaeology papers for publication and writing a book on the life and times of her grandmother Alice Hyde (née Lee).

Notes

1 On ‘star search’ competitions in the UK see Jenny Hammerton, ‘Screen-Struck: The Lure of Hollywood for British Women in the 1920s’, Crossing the Pond: Anglo-American Film Relations before 1930, ed. Alan Burton and Laraine Porter (Trowbridge, UK: Flicks Books, 2002), 100–105 (where Hammerton discusses both the 1920 Pathé Frères/Daily Express/Sunday Express competition and the 1922 Daily Sketch/Topical Budget/First National competition), Chris O’Rourke ‘“On the First Rung of the Ladder of Fame”: Would-Be Cinema Stars in Silent-Era Britain’, Film History 26.3 (Fall 2014), 84–105, 90–91 (where O’Rourke discusses the 1919 Sunday Express/Stoll competition and the 1922 Daily Sketch/Topical Budget/First National competition, as well as the competition that is the subject of this article), and Chris O’Rourke, ‘Imagining British Film Beauty: Gender and National Identity in 1920s ‘Star Search’ Contests’, Early Popular Visual Culture 19.4 (November 2021), 342–363 (where O’Rourke concentrates on the 1920 Pathé Frères/Daily Express/Sunday Express competition). Lisa Stead mentions the competition that is the subject of this article in ‘Letter Writing, Cinemagoing and Archive Ephemera’, The Boundaries of the Literary Archive: Reclamation and Representation, ed. Carrie Smith and Lisa Stead (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 139–156, 148.

2 Anon., ‘Pictures and Picturegoer’, Advertisers’ Protection Society Monthly Circular, December 1918, n.p. gave circulation figures for the magazine of: 14 September: 71,058; 21 September: 72,619; 28 September: 74,580; 5 October: 77,200; 12 October: 79,343; 19 October: 81,275. These specific figures were backed up by a chartered accountant’s certificate, one of the more reliable ways of evidencing circulation at the time. By March 1919 Odhams was guaranteeing circulation of over 100,000 per week (Advertisers’ Protection Society Monthly Circular, March 1919, n.p.). Julius Elias, managing director of Odhams, was sufficiently confident that Pictures and the Picturegoer had the highest circulation of the UK’s film fan magazines that in early 1917 he wagered £100 to any charity if the publishers of Picture News could demonstrate that they had a circulation of even 6,000 per week, less than one tenth of that claimed for Pictures and the Picturegoer at the time (Anon., ‘The Cinema Papers’, Advertisers’ Protection Society Monthly Circular, February 1917, n.p.). Copies of the Advertisers’ Protection Society Monthly Circular are held at the History of Advertising Trust archives in Raveningham; see https://www.hatads.org.uk/. On the launch of The Pictures in the Autumn of 1911 see Andrew Shail, ‘The Motion Picture Story Magazine and the Origins of Popular British Film Culture.’ Film History 20.2 (2008), 181–97.

3 See Rachael Low, The History of British Film Volume III: The History of the British Film 1914–1918, 1950 (London: Routledge, 1997), 83.

4 Though Pictures and Picturegoer did vary its title during the 1910s (e.g. it would even, for two issues in early 1920, go back to being just Pictures again), its contributors generally referred to the magazine in its own pages as simply ‘Pictures’.

5 The initial letter, from L.V.S. (London), was printed under the title “An English Mary Pickford” in ‘Bouquets & Brickbats’, Pictures and Picturegoer 14.228 (22–29 June 1918), 617. The first set of responses was printed in Anon., ‘An English “Mary Pickford”: “Pictures” to make an effort to find one’, Pictures and Picturegoer 15.231 (13–20 July 1918), 67.

6 Fred Dangerfield announced his intention to organise a competition in F[red] D[angerfield], ‘Editorial’, Pictures and Picturegoer 15.232 (20–27 July 1918), 93. Further responses to the original letter and to the prospect of organising a competition were printed in Anon., ‘The “Pictures” Girl: Some More Letters’, Pictures and Picturegoer 15.233 (27 July – 3 Aug 1918), 116, Anon., ‘The “Pictures” Girl: More Letters from our Readers’, Pictures and Picturegoer 15.234 (3–10 Aug 1918), 137, Anon., ‘The “Pictures and Picturegoer” Girl: Our Coming Competition’, Pictures and Picturegoer 15.235 (10–17 Aug 1918), 163, Anon., ‘“The ‘Pictures’ Girl”: Our Coming Competition’, Pictures and Picturegoer 15.236 (17–24 Aug 1918), 178, all accompanied by promises that the competition would be launched shortly.

7 Anon., ‘Who Will be The “Pictures” Girl?’, Pictures and Picturegoer 15.237 (24–31 Aug 1918), 198. The rules, the prize and the coupon were all repeated in Anon., ‘The Lure of the Screen’, Pictures and Picturegoer 15.238 (31 Aug – 7 Sept 1918), 222, Anon., ‘The Rush to Become the “Pictures” Girl’, Pictures and Picturegoer 15.239 (7–14 Sept 1918), 246, Anon., ‘Girls! Girls! Girls!’, Pictures and Picturegoer 15.240 (14–21 Sept 1918), 271, Anon., ‘The Coming New Film Star’, Pictures and Picturegoer 15.241 (21–28 Sept 1918), 299, and Anon., ‘Any More for the Screen?’ 15.242 Pictures and Picturegoer (28 Sept – 5 Oct 1918), 330. ‘Readers’ Queries Answered’ sections in these made it clear that those aged 15 and those aged 25 were eligible.

8 Anon., ‘Who Will be The “Pictures” Girl?’, Pictures and Picturegoer 15.237 (24–31 Aug 1918), 198.

9 Ibid., emphasis added.

10 In the 21–28 September 1918 issue, the magazine promised that “[n]ext week we shall announce the closing date” (Anon., ‘The Coming New Film Star’, Pictures and Picturegoer 15.241 (21–28 Sept 1918), 299). The closing date of 7 October was finally announced in Anon., ‘Any More for the Screen?’ Pictures and Picturegoer 15.242 (28 Sept – 5 Oct 1918), 330.

11 These reports included ‘X’, ‘Finding the Girl of Girls’, Pictures and Picturegoer 15.252 (7–14 Dec 1918), 588.

12 e.g. Anon., ‘Star Hunting at Walthamstow’, Pictures and Picturegoer 16.259 (25 Jan – 1 Feb 1919), 117, Anon., ‘British Studios’, Kinematograph & Lantern Weekly 31.619 (6 March 1919), 74–5, 75, Anon., ‘The “Pictures Girl”’, Pictures and Picturegoer 16.265 (8–15 March 1919), 247. Anon., ‘One Out of 8,000’, Liverpool Echo 1527 (8 March 1919), 4, Anon., ‘The Winning Smile’, Derby Daily Telegraph 12,317 (10 March 1919), 2, Anon. ‘The New Film Star’s Ambition’, Leeds Mercury 24,780 (15 March 1919), 4.

13 ‘X’, ‘Finding the Girl of Girls’, Pictures and Picturegoer 15.252 (7–14 Dec 1918), 588.

14 Ibid., 588.

15 Fred Dangerfield later claimed that this was because someone at Broadwest has mislaid these two photographs. F[red] D[angerfield], ‘Editorial’, Pictures and Picturegoer 16.266 (15–22 March 1918), 281.

16 Anon., ‘The “Pictures Girl”’, Pictures and Picturegoer 16.265 (8–15 March 1919), 247.

17 ‘X’, ‘Finding the Girl of Girls’, Pictures and Picturegoer 15.252 (7–14 Dec 1918), 588.

18 Anon., ‘Star Hunting at Walthamstow’, Pictures and Picturegoer 16.259 (25 Jan – 1 Feb 1919), 117.

19 Anon., ‘British Studios’, Kinematograph & Lantern Weekly 31.612 (16 Jan 1919), 40–41, 40.

20 Anon., ‘Star Hunting at Walthamstow’, Pictures and Picturegoer 16.259 (25 Jan – 1 Feb 1919), 117.

21 F[red] D[angerfield], ‘Editorial’, Pictures and Picturegoer 16.261 (8–15 Feb 1919), 165.

22 Anon., ‘British Studios’, Kinematograph & Lantern Weekly 31.616 (13 Feb 1919), 86–7, 86.

23 Anon., ‘British Studios’, Kinematograph & Lantern Weekly 31.619 (6 March 1919), 74–5, 75.

24 Editorial, Pictures and Picturegoer 16.264 (1–8 March 1919), 237.

25 Anon., ‘The “Pictures Girl”’, Pictures and Picturegoer 16.265 (8–15 March 1919), 247.

26 Anon., ‘British Studios’, Kinematograph & Lantern Weekly 31.619 (6 March 1919), 74–5, 75. While this character sketch is somewhat fantastical, as we will explain below, Alice’s father George Lee’s job involved chauffeuring, so he may have taught Lee to drive. Similarly, Alice may have learned to ride by proximity to the St Quintins, the landowning family for whom her father worked.

27 Anon., ‘British Studios’, Kinematograph & Lantern Weekly 31.619 (6 March 1919), 74–5, 75.

28 Anon., ‘The “Pictures” Girl’, The Era 82.4,200 (19 March 1919), 20.

29 Ibid.

30 Anon., ‘One Out of 8,000’, Liverpool Echo 1527 (8 March 1919), 4. Anon., ‘The Winning Smile’, Derby Daily Telegraph 12,317 (10 March 1919), 2. Anon., ‘A Promising Film Player’, Barnsley Independent 2,488 (15 March 1919), 5. Anon. ‘The New Film Star’s Ambition’, Leeds Mercury 24,780 (15 March 1919), 4. Anon., ‘A Cinema Girl: Film Firm’s Find’, Mexborough and Swinton Times, 15 March 1919, n.p. Anon., ‘Lavender Lee’, Lincolnshire Chronicle 4,960 (22 March 1919), 8.

31 Anon., ‘The “Pictures Girl”’, Pictures and Picturegoer 16.265 (8–15 March 1919), 247.

32 F[red] D[angerfield], ‘Editorial’, Pictures and Picturegoer 16.271 (19–26 April 1919), 393.

33 Anon., ‘British Studios’, Kinematograph & Lantern Weekly 32.625 (17 April 1919), 90.

34 Anon., ‘British Studios’, Kinematograph & Lantern Weekly 31.621 (20 March 1919), 86–7, 86.

35 Anon., ‘Film News’, Daily Mail 7183 (14 April 1919), 3.

36 ‘Dangle’, ‘Round the Studios’, Bioscope, 1 May 1919, 76.

37 Anon., ‘British Studios’, Kinematograph & Lantern Weekly 33.639 (24 July 1919), 98–99, 98. Broadwest’s other adaptations of Nat Gould novels included A Dead Certainty (trade shown in April 1920) and A Rank Outsider (trade shown in November 1920) (Rachael Low, The History of the British Film 1918–1929 (London: Routledge, 1997 [George Allen & Unwin, 1971]), 152).

38 Lee’s purported ability to ride a horse was mentioned in Anon., ‘British Studios’, Kinematograph & Lantern Weekly 31.619 (6 March 1919), 74–5, 75, Anon., ‘One Out of 8,000’, Liverpool Echo 1527 (8 March 1919), 4, Anon., ‘The “Pictures” Girl’, The Era 82.4,200 (19 March 1919), 20, C. Henry Rule, ‘With Lavender in the Foothills’, Pictures and Picturegoer 16.269 (5–12 April 1919), 337.

39 Advertisement, ‘Walturdaw Releases 1920 Now Booking’, Kinematograph & Lantern Weekly 33.639 (24 July 1919), 32. Only one contemporary source mentions another film: one local newspaper mentioned that Lee was “to be given a leading part in the forthcoming Broadwest film, “In the Gloaming.”” (Anon., ‘Mexboro’ Cinema Girl’, Penistone, Stocksbridge and Hoyland Express 2,004 (22 March 1919), 4), but no trade publications mention Lee in connection with the film (e.g. Bioscope’s review mentions just Violet Hopson, Cameron Carr, Jack Jarman, E. Bonfield and George Butler (Anon., ‘Criticism of the Films’, Bioscope 41.656 (8 May 1919), 63–74, 65)), and various mentions in the trade press indicate that In the Gloaming was finished before Lee could have been involved: in the 3 April 1919 issue of Bioscope Broadwest placed an advertisement that announced that the film was completed (Advertisement for In the Gloaming and Under Suspicion, Bioscope 41.651 (3 April 1919), 80), while Lee only reportedly arrived in Walthamstow on 14 April 1919 (see above).

40 This was mentioned in many articles, including Anon., ‘Forthcoming Trade Shows’, Bioscope 41.677 (2 Oct 1919), 118–120.

41 e.g. Advertisement for The Palace Picture Pavilion, Fleetwood Chronicle, Fylde News & Advertiser 5,166 (23 Jan 1920), 3, and Advertisement for Imperial Picture Palace, Hanley, Staffordshire Sentinel 17,257 (26 Jan 1920), 1.

42 e.g. Advertisement for the Coronet, Notting Hill Gate, West London Observer 65.3,376 (4 June 1920), 4.

43 The British Film Institute holds no versions of film (to which they have given the identifier 186047). See http://collections-search.bfi.org.uk/web/Details/ChoiceFilmWorks/150188315.

44 Pressbook for A Great Coup, BFI Special Collections, PBS-186047. The stills also held by the BFI are copies of the stills in the pressbook.

45 e.g. ‘Sabretache’, ‘Pictures in the Fire’, Tatler 970 (28 Jan 1920), 104, Anon., ‘In Filmland’, Illustrated Leicester Chronicle 263 (29 May 1920), 6: “It is in this picture that the heroine, after some difficulty[,] obtains permission from the Jockey Club to ride in a race. The heroine in question is Poppy Wyndham, and no one who witnesses the film will be able to say that women could not become jockeys.”

46 Anon., ‘A Great Coup’, Bioscope 41.683 (13 Nov 1919), 63–4 (which listed just Poppy Wyndham, Gregory Scott, Stewart Rome, Cameron Carr and Arthur Bawtree (63)); Anon., ‘Reviews of the Week’, Kinematograph Weekly 34.655 (13 Nov 1919), 100–108, 103 (the trade paper had dropped the ‘& Lantern’ starting with the 6 Nov 1919 issue).

47 They provided accounts of the production of A Great Coup without any mention of Lee in: Anon., ‘Notes and News’, Pictures and Picturegoer 17.288 (23 August 1919), 229–230, 230 and B.B., ‘Behind the Scenes with Broadwest’, Pictures and Picturegoer 17.290 (6 Sept 1919), 307. They reviewed the film, again without any mention of Lee, in Anon., ‘Releases Reviewed’, Pictures and Picturegoer 18.330 (12 June 1920), 627: “A British sporting drama, well-played by a capable cast. The story is strong, and the film contains some very interesting racing scenes. Poppy Wyndham makes a fascinating heroine, and Stewart Rome and Gregory Scott are excellent in the respective roles of hero and villain”.

48 B.B., ‘Behind the Screen with Broadwest’, Pictures and Picturegoer 16.265 (8–15 March 1919), p. 243; B.B. ‘Behind the Screen with Broadwest’, Pictures and Picturegoer 16.270 (12–19 April 1919), 367. There is no mention of Lee in any of the remaining ‘Behind the Screen with Broadwest’ columns: in the 10–17 May 1919 issue, the 21 June 1919 issue and the 6 September 1919 issue.

49 Though the Internet Movies Database lists her as having had an uncredited role in Mr. Perrin and Mr. Traill (dir. Lawrence Huntington, 1948), an adaptation of Hugh Walpole’s 1911 novel, starring David Farrar (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0040615/fullcredits), she is not discernible in the film, even to her own descendants. This uncredited role is not mentioned by the BFI’s entry for the film at http://collections-search.bfi.org.uk/web/Details/ChoiceFilmWorks/150029901. The film is currently available to view for free in BFI Player. Similarly, her claim to a journalist for the West Briton in September 1978 that she appeared in a film called And He Never Knew (Peter Bloxham, ‘‘So this will be, after a lifetime of adoration and unrequited affection, Goodbye Alice…’’, West Briton 8,163 (7 Sept 1978), 1) seems to be untrue: no film of this title was made in the UK from 1919 onwards, and the two US films with this title (one from 1921 and one from 1925) listed in the BFI National Archive cannot be connected to her.

50 Anon., ‘Marconigrams’, Penistone, Stocksbridge and Hoyland Express 2,032 (20 Sept 1919), 5.

51 Epsom is mentioned as a location in Anon., ‘Notes and News’, Pictures and Picturegoer 17.288 (23 Aug 1919), 229–230, 230.

52 On the publicity campaign that established Florence Lawrence’s stardom see Andrew Shail, The Origins of the Film Star System (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 124–148. On the use of prosody in film star names see Andrew Shail, ‘The Biograph ‘Anomaly’,’ Screen 61.1 (Spring 2020), 1–27, 26.

53 Anon., ‘Film Folk “Foot It” in Fairyland’, Kinematograph & Lantern Weekly 32.629 (15 May 1919), 100.

54 Anon., ‘The Gymkhana’, Kinematograph & Lantern Weekly 33.642 (14 Aug 1919), 74–5, 74.

55 Anon., ‘B. and C. Celebration Dinner’, Kinematograph & Lantern Weekly 33.643 (21 Aug 1919), 90.

56 Lee’s working at the Kilver’s Steel Works was mentioned in Anon., ‘Sheffield and District Notes’, Bioscope 41.651 (3 April 1919), 104. The details on Lee’s father were mentioned in Anon. ‘The New Film Star’s Ambition’, Leeds Mercury 24,780 (15 March 1919), 4.

57 F[red] D[angerfield], ‘Editorial’, Pictures and Picturegoer 16.267 (22–29 March 1919), 301. C. Henry Rule, ‘With Lavender in the Foothills’, Pictures and Picturegoer 16.269 (5–12 April 1919), 337.

58 C. Henry Rule, ‘With Lavender in the Foothills’, Pictures and Picturegoer 16.269 (5–12 April 1919), 337.

59 I[van] P[atrick] G[ore], ‘Jazzmania’, Pictures and Picturegoer 16.276 (24–31 May 1919), 538 and Anon., ‘“Pictures” at the Ball’, Pictures and Picturegoer 16.276 (24–31 May 1919), 539–42.

60 Anon., ‘Cinema Screen Coiffure’, Pictures and Picturegoer 17.284 (26 July 1919), 112–113, 112.

61 Anon., ‘Film Actress’s Adieu’, Yorkshire Telegraph and Star 10,511 (15 June 1920), 4.

62 Alice Lee and Charles Hyde’s marriage was registered in: Register Office, District of Richmond, County of Surrey, no. 150, 18 June 1921.

63 “Next on the Broadwest list comes The Great Coup [sic], a Nat Gould story, and a very thrilling one. A new film player in the person of Poppy Wyndham will make her secret debut in this picture” (B.B., ‘Behind the Screen with Broadwest’, Pictures and Picturegoer 17.290 (6 Sept 1919), 307).

64 On Margaret Leahy see, for example, Anon., ‘Daily Sketch Girl is Chosen’, Daily Sketch 4,262 (14 Nov 1922), 2; this issue featured a photograph of Margaret Leahy on its front cover. For the story of this competition see Luke McKernan, Topical Budget: The Great British News Film (London: BFI, 1992), 115–117, and Luke McKernan, ‘Just a Brixton Shop Girl’, The Keaton Chronicle 19.3 (Summer 2011), reprinted with revisions at https://lukemckernan.com/2020/03/25/just-a-brixton-shop-girl/.

65 Rudi Blesh, Keaton (New York: Collier, 1966), 218, italics in original; Blesh tells the story in some detail on 217–218. The process of switching Leahy from Within the Law to The Three Ages can be noticed when reading between the lines of Margaret Leahy, ‘Margaret’s Film-Land Debut’, Daily Sketch 4,290 (16 Dec 1922), 6, where she notes that, in spite of still being certain that she would be in Within the Law, “I heard I was soon to be Mr. Keaton’s “leading woman.” I do hope so.” She reported being given the female lead in The Three Ages (describing it as if it was a promotion from the plan for her to play alongside Talmadge in Within the Law) in Margaret Leahy, ‘Margaret Gets a Great Surprise’, Daily Sketch 4,306 (6 Jan 1923) 6.

66 The first of these columns in the Daily Sketch was Margaret Leahy, ‘On the Way Over’, Daily Sketch 4,278 (2 Dec 1922), 6; the second was Margaret Leahy, ‘Our Girl’s Week End Letter’, Daily Sketch (9 Dec 1922), 5; the third was Margaret Leahy, ‘Margaret’s Film-Land Debut’, Daily Sketch 4,290 (16 Dec 1922), 6, and so on every Saturday until the last, Margaret Leahy, ‘Margaret as a Stone-Age Maiden’, Daily Sketch 4,348 (24 Feb 1923), 6; the series of diary entries cuts off without giving any indication that her work on The Three Ages is over.

67 Pictures and Picturegoer claimed that Lee was 19 in, for example, Anon., ‘The “Pictures Girl”’, Pictures and Picturegoer 16.265 (8–15 March 1919), 247. Local newspapers reprinting this date included Anon., ‘One Out of 8,000’, Liverpool Echo 1527 (8 March 1919), 4, Anon. ‘The New Film Star’s Ambition’, Leeds Mercury 24,780 (15 March 1919), 4.

68 Register of Births in the District of Doncaster, 1894, entry 150. Baptisms solemnized in the Parish of Holy Trinity, Upper Chelsea in the County of London in the Year 1896, 16, no. 125.

69 1901 Census of England & Wales Returns: London, Fulham, North East Fulham, schedule 45.

70 1911 Census of England & Wales Returns: London, Wandsworth, Southfields, schedule 47.

71 In the 1921 Census Sheila’s age is given as 4 years and 2 months. 1921 Census of England & Wales Returns: Mexborough, Doncaster, schedule 145. Surviving marriage certificates and marriage banns for the name ‘Alice Lee’ during the 1910s do not seem to pertain to our specific Alice, as the ages on the date of marriage do not line up with a specific birth date of 18 July 1894 or even a general birth year of 1894.

72 1921 Census of England & Wales Returns: Mexborough, Doncaster, schedule 145. The census return records Sheila living in Mexborough with Alice’s mother Sophia Lee and maternal grandmother Harriet Butler.

73 In the 1939 Register, conducted on 29 September 1939, her name is given as Sheila Hyde. 1939 Register, Enumeration District: Surrey, Urban District of Esher, sub-district 30.2, entry 80.2.

74 1921 Census of England & Wales Returns: Mexborough, Doncaster, schedule 145.

75 For an example of a come-as-you-please contest see: Handbill for a film show at the Town Hall, Hartlepool, April or May 1909, RWC.DF.WOD.4717, reproduced in Andrew Shail, The Origins of the Film Star System (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 239. As is clear from reading Luke McKernan’s account of the 1922 Daily Sketch/Topical Budget First National Pictures competition, the most significant upshot of that competition was the provision of attention-grabbing content for both the Daily Sketch and the Topical Budget newsreel, both before and after the result was decided (Luke McKernan, Topical Budget: The Great British News Film (London: BFI, 1992), 116).

76 Anon., ‘The “Pictures Girl”’, Pictures and Picturegoer 16.265 (8–15 March 1919), 247.

77 The week after launching the competition, Pictures and Picturegoer stated that as a result of the Daily Express reporting on the competition even before it was formally announced, they had received many applications not accompanied by a coupon, which they had to reject (Anon., ‘The Lure of the Screen’, Pictures and Picturegoer 15.238 (31 Aug – 7 Sept 1918), 222).

78 Anon., ‘Pictures and Picturegoer’, Advertisers’ Protection Society Monthly Circular, May 1919, n.p..

79 Advertisers’ Protection Society Monthly Circular, June 1919, n.p.. As the magazine increased its advertising charge to £30 per page from 4 October 1919, in line with a further increase in circulation to 250,000, the magazine’s circulation was probably growing anyway, but the ‘The Pictures Girl’ competition probably contributed to this growth. See Advertisers’ Protection Society Monthly Circular, October 1919, n.p..

80 Chris O’Rourke, ‘Imagining British Film Beauty: Gender and National Identity in 1920s ‘Star Search’ Contests’, Early Popular Visual Culture 19.4 (Nov 2021), 342–363, 344–345.

81 Dangerfield insisted that the ‘The Pictures Girl’ competition was not a beauty contest in F. D., ‘Editorial’, Pictures and Picturegoer 15.254 (21–28 Dec 1918), 637.

82 Anon., ‘An English “Mary Pickford”: “Pictures” to make an effort to find one’, Pictures and Picturegoer 15.231 (13–20 July 1918), 67.

83 Jenny Hammerton, ‘Screen-Struck: The Lure of Hollywood for British Women in the 1920s’, Crossing the Pond: Anglo-American Film Relations before 1930, ed. Alan Burton and Laraine Porter (Trowbridge, UK: Flicks Books, 2002), 100–105, 102–3.

84 Peter Bloxham, ‘‘So this will be, after a lifetime of adoration and unrequited affection, Goodbye Alice…’’, West Briton 8,163 (7 Sept 1978), 1.

85 Aubrey Chalmers, ‘We’re Miss Worlds apart…’, Daily Mail 28,642 (25 July 1988), 15. Other publications copied this for their own version of the article shortly afterwards, e.g. Rafe Klinger, ‘Still a beauty at 94!’, Weekly World News 30,587 (6 Sept 1988), 29. Six years later this US uber-tabloid printed a modified version of the article claiming that she was born in 1870, that she had won the first Miss World competition in 1888 and that she was now aged 124, even though she had actually died in July of the previous year (Anon., ‘Still a beauty at 124!, Weekly World News, 22 Feb 1994, 2), and did so again two years later, this time getting her birth date right but making all the other mistakes and claiming that she was still alive aged 102 (June Sawyer, ‘Still a beauty at 102!, Weekly World News, 28 May 1996, 35).

86 BBC Children in Need, BBC1, 18 Nov 1988, 7pm. A clip of the relevant segment is currently available on Box of Broadcasts at https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/ondemand/index.php/prog/RT41ACB2?bcast=119900735, 16.34, and on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFN9EQE3nTQ, 4.55.

87 On the first Miss World contest see Harriet Atkinson, The Festival of Britain: A Land and Its People (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012), p.164; Richard Cavendish, ‘The First Miss World Contest’, History Today 51.4 (April 2001), https://www.historytoday.com/archive/first-miss-world-contest; Anon., ‘Contestants 1951’, Miss World, https://www.missworld.com/#/contestants; Anon., ‘Winners’, Miss World, https://www.missworld.com/#/past_winners.

88 For example, a July 1991 article in the Evening Sentinel claimed that Alice had won the Miss World contest in 1911 and then immediately entered and won an unnamed competition to find an English Mary Pickford, and was thereafter visited by Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks (who tried to persuade her to stay in the UK) and Charlie Chaplin (who gave her his hat and cane and tried to persuade her to move to the USA) (Anon., ‘The first Miss World needed real stamina’, Evening Sentinel, 23 July 1991, 16). (While it is unlikely that Alice met Chaplin, Alice may have been misremembering meeting a Chaplin impersonator at the August 1919 film trade gymkhana, a person who is mentioned anonymously in Kinematograph & Lantern Weekly’s account of the event (Anon., ‘The Gymkhana’, Kinematograph & Lantern Weekly 33.642 (14 Aug 1919), 74–5, 74.) A 1992 article in the Evening Mail added the further inventions that her prize was a world trip and that she danced with Fred Astaire (Anon., ‘The first Miss World’, Evening Mail, 21 Jan 1992, 17, 18–19).

89 The £500 figure is given in Aubrey Chalmers, ‘We’re Miss Worlds apart…’, Daily Mail 28,642 (25 July 1988), 15.

90 Calculated using Lawrence H. Officer and Samuel H. Williamson, ‘Five Ways to Compute the Relative Value of a UK Pound Amount, 1270 to Present,’ MeasuringWorth, 2023.

91 England & Wales Civil Registration Birth Index 1916–2007, Births Registered in July, August and September 1922, 188; Births Registered in October, November and December 1924, 164. A 2007 memoir about the life of one Caroline Blount includes a segment where Blount recalls working as a housemaid for Alice Lee in Scarborough at some point during the 1920s (Julia Ashby and Ann Rayner, ‘Caroline and the First Miss World’, Mexis: The Official Newsletter of Mexborough & District Heritage Society, Feb 2007). While this memoir contains various falsehoods about Lee as ‘reported’ in newspapers in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the elements about Caroline working for Lee in Scarborough, as related to her daughter Ann Rayner née Blount, seem more reliable, though while the memoir claims that Blount worked for Lee at a guesthouse, research in all available issues of Kelly’s Directory of the North and East Ridings of Yorkshire from 1921 to 1937 turns up no evidence of a guesthouse in Scarborough with the name Alice Lee, Alice Hyde or Charles Hyde associated with it. There is therefore insufficient evidence to say with a reasonable degree of certainty that Alice acquired a lump sum from Broadwest. Thanks to Nicholas Hiley for this research on Scarborough.

92 England & Wales Civil Registration Birth Index 1916–2007, Births Registered in January, February and March 1930, 500; Births Registered in April, May and June 1933, 483. England & Wales, Civil Registration Death Index 1916–2007, Register 44C, sub-district 3651, entry 82, July 1995, gave a birth date for Karl of 17 January 1930; Register 19D, Sub-district 712.2, entry 77, Jan 2004, gave a birth date for Ivan of 25 March 1933.

93 1939 Register, Enumeration District: Surrey, Urban District of Esher, sub-district 30.2, entry 80.1.