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13 Grecian Dramatists
New Babylon
THE comic servant of the evil land-lubber in Jerrold's The Mutiny At The Nore was played at the Coburg in 1830 by an actor born Oliver and christened Benjamin, who called himself Conquest. He made good the boast by gaining control of an extensive pleasure resort on the way between Sadler's Wells and the Britannia. Resolves to " elevate the masses " left many marks on London midway through the nineteenth century, and more than one such enterprise developed from the sale of strong drink. In the grounds of the Eagle Tavern an opera house was built with the name of the Grecian. From 1 851 it set out to rival the Wells with Shakespeare before finding its proper level with melodrama. It was now under the Conquests.1 Benjamin Oliver lived from 1804 to 1872; his wife, Columbine and ballet-mistress, from 1803 to 1867. George Augustus, their eldest child, was born under his father's management at the Garrick, Whitechapel, in 1837, and narrowly escaped burning with that theatre in his boyhood. After starting his stage career as a beetle he went to a school at Boulogne and sat, he used to say, on the same bench as Coquelin, whose father kept a tuck shop.
At the age of twenty George Conquest married the most promising pupil of his mother's academy for dancers. The skill he acquired from pantomime he gave fully to Shakespeare before bestowing the experience gained in both upon melodrama. Yet another source of knowledge, altogether different, was his. Ever since his schooldays he had collected French plays ; he read them all and remembered them ; Tom Taylor and Boucicault together had not such a comprehensive knowledge of plots from France. He was often first with the latest Paris fashion. L'Ange De Minuit, by Barriere and Plouvier, staged at the Ambigu on 5 March, 1861, appeared in English at the Grecian on 20 May, 1 86 1 ; John Brougham's version did not reach the Princess's until
1 " Conquest, the Story of a Theatrical Family ", by Frances Fleetwood, was published in 1953.
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