Claude Ramsay

(b. Haigh (Wigan), Lancashire, **/**/1890 - d. South Africa, **/**/1965). According to the British Census, Claude Ramsay Rawcliffe, the son of a collier, was a music student in 1911. In 1913 he married Mabel Mary Bickley, who had previously been married to Charles Burmester, then a civil servant in the employ of the government of the Orange River Colony. After first having joined Burmester when he moved to Canada, she had divorced him in 1911. According to a Canadian Census, she was born in South Africa and the newly-married Rawcliffes may have come out to join her family. At this stage it is not known whether Ramsay had much of an acting career, but in 1918 he played King Solomon opposite Edna Joyce as the Queen of Sheba in H. Lisle Lucoque's film version of King Solomon's Mines, produced for African Film Productions. In 1921 he and Mabel were divorced and he subsequently married Nessie Avis Kusel, who predeceased him in 1953. (FO)

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