Florence Calzado

Florence Calzado (fl circa 1860s)[1] is one of the professional names of the "serio-comic vocalist" Florence Beverley.

Biography

According to the blog Out of the In Bottle[2], virtually nothing seems to be known about either Florence Beverley or Florence Calzado (her stage name for a while - she is also referred to Floraette Blanche Beverley on at least one occasion). While in South Africa she was billed as a "serio-comic vocalist" and having linked up with him, apparently she became the "wife" of violinist Horace Poussard, having had a child by him.

She definitely joined forces with him, the manager Robert Smythe and the latter's wife, the soprano Amelia Bailey, to found the Poussard-Bailey Opera Company and undertake a 4-year "Grand Tour" of India and South Africa. In 1869 the company was also known as the Calzado-Bailey Company

The blog further mentions that she later listed herself as a widow, and goes on to marry a miner named Samuel Paynter Thomas Cornish in Hill End NSW. After that nothing more seems to be heard of her.

Contribution to SA theatre, film, media and/or performance

Coming to South Africa with the Poussard-Bailey Opera Company in 1867, she was billed as Florence Calzado and gave more than 150 performances in most of the major centres of the country.

When Smythe and Poussard left for England and France just after their last oconcert in November 1868, the two singers stayed at the Cape until June 1869, now billed as Calzado-Bailey (inter alia presenting concerts in the Mutual Hall, Cape Town). They then sailed directly back to Melbourne to rejoin the rest of the company and reconstitute the Poussard-Bailey Company.

Sources

http://outoftheinkbottle.blogspot.com/2009/06/calzado-who.html

D.C. Boonzaier, 1923. "My playgoing days – 30 years in the history of the Cape Town stage", in SA Review, 9 March and 24 August 1923. (Reprinted in Bosman 1980: pp. 374-439.)

F.C.L. Bosman. 1980. Drama en Toneel in Suid-Afrika, Deel II, 1856-1916. Pretoria: J.L. van Schaik: pp. 223, 243-6,

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