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Alexandra Street Puppets - 'Just Passing Through!'

 

Blandford’s 1891 Census lists the following people in Alexandra Street:

Ambrose Tiller            (48)      Head               Marionette  Proprietor

Elizabeth Tiller            (61)      Wife

Ambrose Tiller             (22)      Son                  Musician

Lucy Tiller                    (19)      Daughter         Costumier 

Walter Tiller               (25)      Head               Musician

Alice Tiller                   (21)      Wife                Singer & Dancer

Wilfred Tiller              (1)        Son

Annie Dominey           (13)      ----                   General Domestic Servant

Puppet shows were a popular form of adult entertainment in the 1890s. Shows included melodramas, music hall acts and short pantomines. They would travel the country performing mainly to rural audiences staying at each place for about a  week. Saturday afternoons, there would be special shows for children entitled ‘Babes in the Wood’ costing just one penny. After Blandford, the Tiller Group moved on to Sturminster Newton and Stalbridge.

Illustrated is a trick puppet figure of a dissecting skeleton which would have danced and walked before dispersing its bones in the air and then reforming. This particular puppet was recently put up for sale for £2,695. Other Tiller puppets included two stilt walking drunken clowns, a tight-rope walker and a ‘drunken wastrel’ able to raise a beer bottle to his mouth. The latter was involved in a sketch with a policeman. The Victoria & Albert Museum in London has several of the Tiller hand-carved wooden puppets.

At the time of the 1891 Census, the Tiller Marionette Show was performing in Blandford and their travelling show van was parked in Alexandra Street. Ambrose Tiller (48) was Elizabeth’s second husband. Her first husband, also a travelling showman, had lost his life when dismantling a show booth. Son, Ambrose Tiller (22) was to marry Sarah Chipperfield of the circus owning family.





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