The Art of Play: A Marionette from the Tiller-Clowes Troupe, c. 1870

Marionette from the Tiller-Clowes Troupe, 1870
The Victoria & Albert Museum

The Tiller-Clowes troupe, one of the last Victorian marionette troupes in England, kept the tradition of string puppetry alive for decades. Marionette shows were a popular form of entertainment in the Nineteenth Century.  However, these shows, like the Punch & Judy shows (which also started as marionettes before becoming glove puppets) were designed more for adults than they were for children.  Many of the performers of marionette shows were family troupes which travelled around the country. Long before the proliferation of film and television, these puppet shows offered popular entertainment from melodramas and pantomimes to minstrel shows and music hall to the masses. 

Here, we see one of the thirty-five remaining marionettes from the Tiller-Clowes Troupe.  The figures were hand-carved, painted, and elaborately dressed.  The character represented by this figure is that of a working-class male who would have been a stock character, useful in any play requiring an honest workman. The puppet’s hair and beard are carefully carved, and his face has been painted in a tan color to indicate that he labored outside.  This figure has a long and interesting history.  In fact, his most recent appearance in a performance was as “Jack Junk” in the production of “The Floating Beacon” which took place at the Theatre Museum in April of 2004.

The figure was made in Lincolnshire, England between 1870 and 1890.  Notably, this marionette along with the rest of the troupe of puppets and three of their original backcloths had been stored in a blacksmith's shop in Lincolnshire for over thirty years.  They were discovered, cleaned and restrung by  one Gerald Morice and, later, by the famed George Speaight who purchased the lot in 1945.

Together, Morice and Speaight began recreating some of the puppets' original repertoire. They recreated the original backdrops, and in August of 1951, as part of The Festival of Britain celebrations, the marionettes took to the stage one more time as “The Old Time Marionettes,” at the Riverside Theatre, Festival Gardens, Battersea Park.

These puppets, in the 1980s were lent by George Speaight to puppeteers in Germany.  In the late 1990s, Speaight sold them to John Phillips, an expert puppet carver, manipulator and puppet historian, whose widow later sold them to the Victoria & Albert Museum after his death in 1998.