Sue
Thanks very much for the information and please thank your parents for looking after those papers. I have written a snail mail letter to Mrs Lamb as someone called Lamb appears at that address on the current telephone directory. I will let you know if I get a response.
I know a bit about Queenie Cross (nee Simmons/Kirschen). She was born on 31 December 1895 and registered twice under different names. I will scan the certificates for you. You will note that almost everything is different except the date of birth and the mother’s maiden name. The addresses are in fact only a few hundred yards apart but, crucially in different registration districts! I have a feeling that someone told Lily that she should always use her legal name on official documents.
Queenie had a child on 30 July 1915 whom she named Eleanor . She did not name a father but called herself “Queenie Elizabeth Simmons a Music Hall Artiste”. I do not know what became of this child. She may have had it adopted but there was no formal adoption in Britain at that time.
She somehow went to India and there, in Madras, on 14 December 1927, she married Percival Cross. He worked on the railways in India and they stayed there until Indian Independence in 1947. During the war Percival was in the Army but still running the railway. They had no children of their own but at this time they adopted a baby, June Mary Ann Higgs, whose parents were apparently both married but not to one another! After Independence they returned to the UK (and this is the infuriating bit) they lived, in the 1970s, about half a mile from where I lived. But I knew nothing of these stories at the time except that my father had had an aunt who was on the Music Halls. Queenie died on 29 October 1973.
I think Peter Pogany used the surname Scott latterly as Mary Doris’s will dated 1968 names him as “Peter David Scott formerly Pogany” He seems to have died in 2001. Did his mother, perhaps , remarry someone called Scott? Peter seems also to have sent similar information to Max Tyler of the Music Hall Society, as he sent me a copy of part of it back in 2004.
If it is more convenient you could send those scans direct to my e-mail
garrod@hotmail.com.
Best Wishes
Jim