23 Blog （5）：Chapter Four: The Rise of Lily Flexmore

In the velvet hush before the curtain rose, Lily could hear her own heartbeat.

It wasn’t nerves exactly—though those still visited her from time to time, like unwelcome cousins. It was something else. Anticipation. A sort of electric tightrope just beneath the skin.

She stood in the wings of the Liverpool Empire, stretching one leg over her shoulder, then the other, as easily as a maid folds laundry. Her costume shimmered under the gaslight—sequins painstakingly stitched by hand, borrowed feathers, a ribbon that once belonged to her mother’s best apron.

The orchestra tuned. The footlights hissed. The house manager gave her a nod.

She took a deep breath and stepped into the glow.

By the turn of the century, Lily Flexmore was fast becoming a name on the lips of music hall audiences from Blackpool to Bristol.

She had what they called “a good turn”—tight, polished, and just a bit outrageous. Her act was equal parts contortion, comedy, and unladylike charm. She’d arrive on stage with a flirtatious wink, twist herself into shapes that defied common sense, and then deliver a cheeky little music number while somehow still bent in half.

It wasn’t just the physicality—though that helped. It was the personality. She had it.

That thing.

The same thing that made a crowd lean forward in their seats, that made punters queue in the rain, that made bored critics reach for superlatives instead of sneers.

“Miss Flexmore,” wrote one amused reviewer in The Yorkshire Herald, “is quite possibly made of elastic and entirely without shame. She is, in short, delightful.”

The music hall world was both dazzling and cutthroat. You could be a star one week and forgotten the next. Lily learned quickly to rehearse until her knees ached, to tip the stagehands, to sew extra thread into her seams, and to sleep with her money tucked inside her shoe.

She travelled constantly: train to Glasgow, coach to Manchester, a week in a smoky theatre in Norwich followed by a fortnight in Dublin where the theatre leaked and the manager drank too much gin.

Her luggage was battered, her shoes worn thin, but her smile stayed intact.

Because she loved it.

Not just the applause, but the chaos. The camaraderie backstage—the women with rouge-stained mirrors and curling tongs heated over gas rings; the men who juggled and stammered through monologues; the air thick with chalk dust, powder, and nervous sweat.

This wasn’t just a job.

It was a tribe.

And Lily, for all her quirks, fit right in.

She wasn’t the sort of girl to bat her lashes and sigh for a gentleman in the stalls. She laughed too loud. She swore on occasion. She shared her whisky and didn’t mind mending her own stockings. She played cards with the lighting crew and beat most of them.

There was a freedom to the life. It wasn’t respectable—not by any stretch. But it was hers.

She had escaped the narrow expectations of Whitecross Street, leapt clean over them, quite literally. She sent money home when she could. Her younger sisters bragged about her in the markets. Her mother, though she never said so out loud, kept all Lily’s playbills in a biscuit tin.

Even her father, gruff as ever, once turned up in the back row of the stalls in his Sunday best. He didn’t say anything after the show, just nodded once and walked her to the station.

It was the proudest she’d ever seen him.

Some nights, she performed twice.

A matinee full of schoolchildren and tired housewives; an evening show for sailors, bachelors, and weary factory girls.

Her act changed over time. She began to sing more—cheeky little songs with double meanings, the sort that made old men chuckle and young women blush. She worked with comic duos, performed sketches, even danced once with a man who claimed to be the Prince of Siam (he wasn’t).

She had accidents, too. A twisted ankle in Croydon. A collapsed curtain in Nottingham that left her tangled mid-somersault and roaring with laughter while the audience clapped harder than ever.

“Even when it all goes wrong,” she wrote in a postcard to her brother George, “I somehow land on my feet. Or at least my elbows.”

Then came the contracts from abroad.

First Germany. Then South Africa. Then, unbelievably, America.

She was twenty-five when she boarded the ship to New York. Her entire worldly belongings fit into two trunks and a carpet bag. She wore her best hat, her worst boots, and carried a letter of introduction tucked into her corset.

She stood at the rail, wind in her face, heart thudding, and thought:

“Look at me. Whitecross Street would never believe this.”

She was right.

America was chaos, noise, skyscrapers, and speed. The theatres were bigger, the crowds louder, the critics nastier. But she held her own. She performed in Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago. She danced in Buffalo in a snowstorm and did four shows in one night in Manhattan.

Some acts floundered abroad. Lily didn’t.

In fact, she seemed made for it.

Her East End wit translated surprisingly well. Her contortions fascinated. Her fearlessness inspired other women performers, who took her under their wing, then asked for tips. She was invited to supper clubs and asked for autographs in hotel lobbies.

She was no longer just another act on the bill.

She was a headliner.

And yet—she remained, always, Lily.

She never pretended to be posher than she was. She never forgot where she came from. And though she had more stage names than one could count—Flexmore, Flexy, the Rubber Queen of London—she never stopped being Ellen Dunn at heart.

The girl who walked on her hands behind the pie shop.

The girl who kicked a football through fog for the North.

The girl who wanted more.

And who, through sheer grit and grace, got it.

Back in London, posters with her name adorned theatre railings and café windows. Children mimicked her moves in alleyways. Young women copied her curled hairstyle. Men proposed, then proposed again. She turned most of them down.

She didn’t need saving.

She was too busy flying.