Her second marriage was to Theodore Darwin Middaugh, a theatrical tour manager and musician from Friendship, NY.

Ella made fairly regular trips back to Buffalo, NY to perform and visit her throughout her life.

There are two other marriages mentioned in newspaper articles (Army Officer Archibald Christie, Chandler Andrew Sharpe) but they are in error.

With wavy auburn hair and dressed as a young man in evening dress, nervously fingering his white tie, she made a very charming and gay figure ... and though she adopted the tattered clothes and worn top hat of the traditional "broken down swell" act she did so with a difference, making of what might have been ordinary broad comedy something delicate and, in its way, almost moving.In 1915 Hargreaves wrote "Burlington Bertie from Bow", a comic ditty about a penniless Londoner who affects the manner of a well-heeled gentleman.

It was a parody of an earlier song, simply called "Burlington Bertie", written by Harry B. Norris and made famous by Vesta Tilley.

[7][8][3][9] Shields sang the song, dressed up in slightly battered top hat and tails, in the role of Burlington Bertie "himself".

After a period of performing in obscurity, a music-hall reunion show called Thanks for the Memory put "Bertie" back in the spotlight.

Shields worked with many stars over the years, including a very young Julie Andrews in the late 1940s with whom she shared the same bill of a Royal Command Performance.

After finishing the song she collapsed on stage and died three days later, without regaining consciousness, at Lancaster in Lancashire, on 5 August 1952.