Jenny Hill (music hall performer)

Hill made her stage début at an early age in a pantomime version of Mother Goose at the Aquarium Theatre in Westminster.

A contemporary of Marie Lloyd and Bessie Bellwood, Jenny Hill was born in Paddington, London, to Michael Thompson (1812/13–1881) a Marylebone cab driver.

In return for the chance to sing to the public house's customers until 2 a.m. she suffered great privations, which would seriously affect her health in later life, rising at 5 a.m. to polish the pub's bar and pewter, washing glasses, scrubbing floors and bottling beer until her performance began at noon.

[2] On 28 May 1866, aged 18, she married John Wilson Woodley, an acrobat known by the stage name Jean Pasta; he later abandoned her, leaving her with three children, one of whom became the music hall performer Peggy Pryde.

In 1879 she purchased the Star Music Hall in Bermondsey (where Bessie Bellwood had made her debut), and from July 1882 to 1883 she kept a public house in Southwark.

Eventually, she earned enough by dancing the "Cellar Flap", singing her song "The Coffee-Shop Girl" and by her male impersonations to buy The Hermitage and its farmlands at Streatham.

[2] By 1889 the privations she had suffered in her early life were taking their toll, and she was forced to cancel a number of theatrical engagements due to ill health.

[1] Hill played on the vaudeville stage in New York for sixteen weeks from February 1891, but American audiences had difficulty understanding her London slang.