Payne Brothers

Known as "the King of Pantomime", he trained with Joseph Grimaldi and the great Harlequin, Jack Bologna, at Sadler's Wells Theatre, and starred at Covent Garden in the 1830s and 40s.

After other appearances, including one with his brother Fred in Gilbert and Sullivan's Thespis in 1871, choreographed by their father, he went to Drury Lane in 1883, where he played Clown for the last twelve years of his life.

In 1892 Punch said of him: Mr. Harry Payne's scene, besides coming earlier than usual, is, in itself, full of fun of the good old school-boyish kind; and if the Public, as Jury, is to award a palm to either competitor, then it must give a hand – which is much the same thing as "awarding a palm" – to its old friend, Harry Payne, who, with Tully Lewis as Pantaloon, has pulled himself together, and given us a good quarter of an hour of genuine Old English Pantomime.

Probably he owed something to the tuition of his father … whose mimetic feats he would seek to emulate as much as the altered conditions of pantomime entertainments would permit.

It would be difficult to find anything more truly humorous of its kind, than a combination of a fantastic hornpipe and an equally fantastic minuet, danced by Mr. Frederick Payne in the Baron's kitchen.... After the elephant, comes Donato – the great one-legged dancer, and after Donato comes an ingenious three-legged dance by the Paynes – an old pantomimic trick which has not been seen for many years.

[14] In 1877, while engaged in the pantomime at the Alexandra Palace, he became what the newspaper The Era called mentally "affected", and he never fully recovered from this affliction.