She was awarded £2,500 in a breach of promise case and she then left another at the altar and he devoted the rest of his life to her.

Her father was a clerk to an architect in the 1870s and she was training to dance at the Neville Dramatic School and studying ballet.

She adopted the name Phyllis Broughton when she made her debut at the Canterbury Music Hall in London in March 1877.

The Gaiety had a quartet of leading actors Nellie Farren, Kate Vaughan, Edward O'Connor Terry, and E. W. Royce.

In 1884 she was promoted from the chorus to play roles in the theatre's adaptions of stories from One Thousand and One Nights.

Broughon herself broke off her own engagement in 1889 to John Thomas Hedley[1] who had prepared a home, Longcroft, for her to live.

[1] Her will established the Robert Thomson And Phyllis Broughton Scholarship Fund which became a charity in 1965.