[3][4] The youngest of the seven children of Francis Thomas Marshall and his wife Ellen Maria, she maintained a close bond with her siblings and their families throughout her life.

The household in which she grew up was a somewhat unconventional one: her father, a removal-man, died just before her fifth birthday,[5] and shortly afterwards her mother Ellen began a relationship with a man some 20 years her junior, Louis Slade, with whom in 1892 she went on to have one further child.

Her first big break came with an invitation from the American entertainer Laura Hampton (née Bowman) to join her review troupe, following which she was signed up for a European tour of the show 'A Trip to Coontown'.

In the post-war years they can be found as far afield as New Zealand, Australia, Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil, in addition to Austria, Hungary, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia.

After suffering a nervous breakdown she was advised to go to Saratoga Springs to recuperate and it was there she met her second husband Frank Mozee (a chauffeur, some 16 years younger than she was), whom she married in 1930, when she would have been 44.

From America she regularly visited her family back in Tooting (in the early years by boat but latterly by plane), staying at the Regent Palace Hotel in central London.