Walter Passmore

In 1903 Passmore left the company and began a career in musical comedies, plays and pantomimes in the West End and on tour that lasted for thirty years.

On Christmas morning 1881 he sang in Messiah, and the following day he made his first professional stage appearance at the age of fourteen at Sunderland as a page in the pantomime Cinderella.

[2] He then served as an apprentice to the piano makers Cramer & Co, but at the end of the apprenticeship he took a job as a pianist with travelling concert parties and performed in farcical comedies.

[4] The following year, Passmore made his London debut in a revival of Dion Boucicault's drama The Flying Scud at the Standard Theatre, Bishopsgate.

[3] Passmore joined the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company in 1893, where he created the small part of Greg in the unsuccessful Jane Annie at the Savoy Theatre (libretto by J. M. Barrie and Arthur Conan Doyle; music by Ernest Ford).

[3] Passmore continued to play at the Savoy as the Usher in Trial by Jury, John Wellington Wells in The Sorcerer (1898) and King Ouf I in The Lucky Star (1899).

[12] He created the role of Professor Bunn in The Emerald Isle (1901), was Ping-Pong in The Willow Pattern (1901), and played the Lord Chancellor in the first revival of Iolanthe (1901–02).

There he began a career in musical comedies, plays and pantomimes in London's West End and on tour that lasted for thirty years.

[13] In 1910 he played Frank, the prison governor, in Johann Strauss's Die Fledermaus in Thomas Beecham's first opera season at His Majesty's Theatre.

The production – one of the few works in the season not to lose money – "depended for its popularity in part upon Walter Passmore, the celebrated D'Oyly Carte droll".

[13][15] During the First World War Passmore appeared in a variety of comedy parts in the West End and on tour,[13] and at the Gaiety Theatre in April 1924 he played Jericho Mardyke in Our Nell.

[13] A late Gilbert and Sullivan performance was in Trial by Jury at a benefit matinée for Courtice Pounds in 1927, when Passmore was joined by stars including Leslie Henson and Derek Oldham.

The production was brought into the West End in March 1930, when one reviewer wrote "Walter Passmore and Amy Augarde played into each others' hands with an easy competence that was a delight to watch".

[18] Following the death of his first wife in 1901 Passmore married another D'Oyly Carte artist, Agnes Fraser, in 1902 at Wandsworth, London,[19] who frequently appeared with him on stage.