Kitty Mahone

Walter Gibbons was one of Britains most forwardthinking film entrepreneurs and deeply entranced by the music hall In 1900 he launched his phono bio tableaux which synchronised songs recorded by famous music stars on disc with a film of the performance Sadly all but one of the films are lost making this last survivor a unique record of a major Victorian music hall star in sound and vision as well as the oldest British sound film nearly thirty years before the talkies arrived Lil Hawthorne who performs this song was a wellknown American singer often adopting a male persona although she was not strictly a male impersonator