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Plaza Northcote - Herald (Melbourne Vic) Saturday 11 March 1950 page 8

Jenny Howard, playing the Plaza Northcote, commencing March 11, 1950 & playing nightly.

Richard Fotheringham writes - Jenny Howard and her husband King first visited Australia in March 1929 and ‘loved it the moment we got here’ (Howard 1982). They performed before appreciative crowds on the Tivoli circuit in Melbourne and Sydney, and at the Victoria Theatre in Newcastle, before returning home in July.

Over the next decade, Howard became a headline act in regional and metropolitan variety theatres, including the London Palladium. She also released discs, performed on radio, appeared in a musical comedy film, Dodging the Dole (1936), and, in 1937, toured the West Indies.

In June 1940 Wallace Parnell, the general manager of Tivoli Australia, brought Howard and King to Melbourne to produce pantomimes and to headline a new production, The Crazy Show, which toured Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, and Adelaide. A second Crazy Show opened in March 1941. Howard was considered ‘the live wire of the show’ (Sydney Morning Herald 1941, 12), and reviewers praised her ability to switch rapidly from ‘the most ridiculous to the most sentimental’ (Telegraph 1941, 10).

Howard’s energy and dedication became legendary. Between seasons of shows playing up to twice a day, six days a week, she supported Australia’s effort in World War II by performing at military barracks and in fund-raising events.

One of her most famed numbers was the song and march ‘A Brown Slouch Hat,’ which was written by George Wallace in 1942 and became an enduring part of the repertoire for brass bands, particularly at Anzac Day parades. By war’s end, Howard and King were financially secure and living at North Bondi.

King’s son, Richard Boughton, and Howard’s sister, Lilian Jane Leary, joined them in Sydney with their families in 1946 and 1949 respectively. Howard continued to travel extensively to perform, playing the Plaza Northcote in March 1950, then touring Korea and Japan in 1954 to entertain Australian armed forces. She cemented her reputation as ‘perhaps the greatest principal boy of her time’ (Bridges 1980, 96) in many Tivoli pantomimes, including Cinderella, Babes in the Wood, Dick Whittington, and Aladdin.

After King died in 1979, she moved to Burleigh Heads on Queensland’s Gold Coast. On 18 September 1984 she married Eric Albert Aitken, a retired businessman, at St John’s Anglican Church, Burleigh Heads; he died the next year. Diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease about 1990, she lived in nursing homes at Coolangatta and then Tweed Heads, where she died on 21 January 1996.

Her ashes were interred next to King’s in Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs Memorial Park, reuniting their famed double act.

Contributed by Greg Lynch -