Famous Biography

Recently, the Spanish dance troupe called Increpacion Danza staged a production featuring Lola Montez in London which was reported by Times Online. The show included a ‘faux’ sister for Lola called Minnie but clearly they didn’t know that she had a real sister called Catherine Hayes. This is my letter to the Times Online.

Dear Donald Hutera

I read your article with interest because Lola Montez had a real sister called Catherine Hayes. I wrote a comment but I’m not sure if it went through so this is it again:

“Lola Montez had a real twin sister! It was Catherine Hayes, the opera star. Their natural mother was Mary Hayes who was born in Devonshire. Lola was adopted by Eliza Gilbert (nee Eliza Oliver-Green) who was unable to have children. My new book ‘Virtue and Vice’ will detail the evidence.”

I wrote to Increpación Danza a couple of months ago offering to try to promote their show in Ireland but I received no response. I think they should include the character of Catherine Hayes as a singer either of opera or ballads and I’ve one who has learned a particular song for me to promote my book.

I announced at the Frankfurt Book Fair that Catherine Hayes and Lola Montez were twins but I don’t think it was picked up by the press who didn’t visit the Irish stand at all as far as I know. However, I got an interview with a film producer who expressed an interest. The new and true life story of Catherine Hayes and Lola Montez will make an excellent TV series or film far better than any that I’ve seen. I’m interested in selling the TV/Film rights and various foreign translations.

At present, I’m collating my hundreds of research documents and writing up the chapters of the book “Virtue and Vice”. This began as a genealogical exercise to check if Catherine Hayes was one of our ancestors from Limerick. It then developed into a biography of the opera singer and finally , the Lola Montez connection became obvious. This meant a lot more research had to be done into the life of Lola Montez and Bruce Seymour has been helpful to me in this respect.

I’ve also used ‘The Times’ Online archive to help with my research and found one quite interesting account of Mary Hayes having had some of Catherine’s jewellery stolen from her house. This is curious since all of Catherine’s jewellery was supposed to have been left to George Power.

Catherine Hayes and Lola Montez were Twins

The evidence is inescapable that Catherine Hayes (soprano) and Lola Montez (dancer and courtesan) were twins born to Mary Hayes in late 1820. In the biography ‘Virtue and Vice’ the author ( Terence A. Hayes) will be presenting, for the first time in history, the evidence linking the two women. Orders for advance signed limited edition copies can be made from 1 November at

www.suirvista.com

For those of you who love a mystery and solving puzzles, here’s a nice one to be getting on with. Unlike the fictitious Da Vinci Code, this one is for real. The document reproduced below was worth about a million dollars in today’s money to Catherine Hayes. It gave her back control over her assets which had all been transferred to her American husband William Avery Bushnell on their marriage in accordance with English law as it was in 1857.

A lovely and very helpful assistant in the Mairie in Biarritz, spent about an hour of her time getting out the original register of deaths in 1858 and trying to find other information for me from her colleagues. In addition to that, she gave me a free certified copy of the entry. Such a level of service was exceptional in my research although the majority of libraries, archives and others were indeed helpful.

Here is a scanned image of the document which is of course in French which Catherine was fluent in. Your task is to translate and find out what is wrong with it. I’ve given you enough information above to check its validity. One thing which I guess I should tell you because you haven’t got the registers is that entries were signed by the Mayor and only the Mayor for any year I looked at going back to 1790. (I’d already scanned through the registers on microfilm in London before going to France.)

This is the famous document:

Catherine Hayes travelled the world at a time when the bell tolled almost every day at Lloyds in London to signal the loss of yet another ship. She was lucky not to have been lost at sea. She knew the dangers well enough and no one can doubt her courage and determination. The itinerary which follows is one of my working documents and will be expanded with notes in the published text. I thought it might be useful here to indicate those places in the world which she visited and where my biography should be of most interest. Some people may notice that certain dates and places disagree with all other published accounts. This is to be expected because ‘Virtue and Vice’ will be the first true account of her life.

ITINERARY OF WORLD TRAVEL 1839-1860

1839 Limerick - Dublin. Training under Sapio. First public concerts.

1840-1842 Dublin – Belfast – Dublin. Concerts during training.

1842- 1^st Limerick Benefit Concert

1842 Dublin – Paris. Opera training under Garcia.

1842-44 gave at least two public concerts in defiance of Garcia

1844 Paris – Milan. Opera under Ronconi.

1845 Milan – Marseilles 1^st Public Opera Performance.

1846 Milan – Vienna and Venice

1847 Venice- Vienna- Bergamo-Verona-Milan.

1848 Verona-Milan-Florence- Bergamo-Florence-Genoa

1849 Genoa- London. (Bishop Knox died in May 1849)

1849 Tour of England

1849 Tour of Ireland (incl. Waterford)

1850 Tours of England Scotland, Ireland (incl. Waterford)

1850 Dublin – Rome

1851 Rome – London UK Tour (July/August in France)

1851 - Liverpool – New York

1852 New York . Eastern and Southern States. Canada.

P T Barnum’s daughter’s wedding

1852 NY - Panama - San Francisco.

1853 San Francisco – Sacramento-SF- Grass Valley- SF – Chile – Peru

1854 Peru – SF

1854 SF- Hawaii – Australia (Sydney) –Melbourne-Adelaide

1855 Adelaide – Calcutta- Singapore-Java- Melbourne-Sydney.

1856 Australia – England.

1856 Trip to Paris.

1856 Irish Tour

1857 Tours of UK and Ireland. Never returns to S. Ireland again.

1857 Marriage in October. Leaves London for Pau and Biarritz

1858 In France until July. -Hasty return to UK from Bayonne

1859-61. Concerts in UK only until DEATH in August 1861

1860 Trip to Paris for Wieniawski’s wedding.

As a researcher one has to delve into a lot of things. I don’t remember why I looked at the ‘Story of O’ but it has no relevance in the present context.  Q was employed in 1843 by the ‘Morning Post’ in London as their theatre and arts  critic. His real name was Charles G. Rosenberg and he is described in the  North American Review of 1889 as having written ‘a series of brilliant articles on the Theatre and on the Academy (of Arts)’ . He also wrote the book ‘You Have Heard of Them’ which included chapters on Catherine Hayes and Lola Montez.

He actually met Catherine in Paris in September 1843  and not the 1845 or ’46  that he states in the published version of the book which is in the British Library and the Library of Congress. I have copies of the chapter from both libraries and my own copy from a dealer in the USA.  They are all the same but not  the original version!   That was withdrawn at the last minute following objections from Mary Hayes who was in America in 1853 when the proof was produced.  You see, Q was a good critic who liked to get his facts right and he knew Catherine’s real age.  He stated it on page 128  (which is now 129).  You can read the chapter on my site www.suirvista.com/Q  It won’t give you a clue as to what age Catherine was when Q met her.  However, they couldn’t withdraw all the proof copies and  a reviewer had already quoted the paragraph on p.128 with Catherine’s age on it. It agrees with other evidence I found so I believe it to be correct.

Something else you will notice is the spelling of her name  on pages 129 and 130 which is ‘Catherine’ . On the rest of the pages,  it’s the original wrong version ‘Catharine’ and that is also the spelling on the Contents page which has the Chapter commencing on p.128  too. There is another thing about pages 129-130 i.e. they are cut differently from the rest of the chapter. So Mary Hayes didn’t want the world to know when Catherine was really born and she had good reason for that.

Another thing that Q does for research is confirm that Catherine had her own house in Paris and this was something she did anywhere she intended to stay for a lengthy period. She had a house in San Francisco and in Grass Valley too. It was the best solution for privacy and entertaining. At other times, for short stays, they used hotels or enjoyed the hospitality of friends or patrons. 

Rosenberg also noted that Catherine defied Garcia by singing an Irish ballad for which she had to play the music herself because he refused to do so. It showed she was not cowed by authority and went her own way as many a diva does.  He forbade his students to give concerts in public and here again she disobeyed him but that’s another important story.

Remember you read these facts here first. Nobody else has ever before found out much about Catherine’s real life in Paris or anywhere else. In another article, I’ll list some of her friends and describe Paris in the 1840’s.

As far as Catherine Hayes goes, nobody knows more than I do so read the best, forget the rest.

Catherine Hayes has been held out as an example of a virtuous opera singer who was always chaperoned by her mother and never had affairs but come down from the mountain into the real world. Kate was human and enjoyed a sexual life just as Lola Montez did. When I first read a tale of her being involved with the outlaw known as Rattlesnake Dick in San Francisco and Grass Valley, I was inclined to dismiss it.

Her recent biographer, in his detailed chronology of her appearances, didn’t list Grass Valley at all and so I believed him. Then I read the Nevada Journal of April 1853 and there was Kate singing ballads for the miners in and around Grass Valley. She left San Francisco on the 20 March 1853 for ‘a trip into the interior’. She probably rode there with the man who brought the news about Dick and was followed later by her mother and maids in a coach with the baggage. Her manager, Bushnell does not seem to have accompanied them.

I can’t verify the tales but there is a strong possibility that she went there to save her lover from being hanged for stealing a mule. Rattlesnake Dick was in jail at Rattlesnake Bar accused of the crime which was very serious then. A mule could mean life or death for a miner since it was needed to carry all his possessions into the mountains. Anyway, Kate arrived on her horse and Dick was acquitted. My guess is that a message was sent to her in San Francisco and she went post haste to rescue him. In fact, he would have been hanged long before she got there unless they believed she was coming and would pay handsomely to have the charge dropped. Dick was shot dead two years later during a robbery attempt

Don’t rush folks! It’s all worked out and the Hayes family lost every cent of it in the 19^th century.

Catherine Hayes went to Grass Valley, Nevada County, California in March/April 1853. She sang ballads for the miners and they threw gold nuggets on the stage. One of them called Troy went into partnership with her and they bought a claim known as the ‘Kate Hayes and Troy Mine’ . There wasn’t much gold near the surface and it was soon worked out. Troy’s name disappeared from the records and the mine was called the Kate Hayes when the Government Inspectors reported that it was situated directly over an ice age river bed which contained rich gold bearing deposits at a depth of 100 to 150 feet and that it should be worked.

Notices were posted ordering the owners to work the mine according to the law but of course no one responded since Kate Hayes was dead and George Power (the legal owner by virtue of her will) knew nothing about it. Mary Hayes probably knew that her daughter had bought a gold claim but if she received any correspondence from America, she wasn’t going to tell Power and his fellow conspirators. The mine was forfeited to the State and the Court awarded it to four men who had the capital to put it into production. They formed the Kate Hayes Mining Co. which employed over 300 miners and extracted millions of dollars worth of gold into the 1900’s.

According to the Nevada County Historical Society, Kate Hayes St. in Grass Valley and several other topographical features were named in honour of Kate Hayes the singer from Ireland. She may have donated to local causes as was often her custom. She was also a good horse rider who had probably gone out to the remote camps in the hills.

Hash or Rehash?

I’ve an email from a gentleman who said I was doing a rehash of the Catherine Hayes story. I quite agree with him that what has been written by others up to now was a hash i.e. mess up of her true life history. However, I’m not rehashing their efforts. If that was all I had to offer readers, I’d have packed it in years ago. People should know that I started to study Catherine Hayes because there was talk in our family about a great singer from Limerick who was part of our ancestry. So far, I’ve been able to trace my great grandfather to Tipperary which is the next county to Limerick. His father or grandfather might well have moved over the county line. I haven’t yet found the missing links but I sure found out plenty about the life of Catherine Hayes and those who were close to her.

Looking for the Truth

Anyone who undertakes a serious study of the life of Catherine Hayes will be forced to conclude that a lot of rubbish has been written about her. One author admitted to me that his researcher failed to find the records. I’d asked because his book didn’t agree with what I’d seen and copied from the archives . Not that all official or Church records are true. Wealthy and influential people paid to have records lost, altered or replaced when it suited their purpose. The preservation of family honour or obtaining a legacy were very compelling reasons to hide or destroy the truth.

One of the many mysteries surrounding Catherine Hayes is her birth date and parentage. Her mother Mary claims to have been born in Devonshire on the English 1861 and 1871 census returns shown here:

The above is from the 1861 return and below is 1871 when Mary and Henrietta are living together with no servants.

It would appear that Mary Hayes was really born in Devonshire since there can be no transcription error. She was always imaginative about ages  as you can see by comparing the two returns  which are 10 years apart. It’s not clear whether it’s 76 or 70 on the form but a lot nearer the truth than the 50 declared in 1861. It would appear now that Catherine Hayes was  both Anglo-Irish and Church of Ireland.

Catherine Hayes would have been familiar with the 19c arcades in Paris. They were very popular for shopping and socialising since they provided shelter from the elements and a clean tiled floor to walk on. At the height of their popularity, there were over 150 of them providing short cuts linking the streets of central Paris. Some would have been lost in the Haussmann reconstruction which occurred after Catherine Hayes left Paris in 1844 but she would have seen the effects on her later visits which ended in 1860. Relatively few remain today and a selection of those is shown above. Well worth visiting especially on a rainy day.

Most people go to Biarritz to gamble or to enjoy the surfing. You’ll never guess what I was doing there so I’ll tell you.  I was looking for Willy Bushnell’s grave and I spent two weeks  searching every graveyard in Biarritz and Bayonne. I braved mad dogs, the midday sun and wild boar to trace every 19c burial place there is. I suffered cuts and bruises, dehydration and the loss of my precious research papers which were stolen from my car along with my camera and passport.

You may be wondering if I looked in the registers before going on this physically tough tour. I certainly did and they told me that nobody had bought a permanent plot for any Hayes or Bushnell in 1858. Unfortunately, the burial registers run from 1859 only so there was no hope there either.  So I searched and searched tp prove or disprove a point. 

Biarritz is a pleasant place with many Victorian villas still standing  and they are all strictly preserved now by order of the Mayor. I couldn’t pinpoint the precise location of the one  in which Willy died but I found the census showing it was a small place occupied only by the owner, his wife and a 16 year old maid in a poorer quarter of town.

I tried hard but did I find Willy?  Yes and no. All will be revealed in due course.