Bateman, Hezekiah Linthicum

Bateman, Hezekiah Linthicum (1812-1875), American actor and manager, was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on the 6th of December 1812. He was intended for an engineer, but in 1832 became an actor, playing with Ellen Tree (afterwards Mrs Charles Kean) in juvenile leads. In 1855 he was manager of the St Louis theatre for a few years and in 1859 moved to New York. In 1866 he was manager for his daughter Kate, and in 1871 returned to London, where he took the Lyceum theatre. Here he engaged Henry Irving, presenting him first in The Bells, with great success. He died on the 22nd of March 1875.

His wife, Sidney Frances (1823-1881), daughter of Joseph Cowell, an English actor who had settled in America, was also an actress and the author of several popular plays, in one of which, Self (1857), she and her husband made a great success. After her husband’s death Mrs Bateman continued to manage the Lyceum till 1875. She later took the Sadler’s Wells theatre, which she managed until her death on the 13th of January 1881. She was the first to bring to England an entire American company with an American play, Joaquin Miller’s The Danites.

Mr and Mrs Bateman had eight children, three of the four daughters being educated for the stage. The two oldest, Kate Josephine (b. 1842), and Ellen (b. 1845), known as the “Bateman children,” began their theatrical career at an early age. In 1862 Kate played in New York as Juliet and Lady Macbeth, and in 1863 had a great success in London as Leah in Augustin Daly’s adaptation of Mosenthal’s Deborah. In 1866 she married George Crowe, but returned to the stage in 1868, playing later as Lady Macbeth with Henry Irving, and in 1875 in the title-part of Tennyson’s Queen Mary. When her mother opened the Sadler’s Wells theatre in 1879 Miss Bateman appeared as Helen Macgregor in Rob Roy, and in 1881 as Margaret Field in Henry Arthur Jones’ His Wife. Her daughter, Sidney Crowe (b. 1871), also became an actress. Virginia Bateman (b. 1854), a younger sister of Kate, born in Cincinnati, Ohio, went on the stage as a child, and first appeared in London in the title-part of her mother’s play, Fanchette, in 1871. She created a number of important parts during several seasons at the Lyceum and elsewhere. She married Edward Compton the actor. Another sister was Isabel (b. 1854), well known on the London stage.