London Gossip

Southland Times, Issue 20011, 27 October 1926, Page 13

London Gossip

London, August 30. > A skating enthusiast friend took me along ; the Embankment to Millbank yesterday to see the new building of the London Ice Club. It is a really surprising and wonderful place, and they are hoping to open the club before Christmas. It will be an ice rink equal in size to any in the world, and larger, I believe, than any other in this country. “Although the whole of the club rooms will probably not be finished by Christmas, my reputation depends on the skating floor being ready in November!” Mr Clough, the architect, told me. “The rink will be about four times the size of the Old Princes’, and larger than the big one in New York, so it will mean a good deal of hustling,” he continued. As well as the actual building, which is of red brick, excavation has to be made for the freezing machinery 'under the floor. Iceplanes have also to be kept in readiness to smooth down the ice if the surface is spoilt by bad skaters. Beside the actual ice floor there are to be all the usual rooms of a good club down at the new riverside place. It is not to be merely a skating rink. The powers that be are planning the full equipment of writing, reading and card rooms, with a first-rate restaurant —for skating is hungry and thirsty work! The rink will, I understand, be used for skating only during the winter months. In summer time it will be devoted to dancers. The “success secrets” of stage stars are always interesting to those outside the theatre world. Even though the biggest stars are constantly refuting the idea of there being any magic in their success, many people persist in regarding it as savouring of the miraculous. When I saw Sybil Thorndike the other day she summed up such a secret in a few words, though she herself would probably laugh at the idea of so describing what she said. •‘Outside my own work, I do not like to talk too much,” Miss Thorndike said, when asked to deal with matters entirely extraneous from the theatre. “We have a work to do and we have to give up so much to stick to that.” A real truth of stage success. When Vera Lennox comes to the Shaftesbury in “Just a Kiss,” the musical comedy which is breaking records in the country, she will be speaking to her husband, Arthur Margetson, for the first time on the stage. They have worked together for several seasons, and we remember their marriage at the end of the run of “Kid Boots” as one of the romances of the Winter Garden, but they have never officially spoken to each other before the curtain. “We came back from our honeymoon and started work immediately •on ‘Just a Kiss,’ ’’ Miss Lennox told me when we were discussing the new play. She described it as being a charming musical comedy with, plenty of pep and delightful music in it. “My part of Rita Reynolds, or Miss 1926, is that of a very modern girl, and I work it with Barrie Oliver, the American dancer. The dancing is tricky, but I like it, and the part is different entirely from the work which I have been doing at the Winter Garden.” Helen Daniel, who was singing at the Promenade Concert on Tuesday, and who is only 23 years old, must be the youngest prima donna in the world. Only a few months ago, when the great diva was in Paris, hearing Miss Daniel sing, Melba was so convinced that she had a voice of brilliant promise that she actually coached her herself down at Hatfield for a fortnight during the summer. Having finished her second Promenade Concert, Miss Daniel is going to Strasbourg for a seven months’ season, to be the opera prima donna, under the direction of Albert Carre, for many years at the Opera Comique. Considering her youth, Miss Daniel has had a brilliant career. From her childhood her one ambition was to be a singer, but when she left school she became a teacher in Indiana, “a school inarm,” as they used to be called is those days. She saved all her money so that she could study. Last year she sang with Mary Garden during the season in Paris. “I made my debut in Ferrara, in Italy, in Tagliacci,’ ” said Miss Daniel, when talking with me about her work.

"Usually we have a pasteboard chicken to that production, but on this occasion they gave me a real chicken, and it laid an egg in ; my lap! ' “I was terrified, but my friends told me I what a wonderful piece of luck that was, j and was undoubtedly a good omen. I hope ' it may be!” Muriel Barnby, the actrqss, arrived back from Glastonbury just as I was passing her I house in Smith Square, Westminister. I She has been down in Somerset entertaining a party, where they called her ■Muriel Barnby-Chatter,” because she stood i in the middle of a giant drawing-room chatting about all sorts of people and things. ■ When one of the local inhabitants saw ! the programme announcing Miss Barnby’s j appearance she said, “Pm sick of missionaries!” Nobody knows wh£.