The French conquest of the West African kingdom of Dahomey in the 1890s brought attention to the role of female African soldiers. Several entrepreneurs saw opportunities in presenting female African troupes of “Dahomey Warriors”, and there were groups, sometimes approaching one hundred warriors, on tour around Europe including the south London resort of Crystal Palace. The group first appeared there in May 1893. The Daily Telegraph said ‘Nothing so original has been seen in England for many a long day’ and the Daily Chronicle noted ‘A strong attraction, both for its novelty and the alacrity with which it displays the drill of a savage army’ whilst the London Standard said it was ‘the sight of the season’ and the Africans were the ‘finest of the races of Africa’. They made four appearances daily and numbered 58 people. On 17 June 1893 the showbusiness weekly the Era noted that they ‘go through their war dance and perform athletic feats with marvellous agility’ (see website page 098). 

At the beginning of 1903, 44 Dahomians were at the Scottish Zoo and Hippodrome in Glasgow. They were in Bradford and Tynemouth in April. There was a report in the Hartlepool Northern Daily Mail on 9 April 1903 that two of them wanted to get married in England.

Thomas Brown, their manager, was accused of taking clothing from seven of the warriors, who gave the officials at Clerkenwell Police Court, London, their address as the Salvation Army shelter in Hackney. The Salvation Army’s Mrs Bramwell Booth had six of the women, ‘some carrying “piccaninnies”’, on the platform at a London meeting in May 1903. She reported that the Army had arranged for the payment of arrears in wages, and passage money to Sierra Leone. She said, ‘they know nothing about fighting, and, prior to their departure from West Africa on their European tour, had followed the peaceful calling of selling bananas’. A report in the Islington Gazette (London) on 4 May 1903 (page 5) also named the women – Bessie Young, Janet Cole, Phyllis Ducose, Victoria Regina, and Eliza Wilkinson – and said they were ‘natives of Sierra Leone’. Brown was ‘a man of colour’. The Liverpool Evening Express of 30 June (page 7) said that Brown was ‘one of their own countrymen’. The London Daily Express of Moday 4 May (page 5) also noted that one of them had died at the Royal Free Hospital, London ‘on Saturday night’ – from pneumonia.

Problems became public when the troupe was in Wakefield, and reported in the Sheffield Daily Telegraph on 30 June 1903 (page 8). The town’s chief constable was instructed to contact the Colonial Office and was told that they were to go to Germany, where ‘a sum of money has been deposited for their passage home’. Thomas Brown— an African—had been with them for over six years, starting as a troupe member when a German named Herbach ran the group and took them to Russia (depositing the funds, in Hamburg, for return passage to Africa). Herbach deserted them and Brown became the manager. The seven warriors were to receive no assistance from the Colonial Office but the Wakefield police sent them to Hull, to be shipped to Hamburg where the cash deposit was held (Leeds Mercury, 3 July 1903, page 5). This was also reported in the Shields Daily News of 4 July 1903 (‘the stranded Dahomey women’).

At the time the women were in Clerkenwell, where their names were noted as Young, Cole, Ducore (sic), Regina, and Wilkinson, they had been to Italy, Germany, Russia, and many English towns. Brown agreed to return their possessions, pay their arrears of wages, and get them to Sierra Leone.

Brown had an advance agent, a person who booked venues and accommodation long before the show travelled on. Probably a Sierra Leonean, J.V. Crowther’s letter of explanation was published in the Wakefield and West Riding Herald on 25 July 1903. He explained Brown’s system, and noted the wage rates were not less than paid to English bar staff and hotel workers. He ended, ‘they are all more clean than the average white person, having a bath daily’. Back in January 1903, Brown, described as the manager of the Dahomey Warriors appearing at the Hippodrome in Liverpool, had been fined one pound plus costs for accommodating four warriors in a cellar in Walker Street. He had explained that he had ‘experienced considerable difficulty in finding accommodation for his people at lodging-houses’. This was reported in the Liverpool Daily Post of 22 January.

Brown may have been the father of a girl born in Nottingham that summer, reported in the Nottingham Evening Post on 13 August 1903—a ‘dusky little stranger’ born in the West African village. She was registered as ‘Maid Marian Brown’.

The seven stranded warriors (with two babies) were only part of the troupe, for a full page advertisement in the Music Hall and Theatre Review of 15 May 1903 (page 320) showed a larger group, ‘the Wild Women of Dahomey’ numbering 42. They had been in Britain since January and were fully booked into 1904. The director of the troupe was ‘Tom Brown’.

Dahomey Warriors continued to appear in Britain—30 were at the Corn Exchange in Newbury (billed as being from the Crystal Palace) in the autumn of 1904.

The African American song-and-dance show In Dahomey opened in London in May 1903, and in 1904 was touring Britain (see this website’s page 001). It was far removed from the almost genuine Dahomey Warriors who were from Africa. Both groups were very popular presentations.

Thomas Brown remains an enigma.

So too does the German showman Herbach, whose name might have been Bach (Herr Bach) but seems to have been a Swiss named Urbach. He is named in a mention of human zoos in Turin, Italy: ‘the Corps of the Amazons, Wild Women of Dahomey. This was a troupe of over 50 people, led by the Swiss entrepreneur Albert Urbach’ who were exhibited in Turin in 1898 (Guido Abbattista and Nicola Labanca, ‘Living Ethnological and Colonial Exhibitions in Liberal and Fascist Italy’ in Pascal Blanchard, Nicholas Bancel and others (eds), Human Zoos. Science and Spectacle in the Age of Colonial Empires (Liverpool University Press, 2008), p 343).