The Savoy Affair

How Mrs. Brown-Potter was bankrupted by the misdeeds of her solicitor.

In July, 1905, popular actress Mrs. Cora Urquhart Brown-Potter was forced to file a petition for bankruptcy following the collapse of her financial affairs due to the mis-dealing of her London solicitor, Mr. Alfred Fossick.

Mrs. Brown-Potter, an American, had come to England in 1886 in the company of her wealthy husband, coffee-broker James Brown Potter. In America, Cora had been a popular socialite, and in England, due to her husband's wealth, she was able to mix with the highest social orders, and was even invited, along with her husband, to spend a weekend at Sandringham in company of the Prince of Wales. When James returned to America, however, Cora, unhappy with her marriage, stayed behind, choosing to give up her assured lavish lifestyle in order to make England her home and take the risk of pursuing a lone career on the stage.

Cora Urquhart Brown-Potter

Her career following that brave decision, however, had been little less than meteoric. Notoriety and a modicum of talent, developed at home in amateur theatricals, were enough to earn her supporting roles which led to a rapidly growing popularity with the public. Consequently, within a few short years she had established herself as one of the favourites of the English stage, and before long was staging and financing her own productions. At this time her stage earnings were regularly exceeding £3,000 per annum (approx £1/4M at 2010 prices).

In August of 1904, she was unquestionably solvent, and, having established herself in England, she purchased five acres of land adjacent to the Thames river at Maidenhead. There she built the stately Bray Lodge, together with stables, as her country retreat when she was not working in London. Shortly after, she extended the holding by purchasing the adjacent properties of "Thamesfield," another riverside property, and "The Den," which stood directly behind her own, raising her overall outlay to around £15,000.

In September of 1904, she took the bold move of entering into stage management and took out a short lease on the Savoy Theatre, where she intended to stage her own productions. It was at around this time that Cora gave complete control of her financial affairs to Fossick, a man with an excellent reputation and whom she trusted completely, having then been her solicitor for the previous two years. It was a decision, however, that she would bitterly come to regret.

Her first instruction to Fossick after taking over the lease the lease of The Savoy was to raise the sum of £10,000 against her Maidenhead properties to finance some plays and to pay off her bank overdraft, which then stood at £5,000. Fossick then informed her that he had found some financial backers who were also prepared to contribute to the cost of her productions. He refused to tell her who they were, referring to them only as 'The Syndicate', and claiming that they did not wish to be identified with the theatrical world. Sensing the advantage of extra backers to defray her own liabilities, Cora authorised Fossick to arrange terms with the syndicate on her behalf.

Her first production at The Savoy was "The Golden Light", a first attempt at play-writing by Cora's own sister, Madame Raoul-Duval (under the pen name of George Daring). Unortunately, it was an unprecedented disaster which closed after only three nights of playing to near empty houses. On it's opening night, the audience sniggered, then laughed, then sat in mute silence as the thing continued to unfold in all it's dreadful inanity. At the end of each act there was no applause, and when the thing finished those who were left filed out in terrible silence. The press were scathing, "So foolish a play has not been produced in London for many a day", said the Daily News; "The piece is rubbish" opined the Westminster Gazette; "Very poorly written" agreed the Telegraph; whilst the Echo neatly summed up the general feeling "Never was a critic's task more delicate and difficult than to discover reasons why this play was ever produced". Others speculated that sororal love had blinded Cora's former good judgement - how else could you explain such a failure of formerly reliable discernment.

If was a harsh lesson, the large array of "emotional gowns" alone, which had been much vaunted beforehand, all designed by top London costumier Madame Lucille (Lady Duff-Gordon), had cost a small fortune. It might have been enough to cause Cora to abandon the idea of management there and then had it not been for the welcome influx of additional funds that she was now receiving from the syndicate.

The next few productions met with limited success, but "Pagliacci", which she produced in December, 1904, was another dismal financial failure which again cost her a considerable sum of money. Consequently, she informed Fossick that she intended to cut her losses and to give up early her lease of the Savoy, which was due to run until 3rd February. Fossick then told her, however, that the syndicate were prepared to take over the running of the theatre, retaining Cora as theatrical manager, in order to produce Richepin's play "Du Barri". Cora objected that this was a very expensive play to produce, but Fossick informed her that the syndicate would not hear of any other. In any case, the syndicate would be responsible for all liabilities incurred by the theatre subsequent to taking over the lease on February 4th. For her part, Cora was to be paid £100 a week plus a certain percentage of profits.

Cora agreed and signed the documents placed before her by Fossick, transferring control of the theatre to the syndicate, on February 4th, 1905, whereupon preparations for the production began. "Du Barri" opened at The Savoy on 18th March and ran, from the start, at a heavy loss. Cora was never payed the promised salary, and when, after the first week, she asked asked Fossick what the syndicate thought of the outcome of the production he replied that they did not care, it was "the fortune of war." After five weeks, however, Fossick informed Cora that the syndicate had run out of money. Rather than put the cast out of work without notice, Cora pledged her own fabulous jewellery in order to continue "Du Barri" for two more weeks at her own expense before closing the theatre. At that time, in order to pay the wages of the artistes and other workers employed at the theatre, she was forced to sell her furniture at Bray Lodge.

Still, Cora was not yet aware of how serious her financial predicatment was until, at just that time, Fossick was accused of misappropriating funds from the account of another of his clients and the whole financial house of cards he had built with Mrs. Brown-Potters affairs suddenly came tumbling down.

First, the owner of the Savoy called in the receiver, having not been paid his dues under the lease which had been continued in her name, not that of the syndicate. Cora then discovered that not only had Fossick not paid off her overdraft with the funds raised from mortgaging her property, as per her instructions, but that he had also raised more than the amount authorised in the form of three additional mortgages of £1,000 each. Furthermore, it then transpired that the syndicate did not actually exist at all, and that the moneys which Fossick had attributed to that source had in fact been stolen from herself and from the estate of another of his clients, Mrs. Agnes Skinner, who had died around a year previously.

Fossick, it appears, had taken a gamble. Aware of the huge profits that could be made from successful theatrical productions, he had gambled on Cora's theatrical know-how to turn a profit and had misappropriated funds entrusted to him to buy a stake in those profits. Had "The Golden Light" been the success he was hoping for he could have replaced the money before anyone was the wiser, and then pocketed the profits. But when it failed the money he had 'invested' was lost and he had no way of replacing it. From that point on he was committed, pouring more good money after bad in the desperate hope that success would come. It didn't, and eventually he had been found out. At his arraignment, in June of that year, Fossick even attempted to implicate Cora in his mis-dealings, claiming that he had never purported to represent any syndicate but that he had openly loaned her the money from Mrs. Skinners estate, despite having no signed I.O.U. or security, with her full knowledge of it's origin. "Yes, it was all Mrs. Brown-Potter's doings," he claimed in court. "I lent her one sum, which was to be paid back in a month, and then I went on lending her other sums in hope of getting it all back."

Unable to raise the funds to settle the debts to which Fossick had left her liable, Cora was forced to file for bankruptcy and to submit to a meeting of Creditors at the London Bankruptcy Court on July 19th, 1904, at which an order of adjudication was entered against her and Mr. S.P. Child, chartered accountant, was appointed as trustee to wind up her estate. Her liabilities were estimated at around £18,000 - not including a further £5,000 in debts attributable to the "Du Barri" play for which Fossick was, at that time, believed to be responsible.

The Bray Lodge estate was put up for sale, but as this was insufficient to discharge the whole of her debts her personal possessions were also put under the auctioneers hammer. Her jewellery was sold at the sale-rooms of Messrs. Debenham, Storr and Son, mostly going to dealers and fetching nothing more than their trade value. The highest price realised was £225 for a magnificent waist ornament of emeralds and brilliants, which was made up of three seperate pieces of jewellery that could be worn independently as waist buckle, brooch and pendant.

An auction of her other possessions was staged on the lawn of Bray Lodge. These included a pair of Shetland ponies which she loved dearly, and a full-length portrait of Mrs. Brown-Potter herself in the role of Milady in "The Three Musketeers" - which was sold for £75 to Mr. Arthur Aldridge, her former private secretary. The sale was well attended, and such was her popularity that there were frequent cries of "give the woman back her home" from well-wishers among the throng. After two days a sum of around £3,000 had been raised, whereupon a large numbers of lots were struck from the sale - the target amount having been reached.

At his trial at the Berkshire Assizes in August, Fossick was found guilty of misappropriating his clients funds and sentenced to five years penal servitude. "You have apparently made away with these large sums of money simply out of desire to benefit these theatrical ventures in which you take an interest. It is just as wrong on your part as it would have been to pay the money on horseracing." explained the judge at his sentencing.

A test case brought by the Partington Advertising Company in respect of some of the debts incurred directly in connection with the "Du Barri" production at first found in Cora's favour, holding her not responsible for the period during which Fossick had, in the person of the supposed syndicate, effectively misrepresented himself as her employer. Despite Fossick's conviction and Cora's complete exoneration of any wrong-doing in that particular matter, however, an appeal on the 15th January overturned the earlier decision, making Cora personally responsible for that debt and opening the way for further claims against her amounting to around £4,000.

In spite of this set-back, on January 26th, 1906, Cora applied for a discharge of the bankruptcy order. The Receiver opposed the application on the grounds that the realised assets of her estate had thus far only discharged around half of the liabilities - especially since the mortgagees of Bray Lodge had not yet succeeded in receiving an offer for the property greater to their indebtedness. The Metropolitan Bank, who were still owed around £3,000, further opposed the discharge on the grounds that Mrs. Potter had brought about her bankruptcy by "rash and hazardous speculation." The Registrar, however, held that it was clear that the failure had not been due to Mrs. Brown-Potter's wrongdoing but was in fact brought about by the misconduct of her solicitor. Under the circumstances therefore, he felt able to grant an immediate order of discharge.

Cora returned to her life as an actress but never fully recovered either her former standing nor her fortune. A few years later she retired from the profession to live with her mother, whom she had brought over from America, in a modest little house at Staines, on the Thames.

Reproduced below is an interview with Mrs. Brown Potter on the play which opened her season at The Savoy and set the whole sorry affair in motion.