A dough girl in France
Elsie Bierbower born in Columbus, Franklin County, Ohio, on March 16, 1889, daughter of John E. Bierbower and Jane Elizabeth Cockrell
She had been performing since the age of 4 in Vaudeville encouraged by her mother. On Christmas 1899, atthe age of 10, Janis performed at the White House for President William McKinley, even imitating the president.
Her stage name Elsie Janis.
Janis had regularly visited France and England with her mother since 1906. Performing in The Passing Show, a musical revue in London, when the war broke out in August 1914. That autumn , she started singing for British soldiers. She often sailed to England aboard the Lusitania, including a voyage in January 1915, four months before a German submarine sank it. She rejected American neutrality in World War I by singing a song protesting the Lusitania attack, “Where Are You, God?”.
In 1915, Janis’ was still in’ The Passing Show ‘, her opposite in the the show was Basil Hallam Radford, a British actor she’d met in New York two years earlier. Their romance, , came to a tragic end in August 1916, whilst serving as a Captain with a Kite Balloon Section of the Royal Flying Corps in France at the Battle of the Somme. In the afternoon of 20 August 1916 on the Northern part of the Somme battlefield Basil was crewing an observation balloon, watching the German line near the village of Gommecourt, when its steel cable tether snapped, and the balloon, caught in an Easterly wind, began to drift towards enemy lines out of control. To avoid capture, Hallam bailed out of the balloon’s basket but he was obstructed from jumping clear, and fell several hundred feet to his death after his emergency parachute failed to deploy. He was buried at Couin British cemetery
Janis and her mother financed her own tour of France in 1918, which she later called the “most glorious months of my life.” She performed on anything that could be turned into a stage: the backs of pickup trucks, shed roofs, airplane hangars. In Minet-le-Tour, Janis performed in a boxing ring.
Morale-boosting entertainment for overseas soldiers grew as a phenomenon during World War I . the YMCA deployed 1,400 volunteer entertainers to its camps in France, where soldiers took leave — but Janis was the biggest American star to tour France in 1918. During the summer of 1918 Janis spent three weeks in military hospitals, visiting and singing for wounded soldiers. the hospital in Neuilly-Aimes was one of them
in her autobiography, So Far, So Good! Published in 1932 she wrote: “My performance consisted of telling stories filled with hells and damns, singing in a voice that was only mediocre, making the men sing with me, a refined little ditty entitled, ‘Oh, You Dirty Germans, We Wish the Same to You!,’
Janis cheered the AEF on to war throughout spring and summer 1918. General John Pershing, the American commander in France named Janis an honorary general and gave her a Cadillac with an AEF Headquarters logo
By researching Elsie one question came up, will I find German women who entertained the soldiers?
Sources:
The British newspaper archive, CGWC,