Jessie Bond

Jessie Bond (10 January 1853 – 17 June 1942) was an English singer and actress best known for creating the mezzo-soprano soubrette roles in the Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas. She spent twenty years on the stage, the bulk of them with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company.

Musical from an early age, Bond began a concert singing career in Liverpool by 1870. At the age of 17, she entered into a brief, unhappy marriage. After leaving her abusive husband, she continued her concert career and studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London with such famous singing teachers as Manuel García.

At the age of 25, in 1878, Bond began her theatrical career, creating the role of Cousin Hebe in Gilbert and Sullivan's H.M.S. Pinafore, which became an international success. After this, she created roles of increasing importance with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company in a series of successful comic operas, including the title role in Iolanthe (1882), Pitti Sing in The Mikado (1885), Mad Margaret in Ruddigore (1887), Phoebe in The Yeomen of the Guard (1888), Tessa in The Gondoliers (1889) and others.

During the 1890s, she continued performing in the West End for several more years, while being courted by Lewis Ransome, a civil engineer. In 1897, at the age of 44, Bond married Ransome and left the stage. They were happily married for 25 years, moving to Nottinghamshire, where Bond lived the life of a country squire's wife. She also occasionally gave charity concerts and assisted amateur theatre companies. She survived her husband by twenty years, living to the age of 89.

Jessie Charlotte Bond was born in Camden Town, London, the third of five children (and eldest daughter) born to John and Elizabeth Bond. John Bond was a pianomaker who gave his children a musical education. Bond's mother often took the children to see theatre. When Jessie Bond was six, her family moved to Liverpool, where she grew up. At the age of eight, she played a Beethoven piano sonata in a concert. To help with family expenses, Bond taught music as a teenager. At the age of sixteen, she began to study singing, which she much preferred to teaching. The same year, at Hope Hall (now the Everyman Theatre) in Liverpool, she accompanied the music students of professor Isouard Praeger. The next year, she made her own concert singing debut.

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