Name Frederick Yates Died 1842 | Education Charterhouse School Children Edmund Yates | |
Frederick Henry Yates (4 February 1797, London – 21 June 1842, 4 Mornington Crescent) was an English actor and theatre manager.
Contents
Life
As the youngest son of Thomas Yates, a tobacco manufacturer, of Thames Street and Russell Square, Frederick was educated at a preparatory school at Winchmore Hill and at Charterhouse School (at the former meeting John Reeve, whom he would later work with) before joining the commissariat department. In that job he was with Wellington in the Peninsular War and possibly at the battle of Waterloo.
When peace came, he met Charles Mathews at a fancy ball before accompanying him on a trip to France in winter 1817/18 and becoming an actor on his advice (his first stage appearance was in Boulogne during the trip). He then appeared at Edinburgh before making his London debut on 7 November 1818 at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, where he remained until 1824/25.
James Rodwell, who was the lessee of the Adelphi Theatre, died in 1824 or 1825, and the lease passed to his brother George Herbert Buonaparte Rodwell; it then came on the market, and Yates with Daniel Terry bought it, at a price of £30,000. They opened it on 10 October 1825 with Killigrew, for which they both were in the cast: it included also Benjamin Wrench, John Reeve, and Fanny Elizabeth Fitzwilliam.
Yates managed the Adelphi until his retirement from management in 1842 (seven years after his patron Mathews' death in 1835). He also co-managed the Caledonian Theatre, later renamed the Adelphi, on Leith Walk in Edinburgh (with William Henry Murray, 1830–31) and the Colosseum in Regent's Park (with John Braham, 1835). He was still acting at the time of his death in 1842, and was buried at St Martin in the Fields.
Family
Yates married the actress Elizabeth Brunton (21 July 1799 – 30 August 1860) in 1823. Their son Edmund Hodgson Yates become a journalist, playwright and novelist.