ABSTRACT
Liverpool’s Prince of Wales Theatre had been in action a little more than a year, and it was the brainchild of a most exceptional man named Alexander Henderson. Like Lydia’s father, Henderson hailed originally from Cumberland. He was born in a little place named Hutton Soil, near Hesket-in-the-Forest, in 1828, the son of the apparently reasonably well-off Robert Henderson and his wife, Sarah née Lancaster. The history of his youthful days remains a little vague, but the family seem to have left the north of England when he was quite young and they eventually installed themselves comfortably in the village of Rylston(e) in Yorkshire.
