Jessie Charlotte 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.
Bond was born in Camden Town, London, the third of five children (and eldest daughter) born to John Bond Jr, a piano maker, and Elizabeth née Simson, a lawyer's daughter. Bond and her siblings were given a musical education, and her mother often took the children to see theatre. When Jessie Bond was a young girl, her family moved to Liverpool, where she grew up. At the age of ten, 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, her piano teacher. The next year, she made her own concert singing debut.
Bond's mother took her to see Ferdinand Alexis Schottländer (d. 1885), the director of a choral society in Liverpool, who she hoped would be able to help Bond's singing career. Schottländer was ten years older than Bond and had travelled, and the teenaged Bond became fascinated by him, breaking off her previous relationship. Under Schottländer's tutelage, Bond's voice developed rapidly. She gave her first public vocal performance in November 1869 at a concert of his pupils, singing "Ah! quel giorno" from Semiramide and a song by her teacher. She soon became the leading contralto soloist at the Seel Street Benedictine Church (now known as St. Peter's Catholic Church) in the same city. Her father's enquiries revealed that Schottländer was a "bad lot", and he forbade any engagement until Bond was older.
On 8 March 1870, by Bond's account, Schottländer abducted the 17-year-old Bond on her way to sing at a church service, took her to a friend's house and forced her to stay the night with him. He convinced her that she was "compromised" and that they must marry. The next day, she was taken to Manchester, where they were married. The marriage was a terrible experience for Bond, and she became pregnant and ill. "He ill-treated both my mind and my body, he denied me every comfort, often I had not even enough to eat. To add to my wretchedness, the inevitable baby was coming. ... He had been violently ill-treating me, I was a broken, pitiful creature." Her family persuaded her to leave him after ten months of marriage. Bond wrote that she contracted smallpox from the doctor who attended her, but she recovered. The baby, Sidney John Arthur Schottländer, was born on 7 May 1871 and died on 18 June 1871, six weeks later. His death certificate states the cause of death as syphilis. The couple lived separately for several years, and Bond finally divorced her husband in 1874. Bond stated in her divorce petition that she had been knowingly infected with a communicable disease by her husband.
After leaving her husband, Bond continued to teach piano and was immediately back on stage singing oratorios, masses and other concerts near Liverpool, with a busy schedule throughout the early 1870s. She gave a recital at St. George's Hall, Liverpool, at the end of January 1871. In November 1871, Mr and Mrs Howard Paul's Benefit at the Queen's Hall, Liverpool, featured J. L. Toole, and "Miss Jessie Bond and Miss Pattie Laverne both sing several new ballads". In 1873, she was the contralto soloist in Mendelssohn's Elijah in Birkenhead and in Handel's Messiah in Liverpool. In 1875 at the Liverpool Institute, she sang in J. L. Hatton's Enchantress. She became friendly with the baritone Charles Santley, who advised her to move to London to study at the Royal Academy of Music. Bond did so, studying with Manuel García and then J. B. Welch, and she continued to sing concerts both in the provinces and in London. For example, in the summer of 1877, she appeared at the Queen's Theatre in London in at least three of the conductor Jules Rivière's promenade concerts and was widely seen throughout Britain into 1878. The impresario Richard D'Oyly Carte first heard her in a concert at St. George's Hall and suggested concert engagements for her.
In May 1878, Bond made her first appearance on the dramatic stage at the age of 25, creating the role of Cousin Hebe in W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan's H.M.S. Pinafore. The role had been written for a veteran performer, Mrs Howard Paul, but Gilbert and Sullivan were unhappy with Mrs. Paul's vocal abilities, which were deteriorating. Finally, with only about a week to go before opening night, Carte hired Bond to play Cousin Hebe. At this stage of her career, Bond was not comfortable with spoken dialogue, and so her character was written out, or given nothing to say, in several scenes. After opening night, however, a portion of the recitative was converted to spoken dialogue, and Bond would have dialogue in all of the remaining roles that she created. She quickly grew to enjoy character acting.
In December 1878, Bond created the part of Maria in After All!, composed by Alfred Cellier, when that companion piece was added to the bill with Pinafore. In late 1879, Bond travelled to America with Gilbert, Sullivan and D'Oyly Carte to give American audiences their first opportunity to see the authentic H.M.S. Pinafore, rather than the pirated versions that had sprung up in American theatres. While in New York City, she created the role of Edith in Gilbert and Sullivan's next opera, The Pirates of Penzance. This was followed by a US tour of Pinafore and Pirates. Just before the American tour, Bond had developed an abscess in her leg. This never fully healed and would be with her throughout her stage career. In her autobiography, she wrote:
The abscess in my ankle was painful and persistent.... Owing to faulty treatment and want of rest my ankle became perfectly stiff, as it is to this day. Of course, I said as little as possible about it, for even partial lameness would spoil my chances on the stage. I doubt if the management ever knew; the public certainly didn't; and those who saw me dancing and capering light-heartedly about the stage for twenty years little thought under what difficulties I did it, and the pain I often suffered.
In fact, the management knew about Bond's abscess, since Sullivan's diary records that both he and Gilbert visited her during her temporary incapacity, and Sullivan paid the doctor's bill.
Back in London, Bond continued to play Edith until Pirates ran its course in April 1881. One of Bond's sisters, Miriam "Neva" Bond (1854–1936), became a D'Oyly Carte Opera Company chorister for approximately twelve years, from 1880 to 1891. Neva created the role of Isabel in the London production of The Pirates of Penzance.