page_title: Kate Rickards
section_title: Descendants
hierarchical_section_title: Kate Rickards / Descendants
caption_attribution_description: English: Portrait of Noni and Madge Rickards, the daughters of Kate Rickards (1862– 1922) and Harry Rickards (1843 – 1911). At the time the girls were both appearing in their father's production of Puss in Boots.
context_page_description: Kate Rickards was an Australian trapeze artist and later a musical theatre actress. Born in Melbourne, she began performing as a trapeze artist in Australia at the age of 11 under the name "Katie Angel" and later toured the United States, England, and South Africa under the management of the British-born vaudeville performer and impresario Harry Rickards. She and Rickards married in 1880, after which she had a career as a musical theatre actress under the name "Kate Leete". Following her retirement from the stage in 1894, she designed costumes for the Rickards shows for several years and devoted herself to charity work. She died at the age of 59 aboard a ship sailing from England to Australia and was buried at sea.
context_section_description: Three of Kate Rickards's four children predeceased her. Edith, her youngest daughter, had died in infancy in 1887. Sydney, her only son, died of scarlet fever in 1892 at the age of eight. In 1913 Kate endowed a cot in the Royal Alexandra Hospital for Children in his memory. Noni, her eldest daughter, died in 1921 at the age of 41, shortly before Kate's last voyage to England. In her youth she had a brief career as a vaudeville singer and comedy actress. She retired from the stage after her marriage in 1905 to Edward H. Maas. The couple had four children, the youngest of whom was born less than a year before her death. Edward Maas was the treasurer of Harry Rickards's Tivoli enterprise and held the advertising rights for the Tivoli theatre programmes which allowed him to build up a substantial publicity business. For a time, he and Noni were also invested in Madame Irene's Salon on Castlereagh Street in Sydney which sold luxury corsets. 
  Kate's surviving daughter, Madge, died in 1928 at the age of 45. Like Noni, she had a brief career as a singer and comedy actress in her youth. In 1909 she married the English singer and character actor, Frank Harwood, in Margate, England where Harry Rickards owned a country house. Harwood, whose real name was Joseph Gibbs, was born in Birmingham in 1873. He had appeared in her father's Tivoli shows in 1904 and for a while after their marriage. However, they spent most of their married life in England. For three and a half years during World War I, Madge was a volunteer nurse at the military hospitals in Bournemouth. She divorced Harwood in 1920 and moved back to Australia with their young son Harry, who later became a famous aviator. In 1923 she married John Broadbent, the owner of a cattle station near Narandera. According to a report in the Narrandera Argus, their romance had begun in England when Broadbent was one of the convalescing soldiers nursed by Madge. Despite the divorce, Kate left a legacy of £5000 to Frank Harwood in her will "as a special mark of affection and esteem." He died in Sydney in 1930.
  Also surviving Kate Rickards were her two older brothers, Frederick and Archibald Aydon, who had gone by the surname Roscow earlier in their lives. In her will Kate instructed her trustees to set aside two sums for investment with the net income going to her brothers during their lifetimes. Frederick Aydon had managed Harry Rickards's Tivoli theatre in Melbourne for many years and was one of the trustees of his estate. He died in Melbourne in 1935. Archibald Aydon spent his life in Nelson, New Zealand where he had a boot-making business and raised a large family that included triplet boys. He died in Nelson in 1929.
caption: The Rickards's daughters, Noni and Madge, in 1901
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