Jimmy Collins, juggler, cinema manager, MBE and war time photographer was a Western Australian whose birth name was James Jones. Mrs James Jones senior, Elizabeth, gave birth to Jimmy in May 1895 in Perth.
He went to school at James Street public school and while there probably met his future juggling partner. Arthur Beal/e known as Bert. According to later newspaper reports Jimmy juggled pot plants as a schoolboy and Arthur probably caught them.
In 1913 when both Bert and Jimmy were 18 years old, they debuted a juggling act for a week at the Tivoli in Perth. Listed as Collins and Beal, the pair were virtually ignored by reviewers.
Later that year they performed for a charity show at Gossells Hall. Their lack of employment led Jimmy to start a carpentry job. However, the pair received a big boost to their career in late 1914 when a comedian called Leonard Nelson decided to run a competition for amateur performers. It was a stunt, but in December, Jimmy and Bert entered the competition and won the most audience applause. They were rewarded with a week-long engagement at the Melrose Theatre under the management of Fullers. They performed with ‘their chests visibly swelled by their success’. Jimmy juggled and Bert provided the comedy.
In 1914 war came. Jimmy was working as a carpenter and Bert as a storeman. Jimmy tried to enlist but was refused due to a hernia. In 1915 he succeeded, citing carpentry as his profession and was sent to France. He was part of the signal corps and was awarded a medal for reattaching a telegraph wire under fire.
According to Jimmy’s later accounts, he remained in England after the war and performed as a juggler. When he returned to Australia in 1919, he and Bert reformed the act and began the long hard haul of a professional career.
As Collins and Beal, the pair performed primarily in Western Australia, but despite local success, they received no offers from the major vaudeville chains. Eventually Jimmy branched out alone as Colino and slowly became very well known in Australian variety circles.
In September 1919, Colino performed at the Bijou in Melbourne. He twirled bayonets, juggled and performed Cinquevalli’s cannon ball trick, catching a cannon ball on the back of his neck. In October he did the same act at the Majestic in Adelaide receiving ‘roaring applause.’ He was billed as the ‘dexterous digger’ and his service in the AIF (Australian Infantry) was prominent in advertising.
After this success, he toured New Zealand for three months returning to Brisbane in February 1920 where he balanced a fair-sized table on his head, juggled tennis racquets and balls and continued with the cannon ball trick. In June he added knife juggling to the act and the parochial Perth papers were comparing him to Cinquevalli.
But Australia was too small for Jimmy, and by the end of 1920 he was on his way to the United States to try the American vaudeville circuit.
The Perth newspapers followed Jimmy’s juggling career closely. For over a decade they regularly updated their readers about his exploits at home and overseas. Jimmy sent them letters; they did interviews and at one stage published a poem praising his juggling prowess. They were Jimmy’s greatest supporters and fans. It’s probable that Jimmy knew many Perth reporters due to family’s ties to the Western Australian city.
According to an extensive interview with the Perth Mirror in August 1921, Jimmy headed from Sydney to Honolulu at Xmas 1920. He performed there and associated with Duke Kahanamoku. In San Francisco, he worked for Pantages where the week’s programme started on Sunday and each day required four or five shows. It was a gruelling schedule, but Jimmy seemed to enjoy it. He noted to the interviewer that in America, ‘pictures’ were intermixed with turns, and predicted that a similar system would soon come to Australia.
Jimmy returned home for ‘family reasons. He added pool cue manipulation to the act, joined with Beck’s company and toured New South Wales. But Jimmy always returned to Western Australia, he was, as the newspaper said, ‘a quiet, happy go lucky sort of a ‘real’ Westralian.’
Unfortunately, in 1921 Jimmy announced his retirement from the stage. The retirement did not last long and by December that year he was performing at the Tivoli in Perth. He remained in his home state for some time.
Most of Western Australia had probably seen Jimmy’s juggling act by March 1922, so he changed it. In fact, he retired Colino the juggler and reappeared at Dr Kena, an illusionist and magician. In Fremantle, Dr Kena performed the ‘sawing a woman in half act.’ It was a very brief sojourn in the world of magic, Dr Kena promptly disappeared after a month of shows at the Town Hall.
It’s possible that they lady being in sawn in two was Henrietta Nicol. Henrietta was an English woman who was also a performer. Henrietta and Jimmy married in November 1921.
In July 1922, they started a long contract with Perry’s Circus, as The Colino Jugglers. Billed as American, the act included balancing billiard cues and was described as ‘amusing’ and ‘delighting’ the audience.
During their stint with Perry’s Henrietta gave birth to their first child. Eventually, they had three. When the contract finished, they returned to the hustle of stage performance, but usually with Jim as a solo. In 1924 he was performing with Fullers ‘dressed in evening clothes he juggled vicious looking daggers, cannonballs, cigarette paper, billiard cues and a Japanese umbrella.’
Jim announced his retirement several times, but the Perth newspapers were sceptical. They knew Jimmy was addicted to the stage.
In July 1924 Jimmy performed for his hometown at the Shaftesbury Theatre. He was ‘the best turn of the evening’. Jimmy juggled balls of various weights, sticks or billiard cues and various common objects. He also balanced them on his nose or forehead. The highlight of his act at this time was balancing, ‘a small table endways on his forehead, and then by a sharp motion caused it to glide down over his head and up to a balancing position again on its other end.’
Later that year, Jimmy and Henrietta left Australia and toured South Africa, Europe and the United States. They spent almost four years overseas before returning to Perth in 1928.
Jimmy played the Apollo in Paris and visited the Moulin Rouge where he stated, ‘the show centres on production’, and commented on the ‘undressed’ performers. He noted the late hours of the cabarets and theatres in Paris and was surprised his act was scheduled past 11pm. He also played at the Casino in Nice and the Alhambra in London.
Jimmy abandoned the Colino name whilst in England. He said that he was being mixed up with another performer named Colino, possibly Coleano the wire walker, another Australian. He returned home as J J Collins, master juggler and toured the country during 1928 and 1929, which were his last years as an active juggler. In 1929 he began filling in as a production manager for the Capitol theatre in Perth, which mixed live shows and movies. The next year he was appointed manager of the Regent Theatre in Sydney. Jimmy had seen the future in film and had altered his career accordingly.
He moved the family to Sydney so he could pursue his management aspirations. He was employed by Hoyts as an early theatre/cinema director and during the 1930s managed the Embassy Theatre and the State Theatre in Sydney.
In 1938, Jimmy was part of the organising committee for the sesquicentenary celebrations, (the 150th anniversary of the landing/invasion of the English in Australia). Jimmy received an MBE, a royal honour, for his work on the event.
Jimmy and Henrietta lived in the eastern suburbs of Sydney during this time with many of the more successful members of the theatre community. It was an area of wealth and privilege, and their three children, Harry, Douglas and Beryl had a very comfortable middle-class lifestyle.
Jimmy continued managing the theatres of Sydney with their mix of live and filmed shows, until the beginning of World War 2, when he became involved in troop entertainment. He organised the Waratah touring group, which included a young Jimmy Wallace, and even designed a portable theatre for the troupe. He was also an official war photographer for the army and reached the rank of Major.
Shortly after the war’s end, Jimmy divorced Henrietta to marry the much younger Eugenie Bickhoff. The affair was probably rather scandalous within the tight knit Sydney theatrical community. Jimmy and Eugenie almost immediately moved to Melbourne where Jimmy worked as a superintendent, having finally given up all connections to the stage. The pair moved to the affluent suburb of Toorak and had a son, Philip.
In later years, the couple retired to the Gold Coast in Queensland where Jimmy died in 1983. Despite his service in the army in two wars, his MBE and his prominence in the juggling community, the Australian press did not note his passing.
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