or not, but no further pantomime was produced at the Court for fourteen years until 1895 with the presentation of Dick Whittington. Three years later, Arthur Lawrence was appointed the theatre manager. Starting with Aladdin, it was Lawrence who put the Royal Court firmly in the centre of the panto map. The biggest music hall stars of the day would appear in the Court's "annual". George Robey, Harry Lauder, Little Hetty King as Aladdin Tich, the Three Sisters Levey, and the Poluski Brothers all helped to make the Royal Court's pantomime among the most famous in Britain. With the ownership of the theatre passing to Howard & Wyndhams Ltd at the turn of the century, the growth of pantomime blossomed. Arthur Lawrence quoted in The Liverpudlian, November 1938: In 1906, in Aladdin, I had Hetty King and [Happy Fanny Fields], together with Malcolm Scott and Harry Tate-some combination. I produced at the Court, in twenty-six years, twenty pantomimes. The 1906 panto was the biggest success. We averaged takings of just under £2,000 a week, and that in a theatre supposed to hold no more than about £275 at full capacity. Our pantomimes would run elsewhere for about five years, so Liverpool was thus a pantomime manufacturing centre. 'Happy' Fanny Fields, They were all made here—scenery, dresses, jokes and music, and all. I may mention, also, that we had a stage unsurpassed for its equipment. Every kind of trap ever known on a stage was in being. That pantomime Aladdin was repeated, with almost the same cast, at the Adelphi Theatre in London the following year. "A chorus of over 100 Voices" boasted the posters. A magazine was produced in Liverpool solely devoted to pantomimes. [Fanny Fields] in Aladdin By the 1920s the death of Music Hall was underway, and the Royal Court panto mirrored its decline. Hetty King Gone were the stars with their own personal songs to be replaced by "free" songs that anyone could sing. The Royal Court panto ended, replaced each Christmas by musical comedy, or a visit by the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company. Upon re-opening some years after its fire in 1938, its first Panto was Humpty Dumpty, starring Gene Gerrard, Bobbie Comber, the Tiller Girls, and a cast "of Over 80". The consecutive run of pantomime was not to be, With another World War the Howard and Wyndham's—Babes in the Wood spectacle of pantomime found