the latter, Don Ross. She retired in 1938 but made a very successful comeback ten years later with other "old timers" in the show Thanks for the Memory produced by her husband. The show was the centrepiece of the Royal Command Performance in 1948. Her final appearance was on 2 December 1950 at the Empress Theatre, Brixton. She died of cancer on 5 January 1957 in Hampstead, London, aged 69, and is buried in Wigston Cemetery on Welford Rd, Wigston Magna, Leicestershire, which was her husband's birthplace. Some lines of the song "Nellie Dean" are engraved on the gravestone. Legacy In the early 1950s, Frederic Street in Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent, was renamed Gitana Street in her honour; the street leads to the rear of the Theatre Royal in Hanley and the public house now called The Stage Door (at the corner of Gitana Street) was at one time called The Gertie Gitana and it still has her portrait over the door. Her name continues at Gitana's, a public house in Hartshill Road, Stoke-on-Trent. A bench on Edinburgh's Prince Street Gardens has been named in her honour. The inscription reads "A Loving Remembrance of Gertie Gitana Music Hall Artiste" followed by the lyrics "There's An Old Mill By The Stream Nelly Dean". (Note the incorrect spelling of "Nellie".) Her London memorial — "The Nellie Dean" at the corner of Dean Street in Soho (renamed thus in her honour) — at one time had a shrine of her stage memorabilia. In Cockney rhyming slang, Gertie Gitana means a banana. References External links The Potteries - Gertie Gitana - Report and photographs 1887 births 1957 deaths People from Longport, Staffordshire Music hall performers 20th-century English singers 20th-century English women singers