An Actor’s Twelfth Night Cake

The story as it is told

Robert Baddeley made cakes before he made audiences laugh. So the story goes: a pastry cook who found his way onto the stage and became a comic actor at Drury Lane, one of the great theatres of London. When the time came to make his will, he did not think only of money. He thought of the company he was leaving behind, and of the night that closes the Christmas season.

He set aside £100, the tale says, so that every Twelfth Night the players of Drury Lane would gather in the green room, cut a cake and pour punch, and drink to an old friend who was no longer there. Not once, or for a few years, but for ever. And, the story ends, they do. Each January the cake still comes into the green room, and a company that never knew the man raises a glass to him.

What we can confirm

Twelfth Night, the evening of January 5 or 6 that ends the Christmas season, was a big night in Georgian London. William Hone's Every-Day Book (preface dated May 5, 1826) describes it under January 6. Almost every shop "that offers a halfpenny plain bun to the purchase of a hungry boy" put Twelfth-cakes in its windows. Crowds gathered at the pastry cooks' windows. Boys nailed the coat-tails of onlookers to the window frames or pinned strangers together, and a constable kept the doors clear. At home, a party drew paper "characters" from a hat, and whoever drew No. 1 became king for the night.

Robert Baddeley was a comic actor at Drury Lane. The Gentleman's Magazine for December 1794 printed his obituary in its November death list, under the 20th. It says he was "taken ill on the evening of the 19th, as he was about to dress for the character of Moses in the School for Scandal," and that his will left property to the theatrical fund for "decayed actors." Then comes the cake: "The sum allotted for an annual twelfth-cake is three guineas, expressly to make the future sons and daughters of Thespis remember an old friend and member of the profession over a regale of cake and ale." The writer added that "Baddeley's cake and ale" would "float for ever down the stream of Time with Dogget's coat and badge," another famous bequest.

The clown Joseph Grimaldi saw the custom at work. His memoirs, edited by "Boz" (Charles Dickens) in 1838, quote his own account of Twelfth Night, 1802: "we all assembled in the green-room as usual on that anniversary at Drury Lane Theatre, to eat cake, given by the late Mr. Baddeley, who by his will left three guineas to be spent in the purchase of a Twelfth-cake for the company." The playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who ran the theatre, came in with the Prince of Wales. Sheridan lifted the crown off the cake and offered it to the Prince. The Prince replied that he preferred "the cake to the crown," and he stayed to eat.

Modern accounts add detail from the Drury Lane Theatrical Fund. Its archivist told Atlas Obscura in 2019 that the will invested £100 so that about £3 a year would buy cake, wine and punch for the green room. She read a newspaper report from January 8, 1795 saying the "whimsical legacy was properly fulfilled on Twelfth Night." The London Museum says actors at Drury Lane have been greeted with the cake "for over 200 years." Atlas Obscura reports the ceremony has been missed only 13 times.

The facts

• Obituary: died at his house in Store Street, Bedford Square; taken ill on the 19th while preparing to play Moses; buried on the 27th at St Paul's, Covent Garden; three guineas for "an annual twelfth-cake." Gentleman's Magazine, Dec 1794, vol. 64, p. 1153, archive.org
• Grimaldi's Twelfth Night 1802 account with Sheridan and the Prince of Wales. Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi, ed. Boz (1838), Project Gutenberg 46709
• London Twelfth Night shop scenes and coat-nailing. Hone, Every-Day Book vol. 1, January 6, Project Gutenberg 53275
• £100 investment, Jan 8, 1795 newspaper report, 13 missed years. Atlas Obscura, quoting the Drury Lane Theatrical Fund archivist
• Custom continues at Drury Lane. London Museum

Related: What enters the public domain in 2027

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