Ada Crossley

‘Over the Moon’ by H.M. Brock, designed for the front cover of the programs for the D’Oyly Carte Opera Co.’s 1919–1920 season at the Princes Theatre, London. Courtesy of David Lovell.

James Hay, dated 1923. Photographer unknown. British Library, London.

On 1 july 1958, in Brighton, England, a 73-year-old single gentleman passed away in the town’s General Hospital. The death certificate records that he died of cerebral arteriosclerosis, a thickening of the arteries that supply the brain which would have undoubtedly caused a degree of dementia. The fact that the ‘occupier’, a member of the hospital administration, registered the death suggests that no family or friends were there, or even knew of his passing. Furthermore, that the certificate states Occupation Unknown confirms that very little was known about him. No grant of probate was ever recorded, so either his estate was not large enough to need one, or possibly he died intestate.

He was Peter James Hay; an Australian classical singer who had once lived at the swankiest of addresses—a bachelor pad on London’s Pall Mall, had studied with the great Polish tenor Jean de Reszke, had sung with Tetrazzini, and had for a number of years been a principal tenor of the celebrated D’Oyly Carte Opera Company.

There is much we don’t know about his later life or how he came to die in such lonely circumstances in Brighton, but his early life is better documented.

His father, Peter Hay, was a Scottish sheep farmer who had arrived in South Australia in the early 1880s. With his wife Sarah Ann (née Hair) he bought a small farm in Luton near the town of Clare, SA. In that remote rural setting Peter James was born on 21 August 1885. When appearing in The Gentle Shepherdin Scotland many years later, he would recall his early life: ‘My grandfather was a Presbyterian Minister in Edinburgh, but he emigrated to Australia, and there my father took up sheep farming. I remember as a wee laddie minding the sheep, and another recollection which remains with me very clearly is that of my grandfather rocking me on his foot as a tiny child, and singing many of the old airs and melodies reminiscent of the tunes which run through The Gentle Shepherd. I never saw a train until I was fourteen years of age, so you may imagine how remote we were from the busy highways of life.’¹ His father too would sing his young son to sleep with songs of Scotland, something Hay would later acknowledge as the root of his musical ability. ‘I owe all my success to my father, who gave me an appreciation of the best in music, and taught me the right idea of singing.’²  He recalled that his father had a fine tenor voice, and trained his son in the old Scottish folk songs. His guiding principle was expressed in these words: ‘The author of the song is the man who wrote the words.’ Even when Hay was at the height of his career, after years of training, it was noted that he sang with a noticeable Scots burr. It can be heard on the only recording that survives of him singing, a recording of D’Oyly Carte’s HMS Pinafore in which he sings the role of Ralph Rackstraw.

When Hay was 14 years old the family moved to Western Australia, where amongst other musical pursuits, he became a choirboy at Perth Cathedral. ‘On leaving school I went into business, but I used to devote all my spare time, and some of my time that was not spare, to music, the only thing in which I was interested. As a result, I occupied many different positions for only brief spaces of time—much to the annoyance of my father. He died when I had been at work for a year or so, and I found myself obliged to think seriously of my future.’³

His first singing teacher in Perth was a man called Lardeth, thereafter he studied with Mr. J.B. Huntingdon of whom he spoke glowingly in later years, declaring that throughout his subsequent studies in London and Paris and with the great Jean de Reske, ‘no alteration was ever considered necessary in the foundations of the art imparted at this Perth master’s hands.’⁴

Soon after his father’s death, Hay left Perth for Melbourne, but before he went, he gave a final recital at the Boulder Mechanic’s Institute. There was a good ‘front’ house for the concert, but, as the Kalgoorlie Miner reported, ‘the program did not contain the lighter items that appeal to a goldfield’s populace, and consequently there was poor attendance in the back of the hall’⁵ Those that attended certainly couldn’t complain of being short-changed, since the program was astonishingly long, concluding with ‘Take a Pair of Sparkling Eyes’ from The Gondoliers.

Amy Sherwin, dated 1898. Photo by London Stereoscopic and Photographic Company.

State Library of New South Wales, Sydney

Jean de Reszke, photographed by Benque & Co., Paris in 1892

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

Hay arrived in Melbourne with nothing but a letter of introduction and a reputation for being hopeless at business and for wasting his time on music. ‘Then we’ll try you at music,’ said a benevolent Scotsman to whom he was introduced and who soon took him under his wing. ‘I dinna think ye’ll ever dae ower much at business,’ said the old man, ‘but ye micht dae weel at the music.’ ‘I’ll take you to Marshall Hall, and if he says you have a chance of a musical career, I’ll back you for a couple of years till you can make your own living.’ Though Hay acknowledged the help of the generous man numerous times when recounting his career, he never divulged the Scotsman’s name. Marshall Hall’s advice was that he should take up singing professionally and go to Paris to study. Hay replied that he had no money, but the generous Scot provided the necessary financial backing for the crossing.

On the way over to Europe, Hay met the Tasmanian-born operatic soprano Amy Sherwin, with whom he subsequently studied in London for six months. Madame Sherwin had studied with Stockhausen, and Hay later acknowledged her to be a great practical teacher. Moving to Paris he commenced studies with a celebrated French baritone by the name of Monsieur Brouhy, before being taken on as a pupil with Jean de Reszke under whose guidance he remained for eighteen months. Hay recalled the experience: ‘His system, if such it can be called, consisted chiefly in singing a phrase more like an angel, than a human being. “Do it like that” added the great one in French, and of course you did—not! However we used to do operas in his little theatre in the Rue de la Faisanderie, and learned interpretation according to our brain –power. He always threw out the stupid pupils, no matter how fine their voices were.’⁶

Luisa Tetrazzini, 1908. Photo by E.F. Foley, New York.

Boston Public Library, Boston.

Ada Crossley, 1905. Photo by H. Walter Barnett, London.

National Portrait Gallery, London

Returning to England in 1909 he gave a recital at London’s Aeolian Hall which de Reszke had arranged for him. The Daily Telegraph reviewing the concert on 1 December found his performance of an aria from Gluck’s Iphigenia en Tauride ‘rather lacking in dramatic spirit’, but found good taste and delightful charm in his rendering of chansons by Fauré and Debussy. Overall, the recital was deemed to be a success, resulting in numerous subsequent engagements. The first was with the Chappell Ballad Singers, followed by six promenade concerts for Sir Henry Wood at the Queen’s Hall including singing with the Royal Choral Society in Missa Solemnis. On one occasion he was called on to deputise for the indisposed Gerard Elwes in Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius. ‘Next I had the invaluable experience of singing Berlioz’s Faust with Richter and studying oratorio under Rendegger. I then toured with Tetrazzini and Madame Ada Crossley for a couple of years.’⁷

Perhaps it is testament to either his quixotic nature, or to his passion for singing that only a week after his London debut recital at the Aeolian Hall, he travelled all the way to Coleraine, Northern Ireland, to sing in a concert in aid of a local rowing club. Or maybe the fee made the journey worthwhile. He was billed as ‘The New English Tenor’.

Ivor Novello with his mother, Madame Novello-Davies, 1916. Photo by Lallie Charles.

National Portrait Gallery, London

Opera singer Ruby Heyl, 1913. Photo by Matzene, Chicago.

J. Willis Sayre Collection of THeatrical Photographs, University of Washington Libraries

In 1913 we find him taking part in a concert organised by Madame Clara Novello-Davies, to promote the compositions of her son Ivor Novello. Although the newspapers claimed that all the artists taking part in the concert had  been trained by Madame Davies, Hay never acknowledged that he received any tuition from the Welsh Impresaria. Other singers taking part were Ruby Heyl who later had a career in the Chicago Opera Company; Charles Mott, a young English baritone of much promise, and much admired by Elgar, who was tragically killed in action in 1918; and Sara Melita (née Davies) who had sung at the Queen’s Hall Proms with Hay. The Referee found Hay’s rendering of Novello’s song “The Valley” particularly pleasing.⁸ Ivor himself was not at the concert, as he was in America “for the production of his new opera”,⁹ so we cannot be certain whether he and Hay ever met.

Immediately afterwards Hay embarked on his afore-mentioned tour with Madame Tetrazzini. It appears that most of her concerts were in Wales, where she was feted and most rapturously received. When in North Wales, the party stayed at the Pwll-y-crochan Hotel, the finest that Colwyn Bay could offer. The list of guests published by the North Wales Weekly News on August 1 tells us that not only did the great soprano travel with her own maid, Monsieur Tetrazzini was there with his valet, as was James Hay, Esq. of Walton-on-Thames.

‘All this time I had been anxious to go on the stage. So I applied to Mr D’Oyly Carte, of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas. He engaged me, but when I asked him what parts I would play he dashed my hopes. “Parts!” he exclaimed. “When you have never been on the stage before! You start in the chorus.”

‘It was rather a drop for me, but my determination to go on the stage conquered my pride, and I accepted his offer.

‘After a few months I was given a trial as Col. Fairfax in The Yeomen of the Guard, and after that I played parts until March 1915.’

In his later interviews with the press, Hay always said his debut as Fairfax took place in Glasgow in 1912, but as we have seen, unless the company gave him time off to sing for Clara Novello-Davies and Mme Tetrazzini, which is most unlikely, he cannot have joined till the summer of 1913.

We first see him being billed as a company principal in October when he is announced as one of two new tenors expected in Cambridge. The other was Dewey Gibson. Two months later, The Era, in possibly his first review as a principal, as Nanki-Poo in The Mikado at the Borough Theatre, Stratford, East London, reported that ‘Mr James Hay was heard to distinct advantage in the rôle of Nanki-Poo, and he played the persistent lover very successfully.’¹⁰

Between 1913 and 1915, Hay played the roles of Ralph Rackstraw in HMS Pinafore, Earl Tolloller in Iolanthe, Frederic in The Pirates of Penzance, Prince Hilarion in Princess Ida, Nanki-Poo in The Mikado, and Colonel Fairfax in The Yeomen of the Guard.

He left the company in March 1915, but we do not know where he spent the rest of the war years. It seems unlikely that he saw active service. By this time, he had begun a relationship with a wealthy London widow, a multi-millionairess, Stella Ettlinger, many years his senior. It may be that he and Stella fled to safer territories, though their names do not appear on known passenger lists.

Elsie Griffin as Mabel and James Hay as Frederic in Act I of The Pirates of Penzance

Courtesy of David Lovell

Griffin and Hay in Act II of Pirates

Courtesy of David Lovell

The war safely over, Hay returned to D’Oyly Carte in 1919. Richard D’Oyly Carte’s son Rupert had now taken over the running of the company and was firmly wielding a new broom. Rupert began re-costuming and re-designing the operas, launched a West End London repertory season, not at the Savoy but at the larger Princes Theatre (now the Shaftesbury), and created a second company which would tour smaller towns and cities. Hay returned to the principal company, then known as the Repertory Company, and adding Duke of Dunstable in Patience to his roles, he continued to play Ralph, Frederic, Hilarion, Nanki-Poo, and Fairfax. It was a short-lived spell however as in June 1920, he left and returned to Australia to join a new J.C. Williamson company which was being put together to tour Australia with seven of the operas.

Leo Sheffield as Captain Corcoran, Elsie Griffin as Josephine, Frederick Hobbs as Dick Deadeye, James Hay as Ralph Rackstraw and Sydney Granville as Bill Bobstay in HMS Pinafore. Courtesy of David Lovell.

Before he went, he managed to fit in an appearance at the Kings Theatre, Hammersmith, in a production of Audran’s comic opera La Cigalegiven by the Selfridge Operatic and Dramatic Society. The Stage found that ‘as Chevalier Franz de Bornheim, Mr. James Hay showed a tenor of unusual sweetness; his work is accompanied by a good deal of finely-felt singing, and his rendition of “Trifle Not With Love” is extremely fine.’¹¹

Meanwhile in Australia, the Melbourne journal Table Talk reported that ‘Rehearsals for the Gilbert and Sullivan opera season under the J.C. Williamson Ltd. management have already commenced at Her Majesty’s. On the way out from England are Charles R. Walenn, who was such a favourite when he last appeared in the Gilbert and Sullivan opera under the J.C. Williamson management; Gayford Hobbs [i.e. Frederick Hobbs] (baritone), James Hay (tenor). Both of the last-mentioned artists have been figuring with great success in the Gilbert and Sullivan revival in London. Also coming to Australia is Albert Kavanagh, already popular here by his appearance in the role of Popoff in the Clarke and Meynell production of “The Chocolate Soldier.” Others to be included amongst the principals will be Eileen Castles, who achieved great success in Gilbert and Sullivan opera in America; Ethel Morrison, Strella Wilson, and others. The operas will be produced by Minnie Everett, and the conductor will be Gustave Slapoffski.’¹²

Program for HMS Pinfore, Melbourne, 16 October 1920. From JCW Prompt Scrapbook 8, Vol. 4, National Library of Australia, Canberra.

The opening season consisted of productions of The Gondoliers, in which Hay played Marco for the first time, The Mikado, The Yeomen of the Guard, Iolanthe, Patience, HMS Pinafore and The Pirates of Penzance. The tour opened at Her Majesty’s Theatre, Melbourne on Saturday, 7 August 1920, with a performance of The Mikado, before visiting Sydney, Perth, Adelaide, Brisbane, and Toowomba in October 1921. The company then returned to Melbourne by which time Princess Ida and Trial by Jury had been added to the repertory.

The Bulletin, 19 August 1920, p.34

The Bulletin, 10 February 1921, p.34

In most announcements of the tour, Hay was referred to as ‘the new tenor’. It is surprising that more wasn’t made of his Australian roots, although the Sydney Morning Herald reviewing The Mikado, and wrongly calling him a Victorian, at least gave him a glowing notice: ‘To James Hay, a Victorian, came most of the applause. As Nanki Poo his make-up was excellent, and the trueness and sweetness of his voice quickly won favor, which was added to as the entertainment proceeded. His rendering of “A Wandering Minstrel” was delightful.’¹³

James Hay as Hilarion and Sylvia Cecil in the title role of Princess Ida, London

Wilson & Lloyd

James Hay as Frederic and Elsie Griffin as Mabel in The Pirates of Penzance, London

Wilson & Lloyd

At the end of his engagement, Hay returned to London. He frequently recounted the story of an occurrence when he happened to call into Rupert D’Oyly Carte’s office one morning in January 1922 ‘with nothing particular in view, and Pinafore hopelessly in full swing at the Prince’s Theatre. While chatting, a message of despair came through that Derek Oldham had fallen ill, inquiries on all sides had failed, and the day’s matinee would have to be postponed.’ To the amazement of his old friends in the company, Hay was on stage ready in his old costume before the curtain rose. He continued to play Ralph Rackstraw until the end of the season, and soon took over for some performances as Hilarion (in Princess Ida) too. In July he was re-engaged fully as a company principal sharing the tenor roles with Dewey Gibson and Leo Darnton.

The Sphere, 25 November 1922, p.x

In November of that year, in a much reported celebrity Mayfair wedding, he finally married Stella Ettlinger, a wealthy widow fifteen years his senior, following what the papers declared was a 14-year romance. If true, they must have met immediately on his first arrival in London in 1908. On the marriage certificate Hay gave his address as 14 Pall Mall, an address that even on the highest salary that D’Oyly Carte could pay, he could not have possibly afforded. Clearly Stella was supporting him there. She herself lived in nearby fashionable Hertford Street. The marriage took place at Christ Church, Down Street, Mayfair and Lady Dorothy D’Oyly Carte, titled wife of Rupert, and society doyenne attended the wedding.

James Hay, with his bride Mrs Stella Ettlinger, 14 November 1922

From Daily Mirror,15 November 1922, p.11

14 Pall Mall, London

www.rightmove.co.uk

The wedding was widely reported in the national press, with photographs of the happy couple. Their portraits appeared in the society magazine The Sphere,flanking a photo of the Wimbledon Centre Court, currently under construction. The British press were duly congratulatory and respectful. Some of the Australian reports of the wedding were less complimentary: ‘News that James Hay, the Gilbert and Sullivan opera tenor, has married a diamond merchant’s widow worth £40,000 a year, will satisfy Australian friends who found money for sending young Hay to England some years ago. He did very well when at last he got going, and some of his G. and S. performances in his native country were most artistic in all respects. But Nature had given the gentle tenor no physique to speak of. He was on the small side as a stage hero, and, before he left Australia, his sweet tenor had become as hard as a brick, whilst his throat was said to hold out no hope of the voice standing any more hard work. A wife with £40,000 a year should be an easier profession for him than the stage.’¹⁴

Album cover featuring drawing of Bill Bobstay, the Bo’sun’s Mate

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His Master’s Voice factories at Hayes, from an aeroplane

From Opera at Home, The Gramophone Co. Ltd., London, 3rd ed., 1925

During the tour of 1922, and despite having a voice ‘as hard as a brick’, or maybe because of it, Hay returned to London numerous times to record the role of Ralph Rackstraw for HMV. The recording studios were out in Hayes Middlesex and it must have made for long tiring days to get back to wherever the company were playing in time to perform that night. Correspondence has survived between Leyden Colledge, the producer of the recordings for The Gramophone Company and Rupert D’Oyly Carte showing that the two did not always see eye to eye.¹⁵ Rupert was very keen that the singers should all be current members of his company, but Colledge had already rejected Derek Oldham and Dewey Gibson, saying they did not have the right sort of voices for recording. Of Gibson, he claimed ‘the recorders tell me his voice is quite hopeless for our purposes.’ Hay recorded most of the show, however some of the numbers are sung by the tenor Walter Glynne, who was Colledge’s preferred choice for the role. Glynne had replaced Hay in the D’Oyly Carte company back in 1915 when Hay left at the start of the war. Glynne as a singer was clearly happier on the concert platform and did not return to the stage after the war. This recording of Hay as Ralph is the only known one we have of his voice.

For this, his third stint with D’Oyly Carte, Hay remained with the company until June 1923. It is not clear why he left at that point, but possibly Stella had grown unhappy with him being constantly on the road, and demanded more time at the marital home. He was soon signed up however to take part in a new production in Scotland, which alternatively may have been the reason he left.

The Scots poet Allan Ramsay’s pastoral The Gentle Shepherd was an early 18th century ballad opera and often cited as the first Scottish Opera. In London an actor-manager, Nigel Playfair, had revived the fortunes of the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, and in 1920 had produced a much celebrated and admired production of Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera. It was no doubt on the wave of interest caused by this revival that plans were announced to produce Ramsay’s Scottish equivalent, written in 1725, two years before The Beggar’s Opera. The show was staged in Glasgow and Edinburgh in September 1923. The Stagereported that ‘Mr James Hay acts and sings capitally in the title role.’¹⁶ A much-promised West End transfer however never happened, despite favourable notices for the production in Scotland.

The Stage (London), 5 June 1924, p.17

The following year an offer to sing the role of Camille de Rosillon in The Merry Widowenticed him back to the stage, with the added advantage that he could remain at home in London. At that time, most of the roles in Basil Hood and Adrian Ross’s 1907 English version of the show had different names, and the character was then called Camille de Jolidon. The merry widow herself was called Sonia, not Hanna her original name. Such changes might appear unnecessary and bizarre to us today. The show opened at the Lyceum Theatre on 28 May 1924 and ran until the end of November when it closed to allow the Christmas pantomime Ali Baba to take the stage. It starred matinee idol Carl Brisson as Danilo, George Graves as Baron Popoff (Baron Zeta) and Nancie Lovat in the title role. Following the Christmas season the show went out on the road in 1925, but Hay did not go with it.

By 1925 he was back with D’Oyly Carte, but this time as principal tenor with the smaller New Company. This company only toured four operas each year, and stayed only a week in each town, playing smaller towns, and often smaller theatres. It was consequently a more gruelling schedule, and Hay was engaged as the sole principal tenor which meant that he was ‘on’ every night. In 1925 the New Company were performing Patience, Iolanthe, The Mikado and Ruddigore, and Hay accordingly played The Duke of Dunstable, Earl Tolloler, Nanki-Poo and Dick Dauntless. It is probably true to say that the tenor roles in the first two of those operas are not as demanding as those of the latter two; nevertheless it was a punishing tour with more travelling than he had experienced hitherto.

Cast list for the Sydney season of Ruddigore, August 1927. National Library of Australia, Canberra.

Plans were afoot in Australia to mount another J.C. Williamson G&S tour, and in January 1926, Hay left the D’Oyly Carte Company for the last time. Also leaving the New Company to go to Australia with him were contralto Winifred Williamson, soprano Kathleen Anderson, and leading baritones Bernard Manning and Sydney Granville with his wife Anna Bethel.

The tour was to include the first Australian production of Ruddigore, and Hay who had given many performances as Dick Dauntless was given the responsibility of staging it. Ruddigore received its Australian premiere on Thursday, 23 June 1927 at Adelaide’s Theatre Royal.

The Australian premiere of a Gilbert and Sullivan opera was an event of some significance to the nation’s theatregoers, and the production received considerable coverage in the press. Hay gave many interviews prior to the opening, and introduced the country to the opera in a special radio broadcast, which was followed the next night by a transmission of the first act.

The Colemans’ Act 1 set for Ruddigore. Book 07-0028, JCW Scene Books, Theatre Heritage Australia.

The Triad wrote that the production ‘reflects considerable credit upon the efforts of James Hay as producer; because, through his observance of traditional accuracy, we have been able to witness a performance which should pass muster even in the very stronghold of Gilbert and Sullivan—The Savoy itself … James Hay, invoking the shade of Captain Marryat, tripped a most wonderful hornpipe to the noise of a kettle drum heard above a nest of shrilling fifes; the same player’s song about a “Bold Mounseer” was one of the features of the first act.’¹⁷

Of course, no-one who saw the show in Australia had anything to compare it to, so how close it was to the London production we cannot know. Presumably Hay had largely re-created the show he knew from the D’Oyly Carte production, and we assume that the same changes were introduced, principally the new overture by Geoffrey Toye, and the replacement of the Act Two finale with a short reprise of the end of Act One. Robin’s Act Two number ‘Away, Remorse’ remained cut, however we must give Hay credit for re-instating the lovely duet for Rose and Richard—‘The Battle’s Roar is Over’. It’s perhaps not surprising that he restored it, since it’s the tenor’s only romantic music in the piece, and Hay was after all playing the tenor role. He also moved the number from Act One to Act Two. The duet had been cut in the D’Oyly Carte revival, much to the disappointment of G&S lovers all over Britain who wrote in numbers to the press to complain (although it is on the first recording of the show made in 1924).

Sadly few photographs of the production have survived. Probably the costumes were sent over from London, as they were for the other shows. New scenery was designed and painted by W.R. Coleman & W. Coleman Jr. who provided the scenery for many of J.C. Williamson’s productions. As these sets were still in use in the 1940s, we have access to pictures of them. Act One shows a rather strange lighthouse that certainly doesn’t look like anything you would find in Cornwall, and, as others have observed, the cottages look more like the chocolate box Cotswold variety than anything Cornish. Act Two is more traditionally baronial, though the curtained entrance at the back is a peculiarly un-architectural feature.

The Colemans’ Act 2 set for Ruddigore. Book 01-0104, JCW Scene Books, Theatre Heritage Australia.

The complete tour lasted from 3 April 1926 when it opened in Adelaide with The Gondoliers, to the summer of 1928 and included many towns and cities in Australia and New Zealand. By the time the company reached Tasmania in February 1928, it claimed to have travelled over 26,000 miles, ‘a record in the history of theatrical touring’. As well as the usual major Australian cities, and New Zealand, the company also performed in Toowoomba, Armidale, Hobart, Launceston, Geelong, Broken Hill, and Newcastle. Singing every night, plus extensive travelling is a recipe for wrecking voices, and in May 1928 when the G&S company added Lilac Time, the musical comedy about the life of Schubert, to its repertory, the Adelaide Advertiser wrote: ‘Mr James Hay would be the first to grant that the pristine freshness of his tenor voice that has charmed so many thousands in the Gilbert and Sullivan operas has gone, but he still has a serviceable voice, and he has the artistry that enables him to “lift” a scene the moment he appears on the stage. It is a rare gift and its charm is its lack of self-consciousness. From the moment Mr. Hay appeared as Franz von Schober the piece began to sparkle, and if it were more the sparkle and effervescence of sherbet and champagne, there were few to quarrel with it on that score.’¹⁸

Sydney Mail, 7 September 1927, p.10

Clearly Hay’s voice was showing signs of wear and tear from so many years on the road, although it sounded, according to the Perth Sunday Times, that there was life in it yet: ‘The recent operation in Melbourne on the throat of tenor James Hay, of the Gilbert and Sullivan Co., has worked wonders for the singer of “Sparkling Eyes” and other delightful ditties. It was an ex-West Australian medico who suggested to Jimmy that his huskiness could be cured. This was effected in less than 24 hours, J.H. not losing a night’s work.’¹⁹

Hay left the J.C. Williamson company after the performances of Lilac Time in May 1928. By the time the company appeared in Armidale in July Leo Darnton was billed as the leading tenor. Many of the company stayed on for a new contract that would take them on even more punishing one, two and three night visits to such places as Wagga Wagga, Cootamundra, Maitland, Warwick, Maryborough, Rockhampton, as well as return visits to Armidale, Toowoomba, and Geelong.

The Bulletin, 6 May 1926, p.34

Strella Wilson, 1928. Photo by Ruskin, Melbourne.

Flickr

It is to be noted that when Hay left London for Australia in 1926, Stella did not travel with him. Was their marriage already over? Whatever the state of things then, Hay did not appear in any rush to return to the UK, so one can only conclude that to all intents and purposes, it was.

In the second half of 1928 and the early months of 1929 he made numerous radio broadcasts, many with G&S soprano Strella Wilson, returning to a more classical repertoire, and helping to inaugurate a Schubert Festival in Melbourne. He and Wilson also sang together in cinemas before showings of films, a popular practice at that time.

In an interview in April 1929 Hay told his Australian readers that he was preparing to go abroad again, and the Adelaide News reported that he would be passing through Adelaide on the SS Comorin on his way back to England.

We then lose track of him until the following year when he was to be heard in concerts on the radio for the BBC.

In 1932, Hay returned to the stage briefly, when he stepped into the breach to help out an amateur company in Burton-on Trent, Staffordshire, whose Frederic in Pirates had gone down sick. It was a generous gesture, but perhaps a sad last performance for one who had played the role so many times in London’s Princes Theatre, and all over Australia.

Thereafter Hay disappeared from the public’s gaze, as did so many singers in their later years. A surprising number turned to the hospitality profession and took on the management of public houses, but Hay followed a rather different course. It is not till 1946 that we find him in a very different occupation, teaching singing to wayward young boys in what were then called ‘approved’ schools.

And what of Stella? In the late 1920s Stella had left London and bought a large and comfortable mansion called Lindal Mount, on the banks of the Thames at Bray, near Maidenhead, a fashionable market town west of London. 

In 1936 we find Hay living close by at 1 Laburnham Road in Maidenhead. It appears that they could not live together but were never far apart. She continued to call herself Mrs. Ettlinger-Hay until 1938 when she changed her name by deed-poll to Ettlinger-Stewart (Stewart was her maiden name).

During the 1940s, Stella took an apartment in Viceroy Lodge, a fashionable sea-front block in Brighton. Electoral roles show that James Hay lived there with her during 1945.

Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove

Stella’s final Brighton home was at Embassy Court. Many celebrities had apartments in this luxurious Art Deco block  including Terence Rattigan, Rex Harrison and Max Miller.

RIBA, London

The 1939 Register (undertaken at the start of World War II) shows Stella still at Lindal Mount, and Hay now lodging with Albert and Susannah Baker at 187 Hersham Road, in nearby Walton-on-Thames. He is divorced, and describes himself as a musician. It appears that the two continued to live separate lives, though not far away from each other, until astonishingly they appear on a 1945 electoral roll in Brighton living together again at Viceroy Lodge, a fashionable apartment block on the sea-front. Was this an attempt to re-kindle old affections, or a temporary war-time measure of expedience? Whatever, it appears not to have been long-lasting, as the following year Hay took up residence at his final place of employment: Mile Oak Approved School for young offenders where he taught music and singing. Approved schools had been established in 1933 for the residential education and reforming of wayward children, usually boys. Mile Oak took boys of 12–15 years old and was a large forbidding place. Though situated just outside Brighton, on the downs, it was run by the London County Council for the edification of young offenders from the whole of the capital. The teaching staff were resident too and James Hay was provided with his own bungalow in the extensive grounds of the institution.

Early postcard view of Portslade Industrial School, which in 1933 became the Mile Oak Approved School

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The bungalows at Portslade/Mile Oak School, where Hay resided

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A newspaper report in the Norwood News in October 1946 records a rather bizarre and extraordinary event as our last glimpse of Hay in the public eye. ‘On Saturday at the Croydon Youth championship swimming gala held at Central Baths, the voice of Mr. James Hay, formerly principal tenor of the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, interrupted a swimming lesson. The lesson was being given by the boys of the Shiverers Swimming Club, Hove, under the direction of their president, Mr. Carl Wootton, who proved how simple swimming can be once the beginner has the confidence to float. Mr. Hay, mistaking “swimming” for “singing”, launched forth into opera and afterwards introduced his choir of lads, who sang in perfect harmony whilst the Shiverers swam in time. The effect was beautiful, and there was tremendous applause, not only for its perfection but for its originality.’²⁰

The description of this most unusual and original performance gives us a unique last image of Hay.

By the time of his death in 1958, seemingly alone and unknown in Brighton General Hospital, his career appears to have been forgotten. But not in Clare, South Australia. Only a few years earlier an article in the Northern Argus of South Australia had reminded its readers of Clare’s notable past talent as it prepared the program for the South Australia Eisteddfod. Hay was high on the list: ‘Then we remember James Hay of Mintaro, famous operatic singing personality in the great auditoriums of the world with his rich tenor voice.’²¹

The town of Clare was justly proud of its illustrious son.

Endnotes

1. Sunday Post, 26 August 1923, p.16

2. The West Australian, 5 April 1921, p.6

3. The West Australian, 5 April 1921, p.6

4. The West Australian, 5 April 1921, p.6

5. Kalgoorlie Miner, 15 June 1907, p.10

6. Adelaide News, 14 April 1926, p.7

7. Adelaide News, 14 April 1926, p.7

8. The Referee, 15 June 1913, p.5

9. London Evening Standard, 14 June 1913, p.12. According to Sandy Wilson in his book Ivor, the opera referred to was, in fact, an operetta, The Fickle Jade, which he had written for a competition organised by Chappell & Co., the music publishers, who would eventually publish his most famous compositions. He won second prize, but The Fickle Jade was never performed, although some of its melodies appeared in later shows.

10. The Era (London), 3 December 1913, p.15

11. The Stage (London), 3 June 1920, p.16

12. The Referee, 1 December 1920, p.11

13. Sydney Morning Herald, 20 November 1920, p.14

14. The Bulletin, 30 November 1922, p.36

15. Letters between Rupert D'Oyly Carte and Leyden College, 1922, in the collection of Chris Webster

16. The Stage (London), 6 September 1923, p.18

17. The New Triad, Vol. 1, No. 3, 1 October 1927, p.60

18. The Advertiser (Adelaide) 28 May 1928, p.13

19. Sunday Times (Perth) 6 May 1928, p.2

20. Norwood News, 11 October 1946, p.2

21. Northern Argus (Clare), 17 February 1954, p.5

Bibliography

Tony Joseph, The D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, 1875–1982: An unofficial history, Bunthorne Books, Bristol, 1994

Cyril Rollins & R. John Witts, The D’Oyly Carte Opera Company in Gilbert and Sullivan Operas, Michael Joseph Ltd, London, 1961

Raymond Walker, Backdrop to a Legend: The scenic design of the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, Raymond J. Walker, 2018

Robin Wilson & Frederic Lloyd, Gilbert & Sullivan—The D’Oyly Carte Years—The Official Picture History, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1984

Sandy Wilson, Ivor, Michael Joseph, London, 1975

Acknowledgements

David Lovell

George Low

Raymond Walker

Further sources

‘Refrain, audacious tar’from HMS Pinafore—Violet Essex and James Hay (recorded 27 July 1922—conducted by Harry Norris).
Courtesy of Chris Webster.

Bertram mackennal was fascinated by the theatre and theatricals throughout his working life. Australia’s first world-class sculptor was born at Fitzroy, Melbourne in 1863, son of Scottish immigrant parents, his father John Simpson Mackennal becoming an established archtectural sculptor in Australia in the 1860s/70s, and Bertram’s first teacher in his studio.

In 1878 he started studies at the School of Design of the National Gallery of Victoria, where fellow students included another sculptor, Charles Douglas Richardson and artists Tom Roberts, Frederick McCubbin and Rupert Bunny, and in 1881-82 Mackennal, Richardson and Roberts left Melbourne for London.

Bertram Mackennal, 1924. Photo by Walter Stoneman.

National Portrait Gallery, London.

The Lyric Muse, 1888, by Bertram Mackennal

Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

To London and Paris

There the three young men shared a studio and Bertram met several of Britain’s leading sculptors, including Hamo Thorneycroft and Alfred Gilbert, plus members of the emerging group of New Sculptors, including Harry Bates and George Frampton. Australian artists with whom Mackennal socialised in London (and later Paris) included Roberts, Bunny, John Longstaff, Arthur Streeton and ‘Anglo-Australians’ Phil May and Charles Conder.

In 1883 Mackennal studied at the British Museum and started at the Royal Academy schools. His first known work was of his friend and fellow sculptor, Charles Douglas Richardson. During the following five years he left London for Paris, where, probably in 1888, he met and worked in the studio of Auguste Rodin, introduced by the Australian impressionist John Peter Russell.

In 1884 he married Agnes Spooner and the following year their daughter Henrietta was born. In England in 1888 he produced the first of a long line of theatrically-related works, a delightful bronze head of Euterpe, The Lyric Muse. Appropriately she is the muse of poetry and music, joy and pleasure, and is often represented, crowned with flowers, holding an instrument, in this case a lyre.

Head of a Woman [Mary Anderson], 1888, by Bertram Mackennal

Private collection

Mary Anderson as Galatea in Pygmalion and Galatea, 1884. Photo by Henry Van der Weyde, London.

National Portrait Gallery, London

Also in 1888, Mackennal, twenty-five years old, sculpted busts of two great American actresses who were appearing in seasons in London. First came Mary Anderson (1859-1940), who played both Hermione and Perdita in Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Talefor 166 nights at the Lyceum Theatre—by far the longest run of that play, before or since. She was a major celebrity. The Morning Post earlier described her appearance in glowing terms:

Miss Anderson’s beauty is of a Grecian type, with a head of classic contour, finely chiseled features, and a tall statuesque figure, whose Hellenic expression a graceful costume of antique design sets off to best advantage.

Mackennal’s portrait, executed twice,¹ echoes this description, the head confidently modelled. Born at Sacramento, California, as a child Mary Anderson was inspired by Edwin Booth’s Richard III, and her first role was Juliet. She continued with Shakespeare in London, where she became a great favourite. At the time of the sitting for Mackennal, he was working as a designer for the Coalport china company in Shropshire, from where he would visit friends – and work—in London from time to time.

Marble bust of Genevieve Ward, attributed to American sculptor Joel Tanner Hart (1810-1877)

Royal Shakespeare Company collection

Genevieve Ward in Forget-Me-Not, c.1880

From Genevieve Ward: A biographical sketch, Osgood, Boston, 1882

The second great American actress to be sculpted by Mackennal in 1888 was Genevieve Ward(1832-1922), who followed Anderson at the Lyceum in a new play, The Loadstone, specially written for her but unappreciated by the London press.

Born in New York a generation before Anderson, Ward was educated in France and Italy and had career as an opera singer before marrying a Russian aristocrat, Count Guerbel, and switching her attentions to drama. She became famous in England as Lady Macbeth, Volumnia in Coriolanusand Queen Margaret in Richard III.

She toured Australia for Williamson, Garner and Musgrove in 1884-85, opening at the Princess Theatre in Melbourne in Merivale’s comedy Forget-Me-Not, followed by Sydney Grundy’s The Queen’s Favourite, later becoming a celebrated Lady Macbeth.

Finally retiring aged 82, Ward was the first actress to be created DBE. Genevieve Ward’s name appears on the list of Mackennal’s sculptures made by his grandson, Colin Kraay, but its whereabouts is currently unknown.

Return to Melbourne

In 1888, Mackennal and his family returned to Australia so that he could fulfill a commission to execute relief panels for the façade of the Victorian State Parliament.

The fact that Mackennal had made busts of such major theatrical stars as Anderson and Ward may well have given him the credibility to approach others in Melbourne. The sculptor quickly became part of the vibrant artistic and theatrical scene there. In her memoirs, Mackennal’s daughter Henrietta observed:

Life in Melbourne seemed very exciting and my parents met many interesting people. We were living in a colony of artists, writers and theatricals. They told me that there were excellent plays at the Princess Theatre.²

Mackennal rented a small flat and studio on Swanston Street in Melbourne and appears frequently in the letters of the artist Tom Roberts during this time. Arthur Streeton wrote later that while Mackennal was in Australia the sculptor had hosted Bohemian suppers on the last Friday of each month—a young English actress, Janet Achurch, among the guests, as well as Streeton, Conder and Felix Meyer.³

Plaster and terracotta relief of Janet Achurch, c.1890, by Bertram Mackennal

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Janet Achurch as Nora in A Doll’s House, 1890. Photo by Falk [Walter Barnett], Sydney.

State Library of New South Wales, Sydney

It was while living in Swanston Street that Bertram Mackennal created his portrait of Janet Achurch (1854-1916). She was a well-regarded young English actress from a theatrical family. Her first engagement had been with Genevieve Ward’s company in London and her range extended from the Fairy Queen in pantomime to Lady Macbeth. However, it was in the year prior to the creation of Mackennal’s portrait that Achurch became famous—with the opening of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House in London in June 1889.

The actress’s naturalistic portrayal of the proto-feminist Nora created both shock and admiration. Before the opening, Achurch and her husband, the actor Charles Charrington, had signed a two-year contract with the Australian theatrical triumvirate of Williamson, Garner and Musgrove, and it was their future Australian salaries that the couple mortgaged in order to première A Doll’s House in London.

Charrington and Achurch toured Australia and New Zealand from September 1889 to August 1891, becoming closely involved with the artistic communities in both Melbourne and Sydney. Charles Conder met her in Melbourne and according to Table Talk was commissioned to paint her (now untraced, possibly unexecuted) portrait.⁴ The Sydney-based photographer Walter Barnett, another friend of Mackennal, took a number of portrait photographs of her. Arthur Streeton met and became friendly with the actress and her husband—Streeton gave her his painting of Coogee Bay in Sydney. He wrote to Tom Roberts:

... I go and dine at Charringtons, at Woollahra, very often. They are fine people. She is a very artistic woman & all Sydney is running after her now…She is the most earnest professional woman I have ever met.⁵

The reaction of the press in London to this controversial play had filtered quickly to the colonies and the couple and their play already had a contentious reputation when they arrived in Australia. It caused rowdy scenes at the Princess Theatre in Melbourne when it opened on 14 September 1889.⁶

There are three known versions of Mackennal’s portrayal of Janet Achurch.⁷ All are relief portraits. Notable are a number of formal similarities with his later portrait of Sarah Bernhardt. Like the Bernhardt, Mackennal depicted Achurch in profile facing left. The artist’s text and lettering style is similar, inscribed vertically in front of the actress’s face. While the Bernhardt work is executed in low relief, the Achurch portrait is formed and in high relief. There are also differences in the conception of the portraits. Achurch is presented simply as a woman wearing a toga-like garment. Mackennal’s depiction of Bernhardt is more sophisticated, for with her fashionable contemporary dress, symbolic figure and heavy-lidded eyes she is presented as a modern woman.

Mrs Brown Potter, 1901, by Australian artist Theodora Cowan (1868-1949)

Tatler (London), 15 October 1901

Mrs Brown Potter, 1890. Photo by Falk [Walter Barnett], Sydney.

Falk Album, Theatre Heritage Australia

During the same year (1890), Mackennal also made a portrait bust, untraced, of the American actress, Cora Brown Potter (1859-1936), who was also touring Australia for the ‘triumvirate’, with her leading man, Kyrle Bellew (1855-1911). Born in New Orleans to a wealthy family, Mary Cora Urquhart married the New Yorker James Brown Potter in 1877 when she was eighteen. Cora became a leading member of the New York social set, in demand at parties for her beauty and her talent for recitations. In London in the summer of 1886, Mrs Brown Potter met Bellew, an English actor who had previously been a prospector on the Australian goldfields. Leaving her husband, she began a career on the stage with Bellew, a long and successful partnership. Together they undertook extensive world tours and it was while they were in Australia in 1890 that Brown Potter and Bellew met Mackennal.

Although in their dramatic styles the two actresses were quite different—Achurch the modern naturalist, Brown Potter the melodramatic beauty—it is noticeable that in other ways Brown Potter and Achurch had unexpected similarities: their plays and performances were contentious, and both represented the independently-minded ‘New Woman’. Nellie Stewart, a prominent Australian actor-singer of this period, described Brown Potter in her autobiography, My Life’s Story:

Mrs Brown-Potter was very beautiful in her slender and somewhat sinister style, but I don’t suppose that anybody will seriously pretend that she was a great actress.... Her voice, naturally husky… she worked to the point of stridency. She clothed her lithe body in such a way as to give an effect of snakiness. Long before the cinema, she was the first of the vampires.⁸

Table Talk applauded the new Mackennal work: ‘When Mrs Potter’s face is in repose the strength of purpose and determination show more strongly than when the features are softened by a smile, and Mr Mackennal has caught the more lasting expression admirably.’ The same publication later linked Mackennal’s portrait of the American actress to his next commission from a performing artist:

Mrs Brown-Potter’s arrival in Australia found him [Mackennal] an enthusiastic and discerning patron, and the beautiful actress gave him sittings for a bust, into which the young sculptor put some of his best work... After a sojourn in Paris, where Madame Bernhardt was as good as her promise to stand by him, he settled in London, and was invited by Mrs Potter to act as a sort of caretaker-guest for her London home during her absence on her second Australian tour.⁹

Mackennal’s daughter Henrietta recalled this period when her father was a ‘caretaker-guest’:

We arrived in London in early 1894, to stay at the house of the actress Mrs Brown Potter, in Abbey Road, St John’s Wood. It was a strange house, and not really suitable for my father’s work, so from here we had to look for a larger place.¹⁰

It seems likely that this relationship served as a conduit for Mackennal, enabling him to meet and obtain commissions from members of high society and artistic circles when he arrived back in England.

Kyrle Bellew, 1890. Photo by Falk [Walter Barnett], Sydney.

Falk Album, Theatre Heritage Australia

Eugénie Legrand, c.1882. Photo by Albert Naegeli, New York.

Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC

In 1891, still in Australia, Kyrle Bellew’s former wife, the French actress Eugénie Legrand, commissioned an untraced bust from Mackennal. Legrand had been married to Bellew, ‘the handsomest man in Melbourne’, in 1874 very briefly—she left him after twelve hours of honeymoon—but long enough apparently to conceive a son. The wedding between the beautiful couple had been celebrated with great ‘éclat’, according to Table Talk.Her acting career in Australia was substantially over by 1891. The sculptor wrote to Legrand on 3 August from the Hotel Metropole in Sydney:

I expect to begin the work in Melbourne next Monday … I told Madame Bernhardt that you had commissioned me to execute your bust in marble and she was very pleased. Madame has been most kind to me giving me her drawing room as a studio and posing three hours at a time. I should like with your permission to exhibit your bust in the salon at the same time as I do the busts of Madame Bernhardt and Mrs. Potter.¹¹

It is significant that in this letter Mackennal groups all three actresses together and quite clearly at this point intends to exhibit the three together at the Paris Salon.

Sarah Bernhardt in her studio with a self portrait bust, c.1878. Photo by Achille Mélandri, Paris.

National Portrait Gallery, London

Sarah Bernhardt, c.1892-93, by Bertram Mackennal

Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

The French actress Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923) was a bigger star than Anderson, Ward, Achurch or Brown Potter. Like those women, Mackennal not only created portraits of the actress but also socialised with Bernhardt and her company. The sculptor attempted at least three representations—a statuette in role as Cleopatra, a relief and a bust, but only the relief was ever exhibited, the statuette and bust being untraced.¹² It was the bust that was executed first, initially in Melbourne and finished up in Europe. It appears in a photograph of Mackennal’s studio in London c.1898. The surviving bronze relief, now in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, was exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1894.

The ‘Divine Sarah’ was the most celebrated actress of her generation, inspiring the leading writers of her generation to write many of her finest plays.  She was a global superstar who always performed in French. Her voice was ‘a golden bell’, her figure slim, her eyes dark. After her debut with the Comédie Francaise in 1862, she conquered London in 1879, New York in 1880, going on to open her own Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt in Paris in 1899. 

Sarah Bernhardt as Cleopatra, 1891. Photo by Falk [Walter Barnett], Sydney.

Falk Album, Theatre Heritage Australia

Bertram Mackennal’s London studio, with his statue of Circe in the foreground and bust of Bernhardt behind

From The Sketch (London), 29 April 1896

 

She and her company undertook a major tour of Australia in 1891, brought by J.C. Williamson and presenting many of her most famous productions—La Dame aux Camélias,La Tosca,Adriana Lecouvreur,Fedora,Cleopatraand Jeanne d’Arc amongst them. And she gave the world premiere of Pauline Blanchard in Sydney. On a world tour, between May and August, she and her company performed in Honolulu, Samoa, Auckland, Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide, before returning via the USA through Auckland. In Australia, she would play six different roles on consecutive nights, always to packed houses. 

When she first arrived in Sydney harbour, the photographer Walter Barnett and wife Ella boarded her ship prior to disembarkation, signing her up exclusively. Learned from his mother in Melbourne, Barnett spoke French. She sat for Barnett in Sydney and Melbourne and later in London—as she did for Bertram Mackennal. Without fluent French at this stage, it is unclear how Mackennal first met her. It may be that they were introduced by Eugénie Legrand.

However, having met, the first we hear of her relationship with him is that she wrote to the Argus objecting to the fact that Mackennal had only been awarded second place in a public competition organised by the National Gallery of Victoria for his sculpture, The Triumph of Truth.

Marie Tempest as Adele in An Artist’s Model, 1895. Photo by Window & Grove, London.

Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Melba in her garden near Maidenhead with playwright/partner Haddon Chambers (left) and Bertram Mackennal (right). Photo by H. Gude.

Private collection

Back to London

While Mackennal returned to Europe at the urging of Mrs Brown Potter and Sarah Bernhardt, it was not until 1896 that he again produced a portrait of a performing artist. The untraced bust of Marie Tempest (1866-1942) was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1896, and in a review of this exhibition in The Times the critic commented: ‘Mr Bertram Mackennal’s Miss Marie Tempest is a really excellent work.’¹³

Tempest was born Mary Etherington in London and educated in Belgium before studying music in Paris, then vocal at the Royal College of Music in London. Making her stage debut in 1885, she quickly established herself as a star in musical comedy. A friend of Melba, married three times, she toured Australia and New Zealand in 1917 and 1920 taking with her thirteen productions of comedies now long forgotten, it seems. She was created DBE in 1937.

Marie Tempest and her first husband, Alfred Izard, lived close to the Mackennals in St John’s Wood. Henrietta Mackennal wrote about her visits to their home in her memoirs:

Marie Tempest, I remember also visited us at Marlborough Hill. She was to be the leading comedienne of the English stage … She went horse riding most mornings, and often stopped to visit us, tying her horse up to a lamppost right outside our gate … She was not very beautiful, but a fascinating person, and I remember she had the most beautiful hands. Father did a bust of her, and before it was cast, she gave him a packet of letters from her present lover [Cosmo Gordon-Lennox], whom she later married, she begged him to seal them inside the cast where her heart would be. He carried this out, and one wonders whether they are still there today.

Tempest’s biographer Hector Bolitho names Mackennal as a regular guest at her house during this time.¹⁴ It is possible that it was Melba that introduced Mackennal to Tempest. In June 1900, Mackennal told an Australian friend that, for a long time prior to executing her bust, Nellie Melba had been an enormous support to him.

Referring to his success in London, Mackennal said: ‘I owe it all to Melba. She introduced me to all the big people and I held up their walls for years.’¹⁵ One of the ‘big people’ that Mackennal probably was referring to would have been Tempest. Mackennal’s commissioned bust stood in her house alongside copies she owned of his Salome and his Circe.¹⁶ 

In early 1896 Tempest was the leading lady in a musical comedy intriguingly entitled An Artist’s Model and it was while enjoying this success that Tempest commissioned Mackennal to sculpt her.

Another portrait commission that Mackennal probably gained through his connection with Melba is that of Mimi Ronald, née Ettlinger (from Frankfurt-am-Main), the first wife of composer-pianist-conductor Landon Ronald (1873-1938).¹⁷ They married in 1897 and it is likely that Mackennal’s portrait, again lost, dates from around this time. Mimi died in 1932. 

Nellie Melba had met Ronald in 1891, when he was a répétiteur at Covent Garden, becoming her accompanist for many years. We know very little about this portrait, recorded as a bust on Colin Kraay’s list.

Nellie Melba, 1899, by Bertram Mackennal

National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Nellie Melba, 1902. Photo by Walter Barnett.

National Portrait Gallery, London

At the end of the century, Mackennal came to perhaps his most important works in this series, two busts of Nellie Melba (1861-1931), completed in 1899. Had they known each other growing up in Melbourne? As already noted, Melba was the conduit for several of Mackennal’s commissions, including those of Marie Tempest, Mimi Landon Ronald and Ada Crossley. Agnes Murphy, Melba’s secretary and biographer observed:

It had become an established tradition with her to take a house on the River Thames, generally in the vicinity of Marlow, during the summer months…and to this cool retreat she always hurried at the close of her engagements in London, even after the opera... During these terms of river residence Melba did her utmost to make the place attractive for her colleagues in art, and there she loved to entertain them.¹⁸

Mackennal was one of these ‘colleagues in art.’ His daughter recalled:

It was there in Marlborough Hill that I first met Dame Nellie Melba, the great mezzo-soprano [sic] who often visited my parents. One year she took a large house at Henley for the summer, where she entertained. At that time she was always saying that she would like to be buried in the cemetery of the little church of Stoke Poges… In the church she sat and played the organ singing ‘Ave Maria’ in her superb voice… At a later date father completed a bust of her which was for many years on the stairs of the Covent Garden Opera House in London.¹⁹

Interior of Melba’s house at 30, Great Cumberland Place, London. The Mackennal bust may be seen on the left. Photo by W & D Downey, London. State Library Victoria, Melbourne.

Already recognised as the greatest opera singer of her era, in 1898 Melba had recently visited the composer Puccini at his home in Tuscany to study with him his most recent, so far unsuccessful opera, La bohème.²⁰ She performed Mimì in Philadelphia, then at Covent Garden in 1899, the year of Mackennal’s portrait of her, and later that year the diva performed the role at the Metropolitan in New York. Effectively it was Melba who made it the world’s favourite opera.

Melba’s portraits by Mackennal are formal and stately, perhaps reflecting the persona that Melba, now aged 40 and at the height of her career, wished to portray. She had decided that one of the two versions would be bequeathed to the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, her home town, the other to the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden where she reigned supreme. These portraits had a memorial role and it is significant of her esteem for Mackennal that she chose him to execute them. In a letter to the trustees of the National Gallery in Melbourne, printed in The Argus, she focuses on her patronage of the sculptor:

Last year I commissioned Mr Bertram Mackennal, the Australian born sculptor, whose work over here has created so much interest in the last few years, to execute a marble bust of myself with a view to its presentation to the Public Library [sic] of Melbourne. I have now to inform you that the work is finished…and I beg that you, on behalf of the trustees of the Public Library of Melbourne, will accept it from a daughter of the city, as tribute of her unfailing remembrance and affection. The bust, with its pedestal (which in itself is a work of art) will be forwarded to you within the next two or three weeks. May I, in conclusion, express the hope that I am not wholly forgotten in our beloved country.²¹

The version given to Covent Garden still stands at the head of the Grand Staircase—Melba on the left and (until recently) her predecessor the great Adelina Patti on the right. Sadly, in 1970, when an Australian film crew needed to see it, it was dropped, causing the head to be severed from the neck. It has since been repaired.

Of the version in Melbourne, Patricia Fullerton has written (in the Mackennal exhibition catalogue of 2007):

Elevated above eye-level on her pedestal, she looks every bit a prima donna, her imperious gaze surveying an audience before her. With hair swept up, head held high and turned slightly aside, the formality of the composition is softened, giving emphasis to her handsome shoulders emerging from the swirling drapery. A large art-nouveau brooch, in the form of a winged angel with lyre, clasps the knotted drape and draws attention to her throat and chest, alluding to her famed vocal cords and powerful lungs.

Ada Crossley on her marriage to Francis Muecke, 1905. Photo by Walter Barnett.

National Portrait Gallery, London

The portrait bust of another Australian singer, the leading concert contralto Ada Crossley(1871-1929), is also only known of through the list compiled by Colin Kraay. Unfortunately, as with others, it is currently untraced. Henrietta Mackennal says that on occasion Ada Crossley was mistaken for Queen Mary – a clue if the bust is ever to be identified.

Born in 1871 in Gippsland, Victoria, Crossley studied singing in Melbourne, initially traveling the 200 kilometres to her weekly lessons with Fanny Simonsen. Moving to London in 1894, she took further lessons with Sir Charles Santley, then in Paris with the great teacher, Madame Marchesi, who later told an Australian journalist: ‘Miss Crossley has a splendid contralto voice, there is no doubt as to her success. She is very intelligent, a hard worker and I consider her one of my best pupils.’²² 

Successful from her London debut at the Queen’s Hall in 1895, Crossley was much admired by Melba. For religious reasons, she never appeared in opera. It is probable that she also knew Mackennal through the diva. Mackennal’s daughter Henrietta writes of her own close relationship with the singer:

I became very friendly with Ada Crossley, the famous Australian contralto. She married a nose and throat specialist, Francis Muecke, he was best man at my wedding, and they lived near us in London.... Ada Crossley was a retiring type of person, not fond of public life or parties, in fact she even disliked going out alone, therefore she often asked me to go with her, sometimes to dine at the Carlton or the Savoy, then on to a first night or a concert.²³

It seems likely that the Mackennal bust was executed around the time of Crossley’s marriage in London in 1905. Her wedding was attended by over 500, including many London-based Australians. Walter Barnett, another Australian in London, took the formal wedding photography of her.

Salome, 1895, by Bertram Mackennal

 Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

Bertram Mackennal holding his sculpture Salome, c.1895. Photographer unknown.

Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

Mackennal’s Other Theatrical Sculpture

If made in 1905, the Mackennal bust of Crossley is the last of his sculptures of living performers. However, he also made clear his commitment to the performing arts in other ways.

In 1897, Mackennal created one of his best-known works, Salome. This subject had inspired artists throughout the nineteenth century but producing it at the moment he did cannot have been an accident. Oscar Wilde was in prison, in disgrace after being found guilty of ‘indecency and sodomy’, his one-act play Salome, written in French for Sarah Bernhardt, remaining unperformed (indeed banned) in Britain and mocked by the press.

The fact that this was a courageous, perhaps even foolhardy, moment in time for Mackennal to present this piece at the Royal Academy has been overlooked. It calls to mind another moment when censorship had struck, the exhibition of his Circe at the RA in 1891, its riotous base beskirted in case visitors to the show should be corrupted. Wilde’s play was first performed in Paris the year before Mackennal’s work but had to wait until 1905 to be given in England (and until 1933 in Australia).

Mackennal depicts the moment when Salome, naked having performed the ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’ for Herod, thirsting to kiss the mouth of John the Baptist, sword clasped demurely behind her back, now demands her gift from the king: ‘In a silver charger.... the head of Iokanaan [John the Baptist].’²⁴

It is significant that he chose to be photographed later in life with Salome. In this carefully constructed photograph, Mackennal is depicted in an artist’s smock, thoughtfully gazing at one of his most successful theatrical works. A more apt choice for a sculptor who continuously celebrated the world of the performing arts would be hard to imagine.

Circe, 1893, by Bertram Mackennal

National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

The Dancer, 1904, by Bertram Mackennal

Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

There is no evidence that Mackennal was a particular follower of dance, but in 1904 he created his only work in the field, one of his masterpieces, The Dancer.²⁵ By the end of the nineteenth century, ballet had reached a low point, with little in the way of innovation. At the start of the new century, a new star burst on to the scene, the American Isadora Duncan, and it was she that revitalised the genre, working mainly in Paris and London, dancing barefoot and endeavoring to recapture the glories of dance in Ancient Greece.

Mackennal’s Dancer is based on Duncan’s style. The pose is known as ‘épaulement’. While the legs and hips turn to the left, the shoulders and head arch fleetingly in the opposite direction. Rodin’s La Méditation, developed through several versions by the great sculptor between 1881 and 1896, addresses the same artistic goals, albeit more radically, and Mackennal may well have seen one of these in Paris or London.

In 1906, Mackennal was commissioned to create a memorial to Robert Brough (1855-1906), a London-born actor who lived and worked in Australia for the last twenty years of his life. Born into a famous theatrical family, Brough worked initially for D’Oyly Carte’s company, legendary first performers of Gilbert and Sullivan. In 1885, Robert and his actress wife, Florence Trevelyan, travelled to Australia, imported by Williamson, Garner and Musgrove, where they toured comedies.

Over the years they premièred in Australia many of the important playwrights of the day—Pinero, J.M. Barrie and Oscar Wilde amongst them. Brough died of a heart attack mid-season in 1906, the greatest actor-manager Australia had known, according to Beaumont Smith.

Tragedy Enveloping Comedy, c.1906-09, by Bertram Mackennal

National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne—on long-term loan to the Ballarat Fine Art Gallery, Victoria

Robert Brough, c.1894. Photo by Falk [Walter Barnett], Sydney.

Falk Album, Theatre Heritage Australia

Mackennal was to use the Brough memorial’s theme, Tragedy Enveloping Comedy, again in 1911 for another man-of-the-theatre, W.S. Gilbert (1836-1911). He had also used this iconography in Bernhardt’s portrait exhibited in 1894. Gilbert was the writing half of the famous operetta team, Gilbert and Sullivan. His portrait of W.S. Gilbert was not modelled from life. Lady Gilbert commissioned this work as a memorial to her husband and the portrait was placed in All Saint’s, Gilbert’s parish church, near his home at Harrow Weald. It is unknown how Lady Gilbert knew of Mackennal, though both Mary Anderson and Marie Tempest knew Gilbert well and either may have suggested him.

Together Gilbert and Sullivan wrote the Savoy Operas, produced at D’Oyly Carte’s Savoy Theatre in London, their collaboration lasting twenty years. Successful throughout the English-speaking world, Gilbert’s great gift was in writing ingenious, pithy, satirical lyrics that set well to music. Gilbert also wrote straight plays, mostly comedies, before working with Sullivan—including Pygmalion and Galatea (1871), the story of a sculptor who wishes his statue into life as a beautiful young woman, one of Mary Anderson’s most successful roles, and Comedy and Tragedy (1884) written especially for Anderson.²⁶

W.S. Gilbert Memorial, c.1912, by Bertram Mackennal, All Saint’s Church, Harrow Weald. Gilbert & Sullivan Society of Facebook.

Mackennal’s portrait of Gilbert consists of a large portrait in relief in the centre flanked by figures of Comedy and Tragedy. As will have been noted, a recurring theme in Mackennal’s body of sculpture is the iconography of Comedy and Tragedy—the motif appearing both as masks and in figurative form. While this theme was quite common at this time, the repetition throughout his oeuvre might be seen as a motif for Mackennal himself.

The final work of art with a performing arts theme that Mackennal produced was his Shakespeare Memorial, commissioned by Sydney newspaperman Henry Gullett in 1914 (for the bard’s tercentenary) to stand outside the Art Gallery of New South Wales. A major work from the latter part of Mackennal’s career, he perhaps intended it to be a summation of his devotion to theatre and literature. As we have seen, Mackennal had sculpted Shakespearian actors from the earliest days—Mary Anderson, Genevieve Ward, Janet Achurch and Sarah Bernhardt. Surmounted by a full-length figure of Shakespeare, an amalgam of various known portraits of the bard, Mackennal depicted five life-size characters around the base—Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Portia and Falstaff.

Plaster cast of the figure of Shakespeare for the Shakespeare Memorial, 1925, by Bertram Mackennal. Photographer unknown.

Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

Bertram Mackennal modelling a figure for his Shakespeare Memorial, c.1925. Photographer unknown.

Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

Shakespeare Memorial

City of Sydney Archives, Sydney

Shakespeare Memorial (detail) showing Falstaff

City of Sydney Archives, Sydney

Unfortunately, this important public memorial, ‘one of his finest works’ according to William Moore, now rests on the central reservation of the busy highway running from Macquarie Street to the Eastern and Southern suburbs of Sydney.²⁷ A less appropriate place—its back to the majority of the stream of oncoming traffic—for the finale of a great Australian sculptor who embraced the depiction of the theatrical arts would be hard to imagine.

Note

An earlier version of this essay, severely edited, appeared in the catalogue for the major exhibition of Bertram Mackennal’s work at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2007

Acknowledgements

With thanks to Patricia Fullerton, Elisabeth Kumm, Tony Locantro, Meri Machin-Roberts (2007), Michael Magnusson, Sophie Wilson

Endnotes

1. In National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, and terracotta in private collection, Geelong

2. H. Mackennal, The Story of a Royal Sculptor, unpublished and undated, compiled by P. Kraay (1990)

3. Argus (Melbourne), 13 October 1931

4. A. Galbally, Charles Conder: The Last Bohemian, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 2002

5. Arthur Streeton to Tom Roberts, early October 1890, in A. Galbally & A. Gray (eds), Letters from Smike: The Letters of Arthur Streeton 1890-1943, Oxford University Press, Australia, 1989

6. K. Brisbane (ed), Entertaining Australia: The Performing Arts as Cultural History, Currency Press, Sydney, 1991

7. Mackennal’s portraits of Janet Achurch:

i. Bertram Mackennal, Janet Achurch, c.1890, plaster, cast shellac, water-based emulsion paint casting, 57.8 x 47.6 x 8.5cm. National Gallery of Victoria

ii. Bertram Mackennal, Janet Achurch, c.1890, plaster, National Gallery of Australia (I understand that the NGA version was a copy created by Joseph Brown in the 1970s)

iii. Bertram Mackennal, Janet Achurch, 1890 bronze cast, 58.3 x 48.2 x 9.0 cm, Monash University Collection

8. N. Stewart, My Life’s Story, John Sands, Sydney, 1925

9. Table Talk, 18 October 1890 and 3 January 1901

10. H. Mackennal, p.

11. Bertram Mackennal to Eugénie Legrand, 3 August 1891, Lucy Bellew Papers, National Library of Australia

12. Société des Artistes Français, Salon de 1894, Cat. 3335

13. The Times (London), 25 May 1896

14. H. Bolitho, Marie Tempest, Cobden-Sanderson, London, 1936

15. Herald (Melbourne), 13 October 1931

16. Bolitho, p.96

17. E. Cundell, Sir Landon Ronald, in The Dictionary of National Biography 1931-1940, Oxford University Press, London, 1949

18. A. Murphy, Melba: A Biography, Chatto & Windus, London, 1909

19. H. Mackennal, p.13

20. B. & F. Mackenzie, Singers of Australia: From Melba to Sutherland, Lansdowne Press, Melbourne, 1967

21. Argus (Melbourne), 24 October 1899

22. Age (Melbourne), 22 December 1894, quoted in B. & F. Mackenzie

23. H. Mackennal, p.26

24. Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde, Salome, translated from the French by Lord Alfred Douglas, originally published 1894, republished by Dover, New York, 1967

25. Bertram Mackennal, The Dancer, 1904, bronze, 168 x 71 x 69 cm, Art Gallery of New South Wales

26. S. Dark and R. Grey, W.S. Gilbert: His Life and Letters, Methuen, London, 1923

27. W. Moore, The Story of Australian Art, vol. II, Angus & Robertson, 1934

Selected Bibliography

Mary Anderson, A Few Memories, Harper and Brothers, New York, 1895

Ann Blainey, I am Melba: A Biography, Black Inc, Melbourne, 2008

Hector Bolitho, Marie Tempest, Cobden-Sanderson, London, 1936

Katherine Brisbane (ed), Entertaining Australia: The Performing Arts as Cultural History, Currency Press, Sydney, 1991

Deborah Edwards (ed), Bertram Mackennal (catalogue), Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2007

Corille Fraser, Come to Dazzle: Sarah Bernhardt’s Australian Tour, Currency Press/National Library of Australia, Sydney, 1998

Noëlle Guibert (ed), Portrait(s) de Sarah Bernhardt (catalogue), Bibliothêque nationale de France, Paris, 2000

John Hetherington, Melba: A Biography, Faber, Melbourne, 1967

Eric Irvin, Dictionary of the Australian Theatre 1788–1914, Hale and Iremonger, Sydney, 1985

Henrietta Mackennal, The Story of a Royal Sculptor, unpublished and undated memoir, compiled P. Kraay, 1990

Nellie Melba, Melodies and Memories, Thornton Butterworth, London, 1925

William R. Moran (ed), Nellie Melba: A Contemporary Review, Greenwood Press, Westport CT, 1985

Agnes G. Murphy, Melba: A Biography, Doubleday Page, New York, 1909

Roger Neill, Legends: The Art of Walter Barnett, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, 2000

Carol Ockman & Kenneth E. Silver, Sarah Bernhardt: The Art of High Drama (catalogue), The Jewish Museum, New York, 2005

Hal Porter, Stars of Australian Stage and Screen, Rigby, Adelaide, 1965

Joanna Richardson, Sarah Bernhardt and her World, Putnam, New York, 1977

Viola Tait, A Family of Brothers, Heinemann, Melbourne, 1971

Pamela Vestey, Melba: A Family Memoir, Phoebe Publishing, Melbourne, 1996

Genevieve Ward & Richard Whiteing, Both Sides of the Curtain, Cassell, London, 1918