George Robey

R.M.S. “Orsova,” October.

Strictly speaking, the quotation should be “A Chiel Amang Ye” (I believe?), but I have deliberately spared you that, and in any case the original conclusion, “takkin’ fishers,” is so inappropriate to the present circumstances that I prefer to leave it abbreviated and intelligible, if it is all the same to you. [1]

Who that has once heard them can ever forget those words of old Geoff. Chaucer’s—those words of old—just a minute—here they are:

“When y-wis klepe dan Moder brae . . .”

and so on? And are they not singularly applicable to the present case, I ask you? That is to say, there is nobody who engages in foreign travel who does not at some time or another—sooner or later—later or sooner—yearn to write home about it to the more fortunate stay-at-homes. When Nim, the son of Shur, left the tent of his fathers for the dug-out of his in-laws way back in B.C. let-me-see, hieroglyphics hastily scribbled with chisel and hammer on granite tablets carried the glad tidings to the world. When Hetty the Hen adventured o’er the road the darkest races of Ethiopia bade their minstrels fashion from her journey a conundrum in vogue to this day. And so the good work goes on, e.g., “America Through the Eyes of a Tortoise,” “Seeing India with a Bandmann,” [2] and other imperishable volumes. These few notes are about Australia—Australia from the theatrical point of view, as it strikes the ordinary average touring English actor (fresh from Sunday night arrivals in Rochdale or Tunbridge Wells and Monday morning meetings at Jonas' corner and other characteristic spots.) With not one reference to the Back Blocks and entirely free from Beating about the Bush. And, first of all, we have to get there.

This is usually done by boat, in my case the “Orsova.” [3] This boat will go down to history as that unit of the Orient fleet which carried Charlie Austin and the Misses Pounds, to say nothing of George Tully and others, to their triumphs "down under.” Many are the anecdotes of these famous folk, related to me by the chief officer, by the purser, and by the skipper himself. This voyage must be very tame by comparison, I'm afraid. That universal look of high expectancy which used to greet me as I entered the smoking-room has now, I notice, died down to a mere glazed recognition. Entertainment is sought in other quarters, notably from the tall slim figure with the thin, keen face of an ascetic enthusiast, and withal a boyish, boisterous sense of fun, regarded, I imagine, with something of suspicion by the staider members of the ship’s company. In great demand, he is equally ready to referee the boxing, to auction the figures of the day's run, to present the prizes to the third-class, to voice the complaints of the passengers, to recite to me, privately, from Browning and Kipling in support of some political tenet, to emerge victorious from the final of the bolster-fighting championship, to rehearse with me a five-scene problem drama he has projected for one of our two distinguished actor-managers, interspersed with tales of touring days in England and South Africa, with Sass and Nelson. A varied and vivid personality. In sum, Mr. Pemberton-Billing. [4]

Colour lithograph by Charles Dixon

Australian National Maritime Museum

British polymath Noel Pemberton Billing

National Portrait Gallery, London

There is that about these sea voyages. One has regular meals and one has the opportunity—so painfully lacking at No. —, Railway Cottages, Chester-le-Street—of mixing with the Nobility, Clergy, and Gentry. That again is not to everybody’s taste. For instance, it didn't suit my friend Alfred, the Shy Comedian. That was not his bill-matter, it was his misfortune. He travelled to Melbourne on board a vessel which had the honour of conveying, in addition to Alf., a Very Great Personage, indeed. I think he was a Viceroy or a Governor-General or perhaps a Potentate. In any case, he was poor Alfred’s downfall. When he and this Magnifico met face to face on a lone expanse, of deck (as they frequently did in spite of all Alfred’s scheming) it taxed the comedian’s resource to the utmost to devise new methods of unconscious avoidance of the august eye. Paroxysms of sneezing and coughing gave way to the good old Refractory Bootlace. The Young Man suddenly arrested by Thrilling Sight Five Hundred Miles out at Sea stunt was much overworked. It was getting poor Alf down, which probably accounts for his entering for the Gents’ Doubles in the Deck Quoits competition, without reckoning up possible consequences. Realisation came later. The Very Great Personage, in genial mood had entered also. Supposing—cold shivers attacked the Shy Comedian's spine at the very thought. The imminence of the draws found Alfred a nervous wreck; to a lady “Committeeman” his repeated inquiries as to whether she had yet made them presented itself as the worst kind of joke shamelessly persisted in. And then, of course, it happened. Alfred and the Duke were drawn together. To be played off at 2.30 and any competitor failing to arrive losing the game. Alfred did not tell me how the episode ended, but I like to picture a grimy comedian emerging at midnight from the stokehold, happy and disqualified.

We go ashore at Toulon. The dramatic possibilities of Toulon appear to be undeveloped. At any rate, judging by the display of bills which recall the theatrical priming of, say, Chislehurst in the sixties. Why should the taste of Toulon be so far behind Paris? Toulon may be the Portsmouth of France, but Mr. Peter Davey would not like the parallel to be extended to its theatrical catering. Naples—where we next stopped—seemed in a worse plight. That is, unless the printing was very, very misleading. We in England are perhaps a little too much influenced by “the poster on the walls.”

The ship is very full, and I think 75 per cent, of its first-class passengers are Australians and New Zealanders returning from holiday at “home.” They appear, most of them, to have spent the bulk of this holiday in London—in West-End theatres. They criticise us very candidly and very intelligently. London acting is more polished than Australian, they tell me—and I thank them most politely, but where are our singers, they ask? They heard very little singing worth calling singing in our revues and musical comedies. In this direction Australia will astonish me (they assure me). I had to explain that our revues and musical comedies are breathless affairs. There is no time for singing in the best of them. Dear souls; I wonder whether the theatre will hold one half of the people who have so eagerly promised to attend our first night. Bless them! and it makes no difference at all that so many of them don't know or won't remember even our names.

We are fortunate in having Dorothy Brunton with us. She is a great favourite “down under”; the demeanour of our fellow-passengers made the telling unnecessary. [5]

Dorothy Brunton. Photo by Bertram Park.

National Library of Australia, Canberra

Colombo. Here is the East, with a Maidenhead and musical comedy setting. My “rickshaw-driver” (I don't suppose this is what they call him) stays his servile trot to pluck the sahib a scarlet flower from the hedgerow. My taxi-driver never did so much for me on the heights of Haverstock Hill. Extending this pretty idea (duly charged for, I suppose, but I got in such a muddle with cents and rupees that I don’t know whether I set him up for life or cast him down to death), would it not add to the amenities of travel if George, taking advantage of a stoppage in the traffic, were to hop off his driver’s seat into a near-by “Lyons,” and bear forth, all steaming, a fragrant cup of tea for his sahib? Even, with the traffic problem growing acuter still, a luncheon at Ludgate, with dinner to follow outside Liverpool Street? Inside a Cingalese interior (into which I shamelessly rubber-necked) I beheld framed upon the wall two highly coloured chromo-lithos of good King Edward in Coronation robes and George Robey in full regalia as the Mayor of Muckemdyke. No doubt the loyal coolie reverently and impartially removes his shoes before daring to contemplate either. The Sahib’s roving eye furthermore noted that in the Public Hall for one week only “Daisy Harcourt, the original singer of ‘Blighty,’ would be supported by those famous all-English artists, the Dandies.” Henry J. Corner, please note.

Edward VII

Heritage images

British comedian, George Robey

National Portrait Gallery, London

Colombo— with its officers’ mess of the Ceylon Police, its Galle Face Hotel, its Prince’s Club—was a particularly green oasis in a rather arid voyage, and we started on our ten days’ run to Fremantle with real regret. 

October 18.—A low-lying dark blur on the port—or is it the starboard bow? The elegantly gowned ladies of the haut monde around me murmur excitedly. A hum of patriotism swelling as the dark blur on the horizon swells, and made articulate at length by the fashion-plate beside me:

“Orstrylia!"

I believe it is.

THE STAGE (London), 29 November 1923, p.19

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Endnotes

Compiled by Robert Morrison

[1] The quotation comes from Scots poet, Robert Burns’ 1789 verse On The Late Captain Grose’s Peregrinations Thro’ Scotland(Collecting The Antiquities of That Kingdom) and occurs in the opening stanza:

Frae Maidenkirk to Johnie Groat’s;-

If there’s a hole in a’ your coats,

I rede you tent it:

A chield’s amang you takin notes,

And, faith, he’ll prent it:

(Ref:http://www.robertburns.org/works/275.shtml )

[2] A pun on the surname of New York-born theatrical impresario, Maurice E. Bandmann (1872–1922) who toured English musical comedy and dramatic companies throughout India and the Far East between 1905 and 1922 from his home-base in Calcutta.  Following his death his companies continued to operate and it was not until the late 1930s that the Bandmann Eastern Circuit and its attendant companies finally closed down. (Ref:https://gthj.ub.uni-muenchen.de/gthj/article/download/5019/4312/6264 )

[3] The Orient liner, RMS Orsova departed from London on 15 September 1923, and arrived in Toulon on 21 September and Naples on 23 September en route to Australia via the Suez Canal.

From The Illustrated London News, 8 September 1923, p.1

A pictorial video of the Orsova and its luxurious on-board appointments may be viewed on YouTube athttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SpGVWRqwWU

[4] Noel Pemberton Billing (1881–1948) was a British aviator, inventor, publisher and politician. He emigrated to Australia in 1923 to establish an acoustic recording studio and record production plant in Melbourne, but ultimately returned to Britain after the failure of the business in 1926, when the new electrical recording systems had supplanted the now out-moded acoustic system.

It was in Australia that he patented a recording system intended to produce laterally-cut disc records with ten times the capacity of existing systems. Billing’s “World Record Controller” fitted onto a standard springwound gramophone, using a progressive gearing system to initially slow the turntable speed from 78 rpm to 33 rpm and then gradually increase rotational speed of the record as it played, so that the linear speed at which the recorded groove passed the needle remained constant. That allowed over ten minutes playing time per 12-inch side of the records, but the high cost of the long-playing discs (10 shillings apiece), the fact that the speed varied, and the complexity of the playback attachment, prevented popular acceptance.

In 1923, Billing set up a disc recording plant under the name World Record (Australia) Limited. The plant was in Bay Street in the Melbourne suburb of Brighton, from where he produced his 78 rpm to 33 rpm discs.

The plant was also the base for radio station 3PB, which he established in August 1925, for the purpose of broadcasting the company’s recordings. It was a limited “manufacturers’ licence”, a type which was only available during the first few years of wireless broadcasting in Australia. 3PB was only on the air for four months.

The first recording made by World Record (Australia) was released in July 1925, and featured Bert Ralton’s Havana Band, then performing at the Esplanade Hotel in the Melbourne suburb of St Kilda.

(Ref: Ralph Powell, Magician or Mountebank—The Mecurial Noel Pemberton Billing—Pioneer of Commercially recorded Sound in Australia; Vjazz, issue 67, August 2015, pp.14–15 [Australian Jazz Museum, Wantirna, Victoria]: https://www.ajm.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/VJAZZ-67-web.pdf )

[5] Melbourne-born actress, Dorothy Brunton (1890–1977) was returning to Australia after an absence of almost two years. She had made her London debut in 1918 appearing as ‘Fan Tan’ in Shanghaiat Drury Lane, and in December, took over the female lead in Soldier Boy at the Apollo Theatre, followed by lead roles in The Bantam, V.C. and Baby Buntingin 1919–20. Dot then returned to Australia to star for J.C. Williamson Ltd. in the local premieres of the musical comedies Yes, Uncle! (in June 1920) Baby Bunting (in December 1920) and Oh, Lady! Lady!!(in June 1921), as well as revivals of her earlier successes High Jinks and So Long Letty, plus Going Up and Irene.

Field Fisher, Dorothy Brunton, William Greene and Alfred Frith in a scene from Baby Bunting (1920). Photo by Monte Luke–Falk studios.

At the conclusion of her Australian tour, Dot left with her mother in early November 1921 to return to London via America, where they visited her brother, Jack in Los Angeles, who was working as a manager at their stepbrother, Robert Brunton’s Studios in Hollywood. 

Robert Brunton was a son of their Scottish father John Brunton’s first marriage in Edinburgh, who had initially followed his father’s profession as a scenic artist in London for some years before being sent to New York with an English theatrical company around 1914. When his engagement was completed he did not return to London, and later found scope for his ability in moving picture studios. His real opportunity came when a coterie of investors financed a film-making venture known as Paralta Plays Inc. and built a studio at Los Angeles, California in 1917. Robert Brunton was appointed manager of it, but due chiefly to a spirit of mutual distrust that developed among the partners, the company did not make a success of the venture. Eventually it was decided to put the plant up at auction in 1918, and Brunton made an offer to buy it at a price in excess of what it was likely to fetch under the hammer, for a small cash payment, and bills for the remainder of the purchase money. This was accepted, and in a few months he turned the proposition into a profitable concern. Brunton did at times interest himself in the production of pictures, but his chief business was to accommodate independent companies and hire out anything necessary to make their films. (Mary Pickford was amongst the Hollywood stars who made films at the Brunton Studios.) In January 1922, Robert Brunton disposed of the business to a syndicate which included T.J. Selznick and Joseph Schenck (the studios later became the site of Paramount Pictures) and left for England with Dorothy intending to establish a similar plant there.

Robert Brunton

IMDB

A glass-walled studio of the silent film era, which allowed for filming in natural sunlight

Wikipmapia

Dot had intended returning to the London stage, but was persuaded by Robert to take a rest with him on the Continent. They set off from Paris, and toured by car from one country to another taking in Amsterdam, Rotterdam and then down to Italy, where Dot revelled in the beautiful theatres in Rome, and saw musical comedy in Venice. The period of rest and comradeship came to an end, however, with the sudden death of her stepbrother in London on 7 March 1923 and, grief-stricken, Dot turned her back on Europe and found refuge for a time in Florida with her brother, Jack (who now managed the Miami Studios built by the Curtiss Airplane Co.), where she was eventually persuaded to return to the stage again. She thus played for a time in Tons of Money in London, where she was subsequently engaged by Hugh J. Ward for his Australian production.

Although Dot had previously appeared under Hugh J. Ward’s auspices during his tenure as joint Managing Director for JCW from 1911, Tons of Money marked her first appearance for Ward after his resignation from The Firm (following its take over by the Tait Brothers in 1920) to form Hugh J. Ward Theatres Ltd. in partnership with Sir Ben and John Fuller in 1922. 

(Refs.: Australian Dictionary of Biography—https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/brunton-christine-dorothy-dot-9608 ; AusStage—https://www.ausstage.edu.au/pages/contributor/235609 ; Table Talk (Melbourne), Thursday, 15 September 1921, p.41—http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article146317421 ; The Herald (Melbourne) Saturday, 7 January 1922, p.16—http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article243632442 ; Wikimapia—http://wikimapia.org/7351995/Former-Paralta-Studios-Robert-Brunton-Studios-United-Studios-Historical-site & The Age (Melbourne), Tuesday, 23 October 1923, p.9—http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article243632442)

To be continued

Syria Lamonte. Photo by Hana, London. Thanks to John Culme for restoring this cabinet card.

So little seemsto have been known about this pioneering recording artist. In his memoirs of 1947, Fred Gaisberg, the American recording engineer who had come over to set up the first London studio—at 31 Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, in 1898, for The Gramophone Company—wrote:

The autumn of ’98 saw me making the first records in London … As [the music hall artists’] rendezvous was Rules in Maiden Lane, next door to the premises we had taken as a recording studio, [Bert] Sheppard brought his companions to us to be amused and this served to give us contact with the greatest artists of the then flourishing music-hall world.¹

Then in a later conversation (in 1949) with Brian Rust, Gaisberg added:

I remember Syria Lamonte. She was an entertainer: I suppose she must have served drinks—in Rules, the pub next door to the first recording studio in Maiden Lane. She was the first artist I recorded, I’m sure of that… she had a big voice, and that was what we wanted.²

So what does that tell us about her? A “barmaid” at Rules? A singer who had made one of, possibly the earliest studio recordings in Europe? At some stage it was suggested that she was Australian. But was she really? Who exactly was this mystery woman?

In July 2009, the search for Syria Lamonte was set in motion by an email from Rob Morrison in Melbourne. Attached was a letter he had received from the doyen of Australian collector-researchers, Peter Burgis. In the course of one paragraph on Lamonte, Burgis refers to her as a “Melbourne soprano” and also a “Sydney soprano”. And in a letter to For the Record magazine (Spring 2008), Peter Adamson of St. Andrews University asks, “So was Syria Lamonte perhaps Australian?”

Quite quickly a group of interested individuals³started the search for her. Given the growth of the online newspaper database, TROVE, by the National Library of Australia, assembling her early career turned out to be a relatively straightforward matter.⁴She first appears in March 1892, performing with the touring theatre company from England of Mrs Bernard Beere in Melbourne. Then singing the coloratura aria “Regnava nel silenzio” from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor and Trotère’s “In Old Madrid” at the first of several concerts at the Rotunda Hall, Bourke Street.

By March the following year she was touring Victoria and South Australia (venturing as far as Broken Hill in New South Wales) with Gourlay, Walton and Shine’s Musical Comedy Company in G.R. Sims’s Skipped by the Light of the Moon, the singing of Syria Lamont (without the e) “much admired”. By September she was back in Melbourne performing at a benefit for the unemployed stagehands of Melbourne theatres.     

By January 1894 Syria Lamont was a leading member of the Melbourne-based touring Austral Opera Company, recently formed by two English-born singers, tenor Charles Saunders and baritone William D’Ensem. Initially they gave Benedict’s The Lily of Killarney and Dibdin’s The Waterman, interspersing these performances with “sacred recitals”. Later in their tour of Victorian towns, the company introduced Balfe’s Dolores (with Lamont in the title role). Throughout that tour, Syria Lamont was praised by local newspapers as young, beautiful and an excellent singer.

Harry Rickards, c.1893. Photo by Falk Studios, Sydney.

Falk Album, Falk 126/7, Theatre Heritage Australia

Oxford Music Hall, London,  c.1900

Theatres Trust, London

Early in 1895, Syria performed at Melbourne Opera House in a benefit for Mrs Edouin Bryer and by April she was making her debut season in Sydney (with William D’Ensem) in vaudeville for Harry Rickards at the Tivoli. By this time, Miss Lamont had become Lamonte. In June she sang at another benefit, this time a farewell, at the Lyceum for the celebrated English singer who had settled in Sydney, Emily Soldene (1838-1912). The audience included most of the great and good of the city.

By August Syria Lamonte had left the Rickards company at the Tivoli and had joined Williamson and Musgrove’s Royal Comic Opera Company, initially performing in Brisbane in Ross and Leader’s musical comedy In Town. They followed this up at the Lyceum in Sydney with Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado, Syria Lamonte as one of the “little maids”, but by January the following year she was back in Melbourne with Harry Rickards’s company at the Opera House.

In May 1896, Syria Lamonte was reported as having sailed the previous month to London “to complete her musical studies under Marchesi”. Whether her target was Mathilde Marchesi, Nellie Melba’s teacher in Paris, or Mathilde’s daughter Blanche in London, is not clear—and there is no indication (thus far) that this ambition was ever fulfilled.

Arriving in London, she seems to have been offered a part in Wagner’s Lohengrin in Berlin and at the same time a three-year contract with the Tivoli and Oxford music-halls. She seems, not unnaturally, to have taken up the latter, the London Stage reporting that she had “a true, sweet soprano voice of much flexibility and good range, and her singing [of Ganz’s ‘Sing, Sweet Bird’] is something to be enjoyed.” She was in exalted company at these halls, the other artists including Vesta Tilley, Katie Lawrence, R.G. Knowles and James Fawn.

Fred Gaisberg

EMI Archive Trust

George Robey in the early 1890s

National Portrait Gallery, London

Clearly the contract with the Tivoli and Oxford was not too restrictive for her, and by December she had been cast to play the role of Principal Girl in the pantomime Dick Whittington in Birmingham, with George Robey as Idle Jack.

In 1897 Syria Lamonte sailed to South Africa for a three months’ engagement “at £35 a week”. Her return to London in November was not to be a happy experience. Before the voyage from Cape Town, she had met a cattle dealer named Ian Henterick Hugo, who had “conceived a grand passion for the fair Australian”, and showered her with expensive diamond jewels. Unfortunately, on arrival at Southampton together, Hugo was arrested, apparently having obtained money by false pretences, and Miss Lamonte had to relinquish the jewels to the police.

This episode was followed, according to Era in December, by a “severe illness of five months”, from which she was “now on the road to recovery.” What was the nature of her “illness”? Pneumonia? Pregnancy? Imprisonment?   

The Gramophone Company studio, 1898. EMI Archive Trust.

The stint at Rules and the consequent pioneering recordings came in August the following year. In all, she recorded some fourteen sides with Gaisberg (one, a duet, being uncredited). It is probable that it was Gaisberg himself who accompanied her on the piano. The exact dates of all these remain unclear. By October she was back at the Oxford Music Hall, accompanied by Tom Collins, touring with him the following spring.

By 1900 her career had also encompassed continental Europe. November saw her at Ronacher’s in Vienna, where, according to reports, the band one day struck up “God Save the Queen”, Syria leading the singing “with heart and voice, winning much applause”. Vienna was followed by Bucharest and St. Petersburg, and Paris in 1903.

In July 1906 she had emigrated to America, where she appears to have lived and presumably worked in vaudeville for the following years (reportedly making further recordings for Columbia), before returning to Australia in 1912.

She seems to have opened at the Empire in Brisbane in early April, before misfortune overtook her following a train journey between Sydney and Melbourne. Her luggage was lost—including all her performing wardrobe and her jewellery “which she values at £800”. This mishap (the luggage was quite quickly found at Wagga Wagga and restored to her) created the possibility of dramatically raising her profile again in Australia, from which she had been absent for some sixteen years.

However, there are few reports of further performances by Syria Lamonte. Aside from a broadcast in Melbourne in May 1926 and an entertainment at Caulfield Military Hospital in June 1929, she seems effectively to have retired.

But does her long association with Australia mean that she was really an Australian? After all, she could well have come initially from England with Mrs Bernard Beere’s troupe.

This remained a puzzle for quite some time. Exploration of the online births, marriages and deaths indexes of both Victoria and New South Wales revealed plenty of Lamonts of Scottish origin, but no-one who could be our Syria. Eventually it became clear that she was neither a Lamont nor a Syria by birth.

In fact, she was Sarah Cohen, daughter of Morris Cohen and Rachel née Isaacs, born 12 March 1869 at Elizabeth Street, Sydney. Father Morris was 23 and a clerk, mother Rachel just 18. Both had been born in London and were married in the gold-rush city of Ballaarat in Victoria in 1868. Morris Cohen was later described as a “commission agent”. Exactly when the Cohens moved from Sydney to live in Melbourne is not clear, but it was most probably in 1873. Sarah, the eldest, was to have at least six siblings.  

It is clear from newspaper reports in the 1890s that Sarah Cohen’s singing teachers had been Lucy Chambers and Pietro Cecchi. These were arguably the finest teachers in the city, their work reflected in the good reviews that Lamonte received throughout her performing careers in Australia and England. The contralto Chambers was born in Sydney in 1840 and studied under Manuel Garcia jnr in London, then with Romani and Lamperti in Italy. Following a successful career in Europe, she returned to Australia in 1870 with Lyster’s Italian Opera Company. She was often described as the “Australian Marchesi”, her successful pupils including Amy Sherwin and Florence Young. The Italian tenor Cecchi was Nellie Melba’s main teacher in Melbourne prior to her move to study with Marchesi in Paris.

In February 1889, at nineteen, Sarah Cohen married Joseph Pearl, a Melbourne jeweller. He strongly opposed her performing ambitions, but she persisted. There were two offspring of the marriage, both dying in childhood. The marriage was dissolved in 1900, when Syria was living in London, following her “desertion and misconduct with one J.J.A. McMeckan.”

She next married Anton Vincent Jonescu, an electrical engineer, in London in April 1905, presenting herself grandly on the marriage certificate as Syria de Lamonte Cowane. Whether or not he went with Syria to America the following year remains unclear, but he supposedly died in 1908.

As Syria Jonescu she married a third time in June 1924—in Melbourne, to George Arthur Senior, a master butcher. She was 55, he 59. Sarah/Syria Cohen/Pearl/Lamont/Lamonte/de Lamonte Cowane/Jonescu/Senior died at St. Kilda, Melbourne, aged 67, on 8 April 1935, eight months after her last husband.

While she was by no means a major star, nevertheless Syria Lamonte was an admired performer with a thriving career in light opera, musical comedy and music hall, and was an important pioneer in the fledgling recording industry—not someone to be a mere footnote in musical history.

Having listened to several of her recordings in 2009, Tony Locantro, veteran of EMI, concluded: “I would say that Syria’s voice had a firm and well supported lower register that enabled her comfortably to sing in the mezzo range but a bright top and a good technique to do the more showy soprano pieces. And I was quite impressed with her trills—would that more of today’s songbirds could do as well!”

Postscript

When I wrote about Syria Lamonte in 2014, I was convinced that she had been the first Australian singer to be recorded—by Berliner in London—on 28 August 1898. Now I believe that particular garland belongs to Frances Saville, who recorded ‘Caro nome’ from Rigoletto on cylinder for Bettini in New York in 1896/97.

Endnotes

1. F.W. Gaisberg, Music on Record, Robert Hale, London, 1948, pp.28/42

2. Jerrold Northrop Moore, A Voice in Time: The Gramophone of Fred Gaisberg 1873–1951, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1976, pp.241–242

3. The group, which corresponded mostly by email, included Peter Adamson, Anton Crouch, Kurt Gänzl, Andrew Lamb, Tony Locantro, Peter Martland, Rob Morrison, Roger Neill and Frank Van Straten. Andrew Lamb wrote up the results in an article for On Stage (Summer, 2010) in Australia and Call Boy (2010) in Britain.

4. Australian newspapers consulted include: The Argus (Melbourne); Bendigo Advertiser; The Advertiser (Adelaide); South Australian Register; Barrier Miner (Broken Hill); Euroa Advertiser; Riverine Herald; Horsham Times; Camperdown Chronicle; Colac Herald; Bairnsdale Advertiser; Traralgon Record; Morwell Advertiser; Warragul Guardian; Sunday Times (Sydney); Sydney Morning Herald; Evening News (Sydney); Brisbane Courier; North Melbourne Gazette; Daily News (Perth); Chronicle (Adelaide); Referee (Sydney); West Australian (Perth); Kalgoorlie Miner; Queensland Figaro (Brisbane); The Register (Adelaide); Williamstown Chronicle

Discography

Syria Lamonte’s Berliner recordings

The Gramophone Company, 31 Maiden Lane, London, with piano

A Geisha’s Life (The Geisha, Jones)
E3000 28 August 98

Star of Twilight
E3001 no date

The Holy City (Adams)
E3002 no date

Sing, Sweet Bird (Ganz)
E3003 no date

Si tu m’aimais (Denza)
E3004 no date

Il Bacio (Arditi)
E3005 1 September 98

Il Bacio (Arditi)
E3005X 7 September 98

Tell Me My Heart (Bishop)
E3006 not seen

Comin’ thro’ the Rye (trad)
E3007 2 September 98

Jewel of the East (sic) (The Geisha, Philp)
E3008 7 September 98 (unissued)

The Cows are in the Corn (Harding)
E3009 no date

Roberto tu che adoro (Roberto il diavolo, Meyerbeer)
E3010 7 September 98

Listen to the Band (= “Soldiers in the Park”, A Runaway Girl, Monckton)
E3011 27 September 98

The Jewel of Asia (The Geisha, Philp)
E3012 27 September 98

They always follow me (The Belle of New York, Kerker)
E3013 27 September 98

Dear Bird of Winter (Ganz)
E3014 27 September 98

Home, Sweet Home (Bishop)
E3015 3 October 98

The Poor Little Singing Girl (A Runaway Girl, Caryll)
E3016 3 October 98

A Streamlet full of Flowers (duet, uncredited)
E3017 not seen

When a Merry Maid Marries (The Gondoliers, Sullivan)
E3018 3 October 98

The Amorous Goldfish (The Geisha, Jones)
E3020 3 October 98

Listen to Syria Lamonte singing ‘Comin’ thro’ the Rye’, as featured on From Melba to Sutherland: Australian Singers on Record (Decca Eloquence):

This article was first published in The Record Collector, March 2014. Republished with permission.