Peter Dawson

Australian vocalist (bass-baritone). Né Peter Smith Dawson. Born 21 January 1882, Adelaide, SA, Australia. Son of Thomas Dawson and Alison Miller. Died 27 September 1961, Sydney, NSW, Australia.

Noted recording artist from 1910s.

Riley/Hailes Scrapbook, page 185.

Florrie—Her Husbands and Homes

In various memoirs Florrie wrote in newspaper and magazine articles in Britain, she made no mention of her marriage in Sydney to policeman Walter Bew in 1893. And no evidence has emerged to indicate either a divorce or his death. So her marriage to Laurie Barnett in 1905 (where she declared herself to be a spinster) was likely to have been unlawful.

Florrie’s relationship, both personal and professional, with Percy Krone was clearly of significant importance for some years. From 1900 to 1905 he acted as her agent, and at the same time they were living together at the same addresses and travelling as ‘Mr and Mrs Percy Krone (Miss Florrie Forde)’.

Florrie Forde, 1930s. Photo by Perfect Photo Reproduction Co., London.

Edwards and Flanagan collection, Theatre Heritage Australia

Florrie Forde, 1930s. Photo by Kay Foley.

Edwards and Flanagan collection, Theatre Heritage Australia

Percy Krone had been born at St Kilda in Melbourne in 1865 (ten years before Florrie) and was educated at the Scotch college there. His father, Captain Henry Krone was Registrar-General of Victoria. Percy worked in Melbourne as a patent agent, then for G.W. Taylor and Co, property auctioneers, before first coming to London in 1889. But soon he returned to Australia, where (among other things) he played cricket for South Melbourne. Did he first see Florrie on stage there? In 1895 he married the first Mrs Krone in London, and they took their honeymoon by going to Australia, stopping off at Cape Town. By 1899 he was living in South Africa, searching for the ideal goldmine, when war broke out with the Boers. He is said to have fought in that conflict with the British army.

However, he came back to London before the end of that war (May 1902) and on 8 December 1900 the Era carried an advertisement for Florrie Forde announcing her representation as being carried out by Percy Krone of Clifton Lodge, Overton Road, Brixton. It gradually became clear that they both lived at this address in southwest London. The last we are to hear of them together was in March 1905, when a gift was noted from the pair to newlyweds (Charles Baxter and Lillian Kendall) at South Yarra.

Just eight months later, on 22 November 1905, Florrie was formally married to Laurence Barnett at Paddington Register Office in London. The switch in 1905 from Percy Krone to art dealer Laurie Barnett seems to have been rather precipitate. What exactly had been the nature of her relationship with Krone? Business certainly. Cohabiting too. But were they more than that, living together as man and wife? Perhaps we shall never really know.

However, from time-to-time Florrie dropped heavily coded clues. In an article she wrote for the People’s Journal in March 1914, she described ‘Billy’, a ‘bloodthirsty fellow’ who was weighed down by the ‘green-eyed monster’ of jealousy. Billy threatened to come to Florrie’s wedding and ‘shoot me’.¹ Was Billy in reality Percy Krone? Or someone else entirely? A clue that makes the Percy identification more likely is that, in the article, Florrie compares Billy to Ananias. Why?

In the ‘Acts of the Apostles’ (Chapter 5), Ananias is revealed as having secretly kept a portion of the money from the followers of Jesus, having sold a plot of land. Is this what Percy had been doing as Florrie’s agent? And had she discovered it? It is interesting that Florrie was later written out of the narrative of Percy’s life. When he died in Melbourne in 1941, his widow announced that he had written the popular song ‘Down at the Old Bull and Bush’ (in reality he had written some new words in the English version of 1904), which had apparently been sung by ‘Kate Carney’ (with no mention of Florrie). Yet there is no mention anywhere of a relationship between Percy and Kate Carney, business or personal. Clearly, he had not told his new wife about Florrie.

In the event, to Florrie’s relief ‘Billy’ did not turn up at the wedding at Paddington Register Office, so there was no shooting. Florrie and Laurie were together for thirty years (until he died in October 1934)—the ‘great love story of my life’.

Florrie tells us that she first met Laurie Barnett on a train journey to Paris. He seemed shy, but they talked and she reflected that it was ‘in both instances love at first sight’ and that ‘neither of us saw the necessity of wasting time needlessly.’² The encounter seems likely to have taken place in February 1905 following her Little Red Riding Hood pantomime season, which had opened at Derby before Christmas and ended in Edinburgh on 11 February. Then she had a two-week break, when she may well have had her crucial first meeting with Laurie.

In her Thomson’s Weekly News memoirs of 1916, Florrie makes every effort to set the record straight. She writes: ‘I plan to make the fact clear that I have only one husband, the only one I have ever had.’ The problem is: she may have wished it were so, but it is unlikely to be true.

Quite fortuitously (and unprecedentedly), following two more weeks back on the halls in London, Florrie had what appears to be a five week break from performing—time enough to get to know Laurie well. At the time of their marriage in November, Laurie was living at 203 Lauderdale Mansions in Maida Vale, and they may well have made their first home together there. However, by 1907 their address was given as 46 Binfield Road in Clapham and they remained there until 1915, when they moved to 101 Bedford Court Mansions in Bloomsbury, which remained their London base for thirteen years until May 1928, when they moved to 10 Howitt Road, Hampstead.³

Beanie Galletly in 1896. Photo by Falk Studios, Sydney.

From Melbourne Punch, 28 May 1896

Florrie Forde, 1910s, by unknown photographer

Edwards and Flanagan collection, Theatre Heritage Australia

In June 1920 an advertisement in The Stage announced the opening of a new venture between Florrie and her old Australian friend, the dancer and choreographer Beanie Galletly. It read:

Wanted … a number of attractive Young Ladies to train for the stage in the Art of Singing, Dancing and Deportment. Children’s Classes every Saturday under the personal supervision of Miss Beanie Galletly, Australian and Continental Danceuse. Good engagements assured for efficient people.

Applicants were requested to write to the two founders at 64a Brixton Road (which ran through Stockwell, between Kennington and Brixton in South London). Beanie had first appeared with Florrie in Sydney in 1895 and was to return as choreographer in Florrie’s revue Cameos of 1923 which toured extensively. Also in the early 1920s, Florrie and Beanie jointly owned a millinery. Perhaps that was also at Brixton Road.

Florrie’s Beach Club

In 1932 Florrie and Laurie made a major move. While maintaining a London base, they leased a bungalow, Gull’s Nest, on the south coast of England at Shoreham-by-Sea in Sussex. Just west of Brighton, it was some sixty miles (97 km) from London by train or car. There Florrie took over an existing dance club, renaming it Flo’s Beach Club. Laurie appears to have principally lived from that time at Shoreham, running Florrie’s club.

‘Bungalow Town’ at Shoreham, built on a spit of land, had become a colony for mainly music hall performers and actors since Marie Loftus had moved there around the turn of the century. Many of the dwellings were converted railway carriages. It was also to become an important centre for the early years of the British film industry. 

Sadly, Laurie died at 58 at Shoreham on 22 October 1934—less than two years after moving there. Florrie gave up the club in 1936 but continued to maintain two homes until her own death in 1940—in London at 115 Park Poad, Regent’s Park, and in Shoreham at Goscote, 108 Old Fort Road.

That year, fearful of invasion, the army requisitioned and demolished the whole of the Bungalow Town development at Shoreham, turning it into a defensive minefield.

Hamilton Hill

Courtesy Geoff Bowden, British Music Hall Society

Nellie Melba, 1903. Photo by Walter Barnett, London.

National Portrait Gallery, London

Recording, Radio and Film

Florrie had arrived in London just in time for the explosive growth of sound recording, which was followed by radio and film. Florrie embraced all three new media.

Although sound recording with a phonograph had been invented by Thomas Edison in 1877, for many years it consisted of primitive recordings on fragile wax cylinders. The process was entirely mechanical—ie without electricity—with the performers clustered round an acoustic horn. By 1903, when Florrie Forde made her first cylinder recordings, technology had moved on somewhat, and by 1912 she had made over 220 cylinders—mostly for Edison labels but also for Sterling and Lambert.

In the meantime, flat discs and the gramophone were invented by Emile Berliner in 1887. This method used the same recording process with artists around a horn, but discs were much easier than cylinders to manufacture in bulk. As with cylinders, Florrie made her first disc recordings in 1903—for the Gramophone and Typewriter Company in London—and continued to make them until shortly before her death in 1939.

Florrie says that she was introduced to recording by Australian baritone Hamilton Hill, who took her to his recording company, most likely the Gramophone Company in London, to make a test record. It was of ‘Flo from Pimlico’, she recalled, but the company did not book her, her voice being judged to be ‘no use for the machines’. Hamilton Hill was already a best-selling artist, having made recordings of patriotic songs during the Boer War. And his Australia wife, dancer Beanie Galletly, was to remain a close friend and associate of Florrie.

She was taken to try again sometime later by comedian-singer Bert Shepherd, this time with a more successful outcome, coming away with a three year contract.⁴ The Gramophone Company (which became EMI, now Warner) and its other labels (Zonophone and later HMV), remained a major partner for her, but she also recorded for several Edison labels (cylinder and disc), Sterling, Ariel and others. Overall, Florrie is estimated to have made some 550 recordings.⁵

The years following 1903 experienced the birth of a new industry, together with dramatic growth in the sales of recordings and gramophones, and celebrated singers with large numbers of enthusiastic supporters benefitted accordingly. With her wide range of recorded popular songs, Florrie earned a steady income stream from them. However, this was nothing compared with two of her most successful Australian compatriots in Britain at that time – Nellie Melba and Peter Dawson.

It is extraordinary that three Australian singers should so dominate the British record market in the years before the First World War. They ploughed different furrows: Melba was principally an opera singer, while Dawson was a concert singer and Forde sang in music halls.

Peter Dawson, 1930s. Photo by Tornquist of Wellington.

National Portrait Gallery, London

Florrie Forde, 1920s, by unknown photographer

Edwards and Flanagan collection, Theatre Heritage Australia

Florrie’s deal with the Gramophone Company stipulated an annual fee of £30 (rising to £40 by 1913), plus £2.60 to £3.60 per recording made. The company archives reveal that, over the decade 1904 to 1913, she made a total of £1,133—quite a small proportion of her total income. Meanwhile, Peter Dawson revealed in his memoirs that in 1912 he made no less than 30 guineas a week (£31.50) from recording. He earned more than Florrie from recording because he was both a regular session singer and a classically trained artist.⁶

And after a lengthy wooing period, in 1904 the great diva Nellie Melba made her first recordings for the Gramophone Company. The deal was that she was paid £1,000 up front (roughly equivalent to £80,000 now), plus a royalty of five shillings (25p) per record sold. And her records sold for a guinea each (£1.05)—a higher price than any of her competitors—and carried a distinctive lilac-coloured label with her facsimile signature.⁷ In the year 1906, Melba earned £6,060 from GramCo royalties.

In the early years, in parallel with her recordings for the Gramophone Company, Florrie also formed a working relationship with a cylinder recording engineer, Russell Hunting, who had been working with Florrie for Edison before moving with her from 1904 to become a significant shareholder in the Sterling Record Company. Florrie and her then manager-partner Percy Krone were also shareholders, and she was to become their best-selling artist until 1908, by which time sales of cylinder recordings had declined, and the company went into liquidation.⁸

1925 saw the emergence of electrical recording through the introduction of the revolutionary Western Electric microphone. Florrie was said never to need to use a microphone in live performance, but, as with so many singers, she became adept at handling the new technology in the recording studio and on radio and for film. Among the most treasured of her post-microphone recordings are medleys of her most celebrated choruses from 1929 and 1936.

Although the first public radio broadcasts in Britain had been made in 1920 by the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Co,⁹ Florrie does not seem to have been on air until August 1929, broadcasting on the BBC’s 2LO service. A few days later, it was announced that she was to make a ‘broadcast for the first time from 5XX last night’,¹⁰ singing ‘Has anybody here seen Kelly?’, ‘Wearing her clogs and shawl’, ‘Lassie from Lancashire’, ‘Oh! Oh! Antonio’ and ‘Down at the Old Bull and Bush’. It was reported that ‘there was not the slightest trace of microphone nervousness …’. ¹¹

Florrie was to have a career on radio in Britain through the 1930s—a mix of her recordings and live broadcasts—and her recordings were regularly broadcast in Australia, New Zealand and, presumably, other anglophone countries.

Scene from My Old Dutch, 1934. Photo by by James Jarché, for Daily Herald. National Portrait Gallery, London.

‘Talkies’ arrived in the mid-1920s, but it was not until 1933 that Florrie became involved with film. Her first venture was Say It with Flowers: A Symphony of London Life, which was shot at Twickenham Studios in November. In it, traders in a street market in the Old Kent Road rally round when a flower-seller falls ill. It stars Mary Clare, Ben Field and George Carney, with Florrie Forde, Marie Kendall and Charles Coborn as themselves. A mix of music hall and Cockney life, Florrie reprises ‘Lassie from Lancashire’, ‘Has anybody here seen Kelly?’, ‘Hold your hand out, naughty boy’, ‘Oh! Oh! Antonio’ and ‘Down at the Old Bull and Bush’. It was well-received and in May the BBC broadcast (a first) the soundtrack of the film’s music hall scene.

Next came My Old Dutch, shot at the Islington Studios of Gainsborough Pictures in April 1934, in which ageing cockney parents see their son die a hero in the Royal Flying Corps. It stars Gordon Harker, Betty Balfour and Florrie Forde (this time in an acting role as Aunt Bertha). It has recently been described as a ‘sentimental wallow’. At the time a Bristol theatre organised a showing as a ‘treat for old couples’.¹²

The third and last film that involved Florrie was Royal Cavalcade, which featured achievements made in the reign of George V and was part of his Silver Jubilee celebrations. It featured Marie Lohr, Hermione Baddeley and others with George Robey and Florrie Forde. It had six separate directors, and opened in 1935. Recently it was regarded as ‘thoroughly embarrassing’, while at the time an advertisement presented it as a ‘truly great film’ ¹³ In a cameo, Florrie re-enacted the original performance of ‘Tipperary’ in the Isle of Man in 1913.

In April 1936 Florrie had an offer to go and make movies in Hollywood. At the time she had been performing in her annual pantomime at the Lyceum in London. However, she said: ‘You know I’d rather make pictures in this country … In any case, I can’t go this year, for I’m booked up on the halls, and I’ve got my summer season at the Isle of Man.’ ¹⁴

Edwards and Flanagan collection, Theatre Heritage Australia

The Last Years

By 1934 Flanagan and Allen had moved on, beloved husband Laurie Barnett died on 22 October, and Florrie Forde had been performing professionally for forty-two years and was fifty-nine-years-old.

While she continued to tour through most of the year, there was less of it than in her heyday before the First World War. She spent several weeks filming Say it with Flowers and My Old Dutchand also took time on the south coast at her home at Shoreham, Gull’s Nest, and running her club there. In the summer of 1934 she performed as usual at the ballroom of Derby Castle in the Isle of Man. As the Christmas season approached, she started rehearsals for Sleeping Beauty at the Grand in Brighton.

With the exception of filming, the same pattern of work persisted for Florrie between 1935 and 1939. The pantomimes each year were based for several weeks in one theatre: Forty Thievesat the Lyceum in London (1935), Puss in Boots at the Shakespeare in Liverpool (1936), Queen of Hearts [click here to view rare footage of production] at the Theatre Royal in Edinburgh (1937, with Florrie as the Queen of Hearts), Aladdin at the Theatre Royal Edinburgh again (1938) and a final Aladdin back at the Shakespeare in Liverpool (1939).

By this late stage in her career, Florrie’s performances were overwhelmingly in the north of England and Scotland. In November 1939, she took up one of the major popular songs of the Second World War (which had started two months earlier)—‘We’re going to Hang out the Washing on the Siegfried Line’.

(left) The Tivoli, Aberdeen. Wikipedia. (right) One of Florrie’s last playbills. University of Glasgow.

Aladdin in Liverpool finished earlier than was usual for Florrie’s pantomimes—on 20 January 1940—perhaps because there was awareness that Liverpool would become a major target in the coming months for the Luftwaffe. But Florrie immediately went back to intensive touring (for a final time) with Moss Empires theatres—in London at Ilford and New Cross (with Hettie King), then at Birmingham, York, Portsmouth and Huddersfield. And then her last performances in London in the week of 11 March at the Gaumont at Holloway, followed by Manchester, Nottingham and Halifax (with Wee Georgie Wood) before her last week—at the Tivoli in Aberdeen.

Of the opening night at the Tivoli, the Aberdeen Press and Journal said:

The vaudeville bill … is the best that has been seen in the city for a considerable time. At the top is Florrie Forde, who can persuade any audience out of its self-consciousness to join in the chorus-singing which she leads. And war-time is the time for community singing.¹⁵

And Florrie taught them a new song: ‘Till the Lights of London Shine Again’. Three days later she was dead. The Press and Journal reported:

A few hours previously she had been wildly cheered by an audience of Navymen at Kingseat Naval Hospital. She had taken her company from the Tivoli Theatre, Aberdeen, to give a special show for the sailors.¹⁶

She sang for them a medley of her popular choruses. Her last song, according to the newspaper, was ‘Goodbye-ee’. ¹⁷ She was sixty-four and had been performing professionally in Australia, Britain and Ireland for forty-eight years.

Florrie’s death was carried as a significant news story in British and Irish newspapers: ‘her name was long a household word,’ said the Scotsman; ‘Tipperary’ was ‘the greatest marching song of the last war,’ wrote the South Wales Daily Post and ‘almost replaced the national anthem,’ asserted the People, which added that she was ‘big framed, big hearted.’ The Guardian noted that: ‘She defied all attempts by misguided managers to bring her up to date.’

Although she did not return to her birth country after 1897, nevertheless Australian newspapers carried the story in their dozens, but usually only in a few lines. Her half-brother, HW Snelling Ford at Guildford in Sydney’s western suburbs, graphically described her as the ‘Melba of the Masses’.¹⁸ And it seems that Melba concurred with this assessment. According to Frank Van Straten in his book, Tivoli, Melba said:

Hers is a voice of true Australian quality. She might have been trained for opera but, instead, gives pleasure to a far wider audience.¹⁹

Performing for wounded soldiers and sailors had been important for Florrie throughout her career in Britain, starting in the Boer War (when she did a benefit in 1900 at the Alhambra for Australian soldiers), then later in the two World Wars. A typical example came at Newcastle in December 1918, when 1,500 wounded soldiers were invited to a dress rehearsal of Cinderella. In 1921 and 1923 Florrie travelled to Cologne—to give her only performances in continental Europe—at the Scala Theatre in Cologne for soldiers of the occupying Rhine Army. And when the body of an unnamed sailor was washed up on shore at the Isle of Man, Florrie had him buried with a gravestone that read ‘Some Mother’s Son’.

Louis MacNeice, 1945. Photo by Howard Coster

National Portrait Gallery, London

Florrie Forde, 1930s, by unknown photographer

Edwards and Flanagan collection, Theatre Heritage Australia

Florrie was buried next to her eldest sister, Mrs Emily Brown (née Flannagan) at Streatham Park Cemetery in South London. The funeral cortege went from the home at Streatham Hill of the Crumners, Mrs Crumner being the niece, daughter of Emily, who had been Florrie’s principal boy in pantomime in the First World War, Flora Carlton. Among those who followed the cortege were Bud Flanagan, Chesney Allen, Aleta Turner, Bert Feldman, Prince Littler and Minnie Simpson, who had been Florrie’s ‘personal maid and companion’ over her last fifteen years. The Streatham News reported:

Hundreds of people were at the graveside including many old-time variety stars. Half the provincial theatres in Britain were represented … For some hours after the burial people were passing the grave admiring the flowers banked for 100 yards behind the turned earth.²⁰

After her passing, Louis MacNeice wrote a poem, ‘Death of an Actress’. It has been touted by Florrie’s supporters as some kind of celebration of her life, an homage, but in reality it is typical of the way in which the separation of so-called high-brow from low-brow culture in twentieth century Britain could facilitate the relentlessly patronising tone of MacNeice’s poem.²¹

Although Florrie Forde never returned to her birth country, she was throughout her career a proud Australian, supporting other Aussies when they arrived in London. As noted, there were three Australians who dominated the scene in that generation—Nellie Melba, Peter Dawson and Florrie, each of them singing their own musical genre to their own audience.

www.findagrave.com/memorial/90165829/florrie-forde

Endnotes

1. Dundee People’s Journal, 21 March 1914

2. ibid.

3. Some twenty years ago, the present writer recommended to English Heritage that they put up a Blue Plaque on the Bedford Court Mansions property; after two years of cogitation, they declined, asserting that she had lived at Shoreham, not in London … 

4. Fred Gaisberg credits Bert Shepherd with bringing a stream of music halls to The Gramophone Company for recording, including Ada Reeve, Vesta Victoria, Gus Elen, Albert Chevalier, George Mozart, Marie Lloyd, and Vesta Tilley; it may also have been Shepherd who introduced Syria Lamonte to Gaisberg

5. With grateful thanks to Keith Harrison for his list of Florrie Forde recordings which accompanies his book on Forde for the City of London Phonograph and Gramophone Society (2022); there seems to be no reliable estimate of Florrie’s total record sales

6. Peter Martland, Recording History: The British Record Industry 1888–1931, pp.191–92

7. Roger Neill, Melba’s First Recordings, Historic Masters, London, 2008, p.11

8. Keith Harrison, Florrie Forde: The World’s Greatest Chorus Singer, City of London Phonograph and Gramophone Society, 2022, pp.30–33

9. The first live broadcast concert was given by Dame Nellie Melba for Marconi in Chelmsford, Essex, on 15 June 1920

10. 5XX was the Daventry transmitter of the BBC, which had gone live in 1925 and was said to reach 94% of the population of Britain

11. Nottingham Evening Post, 27 August 1929

12. The Era, 24 October 1934

13. Leicester Chronicle, 4 May 1935

14. Evening Despatch, 24 April 1936

15. Aberdeen Press and Journal, 16 April 1940

16. Ibid, 19 April 1940

17. The death certificate recorded that she had died from ‘arterial hypertension, cerebral haemorrhage and cardiac failure’

18. Cumberland Argus, 22 May 1940

19. Van Straten had an undated, unsourced clipping with this quote

20. Streatham News, 26 April 1940

21. The hifalutin Cambridge Guide to the Arts in Britain: The Edwardian Age and the Inter-War Years (1989) scarcely mentions the existence of music hall; two rather different writers, both contemporaries of Florrie Forde, who took music hall arts and artists seriously were Rudyard Kipling and T.S. Eliot

Appendix 1: A selection of Florrie Forde’s most enduring songs 

Click on headings to link to recordings on YouTube.

See Me Dance the polka

Published: 1886

Music and words: George Grossmith sen

Popularised by Billie Barlow, G Grossmith sen; in Australia by Billie Barlow, Florrie and others

After the Ball

Published: 1892 (USA, massive sales of sheet music)

Music and words: Charles K. Harris

First sung: Sam Doctor (amateur who forgot the words); popularised in USA by J. Aldrich Lilley; by Florrie Forde in 1893 at Melbourne and Sydney  

Recorded: by many and by Florrie in 1934

Daisy Bell

Published 1892

Music and words: Harry Dacre

Recorded: Dan W. Quinn (US cylinder) 1893; Florrie Forde 1934

Refers to Prince of Wales (Edward VII) mistress Daisy Warwick; popularised by Katie Lawrence

Courtesy Geoff Bowden, British Music Hall Society

Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Goodbye, Dolly Gray

Published: 1897

Music: Paul Barnes; Words: Will D. Cobb

Recorded: USA Harry McDonough 1901; UK Hamilton Hill, Florrie Forde 1933

Composed in Spanish-American War; popular in Boer War

Down at the Old Bull and Bush

Published: As ‘Under the Anheuser Bush’ in USA 1903; UK (revised) 1904

Music: Harry Von Tilzer; Words (original): Andrew B Sterling; words (revised for UK): Percy Krone

First sung: Florrie Forde 1904

Recorded: USA Billy Murray 1904; Florrie Forde 1904

UK version references pub at Hampstead in London

www.fredgodfreysongs.ca

Sheet Music Warehouse

She’s a Lassie from Lancashire

Published: 1907

Music: C.W. Murphy; Words: Dan Lipton, John Neat

Original hit for Ella Retford 1907; sung and recorded Florrie Forde 1907

I do Like to be Beside the Seaside

Published: 1907

Music and words: John H. Glover-Kind

Popularised and recorded by Mark Sheridan and Florrie Forde 1909

Famously played on the organ at the Tower Ballroom Blackpool by Reginald Dixon 1930-1970

Oh! Oh! Antonio

Published: 1908

Music: C.W. Murphy; Words Dan Lipton

Sung and recorded: Florrie Forde 1908

Included in From Melba to Sutherland: Australian Singers on Record 2016 

Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly?

Published: 1909

Music: C.W. Murphy; Words: Will Letters

Sung and recorded: Florrie Forde 1909

Kelly is the most common surname in the Isle of Man

It’s a Long Way to Tipperary

Published: 1912

Music and words: Jack Judge and Harry Williams

First performed by composer Jack Judge 1912; performed by Florrie Forde at Isle of Man 1913, but dropped by her; re-adopted by Forde when it became popular marching song in First World War 

Recorded: John McCormack 1914; Florrie Forde 1929

Hold Your Hand Out, Naughty Boy

Published: 1913

Music: C.W. Murphy; Words: Worton David

Sung and recorded: Florrie Forde 1913

Very popular in First World War

Hello!  Hello! Who’s Your Lady Friend?

Published: 1913

Music: Harry Fragson; Words: Worton David and Bert Lee

Sung and recorded: Harry Fragson 1913; sung Florrie Forde 1913, recorded 1929

Popular in First World War

Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag

Published: 1915

Music: George Asaf (George Henry Powell); Words: Felix Powell (brother)

Sung Florrie Forde 1916; recorded by her 1929

Popular marching song in First World War

Goodbye-ee

Published: 1917

Music RP Weston; Words: Bert Lee

Sung and recorded: Florrie Forde 1917

I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles

Published: 1919

Music: John W. Kellett; Words: Jaap Kenbrovin (a collective of three)

Popularised in USA late 1919, UK in 1920 by Florrie Forde and others; recorded by her in medley 1936  

Anthem of West Ham United

Yes, We Have No bananas

Published: 1923

Music: Irving Cohn; Words: Frank Silver

Recorded: USA Billy Jones, Billy Murray; performed 1923 by Florrie Forde (but not recorded by her)

Massive sales of sheet music (and bananas)

When You’re Smiling

Published: 1928

Music and words: Larry Shay, Mark Fisher, Joe Goodwin

Popularised in USA 1928-29; in UK in 1930 by Florrie Forde and others; not recorded by her

Unofficial anthem of Leicester City Football Club

We’re Going to Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line

Published: 1939

Music: Michael Carr; Words: Jimmy Kennedy (Irish)

First performed by Adelaide Hall 1939; by Florrie Forde 1939 (but not recorded by her)

Popular marching song in the Second World War

Appendix 2: Edwards and Flanagan

No, not another music hall double act. Rather, two men, both obsessed with the career of Florrie Forde, who lived near Oldham in Lancashire, and who exhaustively compiled scrapbooks of promotional materials, photographs and press cuttings from 1910 until her death in 1940. In fact, they kept two scrapbooks going in parallel throughout—one for Florrie and one for themselves.

They were Arthur Edwards and James Flanagan. Edwards complied the scrapbooks from 1910 to mid-1915 and Flanagan seamlessly took over the task from that point until Florrie’s death twenty-five years later. The only gap occurs in 1917, when, having initially joined up in 1915, Flanagan was sent to France in a platoon of the 22nd Battery of the Manchester Regiment. Wounded, he was repatriated to hospital in Britain before returning home.

Florrie was delighted with their work—as is the present writer.  Currently, a set of four scrapbooks covering 1910 to 1930 are held in the Special Collections of the Templeman Library at the University of Kent in Canterbury, and a further three, covering from the late 1920s to 1940 are in the possession of Keith Harrison of the City of London Phonograph and Gramophone Society. The V&A in London has a further set which is unavailable at the time of writing.

Remarkably a further three scrapbooks made their way to Australia. Comprising some 74 portraits of Florrie dating from the 1910s onwards, these volumes, now in the possession of Theatre Heritage Australia, were in the collection of the late Frank Van Straten. When and where he came by these books remains a mystery but suffice to say THA is thrilled to be the custodians of such an important collection alongside three significant UK repositories.

Bibliography

Alomes, Stephen, When London Calls: The Expatriation of Australian Creative Artists to Britain, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999

Anderson, Gae, Tivoli King: Life of Harry Rickards Vaudeville Showman, Allambie Press, Sydney, 2009

Bailey, Peter (ed.), Music Hall: The Business of Pleasure, Open University Press, Milton Keynes, 1986

Bratton, JS (ed.), Music Hall: Performance and Style, Open University Press, Milton Keynes, 1986

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

Brownrigg, Jeff, The Shamrock and the Wattle: Florrie Forde The World’s Greatest Chorus Singer, National Film and Sound Archive, Canberra, 1998 (CD booklet)

――, ‘Melba’s Puddin’: Corowa, Mulwala and our Cultural Past’, Papers on Parliament 32, Canberra, 1998

――, Florrie Forde (1875–1940), Australian Dictionary of Biography, Supplement, 2005

Cheshire, D.F., Music Hall in Britain, Farleigh Dickinson University Press, Cranbury NJ, 1974

Colquhoun, Edward and Nethercoate-Bryant, KT, Shoreham-by-Sea: Past and Present, Sutton Publishing, Stroud, 1997

Dawson, Peter, Fifty Years of Song, Hutchinson, London, 1951

Disher, M. Willson, Winkles and Champagne: Comedies and Tragedies of the Music Hall, Batsford, London, 1938

Djubal, Clay, ‘Florrie Forde’, Australian Variety Theatre Archive, forde-florrie-23122012.pdf (ozvta.com), 2012

Felstead, S. Theodore, Stars who made the Halls, T. Werner Laurie, London, 1946

Gaisberg, F.W., Music on Record, Robert Hale, London, 1947

Green, Benny (ed), The Last Empires: A Music Hall Companion, Pavilion/Michael Joseph, London, 1986

Harrison, Keith, Florrie Forde: The World’s Greatest Chorus Singer, The City of London Phonograph and Gramophone Society, London, 2022

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

Kilgarriff, Michael, Sing Us One of the Old Songs: A Guide to Popular Song 1860–1920, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998

Laver, James, Edwardian Promenade, Edward Hulton, London, 1958

Macqueen-Pope, W., The Melodies Linger On: The Story of Music Hall, W.H. Allen, London, 1950

Mander, Raymond and Mitchenson, Joe, British Music Hall: A Story in Pictures, Studio Vista, London, 1965

Martin-Jones, Tony, ‘Florrie Forde: Her Early Life in Australia’, Florrie Forde: her time in Australia (apex.net.au), 2020

Martland, Peter, Recording History: The British Record Industry 188801931, Scarecrow Press, Plymouth, 2013

Neill, Roger, Melba’s First Recordings, Historic Masters, London, 2008

――, ‘Going on the Halls’, unpublished, part of uncompleted dissertation, Goldsmiths College, London, 2013

――, ‘Re-discovering Syria Lamonte: Pioneering Recording Artist’ (online), Re-discovering Syria Lamonte: Pioneering Recording Artist - Theatre Heritage Australia, 2023

――, The Simonsens of St Kilda: A Family of Singers, Per Diem Projects, King’s Sutton, 2023

Short, Ernest, Fifty Years of Vaudeville, Eyre & Spottiswoode, London, 1946

Upward, Penelope, Florrie Forde: The Girl from Fitzroy (play), unpublished, nd

Van Straten, Frank, Tivoli, Thomas C. Lothian, Melbourne, 2003

――, Florence Young and the Golden Years of Australian Musical Theatre, Beleura, Mornington, 2009

――, ‘Fabulous Florrie Forde’, Stage Whispers, Fabulous Florrie Forde | Stage Whispers, 2013

Wilmut, Roger, Kindly Leave the Stage: The Story of Variety 1919–1960, Methuen, London, 1985

Woollacott, Angela, To Try Her Fortune in London: Australian Women, Colonialism and Modernity, Oxford University Press, New York, 2001

Acknowledgements

Thanks (for help of various kinds) to Christine Davies and colleagues (Templeman Library, University of Kent), Elisabeth Kumm, Tony Locantro, Tony Martin-Jones, Penelope Upward, Sophie Wilson

 Horace Stevens: A brief history of his career and repertoire

Introduction

It is of no surprise that Australia has produced a plethora of excellent opera singers in the brief time Europeans have lived here. Dame Nellie Melba, though not our first opera star, is certainly one of the best remembered. She has gone down in public consciousness in part for her exceptional voice and in part for a steely desire for self-publicity. Currently there are at least five biographies of Melba on the market, including her autobiography Memories and Melodies. Opera historian Roger Neill has produced his excellent book on the students of Mathilde Marchesi, which includes not only Melba, but Australians Ada Crossley, Fanny and Martina Simonsen, and their sister Frances Alda.

Neill has also written an essay on the mysterious Australian dramatic soprano, Margherita Grandi, which places the histories well and truly into the post-world war two era. Opera Australia historian and archivist Brian Castles-Onion AM has produced a series of CDs displaying the talent of Sutherland’s contemporaries, which includes interviews he was able to undertake before some of these legends were lost to us forever.

The histories have been predominantly directed at our female stars. The glamorous Marjorie Lawrence had her autobiography Interrupted Melody turned into a Hollywood movie, and a further biography, Wotan’s Daughter has been produced following a renewed interest in her re-released live recordings. Another Brünnhilde, Florence Austral was celebrated in an autobiography by James Moffat, accompanied by a two CD set released by Larrikin Records, but what of our male singers? There have been several world class talents, and particularly in the inter-war period Australian exported a trio of exceptional baritones; Harold Williams, John Brownlee and Horace Stevens. Brownlee is remembered in America because of his time at the Met, and as director of the Manhattan School of Music. In addition, he is the subject of a biography A memoire of Don Juan, and features on the justifiably famous Fritz Busch recordings of Mozart Operas from Glyndebourne in the thirties. Harold Williams is less well remembered, although the recent re-release of the first ever complete recording of Mendelssohn’s Elijah from 1930 has brought renewed interest in his career.

Horace Stevens, on the other hand, remains an enigma. He was of an earlier generation to his aforesaid baritone colleagues, born in the same decade as singers of the golden age like Caruso, van Rooy and Tetrazzini. He arrived on the British music scene in 1919 as a dramatic baritone with his voice fully matured and nurtured by the sophisticated Melbourne musical scene of the Edwardian era. His very first performance as Elijah created such a stir, he was hailed as the greatest exponent of the role since Sir Charles Santley (an opinion echoed by Santley himself), and later endorsed by no less a personage than Sir Edward Elgar who described him as the greatest Elijah, “not excepting Santley”. His operatic debut as Wotan at Covent Garden at the age of 47 resulted in adulations from Melba, something so unusual, it was remarked upon in the newspapers of the time.

Sir Edward Elgar

Sir Charles Santley

This “out of time” quality alone is worth further investigation. By the time Stevens was creating such a stir, his operatic contemporaries had either died or retired. The interesting point to make here is that often one’s introduction to the singers of the “golden age” is an acoustic recording where the singer sounds like they’re a mile away, calling through the scratches and hiss. With Stevens we can hear what a robust sound these singers must have made, with his later electrical recordings.

The other important point I would like to make about Stevens is his pedagogic pedigree. While the majority of singers at this point in history went to Europe for their singing lessons, Stevens was a home-grown product. As a child he was taught by Mr. Charles Truelove, the chorus master of All Saints Church, St Kilda. As an adult, he seems to have been taught solely by Bessie Jukes, a close friend of his mother’s, and to whom he credited his technique quite late in life. The longevity of Stevens voice, and it sounds just as impressive in recordings made before he left Britain in 1937, also points to the amazing musical scene in Melbourne in the Edwardian era. Though he had sung no opera by the time he arrived in Britain, his knowledge of concert repertoire was astounding. He maintained a life-long love of choral works, many of which we may never hear again, due to the financial resources and sheer numbers required to stage them.

This brings me to my third and final point. We know so much more of singers in the Victorian and post-World War Two eras, than we do of the Twenties. After the First World War Europe was in a parlous financial state, and understandably the health of the Arts was not at the top priority for governments. Without the Aristocracy to fund opera and concerts, a group of concerned musicians set about creating Government funding of the Arts. This passed without a murmur in Europe, but Britain was less inclined. In 1922 the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) was created and, despite a rocky beginning, was able to save institutions like the Proms. Opera in Britain was not as smooth: as then, like today, its social desirability attracted too many cooks, but by 1931 Covent Garden was funded by the British Government. Against this unstable background, it is amazing that Stevens made the extraordinary impact that he did. When he returned to Australia with the Fuller Opera Company in 1934, it was expected the newly formed Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) would assist with the running of the company, and Australia would have a National Opera. Against the background of the Great Depression, this proved not to be the case, although Stevens continued to lobby for a national company, and was able to assist Gertrude Johnson in her efforts to create the National Theatre in the forties.

Stanley Parker caricature of Stevens as 'Wotan'

Table Talk (Melb.), Thursday, 8 November 1934, p.22

John Frith caricature of Stevens as 'Kurvenal'

The Bulletin, 6 February 1935, p.18

During the research and writing of this thesis, the writer has pondered the question “why is the Australian public so much more interested in our female opera singers, than our males”? At one stage I conjectured that it may have been a form of sexism. I suspect the true answer, though, lies in several interviews Stevens gave in the thirties where the interviewers felt compelled to point out that men in the arts weren’t “sissies”. There is something of this attitude even today. The male singers of this era we return to as a nation are Peter Dawson, who, one might argue, never had the size of voice to sing the great orchestral works, and Malcolm McEachern, who put aside his career as Hagen to become Mr. Jetsam in a popular music hall duet. Stevens remained a true artist. A friend of Ralph Vaughan Williams and Sir Edward Elgar, he is truly an Australian legend.

Preliminary considerations

Horace Stevens is an important singer for several reasons. He spans three very distinct eras in classical singing, providing a link between those scratchy acoustic recordings of the early part of the twentieth century, to his connection with a generation of post Second World War vocalists who recorded onto magnetic tape, and in stereo.

Secondly the study of his repertoire provides a window into the lost world of the great tradition of Victorian choral music, with its massive groups and extraordinary compositions, sometimes of a gargantuan size, both in physical resources required for their staging and in the physical stamina required for their length. The texts of these works comprise an eclectic group of subjects taken from the Bible, religious and secular poetry and historical subjects.

Finally, Stevens was a part of a largely forgotten group of Australian musicians who travelled to Britain, Europe and both North and South America after the First World War with remarkable success. Considering the paucity of operatic performance in Australia, their success is nothing short of miraculous. Many of these artists, Stevens included, were involved in the unsuccessful attempt by Sir Benjamin Fuller to start a full-time opera company in Australia in 1934. After his retirement from professional singing, Stevens indeed pursued a long-held desire by assisting his colleague Gertrude Johnson in the formation of an opera school to prepare a generation of young singers for their turn as Australia’s operatic ambassadors to Europe.

Stevens was born in 1876. Fifteen years younger than Melba, he was three years younger than Caruso and Chaliapin and the same age as DeLuca, the great baritone. While these singers are remembered as the golden generation that performed from 1900-1920, during this period Stevens was a successful dentist and a popular recitalist in Melbourne. Not that he was estranged from the performances of international singers. Australia, and particularly Melbourne, was visited by some of the greatest vocalists in the world, due in no small part to the influence of Melba.

Clara Butt, Kennerly Rumford and family embark for their 1907- 08 tour of Australia and New Zealand for J & N Tait

Because of the era in which he was born, and the artists with whom he sang, Stevens becomes a missing link between the operatic “Golden Age”, the mid-19th century and ultimately with today. I have sung with one of Stevens’s pupils on many occasions in the early part of my career as a singer and have been influenced and educated by that experience. We can experience the era of electrical recordings through Stevens whereas many of his contemporaries only survived to record in an acoustic format.¹ The quality of his voice in his live recording of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius from Hereford Cathedral in 1927 gives the listener an insight into the two singers he was so often compared with, Sir Charles Santley and the French basse chantante, Pol Plançon, both of whom recorded before the First World War.

The repertoire with which Stevens rose to prominence is also of interest, and possibly a reason why he is not better known today. While it is true that his operatic output remains at the core of modern operatic repertoire, nevertheless Stevens didn’t appear on a professional operatic stage until 1923, at the age of 47. Prior to that he was famous in his home state of Victoria as an amateur recitalist, and a soloist with many of the local, long-standing choral societies and remembered predominantly as a “concert singer”. He continued as a concert singer well into his 60s, performing his last Elijah in 1939.

It is difficult, from a 21st century perspective, to understand the importance the community choral group played in Victorian and Edwardian society. By the time Stevens was performing in the United Kingdom in the 1920s and 30s, it was already waning. In an interview from 1934, at the beginning of his Australian concert tour, he remarked that “due to the popularity of wireless more than 25 per cent of musical societies have been forced to close”.² These were not small groups. A photograph in my possession of the Murwillumbah Philharmonic Society from 1950 shows a group of over 50 performers, whose repertoire extended from William Byrd to Benjamin Britten. In 1852 the Handel and Haydn Society of Boston boasted a membership of 200.³ The Fairbairn production of Hiawatha that featured so prominently in the career of Stevens, was said to have utilized 800 choristers. There were certainly so many that they had to dress in tents erected outside the Royal Albert Hall, in Kensington Gardens.

Understandably, much of the repertoire of this period can no longer be performed. The resources are no longer there. The Early Music renaissance has allowed the choral masterpieces of Handel to remain in repertoire, simply because he used much smaller choral resources, often one singer per part. Other pieces like Mendelssohn’s Elijah, are performed regularly with smaller groups. Coleridge-Taylor’s Hiawatha, although glorious, is a victim of modern sensibilities to the plight of the Native American, while a massive choral work like Bantock’s Omar Khayyam was regarded as a “bulky novelty” when revived in 1927.⁴

Swindon Libraries

Stevens as 'Hiawatha'

Many of these pieces have, though, had very good modern recordings made of them and can be rediscovered in the privacy of one’s lounge room. When one considers that great composers like Gounod, Elgar and Vaughan Williams composed specifically for these great choruses, they remain an important area of musical achievement, and help to illuminate an era in which a performer could survive purely as a concert singer.

My research has uncovered so many Australian musicians who worked with their British colleagues to keep opera as a valid art form in inter-war England. Conductors like Aylmer Buesst, who assisted John Barbirolli and Adrian Boult, both with the British National Opera and the re-formed Covent Garden in 1931. Forgotten singers like Sydney-born soprano Leah Myers who created a storm in the 1923 Covent Garden season performing the lead role in Charpentier’s Louise. Sydney-born baritone, Harold Williams and Melbourne-born bass baritone Frederick Collier. So many stories. Their brief appearances in the Stevens story belies their importance in the history of Australian music.

Horace Stevens and "friends" at the re-opening of Covent Garden (photo by Sasha) The Tatler (London), 23 September 1931, p.521

Williams was, like Stevens, a digger in the war driving an ambulance, although one story has him discovered by General Birdwood singing in the trenches of Gallipoli and moved to the entertainment corps. Collier, a little younger than Stevens was a product of Archbishop Thomas Carr, Roman Catholic prelate of Melbourne’s attempt to inject some Catholic blood into an art form that had attracted mostly Protestants.

All these Australians arrived in Britain with extensive musical experience in their home country. Stevens’s background with the Melbourne Philharmonic had grounded him in the repertoire of the great oratorios. It must be remembered that when he made his historic debut as Elijah in Leeds in 1919, he had been performing in the piece since 1888, first as a boy, then in the title role from 1902. As a youth he had observed the great Charles Santley sing the role in 1890. Unlike many Australian singers, his vocal education had been an all-Australian affair. His mother’s life-long friend, Bessie Jukes eased the transition from boy soprano to baritone, and, as he remembered in an interview during his brief return to Australia in 1920, she had coached him on all his repertoire since then, until the war.⁵

There are several remarkable aspects to the British career of Stevens, not the least being that by 1922 he had performed with Sir Henry Wood, Sir Thomas Beecham, Malcolm Sargent and Adrian Boult. He was introduced to Sir Edward Elgar in 1926 and recorded with him in 1927. He sang with Ralph Vaughan Williams throughout the twenties and premiered his Sea Symphony in the United States. During his visit to North America, he was bass soloist in the American premiere of the Bach B minor Mass with the New York Philharmonic.

All these accomplishments are remarkable, but to that I add his operatic accomplishments. By all accounts not the most animated performer, nevertheless it appears he may have been Australia’s first, native-born Wotan. There is more information coming to light every day, but for now, this brief introduction will help fill in the blanks of an extraordinary time, and an amazing Australian performer.

Australian Singers 1890-1950: A Literature Review

Two books form the principal secondary sources for Australian singers of Horace Stevens’s lifetime: Opera for the Antipodes by Alison Gyger,⁶ and Singers of Australia by Barbara and Findlay Mackenzie.⁷ The Mackenzie’s present brief biographies of Australian singers from 1880 to 1966. The book is now dated but when it was written many of these singers were either still alive, or fresh in the memories of people who knew them. As Horace Stevens was a very private man, accounts by contemporary colleagues and friends are a vital window into the life of this great artist.

Opera for the Antipodes is a fascinating overview of the Australian operatic world from 1881 to 1939. The only section that deals with Stevens directly discusses the Fuller tour of 1934-35 in some detail. The book is of great interest also, for information about the Australian cultural world prior to the First World War in which Stevens established his career. The earlier development of opera in Australia in the period between 1861-1880, prior to Stevens, is outlined in The Golden Age of Australian Opera.⁸ This book is useful as it discusses some of the older singers who sang with the young Stevens, for example the tenor Armes Beaumont.

There are several books which present biographies of individual Australian singers of this period. Four biographies of Dame Nellie Melba are currently extant, plus her autobiography Melodies and Memories.⁹ Melba’s very presence was such an inspiration to young singers. She regularly returned to Australia to hear and advise young singers, many of whom she took under her wing. At a time when it took a month by steamer to travel between Australia and England, her international schedule was exhaustive.

After Melba, the Australian singer most often written about is the Wagnerian soprano, Marjorie Lawrence. Less familiar to Australians, her career was mainly in North America, where she made regular appearances at the Metropolitan Opera. A famed beauty, her vocation was interrupted by polio. Her autobiography, Interrupted Melody ¹⁰ was made into a Hollywood film ¹¹, and recently a biography, Wotan’s Daughter ¹² has been published.

Marjorie Lawrence

photo by Delar, N.Y. (1947) - National Library of Australia, Canberra

Florence Austral

National Library of Australia, Canberra

A direct contemporary of Stevens and his partner on both the operatic and concert stage, soprano Florence Austral was the subject of a biography by James Moffat.¹³ There are some errors in the references to Stevens, particularly regarding his 1927 American concert tour.

Stevens’s famous contemporary, Peter Dawson, also wrote an autobiography, Fifty Years of Song,¹⁴ and an excellent biography of this artist was written by Horace Stevens’s last student, Russell Smith.¹⁵ Given the popularity of Dawson between 1900-1950, I was initially surprised how little his story connected to Stevens’s career. Dawson’s reputation has been raised to mythical proportions, but during my studies it became clear that he was in a different milieu to Stevens. Although Dawson appeared in the Proms two or three times, and attempted to sing Elijah once, he was primarily engaged for popular entertainment, in which he was a highly-paid success.

Peter Dawson

photo by Harrods (c.1933) - National Library of Australia, Canberra

Harold Williams

National Library of Australia, Canberra

During the 1930s there were three Australian baritones frequently appearing together in reviews and articles: Horace Stevens, Harold Williams and John Brownlee. Brownlee, like Lawrence, is better known in the USA, appearing regularly on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera, and later directing the Manhattan School of Music. He is commemorated in Giovanni: the life and times of John Brownlee by Lloyd Bell.¹⁶ Harold Williams is treated in a chapter within Singers of today by Donald Brook.¹⁷ Sadly, written after Stevens’s retirement, and a year before his death, Brook’s book does not include Stevens, but is a significant source of information concerning many of Stevens’s fellow performers, including Norman Allin and Muriel Brunskill, who also were part of the 1934-35 Fuller tour of Australia. While the biography Malcolm McEachern: Master of Song by Howard C. Jones documents the life of the Albury-born bass.

Despite the significant presence of Australian singers on the International opera and concert stage at this time, it is remarkable there are so few books detailing their lives and careers. Many of the women are discussed in Roger Neill’s Divas: Mathilde Marchesi and her pupils,¹⁸ but material discussing male singers is comparatively sparse.

Understanding the Context.

The accounts of pre-Federation and early Edwardian Melbourne in Manning Clark’s History of Australia ¹⁹ illustrate the vibrancy and sophistication of the city, although in country Victoria people were shooting each other. The Kelly gang was formed the same year Stevens was born. The incomplete collection of The Australian Musical News (1911-1963) at the State Library of Queensland ²⁰ and chapter two of The Australian Symphony from Federation to 1960 ²¹ by Rhoderick McNeill also shows how musically sophisticated Australians were during this period.

The era of Stevens’s professional life in Britain between 1919 and 1937 is best understood from the biographies and autobiographies of the conductors and musical leaders of the era. Many of the problems encountered by singers of the age were a direct result of the mighty shadow cast by conductor Sir Thomas Beecham. His efforts to control operatic Britain both during and immediately after the First World War were set against the social and fiscal difficulties that the war had created. Beecham’s autobiography²² finishes at the beginning of 1923, the year Stevens made his operatic debut at Covent Garden as Wotan. The centenary tribute by Allan Jefferson²³ did not illuminate the period surrounding 1923, where Beecham left the Garden, and 1931, when he returned. However, the musical politics of the era is well presented in A History of the Royal Opera House. Covent Garden. 1732-1982.²⁴ A key contribution to operatic stabilization was made through the continued political lobbying of publisher William Boosey, which resulted in the Government funding Covent Garden in 1931. This is chronicled in his autobiography, Fifty Years of Music.²⁵

Charles Reid’s biography of conductor Malcolm Sargent²⁶ mentions Stevens in a way that shows his importance in the musical world of Britain at the time. It gives vital information on the preparation and performance of the fabled Hiawatha performances at the Royal Albert Hall.

HIAWATHA perfomed as an Opera at the ALBERT HALL, The Sphere (London), Saturday, 24 May 1924, p.11

As Stevens’s professional career was tied so closely to the support of Sir Henry Wood, the related chapters in My Life of Music²⁷ are pertinent. Although Stevens is not directly mentioned, Wood describes the British debut of fabled heldentenor Lauritz Melchior at the Proms. Stevens was the Wotan at that concert, and Wood points out that each singer in the concert performance of Die Walküre sang in their native language.

Finally, the conductor Eugene Goossens’s²⁸ letter to his father en route to take over the Sydney Symphony Orchestra is perhaps more evocative of the personality of the conductor than of the singers he dismisses as teachers in Australia.

What is documented about Stevens?

Aside from Singers of Australia and Opera for the Antipodes, there is little published about Stevens in secondary sources. The essay on Horace Stevens in the Australian Dictionary of Biography²⁹ is a very important source and features some interesting anecdotes. The author, James Griffin, knew Stevens personally, according to his son, and many of the references at the end list ‘private information’. I have been able to access Griffin’s other named sources which include the Mackenzie book, Isabelle Moresby’s Australia makes Music ³⁰ and Melbourne Savages by David Dow.³¹ The Moresby account of Stevens has the friendly, chatty aura of an interview, although it mistakenly puts Stevens’s Covent Garden debut in 1927 rather than 1923. The Dow book is reverential towards Stevens, while detailing some of the robust exploits of the Savage Club members.

A Century of Harmony, the centenary history of the Royal Melbourne Philharmonic Society, by W.A. Carne is a very important source. Through its chronological list of all appearances as the Youth to Sir Charles Santley’s Elijah in 1890 to his final official appearance with the choir in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in 1935. He is not mentioned in the cast of Hiawatha in 1939 but did perform in it and was broadcast in the role by the ABC.

There are several mentions of Stevens in Frank van Straten’s National Treasure,³² the story of Gertrude Johnson’s creation of the National Theatre. Stevens and Johnson knew each other when they were performing together in Melbourne before the First World War. Given the tone of some of Stevens’s interviews when he returned to Australia, the germ of an idea to train young singers in stage craft had already taken root by 1934. He assisted Johnson and coached from time to time. Brian Castles-Onion, in his obituary for Robert Allman for The Australian ³³ mentioned that young singers were sent to Stevens first, to gauge their suitability in the field of opera.

The Record Collector ³⁴ has a fascinating article by Wayne Turner and Graham Oakes which appears to have information that could only be gathered from first hand sources, including a story of the 12-year-old Stevens suffering from stage fright at his first audition. It makes a couple of obvious errors. The contralto for the Santley performances of Elijah was not Adelina Patti, but Janet Patey. However, the article includes some descriptions of Stevens’s performances by colleagues Sir Keith Falkner, Norman Allin and Rispah Goodacre. The Record Collector article claims that Stevens sang in The Golden Cockerel, Madame Butterfly and The Marriage of Figaro, though I have found no press reviews to confirm or consolidate this information.³⁵

Stevens is so closely associated with the three major oratorios of Sir Edward Elgar, particularly The Dream of Gerontius, it came as no mild surprise that he didn’t meet Elgar until 1926, the year before their celebrated collaboration at Hereford Cathedral which produced the magical live recording of ‘Jesu, by thy suff’ring dread’. Michael Kennedy’s essay ‘Some Elgar interpreters’ in the book Elgar Studies³⁶, is effusive in his praise for Stevens’s performance. Bearing in mind the recording itself, (initially re-issued on Lp in 1972 and re-released on CD in 2011), one can only agree. It has been said that the acoustic of Hereford Cathedral was perfectly attuned to Stevens’s voice. One certainly hears none of the American critic’s complaints that sometimes he was drowned out by the orchestra.

Regarding Stevens’s limited recording career, I was fortunate to obtain a copy of Herman Klein’s contemporary reviews for the magazine The Gramophone.³⁷ Klein is extremely complimentary about Stevens’s voice and, usefully, most of the recordings he reviews are issued on the Truesound Transfers discs discussed below. Klein also provides critical comparisons with contemporary singers in the same repertoire. Most of these recordings are also available for comparison.

Singers to Remember,³⁸ by Harold Simpson, gives a good, if somewhat basic account of Stevens’s career. It ignores his amateur career in Melbourne, and, like many of the later articles and biographies, places his death in 1954. There is also mention of him singing Hagen from Götterdämmerung. The Moffat biography of Florence Austral also states that he took part in a performance of that opera with her. It was never reviewed, if it happened. The excerpts at the Cincinnati May Festival in 1927 contain no Hagen sections.

James Glennon devotes one and a half pages to Stevens in his book Australian Music and Musicians.³⁹ It is a brief and basic account of his life. The dates and repertoire are correct. There is no mention of Elgar and Sir Henry Wood becomes Sir Thomas Wood not once, but twice.

Portrait of Horace Stevens by Ernest Buckmaster (Entered into the 1936 Archibald Prize)

The Recorded Legacy

One of the most challenging aspects of researching Horace Stevens is the difficulty in obtaining recordings, not only of Stevens himself, but also for much of the music he sang, which is no longer fashionable, or requires resources that are, at best, difficult to assemble.

In dealing with Stevens’s recordings, the Eloquence release on Decca, ⁴⁰ Pearl’s 20 Great Bass Arias and songs volume 2 ⁴¹ and The Elgar Edition on Warner Music⁴² (formerly EMI) all contain the same excerpt; ‘Jesu, by thy suff’ring dread’. At the start of my research at the beginning of 2017, YouTube had one Stevens recording; an obscure aria, ‘Sulla Poppa’, from La Prigione d’Edimburgo (Frederico Ricci).⁴³ This performance is of interest because it appears to be Stevens’s only recording not in English (his Italian is impeccable), and that there is no evidence that he sang it in public. The year it was recorded, it was sung at the Proms by Herbert Heyner.

Two volumes of Stevens recordings are available on Truesound Transfers.⁴⁴ Restored by Christian Zwarg, they contain his important recordings, including the Elijah arias, both in early versions for Vocalion records, and later versions for the fledgling Decca corporation. ‘Hiawatha’s Vision’ is also there, and gloriously sung.

Lastly, there is Elgar’s Interpreters on Record. Volume 5.⁴⁵ This set contains excerpts from The Dream of Gerontius from 1936, conducted by Adrian Boult. We hear Stevens at 60, about to leave England forever, and despite Boult’s extremely slow tempi, the voice sounds powerful and fresh.

Finally, I needed to familiarise myself with the music Stevens sang. Whenever possible I tried to obtain contemporary recordings or versions that retained similar performance sensibilities. Stevens recorded the arias from Elijah, but the first recording of the complete oratorio was made in 1930 featuring compatriot Harold Williams.⁴⁶ Sir Malcolm Sargent left an early recording of Handel’s Israel in Egypt⁴⁷ without bass solos. The bass chorus sings ‘The Lord is a Man of War’. It doesn’t include the interpolated aria from Ezio, ‘Nasce al Bosco’, that Stevens sang, but it presents an interesting insight.

Stevens sang in the British premiere of Handel’s Eracle under Beecham. A later live recording from 1958 at La Scala exists⁴⁸ that shows an older performance practice with basses singing the castrato roles, now usually undertaken by counter tenors, and the tenor arias sung by Franco Corelli, not a voice we would associate with Handel today. The Vaughan Williams Sea Symphony,⁴⁹ and the three Elgar oratorios⁵⁰ are all available under Sir Adrian Boult, with whom Stevens worked on a regular basis. Parry’s Job,⁵¹ Coleridge Taylor’s Hiawatha ⁵² and Bantock’s Omar Khayyam⁵³ are available on excellent, modern recordings. Stevens’s repertoire as a boy soprano can be heard on the Nostalgia Naxos release; Master Ernest Lough. Wings of a Dove.⁵⁴

Leff Pouishnoff, who shared the concert stage with Stevens on his tour of Australia in 1934, can be heard on a double CD set for APR.⁵⁵ Sadly, his lieder recordings with Walter Widdop are yet to be released.

The performers with whom Stevens shared the operatic and concert stages are available on several excellent compilation CDs, and to finish, to give some of the flavour of the 1920s music scene, Whispering Jack Smith⁵⁶, the performer who provided light relief during Stevens’s Armada Concert on BBC Radio, and the Coon-Sander’s Nighthawks,⁵⁷ who finished off the Cincinnati May Music Festival, after the concert performance of Götterdämmerung, both have dedicated CDs.

To be continued...

Endnotes

1. Many of Stevens’s operatic contemporaries had remarkably brief lives. Caruso was dead at 48; Emmy Destinn, Puccini’s first Fanciulla del West died in 1930 at the age of 52.

2. 20 February 1934. The Argus, p 5. Trove. Accessed 21 March 2017

3. Michael Broyles. Growth, Change, and Discoveries in the Nineteenth Century. P. 57 The Handel and Haydn Society. Bringing Music to Life for 200 years. The Handel and Haydn Society in association with David Godine, Publisher, 2014.

4. The Times 29 October 1927 p. 10; Issue 44725. Trove. Accessed 3 May 2017

5. Table Talk. 19 August 1920 p 25. Accessed 19 April 2017. Trove.

6. Alison Gyger: Opera for the Antipodes: Opera in Australia 1881-1939. Currency Press. 1990

7. Barbara and Findlay Mackenzie: Singers of Australia from Melba to Sutherland. Lansdowne Press 1967

8. Harold Love.: The Golden Age of Australian Opera. W.S. Lyster and his companies. 1861-1880. Currency Press. 1981

9. https://trove.nla.gov.au/book/resulty?q=Damje+Nellie=Melba Accessed 11 March 2018

10. https://trove.nla.gov.au/book/result?q=Marjorie+Lawrence Accessed 11 March 2018

11. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0048210/ Accessed 11 March 2018

12. Richard Davis. Wotan’s Daughter. The Life and Times of Marjorie Lawrence. Wakefield Press. 2012

13. James Moffat Florence Austral. One of the Wonder Voices of the World. Currency Press. 1995

14. http://trove.nla.gov.au/book/result?q=Peter+Dawson Accessed 11 March 2018

15. Russell Smith and Peter Burgis. Peter: Peter Dawson. The World’s Most Popular Baritone. Currency Press. 2001

16. Lloyd Bell. Giovanni: The Life and Times of John Brownlee. [Philadelphia]: Xlibris. c 2002

17. Donald Brook. Singers of Today. Tapp and Toothill ltd. 1949

18. Roger Neill. Divas. Mathilde Marchesi and her pupils. Newsouth. 2016

19. Charles Manning Clark. A History of Australia, Melbourne University Press. 1962

20. http://onesearch.slq.qld.gov.au/primoexplore/search?vid=SLQ&searchscope=SLQPCIEBSCO&query=any,contains,Australian%20Musical%20News

21. Rhoderick McNeill. The Australian Symphony from Federation to 1960. Ashgate 2014 Chapter 2

22. Sir Thomas Beecham.: A Mingled Chime. Hutchinson and Co. 1944

23. Alan Jefferson. Sir Thomas Beecham. A Centenary Tribute. MacDonald and Jane’s. 1979

24. Andrew Saint. B.A. Young Mary Clarke. Clement Crisp. Harold Rosenthal.: A History of the Royal Opera House. Covent Garden. 1732-1982. The Royal Opera House. 1982

25. William Boosey. Fifty Years of Music. Ernest Benn Limited. 1931

26. Charles Reid. Malcolm Sargent. A Biography. Hamish Hamilton 1968

27. Sir Henry Wood. My Life in Music. Victor Gollancz. Ltd. 1938

28. Carole Rosen. The Goossens. A Musical Century. Andre Deutsch. 1993

29. http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/stevens-horace-ernest-8653 Accessed 1 March 2017

30. Isabelle Moresby. Australia Makes Music. Longmans, Green and Company. 1944

31. David M. Dow. Melbourne Savages. A History of The First Fifty Years of The Melbourne Savage Club. The Melbourne Savage Club. 1947

32. Frank Van Stratten. National Treasure. The Story of Gertrude Johnson and the National Theatre. Victoria Press. 1994

33. https://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/a-baritone-of-celebrated-force/news-story/4b1f555ab3b4a967f1c30d79d34afde8?sv=58df8723023c060e8936f5074e4c4009

34. Wayne Turner. Graham Oakes. The Record Collector. Vol. 46. No. 3. Editor: Larry Lustig. September 2001

35. The absence of Horace Stevens in the credits for such productions listed in J.P. Wearing's The London Stage 1920-1929 and The London Stage 1930-1939. [Scarecrow Press. 1984], indicates that such performances took place outside of London. 

36. Raymond Monk. Edit. Elgar Studies. Scholar Press. 1990

37. William R. Moran. edit. Herman Klein and The Gramophone. Collected Reviews. 1923-1934. Amadeus Press. 1988

38. Harold Simpson. Singers to Remember. The Oakwood Press.

39. James Glennon. Australian Music and Musicians. Rigby Limited. 1968

40. Decca Eloquence. From Melba to Sutherland. Australian Singers on Record. Compilation Producers: Tony Locantro and Roger Neill. 482 5892.

41. Pearl. 20 Great Bass Arias & Songs. Volume II. GEMM CD 9173. Pavilion Records Ltd.

42. Warner Classics. The Elgar Edition. 9 CD. 50999 95694 2 3 Mono ADD.

43. https://youtu.be/WSXzyhUh288

44. Horace Stevens 1. TT-3002. Horace Stevens 2. TT-3003. Source Materials provided by Chris Mankelow (Sunday Opera records). Christian Zwarg Compilation, discographical research and digital audio restoration: Christian Zwarg.

45. Elgar Editions. Elgar’s Interpreters on Record. Volume 5. EECD003-5 Broadcasts from the Leech Collection at the British Library. (1935-1950) add Mono.

46. Divine art. HISTORIC SOUND. Mendelssohn: Elijah. 27802 mono ADD

47. Dutton. Handel: Israel in Egypt. CDLX 7045

48. MYTO. G.F. Handel. Eracle. 2 CD 00159

49. Warner Classics British Composers. Vaughan Williams. The Nine Symphonies. Sir Adrian Boult. 5099 0 87494 2 3 Stereo ADD.

50. Warner Classics. Elgar Choral Works. Sir Adrian Boult.0946 3 67931 2 2 Stereo ADD.

51. Hyperion. Sir Hubert H. Parry. Job. CDA67025 DDD

52. Argo. Scenes from the Song of Hiawatha. The Decca Record Company. 430 356-2 ZH2

53. Lyrita Itter Broadcast Collection. Granville Bantock. The Complete Omar Khayyam. Norman Del Mar. BBC. REAM.2128

54. Nostalgia Naxos. Master Ernest Lough. Wings of a Dove. ©2005 Naxos Rights International. 8.1 2083 2

55. APR Leff Pouishnoff. The Complete 78 rpm and Selected Saga LP Recordings. APR 6022.

56. Flapper. Whispering Jack Smith. Past CD. 7074

57. ASV Mono. Living Era. Everything is Hotsy-Totsy Now. The Coon-Sanders Nighthawks. CD AJA 5199.