JC Williamson

Gilbert and Sullivan in Victoria

In the world of Gilbert and Sullivan 2025 actually marked four notable anniversaries:

• Arthur Sullivan died on the 22 November 1900, 125 years ago
• The Mikado the most popular of the Savoy Operas, premiered on the 14 March 1885, 140 years ago
• But more importantly to us, the first collaboration for Richard D'Oyly Carte happened on the 25March 1875, 150 years ago
• And the Gilbert and Sullivan Society of Victoria was founded on the 28August 1935, 90 years ago

How did it all come about?

Richard D’Oyly Carte

Arthur Sullivan, 1888, by Sir John Everett Millais

An opera singer called Celina Dolaro hired the Royalty Theatre in London to present herself in a variety of operas. She engaged as her manager a young man known as Richard D’Oyly Carte, who was also her agent, with the firm of Rudal Carte and Co.

Theatre-goers in the 19th century liked to get their money’s worth and expected more than one work to be on the program. In addition to the main attraction there would be a curtain raiser and an afterpiece.

It was D’Oyly Carte who reunited Gilbert and Sullivan to create an afterpiece for La Pericole, by Offenbach. (They had previously collaborated on Thespis, or, The Gods Grown Old for John Hollingshead, which was staged at the Gaiety Theatre, London as a Christmas extravaganza in 1871, but afterwards had gone their separate ways, except for a couple of ballads that they wrote: 'The Distant Shore' published in 1874, and ‘Sweethearts’ – inspired by Gilbert’s play of that name – published in 1875).

Most books on G&S say that Carte happened to run into Gilbert and asked him if he were interested in providing something for the theatre. But in fact, Sullivan was engaged first. The programme for the opening of La Pericole on the 30 January states ‘in preparation a New Comic Opera, composed expressly for this theatre by Mr Arthur Sullivan in which Madame Dolaro and Nellie Bromley will appear’. This is the first night programme. You will notice in the cast a certain Frederic Sullivan. D’Oyly Carte had previously worked with him and it may be that though his brother Carte came to know Arthur Sullivan.

Obviously, Carte thought the bill could be improved and brought the composer together with W.S. Gilbert who was making his name as both a dramatist and a librettist. Trial by Jury had begun life as a Bab Ballad. Gilbert regularly contributed comic verses for a magazine called Fun. Trial was one of these.

Gilbert had adapted this into a one-act work for the stage, which he sent to Carl Rosa, who had his own opera company, for Rosa to set for his wife. Unfortunately, that lady died and the manuscript was returned. So, on the request of Carte, Gilbert brought it out and Sullivan was asked to set the work. There was only a matter of weeks before it was finished rehearsed and put on the stage on the 25 March 1875.

Programme for the 1875 season at the Royalty Theatre

At that stage, Sullivan, just 32, was expected to become the beacon of English serious music and through his life he continued to write oratorios, cantatas and works for major music festivals.  He was seduced away to the world of light opera by Carte and we can all be grateful for this.

On Trial’s opening the main attraction was still La Pericole, but with a curtain-raiser called Chryptoconchoidsymphonsamata!

The merit of the work was immediately recognised and Trial soon replaced the work with the unwieldy title in the more prestigious position as curtain-raiser.

It was Carte’s ambition to create a school of English comic opera. He envisioned a number of composers and librettists creating works, which he would produce. Of course, his partnership with Gilbert and Sullivan was so successful that he did not move on to managing a stable of composers and librettists.

It took him two years to raise enough money, to commission the writing of their next work The Sorcerer. And then there were various problems with investors, until he managed to get rid of them and form the triumvirate of manager, composer, librettist to bring the works to the stage.

So, Trial by Jury was the beginning of what must surely be the most successful theatrical partnership in history. They became household names not only throughout Britain but also the USA, Australia and Europe and continued to be so through most of the 20th century.

So, now let us look at how we, in Australia, came to know and love the operas.

Piracy was rife, not on the high seas, but in all forms of artistic enterprise. Copyright laws were not strong enough to prevent works being produced in just about every country, but the most egregiously in America. In 1878, HMS Pinaforetook to the stage in London and very soon after around the world. It created the same style of enormous following that the Beatles did in the 1960s and that Taylor Swift seemed to engender on her recent tour of Australia.

It is said that there were over 100 productions in America, and of course none paid any royalites to Gilbert or Sullivan. Seeing the popularity of these works was an American actor named James Cassius Williamson.

Trial by Jury, 1875

In late 2025, Theatre Heritage Australia, launched a book about George Coppin, the Australian entrepreneur. It was Coppin who was advised by his American agent, that he should engage Williamson and his wife, Maggie Moore, to tour Australia under Coppin’s management and that it would be ‘the most profitable engagement ever made by you and me’. This was in 1873, before the G&S partnership. And what’s more, with something that seems like a premonition of the future, the ship on which they arrived in Australia was the SS Mikado.

The Williamsons arrived in Melbourne in July 1874, on a day they described as ‘cold, wet and miserable’ and opened at the Theatre Royal with the play that had brought them great success in their home country, Struck Oil.

And indeed, they did 'strike oil'. The play achieved a run of 43 nights, which was a record for this city of 110,000 residents. They toured Australia for fifteen successful months and returned to America via India and England.

Three years later, once Pinafore had established itself as a major money maker, Williamson contacted Gilbert and Sullivan and paid for the exclusive right to present the work in Australia. The rights were originally offered to William Lyster but he turned the offer down on the grounds that such a work would not be to the taste of Australians. Wiliamson heard that there were already productions of Pinafore happening here and took legal action.

If you visit Castlemaine, you will hear that HMS Pinafore was the first of the G&S operas to be staged in Australia and this was at their theatre, now a cinema. I asked about this claim when I was there and they are adamant that this is true, but could not give me any details, so we will not give them any credence.

But a firm led by Leon and Kelly was playing the work and so was Horace Linguard, another American who had in the past employed Williamson, and also Hiscock and Hayman. All claimed that English copyright laws did not apply to them, and anyway JCW was still in America and so the pirate performances continued. Williamson engaged lawyers to sue and won the cases, collecting £500 from Leon and Kelly, £200 from Hiscock and Hayman and £300 from Horace Lingard. So before setting foot in Australia he had made a handsome profit, having only paid £300 for the rights.

Struck Oil

Nellie Stewart

A performer in one of these offending productions was Nellie Stewart. She would go on to a most distinguished career and did indeed return to G&S in Australia.

Once he had legally established his exclusive rights he travelled to Australia and then opened his own production, playing the role of Sir Joseph Porter himself with his wife as Josephine. It went brilliantly.

Its huge success encouraged Williamson to negotiate for the rights of the next opera, The Pirates of Penzance, for which he paid £1,000. This time he played the Sargent of Police with an Irish accent, creating a tradition that all following in the role also used the same accent.

From this success, Williamson formed his own Comic Opera Company, later amended to the Royal Comic Opera Company, because his productions were seen at the Theatres Royal in both Sydney and Melbourne.

Although he appeared in the first two of his productions, he did not have a good singing voice. His conductor, Signor Paolo Giorza, said of him ‘he knew only one note and he sing it all the time.’

He did appear on stage after this but most of his time was spent on management. His firm secured the rights to all the G&S operas until the copyright ran out in 1961. It was the foundation of his success and if there was ever a lean spell, another revival of the Savoy operas was created to bring in the money.

In time Williamson’s became the largest performing organisation in the world. Not only did it tour all the large productions from Britian and America throughout Australia, New Zealand and parts of Asia, but they owned theatres in the capital cities and later film and radio studios.

Of course, these antipodean performances created the desire for more involvement with the G&S Operas. By the way, in what we call the ‘inner brotherhood’—a term from Patience, we never say operettas. They are comic operas.

JCW mainly engaged his cast from Australian singers but he also brought out many who had worked in England under the direction of Gilbert. They insisted our productions should be performed as they were at the Savoy and so Australia adopted the revered Tradition of the works from the outset. When The Mikado opened in Melbourne, it was heralded on the cover of the Australasian Sketcher.

Maggie Moore and J.C. Williamson in HMS Pinafore, 1879

Scenes from The Mikado, Australasian Sketcher, 10 March 1886

Some of these artists had the good taste to like this country so much that they stayed on and became Australian household names, starring not only in G&S but also other Williamson works. One of these was Federici, real name Frederic Baker.

Federici's only appearance at the Savoy was as Sir Roderick Murgatroyd in two matinee performances of Ruddigore in February 1887, before going to New York to play the role in D'Oyly Carte's American production of the opera until April. But he toured all round England for many years in the various D'Oyly Carte touring companies. When The Pirates of Penzance premiered in New York, it was essential to secure the British copyright, so a once-only performance of it was done in the Devonshire town of Paignton. Federici was the Pirate King. Later he was the first to play the Mikado in New York. He also played that role in Australia at the Princess Theatre, Melbourne in 1887. He remained here and created another degree of fame for himself. He was cast as Mephistopheles in Faust, which opened at the Princess Theatre. As he sang his last notes and descended through the trap to hell, he suffered a heart attack and died. Nevertheless, the cast all claimed he was on stage with them in the curtain call. There are those who still claim that he can be seen in the theatre and if he is present at a first night, then the show will be a success. There is a plan to celebrate this man with a musical about his life.

As the popularity of the operas grew so did that of those associated with various roles. Just as in England, the comics parts were known as the Grossmith roles, then the Lytton, the Martyn Green, the Peter Pratt and the John Reed roles. So, it was down under. One of the first to establish this was Howard Vernon. In 1881 he played Major General Stanley in The Pirates of Penzance going on to Bunthorne in Patience, the Lord Chancellor in Iolanthe, and here he is as Ko-Ko in The Mikado. 

Howard Vernon (1885)

Autographed title page of Vinia de Loitte's booklet

We know about him mainly from a small book that his second wife, Vinia De Loitte published. There is very little written on G&S history in Australia but De Loitte, also known as the Comtesse de Vilme-Hautmont, published this small booklet covering the productions. It seemed to come out almost every year with updates. I have seen at least half a dozen editions dated in various years to the mid-1930s.

Incidentally, every copy I have seen is autographed, so if you find an unautographed one it may be rare and valuable. She herself joined the Williamson company and among her many appearances was in the Australian premiere of Utopia, Limited, as Princess Kalyba.

Aggie Thorne as Princess Nekaya & Vinia de Loitte as Princess Kalyba in Utopia, Ltd. (1906) 

Ivan Menzies as John Wellington Wells in The Sorcerer (1942)

Although Vernon was greatly acclaimed, he retired to Melbourne and owned a bookshop and when he died his estate was valued at £47.

Another English performer who starred in G&S was C.H. Workman, who performed here with great success. He was invited back to the Savoy, but died at sea off Hong Kong on the way back to Australia following a tour of India and the far East with the JCW G&S Opera Company in 1923. You can find out his history from Theatre Heritage’s own on-line magazine.

Coming into the 20th century, I have met many who think of the G&S performances as represented by Ivan Menzies.

He had been an understudy in the touring D’Oyly Carte companies for a few years, taking over as principal comedian of the "New" Company in July 1925 until its disbandment in June 1927, and had married the lovely soprano Elsie Griffin. He seized the chance to come to Australia when invited to join Williamsons. Here he became a star. Everyone who remembers seeing him from those days has great praise for him, but I have met a number of folk who knew him personally and I have never heard a good word said about him. When he married Elsie, the company was playing in Leeds but they travelled to Sheffield for the wedding. It was his view that before the marriage Elsie, as a single woman, should pay her own train fare there and as her husband, he would pay it on the way back.

Later he joined the Moral Rearmament Movement and a biography of him does seem to have been written to promote that. But I do not have enough knowledge of the organisation to make any relevant comment.

JCW, which I will from now on refer to as ‘The Firm’ regularly revived the operas and took them round not only Australia but New Zealand and parts of Asia. These tours occurred regularly through the teens to the early 1960s.

John Adams as Pish-Tush, Richard Wordsworth as Ko-Ko & Martin Lawrence as Pooh-Bah in the 1962 JCW revival

One revival of the operas came to Melbourne in 1935. To promote it, the Argus newspaper conducted a plebiscite of its readers, asking them to vote for their favourite opera.  For the record The Yeomen of the Guard won, with The Mikadocoming second. This prompted a suggestion that there should be an association for lovers of the operas. A Mr Stewart set the ball rolling by sending a letter to The Age, proposing a G&S Society. This was responded to by a number of people influential in the music world at the time, including Professor Bernard Heinze, Director of Music at the Melbourne Conservatorium. Bernard Manning, one of the old D’Oyly Carters who was now performing with the Firm and Gregory Stroud, another such, gave their support, as did Frank Tait, managing director of J.C. Williamsons. Professor Heinze offered the conservatorium as a meeting place. On 28 August 1935, The Gilbert and Sullivan Society of Victoria officially came into being.

This did cause a little discord. The Old Player and Playgoers Club, had had a similar idea and was setting up a club called The Savoyards. Their president Alfred Peters was not happy to be overtaken by another society and terse letters were exchanged.

Once initiated, the G&S Society met on the third Friday of every month, read through parts of the operas or Gilbert’s plays and sang choruses. After a year of this, they felt ready to produce a full opera which they did on the 24 October. If you pass a Mexican restaurant near the corner of Russell and Bourke Streets, give it a reverential nod—because in 1936 it was the site of the King’s Theatre and the venue of our first season. The Sorcerer was presented with Gilbert’s play Rosencranz and Guildenstern preceding it.

It was reviewed in The Herald. It is difficult to read, but it is a curiosity because it focusses solely on the costumes.

Colourful settings and gay costumes are features of this bright opera.  Violet Jackson wore several attractive frocks, her first appearance was made in a period gown of sage green taffeta made with a wide panier skirt.  Later she wore a lovely frock of white satin which had a full skirt, amply trimmed with frills of gold lace. Dorothy James, who played the part of Lady Sangazure was a decorative figure in a lavender brocade gown embossed with glistening crystal beads and trimmed with silver lace.

The Argus chose to be more constructive:

As the family sorcerer John W. Wells, Paull Fiddian carried off the dramatic honours of the evening. His handling of the patter song was remarkably good … Violet Jackson made an attractive heroine and was well seconded by her adoring Alexis.

Violet Jackson, I may add, our first leading lady, was involved with the Society through the years from the start to the 1980s. She had been a principal with the Firm, but retired when she married. She performed with us for some years and then, she became a director and passed on her knowledge to succeeding generations. Here she is in a program from our 50th year where she is listed as producer.

From G&S Society of Victoria program

Suzanne Holden as 'Josephine' in Pinafore 

While many of our members went on to a professional career, only one ever rose to the heights of singing with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company.  After performing the leading soprano roles in several of our productions, Suzanne Holden auditioned for and won a place with the premiere G&S Company in England, staying with them until they wound up in 1983.  This photo is of her singing Josephine in HMS Pinafore, a role she understudied.

By now of course Williamson himself had moved on to that great green room in the sky and The Firm, still under its old name, had amalgamated with the Taits, a family of four brothers, with Frank Tait at the helm.

Tait had been supportive of the establishment of the G&S Society but now was even more generous. 

The G&S Society then staged the first revival of Utopia, Limited since its professional Australian tour of 1906, for four nights at the King’s Theatre from Wednesday, 6 October 1937 to the following Saturday. The Sun-News Pictorial noted that: “It will be presented by a specially selected cast and chorus of 80, with the University Students’ Orchestra conducted by J. Sutton Crow. The producer is Mr. Lennox Brewer, formerly of J.C. Williamson Ltd.” This followed on from a programme of excerpts from the opera that the Society had presented in the Melba Hall at Melbourne University in late June of that year. The production was subsequently reviewed in the Sun, with emphasis once again given to the costumes rather than the performance itself.

Utopia Opens at King’s Theatre

COLOUFUL settings and gay frocking make bright entertainment of the Savoy opera, Utopia Ltd., presented by the Gilbert and Sullivan Society of Victoria, in association with J. C. Williamson Ltd., in the King’s Theatre last night.

This amusing opera, which takes place over two acts in Utopia, will be presented again tonight, tomorrow and Saturday nights.

Opening in a palm grove, with the blue ocean in the background and tropical foliage on the shore making a glamorous background for the grass skirts, leis and flowers worn by the girls, the action then moves to the throne room in King Paramount’s Palace.

In vivid contrast with the colorfulness of the clothes worn by the island girls are the pure white saris and draped skirts worn by the Princesses Nekaya and Kalyba (Alice Harris and Amanda Neil) and the emerald green velvet frock of the Princess Zara (Dorothy Bendall). This frock is made with a redingote with a scalloped band of gold metal lace at the hem of the full skirt, matching the flounced underskirt and frills edging the elbow-length sleeves. Her hat of matching velvet is trimmed with shaded green plumage.

The Sun News-Pictorial, Thursday, 7 October 1937, page 46

The backing of Williamson’s is also an indication that the production may have reused the original 31 year-old scenery from the opera’s 1906 tour (or at least “equivalent” scenery from its storehouse), in addition to costumes from the JCW Wardrobe Department.

In 1938 the society also mounted a production of The Gondoliers, for which Frank Tait allowed us to use His Majesty’s Theatre as well as JCW's costumes and scenery and orchestra.

Publicity for the production noted there were 100 performers involved. I am guessing that this must have included the orchestra as fitting 100 people onto the stage, not to mention allowing them to dance on it would have been some feat.

When the copyright lapsed in 1961 there were attempts to mount more modern productions but the public rejected them.

Program for the 1969/1970 season

Dennis Olsen in Patience

Then in 1969, the Elizabethan Theatre Trust, a forerunner of the Australian Opera, mounted four of the operas; Pirates, Iolanthe, HMS Pinafore and The Yeomen of the Guard and toured them round the country. It was cast mainly with opera singers, who were able to act and bring the works to life musically as perhaps they had not been heard for some time. They had a very successful season at the Princess Theatre in Melbourne, and they also created a star. Dennis Olsen was primarily an actor with a good reputation in dramatic roles. He was cast in the patter roles of Major General Stanley, the Lord Chancellor and Sir Joseph Porter and from then on, he was known for his G&S work—although he by no means stopped performing in other genres. The Australian Opera thrived on its revivals of G&S.

Greg Dempsey and members of the Hawthorn Operatic Society

We were not the only company to perform G&S in Melbourne. In the 1970s, when I moved here, there were at least five who regularly put on the operas. Now we have two. The Savoy began its life when members of a Surrey Hills Church Choir formed the Mont Albert Choral Society and then began staging operas under the name of The Youth Operatic Society. By 1952 they were the Hawthorn Operatic Society and one of their members was Greg Dempsey. You may remember him as a principal with the Victoria State Opera and the Australian Opera, but he had previously made a considerable career in England, especially well-known for his roles in Britten’s operas but he began with the Hawthorn Society, and thanks to our THA member, Geoffrey Orr, I can bring you some pictures of his early days on stage. Geoffrey has contributed articles on Demsey to our magazine.

The Hawthorn Society went through more changes of name. A portion of the society preferred to sing G&S while others wanted to move to operetta and opera. That section called themselves the Victorian Light Opera Company which later was the foundation of the Victoria State Opera, of beloved memory. The remaining members christened themselves the Savoy Company. They now exist as a touring group visiting smaller venues round Melbourne and Victoria.

But back to us. We have moved around over the years from school halls to better equipped theatres. We have also taken shows to a number of country venues all round Victoria and twice to England to attend the International Gilbert and Sullivan Festival in Buxton, where we presented Patience, Yeomen and The Arcadians. The shows were well received and garnered several awards.  We have even performed on the Polly Woodside with something we called HMS Gilbert and Sullivan and most bizarrely, we took Trial by Jury to Pentridge Prison and the inmates loved it. Of course, it helped that the father of the Plaintiff was a prison governor.

Over the years we have strived to improve our staging, I believe during the war, sacking was used to paint backdrops on. That must have been difficult. Also, our programs have become more sophisticated.

At the end of Diana’s talk, a delightful concert performance of Trial by Jurywas given by members of Gilbert and Sullivan Opera Victoria.

Photo by Robert Wagner 

American actress & vocalist. Née Margaret Virginia Sullivan. Born 10 April 1851, San Francisco, California, USA. Daughter of James Edward Sullivan and Bridget Mary Whelan. Married JC Williamson (actor & manager), 2 February 1873, San Francisco, California, USA (div. 1899), (2) HR Roberts (actor), 12 April 1902, New York City, New York, USA. Died 15 March 1926, San Francisco, California, USA.

On stage in Australia from 1874, performing in G&S, comedy, drama, pantomime. One of her early successes was in Struck Oil alongside JC Williamson.

Riley/Hailes Scrapbook, page 93.

J.C. Williamson & Maggie Moore (photos by J. Noble, Melbourne, 1874) (NLA) – Character sketches as John Stofel and his daughter, Lizzie in Struck Oil

WhenMr. J.C. Williamson was governing director of “The Firm,” the theatre in Australia reached its most brilliant period. As many as fifteen touring companies were on the Australian and New Zealand circuit. Six theatres and two music halls provided entertainment for Sydney. Her Majesty’s was the most distinguished theatre, and housed always the principal Williamson attraction. It is questionable if anywhere in the Empire there was a more powerful theatrical organisation than Williamson directed. He knew show business on both sides of the curtain and the theatre was his sole existence. He was a striking personality and a familiar figure in all the capitals of the world where the theatre flourished. When he passed on the vitality his management had imparted was never regained.

James Cassius Williamson came to this country from USA with Maggie Moore and a trump card in Struck Oil.¹ The legend is that the old melodrama was the foundation of his fortune. But before he obtained his command of the theatrical field Williamson had his ups and downs. The situation was desperate at the final rehearsal in the nineties of Djin–Djin, a pantomime written by his then secretary, Bert Royle. For Williamson told the company that all he had and more was in the production, and that it was in their hands when the curtain went up the following night whether they sank or swam. Djin–Djinwas a resounding success, and never again was Williamson to bow anything but a full treasury.²

Will R. Barnes costume sketches for the Shogun

Tait Collection

… and Djin-Djin, the Japanese Bogie Man (1895)

Tait Collection

He became probably the most powerful theatrical entrepreneur in the Empire. “Williamson is in London” was exciting news to authors and actors thereafter for a quarter of a century. Whether he staged the work of dramatists or not he bought the Australian rights to do so. This effectively shut out anyone who thought of invading his territory. Authors wanted ready money which Williamson had, and he purchased their plays at bargain basement prices.

One of his “buys” was the Operas of Gilbert and Sullivan. At the time pirated versions were enriching managers in America. The copyright laws were full of pitfalls, and Williamson made a deal with D’Oyly Carte to pay £200 a year to stage in Australia and New Zealand whatever the famous librettist and composer let Carte have for the Savoy.

He was hurrying from London to Australia with the scene plot and score of The Gondoliers, Williamson once told me, when in New York he found that he had left the orchestral parts behind him. He scared up a musician to score them, and in a few days was on his way to San Francisco to catch the ship to Sydney.

“The musician who did the orchestration,” he related, “was a young man named Phillip Sousa, of whom you would have heard.” Sousa’s orchestration was still being used in revivals of The Gondoliers when Williamson was alive and for all I know it still is.³

John Philip Sousa, c.1890

Library of Congress

George Bernard Shaw, 1911. Photo by Alvin Langdon Coburn.

Wikimedia

Williamson had a custom of engaging newspaper men as secretaries, and I was supposed to fill that hazardous occupation as well. For there was a high rate of mortality in the job. As well be secretary for W.M. Hughes in later years. Fortunately for me, Williamson had a highly competent secretary in Miss Cissie Jamieson. 

I don’t think I ever took more than half a dozen letters from his dictation. One, I recall, was to Bernard Shaw. (Critics were demanding Shavian theatre and Williamson bowed finally to their insistence.)⁴ The letter was long and disingenuous; it told of a backward cultural country, of meagre population and of a manager’s foolhardiness in

attempting to offer it intellectual drama. It spelt, of course, financial loss and by reason of this being inevitable, five guineas a performance was a reckless offer to make for plays for eclectic audiences, if such existed in Australia.

The old boy was manifestly pleased with this appeal for mercy and the letter went off. A month or so later he passed Shaw’s reply over to me. It was sardonically instructive in vital statistics, wealth of our cities, the date when compulsory education was introduced here, the standing of our universities (listed), the flourishing condition of theatres, and much about ourselves of which the writer was surprised Mr. Williamson should be ignorant. In all the circumstances the Shaw royalties for Sydney and Melbourne were 15 per cent, of gross takings and 10 per cent, in other State capitals. “He's as good a businessman as he is an author and that’s saying a lot,” commented Williamson wryly.

It was his policy nevertheless to keep abreast of the development of the drama in London, New York and Europe. Many times he confirmed this by stating it as his belief that a gap could occur which it would be difficult to bridge; that if we didn't keep pace with the movement of drama where the theatre was vital, our theatre as a living force would cease to be.

JCW’s mansion ‘Tudor’, with Mrs. Mary Williamson, daughter, Viola and her nanny, Miss Hill rowing on Elizabeth Bay c.1907

JCW’s portrait by Sir John Longstaff

He had an instinct for both sides of the curtain and a genuine love of the stage. He was a true cosmopolitan and the best things in life were good enough for him. So far as he could be said to have a home, it was in the subdued elegance of a mansion at Elizabeth Bay. Everything he surrounded himself with was of the best. Longstaff had painted his portrait and the portraits of his two girls, and hung on the walls were the landscapes of Australia’s most gifted artists of the period.

He was an easy host and you would be a sybarite when he lunched you, he recommending a wine and taking keen pleasure in your enjoyment of it. He had a claret that was truly poetic. It was from Queen Victoria’s bin. He bought it from her wine merchant at her death, securing all that was left in the merchant’s cellar.

Once on a mission for him to Hollywood, my dining-room steward gave me a clue to Williamson's philosophy of being able to do without the necessities of life if he could have the luxuries. Somehow Williamson’s name came up.

“Ah,” said the steward, leaning lightly over my table, “that man Williamson is a genius.” “A genius?” I asked. “Yes, a genius,” he affirmed; “if there’s only one pineapple left on the ship, he gets it.”

Although from America, Williamson disdained the product of their tailors. All his clothes came from Savile Row, his hats from Scott’s, his shoes handmade by a London shoemaker. He was a strikingly handsome man and preserved his figure by eschewing physical exercise in favour of massage. A hansom cab, driven by an old Irish-man took him to and from the theatre. One evening, on calling for him, this jehu said to him through the roof, “Thim's a couple of foine comedians you have at Her Majesty’s, sir, thim Gilbert and Sullivan.”

George Tallis

Maj.-Gen. Gustave Ramaciotti, 1916

Army Museum of NSW

When I joined him he had taken in two partners as managing directors, Gustave Ramaciotti in Sydney and George Tallis in Melbourne. They each paid £7,500 for a quarter share, Williamson retaining a half interest in the enterprise. Mother Goose returned them more than their investment, Ramaciotti informed me. This pantomime, with Florence Young as principal boy, was the first joint venture of the triumvirate.⁵

Ramaciotti was then a colonel, and on Saturday mornings would appear at the office in military uniform. He rode a spirited charger, and in order not to prick his mount he showed us how he had inserted two sixpences for rowels so that the animal would be easier held when the spurs were applied. When he left the room, Williamson remarked dryly, “Ramaciotti will be putting someone’s eye out chucking his money about like that!”

Montague Grover, an ex-Williamson secretary, was in my room one afternoon when the Guv’nor looked in. Grover was then editing the Sun. Over the building in which it was housed Williamson held the mortgage. As an incentive, Monte had been given a parcel of shares, and, being aware of this, Williamson began needling him on putting on fat, “like all capitalists.” I put in, “I notice nobody is commenting on my painful thinness.” Next day Williamson sent for me, and handed me a piece of scrip in the Firm. “This might help to fatten you up,” he said.

 

 

The Home, 1 June 1922, p.11

On rare occasions Williamson would take a particular interest in the stage presentation of a play and it was then one saw his thoroughness in squeezing the last ounce of drama from a scene. I recall his rehearsing of The Climax, a one-act drama.⁵ Jimmy Atholwood, an old-time actor, was cast as a music master. He had in a dinner scene to pick up a knife, walk round the table, and stab the seducer of his daughter. His dramatic timing was faulty. Williamson acted the business seven or eight times and held the intensity of the situation so that it gripped. Finally he had Atholwood try again.

“Damn it all, he hasn’t got it now,” I couldn’t help exploding. Williamson, whom I hadn’t noticed come into the darkened stalls, was behind me. “No,” he said, “and he never will.”

He set great store on stage business, even in musical comedy. In one of the Gaiety pieces two comedians, in an ancestral room where supper was set, began a burlesque fencing bout with a claymore and a rapier.

“The public won’t think it funny,” pronounced Williamson. “Put a long twisted loaf on the table and a carving knife as well. Fence with them,” he directed. “Burlesque,” he said to me, “must always be with objects familiar to everyone in the audience, the more ridiculous the better.” Anyhow, it got the laughs his way.

He was never tempted to venture into management in London or New York. Nearest he got to it was when George Edwardes, so long supreme in musical comedy at the London Gaiety, got into financial low water, mainly through his racing stable. He had Lehár's The Merry Widow, but was shy on production costs. Williamson let him have £10,000 as a loan. The Viennese hit quickly restored George Edwardes’s fortunes.⁷

With Carrie Moore transferred from the Gaiety in the title-role and Andrew Higginson as Danilo, The Merry Widow played in Australia to business never heard of before.

George Edwardes with JCW in Karlsbad, Germany, 1907. Photo by Adler.

Australian stars of The Merry Widow, 1908

National Library of Australia, Canberra

At this time Williamson shows were toured in all States and New Zealand. It was a highly organised routing of attractions. But bad patches were sometimes struck, as on the goldfields in Western Australia.  A touring manager’s report on Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie, I remember, amused Williamson. It said that receipts were ruinous as a result of the authorities stopping gold stealing.

About this time opposition of a serious nature came about. Meynell and Gunn found backing to produce The Arcadians with a company of fresh faces.⁸ The Royal Comic Opera Company, favourites though they were, were hardy perennials, (the chorus also in the veteran class.)  The impact of new principals and rounded dancing limbs the rival management offered gave Williamson’s a much needed shock. The public immediately benefited.

Maie Sydney as ‘Sombra’ in The Arcadians, 1910

The bid for supremacy lifted the theatre to the highest level of attraction it ever was to know. Meynell and Gunn imported Oscar Asche and Lily Brayton with a London company in Shakespeare; also Ethel Irving in Maugham’s plays;⁹ Williamson came back with H.B. Irving and his Shakespearean players, Margaret Anglin and Henry Kolker, Genée and her ballet, Melba in grand opera, Maeterlinck’s Blue Bird (Claude Rains as stage manager), a new musical comedy company and a ballyhoo about star engagements ahead.¹⁰

Asche as Shakespeare’s ‘Othello’ with his wife as ‘Desdemona’

National Library of Australia, Canberra

The pace in rivalry was short-lived, however. A merger was the outcome and “the theatrical combine” was with us once again.¹¹ Williamson always preferred it that way. It was the American way of the unassailable might of the theatrical trust of the times. (His own family “trust” secured for them £400,000.) He had come to Australia as other American actor-managers had before him, intending to return to the USA.

The Sunday Herald (Sydney), 5 October 1952, p.9, https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/18507113/1054912

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

Endnotes

Compiled by Robert Morrison

[1] The 3 act comedy-drama, Struck Oil; or, The Pennsylvania Dutchman, based on the unproduced play The German Recruit by Sam W. Smith, adapted and expanded by Clay Greene as The Deed, or Five Years Away; subsequently retitled with further revisions by J.C. Williamson, premiered at Salt Lake City, Utah on 23 February 1874 and received its Australian premiere at the Theatre Royal, Melbourne on 1 August 1874 for an initial 43 performances. This was followed by a return season of a further 13 performances commencing on Derby Day, 31 October and “every night during the Great Cup Week” concluding on 14 November. The play was then given a “Farewell Performance” as a Complimentary Benefit for the Williamsons on the final night of their Melbourne season on 21 December 1874, resulting in a record tally of 57 performances.

[2]The pantomime Djin-Djin: The Japanese Bogie Man by Bert Royle and J.C. Williamson, with music by Leon Caron and additional numbers by H.J. Pack, premiered at the Princess’s Theatre, Melbourne on 26 December 1895 for a seven week season. Due to the economic depression of the 1890s, which followed on from the collapse of the land boom of the previous decade, the Firm of Williamson and Musgrove was in a serious financial crisis and staging the pantomime was JCW’s last ditch attempt to recover revenue lost from their other failed theatrical productions at the time. The immediate success of the production, which subsequently toured to the other Australian colonies, New Zealand and South Africa, helped to restore JCW’s fortunes.

[3]W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan’s comic opera The Gondoliers (which had premiered at the Savoy Theatre, London under the management of Richard D’Oyly Carte on 7 December 1889 for a run of 554 performances) received its Australian premiere at the Princess’s Theatre, Melbourne on 25 October 1890 for a run of 8 weeks, closing on Friday, 19 December before going on tour to the other colonies and New Zealand. An aficionado of the works of G&S (on which he modelled his own comic operas) John Philip Sousa was also responsible for re-orchestrating one of the ‘pirate’ productions of their earlier success H.M.S. Pinafore staged in the U.S. in the late 1870s.

[4]JCW subsequently purchased the Australasian performing rights to George Bernard Shaw’s plays and the first of these to be given its professional premiere in Australia by J.C. Williamson Ltd. was Arms and the Man staged at the Theatre Royal, Sydney on 26 February 1910 for an initial run of 5 performances in a season of plays starring Julius Knight. (In later years Shaw’s play The Millionairess received its world premiere performance in English by the Gregan McMahon Players for JCW Ltd. at the King’s Theatre, Melbourne for a season commencing on 7 March 1936. The play was first performed in German at the Burgtheater at the Akademie Theater, Vienna on 4 January 1936. Ironically, Shaw’s play Pygmalion, in which cockney flower seller, Eliza Doolittle is taught to speak correct English by Professor Henry Higgins, was also first performed in German at the Hofburg Theater in Vienna in October 1913, before Beerbohm Tree’s London premiere production at His Majesty’s Theatre in April 1914.)  

[5]The Drury Lane pantomime Mother Goose (with a book by J. Hickory Wood and songs from various sources) was given its Australian premiere at Her Majesty’s Theatre, Melbourne on 22 December 1906 for a 12 week run, before going on tour. The cast included Harry Phydora in the title role, Florence Young as the principal boy ‘Colin’ and Celia Ghiloni as the fairy ‘Heartsease’. (The program may be viewed on-line at https://viewer.slv.vic.gov.au/?entity=IE21360608 )

Souvenir program cover

State Library Victoria, Melbourne

Florence Young as ‘Colin’, 1906

State Library Victoria, Melbourne

[6]The one-act drama The Climaxby Edward Dyson was staged as a matinee attraction at Her Majesty’s Theatre, Sydney commencing on 28 December 1909, as noted in the following item published in The Daily Telegraph(on page 8):

The first of a series of matinees of “The Climax” is announced by the J.C. Williamson management to take place at Her Majesty’s this afternoon at 2. Interest in the event is heightened by it marking Miss Florence Young’s first in a dramatic role, that of Adelina von Hagen, an operatic student. This calls for a soprano, as three songs are incidental to the play. These are “The Even Song,” “Youth’s Appeal to Age,” and “The Song of the Soul,” written for "The Climax” by Carl Breil. Messrs. J.B. Atholwood, Reginald Roberts, and Dion Titheradge will also appear in the cast. The final rehearsal took place yesterday forenoon, under the personal supervision of Mr. J. C. Williamson. “It was one of the most striking plays I saw on my last tour abroad,” he stated yesterday; “it has originality, and takes a sympathetic view of life, while the characters are all very human.”

[7] George Edwardes’ production of the Franz Lehár operetta The Merry Widow in its English adaptation by Basil Hood, with lyrics by Adrian Ross, created a sensation at Daly’s Theatre in London, where it opened on 8 June 1907, starring Lily Elsie and Joseph Coyne and featuring George Graves as ‘Baron Popoff’, Elizabeth Firth as ‘Natalie’ (the wife of Popoff), Robert Evett as ‘Camille’ and W.H. Berry as ‘Nisch’, with costumes by Lucile and Percy Anderson. The London production ran for an extraordinary 778 performances and toured extensively in Great Britain.

The Australian premiere of the Hood and Ross adaptation was given by JCW at Her Majesty’s Theatre, Melbourne on Saturday, 16 May 1908 for a run of 11 weeks concluding on 31 July with its 77th performance followed by an Australasian tour. In addition to Carrie Moore in the title role and Andrew Higginson as ‘Prince Danilo’, JCW’s Royal Comic Opera Company cast included Florence Young as ‘Natalie’, Reginald Roberts as ‘Camille’, Victor Gouriet as ‘Baron Popoff’ and Fred Leslie as ‘Nisch’.

[8]The ‘fantastic musical play’ The Arcadians (music by Lionel Monckton and Howard Talbot, lyrics by Arthur Wimperis, book by Mark Ambient and Alexander M. Thompson) premiered at the Shaftesbury Theatre, London on 24 April 1909 under the management of Robert Courtneidge and ran for 809 performances. It received its Australian premiere under the management of Clarke and Meynell at the Theatre Royal, Melbourne on 26 March 1910 for a run of 11 weeks closing on Friday, 10 June, before going on tour. Its cast included Maie Sydney as ‘Sombra’, William Cromwell as ‘James Smith’ aka ‘Simplicitas’, Harold Thorley as ‘Jack Meadows’, Gertrude Gilliam as ‘Eileen Cavanagh’ and Tom Walls as the jockey ‘Peter Doody’.

Gertrude Gilliam as ‘Eileen’ in The Arcadians, 1910

Tom Walls as ‘Doody’ in The Arcadians, 1910

[9]Oscar Asche and Lily Brayton commenced their Australian tour for Meynell and Gunn at the Theatre Royal in Melbourne with The Taming of the Shrew on 17 July 1909 followed by Othello and As You Like It. The season concluded on Wednesday, 29 September and their company headed to Sydney to open at the Criterion Theatre, followed by seasons in Adelaide at the Theatre Royal and Perth at His Majesty’s Theatre. Return seasons in Melbourne and Sydney ensued in which they played in The Merchant of Venice, Count Hannibal, The Merry Wives of Windsorand The Honeymoon. Initially scheduled for 26 weeks their tour was extended a number of times before finally concluding in Perth at His Majesty’s on 27 August 1910.

English actress, Ethel Irving and her London company commenced a seven-month Australian tour for Clarke and Meynell at the Theatre Royal, Melbourne on 8 July 1911. Her repertoire of plays included The Witness for the Defence by A.E.W. Mason, Somerset Maugham’s Lady Frederick (performed with the one-act curtain-raiser Dolly's Little Bills by Henry Arthur Jones) and Frederick Fenn’s English adaptation of the French play Dame Nature by Henry Bataille. Following seasons in Adelaide and Sydney (plus return visits to Melbourne and Sydney, where her tour concluded on 2 February 1912) JCW Ltd. negotiated for her to pay a flying visit to New Zealand under the Firm's auspices for a six-week tour, which concluded on 21 March 1912.

[10]H.B. Irving (the elder son of Sir Henry) and his wife, Dorothea Baird commenced their six-month Australian tour for JCW at Her Majesty’s Theatre, Sydney on 24 June 1911. Their repertoire of plays included Hamlet, The Lyons Mail, The Bells, Louis XI (made famous by Sir Henry in Britain), and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

Canadian-born actress, Margaret Anglin commenced a six-month Australian tour for JCW at Her Majesty’s Theatre, Sydney on Saturday, 27 June 1908 with a company that included New York actor, Henry Kolker. Her repertoire of plays included The Thief, The Truth, The Taming of the Shrew, Camille, Zira and Twelfth Night. 

The Melba-Williamson Opera Company commenced its Australian tour at Her Majesty’s Theatre, Sydney with a production of La Traviata on 2 September 1911. The company’s repertoire consisted of twelve operas in all, of which Melba sang in six: Verdi’s La Traviata, Rigoletto and Otello; Gounod’s Faust and Roméo et Juliette and Puccini’s La Bohème. The season included two Australian stage premieres, Tosca and Samson and Delilah (which commenced on 5 September under the title of Sansone e Dalila, being sung in Italian), with the remaining operas comprising Madama Butterfly, Carmen, Aida and Lohengrin. The eight-week Sydney season was followed by a truncated season of six weeks at Her Majesty’s Theatre, Melbourne commencing on 28 October and the company returned to Sydney for a final two weeks from 11 December.

The Danish ballerina, Adeline Genée and the Imperial Russian Ballet commenced an Australasian tour for JCW at Her Majesty’s Theatre, Melbourne on 21 June 1913 performing in the triple bill of Coppelia, The Secret of Suzanne and assorted Divertissements. Other ballets in the company’s repertoire included The Daring of Diane, Les Sylphides, Arabian Nights, La Camargoand Robert Le Diable. The tour concluded at Her Majesty’s Theatre, Sydney on 7 October before departing for New Zealand.

 

National Library of Australia, Canberra

The Blue Bird by Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck received its Australian premiere with Frederick Harrison’s Haymarket Theatre Company at the Criterion Theatre, Sydney on Saturday, 6 April 1912, and concluded its season there on Friday, 17 May after a run of six weeks, followed by a tour to the other Australian capitals. English actor, Claude Rains, who stage managed the tour, would gain fame in later years as a notable Hollywood character actor in such films as The Invisible Man (1933) The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) Casablanca (1942) Caesar and Cleopatra(1945) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962) amongst others.

The theatre program for the Melbourne season (which commenced at the Theatre Royal on 22 June and includes photos of the cast ‘in character’) may be viewed in full here on Trove.

Norman O’Neill’s incidental music composed for the play may be heard on YouTube, played by the Court Symphony Orchestra conducted by the composer, recorded by Columbia in Wigmore Hall (London) on 25 February 1927.

[11]Clyde Meynell joined JCW Ltd. as a managing director in 1911 and celebrated his 30th year in theatrical management in 1921, as recounted by the following newspaper report marking this milestone:

CLYDE MEYNELL.

STRIKING THEATRICAL CAREER.

Mr. Clyde Meynell, one of the four managing directors of J.C. Williamson, Ltd. enters to-day upon his 30th year of theatrical direction, during nearly half of which his artistic experience and good judgment have powerfully influenced for good the course of stage enterprise in this country.

Not many people are aware, outside the immediate circle of his intimate friends, that the manager comes of an old Dutch family, which established itself in Yorkshire shortly after the arrival in England of William Prince of Orange. His own name Is Clyde van Straubenzee, and many of his relatives are in the British army, notably his brother, General Casimir van Straubenzee (retired), who before the war, was colonel of the Suffolk Regiment at Aldershot, and afterwards was in France until disabled, ultimately sharing a divided command as general in the north-east district, with Leeds as headquarters.

When 16 years of age Clyde Meynell adopted that stage-name, in order to join the company of his old friend, Carlotta Leclalr, a celebrity, who at the same time started another beginner, Violet Vanbrugh. Young Meynell’s parents urged him to study medicine, however, and after a year’s experience in “stock” he took his degree at Edinburgh University, … and was coached by Dr. Richard Berry, now the learned anatomy professor at Melbourne University. Nevertheless, after practising as a surgeon for a year, Mr. Meynell returned to his first love, first with Frank Harvey’s company (that actor-manager being father of the artist so well-known here), and then with the famous Compton Comedy Company, of which Harcourt Beatty was then a member. From that time on Meynell took up management, beginning with Horace Lingard and Alice Dunning, next with Miss Fortescue, who was awarded £20,000 for breach of promise on the part of Earl Cairns’ son (a still standing law record), and again as resident manager of theatres at Bournemouth and Southampton.

Various speculative enterprises in England followed before Mr. Meynell represented Beerbohm Tree, and in that way came to Australia in 1903 as general manager for the Julius Knight and Maud Jeffries combination in “Resurrection,” “The Eternal City,” and “Monsieur Beaucaire.” Independent management on this side in partnership with the late John Gunn led to the importation of various English stars, and in 1908 Sir Rupert Clarke joined the firm. A very noteworthy period In our stage history began with “Miss Hook of Holland” and “The Arcadians” and sustained by the arrival of Oscar Asche and Lily Brayton, Ethel Irving, and Matheson Lang. Sir Rupert Clarke and Meynell amalgamated with J.C. Williamson, Ltd., in 1911 and the latter was for five years (1915–1920) London representative, during which period he joined Sir Alfred Butt in staging “High Jinks” at the Adelphi, where the piece ran for more than a year.

The Sydney Morning Herald (NSW), Thursday, 7 April 1921, p.10, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article15958129

Additional Sources

Ian G. Dicker, J.C.W.—A Short Biography of James CassiusWilliamson, The Elizabeth Tudor Press, NSW, 1974

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

Viola Tait, Dames, Principal Boys … And All That, Macmillan, Melbourne, 2001

Michael & Joan Tallis, The Silent Showman, Wakefield Press, South Australia, 1999

Raymond Mander & Joe Mitchensen, Theatrical Companion to the Plays of Shaw, Rockliff, London, 1954

“AND NOW” (he said) “it is nearly time to take in sail. The burden of theatrical direction is heavy; the pressure is unceasing—and I am no longer young. After forty-five strenuous years in the service of the public, I feel that I owe a little to myself, a great deal to my wife and children. At sixty a man may fairly rest from active labour. It is not easy to give up when one feels so well and strong; but my desire is to relinquish management in the very near future.”

I WAS BORN at Mercer, Pennsylvania, USA, on 26 August, 1845. Mercer is a county town where my father was a doctor. Both my father and mother were Americans. He was of Irish descent, she of Scottish. Of course I look upon America as my native country. Sometimes people have said to me, “Your fortune is bound up in Australia now; why don’t you get naturalised?” I don’t see that. Australia is my country too, and I expect to spend the rest of my days here, but I think a man should never deny his mother country.

JCW as a youth

I had a good common school and high school education, and the American schools in those days were excellent. One thing they seemed to do was to make every boy wish to hit out for himself. That was the first idea of every American boy in my time, to get away from home as soon as possible and start and make his own way. The schools encouraged independence of character. I don't think they do so now —I don’t know, of course, because I haven't been in close touch with America for a long time—but it seems to me that the American boy of to-day is less ambitious than we used to be. He isn't so eager to go ahead and do something for himself at an early age.

While I was a boy, our family shifted west to Milwaukee, the capital of Wisconsin, where my uncle was a merchant in a big way of business. There was a large family of us boys and girls, but I was the only one with a turn for the stage, and I don’t know that any of my father’s or mother’s people was ever inclined that way.

“Jimmy” was the Bloodhound

I used to act in amateur theatricals, and when I was sixteen I got an engagement with a company at the Milwaukee theatre. I was full of energy and enthusiasm, and did pretty well everything. My mornings were spent in learning fencing and dancing. In the afternoon I’d look after the box office, and at evening help the stage manager and take my part—sometimes three or four parts.

I remember I even painted some of the scenery for a performance of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I knew nothing about scene-painting, but I did the ice scene—with the blocks of ice made out of candle boxes—and when Eliza and her child were escaping across the ice I shouted and waved the red fire, and looked after the barking of the bloodhound. I was the bloodhound.

‘Eliza Crosses the Ohio on the Floating Ice’ in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Drawing by George Cruikshank, 1852. The Victorian Web.

Well, one of the company arranged to go to Canada, and asked me to come along. That was in 1862. I went to my uncle—who was my guardian, my father being dead—and told him about it. I suppose they saw there was no stopping me; but he said “Remember, if you go, you go for good: there must be no coming back unless you give up the stage altogether. You can't do a little of this and a little of something else.” He wanted me to go to Harvard or Yale and study for a profession. “All right!” I said, and off I went, and from that day to this I have been connected with the stage, and I can say truly that I have made my own way and never had help from anybody to the extent of a shilling that I didn’t earn.

* * * * * * * * *

We played in Canada one year, and when the company broke up I determined to come to New York. That was in 1863. New York, of course, was the centre of our theatrical world, and it seemed there wasn’t much chance there for a youth of seventeen. However, I came along, and met a Mr. English whom I had seen with the company in Canada. He was running a high-class vaudeville entertainment at the Olympic Theatre, and he told me that he was going to put on a farce to play before his entertainment, and offered me a small part. I was to be “Quicksilver” in The Artful Dodger. He offered me ten dollars a week, and I took it gladly. I was engaged in New York!

Engaged in New York

Well, when the rehearsals came on I saw there was likely to be trouble. The principal actor objected to me playing “Quicksilver,” the fact was he had a friend of his own whom he wished to put on, and he would not hear of me. So one day I went in and saw Mr. English, and he said: “Jimmy, I can’t give you that part.” “But,” I said, “you've engaged me.” “Well,” he said, “I’m sorry, but the fact is Mr. So-and-So objects. He says you're too young.” “But,” I said, “I'm engaged!” “I can’t help that,” he said; “you can't have the part.” The end of it was he offered me another and smaller part. “But,” he said, “I can only give you five dollars a week!” “Never mind; I'm engaged!” That was my idea to have an engagement. Five dollars is only £1 a week, but I didn’t care: I could live on that, and I went on and took the part. The result was that in a few nights the actor who was playing “Quicksilver” didn't turn up, and I played “Quicksilver” for the rest of the run of the piece.

I had an idea I could do better, so one day I went and saw the elder Mr. Wallack. Wallack’s Theatre at that time was the leading theatre of America, and there never has been a better company on the English-speaking stage than Wallack’s company was then. There were no stars, but nearly every performer was an artist worthy of being starred: and if the same company could be brought together at the present time under the existing conditions of theatrical affairs there would not be a theatre in New York which would hold money enough at regular prices to pay the salaries they could command. That is because salaries were comparatively very low in those days. The most I ever drew at Wallack’s was fifty dollars a week. They used to stage the old comedies like Sheridan’s, and newer ones like Robertson’s. I remember Charles Mathews was the light comedian one season, and Charles Wyndham (now Sir Charles) was another.

Wallack’s Theatre, at the north-east corner of Broadway and Thirteenth Street, New York, c.1865

J.W. Wallack, sr.

I called at the old gentleman’s house—he was over seventy at that time. I met him just as he was getting into his carriage, and he consented to see me the following day. The following day I called, and was shown into a waiting-room—and I’ll tell you a singular thing. Do you see that picture of John Kemble as Rolla hanging on the wall? That was offered to me some years ago as a portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence. I made enquiries, and the history seemed to be all right, it being the original study for his great picture in the Peel gallery, so I bought it. Well, I couldn’t help thinking that I had seen it before; and one day, as I was looking at it, the memory came back to me. It had hung in old Mr. Wallack’s house, in the room where I sat waiting for him. I looked into the papers I had got with it, and sure enough I found that it had been owned by the elder Mr. Wallack. So it had travelled from England to America and from America to Australia, and had come to remind me of my first important engagement.

Taken on at Wallack’s

When I was shown into the old gentleman’s room I told him I wanted an engagement to fill a vacancy there would be in his company the next season. He put his hand on a pile of papers that seemed about two feet high, and he said “Do you see that, my boy? Two-thirds of those letters are from people who want the little engagement you are asking me for.” Then we talked, and he asked me to call again. I called, and found he had gone to the seaside. When he came back I called again, and he told me he was going to give me the part. So I came on at Wallack’s.

* * * * * * * * *

Just before I joined I had a joke with Mr. English. He was forming a company to go touring, and he met me one day and offered me a place in the company. I thanked him, and said “No,” I didn't think I'd be able to; I thought of taking an engagement at Wallack’s. That rather took him aback, for, of course, he didn’t believe the thing was possible, because Wallack’s was a close corporation in those days. To show you the strength of their company at that time, they played The Rivals in New York one night, complete to the smallest part. Every part was played by an actor, and by a good actor too. The same night the other half of the company played The School for Scandal at Brooklyn, also complete, with a good actor for every part. All the actors in both pieces belonged to the regular company, and either of those casts would be considered star casts nowadays.

I made my first big New York success as Dick Swiveller in The Old Curiosity Shop with “Lotta”—America’s most popular star comedienne—during a summer season at Wallack’s.

Lotta Crabtree

California Historical Society

Lester Wallack

The Lambs Inc., New York

A Treble Recall and a Waiting “Star”

Altogether I stayed with Wallack’s for seven years, playing all kinds of parts, and gradually improving my position. Generally I was cast for dialect parts. I took all dialects—French, Dutch, Irish, Chinese, Negro, Yorkshire, Somersetshire—anything that came along. Perhaps the greatest success of my young days was gained one night that I was playing “Sim” in O’Keefe's play of Wild Oats. I had a scene with Lester Wallack, who was a great actor. Now, Wallack’s Theatre in those days was a regular home of stage tradition, so far as the old comedies were concerned. The prompt books contained all the business that had been set down for the regular parts in all the plays, often going back many years and commencing with the business directed by the authors. The books were regarded as a kind of stage Bible, and any departure from them was simply not to be thought of.

Well, in this scene with Lester Wallack, between Rover and Sim, I seemed to feel the part much better in my own way than in the way it was set down for me by the prompt-book. I told that to the stage manager—Mr. John Gilbert—and he was properly shocked. “My boy,” he said, “it’s not to be thought of!” But when I got on the stage I felt as if I must take the part my own way after all, and I did. When my scene was over I went back to the dressing-room, and after a bit (it seemed quite a good while) a call boy came along and said “Mr. Williamson, you’re wanted!” I came out wondering what was up, and thinking the old gentleman was going to take me to task for altering the business. To my surprise I was told to go on in front; the audience had called for me—a remarkable thing in the middle of a scene. I went on, and they applauded furiously. Then I went off and was called back for more applause. Then I went off again, but the public would not let Mr. Wallack go on with the scene and a third time I was called back, and we had to do the end of the scene over again before they would let us go.

Well now, Mr. Wallack was a star, and I was only a youngster, and it was a very unusual thing that the star should be made to wait while the audience recalled the junior who had played with him. I always think that was one of the finest things that ever happened to me; and I was very proud of being specially complimented by Charles Fechter, who was in front.

Playbill for Wallack’s Theatre for 31 January 1870

JCW, c.1868

“Where’s Jimmy Williamson?”

One night old Mr. Wallack came to me and said that, owing to the illness of John Brougham, I must play the part of Sir Lucius O'Trigger in The Rivals on the following night. It is a very long part, and there were only a few hours to get it up in. “Jimmy,” he said, “you've got to do it!” “Well,” I said, “I'll try.  So after the play that night I went home and wrote out the part, which took me till about two o'clock, and studied it. Then I went to bed for two or three hours, woke up, had some strong coffee, and at it again. At night I played the part letter perfect. That was my idea, always to be ready for anything, and never miss a chance of getting on. The consequence was that, in the last years of my time at Wallack’s, whenever there was anything out of the way to do, they said “Where's Jimmy Williamson?”

After that I got an engagement at the Old Broadway Theatre as principal comedian; till in 1871 John McCullough, manager of the California Theatre, came to New York looking for a comedian. The California Theatre at San Francisco was a very big affair in those times, and prided itself upon its superiority. Their leading comedian, John Raymond, was leaving them, and after looking all round the manager offered me his place. That, of course, was a high testimonial, so I signed on at a very fine salary, and said good-bye to New York. In San Francisco I had great success at the California, with occasional trips starring round about. While I was in San Francisco, Dion Boucicault, senior, father of Dot Boucicault, came over to play a season, and I’ll tell you how he dished the ’Frisco reporters. They thought themselves smart men, as indeed they were, and when Boucicault’s season was announced they all sharpened their pencils, and it was hinted that Dion was going to have a warm time.

John McCullough

California Theatre, Bush Street, San Francisco, c.1871 where JCW and Maggie Moore appeared together between 1872 and 1874

How Boucicault Dished the Reporters

Well, of course, he heard all about it, and this is what he did. On his first night he introduced a sketch called Boucicault in California. In this he appeared at home in the Occidental Hotel, just arriving. I was Murphy, his servant, with remarks on all and sundry; Barton Hill came to tell him about the pieces he was going to play; then came in an actress to play the part of a debutante with a San Jose reputation (which is as if a debutante with a Parramatta reputation came to play at Sydney)—and so on. Then came in the reporters, especially W.A. Mestayer, as Bogus Push, of The Weekly Pill—and Boucicault talked to the reporters. He told them his opinion of everything, especially California—and left the genuine reporters without a leg to stand on. He simply said on the stage everything they had to say in the papers, and left them nothing at all to write. That always struck me as a particularly happy instance of turning the tables.

* * * * * * * * *

Maggie Moore, JCW’s first wife whom he married in San Francisco on 2 February 1873

JCW in San Francisco, c.1871

After three years of San Francisco I determined to try a trip to Australia. Horace Greeley’s advice, “Go West, young man! Go West!” was a popular saying in America about that time, and we determined to go still further West. Well, we came to Australia and landed in Melbourne in 1874, and opened at the Theatre Royal with Struck Oil. I suppose there’s no better known piece in this country. I’ve met hundreds of people who date their acquaintance with the theatre back to that piece. Men meet me and say “Look here, Mr. Williamson, I know you well! I remember when I was a boy my father took me to see Struck Oil.”

Theatre Royal, Melbourne, where Struck Oil opened on 1 August 1874

Australian Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne

JCW as John Stofel with Maggie Moore as his daughter, Lizzie in Struck Oil

The History of “Struck Oil”

The history of the piece is rather interesting. While I was at the California I was told that an old miner named Sam Smith had written some plays and was anxious to sell them. I was looking round for some things to take to Australia, so when a friend asked me if I would go and hear him read one I said “Certainly.” The piece the old man wanted to show me was called The Blue and the Grey, but I saw there was not much in that. “Well,” he said, “I have another piece if you’ll let me read it. It’s called The Deed, or Five Years Away.” So he read that, and it contained the basis of Struck Oil. I saw there was a good deal in it, and a great deal that would have to be cut out and altered. So I bought it right out, giving the old fellow a hundred dollars more than he asked for it; and got a friend of mine—Clay Greene—to re-write it. A little later, I went starring to Salt Lake City, and I thought I'd try this piece. We rehearsed it, and I saw the last act wouldn’t do.  So one Sunday morning I started upon it and wrote and re-wrote until I had made it suit my own notion, giving out the parts to the company as I went along. We played it the next night, and it went very well, so we took it back to San Francisco and played it there, and I brought it along to Australia.

The first page of the script of Struck Oil

Ink and charcoal poster for Struck Oil

One of my friends, Mr. William Hoskins (so well known in Australia), said to me in San Francisco, “What have you got to take out there?” “Well,” I said, “I've got so and so, and so and so,”—and I mentioned Struck Oil. He said, “Don’t give them that in Australia on any account, it will be an utter failure. There are no Germans out there, and they won’t understand it.” Then, coming over in the ship, I used to have a look at it now and again, and read a bit here and there. The captain stopped one day to hear me, and he said, “Now, if you'll take my advice, you’ll keep that in your box. A thing like that won't go down in Australia.”

Well, I suppose I ought to have been discouraged, but I wasn’t, and I’ll tell you how I came to play it on our opening night in Melbourne. The night before we opened, I had gone to the Opera House, and Richard Stewart was there playing Prince Cassimir in the Princess of Trebizond. About the only German he used was “Mein Gott in Himmel!” and that seemed to go down so well with the audience that I said, “We'll have Struck Oil.” And of course you know how it caught on.

A Nightmare Adventure

In 1875 I went to India. It was at the time that the Prince of Wales was visiting there—the present King—and India was en fête. I suppose there has never been such a time there since. I had the honour of meeting the Prince of Wales in Charles Mathews’ dressing-room (for he was in India too), and I can tell you a story in connection with Mathews. One night after the play a lot of English officers came to supper with him, and I was there, and we had a very jolly time, and sat up till three in the morning. Their talk was all military, and they told us the awful tales of the Mutiny, of the well at Cawnpore, the massacre at Delhi, and so on— a very gruesome set of stories.

With all these things ringing in my head I went to bed and dreamed of throat-cutting and smothering, and all kinds of horrible things, and suddenly I woke to consciousness and realised that I couldn’t breathe. I opened my eyes, and saw what seemed to me (scarcely half-awake) a horrid black figure holding my nose with one hand, while he brandished a razor in the other. I gave a fearful yell and caught up the pillow and dashed it at him—sent him flying into one corner of the room, and his razor into the other. Next moment I was out of bed ready to defend myself, and I saw this darkey crouching at the other side of the room, and chattering pitifully. He didn’t understand what had happened to him, and for a moment I didn’t understand either. Then it came to me that it was the native barber who was accustomed to come in early in the morning and shave me while I lay in bed, and he had just been starting operations when he got mixed up with my dreams of the Mutiny.

THE BOOKFELLOW, 10 January 1907, pp. 11-12

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

Edward, Prince of Wales, late-1870s

National Portrait Gallery, London

British comedian and playwright Charles Mathews, 1875

National Portrait Gallery, London

WELL, to continue. After India a few months were devoted to a jaunt through Egypt, Italy, France and Germany. Then, on Easter Monday, 1876,I opened at the Adelphi under the management of F.B. Chatterton, who had also the Drury Lane Theatre. Chatterton was the author of the much-quoted remark, “Shakespeare spells ruin.” We commenced our season with Struck Oil, the engagement being to star for three months with the option on the part of the manager to extend. This option was almost immediately exercised, extending the season from Easter to Easter—twelve months in all. We played Struck Oil 100 nights, which was a good run in those times, thirty years ago.

Silk theatre program for the Adelphi Theatre, 1876

We then went into Irish drama, doing a revival of Arrah-na-Pogue with a big cast, including such London favourites as William Terriss, Sam Emery, Mrs. Alfred Melon and Shiel Barry — the great Michael Feeney. We played Arrah-na-Pogue for four months, with such success that the manager wished to continue us in Irish drama, and insisted upon putting up The Shaughraun. I wouldn’t agree to this, because I knew the piece was Dion Boucicault’s. It was copyrighted in America, but the copyright did not extend to England, and legally we were free to play it. But Boucicault would not give his consent, though the manager offered him every inducement—and I held out that I would not play till Boucicault did give his consent. The manager went so far as to cast the piece and call rehearsals, and when he found I was determined he commenced an action at law against me for breach of engagement, but the case fell through. In fact, he had no chance, for I had Charles Mathews, Joe Jefferson, and others ready to back me up, and prove that he had no business to make the cast without the star’s consent. But the dispute ended our Adelphi season, and after touring two years in America, starring in Struck Oil, I decided to make another trip around the world, and came back to Australia. That was in 1879, and I've been here ever since; except for trips every two or three years to get new plays, new people, and new ideas. I believe in keeping myself right up to date.

Alfred Bryan caricature from The Entr’acte (London), 18 November 1876

Dion Boucicault in The Shaughraun

New York Public Library, New York

I had always said I would never go in for permanent management, because you see a manager’s life is never his own: he has to be at work all the time. I was doing well enough as an actor, and when a star actor wants a rest he can simply knock off and take a holiday for six months, or as long as he likes and then begin again. But a manager has no rest. Once he starts he has to keep going all the time. So I had always said “No management for me!”

At the Head of the Australian Profession

But when I came to Australia the second time, I brought out among other new pieces Pinafore, and the first thing I had to do when I landed was to take out injunctions against the people who were playing it without authority. Pinafore went very well, and then I got The Pirates of Penzance. George Musgrove was running an opera company at the time with Tambour Major, and Arthur Garner was running his English comedy company, and they came to me and said “We had better go into partnership!” Well, I held out for a bit, but eventually agreed, and that started what people called “The Triumvirate,” which lasted for nine years. Then Musgrove went out, and Garner and I were together for two years. Then I bought Garner out for a time until Musgrove rejoined me. We were together for seven years, and I was alone for four years until I joined forces with my present partners, Mr. George Tallis and Mr. Gustave Ramaciotti—both friends long associated with my affairs—Mr. Tallis as my Melbourne manager and Mr. Ramaciotti as legal adviser.

Maggie Moore and JCW in HMS Pinafore,1879

Theatre program for 15 November 1879

National Library of Australia, Canberra

The Triumvirate—Arthur Garner, JCW and George Musgrove, 1882

So now you’ve got a very fair outline of my professional career. A good deal of it has been spent in playing, but there’s a good deal that has not been play by any means. The stage has given me a lot of pleasure, a fair share of success, and a great deal of very hard work. I think it is capacity for hard persistent work that the Australian-born actor sometimes lacks. Sometimes he wants perseverance: he doesn’t keep plugging away, and he doesn’t think enough of the stage when he’s off the stage. If a man wants to be a good actor, he has to give his mind to the profession all the time. It’s not enough to gain applause at night, if you think so much about the applause next morning that you forget to look out for the next chance. An actor should be always studying to improve himself, always studying to fit himself for better parts, always studying to make himself such a trustworthy man all round that when there's an opening ahead, he'll be chosen to fill it.

Australian Actors

In our profession it is difficult to know enough, and you can never know too much. As a young man, when I was not engaged in a piece, I used to go round to the other theatres, wherever I happened to be: picking up an idea here, a wrinkle there, or storing away a little bit of business for future use: watching the other fellows take a part and deciding how I would take it if I got the chance, and so on: and, what is most important, studying what to avoid in order to correct my faults. Australian actors have great talent, naturally—and, mind you, I'm not making any sweeping condemnation, but I do think that it may fairly be said that some are deficient in application, deficient in painstaking ambition, too apt to forget that stage laurels will fade if they are not continually refreshed by new achievements. It seems to be the fault of the country. Things ripen too quickly. The fruit ripens quickly, the crops mature quickly—but the harvests are irregular.

JCW with his second wife, Mary (née Weir) and their daughters, Marjorie and Viola (‘Tootles’) in 1907

THE BOOKFELLOW, 24 January 1907, p.8

Additional Source

Ian G. Dicker, J.C.W.—A Short Biography of James Cassius Williamson [The Elizabeth Tudor Press, NSW: 1974]

Original Sources of Photos and Illustrations

The Harvard Theatre Collection: Wallack’s Theatre, c.1865; J.W. Wallack, Sr.; JCW c.1868; Maggie Moore (1873); Poster for Struck Oil

California Historical Society, San Francisco: John McCullough; The California Theatre c.1871; JCW c.1871

The New York Public Library Theatre Collection: Playbill for Wallack’s Theatre

J.C. Willamson’s Life-Story in His Own Words [N.S.W. Bookstall Co. Ltd., 1913]: JCW and family

J.C. Williamson Theatres Ltd., Sydney: Script page of Struck Oil

(The original 1874 orchestra parts for the incidental music for Struck Oil remain extant in the “J.C. Williamson collection of performance materials” archived at the National Library of Australia in Canberra—see https://trove.nla.gov.au/version/23704496)

The Australian Stage.

What it Demands of the Actor, the Author, and the Manager

An Interview with J. C. WILLIAMSON

Her Majesty’s Theatre, Sydney, 1903

IN what I have said of Australian actors I allow for exceptions, of course. But I’m speaking to you frankly, as you asked me; and speaking with all kindness, because a manager in his own interest always wishes to help people on if they’ll give him a chance—and some Australian actors don’t give the manager chance enough. They don’t exhibit the qualities that make a manager say “This fellow is ambitious: he works hard, he takes his present part well—he is taking trouble to fit himself for better parts. That’s the man I want.” Managers in Australia never get enough of that class of Australian actor.

The women are better in that way. They work harder, and they work more persistently. Then they seem quicker and more adaptable. If you think of all the good Australian actresses we’ve had though I needn’t mention any names—you will see my point. They have talent as well as the men, and they stick more closely to their profession. There’s any amount of talent, but often it is not talent that perseveres. And as I’ve said that, I ought to say, too, what good colleagues I’ve found in Australian actors, actresses and singers; what fine support. When they are interested, they don’t spare themselves in their efforts to help, and their natural aptitude is so great that they learn very quickly. What I would like them to do is to maintain their interest and their effort all the time, because my experience teaches me that’s essential. As soon as you let go in our profession, you lose ground.

Augustin Daly

New York Public Library, New York

J.C. Williamson, c.1908

Advice to Players

Let me show you in one of my old scrapbooks a notice which I have always treasured and many times referred to with pride when thinking over old times. It was written by Augustin Daly over 41 years ago, when he was one of the leading dramatic critics on the New York press. He afterwards became, as you know, America’s leading manager, and succeeded to the position formerly occupied by the Wallacks.

[This is portion of the article referred to by Mr. Williamson.]

Room for the Little People of the Stage! Make way there! and let us bow in the third and fourth rate actors, who, as “lords,” “gentlemen,” “Marcellus and Bernardo” or “Catesby” and the “Lieutenant of the Tower” have so often in their turn bowed in the Star of the evening.

The first-rate actors have their chroniclers; the second-rate actresses have their flatterers; who shall be the historians of the neglected ones of the lower grade? Shall we not lift them from the small notoriety of their favourite porter-house, and make them proud of something more than the awful admiration of little dirty boys along the street?

Is not the “utility man” worthy of honourable mention beside his distinguished co-labourers on the stage.

Let us see.

In the first place, the position of the fourth-rate actor demands of him the following qualities: Great versatility—for he must be one night a comedian of the old school, then a gay fellow of the genteeler comedy, then a noble patriot of the ante-Christian era, then a respectable tragedian of the modern period, then a howling bandit in a cavern, then an innocent rustic in a smock, then a belaced courtier of the Shakspearian drama, and then a red-shirted creature of the sensational.

Great application—for he must study hundreds of new parts in the course of the year;

Great patience—for he must wait and wait and bide his time for advancement through many weary seasons;

Great hopefulness—for he must never despair;

Great amiability—for he must endure the insults of stars and the jeers of his equals.

In fact—it requires more real ability to be a fourth-rate actor with his ceaseless and unnoticed labours, than to be a distinguished star who has half-a dozen stage pieces which he enacts all the year round, and who sees his name constantly mentioned in the papers.

It is a matter of congratulation that we are now having a better class of people in the humbler roles. If every stage only had a competent manager, to assist in developing the young talents, many famous actors might be made of the staff at present under command.

As it is, Mr. Williamson, of Wallack’s company, Mr. Burrows, of the Winter Garden, and Mr. Rockwell, of the Olympic, promise (if their modesty continues) to be actors of no mean order five years hence. But Mr. Williamson will be better than them all—not because he is more ambitious—but because he is more attentive and less vain!

Will the little people of the drama take some brief advice?

Give as much time to your dressing as a great actor gives to his. When Florence, the comedian, was a utility man, he used to make his own dresses and wigs for every little part he played—in order to look the character he was cast for. Florence was only a poor boy too, and had to stint himself to do it.

Never be ashamed, when on the stage in the presence of a “star,” to speak your lines with the emphasis you shall have studied in your own chamber.

Do not spend your leisure in idleness with those on whose level you now are, but retire early to your homes and study for a higher position.

Do not criticise the actor above you in the discontented circles of the green room, but try and learn from him how to be as good or as great as he. Fleury, the greatest of French comedians, when in his glory under the Empire, one night consented to play a part of but one scene, and in which he had but five words to speak. It was that of an insignificant old seigneur, to whom an appeal is made by a poor woman whose husband upon their wedding day is under arrest. Fleury seemed to listen to her at first, with the indifference with which a nobIeman usually receives the applications of such rude and ignorant peasants as she pretended to be; then all at once struck with the dignity of her manner and sentiments he fixed his eyes upon her, and while continuing to listen, as if by instinctive, almost involuntary movement, his hand was raised by degrees to his hat, which he finally raised from his head and lowered before her as if mechanically. When the wife was done speaking the old man was in the attitude of most respectful obeisance. The pantomime was so true, so delicate—it expressed so naturally the feeling of respect and surprise at finding the woman so superior to what she seemed, that the effect was electrical, and Fleury, who had not spoken a single word, was greeted with the most tumultuous applause.

A poor devil of an actor, who usually took the part, could not understand this at all: “Only see,” said he, “what prejudice does. Fleury got three rounds of applause just for taking off his hat; and I never got any applause in the part—and yet I never move my hat at all.”

But this is one thing the Little People must learn, above all, and remember—that if actors deserve it the public will reward them whether they are “stars” or not.

Always ask yourself what such or such a character would be apt to do in real life and govern yourself accordingly—never forgetting that in real life the simple message of a servant conveying important news is always as impressive as the circumstances justify. 

When a servant says: “Sir, your carriage is waiting”—he will, of course, do so in a business-like way. But should he have to announce: “Sir, your son is dead”—in real life, he would undoubtedly exhibit as much real concern in face and voice as the person whom he informs would be likely to feel. This simple illustration presents the case. Know the object of what you have to say, and ordinary discretion will suggest the mode of saying it.

Since we have no school of acting whence professionals may graduate, every humble performer must make his closet his college and tutor himself. With his looking-glass, his book, and a good deal of diligent observation and thought, every actor may be an artist, but it is equally certain that with foolish company, and discontented mind and disordered life—every drudge will remain such to his dying day.

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

I think those remarks are well worth a young actor’s study.

Australian children are wonderfully gifted. There are no brighter children on the stage to he found anywhere. Go and see the children dancing in the Pantomime now: it’s a pleasure to watch how well and heartily they do it.

Australian Drama

About Australian drama? Room for it? Of course there is room for it. Hundreds, I might almost say thousands, of plays have been submitted to me, but the authors are either too literary, or they forget the prime requisites of a play. What are those? Well, a good play must have heart interest. It must hit the audience below the collar button. And it must have head: it must have a good plot, and not be intellectually below contempt. And in the third place it must admit of an appeal to the eye. Perhaps I should have put these qualities in the reverse order. The audience has first to be pleased through the eye; then it must have the appeal to the heart; and then there should be sufficient plot, sufficient intelligence, to leave a pleasant after-taste in memory.

If you look over all the plays that have been great successes, right from the very beginning, you will find they all have these qualities. There must be the love interest, there must be the plot, and the language must not be above the heads of the average playgoer. People go to the theatre as a distraction, as an amusement, as a relaxation after the toil of the day, so that they can drop their burdens and forget their troubles for a little while. They do not go to be instructed, or to be puzzled, or to be bored—and being human beings, the same human qualities appeal to them generation after generation. Take any play that has been a striking success—take The Silver King. That shows you what I mean. We can revive that play time after time, and always to good audiences. It has the love interest, it has the plot, and it is not a stupid play—though it does not profess to deal in problems. There is the child interest in it which always appeals to an audience, and it admits of being well staged so that it attracts the eye.

Where Local Drama Fails

So far Australian drama has failed to give us these things, or to put them in the right way. Certainly an Australian play could be made like In Mizzoura, but not so well,  because in Australia the types have not crystallised yet. America has been longer settled, and the Dutchman, the Negro, the Yankee, the Irishman, have all become well-known types of national life. In Australia it is not so. There is a bushman, of course, but he is not so definite a type as those I have mentioned, and he is not comparatively so interesting to a city audience.

Struck Oil is another play of the kind I mean. There is the old father—simple, honest, shrewd and kindly, and his happy laughing daughter. You see them together—father and child. The man goes away to the war, and Deacon Skinner comes in—the villain of the piece—the same old villain that you find in a hundred pieces. There seems to be nothing extraordinary in the story, yet that play always holds the audience, because it is sincere, because it is human, because it is true. Those are the keynotes of the play that lasts—humanity, sincerity, truth.

Of course there have been some fair Australian plays. Alfred Dampier did well with His Natural Life and Robbery Under Arms; and those are typical Australian plays. Very good in their way, no doubt, and in a sense representative. The fault I find with them is that they always bring in the revolver. That is always introduced when the dramatist gets in a difficulty. There is the bushranger, the heroine, and the villain, and they get along all right up to a certain point—then somebody must be shot in order to clear the air and let the play proceed. That seems to me to show a certain poverty of invention. A play should go easily and naturally, and nothing outrageous should occur in it. I suppose in convict and bushranging days the revolver episode was the natural thing; but it isn’t the natural thing now, and I don’t see why it should be so characteristic of the Australian drama we have. The Sunny South was another very good play of George Darrell’s—his best, I think. That was Australian; and there again—he had to use the revolver.

George Darrell. Photo by J.W. Lindt.

National Library of Australia, Canberra

Alfred Dampier, c.1875

State Library Victoria, Melbourne

A scene from the Alfred Dampier and Garnet Walch play Robbery Under Arms at Her Majesty’s Theatre, Sydney (1890). National Library of Australia, Canberra.

The Way to Write a Play

Well, your authors have got to write better before they will make a really successful play. The way seems obvious, and yet they don’t manage it. Authors bring plays to me: I have taken lots of trouble with some of them; and I’ve pointed out this thing and that which my experience tells me must be altered. They always profess themselves quite ready to alter and improve—always glad of suggestions, and so on—but somehow they don’t carry out the suggestions. They take the play away and bring it back, revised, but the faults are there just as before. It almost seems as if it wanted two men to write an Australian play, one to create it, and another to put it into shape for the stage. In the case of The Silver King the two authors had the valuable assistance of the technical knowledge and stagecraft of Wilson Barrett.

Perhaps that is why so many journalists fail. Their ideas are good enough, their language is good enough—sometimes a little bit too good—but it isn’t the kind that tells on the stage, and they don’t get the situations right. Then, they don’t seem to me to take enough trouble at the beginning. Now, I have had good authors under contract to me to write plays—Dion Boucicault and W.S. Gilbert, for example—and I know something of the way they set about it. I was particularly impressed with the trouble Gilbert took with his scenario: it was almost as long as the play. He wrote the scenario first to get his general effect, his main points, and his leading situations; and he spared no pains to put everything in the exact place where it was wanted for stage representation. It was only after he had made a scenario that would act that he set to work and wrote the play, filling in the language, creating the characters, and polishing every line until, in any play of Gilbert’s, you will find there is very little that can be dispensed with—very little indeed that can be cut with advantage. The reason is, as I say, that he has his careful scenario behind his language: his play is built before it  is decorated.

W.S. Gilbert, 1890. Photo by Herbert Rose Barraud.

National Portrait Gallery, London

Dion Boucicault

New York Public Library, New York

Words and Plot

A drama may be literature, but the words are not the essential thing about it. The essential thing is that it should live and move like a piece of real life—and that depends on the construction. Words are only the clothes, the dress of the drama itself. Struck Oil, for example, was in a great measure written upon the stage, as you might say. My part wasn’t even committed to paper until we had taken it all round Australia. We used what we call a skeleton manuscript, with only the cues given, and one night a good phrase would occur, another night we would invent a little bit of business, and so on, until the whole thing was different from the play as conceived by the original writer. But, mind you, behind the whole there was always the living interest—the heart-interest that I have spoken of. That must be the basis of a really successful play: that is what gives it vitality. Then the play must be built so that this interest can be effectively displayed, and last of all you drape it with words to interpret the interest and construction to the audience.

Australian authors usually seem to go the other way about. They write the words, and as long as the thing makes a continuous story, and the language is good, they seem to think the play looks right. But all they do in most cases is to dress a lay figure. You have to start from the other end—start from human emotions, human instincts, and base your plot on them, and only when you’re sure you have the play, and the interest of the play, and the construction of the play, go on to the language. In real living drama the language is the last thing to think about.

The First Act

Another thing about a play is that when you get a good one it goes of itself, it unfolds itself. I agree that the last act should always be the strongest: too much strength in the first act is a mistake—because you can't live up to it. I remember a very interesting example of that in a New York theatre. There was a play of Dion Boucicault’s—I think it was The Shenandoah. The first act simply amazed the audience—they couldn’t contain themselves. They applauded and applauded. The stage manager came round to Boucicault in a great state of excitement. “We've got them this time, Mr. Boucicault.” “No,” says Boucicault, “no.” “What?” said the other fellow. “What? Don’t you hear that applause?” “No,” says Boucicault, “we’re done. The play’s a failure. That first act is too strong.” And it turned out exactly as he said. The play could not live up to the first act, and it never succeeded. That shows you how stage experience and stage insight come in. Of course the elder Boucicault was a very clever man, one of the very cleverest men that have been connected with the modern stage. He was a great author, he was a great actor, and he was a great stage manager—a man with great ideas.

It is always difficult to foretell the success or failure of a play from the first act, and when I am telegraphing to my partners after the first act of a first performance I am always very careful to add some qualifying words. Sometimes the first act appears to go very well indeed, but you can’t trust it. In order to be quite sure, you have to wait. There is something in the attitude of an audience that tells you things are going right, or they are not going right—some magnetism, quite apart from the obvious signs. I mean by obvious signs, for example, an audience coughing, or things like that. When you hear a few little coughs, that clearing of the throat, you have to pay attention: something’s going wrong.

The play’s not holding the attention of the audience. The man in the chair has lost interest, and as soon as he ceases to be absorbed with the stage he turns his head away and gives that little cough—the manager’s danger-signal.

The Verdict of the Audience

A very curious thing is the way in which intelligence about a play is communicated. You produce a play on Saturday night. Everything appears to go well, and yet you’re not convinced. The audience separate and go away, and then—the fate of the play is settled between Saturday night and Monday night. Perhaps you get flourishing notices in the papers on Monday morning, after a first-rate house on Saturday night, and yet Monday morning’s booking falls off, and Monday night’s house drops to half, and the play does not run. It has failed to hit them, somehow.  The people settle it going home in the trams, or when they meet on Sunday: I don't know how. Time and again that has happened. A successful Saturday night; first-rate press notices on Monday; and on Monday night—the audience missing! They’ve given their verdict going home in the trams, and the air has carried it like microbes.

Charles Warner, 1891. Photo by Walery.

National Portrait Gallery, London

The Centennial Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 10, May 1889, p.699

National Library of Australia, Canberra

Captain Swift was a case like that. We opened in Captain Swift at the Theatre Royal in Sydney. It seemed a good play, with popular Charles Warner in the title role; it had a splendid reception, got splendid notices in the papers; and yet there was a poor house on Monday night, and it only ran a fortnight. In England a manager has time to recast and re-model his plays, and so he can convert a failure into a success. Several of George Edwardes’ musical comedies have been first-night failures. The audience simply wouldn’t stand them—but he has improved them night by night, and turned them into successes. In Australia we can’t do that, because the average run of a piece doesn’t give us time. In London people keep on going to the house, and there is population enough to give the manager a chance at mending. 

English and Australian Audiences

Perhaps English audiences are creatures of habit to a greater extent than Australian. They get used to an actor; they get used to a theatre; and as long as that actor and that theatre are above ground they will never leave them if they can help it. The Australian audience wants the actor and the theatre to justify themselves every time. If an actor fails in a new part, it doesn’t matter how often he’s succeeded before; if a new piece fails, it doesn’t matter how many other pieces have succeeded before: the audience stay away until the actor or the theatre offers them something better. Australian audiences are hard to please in that way. They’ve been used to the best things, and they want the best things all the time.

You may be sure that sooner or later an Australian author will make a good play on the lines I’ve suggested, and if it is good the Australian audience will soon let him know. You can trust their judgment, you can trust their appreciation. I have mentioned two or three Australian plays; we have had one or two good musical dramas like Tapu, with bright, original music; and I think that our pantomimes, such as Djin-Djin and Matsa, will bear comparison with anything of the kind done anywhere. And in Parsifal, just now, you have a successful play that’s made right on the Australian premises—our own scenery, our own scenic artists, our own costumes, as well as our own play. The whole thing is done here. In London it is quite different.  A theatrical manager sends for his costumes to one place, for his scenery to another, and so on. I don’t suppose there is a London theatre that employs a permanent staff of scenic artists. Here we have to do everything, as I say, on the premises.

Illustration by Will R. Barnes, 1895

State Library Victoria, Melbourne

Illustration by Will R. Barnes, 1896

State Library Victoria, Melbourne

Australian audiences are in many ways the best in the world. They are most difficult to please, for the reason that they have been accustomed to nothing but the best. Almost every play is tried in London or New York before it is staged here, and you never see the failures. You get scenery and costumes as good as London’s, and you get the most attractive plays. So audiences have naturally a high standard, and when a manager falls below that standard they are apt to complain. On the other hand, when they are pleased they support you well. They are very intelligent, very responsive, and very ready to excuse accidental shortcomings. When they do not like a play they do not hiss or make a row, they simply stay away—and they stay away with very great unanimity.

An Actor and His Part

When the Australian audience likes you their applause is very genuine. It’s a great thing to feel that you have an audience in your hands, and that their emotions respond directly to those you are portraying. The part I myself like best is the part which gives you an opportunity to make an audience cry one minute and laugh the next. “John Stofel” is such a part, and “Rip Van Winkle.” The scene where the old man is trying to recall himself to his daughter’s memory, I have always considered a test of the strength of my acting. I’ve never failed in that part to make the actress who was taking the daughter’s part cry—really cry. Never but once—the exception was a woman who paid no attention at all: she might just as well have been eating lollies. She wasn’t really concentrating her attention on the business of the piece. So I said to her one day, “Why don’t you wake up and listen to what is going on? Surely you have feelings: surely you understand the scene?” After that she did pay a little more attention, and she did feel the pathos. Before she had been letting the mind wander, with the result that I could not touch her at all.

An actor, I think, must keep control of himself, he must not let himself, as people say, be “carried away by the part,” for the result is that he ceases to play the part. He is merely himself. But you can feel a part intensely, and still remain in full possession of your faculties. You can realise the way the thing is going, and watch it, and decide how it shall go. To lose control so far that you forget you are on the stage at all—well, I doubt if it ever happens; and if it did happen, I should think the actor had made a mistake. He is there to act the part and if he forgets that he forgets the reason of his presence on the stage.

Stage Aspirants and “Twang”

One thing I do not like to notice, and it is a thing I have remarked about before: that is the twang that so many Australian children are growing up with. To my mind it is the result of simple carelessness. The children are not taught at school or at home to speak with the proper intonation. At the school, of course, the teachers may be as bad as the scholars. I think parents are at fault for not correcting their children in the home; I think teachers are at fault for not correcting the children in the school; and I think the Government is at fault for not correcting the teachers—for not saying that the first qualification of the teacher should be that he can speak correctly the language he is using. Government should insist that teachers are properly trained before they become teachers at all.

I hear this twang, of course, very frequently in the girls that come to me and offer to sing or act. So many of them have charming voices and excellent qualifications otherwise, if they would only speak correctly. Many, I am sorry to say, have no qualifications at all; and I think that girls who are aiming at a stage career should at the very outset of their training see somebody who would tell them this—somebody who would be able to say decisively that their voice, or their age, or their appearance disqualifies them for the stage. That would save many of them from wasting years at work which they ought never to have undertaken.

Some Old Parts

My favourite part—well, I can’t tell you that—I've succeeded in many. “John Stofel” in Struck Oil was a very good part, of course; and that part of “Sim” in Wild Oats was very popular in its day. Then I loved to play “Dick Swiveller,” “Kerry,” “Rip Van Winkle,” and lots of other parts which blended pathos and comedy. I can remember the first big round of applause I ever got—it was when as a boy of sixteen I took the part of “Ross” in Macbeth, and was applauded for the lines of Ross’s reply to Macduff: “Stands Scotland where it did?”

          Alas! poor country;
Almost afraid to know itself. It cannot
Be call’d our mother, but our grave; where nothing,
But who knows nothing, is once seen to smile;
Where sighs and groans and shrieks that rent the air
Are made, not mark’d; where violent sorrow seems
A modern ecstasy; the dead men’s knell
Is there scarce ask’d for who; and good men’s lives
Expire before the flowers in their caps,
Dying or ere they sicken.

That seems a very long time ago now, and indeed it is a long time since I thought about these things at all. Theatrical management keeps you too busy for personal recollections. It’s not alone keeping the companies going—though that is no light task in itself—but sometimes I have to take part in stage management. In Parsifal, for example, I staged the play and invented things as I went along. Then there is the continual labour of keeping in touch in order to be up to date. Weekly letters come from our agents in London and New York telling us what is going on there, and these have to be carefully considered. You have to keep an eye open for new men—for rising talent both in the field of authors and in the acting field. You have to see not only that the whole machine works, but that every part of it works so well that there is the least possible friction.

Act 1 scene 1 from Parsifal—Summit of the Grail Mount (scenery by W.R. Coleman). The old King of the Holy Grail, Titurel, blesses his son Amfortas as he sets out, armed with the Sacred Spear to attack the castle of the sorcerer Klingsor. State Library of New South Wales, Sydney.

A Manager’s Responsibility

And then you keep a general lookout on what’s going on around you. Often I come home from my office and bring my work with me, and my secretary to deal with a heap of correspondence that can’t be crammed into the day; and then, maybe, it’s necessary to sit up till two or three in the morning reading plays, or looking over the English and American dramatic papers, so as to miss nothing that will be of service. It requires constant watchfulness to keep you from falling behind and I think I can say that I am well abreast of everything that is doing in the theatrical world. But the labour it involves!—in addition to the responsibility and worry. That is what has made me ask myself frequently of late what am I getting out of it all.

Here I am at 61, still straining at the collar. Well, I haven’t many more years to play with, and I ask myself should I not try and get a little leisure. There is no such thing as leisure in management; the responsibility is always with you. And I think not only of myself, but of my wife and children. I would like to give my children the chances which I have often regretted missing for myself. My little girl Marjorie, for example, whose picture by Longstaff you see over yonder—will soon be of an age to travel, and I should like her to see the best pictures, hear the best music, read the best books, attend the best theatres, and meet bright, clever people. That, I think, is the best education a girl can have, and she should have it in her youth when her mind is receptive.

And while my children are growing up, I want to be with them. To me it is the greatest pleasure in life to be in the company of children. My other little girl had a birthday party in Melbourne the other day; she was four years old: so all her little friends came to luncheon, and afterwards they went along to the theatre to see Mother Goose—there happened to be a matinee performance; and I tell you the day I spent with them, watching them enjoy themselves so heartily, was one of the pleasantest I can remember. There happened to be a lot of little girls from the Orphan Asylum up in the gallery; and it was good to watch them too.

JCW with his wife, Mary and youngest daughter, Viola in the drawing room of their home ‘Tudor’ at Elizabeth Bay, Sydney in 1907. The portrait by Longstaff of Marjorie is to the right.

Harry Phydora as ‘Mother Goose’, 1907

National Library of Australia, Canberra

Personal Plans

So I should like to take my family and go away for a long trip, entirely free from care and worry. But the time is not yet come: for my business engagements have still some years to run. I am going to try and slacken the strain gradually. Next week, for example, I am going to New Zealand. I took a company through New Zealand twenty-five years ago; but since then I have not been back except on hurried visits, so I am going to renew my acquaintance with the country under its changed and improved conditions, and I shall spend some time in visiting all the leading towns. The New Zealand public always treat my companies splendidly. I shall keep in touch, of course, with my partners, who already relieve me of a great deal of the strain of management, but I shall try to make my visit as much of a holiday as possible. Perhaps later on I shall take a long trip to Europe, giving myself more leisure than I have previously had, and devoting my attention rather to securing new material, new plays and new actors, than to the direct business of management. So possibly I shall be able to slacken off work by degrees.

I’m not complaining; I’m explaining. In many ways I’m a fortunate man. I am deeply and sincerely grateful to the friends, and partners, and actors and actresses, and other assistants, who have made my success possible; and I am especially grateful to the Australian people, who have given me so warm a welcome and have made me one of themselves. As I told you, I’m still an American, for I don’t think a man should disown the country he was born in. But I’m Australian too, and when I have had the long holiday that I feel is necessary to my family and myself, this is the country I’m coming back to; this is the country where I want to live and die.

THE BOOKFELLOW, 31 January 1907, pp.14–17

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Endnotes

Compiled by Robert Morrison

Plays mentioned in the article:

In Mizzoura—4 act comedy-drama by Augustus Thomas premiered at Hooley’s Theatre, Chicago on 7 August 1893; written as a star vehicle for American comedian, Nat Goodwin who played in its Australian premiere at the Princess’s Theatre, Melbourne on 1 August 1896 for a 1 week season and subsequently on tour amongst his repertoire of plays.

For the Term of His Natural Life—Drama in 6 tableaux and a prologue by Thomas Somers (pseud. of Thomas Walker) and Alfred Dampier, based on Marcus Clarke’s novel His Natural Life (1874) premiered at the Royal Standard Theatre in Sydney on 5 June 1886 and played for an initial 42 performances. The play was subsequently revised by Walker and Dampier and produced at Her Majesty’s Theatre, Sydney on 30 November 1895 for an initial 19 performances.

Robbery Under Arms—5 act drama by Alfred Dampier and Garnet Walch, founded on Rolf Boldrewood’s novel (of 1888) premiered at the Alexandra Theatre, Melbourne on 1 March 1890 and ran for an initial 42 performances.

The Sunny South—5 act drama by George Darrell premiered at the Opera House, Melbourne on 31 March 1883 for an initial season of 36 performances.

Struck Oil; or, The Pennsylvania Dutchman—3 act comedy-drama, based on the unproduced play The German Recruit by Sam W. Smith, adapted and expanded by Clay Greene as The Deed, or Five Years Away; subsequently retitled with further revisions by J.C. Williamson, premiered at Salt Lake City, Utah on 23 February 1874 and received its Australian premiere at the Theatre Royal, Melbourne on 1 August 1874 for an initial 43 performances. This was followed by a return season of a further 13 performances commencing on Derby Day, 31 October and “every night during the Great Cup Week” concluding on 14 November. The play was then given a “Farewell Performance” as a Complimentary Benefit for the Williamsons on the final night of their Melbourne season on 21 December 1874, resulting in a record tally of 57 performances. (The original 1874 orchestra parts for the incidental music for Struck Oil remain extant in the “J.C. Williamson collection of performance materials” archived at the National Library of Australia in Canberra—see https://trove.nla.gov.au/version/23704496)

The Shenandoah—no play of that title is listed amongst the works of Dion Boucicault, however JCW may have been referring to Boucicault’s Belle Lamar, a play based on an episode of the American Civil War set in the Shenandoah Valley in the Spring of 1862, which opened at Booth’s Theatre, New York on 10 August 1874, and, failing to live up to audience expectations, closed on 13 September after a limited run of 34 performances. Although JCW was performing in Melbourne at the time and did not witness the play at first hand, he would have subsequently heard the anecdote about its failure at a later date, possibly from Boucicault himself.

The Silver King—5 act drama by Henry Arthur Jones and Henry Herman premiered at the Princess’s Theatre, London on 16 November 1882 and received its Australian premiere at the Theatre Royal, Melbourne on 27 October 1883 for an initial run of 49 performances. (The biographical Life and Letters of Henry Arthur Jones by his daughter, Doris Arthur Jones [Victor Gollancz, London: 1930] quoted Jones with regard to the play’s authorship: “Herman gave me the end of the second act, but he never wrote a line of it.”) Its popularity was such that it was regularly revived in Australia up to the late 1920s.

Captain Swift—4 act comedy-drama by Australian playwright, Charles Haddon Chambers premiered at the Haymarket Theatre, London on 20 June 1888 and received its Australian premiere at the Theatre Royal, Sydney on 16 February 1889 for a run of 12 performances. (In the original published text of his article JCW erroneously stated that the play had opened at the Princess’s in Melbourne, but this has been amended in the present transcription. The play was not included amongst Charles Warner’s repertoire during his prior Melbourne season at the Princess's Theatre from 31 March to 14 June 1888 and was only added during his later Sydney season at the Theatre Royal, after it had achieved success in London in Beerbohm Tree’s production.)  (See also “The Idiosyncrasies of the Australian Play-goer” by Gerald Marr Thompson in The Centennial Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 10; May 1889, p.699—https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-3083699840/view?sectionId=nla.obj-3089613560)

Tapu; or, A Tale of a Maori Pah—2 act comic opera with a book by Arthur H. Adams and music by Alfred Hill premiered at the Opera House in Wellington, New Zealand on 16 February 1903 for a season of 6 performances and received its Australian premiere at Her Majesty’s Theatre, Sydney on 9 July 1904 for an initial run of 19 performances. (The original orchestra parts for Tapu remain extant in the “J.C. Williamson collection of performance materials” archived at the National Library of Australia in Canberra—see https://trove.nla.gov.au/version/15801772)

Djin-Djin: The Japanese Bogie Man—pantomime by Bert Royle and J.C. Williamson, with music by Leon Caron and additional numbers by H.J. Pack, premiered at the Princess’s Theatre, Melbourne on 26 December 1895 for a seven-week season. (The original orchestra parts for Djin-Djinremain extant in the “J.C. Williamson collection of performance materials” archived at the National Library of Australia in Canberra—see https://trove.nla.gov.au/version/21824012 ; the published script is also available to read on-line from State Library Victoria at https://viewer.slv.vic.gov.au/?entity=IE6980073&file=FL19756886&mode=browse)

Matsa: Queen of Fire—pantomime by Bert Royle and J.C. Williamson, with music by Leon Caron and George Pack, premiered at the Princess’s Theatre, Melbourne on 26 December 1896 for a seven week season. (The published script is available to read on-line from State Library Victoria at https://viewer.slv.vic.gov.au/?entity=IE4122792&mode=browse)

Parsifal; or, The Redemption of Kundry—4 act drama by Rev. Thomas Hilhouse Taylor premiered at Her Majesty’s Theatre, Sydney on 22 December 1906 for an initial season of 51 performances. (Incidental music selected, arranged and composed by Christian Hellemann, and included the Prelude to Wagner’s opera.)

J.C. Williamson’s favourite parts included:

“John Stofel” in Struck Oil (see play details above).

“Sim” in Wild Oats—a comedy in 5 acts by John O’Keefe (which premiered in London at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden on 16 April 1791), was first played by JCW for a season at Wallack’s Theatre, New York which commenced on 20 December 1869.

“Dick Swiveller” in Little Nell and the Marchioness—a 4 act drama by John Brougham (“Partly adapted from the principal incidents of Charles Dicken’s The Old Curiosity Shop”), was first played by JCW for a season at Wallack’s Theatre, New York from 15 August 1867 opposite Lotta Crabtree in the dual title roles. He subsequently reprised the role for a two week season at the Theatre Royal, Melbourne, which commenced on 17 October 1874, in which JCW’s first wife, Maggie Moore played the dual roles of “Little Nell” and “The Marchioness”, and her brother, James Moore made his Australian debut.

“Kerry” in Kerry; or Night and Morning—a one-act play by Dion Boucicault, in which the title role was apparently first played by JCW at the Theatre Royal, Melbourne during a four week season, firstly as a curtain-raiser to Uncle Tom’s Cabin— “an emotional drama in 3 acts founded upon incidents connected with the world-read novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe” (in which JCW played the title role and Maggie played “Topsy”) from 21 September 1874 and again as a curtain-raiser to The Fairy Circle; or O’Carolan’s Dream— “a romantic and legendary drama” in 3 acts by H.P. Grattan (in which JCW played “Con O’Carolan” and Maggie played his wife “Molshee”) which commenced on 3 October 1874.

“Rip Van Winkle” in Rip Van Winkle—a 3 act drama by Joseph Jefferson (based on the story by Washington Irving) first performed by Jefferson at Washington D.C. in the U.S. in 1859 and in Australia at the Royal Victoria Theatre, Sydney on 3 February 1862, and subsequently revised by Dion Boucicault for a production at the Haymarket Theatre, London, starring Jefferson, which premiered on 4 September 1865. JCW first played the title role in the Australian premiere of Boucicault’s revised version for a two-week season at the Theatre Royal, Melbourne, which commenced on 30 November 1874. Maggie Moore was suffering from a severe cold at the time, so in order to give her a rest from performing, he hurriedly learned the role in three days and played it for the first time the following Monday. He subsequently wrote in a letter (dated 12 December 1874) to his actor friend, Henry Edwards in San Francisco: “I achieved a complete success the first night, and greatly improved upon it afterward, the press were unanimous in their praise. We played it two weeks.”    

Theatre Royal, Melbourne, 1877. Photo by N.J. Caire.

State Library Victoria, Melbourne

Maggie Moore & JCW, c.1874. Photo by Bardwell, Ballarat.

National Library of Australia, Canberra

Additional Sources

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

Ian G. Dicker, J.C.W. —A Short Biography of James Cassius Williamson[The Elizabeth Tudor Press, NSW: 1974]

Lynn Earl Orr, Dion Boucicault and the Nineteenth Century Theatre: A Biography [Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College: 1953]

The New York Times

The Argus (Melbourne)

Postscript

An insight into the financial aspects of The Firm and the scale of its operations in Australia and New Zealand in the era in which J.C. Williamson was interviewed is provided by the following newspaper article published in 1906.

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

DRAMA AS AN INDUSTRY

MR. J. C. WILLIAMSON’S ENTERPRISES.

SALARY LIST OVER £100,000.

The relation of the stage to literature, to public morals, to the church are subjects of frequent discussion and controversy. Its relation to the industrial life of the community is never considered. The economist and the statist who delve fearlessly into almost all sorts and conditions of life and occupation, hang back from the stage door, as nervous as the youth with his first billet doux. All the same, the stage is a considerable factor in industry, and even in a population relatively small, like that of Australia, the magnitude and extent of its operations are unguessed by most of those who are excellently acquainted with it from the front of the house.

The various companies now controlled by the firm of Messrs. Williamson, Tallis and Ramaciotti include no fewer than 650 persons on the permanent staff. Of these 187 are actors or actresses, 83 musicians, and 52 mechanists and stage hands; while what might be termed the “headquarters staff” —to which falls the task of supervising the whole of this vast enterprise through the managers of the various departments—numbers 12. In addition to these persons, there is a large “floating” staff, consisting of the supers and assistants picked up at the cities as they are reached by the different theatrical companies. Although, of course, only casually employed, those who draw salary in the course of a year in this way must number nearly as many as the regular members of companies.  Indirectly there are a host of persons who derive work and wages from the enterprises. In fact it is only necessary to consider the immense figures supplied yesterday by Mr. J.C. Williamson to realise how much of the shilling which the playgoer pays for his amphitheatre seat is distributed again in wages to a multitude of trades. When the money has reached the treasury of the theatre the cue has come for “Enter Omnes.”

In salaries and wages, Mr Williamson paid away during the year 1905 no less than £110,183 [approx. equivalent to $17,435,832 in today’s currency], the greater part going to Australians. The printing and advertising cost £22,469 [$3,555,591]. The columns of advertisements published throughout Australia and New Zealand, placed end to end, would reach over two miles [approx. 3.2 km]; while the posters and bills exhibited on hoardings or walls, covered an area just under three acres [approx.1.2 hectares].

The rent bill amounted to £19,428 [$3,074,370], and the cost of lighting was £9,783 [$1,548,104]. Scenery cost no less than £10,593 [$1,676,282], 14 square miles [approx. 22.5 square km] of new canvas and 9½ miles [approx.15.3 km] of new timber having been used.  Even these immense figures do not represent all the raw material which was transmuted into landscapes and architecture, for nearly as much old canvas and timber again was repainted, and made available for stage presentation. Nearly the whole of the money spent under this head is distributed in Australia. There is a complete staff of scenic artists and assistants at both Melbourne and Sydney. The same system is followed in respect to the properties, which, inclusive of furniture and furnishings, absorbed £6,627 [$1,048,685]; and the costumes, in which the year’s expenditure was £5,390 [$852,937]. The employees in the costume department and wardrobe stores work without cessation all the year round.  Whether a big production is approaching makes but little difference to them. There is always something to do, and in the storerooms the strenuous life is discovered. In Sydney the whole of a building, formerly used as a skating rink, is used to store surplus wardrobe. The floor space is covered with hundreds of huge baskets, and day after day the contents of these are taken out and sorted, brushed, exposed to air and sunlight, and repacked with a fresh supply of preventives against the ravages of moths. In this store the costumes are the accumulation of 25 years of management, dating back to the time when the firm of Williamson, Garner, and Musgrove dominated the Australian stage. Added to the costumes purchased by this firm are those obtained during the periods when Mr. Williamson and Garner were in partnership, when Mr. Williamson controlled the enterprise alone, when Mr. Musgrove joined him, and when, subsequently, after another period of sole proprietorship, he became the senior partner of the present firm.

“These costumes would be worth a fortune for anybody who could find a use for them,” said Mr. Williamson. “In England and America managers are able to dispose of their surplus stocks for the provincial tours. Here there are no such means of recovering a portion of the initial expense. We cannot sell the costumes. All we can do is keep them in order, on the off chance of making use of the parts as opportunity arises.”

In 1905 over £5,000 [$791,222] was paid away in royalties to authors and others holding the copyrights of plays produced. In addition to such plays, however, Mr. Williamson holds the full Australasian rights of 105 musical operas and musical plays, 40 comedies, and 91 dramas which he has at different times bought outright. Such purchases have been spread over many years, and include the most successful musical and dramatic works produced in London for the last 20 years, as well as many American successes.

One of the largest items in expenditure is transportation. Last year £12,858 [$2,034,705] was expended in fares and freight. The Gilbert and Sullivan Company, which finished its Sydney season last Friday, started immediately for Adelaide, there to take the steamer for Perth, where it opens on October 1. For this season of three weeks only over 80 persons were despatched, and the fares alone amounted to over £1,000 [$158,244]. Companies now travel in a manner never dreamed of 10 years ago, the most striking instance of all being provided by the record of one week in 1905.  Within seven days the Repertoire Company started from Perth to Sydney; the Royal Comic Opera Company travelled by special train from Sydney to Port Adelaide to catch the steamer for Perth; the Nance O’Neill Company arrived in Sydney from San Francisco, and took train immediately for Melbourne; the Andrew Mack Company travelled to Sydney; the Gilbert and Sullivan Company from Melbourne to Sydney; the Tittell Brune Company from Melbourne to Wellington via Sydney; and the Knight-Jefferies Company from Sydney to Brisbane. During last year the various companies covered 76,674 miles [approx.123,395 km].

The Argus (Melbourne), Tuesday, 25 September 1906, p.5, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article9655665

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N.B. Ticket prices for JCW productions in 1905 amounted to 5/ (shillings) (for seats in the Dress Circle & Orchestra Stalls), 3/ (Stalls), 2/ (Back of the Stalls) and 1/ (Ampitheatre or Gallery) =  $39.56, $23.74, $15.82 and $7.91 respectively in today’s currency.

Princess’ Theatre, Melbourne, 1893. Photo by Charles Rudd. State Library Victoria, Melbourne.

Another celebrity was Mr J.C. Williamson, who came to us accompanied by his wife, Miss Maggie Moore, from America, in 1874. They opened at the Theatre Royal on 1st August. Maggie Moore had a good singing voice; she went on the stage when only eight years of age. Their opening piece was “Struck Oil”, which ran for 57 nights. It was so successful that it was taken to Ballarat, Bendigo and Castlemaine. The company went on to Sydney and played the same piece for 20 weeks. “Struck Oil” was, I believe, the best money-making piece ever produced in Australia. After 12 months’ continued success in Australia, Mr and Mrs Williamson went to India, America and Great Britain, meeting with continued success everywhere. They returned to Australia in 1879. Mr Williamson relinquished acting and developed all his energies and experiences to theatrical management. His name is still borne by a theatrical management now carrying on business here.

JC Williamson. Photo by Bradley & Rulofson, San Francisco.

State Library of NSW, Sydney

Maggie Moore. Photo by Tuttle & Co., Sydney.

State Library of NSW, Sydney

We have had Maggie Moore with us until quite recently, when she announced her intention of departing for her native state, San Francisco. A special matinee was held in her honour on 13th of October 1925. Her memory will ever remain fresh in the minds of those who have been privileged to see her on the stage.¹

Frederick Marshall must not be forgotten. He came here under Garner’s management. He was a highly finished actor, carefully studying the characters he had to portray, his principal ones being Markham in “Friends”, Perkins Middlewick in “Our Boys”, and Quilp in “The Old Curiosity Shop.”

Another of our visitors was Mr William Creswick who gained distinction as a tragedian in the Old World. It was late in life when he came to Australia, and his brilliancy had rather faded. His greatest character was that of Sir Giles Overreach.

Dion Boucicault Sr. Photo by Bradley & Rulofson, San Francisco.

State Library of NSW, Sydney

G.W. Anson as Eccles in Caste. Photo by Falk, Sydney.

Falk Album, Theatre Heritage Australia

Dion Boucicault visited us in 1885. He was distinguished not only as an actor but also as an author. His comedy of “London Assurance” made him famous. His first appearance in Melbourne was as Conn O’Kelly in “The Shaughraun”, his own Irish drama. When he left these shores, he left behind him a son and daughter, Mr “Dot” and Miss Nina Boucicault, who inherited the talent of their father and proved admirable additions to the comedy company of Mr and Mrs Robert Brough.

Anson was on our boards for some time. The principal character in which I remember him was that of Eccles in “Caste”, which was a truly clever performance.

Mr John Dunn, the original “Jim Crowe”, came here accompanied by his two accomplished daughters and played with ultimate success. The eldest, Rose, was married to a well-to-do grain broker, Mr L.L. Lewis, who was also a skilled musician. He was organist in St John’s Church, Toorak, where I was a member of his choir. The younger daughter, Marion, was married to Marcus Clarke, the author of the well-known, “For the Term of His Natural Life”, and other well-known works. I was acquainted with Mr Clarke before his literary fame. He was then a clerk in the Bank of Australasia. On the death of her husband, Mrs Clarke was appointed Registrar of Births and Deaths for Melbourne, in recognition of her husband’s talents.

Julia Mathews, 1875. Photo by Lock & Whitfield, London.

National Portrait Gallery, London

Rose Edouin

State Library Victoria, Melbourne

One of the most clever and versatile actresses with whom we have been favoured was Miss Julia Mathews, who came to us from New South Wales, where, I believe, she was born. Her range of characters was unlimited. She was a most deservedly popular favourite. She left us in search of success in London, where she was engaged for the part of “The Grand Duchess Gerolstein”, in which she achieved success. Poor girl, she did not live long to wear her laurels. An unfortunate contretemps occurred to an intimate friend of mine, who had access to the stage of the Princess Theatre, and went there to see his friend, Willie Edouin. He and Miss Matthews were playing in the same piece, both dressed as sailor boys. My friend saw a figure stooping to look through a peephole in the drop scene, which is kept for the purpose of viewing the state of the house. My friend, stepping lightly forward, gave the figure a vigorous slap behind, when to his horror and consternation, Miss Matthews turned round and called out, “Here, look out; mind what you are doing”.

The Edouin family, consisting of a son and three sisters, were included in our public favourites. Willie afterwards became manager of a public theatre. His eldest sister, Rose, was married to Mr G.B.W. Lewis, for many years a leading circus proprietor. After the death of her husband, she was, to the best of my remembrance, manageress of the Haymarket Theatre.

Miss Fanny Cathcart, afterwards Mrs Robert Heir, was a brilliant exponent of Shakespeare and other well-known authors and was leading lady. She fell in love with Mr Robert Heir and married him. They continued to play in Melbourne for many years. He, poor fellow, came to a sudden end. He was on the way to New Zealand, when one day, sitting on a deckchair, he fell forward and expired, a victim of heart failure.

Louise Cleveland

Australian Performing Arts Museum, Arts Centre Melbourne

Madame Céleste

State Library Victoria, Melbourne

Miss Cleveland must not be omitted from my list. She arrived here in 1864 with her husband, Mr Viner (Vincent on the stage). In the character of Constance in “King John”, she displayed wonderful versatility, grief, indignation, and utter despair, which were depicted with tragic force. She even essayed to play the part of “Hamlet”, in which she fairly succeeded.

We were favoured with a visit from Madame Céleste in 1867, which is to be well remembered as Nature had dealt kindly with her. The play in which I best remember her was “Green Bushes”.

Adelaide Ristori. Photo by J.T. Gorus, Sydney.

State Library of NSW, Sydney

Sarah Bernhardt as Cleopatra. Photo by Falk, Sydney.

Falk Album, Theatre Heritage Australia

Another distinguished visitor we had was Madame Ristori, in 1875—to give her full title, the Marchioness Capranica del Grillo. She appeared in Melbourne and the provinces for three months. Some of her leading characters were “Mary Stuart”, “Myrrha”, and Lady Macbeth”.

Although Sarah Bernhardt was here for a very short time, she left behind a lasting impression of her talents. Among her best characters were those of “Camille”, “Fedora”, “Cleopatra” and “Jeanne d’Arc”.

Jennie Lee as Jo. Photo by E.C. Waddington & Co., Melbourne.

State Library Victoria, Melbourne

Nellie Stewart as Zaza. Photo by Talma & Co.

Talma Postcard collection, Theatre Heritage Australia

Jennie Lee must not be forgotten. From her first appearance in Melbourne, she jumped to the front as a great actress. She was most natural. He delineation of the Street Arab in “Bleak House” was excellent. It appealed to the heart, with pity for the sufferings of the poor waif.

One of my great favourites was Miss Nellie Stewart, who possessed great powers as an actress, as well as vocal powers in comic opera. In the character of Zaza, the actress disappeared, and the spectators saw a woman of many moods and deep emotions. Another character in which I admired her was “Sweet Nell of Old Drury”.

I have left to the last my old friend and one in whom I hold in the greatest esteem, George Coppin. He and his wife arrived in Melbourne in July 1845,² bringing a theatrical company, including G.H. Rogers, the famous comedian. As a comedian, Mr Coppin was a master. He took the management of the Queen’s Theatre and produced the first pantomime in Melbourne. He may well be termed the Father of the Victorian Stage. In later years, when it was my privilege to see Mr Coppin on the stage, he took the character of Paul Pry, and the manner in which he sneaked on the stage to interrupt some business in which he was not wanted, with the expression “I hope I don’t intrude”, was a very fine piece of acting. Other characters in which he excelled were Aminabad Sleek in “The Serous Family”, Mawworn in “The Hypocrite”, also Bob Acres and Milky White. We are indebted to Mr Coppin for his enterprise in introducing to Australia very many actors and actresses of great ability, including the late G.V. Brooke. Mrs Charles Young should also be mentioned as having been brought out by Mr Coppin. She afterwards became famous as Mrs Herman Vezin.

George Coppin as Paul Pry

State Library Victoria, Melbourne

G.H. Rogers. Photo by J.T. Gorus, Sydney.

State Library of NSW, Sydney

The Theatre Royal was erected by Mr John Black and Mr Bayne, a solicitor, and it was destroyed by fire in 1872. The present structure is on the same site.

The Olympic Theatre, in Lonsdale-street, was commonly known as “The Iron Pot”. It was one of Mr Coppin’s ventures, put up in 1855 and took only about 30 days to erect. It became the home of many able and talented companies including a company of black-faced comedians, well and deservedly known as “The San Francisco Minstrels”.

Another great enterprise was Cremorne Gardens, Richmond, on the bank of the river, which was opened in 1856. It became a very popular resort for out-of-door entertainments. The gardens were well laid out and included a number of statues. It had refreshment rooms, a wild beast show, optical illusions, and a clever tightrope dancer. Its greatest attraction was a scenic representation of the Siege of Sebastopol, consisting of a painted canvas which spread along the lake at the bottom of the gardens, and from which there was a nightly display of fireworks.

Later on, in 1858, a theatre was added to the attractions of Cremorne. Part of the pleasure of a visit to these gardens was a trip up the river in Waterman’s boats in the cool of the evening. Subsequently a railway was constructed by the Melbourne Railway Company as far as Cremorne, which now forms part of the Brighton railway line. Ultimately the gardens and their contents were disposed of and, alas! to what sad uses may we become at last, it became a private lunatic asylum. For one act alone Coppin’s name deserves to be immortalised; it is that of the establishment of the Old Colonists’ Home. He initiated it as a Home for Old and Disabled Actors and Actresses. I was in the audience of the Theatre Royal when he propounded his plan. It is still a home for disabled actors, but since the original establishment, others than frequenters of the stage are given homes there. In addition to Mr Coppin’s residence in Lennox-street, Richmond, he had a seaside home at Sorrento, in which he passed a good deal of his time. He once wrote to the Government, suggesting the planting of trees on the ocean side of Sorrento, and as I then had charge of State Forests, the matter was handed over to me. Before coming to a decision, I deemed it advisable to visit the place. Mr Coppin, hearing of my arrival sent an invitation to the hotel to spend the evening with him, which I accepted. It was a most delightful interlude. He had staying with him Miss Georgia Hodgson, principal contralto in Lyster’s Opera Troupe, who filled up the evening by singing and playing, to my great delight. After that I often met Mr Coppin in the city, when he would never let me pass without a few words of pleasant converse. When he passed to that “bourne from whence no traveller returns”, I felt I had lost a dear friend.

I have personally had some little experience on the stage. In 1863 I joined the “Garrick Club”, and included in its membership were a number of leading business and professional men. I remained a member of the club for some years, and appeared, I think, on the stage of all the Melbourne theatres, taking part in Shakespearian plays and English comedies.

In conclusion, may I ask my readers to think kindly of the poor players who “strut and fret their hour upon the stage”, and then are heard no more.

David Martin. Photo by Talma & Co., Melbourne.

Courtesy of Margaret Knight

Endnotes

1. Maggie Moore died last month, Jan 1926,  at San Francisco, supervening on an operation in which she lost a leg—Editor of The Justice of the Peace Magazine

2. Possibly January 1845—Margaret Knight, 2025

First published The Justice of the Peace Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 119, 7 February 1926, pp.2-3

Thank you to Margaret Knight, great grand daughter of David Martin, for providing a transcript of this article and also for supplying photographs of her great grandfather.

For more information on the career of David Martin, refer https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/martin-david-7502

Film shows were beginning to oust stage melodrama in popularity with the public and on 30 July 1909 the site reopened `under new management’ as ‘The Paragon Pictures’ with the boasts of ‘comfortable seats’ and an ‘unobstructed view for 4000 people’. The program was made up of short films and a few vaudeville acts accompanied by a ‘full Bavarian Band’. After mid August the site was briefly advertised as ‘Majestic Square’ but by early October this was dropped in favour of ‘Paragon Picture Pavilion’. The change of names seems to have done little to popularize the venture, however, and it closed early in November 1909.

The Argus of 13 December 1909 reported: ‘The Hippodrome, in Exhibition street, has been transformed into a theatre, and henceforth will be known as the Criterion. Rows of seats occupy the old ring, a stage has made its appearance out of the wall, and an orchestra has taken the place of the brass band. The lessee, Mr. Phil Bernard, aspires to entertain his patrons with healthy dramas and musical comedies.’

A revival of an old musical, My Sweetheart, complete with ‘Sheep supplied by Angliss and Co.’, was the opening attraction on 11 December. Another musical followed this but by late January 1910 these had given way to weekly change melodramas which continued until about mid March.

Hugh D. McIntosh, 1908

National Library of Australia, Canberra

J.C. Williamson, c.1913

State Library Victoria, Melbourne

The property now also caught the eye of the colourful promoter Hugh D. McIntosh, who would later control the Tivoli vaudeville circuit. McIntosh took out a lease in April 1910 and commissioned plans from architect Frank Stapley for a large two-level octagonal-shaped stadium for boxing matches. Although the plans, dated 18 November 1910, were lodged with the Board and the site leased to a McIntosh company in October 1911, the building was never begun.

It's quite possible that McIntosh’s ambitions outreached his resources; it’s also possible these ambitions reignited Williamson’s interests in the property, for within a short time The Firm had acquired the lease. Aside from thwarting McIntosh’s threatened incursion opposite their august Her Majesty’s Theatre, The Firm obviously saw the prominent corner as perfect for a modern playhouse. This would be ideal for more intimate offerings than the spectacular melodramas and musical comedies then occupying their larger theatres.

Design of the J.C. Williamson Memorial Theatre

From The Argus, 10 September 1913, p.15

The Firm first announced the creation of a ‘Williamson Theatre’ for comedy productions here in July 1913. This was to be a memorial to their founder, James Cassius Williamson, who had died in Paris earlier that month. According to press reports in The Age and The Argus, plans had been commissioned from architects Kent and Budden of Sydney and William Pitt of Melbourne. Although building was announced to start ‘almost immediately’, nothing was done before the declaration of war in August 1914 threatened the economic outlook, thus halting the project.

Mahlstedt map showing the JCW film studio and scenery store on the corner of Exhibition and Lonsdale Streets. Although dated 1910, properties have been updated to c.1920.

State Library Victoria, Melbourne

Meanwhile, threats of a different kind were coming in the shape of American film versions of plays to which The Firm held Australasian performance rights: the film Sealed Orders with J. Warren Kerrigan had opened in Sydney in May 1914, during the run of JCW’s stage production of a popular melodrama of the same name. The Firm had been forced to seek an injunction to prevent further screenings, while the question of copyright was debated.

This case may well have given rise to the idea of JCW venturing into film production for itself. That this was public knowledge by mid-1914 is made clear by an item in the Adelaide paper, The Green Room: ‘Melbourne theatrical people and picture showmen are still discussing the proposed entry of the J.C. Williamson firm into the film business, but, from all accounts, it may not come to pass. What will probably happen, however, is that on the return of Hugh J. Ward (one of JCW’s directors) The Firm will film a number of its plays and send them on tour in the smalls hitherto not reached by any properly equipped dramatic company.’

In fact, JCW held fire for a further nine months before acting—a slight added incentive coming in December 1914 with the introduction of a Commonwealth Government import duty on all overseas-produced films. The Firm was again goaded, in late January 1915, by Melbourne screenings of The Sign of the Cross with William Farnum. The Wilson Barrett play on which this film was based had been an outstanding popular vehicle for their matinee idol Julius Knight.

Decisive action was essential: while injunctions against further screenings of The Sign of the Crosswere granted, a ‘Notice of Intent to Build’ dated 29 March 1915 was lodged with Melbourne City Council (there was no compulsory submission of plans at this time). A.W. Purnell, acting as architect and builder, was to construct a ‘wood and fibro-cement studio’ with work to commence on that date on land at the south-east corner of Exhibition and Lonsdale Streets, of which The Firm was now the owner. The total estimated cost of the building seems to have been £66/6/6—little more than $5000 in today’s currency.

Scene from Napoleon and the Miller’s Daughterfeaturing C.H. Workman and Dorothy Brunton. This film sequence was screened as part of the musical comedy The Girl on the Film, 1914

 

The idea of using the cleared corner site for a film studio may well have originated late in 1914 when, on 5 December, motion picture inserts for JCW’s stage musical comedy The Girl on the Film were photographed there under the direction of English stage producer Harry B. Burcher. Punch carried a pictorial feature on the Saturday morning shoot of the period film within the play, Napoleon and the Miller’s Daughter, with Charles Workman and Dorothy Brunton in the title roles: ‘Surrounded by an interested crowd, the actors and actresses went through their parts, not under the limelight, but in the broad light of day, while the operator turned the handle …’

The Hawkletconcluded: ‘The JCW Ltd have taken possession of the old Hippodrome site on Exhibition Street, opposite Her Majesty’s Theatre, for the sole purpose of building a studio, etc. for the developing of films of their productions.’ The Bulletinreported: ‘The Firm will film some of the Niblo and Julius Knight shows in its own studio, and a Yankee picture-play producer has been engaged to instruct the companies how to make Get-Rich Quick Wallingford etc. interesting in a silent potted form.’

The studio seems to have been completed within a few weeks and the same paper noted that The Firm had ‘fixed up its cinema studio, Pathé system … It’s a simple affair, just a wooden shed with two sides and the roof of glass.’ The glass roof and walls were an essential feature of studios at this time, as daylight was the primary source of illumination for the interior sets. The harsh sunlight was diffused either by use of frosted glass, or by muslin drapes strung across clear glass to give a soft, even light to the scenes being shot.

The first production from the J.C. Williamson studio was a four-reel (approximately one hour) version of George M. Cohan’s comic play Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford, starring Cohan’s brother-in-law Fred Niblo, who along with his wife, Josephine Cohan, became one of The Firm’s most popular ever importations.

Everything about this first humble Australian effort was rushed, however: W.J. Lincoln’s scenario is said to have been prepared in a few days and, although The Firm had tried to hire an experienced American director, it was probably pressure of time that resulted in Lincoln, then Niblo, being appointed, as the Niblos were booked to sail from Sydney for San Francisco on 5 June.

Clip from Officer 666, starring Fred Niblo

National Film and Sound Archive, Canberra

Most of the filming seems to have been completed in little more than a fortnight. Within a few days of finishing Wallingford the Niblo company were hard at work on their second film: another adaptation of a George M. Cohan play, Officer 666. The film was completed by late May 1915, but as with the Wallingford film, release was delayed for nearly a year.

The studio’s third film, a propaganda feature, Within Our Gates, was the first to be released, premiering at the Victoria Theatre, Melbourne on 19 July 1915. Of the four stage adaptations filmed by JCW it seems likely that Within the Law (their fourth film) was the best, with Muriel Starr in the lead. A second war movie, For Australia followed. Most of the film seems to have been shot in and around Sydney, but post production, including shooting of inserts, titles and film editing, was probably completed in the JCW studio in Melbourne.

The Firm lodged a second ‘Notice of Intent to Build’ with the Melbourne City Council on 29 October 1915. This recorded the proposed erection of an ‘insulated building measuring 50 ft x 100 ft (15.24m x 30.48m) on the JCW studio site for what seems to have been a total estimated cost of £80/9/9 (about $6100 today).

Work was due to start on 1 November and seems to have been completed in about a month. An MMBW Melbourne Water map made after this date shows the plan of an irregularly shaped building of around these dimensions, set about 35 feet (about 10.6m) away from what appears to be a plan of the original JCW Studio Building. It’s probable this second building was intended for film storage, laboratory, cutting room or administrative purposes rather than as additional studio space.

Clip from Seven Keys to Baldpate, starring Fred Maguire and Dorothy Brunton

National Film and Sound Archive, Canberra

The fourth and final JCW stage adaptation to be filmed was a four-reel version of Seven Keys to Baldpate, directed by Monte Luke. The script was adapted from another George M. Cohan play that had been a popular stage vehicle for Fred Niblo. English actor Fred Maguire performed Niblo’s role in the film supported by Australian stage favourite Dorothy Brunton. Seven Keys to Baldpateseems never to have had a city screening in Sydney or Melbourne, but was first shown at the Hub Theatre, in suburban Newtown, Sydney, on 24 May 1916 and seems to have been ignored by reviewers.

JCW feature production activities were halted after completion of this film, and late in January 1916 The Firm sent Monte Luke to the USA to study film production techniques, but ‘after witnessing work on D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance, he returned, overwhelmed, to recommend that Williamson should abandon production and leave it to the Hollywood experts’.

Although J.C. Williamson’s feature production activities were halted after the completion of Seven Keys to Baldpate, the JCW studio on the Exhibition/Lonsdale Street corner was not immediately left idle.

Early in February 1916, W.J. Lincoln, now released from his Williamson contract, returned to production with an independently financed project, Nurse Cavell, inspired by the real life story of the heroic World War I English nurse executed by the Germans in October 1915. No doubt Lincoln was also inspired by the box office success of a recent NSW production on the subject, The Martyrdom of Nurse Cavell.

Scene from W.J. Lincoln’s 1916 film Nurse Cavell

National Film and Sound Archive, Canberra

Lincoln’s Nurse Cavell seems to have been shot largely at the JCW studio in just four days, from 16 to 19 February. It premiered at the Palais Pictures, St. Kilda, on 21 February 1916.

Less than a fortnight after the release of Nurse Cavell, Lincoln was preparing a second film of the same subject, La Revanche (The Revenge).

Production of La Revanche seems to have taken only a little longer than its predecessor and within a fortnight the film was ready for preview. The Winneropined: ‘In the manner and mounting and dressing, everything is on a more elaborate scale than has hitherto been the case with locally produced screen subjects, and some striking effects have been achieved. A notable feature of the film is the bright, crisp photography for which, it is said, natural light was used throughout.’

In spite of this goodwill, La Revanche failed to draw; it was pulled from the Britannia Theatre, Melbourne, just three days after its 10 April 1916 opening.

The public may have felt the novelty of the Cavell story wearing thin after three films in as many months and may also have found the French title off-putting. Lincoln was nothing if not resilient; The Winner of 7 June 1916 reported him ‘busy just now looking for types, locations for exteriors, and a lot of other things for his forthcoming film based on the life of Adam Lindsay Gordon’.

After six years of hopeful activity, Melbourne’s motion picture production business had also ground to a halt. A Bulletin item noted: ‘Of three movie studios erected in Melbourne, one is now used as a laundry, another as a store and the third is full of cobwebs.’ The cobwebs seem to have remained undisturbed at the JCW studio until 1918 when the Australian Red Cross decided to add film production to its other fund raising activities.

A driving force behind the Melbourne production was Captain N.C.P. Conant, the young aid-de-camp to the Governor of Victoria. He devised a scenario set in England entitled His Only Chance, about the spoiled son of a wealthy family who is saved from a life of dissolution when he enlists in the army.

His Only Chancewas the last chance for the JCW studio; with no further film production planned by The Firm and no apparent interest from independent producers the old studio building was converted into a scenery dock for Her Majesty’s Theatre—the original purpose J.C. Williamson had originally intended for the site back in 1908.

Exterior of the Comedy Theatre during the run of Rookery Nook, 1928

Australian Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne

Auditorium, 1928

Australian Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne

Dress circle foyer, 1928

Australian Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne

Fresh plans for a smaller theatre to house repertory plays were then drawn up by Albion H. Walkely and C.N. Hollinshed and imminent construction was announced in April 1927.

The Comedy Theatre, as it was now to be called, was a five storey building whose upper floors became the administrative headquarters of Williamson’s entire Australasian organisation. The exterior was modelled on a Florentine palace and the theatre itself comprised the wide rather than deep auditorium with two levels of seating in stalls, dress circle and boxes to a capacity of 1050. There was much use of marble and artificial Italian stone in the foyer, and the decorations included two large, Spanish style chandeliers and an intricately painted wood beamed ceiling in the auditorium. There was also what was claimed as the first thermostat regulated heating and ventilating system in any Australian theatre, according to The Argus of 27 April 1928. The prevailing colours were green, gold and walnut but the original ‘unlucky’ green front curtain was held responsible for the deaths of several theatre personnel soon after.

Cover of the 1928 souvenir of the opening of the Comedy Theatre. The full booklet may be viewed via the State Library Victoria, Melbourne website.

 

Margaret Bannerman’s company opened the Comedy Theatre on 28 April 1928 with Our Betters by W. Somerset Maugham. Drawing by Errol Castileri.

National Library of Australia, Canberra

Set for Our Betters, 1928

Theatre Heritage Australia

Costing over £100 000, the still incomplete Comedy opened on 28 April 1928 with Canadian born Margaret Bannerman in W. Somerset Maugham’s society drama, Our Betters. The Bannerman season, which was only moderately well received, was followed on 16 June by the Ben Travers farce, Rookery Nook, with Hastings Lynn (brother of the play’s original London star, Ralph Lynn) and Basil Radford.

To be continued

A Radical New Idea

Although copyright for published books dates back to the British Copyright Act of 1770,¹ it only applied to items the technology of the time could copy in large numbers, principally the printing press. By the nineteenth century it was woefully out of date, particularly in relation to theatrical performances, which were based on an often unpublished script used to create a transient public event, not an object for private reading.

In the early nineteenth century, copyrighting play performances was a new idea. The tentative groundwork was established by the Dramatic Copyright Act(1833) of the British Parliament, supplemented by some provisions of its later Literary Copyright Act(1842) which applied to plays.² Two distinct rights could be granted: copyright (to prevent unauthorised copies of a published work being made) and performing right (to prevent the unauthorised presentation of a story in acted form on the public stage). Only published books could be granted copyright protection, and similarly for a play the performing right began at the first public performance.

Act 1 script for Struck Oil, 1874

Australian Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne

Script for The Wool King by Wilton Welch, 1911

National Archives of Australia, Canberra

Judges, puzzling over this radical new idea, struggled with and were slow to allow anything more than the absolute minimum rights unambiguously conferred by the legislation, while many stage entrepreneurs simply ignored or actively resisted it. They regarding staging plays as their unencumbered right and were reluctant to pay royalties to the playwright—and particularly to pay a licence fee to a rival manager who claimed to have bought the ‘rights’ to a play and was now trying to prevent them from also performing it.

There were also practical difficulties for those trying to enforce the new laws, particularly in the provinces and distant colonies of the British Empire and in the US states west of the Ohio. Who knew what the travelling troupes were presenting? Enforcing performing rights outside the major cities only became possible as the means of communication improved.

From 1869 onwards the five mainland Australian colonies passed their own copyright acts based on the British laws, which were in turn replaced by a Commonwealth Copyright Actof 1905 (in force from 1 January 1907), but the 1833 Act remained the basis of legislation until the 1911 British Copyright Act,the adoption of which in Australia on 1 July 1912 marked the beginning of a fundamentally new approach to copyright law and is therefore the logical cut-off point for this account.³

Even after the first laws to prevent dramatic piracy were passed in Britain and its colonies, Australian playwrights (or managers who had purchased the script from them) found it difficult to protect their work or their investment. If registered in the colony where it was first performed, the play was protected only in that colony, whereas a script registered at Stationers’ Hall in London was protected throughout the Empire.

The situation in the USA was even more difficult, since the US refused for a full century to agree to the 1886 Berne Convention which almost all the other nations in the western world signed and which meant that copyright in one country applied world-wide.⁴ In the USA, till 1986, unless the copyright owner was a permanent resident in the US, they could not secure copyright in that country even if they were performing their own play there. Some tried, nevertheless. The Queensland politician and prolific playwright Randolph Bedford did manage to register no fewer than nine of his plays with the Library of Congress in the years 1910-1930, though it is unclear how. He would have needed to have it performed there and then got a US citizen to register it. Neither seems to have happened. Like many copyright claims in this period, his was probably just bluff.⁵

Dramatists in Australia before 1912 mostly sold their scripts outright to theatrical producers who in turn, instead of relying on copyright protection, attempted to restrict what they regarded as piracy by more direct means. A popular unpublished play usually existed only as a single manuscript prompt script which was guarded like a prized jewel. If it was stolen or destroyed—and in the Victorian era theatres often burned down—then the work itself was lost.

As had happened since at least Shakespeare’s time, actors were only given ‘sides’—part scripts containing only their own lines and the relevant cues; and often had to return them to the actor-manager at the end of the season. This was customary practice in any case in a period when copies had to be laboriously transcribed by hand, but it also restricted the opportunities for piracy.

In England stage censorship required that a complete copy of a work had to be submitted to the Lord Chamberlain’s Office for approval before being performed. When copyright laws were passed in the Australasian colonies (and similarly in the USA), it was intended that this too would involve the submission of complete copies of all works for which copyright registration was sought. With publishedworks (in the literal sense of the term which still survives in modem copyright legislation; i.e. those printed and distributed in multiple copies as books, including printed plays, etc) this was indeed the case, and those copies submitted now form a major part of the collections of Australiana in the state and national libraries. With the performanceof unpublished dramas in manuscript it proved impracticable to demand that a complete copy be deposited—at least until carbon paper and then typewriters came to be widely used.

Obtaining copyright protection for a play in Australia in the nineteenth century was also not the automatic consequence of having written it that it is today. Dramatists were expected to register their work at an appropriate Copyright Office, attached to the Trademarks and Patents Office in each colony. In the earliest years, a copy was submitted to the officer in charge, who read it to see if it contained scurrilous, obscene, defamatory or anti-government material.⁶

If approved, the manuscript was stamped and (if it was the only copy) returned to the author or theatre manager who had submitted it. Later, these attempts at censoring plays were abandoned. Instead, legislation granting licences to theatre owners include clauses that gave powers to governments to close their premises if offensive material had been performed. Instead of being tied to censorship powers, copyright registration became a powerful weapon (though, as we shall see, until 1912 an imperfect one) which authors and managers could use to guarantee their intellectual property and the way it was used.

The Registration Books in which the copyright officer wrote the details of authorship, title, date and place of first performance, and, if relevant, the assignment of rights to a theatrical manager, have survived for each mainland state (Tasmania had no relevant legislation). Together with the Registers of the later Commonwealth Copyright Office, they offer a basic guide to Australian theatre between 1870 and 1969. In addition the Registers of Stationers’ Hall in London (now held in the Public Record Office at Kew) contain entries relating to the performance of Australian plays between 1877 and 1907; however it is not clear whether a play performed only in Australia could be granted a performing right in Great Britain. Some Australian dramatists did apply to Stationers’ Hall; unfortunately, the whereabouts of the actual scripts sent to London for registration is, according to the Stationers’ Hall’s archivist Robin Myers, ‘something of a mystery’.⁷

For the United States the published two-volume index Dramatic Compositions Copyrighted in the United States 1870-1916gives information about the attempted registration of plays in that country by many authors associated with Australia, including W.M. Akhurst, Randolph Bedford, Kyrle Bellew, George Fawcett Rowe, E. Lewis Scott, Toso Taylor, Inigo Tyrell, and J.C. Williamson. It also indicates that scripts of Scott’s The Silence of Dean Maitland (performed in 1894 in Adelaide, registered in 1900 in the USA) and Bedford’s White Australia (1909 Melbourne, 1910 USA) were at one time held in the Library of Congress. I obtained a photocopy of, and later published, Bedford’s offensively racist but influential play, presented by William Anderson’s company in 1909 and witnessed in Melbourne by many fellow legislators and other leaders of Australian society.⁸

V&A, London

Loopholes, bullying and bluff

Nineteenth-century courts in Britain, the United States and Australia were unwilling to allow authors any rights over their work beyond those unequivocally prescribed by statute. In one famous example, Stowe v Thomas(1853), a Circuit Court in the United States held that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s copyright in Uncle Tom’s Cabin had not been violated by an unauthorised German translation, even though Stowe had previously caused her novel to be translated into German and had secured copyright for her authorised translation.⁹ Strange as such a decision seems now, the reasoning of Mr Justice Grier shows the fear of the courts that extending authors’ rights would severely inhibit the dissemination and influence of literary and dramatic narratives, characters and ideas throughout society:

By the publication of her book, the creations of the genius and imagination of the author have become as much public property as those of Homer or Cervantes. Uncle Tom and Topsy are as much publici jurisas Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. All her conceptions and inventions may be used and abused by imitators, playwrights, and poetasters. They are no longer her own: those who have purchased her book may clothe them in English doggerel, in German or Chinese prose.

The learned judge clearly didn’t care that Cervantes was long dead, but that Mrs Stowe was alive and trying to make money to support her seven children.

The major gap in the 1833 British Dramatic Copyright Act was its silence on such questions of translation and adaptation, and in particular on the common practice of making unauthorised stageadaptations of literarynarratives, which the English courts decided did not constitute piracy. This anomaly was a source of much frustration throughout the nineteenth century to novelists in particular, who were obliged to write play versions of their own works, and have them performed in public, if they wished to obtain the performing right for their stories.

The belief that this gave authors some control over dramatic piracy came from Reade v Conquest (1861).¹⁰ In 1853 Charles Reade had written a play Gold! which dealt with the Australian goldrushes, and which was performed and also published as a book. Three years later Reade reproduced parts of this play in his novel It’s Never Too Late to Mend,which was in turn dramatised by the popular playwright George Conquest and staged by Conquest’s brother with great commercial success at London’s Grecian Theatre. Reade was able to sue successfully for breach of performing right not because Conquest had dramatised his novel, but because Conquest’s play was held to have a ‘substantial identity’ with Reade’s original play Gold! ¹¹ Novelists therefore assumed that they could protect their works by either dramatising their own narratives or employing a trusted playwright to make an authorised stage version.

From this belief—and from the fact that in any case it was necessary to perform a play in public before performing right could be granted—came the practice of giving a ‘copyright performance’. This involved hiring actors to give a public reading of a new play, sometimes in costume, so that performing right could be claimed before piracy could occur. The practice of giving such readings – both for dramatisations of stories and for original plays—was common in Australia until the 1912 legislation came into effect; special playbills sometimes being printed to give colourable substance to these ‘performances.¹²

George Coppin, 1881, photo by Waddington, Melbourne

State Library Victoria, Melbourne

Dion Boucicault, 1870s, photo by Bradley & Rulofson, San Francisco

State Library Victoria, Melbourne

Several of the cases reported in Australian courts confirm the lack of faith which playwrights and managers had in the power of the copyright legislation. While in London in 1865, the actor and entertainment entrepreneur George Coppin thought he had secured an agreement with Dion Boucicault—by then and for some years afterwards the most successful popular playwright of them all in Britain, the USA and Australia—for the exclusive right to perform in Australia Boucicault’s latest success, Arrah-na-Pogue.

Back in Melbourne early in 1866, Coppin was angered to learn that the rival actor-manager Barry Sullivan was already staging it in Sydney. Coppin took him to the NSW Supreme Court. Sullivan said that he had evidence that Boucicault had also authorised his production but couldn’t prove this, so an injunction was granted in Coppin’s favour.¹³ (He widely publicised this and, until I pointed out the error, even his official Australian Dictionary of Biography entry believed him.) However, only two weeks later, Sullivan tendered written evidence to the court that Boucicault had in fact granted him permission to stage the play in Australia. Coppin’s injunction was set aside, and Sullivan’s staging went ahead to much greater acclaim than Coppin’s.¹⁴

Soon after, Coppin tried again in a different colony, South Australia.¹⁵ In this case an Adelaide manager, Abraham Solomon, did ask Coppin’s permission, but the latter’s proposed terms—fifty percent of the gross takings over and above the first one hundred pounds a week—were not acceptable to Solomon, who went ahead with an unauthorised performance. In the South Australian Supreme Court Gwynne J. rejected Coppin’s application for an injunction to prevent Solomon from presenting Boucicault’s play.

The problem was that, the year before Coppin’s presumed purchase of the Australian performing rights to Boucicault’s play, in London the case of Jeffries v Boosey(1854) had been decided. The judge, Lord St. Leonard, stated that copyright could be sold outright but notdivided up amongst different purchasers in different parts of the British Empire.¹⁶ Thus rights could be assigned(that is, sold in their entirety), but a manager who had simply obtained a licenceto give performances in particular English counties or overseas colonies could not sue other managements for breaches of copyright. Boucicault himself could have sued Solomon successfully, but Coppin could not. This case was cited and followed by court in colonial Australia from that time onwards.

Probably this difficulty was a relatively minor one in Great Britain where a manager who had obtained a licence to perform an author’s play could quickly communicate with the author or the assigned copyright holder, and where licence agreements presumably contained clauses which obliged the copyright holder to protect the exclusive rights of a licensee. However, it was a major obstacle in the distant colonies of Australasia, where a pirate might well conclude a long and successful season before the author even knew of the breach of performing right, and where in any case legal proceedings by the author would have been greatly hampered by the tyranny of distance.

Jeffries v Boosey didn’t stop George Coppin. An occasional playwright himself, he established the Dramatic Author’s Association and, according to his Australian Dictionary of Biographyentry, claimed to have ‘acquired the nucleus of what later amounted to the performing rights covering some eight thousand works’.¹⁷ He publicised his first legal victory and not the ones he lost and pursued other managements relentlessly. They, often less financially secure than he was and, in any case, wanting to avoid the expense of litigation which would probably cost more than the licence fee, generally capitulated. But there was no legal basis for Coppin’s bullying for the next 41 years.

Maggie Moore and J.C. Williamson in Struck Oil, from The Australasian Sketcher, 5 September 1874

State Library Victoria, Melbourne

Alice Lingard as Josephine in one of the many ‘pirate’ versions of HMS Pinafore, 1879/1880. Photo by Clifford & Morris, Dunedin.

State Library of NSW, Sydney

J.C. Williamson’s bluff

The next actor-manager to succeed Coppin and used the same bluff and bully tactics was J.C. Williamson. Williamson and his then wife, Maggie Moore, were Americans who had toured Australia in 1874-75 with a hugely successful play written in part by Williamson himself, Struck Oil.(A beautiful manuscript of this is held in the Victorian colonial copyright collection.) They subsequently played it in England and America, and early in 1879 made plans to again visit the Australian colonies.

Wanting to move from being an actor to a theatrical entrepreneur, Williamson came to an agreement with Gilbert and Sullivan which he thought granted him an exclusive right to perform in Australia and New Zealand their extremely successful new comic opera HMS Pinafore. This licence, which cost Williamson the large sum of three hundred English pounds for only one year’s rights, also specifically empowered Williamson to sue, ‘in the name of the authors, for all damages and penalties incurred by others not licensed to represent the said piece’.¹⁸

While playing in San Francisco in June, Williamson heard to his alarm that ‘Pinaforemania’ had already reached Australia. Kelly and Leon’s company were performing it in Sydney and there were two simultaneous productions in Melbourne: one by the Lingards at the Academy of Music and the other by the Stewarts at St. George’s Hall. Williamson instructed his Australian attorney to register HMS Pinafore in the colonies and, arriving in Sydney on the Zealandiaon 3 August, he immediately commenced legal proceedings against all three companies. The Stewarts’ season had already ended; their management later came to a ‘satisfactory arrangement’ with Williamson.¹⁹ The Lingards, still performing in Melbourne while Williamson was litigating Kelly and Leon in Sydney, ignored his suit. After fifty-six performances to capacity houses, they closed their production just before Williamson arrived in Melbourne and shortly afterwards went to New Zealand. Williamson’s lawsuits pursued them, but no evidence has been sighted to suggest that he was successful in suppressing unauthorised performances ofHMS Pinafore by the Lingards or any other company in any colony other than New South Wales.²⁰

However, in Sydney on 9 August 1879 in Williamson v Kelly, Williamson succeeded in getting an injunction to restrain the Kelly and Leon Minstrels from performing HMS Pinafore. As this was the first action he had commenced, it must have given considerable concern to his adversaries and confirmed their desire not to indulge in expensive and possibly unsuccessful litigation. An ‘unusually large attendance of the public’ was present on the Saturday morning of the case, and reports of the hearing were widely and prominently reported in the Sydney and Melbourne press.²¹

However, the reports suggest that the matter was decided on the facts, but despite the law:

It was the defendants’ fault, for they let the case be heard on plaintiff’s affidavits only. He had facts on one side only, but arguments on both sides.... His Honour... said he had some difficulty in granting the injunction in the face of Jeffries v Boosey.He thought there was sufficient ground to grant the injunction especially as plaintiff had gone to great expense in preparing for the piece.

The matter was complicated by the fact that the judge, Sir William Manning, was an acting judge and his duties were to cease at the end of the same Saturday’s session. He decided therefore to grant only an interim injunction, effective from the following Monday, until the matter could be heard by the Full Court of the Supreme Court. However, Kelly and Leon decided to save themselves further legal expense by withdrawing their production after that Saturday evening’s performance. (They had already played a full season of HMS Pinafore and had completed several weeks of a return season.)

Williamson’s aggressive willingness to litigate his presumed ‘rights’ appears to have successfully bluffed the pirates into a strategic retreat, but the matter was not mentioned in the law reports for that year and was not cited as authority in subsequent cases. The incident shows something of the gap between industry myths about copyright law and established case precedent. Many theatre professionals chose to believe that this case had validated copyright licence agreements in the Australian colonies, a belief which Williamson himself did much to promulgate,²² as Coppin had done with his single success thirty years earlier. Judicially it did not alter the law in any way and almost certainly a permanent injunction would have been refused if the matter had ever gone to the Full Court.

To be continued

Author’s Note

The first version of this article, entitled ‘Dramatic Copyright in Australia to 1912’ and written jointly with lawyer Roslyn Atkinson who located the surviving cases and checked the draft for legal accuracy and correct citations, originally appeared in Australasian Drama Studies 11 (1987): 47-63. Full citations appear there, plus a guide to some scripts registered in the Victoran colonial Copyright Office. Since then, I have found more relevant evidence, which has been incorporated in this new version. See also Richard Fotheringham, ‘Copyright Sources for Australian Plays and Films’, Archives and Manuscripts 14.2 (1986): 144-53.

Endnotes

1. ‘The printing press and the Statue of Anne‘, Australian Libraries and Archives Copyright Coalition, alacc.org.au, accessed 17 December 2025.

2. For an explanation of copyright as it applied to dramatic works in England in this period, see ‘Copyrighting a Dramatic Work ‘, Phyllis Hartnoll, ed., The Oxford Companion to the Theatre(London: Oxford UP, 1951), pp. 149-154.

3. See Merilyn Minell, A Nation’s Imagination: Australia’s Copyright Records, 1854-1968. National Archives Research Guide No 18 (Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, 2003).

4. See ‘Berne Convention’, Intellectualpropertyoffice.org, accessed 17 Deecmber 2025.

5. Dramatic Compositions Copyrighted in the United States 1870-1916, 2 vols (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1918).

6. For an example of an attempt to use copyright laws as a form of political censorship, see Veronica Kelly, ‘The Banning of Marcus Clarke’s The Happy Land:Stage, Press and Parliament ‘, Australasian Drama Studies,2.1 (l983), pp.78-80.

7. Robin Meyers, letter to the author, 14 October 1986.

8. Playlab Press (Brisbane), 2014.

9. 2 Wall. Jr. 547; 2 Am. Law Reg. 210.

10. 9 C.B. (N.S.) 755 [142 E.R. 297]; (1862) 11 C.B. (N.S.) 479 [142 E.R. 883].

11. ibid.

12. See e.g. the playbill printed for the copyright performance on 31 July 1911 for Wilton Welch, The Wool King,CRS A1336/1 item 2026, National Archives of Australia (ACT).

13. Sydney Morning Herald, 9 March 1866.

14. Sydney Morning Herald, 21 March 1866.

15. Coppin v Solomon(1868) 2 S.A.L.R. 83.

16. 4 H.L.C. 815; [10 E.R. 681].

17. Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 3, 1969.

18. Sydney Evening News,9 August 1879, reprinted in the Argus (Melbourne), 12 August 1879, p.6.

19. Argus,19 August 1879, p.5.

20. Coppin v Solomon(1868) 2 S.A.L.R. 83.

21. Sydney Evening News,9 August 1879. See, in addition to the Sydney Evening News and Argusaccounts, Sydney Morning Herald, 1 August 1879, p.6.

22. Garnet Walch, The Williamsons, Being A Brief Account of the Careers of Mr and Mrs J C. Williamson. Together with Facts and Figures Relating to the Firm of Williamson, Garner, and Musgrove(Melbourne: William Marshall, 1885), p.22. I am grateful to Professor Veronica Kelly for drawing my attention to this obscure source.

American actor, vocalist & manager. Né James Cassius Williamson. Born 26 July 1844, Mercer, Pennsylvania, USA. Married (1) Maggie Moore (actress), (2) Mary Weir (dancer). Died 8 July 1913, Paris, France.

On stage in USA, Australia and England from1860s. Arrived Australia in 1874 under engagement to George Coppin. Went to found Australia’s most important theatrical companies, J.C. Williamson Ltd.

Riley/Hailes Scrapbook, pages 62, 93, 286.