Mystery tune solved

Just before I was about to launch a you tube plea to find a unidentified song I found it viz usage of 'tunatic' an application for identifying music. It had not worked in the past because my speakers were not loud enough.

The tune was by a Swedish group (I guessed the language aright! Legend, I!) called "Raymond and Maria" and the song was " Ingen vill veta var du köpt din tröja" which translates as "Nobody wants to know where you bought your sweater." Don't ask but it's a poppy little tine, for which I am a sucker.

'orace cops a floggin'

Poor Horace Poussard slammed right into a Frenchman with a critical ear, familiar with Parisian taste in 1864, in Colombo. It seems that Frenchman, Fr. Devay (see last post)...well I'll let him tell it:

"Msr. T... and I let ourselves be tempted (by the ads Smythe had placed). I was in full dress having pressed and starched myself for this Musical Fete in full funeral costume as one wears to weddings and burials in all the civilized parts of the world. There were few people there despite the charlatanism and promises of the advertisements. A dozen women or more of whom one was black; some officers of the garrison and half-blood creoles. The celebrated Msr. Poussard is a man of 28 or 30 years. he's a clever instrumentalist and he, with great taste, makes his violin sing...when he wants to. But, for a long while now, he has lived and run about in the English Colonies. Dutch Colonies and other overseas territories. He has so bent and lowered his talent to the demands of average listeners that he plays difficult music in a burlesque manner; he made his violin cry, whistle, howl, croak, caw and bray. He made it sound like a tambourine, a jews-harp, an oboe, a guitar and bagpipes all to the frenetic applause and repeated encores from a rowdy mob with unsophisticated ears therein assembled. When Msr. Poussard returns to Europe he will have to deal with more refined listeners. He will have to abandon all this prestidigitation, these musical monkey tricks, this jumping about and somersaults for a more emotive and passionate execution which can move and enflame for music goes from the ear to the soul. Msr. Poussard proved this evening that he has in him the stuff of a real musician by playing with great purity and feeling, La Resignation by De Bériot and some scottish airs."

Again, Ouch!

Frederick Thomas Smith

Smythe had a brother. A Professor of Music, temperance lecturer and Hotel Proprietor of the West Central Hotel, London. It was in family hands at least until World War 2, and it survived the blitz. He had married in 1863 to neighbour and Temperance/Church singer Emma Barnett.

Frederic Thomas Smith was born January 4th 1841 in Lambeth and died in 1919 in Hendon, leaving the Hotel to his sons, of whom Frank Barnett Smith died in 1926. He had eight children from whom there must be a descendant or two. Surely. The Temperance papers mentioned him in 1919 I am sure as he was well known and high up on the ladder of the don't tipple legion. What papers these are and where they are to be found is a mystery to me although Lambeth Palace (or is it the Kensington one?) has the records of some of the Temperance movements like the Band of Hope (of which Frederic was a secretary), although still extant and doing marvelous work, know nothing of their ancient history (which is understandable given they deal with suicides, drugs and such on a daily basis) nor could point me to any eccentric single-subject researcher who might have fondly pestered them and bored them to death at functions.

I need a paid professional walking, talking, microchipped, half-mad, English researcher with a packed lunch and eccentric manner to ferret about in the papyrus of London. So, I must await the pink sparrows liberation from their birdcage until I can afford such engagements. Should the pink sparrows die in their cage I am done for...perhaps.

Smythe, Book Hunter of the Antipodes

Another anecdote abut Smythe from the myesterious J.L.F. of the Hobart Mercury. This time from the 29^th of July 1902

A few days ago, I got a letter from my old friend-and the public's old friend Mr. R. S. Smythe "the much-travelled, and, it may be added, "the much-read" in which be refers to the recent death, in Hobart, of the venerable bookmonger, William Legrand.

"What," says Mr. Smythe, "could possibly induce a Frenchman in those times to try his fortune in Van Dieman’s Land? But, I suppose there was a romance about going to the Antipodes, for a good many did go out, among them William Elliston, second son of the great actor. I met Legrand, and bought of him a charming book by Souvestre, ‘The Pleasures of Old Age.’ It bears the stamp of the Port Arthur Library. Of course I shall not care to read it for many years to come: it would not interest me."

Why Mr. Smythe should have any disinclination to know something beforehand of old age, and how he may make it pleasant is not easy to see. Most of us who have read "De Senectute" at school have looked forward brightly to our reaching 45! But Mr. Smythe's fishing up Souvestre's book in Legrand's old shop has reminded me of the romance of book-buying in that dingy, mysterious-looking store in Collins Street, which always seemed to be out of place in a comparatively new city. It looked like an accessible Hades, where the spirits of authors, Long dead and gone, congregated and talked about men and things, and received congenial visitors.

Amelia Bailey-Part Six

Amelia arrived in Shanghai, with her manager Smythe, Mr. Simmons and James Chisholm on the 15 th of July 1863. They booked into a Hotel and gave a series of concerts over five days but the place was under the the black cloud of Cholera; Boulanger, who had come to China to make some money for his Sydney based wife and child had died the day before they arrived at the Hotel Astor (now the Russian Embassy) and Robbio, fearing death by the disease had fled to Nagasaki as many foreign wives and families had done. They had committed to a small series of concerts which on at least one occasion was followed by a late night hotel party of rowdy and celebrated a nature. Shanghai had few single western women and had never see a professional singer as young or as pretty and in one night Amelia, as the star attraction made 1500 pounds and dozens of gifts. The party took the next available boat to Shanghai on the 20th which would prove to be equally dangerous, for what was supposed to have been a four day voyage turned into a twelve day one when the ship, the “Dolphin” was swept up in the edge of a Tornado and tossed around off course. rations were imposed and several times the ship looked like it was going to go under. They eventually put into safe harbour in the arms of an island of the coast of Korea before limping into Nagasaki.

Upon arrival in Nagasaki Bay it was noted by Chisholm that one of the two women on board the ship asked the Captain to bring a Japanese fisherman a little closer. The poor devil, dressed only in a loin cloth and probably not the handsomest of gentleman of his race, was looked at and disappointedly requested by proxy of the Captain to go back about his business. Such was Amelia’s first introduction to the Japanese.

Smythe claimed that the Amelia at that dangerous time was the only English woman in the city. The decision to open the country to trade had led to factional division between clans and within government. The day before the Bailey Company had arrived in China, a fleet under Admiral Kuper had sailed to Kagoshima to exact punitive bombardment on the Satsuma clans financial base, for their failure to hand over the assassins of a diplomat named Charles Richardson and his party. They did give Nagasaki a concert or two, even attending (and singing for their supper) at the bungalow of Thoams Blake Glover, the Scotsman who was in the following years earn himslef the respect of the Japanese as a nation. At his newly built bungalow he was also hosting Commander Skyryploff of the Bogatyr, so Amelia got to see her Russian Sailors once more.

Kupers fleet had been buffeted about during the battle of Kagoshima by the same typhoon that knocked about Amelia’s “dolphin” and when Kuper returneed to Yokohama, there arrived soon after, Miss Bailey, Mr Chisholm and Mr. Smythe and a certain Mr. Rudolofo Sipp, a temperamental pianist with a fondness for the bottle that guaranteed his name would slip from the feast table of history onto the floor to be swept up in the academic dustpan. Simmons, the magician had had an argument with Smythe over Amelia, although we don’t know the cause. Was it this that forced Smythe to marry Amelia in Nagasaki? Or did they marry in Shanghai under threat of Cholera? Or did they as I suspect, not marry at all? Either way, Simmons was a liability, having a limited repertoire and refusing to pact it over the course of a week or so. The effect of which was that each concert with the same audience attending over three days would receive different music and songs from Sipp, Chisholm and Amelia, but be subjected the same tricks seen the night before. Some punters were not happy.

After Yokohama, they sailed back to Nagasaki and on to China again, where Amelia teamed up with Martin Simonsen a danish born violinist of great skill and his wife Fanny. Sipp had gone onto America from Yokohama where Chisholm too had chosen to stay before his eventual departure for America a little under a year later. Once she left Shanghai where-in we know she gave three seasons of a week each in between the Northern Chinese cities that had European occupants, she sailed with Robert to Manilla, then to Shanghai where she did very well although resources have yet to be found and examined. Two thing during this period are certain, she wrote a letter to Poussard in Melbourne c/o the Argus extending an invitation to he and Douay to tour India, and she was pregnant, or had just had her eldest child, Bryan Bailey Smythe, who by the time she had left India was dead. Poussard replied and accepted, although the idea was most certainly Smythe’s, but Douay had suffered a sever nervous breakdown and Poussard arranged to meet Amelia and Robert in Ceylon in August of 1864, with Florence Calzado a comic singer of average ability, who arrived in Melbourne from England we-know-not-when and had entered into a ‘marriage’ with Horace serious enough to produce a child, who survived and ended up in France many years later. Florence had some skill, and had advertisied herself upon arrival sans agent, as Florence Beverley, contralto, then under the management of a Kate Howard, as Floraette Blanche Beverley. While with Poussard she used the name Calzado. I am assuming it was a confection of Poussards, having chosen the name after Torrio Calzado, the Havana born Opera Impressario that managed the Italian Opera in London sometime in the 1850’s. It might even bee that she was a real ‘Calzado’ being Torribo’s daughter. That would certainly explain her career bravely touted on little skill and so far away as Australia.

We can pick up Amelia’s trail again in Ceylon, where she started her great Indian tour of 1864-1867.

Cyril de Valemency

I do rather hold a small mental grudge that hangs on the entry wall of my brain in a nice gilded frame, rather too big for it's content, regarding authors who mention a person in a biography and give no indication of who they are, what they do, did or failed to have done, wherein lay their span of years or worst of all, fail to supply even a whiff of a notion of why they should be mentioned at all. It is a thing of which (in my book) I don not want to be guilty. Some authors, I understand are writing for a captive audience, but neglect to reason out the fact that readers read for reasons various and that a neat corralling for the purposes of demography is asinine. 'Always write for a reader a thousand years hence' (my apologies to the man who penned 'Samarkand')

Cyril de Valmency, the rubrique of this emblogation is once such neglected personage. He was a painist whom I first encountered performing in the 1880s in Brisbane with Horace Poussard the french violinist about whom much is known. I tried in vain to find the merest jot regarding Valmency and did manage to contact a descendant and historian of a famous piano teacher named Richard de Valmency from whom the Cyril surely must have been related. He had never heard of him. Indeed, outside the Brisbane papers and a little wafer of gossip in Sydney's Tabletalk I had never heard about him again.

But this week, my knowledge regarding him exploded, beyond knowing he had red-hair and played Chopin quite well. I chanced upon an article in New Zealand that mentioned him to be Ralph Hood, a veteran of concert going in the land of the long white cloud ever since he had arrived there 'for his health' after a heavy course of piano learning under the German system. He was a Dartmouth born man of the year 1864 and so was Devonshire born and bred and his full name was Ralph Stewart Thomas Mitchell Hood, son of Army Surgeon and amateur archaelogue, Cpt. Stewart Thomas Mitchell Hood (brother to the Factor, which is Scot's for Land Steward, of the then Lord Airlie, to whom Ralph was a distant relation via a great grandmother). Ralphie boy was sent to Germany to further his piano talent and was very likely at some stage a student of Richard de Valmency (or relations thereof) in London or Paris.

Le voilà! He came to Australia as Ralph Hood, briefly emblazoned himself with the name Cyril de Valmency and went to England in that odd period between Victorian and Edwardian, Chopin-ing himself all over under the name Ralph Stuart. After that he disappears but that is enough. The papers in NZ further note that at each change of name he changed his appearance, being brunette, blonde and russet at various stages of his career.

Ralph my boy, here at least, and in my book, you will be given some modicum of noteworthiness for at least having devoted yourself to the sowing of Chopin.

Amelia Bailey-Part Five

Oatlands, is a town north of Hobart overland to Launceston where the company was persuaded to give a concert in the only available venue; the court house. By the time tickets had been exchanged for use of the facilities, the finding of chairs, provision for lights and the borrowing and carriage of the nearest piano to the court house, the ‘house’ was full, the company performed and no-one made any money. They left to perform in Launceston where Aitken stayed, having found Scot’s men and women much to her liking, and Chisholm and Bailey gave Moonlight concerts in the gardens there. Amelia was now in billing, part of the Chilsholm-Bailey troupe; her first as a principal in a touring concert company which, after having sailed back to Melbourne toured the provinces a little before Smythe suggested a larger project for 1863.

Early in 1863 a magician arrived in Melbouren with a small repertoire and the desire to make a career of himself. His name was John Simmonds, who billed himself as “Washington Frikell.” he was performing at the Mechanics Insititute, having been hired by Louis Laurens Smith, son of the great London entrepreneur Edward Tyrell Smith, in turn the offspring of a famous Royal Navy Admiral. Dr. L.L.Smith had also hired Geraldine Warden, a scot’s singer of some talent and fellow student of Amelia’s under Elsasser.

Simmons could never quite mange his time nor was he familiar with the necessities of getting people to pay money, so Smythe entered the picture, acting as manager and hiring Amelia as the vocal/pretty portion of the evening. Together they toured the countryside and goldfields, Marquis Chisholm having left to go solo in Sydney and surrounds.

In May of that same year the Russian corvette ‘Bogatyr” was in Melbourne on a visit (actually it’s real prupose was a ‘we bad, we big” tour, letting the British and assocaied countries know that they had muscled up after their defeat in Crimea) and the town was excited to see the white dressed Russian sailors in Town, the ladies especially. Amelia as it happened gave a private concert onboard the Bogatyr under the patronage of Admiral Popoff and crew.

In April, she gave a concert with Charles Horsely and Marquis Chisholm at Hocklin’s Hotel, then a popular concert venue opposite St. Francis Church. It was about this time that they may have been to the Otago Goldfields in New Zealand with Aitken.

Here we lose track of Amelia’s actual movement’s for Smythe arrives back in Melbourne having written a communiqué to Chilshom in Sydney and having also finished with the Wizard Mr. Simmonds, he was in Melbourne. Amelia is then next noticed setting sail on a coastal steamer called the Urara, with Mr. Smythe, Mr. Chisholm and Mr. Lynn, all of whom were intent on using Sydney as a jumping off point to sail to Shanghai, where they would, under Smythe’s plan, meet up with Edouard Desirée Boulanger, veteran pianist of the Californian goldrush and Agostino di Robbio, a temperamental pupil of Paganini with almost ten years of touring various Spanish Colonies under his belt. They arrived at the pier on the hour of sail, having stored away their luggage and Chilshom’s new harmonium (which Smythe had paid to be given to him as a ‘gift’) on board the Moneta that morning with the Company’s money (500 pounds) on the ship safe. They missed the ship, after having indulged in a last big lunch and had to pay some sailors to row them out to it for the Commander, a Captain Withers was awaiting a good wind and tide. Simmons stood at the rear fo the rowboat shouting and waving his large white ‘kerchief. The Captain was none too happy but the troupe was safely on it’s way.