The Silent Showman
Chapter Two - The Irish Connection
Everybody has heard of ‘the man behind’; he is the unknown genius who does all the work unapplauded.
The ‘man behind’ the theatrical show is, paradoxical as it may seem, really the ‘man in front’. For the ‘man in front’ is the business manager, and the business manager is the brain of the show.
On him depends in greatest measure its success or failure. He has to possess a mixture of all the qualities which go to make success in other professions. He must have the guile of a lawyer, the eloquence of a parson, the astuteness of the stock and share broker, the urbanity of the popular physician; and joined to all this he must know his theatrical world like a book. He has to deal with the most difficult, the most touchy, the most contradictory class of human beings that exists - the stage folk.
So began a piece of whimsy in Melbourne Punch in 1908. The writer’s purpose was to extol George Tallis’s success in the theatrical profession, and he went on to suggest that two qualities had been particularly important in George’s rise, one of them coming naturally to an Irishman, the other rather rarer:
Somehow it seems that such an agglomeration of virtues can only be expected in the men of one race. The Irish temperament, materialised into that mysterious something which the Irish themselves call ‘blarney’, is peculiarly suited to the woes and worries of business management. In proof of this Irishmen have shown themselves to be pronounced successes. The difficulty is to get the Irishman with the business acumen essential for the job.1
A family friend would later attest to George’s talent for ‘blarney’ when she said that ‘he was the kind of man who had the knack of making everyone he met feel the most important person he had ever spoken with. He had a lovely play with words, and he could charm a bird off a tree’. In business dealings, where he was inclined to combine tactical silence with the ‘friendly chat’ to win his way, Tallis steered syndicates through large and delicate corporate manoeuvres without fracturing relationships. Only a few - mainly competitors within his own organisation - would remain unconvinced by his personal charm. And few would doubt that this Irishman was blessed with ‘business acumen’: his investments over decades helped to make both his firm and himself, as one newspaper wag put it, ‘rich beyond the dreams of actors’.2
George Tallis was born on 28 October 1869 at 18 Bridge Street, Callan, County Kilkenny. There were ten children belonging to John and Sarah Tallis, five girls and five boys. George was the youngest.
The Tallis home is today known as Avon Ree House, and it stands near the Kings River Bridge. Bridge Street is very narrow, but it would have done nicely in the horse-and-buggy era. It formed part of the main route connecting the cities of Cork and Dublin, and for that reason alone the small town of Callan was an important centre. The coach, which ferried passengers between the two cities, rattled through Callan at the dead of night and became the subject of a disturbing folktale. One version told to George was passed on by him to his children:
Did you ever hear about the Headless Coach? Well, I saw it! It was a winter night, and the cold was upon the ground. I went out to bring in some turf for the fire, when I heard the sound of horses. I looked up, and there was a coach against the moon, racing like the bats of hell. And I swear that neither the coachman nor the passengers had a head to hang a hat on. It was the Headless Coach for sure, and I ran home and couldn’t speak for the trembling. And no one believed me.
No doubt the Tallis children rehearsed this story well as they fell asleep so close to the route of the Cork-Dublin flier. With the clatter of horses’ hooves on the Kings River Bridge still ringing in their ears, Sarah probably had little difficulty in convincing her children to stay in bed at night.
Good story-telling was part of the Irish social fabric, and the best tales were a mix of truth and the occult. This was the breeding ground of great authors like Oscar Wilde, WB Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, James Joyce and many others, who formalised a distinctive Irish oral tradition for comedy through their writings. George’s early immersion in folklore may have guided him in selecting shows that would work in the world of theatre, where audiences had to be at once thrilled and convinced by the story unfolding before them.
As the youngest child in a clutch of ten, he had incentive to learn a way with words to help him hold his own, and reason also to develop the facility sometimes attributed to him, of being able to ‘slip away’ from disputes and confrontation to pursue his own goal.
George’s oldest son, Mick, told some stories of his father’s Irish ways:
I am six years old. I know this for a fact because my dad just told me while he shaves in his dressing room. I obediently cup my hands in preparation for Colleen’s curls, which are beginning to take shape as he expertly guides a sharp knife around a large green apple.
And now with the curls safely within my grasp, I turn to go. ‘What do you do with them?’ he asks with interest. ‘I give them to Maggie and she puts them in a bowl.’
‘And what does Maggie do with them then?’ But this last question is rhetorical, because father has started his day.
If this story is any reflection on George’s early upbringing by his own father, John, then it is plain to whom George owed a debt for his blarney.
For his business acumen he had much to thank his mother, who was twenty years younger than John. The house at 18 Bridge Street was part of an off-licence spirit and grocery store. John, Sarah and their first four children had moved there in 1861 from the thirty-acre farm John had inherited. John died at seventy when George was just seven, but even before that Sarah had been the driving force in managing the family store. She made sure that the children helped with all the duties, and some of George’s siblings later became successful manufacturers and shopkeepers.
In her letters to George in Australia Sarah often gave advice about money, and related the vicissitudes of the family’s small businesses. She was plainly a formidable woman and a fund of business advice. George would later claim that while he couldn’t read a balance sheet, he knew where to find the bottom line!
Life in the Callan days must have been hard. Money was tight, the living crowded, peace and privacy victims of the off-licence. Few stories of these times have percolated through to the present day; certainly neither George nor his sisters spoke freely of their time in Bridge Street.
Sarah and John were Church of Ireland and St Mary’s in Bridge Street was the family church of worship, all the other churches in Callan being Roman Catholic. The Protestant Church of Ireland was, and still is, the minority denomination in Southern Ireland. George Tallis the businessman was often described as aloof and single-minded in his decision-making habits. He listened to opinions when offered, especially those from his inner circle, but relied on his own counsel. Perhaps his early years in a family of religious outsiders give some hint of a reason.
Like many an Irish youth, George became intrigued at an early age with ‘grand houses’. Running errands on behalf of the family store, he would have visited nearby Desart Court3, and perhaps experienced its crowning glory, a double staircase with carved foliage instead of a banister. He may even have met the mansion’s resident ghost, of whom weird tales abounded. You can imagine the local Callan lads peering over the fences of this magnificent old estate, with its ample gardens housing a central building with flanking wings. George, however, may have seen past the thrills of taunting Lord Desart, and dreamt of a grand lifestyle far away from the crowded off-licence.
Sarah’s business continued to provide work and money for the family until 1883, when the children dispersed. The most traumatic departure was that of George’s brothers, John and Henry, who sailed for Australia in late June. They were in poor health and hoped that Australia’s climate would offer a cure. Moreover, their destination was said to be a land of opportunity.
George and three of his sisters moved to the larger town of Kilkenny, where the sisters set up a couturier business providing employment to local seamstresses. Not to be outdone, their mother moved to Dublin with her youngest daughter, Charlotte, to open a similar operation. These twin enterprises spread the risks and straddled the markets, providing a comfortable income for Sarah and her daughters long into the future. At her home in Dublin, Sarah worked tirelessly in the workshop, shrewdly monitored business matters, and made suggestions that her family found wise to consider.
Sarah was disturbed by John and Henry’s emigration. In part, she blamed her brother, Richard (Dick) Nicholson, who had emigrated to Australia years before, and who wrote glowing reports home. The Tallis children absorbed his news, and Sarah presided over the fragmentation of her family.
At that time, and since, Ireland provided one of the main streams of young migrants to America and Australia. While this drained Ireland’s pool of native talent, the vigour and intelligence of its youth helped mould the future of these two rapidly developing countries.
George lived with his sisters in Kilkenny for three years, and after the first year joined the Kilkenny Moderator as a cadet reporter. He soon recognised the importance of being able to record speeches and events rapidly, and decided to add the recently developed shorthand of Pitman to his typing skills. Taking down the long Sunday sermons at St Canice’s Cathedral gave him excellent practice and, as his speed and accuracy improved, he earned the respect of his employer by providing full accounts of what the bishop had actually said.
Brothers John and Henry, meanwhile, fared very badly in Australia. They landed in Sydney towards the end of 1883 and lived in the thriving Rocks area of the harbour, near Circular Quay. John worked as a grocer, Henry as a jeweller. But within eighteen months of his arrival John was taken seriously ill. At just twenty-two he died at Sydney Hospital and was buried in the Anglican section of the Rookwood Cemetery. Henry travelled by the special hearse-train out west of the city to accompany his brother on his last journey.
News of the appalling situation in Australia trickled back to Ireland. Henry had no money, and could not find regular work. He had read of a job at Silverton, near Broken Hill, and was wondering if his uncertain health could tolerate the rigours of the outback. At home in Ireland, the family saw the need for drastic action.
Charlotte, a strong-minded twenty-four, decided to take matters into her own hands. She would go to Australia and attend to Henry herself. This arrangement must have cheered George, who had been harbouring his own ambitions to try his luck in the new country. At the age of seventeen, however, his mother would hardly countenance his travelling alone. On the other hand, if he accompanied his sister Charlotte on her mission to straighten matters out in Australia ...
Charlotte and George boarded the Orizaba on 30 September 1886, and arrived in Melbourne on 24 November. For the first few days they stayed at the White Hart Hotel in Spring Street, the same hotel that had attracted JC Williamson and his new wife, Maggie Moore, on their first trip to Australia twelve years before.
Henry Tallis, meanwhile, had moved to the small gold-mining town of Maldon, about sixty miles north of Melbourne. In spite of the mercy mission from Ireland, he died suddenly late in 1888, two days before his twenty-fourth birthday. Soon after the funeral Charlotte returned home alone, having failed to persuade George to go with her.
By that time George was already over a year into his long career in Australian theatre management. Unlike his poor brothers, he had fallen on his feet, and was relishing the climate, freedoms and opportunities of this new land. Anne, his oldest sister, wrote in June 1893 unwittingly reminding him of his good fortune:
When are you coming home for a holiday George? You could stay with your cousins at Pottlerath. The mud really isn’t so bad this year ... Hope you are well, and not the worse for the wetting you got when rabbit shooting. What a pity you didn’t go some place on a week day instead of a Sunday. No wonder you had no luck.
Anne also counselled George to beware of ‘play people’, reminding her youngest brother ‘that there is very little thought of such people here’. Indeed, there is no evidence that any of George’s forebears had ever trodden the boards or worked in theatre. So what attracted him to the theatre world?
It is likely that George, while working as a cadet reporter for two years on the Kilkenny Moderator, had seen local and international press references to the Williamson activity in Melbourne. JC Williamson and Maggie Moore had taken a company to Dublin in 1877 as part of a three-year world tour from America that included a long season in Australia. The repertoire had been immensely popular in Dublin, with its Irish-American principal players and Irish dramas, as well as the Williamsons’ evergreen triumph, Struck Oil. From time to time Tallis may have had assignments in Dublin, where intriguing stories circulated about Williamson and his emergence as the biggest theatrical operator in Australia. So when his sister Charlotte decided to go to Australia in 1886 to see what was up with brother Henry, no wonder ambitious young George’s ears pricked up.
George would be joining good company. Although officially Australia was just six per cent Irish, a disproportionate number of young Irish men and women were in the theatre business and either came from Dublin, or had trained there. They included serious actors, comedians, managers, playwrights and É the list was endless. Dublin then, as now, was a thriving theatre centre that exported its products world-wide. So while George Tallis’s family background would not have led him directly to the theatre, as a young Irishman he would have been well received in Australia’s theatre scene. And as it turned out, both Williamsons had ancestors from Ireland, nicely completing the Irish connection.
In any event, Tallis had obtained two letters of reference before he left for Australia, most probably from his employer at the Kilkenny Moderator. One letter was addressed to JC Williamson, and the second to Dr Cunningham, chief-of-staff of the Argus newspaper in Melbourne.4
Of the ten Tallis children, three emigrated to Australia. But of those three, only George had luck, opportunity and, above all, good health. That he chose the precarious world of the theatre, rather than continue a career in newspapers, speaks for his adventurous spirit and as well, perhaps, for his Irish heritage.
Notes
1 Melbourne Punch, 2 April 1908
2 Melbourne Herald, 14 March 1923
3 G Mauresceaux, Old Kilkenny Review
4 Melbourne Herald, ‘Sir George Tallis Looks Back’, 13 November 1931