The Silent Showman

Chapter Four - Preparation of an Irish Immigrant

When George Tallis arrived in Melbourne as a seventeen-year-old he was ‘the freshest of fresh Irish importations, [with] a soft brogue that would have served to identify his race anywhere, and a pair of Irish blue eyes’. In this respect, George was no different from hundreds of other young Irish men working in humble jobs in the city. However, according to the writer of those words, underneath his soft Irish manner Tallis had ‘a keen brain, with an enormous capacity for taking pains with his work - a desire to learn, and apply all that he learnt’.¹

Bert Levy, who became a world-renowned theatre journalist, worked as a young man alongside Tallis for the Triumvirate and came to know him well. He wrote affectionately in 1920:

[He] is a silent man, undemonstrative and strictly business. I have a mental picture of an immaculately tidy young Tallis at the Theatre Royal, Melbourne, thirty years ago - when he, as treasurer, paid me my first salary, an immaculately clean, one pound note. He paid me as seriously as if the amount was one hundred pounds, and he demanded a properly signed receipt, and he would not permit any jokes or familiarities.²

Jokes and familiarity? There must have been plenty in those early days, as young actors and actresses, artists, stage hands and managers mingled. But George resisted the bohemian lifestyle although, as he wrote in his memoirs:

It was an amazingly colourful world into which I entered in 1886, under the aegis of the original firm of Williamson, Garner & Musgrove. A world in which melodrama, with good honest retribution in the third act, ruled on the Melbourne stage! Typical of this was Human Nature, the play then running at the Theatre Royal. That show had its big scene in the British campaign in the Sudan, and was full of lofty and patriotic sentiment.

George’s family background in middle-class Irish shopkeeping would have promoted a business-like ethic. Perhaps warnings from family ‘to beware of the ‘stage folk’ rang in his  ears as he kept actors at what Levy called a ‘respectful though not unfriendly distance’. From Ireland he also received well-intentioned advice from a family medical friend, ‘not to keep late hours at the theatre’, ‘to keep out of the crowds and the strong lights’ and ‘to try to go for a walk during the performance’. All somewhat impractical for a rising young man of the entertainment world.

George may also have inherited a certain aloofness at work from his boss JC Williamson, who was known not to play favourites. ‘It is this characteristic which has earned him the respect of everyone in theatrical Australia’ wrote Bert Levy of Tallis in 1920. ‘His words - like the words of the Guv’nor [Williamson] - mean something. He never wastes them.’³
 
George grew to love the theatre, but unlike his mentor Williamson, or Williamson’s great predecessor George Coppin, he had no aspirations as an actor. In this respect, at least, he stands closer to George Musgrove who, like his uncle William Lyster, was from the start an entrepreneur, rather than an actor-manager. Musgrove, of course, had background and training in theatre through his family. Tallis had none. Yet he rose rapidly in theatre management. Punch explained the apparent anomaly like this:

Every immigrant who comes to Australia has only to get a list of this country’s leading men in every profession and investigate something of their history to find that four out of every six began with nothing and started from nowhere. But brains and ability and, most of all, hard work have carried them to the top of the tree ...
[An immigrant] is held down by no clogs of habit and custom. He can look round, pick his height, choose his pinnacle, and shape his course for it.

Tallis came from outside. He had no stage history, no tradition of the footlights to hamper his judgement. All theatrical problems he could face with an unbiased mind, could consider them in their proper business perspective - a feat which JC Williamson as an old actor could never perform. Though there were two other partners in the firm - Garner and Musgrove - it was to Tallis that JC Williamson turned most often.⁴

Even allowing for the hyperbole of hindsight, the Punch assessments make sense in that George was forever interested in innovation and modern practices and technology, as evidenced early on by his decision as a junior reporter to learn the new shorthand of Pitman. Much later he would show the same innovative streak in his embracing of the new media of cinema and radio. And for an ambitious young man interested in novelty and business, there was no better place to be than Williamson’s growing theatre enterprise in the Australia of the 1880s.

From these sketches of the young Tallis at work, a picture emerges of a rather enigmatic character. In an ‘amazingly colourful world’ he was hard-working, immaculately tidy, somewhat aloof, forward-looking and keen to advance. But he was not an aggressive figure; his soft brogue and personal charm made him well-liked and trusted. He might have been without any theatrical background but he had inherited a goodly portion of what Williamson’s firm needed most in order to grow: business sense. With all this, he was blessed with the faculty of being in the right place, at the right time.

These themes - hard work, ability, innovation, speculation, personal charm and luck - recur in their positive and negative guises as we tell Tallis’s story.

Beginning as an assistant at the Melbourne Theatre Royal, George acted as clerk, messenger, usher and general factotum. Unlike his friend Bert Levy, whose introduction to theatre life was as an understudy to the Firm’s house scenic artist George Gordon, Tallis was at the nerve centre, and in the thick of it from the start. He had opportunities to meet all the right people, and to learn from them and the partners of the Triumvirate.

A month into his job, George would have helped in the preparations when the partners opened the lavishly refurbished Princess Theatre in December 1886. Gilbert & Sullivan’s comic opera The Mikado was presented by the Royal Comic Opera Company with the people’s idol, Nellie Stewart, as Yum-Yum. What an initiation! ‘Overnight the Princess became the outstanding theatre in Australia,’ wrote George later in his memoirs.
Over the Christmas and New Year period of 1886, the Williamson Pantomime Company staged Robinson Crusoe at the Royal. Pantomimes were standard holiday fare for Williamson partnerships; in time they became a tradition. There followed more serious work presented by actor-manager George Rignold, supported by Kate Bishop and Bland Holt. Mid-year there was a Maggie Moore-JC Williamson season, featuring the tenth revival of Struck Oil. Further plays and pantomimes rounded out 1887 for the Royal.

Mid-year at the Princess, the musical Dorothy was another great success. Alfred Cellier, the composer, came out from England to conduct. George Gordon was putting the finishing touches to the set even as Cellier was bowing to the first-night applause. The musical left lingering memories, and Melburnians went home humming:

From daylight a hint we might borrow,
And prudence may come with the light,
But why should we wait til tomorrow,
You’re queen of my heart for tonight.

Whether anyone was queen of young George Tallis’s heart in these days we have no idea. Maybe so. Old photographs suggest that he had a cheerful personality and, after all, there was a bevy of actresses and showgirls in his ambit.
George was short of relatives in Australia, but his cousin Fred Nicholson, son of Uncle Dick, had a bank job in Melbourne, and it is likely the pair roomed together for a time to share expenses. This was one way of spinning out a salary of about one pound a week. Even so, there would not have been much left over to invest in the property market, which later became one of George’s passions.

There was an early illustration for Tallis of the virtues of caution in property investment. In 1886 his brother Henry was duped in a land scam that involved the ghost settlement of Rugby, north of Sydney. Mother Sarah berated Henry for this entrepreneurial splurge, encouraging him to save for the future and use the banks. Stung, Henry wrote to sister Anne in Ireland: ‘I sunk money in it, but it may be of great value yet, or worth next to nothing. Still I got a lesson from it.’
Henry, of course, did not live long enough to benefit from the lesson, and George took over the responsibility for the blocks. He enquired of a Sydney land agent early in 1889, and then again some eighteen months later, about the health of the investment. Bad news indeed: the price did not appear to be lifting as expected. That remained the case until 17 July 1971, when the Gosford Council finally terminated the non-existent township of Rugby and put the site under water. The outstanding rates were $15,883.86, owed by a legion of investors who had vanished into the history of this country.
But there was ample food for thought here. Touts, scams and wasted money; they added up to the requirement of ‘due diligence’ for all investment in Australia’s future. Moreover, there was trouble aplenty from the family in Ireland if news of any speculation trickled through. Silence and due diligence then; they would be George’s golden rules, and he stuck to them.

Back at work, George was confronted by an early illustration of how fragile theatre life can also be. The venue was the Princess, the date 3 March 1888, the production Gounod’s Faust - starring Nellie Stewart as Marguerite, the English tenor Clarence Leumane as Faust, and the English bass Frederick Baker - Federici - as Mephistopheles. Young George Tallis and Bert Levy were looking forward to experiencing some grand opera. They got more than they bargained for, as Tallis later explained:

At the end of the first performance Alfred Cellier, the conductor, noticed a tremor in Federici as he descended to hell with Faust in the last scene. The singer suffered from heart disease. From the cellar they carried him up to the greenroom, where he died a minute later, surrounded by the principals in costume. By a marvellous effort of self will he had kept himself going until the last note.⁶

There are still sightings of Federici’s ghost at the Princess!

Perhaps Federici’s demise was an omen. The following year Melbourne’s boom went bust, ushering in years of economic uncertainty. Banks and credit unions collapsed as land prices tumbled, and borrowing became a dirty word. For a year or so the messages were mixed. In 1891 James McMahon, a Melbourne theatre manager, was in America telling all who would listen how well theatre was doing in his city: ‘There is no such thing as absolute poverty in Australia, and where all enjoy prosperity to a certain extent the theatres are sure to prosper.⁷

One year later the financial crisis in Victoria worsened. Credit restrictions skittled more banks, and undid companies and institutions. McMahon’s bravado was looking ill-timed.

In 1893 George’s mother sent him money and wrote:

I hope you will be able to put it with your savings in a safe bank. I was sorry to see such a dismal picture of the state Melbourne is in at present - the papers say things are beginning to mend, which I hope for your sake is the case. I did not expect to hear your salary would be curtailed, which I hope will be no inconvenience to you.

Many years later, when the Great Depression of the 1930s was taking its toll, George was to say that ‘theatres were, if anything, more severely hit in the boom smash of the nineties than at present’. Furthermore, the economic malaise lingered. As if orchestrated by the financial woes, a disastrous drought started in 1896, delaying full recovery until the next century. Williamson’s company was reeling. The cost of importations had risen but, more importantly, there had been a dearth of suitable overseas shows, especially pantomimes. One of these, and a good one at that, was needed urgently for the 1896 season.

In desperation Williamson decided to write one himself and called in his staffer Bert Royle as collaborator. Together they created the unusual plot of Djin Djin, which tells how an Australian prince, Eucalyptus, rescued a Japanese princess from evil. There was ample scope for spectacular ballet sequences and the novel effects that audiences had come to expect from end-of-year shows. The music was by the Firm’s conductor, Leon Caron, and everything was geared for a grand Christmas special. But there was a major problem. There was no money.

How this crisis was overcome has been the subject of several stories over the years, but we cling to George Tallis’s version. He told it to a newspaper in 1931:

An interesting scene during the crash in the nineties had some point for us today. The crash came practically overnight. An opera season was on at the Princess Theatre. Williamson called the company together on the stage after the performance. Standing on a chair he gave them the bad news. A catch came into his throat, there was a tear in his eye. But, before he had finished, Florence Young and other principals caught his hand and reassured him, and the whole company, from stage hand up, made a voluntary reduction of a third of their salaries.⁸

Djin Djin played, and it filled the seats. It was exactly what the people wanted, and it was what the Firm needed. The pantomime toured for months across Australia and New Zealand, saving the company from ruin.

The famous London Gaiety company, with Nellie Farren (left) and Fred Leslie (right) and brilliant comedians, singers and dancers, opened at the Princess in 1888 with Monte Cristo

Despite the problems of depression, the 1890s were years of professional advancement for Tallis. In 1889 the Triumvirate rewarded his diligence by appointing him treasurer at the Theatre Royal and then treasurer of the up-market Princess Theatre in 1892. Around the same time, JC Williamson asked him to become his private secretary at the Theatre Royal, ‘where the name of Williamson was a spell to draw the public’.⁹ Punch later suggested that it was George’s shorthand skills that ensured him the job:

Even a small business man today dictates his letters to a stenographer. Thirty years ago he wrote them himself, or dictated notes which were taken in long hand. Williamson decided to instal a private secretary who was a stenographer. Tallis had learnt shorthand.¹⁰

George’s new position would have involved long hours with his employer, as Williamson revealed:

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’s not [only] keeping the companies going - though that is no light task in itself - but sometimes I have to take part in stage management ... 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.¹¹

What a crash course for a budding theatrical entrepreneur.

Unfortunately, even if the internal workings of the ‘machine’ were smooth enough, there was friction at the top. Initially this was to Tallis’s advantage as the Williamson partnerships went through various permutations.

In 1890 George Musgrove withdrew following a dispute involving Nellie Stewart. Due to financial difficulties, Arthur Garner left the following year. In 1892, Musgrove rejoined Williamson in a partnership that lasted until the end of the decade. From 1895, however, Musgrove was mainly in London, and Tallis became Williamson’s closest business ally. By the turn of the century Williamson and Musgrove had split permanently and George had become pretty much a de facto partner. With all these changes, George had an early glimpse of how brittle partnerships could be, particularly in the theatrical world where egos ruled supreme.

Actors, of course, are also fractious people, as twenty-one-year-old George learnt in 1891 when he supervised some of the arrangements for touring the great Sarah Bernhardt. Born in Paris in 1845, a magnetic personality and a ‘voix d’or’ helped to establish her as the most significant actress of her time. It was a triumph for the partnership of Williamson and Garner that they had induced her to visit Australia.

In May, Bernhardt disembarked in Sydney with hundreds of tonnes of luggage that was to see her through a ten-week tour hailed as the social and theatrical event of the decade. Her company performed La Dame aux camelias, known locally as Camille, and nine other serious plays. Under auditorium lighting, the audience tried to keep up with the French text by reading English translations during the performances. The rustling of the pages distracted Bernhardt who, in turn, kept audiences waiting with excessively long intervals. There was, therefore, some disenchantment both sides of the curtain, and at least once Bernhardt kept a management and a full theatre on edge  but this is George’s story:

Stars were appearing in the theatrical firmament of Melbourne. One had to learn to use a great deal of tact in handling celebrities. Tact, they say, comes easily to an Irishman. However that may be, all the tact in the world was sometimes needed. I found that out in meeting Bernhardt, one of the earliest and most interesting celebrity engagements of the Firm.¹²

One incident is as real in my mind as though it happened yesterday. One Saturday, after two performances - a matinee of Fedora in the afternoon and Tosca at night - Bernhardt and her whole company left the city, in an open drag, for the Dandenongs and a weekend shoot. What they were to shoot, I had not the faintest idea, but it was mid-winter and bitterly cold for midnight driving in open drags.

On the Monday evening 7 o’clock came with no Bernhardt. The theatre was a sell out. Half-past seven; a quarter to eight. Still no Bernhardt. At ten to eight, bugles were heard blowing in the street and Bernhardt arrived in her drag and descended with an air of unconcern. Her performance was a memorable one, which fully compensated for the anxiety she had caused.¹³

Tallis also recalled that Bernhardt’s season in Adelaide led to drama for the organisers when she objected to the terrible train trip from Melbourne, and insisted that she return by ship. There was not a great choice at the local port, so they got to work on the Adelaide, an inter-colonial passenger ship on the Adelaide-Melbourne run. Two cabins became one, and a lightning refurbishment delayed the ship’s departure until one in the morning, when Bernhardt arrived after her last performance. The captain, crew, wharfies and a host of eager passengers met her- and her doctor, manager and maids with hatboxes.

Bernhardt climbed aboard the small vessel and inspected the promised luxury. Spontaneously, it seemed, her disdain of the ‘inferior’ interstate train service softened. All was forgiven; without a word she fled Port Adelaide to see if that ‘lovely train’ was still available.

The Sarah Bernhardt tour was a prime example to George of enormous effort and financial risk in the face of dubious rewards. The season was an artistic success during which fulfilment outran expectations; it was generally appreciated by Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide audiences. As a bonus, the presence of the world celebrity elevated theatrical morale and the prestige of sponsors, Williamson and Garner. But the story goes that money was lost when expenses swamped receipts, and at the close of counting Garner was forced to retire from the partnership.
 

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Notes

1 Punch, 1908
2 The Stage, 8 April 1920
3 The Stage, 1920
4 Punch, 1913
5 greenroom: a backstage room in a theatre where performers revitalise.
6 Melbourne Herald, ‘Sir George Tallis Looks Back’, 13 Nov 1931
7 New York Times, 9 February 1891
8 Melbourne Herald, 13 November 1931
9 Punch, 1908
10 Punch, 1913
11 Williamson, p 36
12 Melbourne Herald, 5 December 1931
13 Melbourne Herald, 13 November 1931