As if the life of the Melbourne conductor and composer G.W.L. Marshall-Hall (1862–1915) was not already noteworthy for its scandals, new revelations about his personal life have been uncovered in the papers of the National Archives, now available on Ancestry. Among them is an exchange of letters between him and his first wife to add to the collection of his letters published by Lyrebird Press in 2015.
Arthur Streeton, Professor Marshall-Hall (1892). NGV
Marshall-Hall and May Martha Hunt married in London in 1884. She came from a large family in the East End, where her father Thomas Willomat Hunt was a grocer, a trade that had also occupied her grandfather. Hunt had four children by his first wife, Eliza Morris, who died in 1862. May was born illegitimately to Martha Harvey in 1864 and the parents waited another seven years before marrying at St Jude’s in St Pancras in 1871. Both the East End origins and the irregularity of May’s birth would have meant that Marshall-Hall—whose father had been a magistrate, a barrister and owner of an eighteenth-century estate in Wiltshire—married well beneath him. But he also chose music as his trade, against his father’s advice.
Blaxland House, Wiltshire, owned in the 1860s by Marshall Hall.
After their marriage Marshall-Hall and May lived in poverty in northwest London. A baby, Harold (named after the opera then in progress), born in late 1889, must have died soon after birth, so that at the time of their emigration to Australia they were childless. Their daughter Elsa was born on 17 August 1892 in Melbourne but not long afterwards May decided to return to London, although she had to wait until February 1893 for a berth on a ship. As Richard Selleck points out in his history of the university, Marshall-Hall’s letters to his friends and his eagerness to join them in their travels to Sydney and Launceston in January–February were not the actions of a husband in despair at the loss of his family. Rumours flared about Marshall-Hall’s attachment to the very beautiful Mrs Edith Eccles, a twenty-four-year-old singer married to the American-born Collins Street surgeon Dr Jacob Eccles. Selleck speculates that Marshall-Hall and Mrs Eccles were together in the summer of 1893–94 at the Curlew Camp on the shores of Sydney Harbour, where Arthur Streeton and fellow artists lived in tents and painted en plein air. Dr Eccles however must not have objected, because he wrote to the Age in support of Marshall-Hall’s treatment when he had a bout of diphtheria in 1898.
Tom Roberts, The Camp, Sirius Cove (1899). Art Gallery of NSW
Marshall-Hall found a new lover not long afterwards and his only surviving son, Hubert, was born later that year to Katherine (Kate/Catherine/Kathleen) Hoare. Unlike May Hunt, Kate Hoare came from a distinguished Irish family, her father a well-respected engineer and surveyor in gold-mining towns and his father a solicitor in County Cork in Ireland. Kate was one of at least thirteen children of the engineer. Of them, her younger sister Lydia would marry the accountant Edgar Dyer, who was prosperous enough to own a house on Albert Rd, South Melbourne, and send his sons to Melbourne Grammar. Several of Kate’s sisters are mentioned in the newspaper account of Lydia’s wedding in 1900 but there is no mention of a Mrs Marshall-Hall or even of a sister of that name.
Kate must have been pregnant with Hubert in 1894 when Marshall-Hall requested leave from the university to return to London on “urgent and most important private matters”. He left in late July and did not return until mid-November, by which time Hubert must have been born (although no birth record exists). The newly discovered file in the National Archives reveals what this matter was: his wife May had petitioned the divorce court for the restitution of her conjugal rights, tendering a letter to “my dear husband” urging him to “take me home to you again and give me your love as of old before your mind was turned against me, for our little child’s sake let us forget the past and again find the happiness we have always known”. Some hint of her awkward status is found in a remark about how coldly society looked on women who lived apart from their husbands and the expression of her wish that “little Elsa” could take her “proper place” in society. Marshall-Hall replied on 19 September from Lewisham (on the other side of the Thames and well away from May’s relatives in Forest Gate). Addressing “my dear May” he wrote, “I have had from Edith a report of your conversation with her. I consider that you have misrepresented the situation entirely to your own interests. I am weary of these eternal threats and indignant at your unjustifiable detention of my property”. In this he appears to be more concerned to reclaim the score of his orchestral Idyl (later performed in London) than to see either May or his daughter. Instead he asked for a year’s separation, “but once for all I will not be forced by threats to lead a life which I am certain would be unhappier than before and impossible for both of us”. Well aware that she might take steps that would ruin his career he offered her 200 pounds per annum to leave him in peace. “I have been so nagged[,] worried and badgered that I no longer care what happens but will sacrifice everything to be free”. Two days later May began court proceedings which dragged on until May 1895, when the court demanded that Marshall-Hall pay her 300 pounds per year, 30 per cent of his salary (which the university was in the process of reducing, due to the Depression). In the meantime Marshall-Hall had taken on the financial responsibility for the university’s new Conservatorium, which opened in February 1895 in the Queen’s Coffee Palace on the corner of Rathdowne and Victoria St Carlton, opposite the Exhibition Gardens.
Conservatorium, University of Melbourne, c. 1901. University of Melbourne Archives
Shipping records show that May returned to Melbourne with an infant and a nurse in in April 1899 and left two months later, no doubt having discovered that Marshall-Hall was living with another woman and their son. The infant she brought with her was her son Norman, who when he married in 1930 left blank the section of the marriage form that required the name of his father. Perhaps he never knew who his father was. May died of cirrhosis of the liver in London in 1901, leaving Elsa (then aged ten) and Norman (three) in the care of her father’s younger brother, Thomas Glensor. Marshall-Hall and Kathleen Hoare married in 1902, two years after a prolonged scandal had ensured that Marshall-Hall lost his job at the university. Although his friends knew his family circumstances and one of them once wrote admiringly of the family’s contentment, it surely was impossible to hide from those who welcomed them in 1891 the fact that his wife had left him and that he had established a home with another woman. The effect of these events on the parties involved is incalculable: for the rest of his life Marshall-Hall worried about money and in two years in London lived in desperate circumstances while after his sudden and unexpected death in 1915 his wife’s terror at the prospect of the details of their relationship being known prevented anyone writing a biography. Hubert Marshall-Hall lived for the remainder of his life in England and named his daughter Georgina; Elsa returned to Australia, married and named one of her children after her half-brother Hubert and another after Marshall-Hall’s opera Stella. It remains a moot question whether a divorce in 1894 would have wreaked any more damage on Marshall-Hall’s career than he did himself in 1898–1900 by his outspokenness. Certainly, as this new letter shows, it might have saved him a substantial sum of money.
“Eh! But it’s graund. I’d sacrifice a professor every week fo sic a controversy”. Lionel Lindsay, Outpost, 7 July 1900.
Ian Burk, author of “Goodbye ’til next time”: A Critical Biography of A.E. Floyd (Lyrebird, 2012) has recently published The Winds of Change: The Music at St Paul’s Cathedral, Melbourne 1947–1973 (Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2021). Floyd, born in Birmingham in 1877, was organist and choirmaster at St Paul’s from 1915 to 1947 and was succeeded by Colin Campbell Ross. Burk has also written about Floyd’s predecessor at the cathedral, Ernest Wood, in Ernest Wood and the Foundation of the Musical Tradition at St Paul’s Cathedral, Melbourne (Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2016). Altogether then, he has mapped the history of music at the cathedral from Wood’s appointment in 1888 until the end of Lance Hardy’s in 1973, only four men having been the cathedral organist in almost 100 years.
Kay Dreyfus, author of Bluebeard’s Bride: Alma Moodie, Violinist (Lyrebird, 2013) will talk about editing Moodie’s letters at an online event hosted by the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music at the University of Melbourne on 20 May 2021. Further details are available here.
Teresa Balough has been writing about Grainger since she commenced a master’s thesis at the University of Kentucky in the 1970s. Her books on Grainger include A Musical Genius from Australia: Selected Writings by and about Percy Grainger (UWA, 1982), which for decades was the principal published source for Grainger’s writings. Her latest book, published by Lyrebird in 2020, is a collection of the correspondence of Grainger and Burnett Cross, co-edited with Kay Dreyfus. Here she remembers meeting Cross and his family.
You have a very longstanding interest in Grainger and his music. How did you first become acquainted with it?
I first heard Grainger’s music when I was an undergraduate student at the University of Kentucky. I was playing flute in the concert band when we were presented with a piece called Lincolnshire Posy by one Percy Grainger. I’m sorry to say that our director made fun of Grainger’s program notes regarding the old folksingers as he read them to us. I was enchanted by the music and asked my husband, Gregor Balough, if he had ever heard of Grainger. He replied with great enthusiasm that he had actually met Grainger when he (Gregor) was a violin student at the Chicago Musical College where Grainger was teaching summer courses. He said that Grainger appeared like a ray of sunshine walking down the halls of the College, smiling and greeting everyone he met.
How did you become acquainted with the family of Burnett Cross? Are there members of the family still living who remember him?
As a graduate student in musicology at U.K., I learned that there was not much written about Percy Grainger at that time, so I decided to do my master’s thesis on Grainger. I wrote to his widow, Ella Grainger, and asked what aspect of his music she would like to see researched. She responded by graciously inviting me to spend several days with her in White Plains, New York and suggested that what was really needed was a catalog of Grainger’s music. During the course of my visit with Ella that summer of 1971, she took me to meet her husband’s close friend and colleague in Free Music, Burnett Cross. We spent a very pleasant evening at Burnett’s apartment, where he played reel-to-reel tapes for us of a number of Grainger’s compositions, including The Warriors. Several years later I was invited to become a member of the board of what was then called The Percy Grainger Library Society, of which Burnett was also a board member. This entailed visits to New York from my home in Virginia; and it was during these visits that I became acquainted with Burnett’s brother Howard and his sister-in-law Fran, with whom I shared meals and conversation at their home in Hartsdale, New York. Howard passed away shortly after Burnett’s death and Fran passed away in 2019; but their children, Howard Jr., Doug, and Pam are all living and have many recollections of the wonderful uncle who was like a second father to them.
Did the family store or collect much material relating to Cross’s collaborations with Grainger?
When Burnett passed away in 1996, Howard and Fran asked me to go with them to Burnett’s apartment in Hartsdale and sort through his papers, keeping any material relating to Grainger as they were concerned that it might otherwise be lost. This was the source of the copies of letters between Cross and Grainger which appear in Distant Dreams and the photos, most taken by Burnett himself, of the progress of the Free Music Machines. There were also copies of programs from Grainger concerts and promotional flyers and other miscellaneous correspondence. All original letters between the two men had, of course, already gone to the Grainger Museum.
What remains in Grainger’s White Plains house of the Free Music experiments?
There is one remaining Free Music machine at the Grainger House in White Plains, New York, the February 1950 instrument labelled “Gliding tones on whistle, notes on recorders, produced by holes & slits cut in paper rolls,” a photograph of which appears on page 26 of Distant Dreams and also on the front cover. The Grainger Society is currently applying for a grant to conserve this machine, which would allow it to be put on display in the Grainger House.
Why do you think Grainger and Cross preferred to work on their own without communicating with other composers interested in new technologies and sound art? Was it because they simply enjoyed building and experimenting for the sake of it?
I think that the reason Grainger and Cross worked alone is because the sound that Grainger was looking for was so different from what other composers of the time were interested in. They did, in fact, begin their collaboration by seeking out the expertise of others in the field but soon discovered that the ideas put forward by those they contacted would either be too cumbersome to be useful or would not meet the required specifics Grainger had in mind. Burnett once remarked that he felt that other composers using mechanical or electrical means to create experimental music were more interested in finding something useful compositionally from existing machines while Grainger had in mind all along the exact sounds he wanted and then had to build something capable of creating those sounds.
Photo: Grainger at Interlochen, Michigan (Grainger Museum). Burnett Cross makes an adjustment to the “Kangaroo-Pouch” Tone-Tool, 1952 (Cross Estate).
The cover of John Whiteoak’s book Take Me to Spain is by the South Australian artist Dorrit Black (1891–1951). Having studied at art schools in Adelaide and Sydney in 1927 Black travelled to London and spent three months at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art, where Claude Flight specialised in colour linocut printing. Black’s interest in jazz at this time can be seen in her well-known linocut Music, dated 1927/28. Argentina (the Spanish dancer), on the cover of Whiteoak’s book, dates from about 1929, when she was studying in Paris. A major exhibition of Black’s paintings and linocuts was held at the Art Gallery of South Australia in 2014, curated by Tracey Lock.
Among the obituaries for Roger Covell, the eminent academic and critic, is the one in the Sydney Morning Herald, the paper that employed him for four decades (available here). Covell’s landmark book Australia’s Music: Themes of a New Society (Sun Books, 1967) was published in a new edition by Lyrebird in 2016.
Catherine Miller reports on “three reasons why we love flamenco down under” in Flamenco Australia Magazine, her response to the publication of John Whiteoak’s book Take Me to Spain.
Picture credit: John Singer Sargent, El Jaleo (1882)
Lyrebird’s latest book, Distant Dreams, a collection of the correspondence of Percy Grainger and Burnett Cross edited by Teresa Balough and Kay Dreyfus, was launched at the national conference of the Musicological Society of Australia on 5 December 2020 by Vincent Plush. The Zoom recording of the launch can be viewed here.
DISTANT DREAMS: THE CORRESPONDENCE OF PERCY GRAINGER AND BURNETT CROSS 1946–60 / With interviews, lectures and other writings on Free Music by Burnett Cross
Edited by Teresa Balough and Kay Dreyfus
Distant Dreams is now available as an e-book from the Lyrebird shop. It publishes, for the first time, the exchange of letters between Percy Grainger and Burnett Cross, charting their journey of discovery and the friendship that grew from it. Fully illustrated with Grainger’s sketches, Cross’s drawings and photos of them with Ella Grainger at Grainger’s home in White Plains, this is a tribute to a lasting collaboration and the realisation of Grainger’s dreams of a music worthy of a scientific age.
