1912 - 1913

Seven months later on 31st July 1912 we find Gwen in the choir of the Grand Festival Concert Season, 1912, when Bennett's May Queen was performed.  Mr Moeller's orchestra accompanied the choir and three distinguished soloists.  All three soloists were from England and were performers of some note on the international circuit.  Gwen had her programme signed and dated by each of them where their photographs appear on the third page.  Gwen's name does not appear on the pages below because she was somewhat casual about what disappeared in the gluing process, but she would have been mentioned in the choir listing under Watson on the last page on the part now firmly glued to the Common-Place Book.

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Below we have a Grand Sacred Concert given on 11th May 1913 as a farewell to the visiting London Imperial Orchestra.  Gwen is listed as one of three "Prominent Local Artistes" performing at the Vaudette Theatre, but neither the theatre nor the orchestra appear to exist any more.  The audience was treated to In the Great Unknown which we have noted on an earlier programme.

We move on now to Saturday, 14th June 1913 for the Grand Festival Concert Season, 1913, when Mendelssohn's Elijah was performed, curiously, over two evenings, the first part on Saturday and the second part on Monday.  Below is the Saturday programme where we find a Grand Wagner Selection after the interval.  Charles Knowles appears again this year, now alongside three other singers also on the international circuit.  Gwen's name appears under the sopranos in the choir where we find her listed as Miss Watson, and we may also note that Mrs Watson, probably Gwen's mother, appears in the contraltos.  Franz Moeller's orchestra is again busy providing the accompaniment as well as featuring in one of two full page advertisements.  Inexplicably, Gwen has not included the Monday programme in her book ... unless she sacrificed her Monday programme for the four photographs pasted in at the back of the book, and added in here after the last page of the Saturday programme.  This time only one of the photographs is signed (Samuel Masters), and the photograph used by Charles Knowles is different from the one he had used the previous year.

Clearly an important date in Gwen's performing diary must have been a Conversazione held on 7th July 1913.  A 'conversazione' was a meeting of those interested in the Arts for the purpose of intellectual discussion, and here that definition has been extended somewhat, as the stated function was to meet the provincial administrator, Sir Nicolaas Frederic de Waal, and his wife, as well as the delegates attending the South African Medical Congress.  Gwen sang For You Alone, accompanied by Franz Moeller.  The invitation below indicates that both Gwen and her mother were invited to attend, and there is also a small card giving notice of the event.  The final item relating to the conversazione is a press report of the event, probably found in the society pages, where we find "Miss Gwen Watson delighted the audience".

The next event to appear was a concert on Saturday, 9th August 1913, given by one of the military bands in South Africa at the time, the Band of the Kaffraian Rifles conducted by Mr R. Johnston Wilson.  There is some comment in the review below on the state of these bands and the way they were being recruited and financed, and this concert took place shortly after a major administrative reorganisation.  The band seems to have survived unscathed apart from their initially depleted numbers.  Nevertheless, the review indicates that they gave a fine performance, and Gwen was one of the singers who performed in both halves of the programme.  In the first half she "was in good voice, and gave a good interpretation of Offenbach's rather difficult Barcarolle," and so fine was her singing that she was called to give an encore, Illusion.  In the second half the audience were given I come to you, with The Serencade as an encore.  Accompanying the singers were Franz Moeller and his wife as well as Miss Maud Nelson, although the notice which preceded the concert says "the vocal items will all be accompanied by the full band."   My guess is that during rehearsals the "full band" was found to overpower the soloists and so the indefatigable Moellers (and Miss Nelson) stepped in. Proceeds from the concert went to the funds of St John's Church. 

Frank Watson, Gwen's father, was a mason (see the final item on this page).  Masonry appears to have been alive and well in East London in the early decades of the 1900s, and the next items are two fliers for a play, Are You a Mason?, which was billed as "A Farcical Comedy in 3 Acts".  This would have been the play written in 1901 by Leo Ditrichstein and later produced as a film in 1915. The performance dates of the East London production are missing, but given that the following item also concerns the Masonic Grand Lodge, it is quite probable that the two were not too widely separated in time.  The first flier below gives a cast list and we find that Fanchon Armitage was to have been played by Jessie Leonhard, but Gwen has crossed out Jessie's name in red and written her own name below.  She could well have been an understudy and probably had to stand in some time after the fliers were printed.  On the fliers we can see the extent of Franz Moeller's business activities, as, apart from pianos and organs, he advertises motorbikes ("side cars fitted"); bicycles ("Gent's Roadster ... Superior Qualities at £8 8s., £9 9s., £10 10."); "colonial furniture"; and sewing machines with "all the latest improvements" including "treadle machines".  And for all of these, "Monthly Payments Accepted."

On Tuesday, 9th September 1913, The Mayor and Mayoress of East London were At Home to meet the R.W. District Grand Master of the District Grand Lodge of Freemasons.  They were actually At Home in the City Hall, as a large number of people had been invited, as can be seen from the review of the proceedings.  "All having taken places and formed groups according to tastes or friendships, a short musical programme was presented." Gwen performed two numbers: The Magic of Your Voice and a "pretty duet" with Mr Wilbur Dartnell, Your Eyes Have Told Me So. 

In the review of the Mayoral At Home above, mention was made of "Captain Mitchell and several other officers from H.M.S. Pegasus," and below, the next day, 10th September 1913, we find the men of this Royal Navy ship putting on a concert to swell the funds of the Seamen's Institute in East London.   I love the language used in these reviews, perfectly of its time; so we should not read anything fanciful into the fact that the seamen "made the Institute look even more gay than usual"!  The majority of the entertainment was provided by the seamen, but a few locals, amongst them Gwen, also contributed. The silver collection "brought in £6 16s. 10½d., a sum which ... testified to the appreciation of the audience of the efforts put forward to entertain them."

The subject in the photograph below appears to be L. Tessier of S.S. McLaren, with the photograph dated 1913.  I can't find any references to this ship, but presumably Gwen met up with this man at some stage in 1913, as the photograph appears at the back of the Common-Place Book.

To the right of the photograph above is that of a steamship which was probably in East London around that time, S.S. Physa.  This ship was completed in 1904 under the name S.S. Saint Egbert, but in 1913 it changed hands and was renamed S.S. Physa, making that year the earliest it could have been in East London under that name.

Apart from L. Tessier of S.S. McLaren, another handsome young man moving in Gwen's orbit was the Second Officer of S.S. Baltic, Mr Bergstrom.  Gwen notes that he was "Sweedish", and indeed Bergström is a Swedish name; but of the three S.S. Baltics which were sailing at that time, the only one likely to have been in East London was Danish.  There are three photographs of Second Officer Bergstrom, and so I think he must have been of more than passing interest to Gwen.  In the third photograph below, which appears next to the other two in the Common-Place Book, there are two other men that Gwen met up with around this time.  Bergstrom is on the left, wearing a different jacket, but of the same rank.

On the same page as the photographs above are two which must have carried some personal significance for Gwen, and I don't think it is going too far to suggest that at least the one on the left might have had romantic associations!

Next we find Gwen contributing the final item in an Organ Recital given in St John's Church, East London, on Sunday, 21st September 1913.  Her contribution was The Rosary, a song by Ethelbert Nevin which was popular at the time and had been presented by the Band of the Kaffrarian Rifles in their concert on Saturday, 9th August 1913, reviewed above.  In the review it was noted that The Rosary was "just now a great favourite at popular recitals throughout the country," and so well did it go down on that occasion that it had to be repeated.  Could this have inspired Gwen to add the song her repertory?

Later that week we find Gwen appearing again, this time in the Y.M.C.A. Hall in a Grand Concert in aid of the Y.M.C.A. Dramatic Society's funds.  The Rosary and The Magic of Your Voice were sung by Gwen "in her well-known pleasing manner" and she "was determinedly recalled on each occasion."   To conclude the musical items of the evening Gwen appeared again with Wilbur Dartnell in Your Eyes Have Told Me So, which they had presented just over two weeks earlier in the Mayoral At Home.

On 14th October 1913 an explosion in the Senghenydd Colliery near Caerphilly in Wales killed 439 miners, making it the worst mining disaster in the history of the United Kingdom.    The explosion was attributed to a spark from signalling igniting firedamp, a mixture of methane and hydrogen; many who were not killed by the explosion itself were killed by the residual gases, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and nitrogen.  The photograph below showing crowds waiting for news of those underground is touching, and the grim industrial atmosphere recalls Blake's "dark Satanic mills," a normal feature of life for so many at the time.  The photograph could well have appeared in the South African press, although it doesn't feature in Gwen's Common-Place Book.  It may even have helped inspire those at the East London Daily Dispatch to raise funds for survivors of the disaster. 

A Grand Sacred Concert was given in aid of the Daily Dispatch funds at the Royal Bio. on Sunday, 26th October 1913, and in their review of the occasion it was noted that "Miss Gwen never gave a better rendering of The Rosary than she did last evening."    They managed to raise £11 3s., a significant contribution to the fund total of £22 18s. 6d.

There was another concert at the Seamen's Institute on Thursday, 13th November 1913, this time given by the crew of Union-Castle S.S. Grantully Castle.  This was the second ship of that name, built in 1910, doing distinguished service during the Great War, and finally being broken up in 1939.  But in this concert the Grantully Castle crew were joined by those from two Norwegian ships also in East London, Ilala and Colonna, bringing the total to about 110 seamen present.  "Loud applause greeted Miss Watson ... the men having pleasant recollections of her previous appearances at the Institute."  Later in the programme she was joined by Wilbur Dartnell again, and "the duet he sang ... with Miss Watson, Your Eyes HaveTold Me So, was one of the biggest hits of the evening."  They raised £2 14s. 10d.

There is another Seamen's Institute concert where the men of the Union-Castle S.S. German performed, but it is undated in Gwen's Common-Place Book.  On this occasion there was a rule that no encores were to be given; however, "in response to an imperative demand the rule had to be relaxed on two or three occasions, especially in the case of Miss Watson, who kindly contributed to the programme by special request of the promoters."  The sum of £2 was raised.

The next item is of considerable political interest: it is a letter dated 3rd December 1913 from John Bisseker to Gwen, presenting her with an unspecified gift, thanking her for her help with the Lovedale Choir.  Bisseker served in public office in East London up to 1907, when he was elected in March of that year as Mayor with a majority of one vote.  He resigned in May and called for a new election, but was not re-elected; but in that same year he also became a Justice of the Peace for East London.  As can be seen on the letterhead, he was a merchant, but was also very active in education, hence the connection with the Lovedale Choir.  The Lovedale Missionary Institute was founded in 1824 and has played an important and complex part in South Africa's evolution of racial policies, particularly in education.  The meeting Gwen assisted in is mentioned in Mission, Science, and Race in South Africa: A. W. Roberts of Lovedale, 1883 – 1938 by Keith Snedegar (Lexington Books, 2015).  A.W. Roberts was appointed to the staff of Lovedale in 1883 where he was a keen promoter of African education.  One of his first political contacts was Col. C. P. Crewe, a member of the House of Assembly and keen supporter of Lovedale and its ideals.  Crewe and Roberts spoke publicly together when the Lovedale Male Choir performed at East London Town Hall in 1913, and, as seen in Bisseker's letter, Gwen must have played some role in the organisation of the event.  In 1939 Bisseker laid the foundation stone of a school which played an important role in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa and was later to become the John Bisseker High School.

An item I am including in this section is a review of Yeomen of the Guard which is undated, apart from Dec 30^th in Gwen's hand.  She had a minor role, but "although she only appeared in a quartette, showed herself to be worthy of a larger place on a future occasion."  I think it likely, therefore, that this dates from around this period in Gwen's career.

Amongst the photographs at the back of the Common-Place Book there are four business cards of people Gwen had met or whose shows she had seen.  They probably range over a number of years, but they all appear on the same page, and amongst them is the suave looking Guy M. Duncan von Arx touring the world with the Great Duncan Co.  I wonder what he did for a living?  Then we have William F. Mitchell, card manipulator and conjurer, and the mysterious E. Morton from Lorenco Marques, Portuguese East Africa.  And finally the more mundane Edward Langford, accompanist from Hammersmith, London.

On the same page as the cards above we find this unidentified portrait which is likely to be of one of the celebrity singers Gwen met during these years.

And finally on the same page we have a photograph which has been torn out,  but tantalisingly a small portion remains, showing two women and a horn loudspeaker on an early gramophone.  I am not sure what that is behind the woman on the right, but it looks very like another gramophone horn. The woman on the left could easily be Gwen, and I know she made a red label recording for HMV in South Africa.  I think it was a duet, the Barcarolle from Offenbach's Les contes d'Hoffmann, and so it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that this photograph was in some way related to that recording.  It would have been issued on a 12" 78 r.p.m. disc, one-sided as was the case in those early days of acoustic recording.  Following the photograph I have added three HMV labels from that period to give some idea of what Gwen's record would have looked like.  The one on the left is a single-sided Paderewski recording of Chopin Op.15 No.1 made in 1911; the middle one shows the British Empire in full swing with Miss Nancy recorded and released in Calcutta.  Paderewski recorded Op.15 No.2 using the latest electrical methods in 1927, and that label is the third one below.  Finally, a contemporary recording of Nevin's The Rosary, one of Gwen's most popular songs, here sung by Irish tenor John McCormack who had settled in America.  As you can see in the video clip, this is a 10" 78 r.p.m. one-sided disc on HMV and made in America, where HMV records were marketed under the Victrola label.  It is extraordinary that in those early days two different versions were acoustically recorded and released under the same catalogue number 64257, the first recording being on 4th April 1912 and the second on 30th March 1915.  It is uncertain which version appears in the video.

Finally in this section is the notice of a concert to be given at 3 p.m. on Christmas Day, 1913, at the Frere Hospital.  The third item in the programme was to be a song, as yet unspecified, performed by Gwen.  Touchingly, as the world was lurching largely unaware into the mass slaughter of the Great War, the proceedings ended, as usual, on a patriotic note with GOD SAVE THE KING.  George V was then on the throne of the British Empire of which the Union of South Africa had been created a dominion in 1909, the same year as Gwen gave her first public performance recorded in the Common-Place Book.

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