Basil Street Blues

by Michael Holroyd

Italian opera seemed what Lucy was heading for even before she sang Amina in Lee’s production, at the Theatre Royal, Dublin, of Bellini’s La Sonnambula. Lee had begun to organize musical evenings in the Antient Concert Room at 42½ Great Brunswick Street. These were often in aid of hospitals and would include a popular overture, some ballads and choruses, and the strengthening contribution from a regimental band. For the Shakespeare Tercentenary of 1864, having worked up a programme of Purcell and Schubert, Lee emerged at the head of his Amateur Musical Society as an orchestral conductor. He had no scholarship but, conducting from a first violin or vocal score, gave the right time to the band. ‘There was practically no music in Dublin except the music he manufactured,’ Shaw wrote.

  ‘He kept giving concerts... and he had to provide all the singers for them. If he heard a flute mourning or a fiddle scraping in a house as he walked along the street, he knocked at the door & said “You come along & play in my orchestra.” If a respectable citizen came for twelve lessons to entertain small tea parties, he presently had that amazed gentleman, scandalous in tights & tunic, singing as “il rio di Luna” to my mother’s Azucena, or Alfonso to her Lucrezia, as the case might be. He coached them into doing things utterly beyond their natural powers.’

  ‘This favourite Society,’ reported the Irish Times on 30 May 1865, ‘...includes many of the most distinguished amateur vocalists in the city... On few occasions has the Ancient Concert’s Music Hall contained a larger and more fashionable attendance... and the concert was in every respect most judiciously carried out.’ This was typical of the notices that the Amateur Musical Society received in the late 1860s. But Lee wanted to conduct oratorio festivals and operas; and his ambitions were set upon London.

  *

  It was probably in 1869 that Lee first began to dream of a conquest of London. He appears to have taken Bessie Shaw into his confidence. On 30 October that year Bessie and her brother made an agreement with their father whereby the son received £2,500 (equivalent to £97,500 in 1997) and Bessie £1,500 paid to her at the rate of £100 a year ‘for her own sole and separate use and free from the debts control or engagements of her husband’. This was in addition to £400 settled on Agnes either through the estate of Ellen Whitcroft or Mrs Shaw’s own trust of 1852. Bessie now had the maximum financial independence it was in her power to command.

  Six weeks later, Lee published a book entitled The Voice: Its Artistic Production, Development, and Preservation. Encased between heavy dark green boards elaborately stamped in gold, with a woodcut on its cover from Maclise’s Origins of the Harp, this volume of 130 pages of ‘agreeably tinted’ paper represented Lee’s passport to a larger musical world. It had been ghosted, Shaw tells us, ‘by a scamp of a derelict doctor whom he entertained for that purpose’ – probably Malachi J. Kilgarriff, Demonstrator at the Ledwich School of Anatomy, a Catholic and one-time neighbour of Lee’s in Harrington Street.

  Not long after this, while still thirteen, Sonny was sent off to be interviewed by a firm of cloth merchants, Scott, Spain & Rooney, on one of Dublin’s quays. His employment in the warehouse loading bales was on the point of being settled when the senior partner walked in and declared that ‘I was too young, and that the work was not suitable to me. He evidently considered that my introducer, my parents, and his young partner, had been inconsiderate... I have not forgotten his sympathy.’

  Unable to convert him from an expenditure at school to a source of income in the warehouse, they had failed to get him off their hands. He returned for another year to the Dublin English and Scientific Commercial Day School. Then, through the influence of his Uncle Frederick he was found employment as office boy in a ‘leading and terribly respectable’ firm of land agents, Uniacke Townshend & Co. He started work there on 26 October 1871 with an annual salary of £18 (equivalent to £875 in 1997). He was no longer Sonny to his family, but the name he most loathed: George.

  Six weeks later an odd, apparently insignificant thing happened: Lee changed his name. In all press notices and legal documents he had been George J. Lee, the J. sometimes appearing as John. After 2 December 1871 the J. is replaced by a V. often lengthened to Vandeleur. This flowering of his name coincided with a fresh thrust to his musical ambitions. Since the publication of The Voice, Lee had been extending his Society beyond the giving of charitable concerts for the poor – increasing his advertisements in the press together with the number and glory of his patrons which, by 1871, included His Excellency the Lord Lieutenant. He had by now begun producing Italian Opera (mixed into the menu with burlesque and miscellaneous band music) at the Theatre Royal and the newly opened Gaiety Theatre – taking these productions on tour to Limerick and Cork, and making a reconnaissance himself to London.

  The opposition to Lee was led by Sir Robert Prescott Stewart, an ambitious academic who had won many prizes for his glees and rose to become the most highly regarded Irish musician of his day. Stewart made his first move in the summer of 1871 – persuading the more eminent members of Lee’s committee to resign. At a meeting on 11 November, following the congratulations on increased membership and money, the Irish Times reported that ‘some misunderstanding has arisen as to members of the Society performing in English or other operas at the theatre [the Theatre Royal], and in consequence of which a considerable number of the committee refused to offer themselves for re-election’.

  Lee acted immediately. He reconstituted his Society into the Amateur Musical, Operatic and Dramatic Society, replaced the various Lords and Generals with a sixteen-man Committee that included a Colonel, two Majors and ten Captains, and announced: A GRAND MILITARY, DRAMATIC AND OPERATIC PERFORMANCE WILL BE GIVEN AT THE NEW GAIETY THEATRE.

  In January 1872, Lee transformed his amateurs into the New Philharmonic Society – a title that signalled his ambition to replace the almost fifty-year-old Philharmonic – and, under one title or another, led them indefatigably through concerts, oratorio festivals and truncated operas. Bessie, as his musical adjutant, was indispensable to him, arranging orchestral accompaniments, copying out band parts, composing songs (‘The Parting Hour’, ‘The Night is Closing Round, Mother’) under the nom de plume ‘Hilda’ and singing with what the Irish Times described as ‘artistic grace and expression’. Her voice, which ‘never expressed eroticism’, was particularly thrilling in the interpretation of songs about bereaved lovers seeking reunion in the next world.

  So successful had Lee become that on 19 September he bought the lease of Torca Cottage (which up to then he had merely rented). Though many of his concerts were advertised as being in aid of charity, only what was termed ‘the Surplus’ found its way to various hospitals. This usually amounted to about £25 – whereas Lee himself, so John O’Donovan has calculated, ‘would have pocketed a sum not far off £200 for each concert’.

  Early in 1873 Lee fulfilled one of his major ambitions by conducting the Dublin Musical Festival. ‘The crowds of persons who besieged each portion of the hall soon filled to its utmost capacity, every particle of available space obtainable... the large doors leading into the building at the end of the Hall had to be thrown open and numbers were content to obtain standing room in the outer galleries,’ reported the Irish Times. After congratulating Lee on his splendid results, the reviewer predicted that with patience he would surely ‘reap the rewards his energies and abilities deserve’.

  Eager for these rewards, Lee prominently advertised two benefit concerts of ‘Amateur Italian Opera’ for himself and the leader of his orchestra, the violinist R. M. Levey, in late March or early April. But Robert Prescott Stewart was already at work; with his encouragement the debenture holders availed themselves of their right to one free ticket and crowded the theatre. On 5 April, Lee and Levey published a sarcastic announcement in the Irish Times in which they begged ‘to return their grateful thanks (?) to the many debenture holders who honoured their BENEFIT... by making use of their FREE admissions’.

  The deciding battle was fought over the 1873 Exhibition the following m
onth. In his opening concert, Lee, having assembled a combined chorus and orchestra of over five hundred, gave a performance of Mendelssohn’s Athalie. Three thousand or more people attended the Concert Hall and the Irish Times reported that ‘the five hundred voices blended most harmoniously’. Stewart was in the audience and next day in the Daily Express he published a scathing criticism of the performance, anonymously. Although Mr Lee had been ‘heartily applauded’ by his own chorus, Stewart concluded: ‘Indiscriminate praise is worthless, and e’er long, heartily despised, even by those who are the objects of it.’ In private Stewart was more outspoken. On page 50 of his copy of The Annals of the Theatre Royal, Dublin, he noted in the margin next to Lee’s name: ‘an impostor, who traded successfully on the vanity of amateur singers: he had a few aliases; now Mr Geo. Lee; again Mr Geo. J. Lee: and also J. Vandeleur Lee; at last he was Vandeleur Lee simply’. In a letter to Joseph Robinson, he admitted: ‘I did in my time one good work in Dublin. I unmasked one arrant impostor and drove him away.’

  The details of this ‘unmasking’ are unknown. On 26 May Lee gave his last concert in Dublin. The attendance was disappointing. At the beginning of June, having abruptly cancelled another concert, he left Dublin for ever and his place as conductor of the New Philharmonic was taken by Sir Robert Prescott Stewart.

  Lee had gone to London. A few days later, on 17 June, her twenty-first wedding anniversary, Bessie Shaw followed him, taking Agnes on the boat with her, and at Hatch Street ‘all musical activity ceased’.

  8

  Marking Time

  The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; thats the essence of inhumanity.

  The Devil’s Disciple

  ‘We did not realize, nor did she, that she was never coming back.’ But there was much that the young George must have realized, and the later Shaw misremembered. The only suggestion that he had known of Lee’s losing battle with Stewart is an acknowledgement in the 1935 Preface to London Music that ‘Lee became the enemy of every teacher of singing in Dublin; and they reciprocated heartily’. But he gave as the reason for Lee’s departure from Ireland his having reached the Dublin limit of excellence: ‘Dublin in those days seemed a hopeless place for an artist; for no success counted except a London success.’

  In the Shavian version, therefore, ‘Lee did not depart suddenly from Dublin... there was nothing whatever sudden or unexpected about it.’ George obviously knew that his mother had left within a fortnight of Lee but in answer to one of his biographers Shaw wrote: ‘As to your question whether Lee’s move to London and my mother’s were simultaneous, they could not have been. Lee had to make his position in London before he could provide the musical setting for my mother and sister. But the break-up of the family was an economic necessity anyhow, because without Lee we could not afford to keep up the house.’ It was towards this ‘economic necessity’ Shaw pointed his biographers.

  ‘My father’s business was not prospering: it was slowly dying. Then there was my eldest sister Lucy... She seemed to have a future as a prima donna; and this was about the only future that presented itself as an alternative to a relapse into squalid poverty, and the abandonment of the musical activity which had come to be my mother’s whole life.

  There was only one solution possible, granting that my mother and father could be quite as happy apart as together, to say the least. Lee was soon able to report a success: all the West End clamoring for lessons at a guinea, and his house in Park Lane a fashionable musical centre. This was clearly the opening for Lucy. It did not take very long for my mother to make up her mind. She sold up Hatch St., after a reconnaissance in London; settled my father and myself in furnished lodgings; and took a house for herself and her two daughters in Victoria Grove, Fulham Road... a couple of miles from Park Lane.’

  As to George Carr Shaw: ‘I should think it was the happiest time of his life.’

  When Lee arrived in London he put up in lodgings at Ebury Street where he remained a year. A mile away, at 13 Victoria Grove, Bessie and Agnes were presently joined by Lucy. Though Bessie continued to sing and work for Lee, who was in and out of Victoria Grove very much in the old fashion, it was probably important that they lived apart. According to McNulty, George Carr Shaw initiated court proceedings citing Lee ‘not as a criminal offender against the sacredness of Holy Matrimony but rather as an object of jealousy to the Petitioner’. Their ‘reconnaissance’, as Shaw calls it, lasted nine months during which time they were paying the rent for two separate premises in addition to the rent at Hatch Street which must partly invalidate the argument of ‘economic necessity’. It was not until the beginning of March 1874 that Bessie returned to Dublin to sell up the furniture in Hatch Street, raise what money she could, and move her husband and son into rooms at 61 Harcourt Street. Then for the last time she left Dublin with her two daughters and returned to London. Perhaps because of some out-of-court arrangement with George Carr Shaw who agreed to pay her one pound a week, she did not live at the same address as Lee. In April he was to cut his last connection with Ireland by selling the lease of Torca Cottage to a musical colleague, Julian Marshall, from whom he afterwards rented 13 Park Lane in London.

  The departure of his mother and Lee was a tragedy for young George. From the pictures in the National Gallery, the hills and bays of Dalkey and Killiney, the music that filled Hatch Street he had woven ‘a sort of heaven which made the material squalor of my existence as nothing’. Shaw represents this daydream world as having been extinguished when he was ten, but the evidence suggests that, especially in his ambitions to be an artist or musician, they persisted until his mother finally left him at the age of sixteen. Instead of an artist, he was a clerk; he would enjoy no more summers at Torca; and ‘I heard no more music’.

  But his mother had not sold the piano. So he bought a technical handbook and taught himself the alphabet of musical notation. He learnt the keyboard from a diagram; then he got out his mother’s vocal score of Don Giovanni and arranged his fingers on the notes of the first chord. This took ten minutes, ‘but when it sounded right at last, it was worth all the trouble it cost’. What he suffered, ‘what everybody in the house suffered, whilst I struggled on... will never be told’. But he acquired what he wanted: ‘the power to take a vocal score and learn its contents as if I had heard it rehearsed by my mother and her colleagues’. From this practice and his reading of textbooks, he also mastered the technical knowledge he would need to become a music critic in London. It was a wonderful example of the advantages of deprivation.

  His desk and cash box at the ‘highly exclusive gentlemanly estate office’ gave him ‘the habit of daily work’. For fifteen months, during which his salary was increased from £18 to £24, he filed and manufactured copies of the firm’s business letters, kept a postage account, bought penny rolls for the staff’s lunch and combined the duties of office with errand boy. In February 1873, after the cashier absconded, George was employed as a substitute. The work gave him no difficulty. ‘I, who never knew how much money I had of my own (except when the figure was zero), proved a model of accuracy as to the money of others.’ His salary doubled to £48. He bought himself a tailed coat, remodelled his sloped and straggled handwriting into an imitation of his predecessor’s compact script and ‘in short, I made good in spite of myself’.

  He became accustomed to handling large sums of money, and to collecting weekly rents by tram each Tuesday, tiny sums from slum dwellers in Terenure – an experience he had not forgotten when he came to write Widowers’ Houses. But ‘my heart was not in the thing’. He was never uncivil, never happy. He felt orphaned. Thirty-five years later he poured out his bitterness through the nameless clerk in Misalliance who seeks to avenge his mother’s shame of bearing him out of wedlock:

  ‘I spend my days from nine to six – nine hours of daylight and fresh air – in a stuffy little den counting another man’s money... I enter and enter, and add and add, and take money and give change, a
nd fill cheques and stamp receipts; and not a penny of that money is my own: not one of those transactions has the smallest interest for me... Of all the damnable waste of human life that ever was invented, clerking is the very worst.’

  Uniacke Townshend ‘was saturated with class feeling which I loathed’. The office was overstaffed with gentleman apprentices, mostly university men, who had paid large premiums for the privilege of learning a genteel profession and who were called Mister while George was plain Shaw. It was his involuntary feeling of inferiority among these colleagues that drove him to excel.

  Art was the great solvent of bigotries and snobberies. George found he was most popular with the apprentices in his role as maestro di cappella. In his imagination he had become a Lee-like presence, replacing Townshend, and providing the young men there with operatic tuition as value for their premiums. ‘I recall one occasion,’ he wrote, ‘when an apprentice, perched on the washstand with his face shewing above the screen... sang Ah, che la morte so passionately that he was unconscious of the sudden entry of the senior partner, Charles Uniacke Townshend, who stared stupended at the bleating countenance above the screen, and finally fled upstairs, completely beaten by the situation.’ This represented a victory for George over Townshend whom, McNulty recalled, he disliked ‘chiefly because he put an “H” in his name, flagrant evidence, in Shaw’s opinion, of middle class snobbery’. Townshend was ‘a pillar of the Church, of the Royal Dublin Society, and of everything else pillarable in Dublin’.

  In his need for someone to look up to and learn from he had fastened at Harcourt Street on another Superman. Chichester Bell took the place of Lee in George’s life. He was a far more sophisticated man: physician, chemist, amateur boxer and accomplished pianist. Where other boys collected stamps or trailed girls, George lusted after information. With Bell, who was responsible for converting him to Wagner, George studied everything from physics to pathology, universal alphabets and ‘Visible Speech’, and completed his education in Ireland.