In Search of Miss Violet

Posted: November 29, 2012

In Search of Miss Violet:

the personal journey of a Gilbert and Sullivan devotee

David A. Usher

Early Days

            I grew up surrounded by music. Mostly it was 78 rpm records and singing while doing the dishes or travelling in the car, but my mother had given piano recitals in her youth and I remember wishing that she would spend more time practicing and less on keeping the house spotless. My father had a fine tenor voice, but his father had steadfastly refused to let him have singing lessons. The only times I heard him sing in front of an audience was during parties at home. In an audio recording that I made of my dad reminiscing, shortly before he died, he said that his father was “an awkward old bugger - someone had dropped a load of metal on his head”. I never met his father, and indeed we seldom spoke of his side of the family. My dad loved Gilbert and Sullivan, and owned many 78 rpm (and a few 81 rpm!) records of well-known opera singers - Caruso, de Luca,  Gigli, Galli-Curci, Battistini, Hammond. One of my traumatic childhood experiences was stepping on and breaking a 78 rpm record when some of the collection was spread out on the living room carpet. In Sutton Coldfield my sister and I had a piano teacher, a Miss Ringwood - who sported a little black and red hat that looked like a pudding. I did not enjoy these lessons. Indeed, I have a theory that my love of rainy days comes from the non-appearance of Miss Ringwood when it was raining. After we moved to  Cheam in Surrey, we had a Miss Holmes, who my sister remembers as being more congenial.

            In 1948 we emigrated from England to Wellington, New Zealand, and our record collection, but not our piano, came with us. My sister tells me that the piano fetched all of £15 at auction. At that time the New Zealand government had put a price control on houses, so until you were trusted in the community not to blab about the real asking price, there appeared to be no houses for sale. As a result, we lived in the Midland Hotel, and then the St George Hotel for about 6 months. The change in hotels came about when a rat was spotted running through the dining room. Eventually we found a house in Eastbourne - not so convenient for my dad, who had to travel the 16 miles into central Wellington each day, but wonderful for children. In front of our house there was a little-used road, then sand dunes, and then the sea. Rather soon we bought a piano: a Danemann, from Charles Begg’s in Wellington. This piano was tried out at my Mother’s request by the New Zealand pianist Colin Horsley, who happened to be practising in the store. I always wished I could have played the piano better, to accompany my dad. I think he would have liked that. I myself had singing lessons from Stanley Oliver in a penthouse at the top of The Dominion building in downtown Wellington, but at that time I was not allowed to sing tenor.

            After one year of Wellesley College, I entered Wanganui Collegiate School as a boarder, and was there from 1950 to 1954. At that time, the teacher in charge of music was not too fond of theatre, and the teacher in charge of theatre apparently was not too fond of music. The upshot was that the nearest we ever got to putting on a G&S operetta was during the school centenary celebrations in 1954 when a number of us were asked to participate in a re-enactment of a bit of H.M.S. Pinafore, outdoors, to canned music, because the school had apparently produced this show some years earlier. We also played a game of rugby, using very old rules that allowed the players to climb up the goal posts to try to stop a conversion. One of the masters (bless him) used to play G&S  on Sunday evenings to those of us who wanted to listen, from 12”  78 rpm records. I fell in love with the voice of the soprano Winifred Lawson. Fairly soon I bought sets of 78 rpm recordings of Iolanthe, Pirates of Penzance (with Peter Dawson as the Pirate King) and H.M.S. Pinafore. It seemed wrong to me that in June of 1953 Wanganui Girls College put on a production of Iolanthe, but the boys of Wanganui Collegiate were not asked to participate. Another memory from those days was homework sessions in the Day Room. One was forbidden to as much as look up. Accordingly, one day when I had finished my assigned work rather quickly, I spent the rest of the time looking down, writing out from memory all the words of the songs from H.M.S. Pinafore.

The Book

            Well, the time came to leave Wanganui Collegiate forever, and I was fortunate enough to have been awarded one or two school prizes. In a rather nice move, one selected one’s prize by being put in a room, around the walls of which were a large number of newly-purchased books. This is how I came to possess a copy of the third edition of Leslie Baily’s The Gilbert and Sullivan Book as a Harvey Memorial Mathematical prize. One reminder of this is a book plate signed by the headmaster, R. Bruce-Lockhart, dated 8 December 1954, and I believe there is a permanent entry on a plaque that sits on the wall of Big School.

            When I first thumbed through this book, I was intrigued by the section beginning on page 364 entitled “1896: Autumnal Interlude”.

FIN DE SIECLE

1896: AUTUMNAL INTERLUDE

The Alps are glittering under the morning sun, the sky is cloudless, the sweet grass of the ravine is fresh and green. No music but the cowbells and the mountain rivulet. No sign of human life but a prematurely grey-haired man and a young woman sitting by the stream. They are eating peaches, and talking . . . gaily. Premature age is forgotten. In the autumn of his life Sir Arthur Sullivan has made up his mind to propose marriage.

How did he come to care for Miss Violet in this way? Many times in these last weeks at and around Lucerne he has asked himself the question. Of course, he'd known her family for years. A truly musical family ('Anton Rubinstein introduced me to your home, remember?—that day when you were only a child, and I first sat at your piano and played my songs.') . . . Now, only yesterday, he had written out one of those songs again, a love song, and sent it up to her room at the hotel for a twentieth birthday present. Yes, a musical family, but a different social circle from that of Mrs Ronalds. Looking down at the gushing water at their feet, he tries to tell Miss Violet the difference. He goes back over his life.

Years of success. The Joy of it, and the bitterness of it. And the inevitable social round. Mrs Ronalds' salon. Cowes and Cannes. Ascot. Monte. Mayfair. 'At homes.'

Queer how these attachments get hold of one. ‘The unofficial ambassadress of the United States at the Court of St James's' . . . Twenty years ago she'd dazzled him with her glitter, her social eminence. Oh yes, he'd loved her, or thought he did. A magnificent figure of a woman. Queen of the beau monde. And she sang his songs divinely. But some of the links in the chain had worn thin. Illness came. Frustration. Now a solitary old man ('old'?—at fifty-four?) is pushed around in an invalid chair in an hotel at Lucerne . . . until one evening someone murmurs the introductions— 'Miss Violet' . . . 'Sir Arthur'.

And so these last days. Days by the lakeside talking of music, and art, and books. The day when the hotel band struck up a selection from ‘The Yeomen’, and he turned irritably upon her and snapped: 'I suppose you hate my music. We've been together for days and you've never even mentioned it.'

'I love your music. I love every one of your operas.'

'That's Gilbert's success. The wittiest man in the world, Gilbert.'

'The wittiest music in the world, yours.'

And then they turned together and laughed. After that the years seemed to fall from

him. It was the old high-spirited Sullivan. Everyone was charmed by him, men as well

as women. One night in the hotel they met Puccini. The two composers bowed and

conversed breezily. She stood by, cool and gentle, taking it in: the Englishman who

had made his name in al1 but the thing he most desired, grand opera; the Italian, up

and-coming, who had just written ‘La Boheme’, who was going to be all in grand opera

that Sullivan longed to be.

The day came when he awoke and his manservant Louis pulled back the blinds, and

as the sun streamed in he knew he was in love. From his bed he gazed across the lake

at the mountain tops. He thought of what might have been, had she been born twenty years earlier. Violet. Lady Sullivan.

Might have been ? . . . fifty-four and twenty . . . was it yet impossible ? What is age ? Those mountain peaks yonder, white, ageless, beautiful. What do they say?

And now the stream, the cowbells, the peaches. 'Everything is beautiful. I am in love.'

The girl looks up at the great mountains, high, eternal, lovely. He is saying: 'I believe in the here and now. No looking backwards any more. Eyes front! Violet . . . To what are you looking forward?'

'Only to being this day with you . . . to having a perfect day with you.'

*    *    *    *   

'He was very frank with me,' said the grey-haired and still beautiful old lady. She paused, and looked out of her window at the London street. A jet-plane screamed overhead. Somewhere in the neighbourhood a radio was playing boogie-woogie. 'He said he had two years to live. Could I not give him two years of my life? Could I find the love that would renew him ? After that—I should still have my own life before me. He would leave me all he possessed. He said it would have to be a secret wedding— "In London. Round the corner, Hyde Park Square. Registry Office." '

'But I thought it over, and I knew it wouldn't do.' *

            The book also reproduced two letters from a number that Sullivan had written to Violet during their time in Lucerne. The first letter:

Dear Miss Violet

                        What do you and yours propose doing?  Shall we sit under the trees, or lie on the grass, or saunter on the Promenade? Or shall we write a joint letter to your Sister? What time do you wish to see me today. I will of course obey any orders you may give.

            Yours sincerely 

                        A.S.

            And a fragment of the last letter:

Saturday

Good morning I am off in half an hour. It was painful last night. I couldn’t stand it any longer & so I left. Yesterday was the most miserable day I have spent.

            I said I was intrigued by this account, but it would be more accurate to say that I was moved by it, even then at the age of 18.  Who was this Miss Violet?  I tried to imagine what Sullivan might have accomplished if she had said “yes”.  Maybe he would not have died four years later. It is an experiment that cannot be done, and of course I have been accused of being an incurable romantic.#

            These thoughts became semi-buried for many years, although they did surface again from time to time. Meanwhile I left New Zealand for Cambridge, went to Harvard, and finally to Cornell University where I have remained ever since. I soon discovered that there was a thriving Savoyards community here, but for several years did not anticipate actually singing with the company.

_______________________________________________________

            *   In a footnote, Leslie Baily states that these recollections, and the letters, were given to him “by the lady concerned” in 1947.

            #   Much later I discovered a section (page 118)  in Myrtle by Stephen Hudson (pen name for Sydney Schiff, Violet’s eventual husband) where similar thoughts cross the mind of Sir Michael O’Halloran, a character who is clearly based on Sir Arthur Sullivan, while the eponymous heroine Myrtle is based on Violet. He is musing on what to say to her before proposing marriage: “What is time on such a morning? What is age? . . . .   I will tell you of the songs I have not written because you were not there to inspire them but now I will write them. I will write songs for you to sing, songs that shall bring laughter and tears to your eyes for laughter and tears are always together They shall be such songs as no woman ever had written to her before. I will pour into them all that I have missed in life, all that life might have held for me. . . .”

_______________________________________________________

            In 1972 I went along to a Savoyard audition for Patience, just for fun really, and volunteered to sing the male part in “Prithee Pretty Maiden” when a soprano was about to sing it as an audition piece. To my surprise I was offered the part of the Duke (a tenor!), and after this, sang with the Cornell Savoyards in 12-odd shows, over the years 1972 to 1991. I even met my wife through the Cornell Savoyards when I gave a friend, Elaine, a lift back to her apartment after auditions. Barbara was one of her room-mates.

               
               

Legend: Above: L to R, the author, Alfred Kahn, and David Wyatt, during a rehearsal of Cornell Savoyards 1973 Iolanthe.  Right: Heidi Merritt as Phoebe and Robert Farrell as Shadbolt in the Cornell Savoyards 1981 Yeomen of the Guard.

            Familiarity certainly increased my appreciation for Sullivan’s music and Gilbert’s words. There were some outstanding artists in some of these shows: my fondness for Winifred Lawson gave way to an admiration for the more robust voices of Patrice Pickering as Patience in 1972, and Marcia Ragonetti as Phyllis in the 1973 Iolanthe, both shows directed by the wonderful Nancy Cole. In the chorus of Pirates (1974) was Madelyn Levy, who later took the name of Madeleine Renée, and who went on to greater things in the world of opera. 

The Beddington Family

            Once the internet became available, I felt a renewed determination to discover the identity of Miss Violet. A simple search (was it Google then or just Dogpile?) on the terms {“Arthur Sullivan” + Violet + Switzerland} turned up an article that told me that “Miss Violet” was probably Miss Violet Beddington. A search on this name revealed that a series of twenty nine letters had been sold by Sotheby’s at auction in 1999 for £5,750. These letters had been written to Sybil Seligman by Sir Arthur and concerned, inter alia, her younger sister Violet. Sybil’s maiden name was Beddington, and so must have been that of Violet. I called Sotheby’s, expecting to be told that they were not able to let me know the identity of the purchaser, but instead I made contact with a very helpful gentleman who told me that the lot of letters had been bought by Lisa Cox Music Ltd, on behalf of the British Library. This was later confirmed by email correspondence with Dr. Simon Maguire of Books and Manuscripts. After a decent amount of time they became available in the BL catalog, and for the trifling sum of £40 I secured copies of them.

            The first of these letters is dated 17 Jan 1896, and it begins “Dear Mrs Seligman”. As time progressed this became “My dear Sybil”, “My dearest little Sybil”, “My darling Sybil”.  Many of these letters mention Violet by name or by inference. Some authors have belittled this episode in Sullivan’s life, but to me these letters show the enduring depth of Sullivan’s feeling for the young Violet Beddington.

            One dated 26 Aug: ‘96,  Wednesday night, from St Moritz was written on crossed-out River House, Walton-on-Thames stationery:

            My dear Sybil (the author begs to acknowledge his indebtedness to the proprietor of the copyright D. S. Seligman Esq. for permission to use this name.) I know you are calling me names - ill mannered brute, heartless beast, and other feminine terms of endearment -  for not writing to you before; but I am sure you will forgive me when I tell you that I have no excuse whatever to offer! Sheer laziness, and dislike of pen, ink & paper are the only reasons. Having thus obtained your forgiveness I will proceed. Shall I describe my feelings when the carriage containing you and your husband disappeared leaving me alone? No, I will not attempt it. I felt miserable all day, and walked about in solitude to avoid all idle chatterers. . . .

            The next letter was written back in Lucerne:  

___________________________

Grand Hotel National, Lucerne

Saturday morning, 3. a.m. (or Friday night!)   What a beastly pen!

My dearest little Sybil

            I can’t sleep, & so I have got up again to hold a little conversa with you dear. And what shall I say to begin with? Shall I make excuses and say that I stayed on at St Moritz until I thought your parents would have left Lucerne? This true to a certain degree, for I really had little hope idea of finding them here, but all the way I nourished the hope that perhaps they were not gone - that they might have lingered on if the weather were fine. When I arrived on Wednesday evening, all doubt was dispelled for there were the cards of all the family on my sittingroom table, left during the day! So common courtesy required that I should return their visit, didn’t it? Accordingly I dressed, dried, & then went to find them at the Schweitzerhof. Violet saw me as I entered the hotel & came to me, introduced me to her parents, and - well, I have been with them from morning to night ever since. Your father is a dear, and I love your Mother. Is that not a sufficient reason for being so much with them? Am I a fool? Yes; you are saying so, and so am I. I say it every moment of the day. At every moment my pride revolts at the humiliating position I have placed myself in. My manhood and my whole past career cry out against me - cry shame upon me for my weakness, & yet though I see and know the right, I follow the wrong. And what does it all mean? When I say I will go away, Violet says “No, you musn’t”, and tonight the tears were in her eyes. I have not much chance of talking to her alone, but even with such little opportunity, I discover in her far deeper feelings - far more sensitiveness than either you or I gave her credit for. She is not strong enough to fight. She can offer passive resistance, but she has not the energy to attack. God forbid that I should dull her young life by trying to force her into such an attitude; it would be criminal. All I can do in the future is to pass my life in solving the question “What am I to do”? unless a Higher Power steps in and solves it for me, one way or the other. The merciless part of it is that I feel so young, alas. . . .

___________________________

            The last letter, written at the turn of the century, is headed: “1. Jan: 180  1900 (That’s the 2nd time today I have written the date wrong.)”

            He died on November 22nd that same year, 1900.

            I soon learned that Sybil was briefly Puccini’s mistress and also his long-term friend, and the meeting between Sullivan and Puccini at Lucerne then assumed a deeper meaning. In his book Puccini Among Friends, Sybil’s son Vincent states that of the approximately seven hundred surviving letters that Puccini wrote to his mother, the earliest one that he could find was from October 22nd, 1904, and was an acceptance of a dinner invitation. However, he allowed that they had probably first met earlier that same year at the home of the Tostis. But if Violet was correctly remembering events from 50 years earlier in her account to Leslie Baily in 1947, it is possible that Sybil met Puccini in Lucerne in 1896. On the one hand, Violet said that Sullivan met Puccini there, and Sybil and David were with Sullivan in Switzerland at least some of that time. On the other hand, they may have remained in St Moritz, which even today, is about a three hour drive from Lucerne. This remains an interesting but unresolved question.

            A potential source of information about the Beddington family was the pianist Carola, wife of Miron Grindea. Carola was the sister-in-law of Arnold Daghani; Arnold was introduced by Carola to Violet Schiff (née Beddington) in London in 1961.  He wrote: “We became friends. She would give us slide-lights of her life, play to us records she had registered of her singing voice in her youth, and let us have a glimpse into her friendship with Katherine Mansfield”. Arnold transcribed (in his ornate style) six letters that Katherine Mansfield had written to Violet, and I managed to secure copies of these letters and a slightly blurry photo of Violet in later life through the kindness of Deborah Schultz of the University of Sussex. The letters had been reproduced in 1965 in the journal Adam, which was published by Miron Grindea (d. 1995).  I tried without success to reach Carola by phone in November 2005  at the “International Society for the Study of Tension in Performance” which she had founded. She died on July 10th in 2009, aged 95.

            Another internet hit was the article “In Search of Violet Schiff” written by the British author, Julian Fane, and published in The Cornhill Magazine in 1970. (Hence the title of my present essay). Until I  received a copy of this article from the library at Auburn University I was not sure that it was about Violet née Beddington, but it was. During a phone conversation with Julian Fane on November 20th, 2005, he told me that his book Eleanor is often assumed to be about Violet, but actually was about his very good friend Joan Moore. There was apparently some awkwardness when Violet’s husband Sydney felt attracted to Joan, but the situation eventually resolved itself. He very kindly sent me a copy of the book. He also told me that he had not known about the Sullivan/Violet connection. He commented that Violet was helpful and inspiring but also could be a bit “destructive”. As an example he mentioned the manuscript of his first book Morning, and Violet sort-of taking over - “you must not type it yourself, you must use my secretary”.

            In December 2005, I wrote a letter to Mike Leigh, wondering if he would consider a follow-up to his movie “Topsy Turvy”, carrying the story into the next century, and including Violet’s story. I finished with: “If something like this story ever found its way into a movie, I have one request: to be present at the filming of one scene: the proposal in Switzerland”.  In his friendly reply of 10 January, 2006 he wrote: “Regarding the notion of a film on the subject, I’m sorry to say that it’s not something I would want to pursue. I feel I have said all I would wish to about G&S in ‘Topsy Turvy’. So I’m sorry, but I won’t be able to invite you to the shooting of the proposal scene in Switzerland!”

            I was aware of the existence of a short book on the Beddingtons: The Rest of the Family: a letter to Nicolas Bentley by Frederick Beddington.  This had been published in 1963 by Stellar Press in an edition of just 100 copies. The British Library owned a copy, but for copyright reasons were not able to send me a photocopy of the whole book, even though it was only 32 pages long. Stellar Press no longer existed, but I identified two of its former directors, John Ryder and Bill Hummerstone. John had died in 2001, and I had no idea how I could go about getting permission from the copyright holder. Another possibility was the Middle East University Library, but Cornell Library was unable to arrange an interlibrary loan with them. On one visit to the UK I got as far as obtaining a reader’s card for the British Library but time ran out, and I had to return to the USA with The Rest of the Family unread.

Contact

            By now it was abundantly clear that “Miss Violet” was indeed Violet Beddington, but information about her and her family seemed not to be widely available. However, the internet was still there. I found that the journalist Christopher Long had posted an obituary for a Frederick Beddington and I wrote asking if it was indeed a Beddington of the same family. He did not know, but left my query up on the web:

Subject: Frederick Beddington

Date: 7 January, 2005

Dear Mr. Long, I just came across an undated obituary for Colonel Frederick Beddington that I believe you wrote, and I am wondering if you know if he was the nephew of Violet Schiff (née Beddington)?

Regards, David A. Usher

He replied:

            David -

            Thank you for your message. I wish I could answer your question . . .  Fred was one of those people who make a huge mark on all those they cared about and I’m very happy to have been one of them. But as for the Schiff connection, I just don’t know . . . . . . . .  In the late 1980s I knew a young man who was, I think, Fred’s nephew but I can’t for the life of me remember his name. If more occurs to me I shall certainly let you know. . .

Best  wishes -

CHRISTOPHER LONG

[... To which I replied, on 9 Jan 2005..]

            Christopher, many thanks for your prompt reply. The Frederick Beddington in whom I have an interest apparently wrote a book entitled ‘The Rest of the Family’, in which he (as I understand it) mentions his aunts Violet, Ada and Sybil. When Violet was about twenty years old, Sir Arthur Sullivan (in his fifties) proposed to her, and she turned him down. Interestingly, Violet and her husband (Sydney Schiff) also had a reputation for aiding struggling artists. Could this be the same Frederick Beddington?  , , , , , , , , Regards, David Usher.

            So Violet not only had elder sisters (Ada and Sybil), but if there was a nephew named Beddington, they must also have had a brother. It was only later that I discovered the 1993 book by Julie Speedie,  Wonderful Sphinx, about Violet’s older sister Ada Leverson (née Beddington). There is a quite fetching photograph of the young Violet Beddington reproduced in this book, as well as photographs of several of her siblings: Ada, Sybil, Evelyn, and George. Another book with photos that I came across later is Richard, Myrtle and I, written by Violet’s eventual husband Sydney Schiff, under his pen name of Stephen Hudson. (A book is soon to be published Sydney and Violet by Stephen Klaidman).

            Five years after Christopher posted my correspondence, out of the blue I had an email from Charles Beddington of Savile Row, asking if I was still interested in the Beddington family: 

Date: Wed, 6 Oct 2010

Subject: Frederick Beddington

Dear Professor Usher,

By chance I spotted on Christopher Long's site emails from you of five years

ago expressing an interest in Frederick Beddington. If you are still

interested, I would be delighted to try to answer any questions you might

have.

Yours Sincerely,

Charles Beddington

            Of course I jumped at the chance.

            Thanks to Charles, the details of the Beddington family were soon made much clearer. Samuel and Zillah had eight children (another one did not survive and was unnamed). The eldest was Ada, then Evelyn, George, Charles, Sybil, Frank, and Arthur. Violet was the prettiest and the youngest and indeed was sometimes called Babs or Baby by her family. Her birth certificate shows that she was born on August 20th, 1874, and Sir Arthur Sullivan therefore proposed to her just after she turned 22. The Charles who had contacted me was the grandson of Violet’s brother Charles. He very kindly sent me a photocopy of The Rest of the Family and an interpretation of who is who in the frontispiece of that book (see figure below). So Charles, the great-grandson of Samuel and Zillah, was the nephew of the Frederick who wrote The Rest of the Family.

            Last year (2011) we all met in London at Cecconi’s restaurant: Charles and his wife Amanda, plus my wife and children and my sister from New Zealand. Seven people meeting at seven o’clock on the seventh day of June. Charles had brought with him to show us a music manuscript, a photo of Violet that I had never seen before (see reproduction below), and postcards written to Violet from Tosti, Puccini and Caruso. We passed them all around the table. The manuscript was of Sullivan’s song “Dearest Heart” - the very same manuscript that was mentioned in “Autumnal Interlude”. It was signed (see photo) “Written out in G flat for Miss Violet Beddington by Arthur Sullivan, 20 Aug: 1896”.  This meeting brought a gratifying sense of closure to my personal quest of nearly sixty years. That was a heady meal, and I scarcely remember what I had to eat.

____________________

Acknowledgements:  I am enormously grateful to Charles Beddington for his kindness, his help in researching the later stages of this article, and for providing the picture of Violet Beddington at Folkestone. I also thank Daniel Sangiuseppe for identifying the exact spot where that photograph was taken, and Alan Taylor for pointing me in the right direction. I am grateful to my wife for many discussions and for a critical reading of the text that resulted in numerous improvements, and to my sister and to Judy Armstrong for their superior memory of some events.

            © 2012, David A. Usher.  The author lives in Ithaca, NY, USA, and is an Associate Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Cornell University.

Above Left: The frontispiece of The Rest of the Family: The people in the opera box were identified by Charles Beddington as, L to R: Sybil (Seligman), Ada (Leverson), Paolo Tosti, Zillah (from the portrait by Millais), Puccini, Evelyn (Beddington-Behrens).  Above Right: Charles Beddington at Cecconi’s Restaurant, London.

Photo of Sir Arthur Sullivan’s signature on “My Dearest Heart”.

      

  

Violet Beddington, at Folkestone, year unknown. This photo was taken at the back of what is now The Burlington Hotel (see comparison photo on the right, taken November 2012). (Violet photo courtesy of Charles Beddington. Burlington Hotel photo courtesy of Daniel Sangiuseppe).