Cinesound Studios in the 1930s and ‘40s — Striving for a Home-Grown Australian Cinema in the Early Sound Era

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Cinema, Heritage & Conservation, Leisure activities, Local history, Memorabilia, Performing arts, Popular Culture, Travel

Cinesound is a name that resonates brightly in the history of Australia’s film industry – it harks back to a time when the indigenous industry still had a place of some significance in the pecking order of world cinema. The establishment of Cinesound Studios (in 1931) to make talking motion pictures, evolved out of a group of movie exhibiting companies (including Australasian Films and Union Theatres) which had coalesced into Greater Union Theatres in the Twenties.

In 1925 Australasian Films purchased a roller skating rink at 65 Ebley Street, Bondi Junction, in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. Australasian converted part of the premises into a film studio but maintained the skating rink as an ongoing commercial concern to help finance the studios’ film production (by day a film studio, by night a skating rink) [‘Cinesound: From roller rink to sound stage’, (Waverley Library), www.waverley.nsw.gov.au].

# 1 Studios Bondi Junction ⬇

Greater Union (henceforth GUT) was involved in all forms of the movie business – production, distribution and exhibition. The Bondi Studios made a few silent films in the late 1920s, like The Adorable Outcast and most notably The Term of His Natural Life which cost £60,000 and bombed badly at the box office [‘Cinesound Productions’, Sydney Morning Herald, 06-Aug-1934 (Trove).

Stuart F Doyle, GUT managing director, appointed former film publicist Ken G Hall as general manager of the newly formed Cinesound Productions. Two more Cinesound studio locations were opened, one at nearby Rushcutters Bay and the other at St Kilda (in Melbourne). Over an eight-year period (1932-40), with Hall at the helm as producer-director, Cinesound produced 17 feature films (16 of which were directed by Hall). The first of the sequence, On Our Selection, revolved round the adventures of one of Australian cinema’s most popular characters, Dad Rudd and his family. The film, benefiting from a new sound-recording system invented in Tasmania, was a box office triumph for Cinesound, earning £46,000 in Australia and New Zealand by the end of 1933, providing a tremendous fillip for the fledgling studios [Andrew Pike & Ross Cooper, Australian Film 1900-1977: A Guide to Feature Film Production, (1998)].

Studios # 1 at Bondi Junction※ provided a large interior space for film production, over 20,000 square feet…with more than 100 craftsmen on the staff, the facility was equipped to complete “all stages of production, processing and sound recording, in the preparation of topical, scenic, educational, industrial, and microscopic films” [SMH, 06-Aug-1934, loc.cit.]. Some newspapers of the day erroneously referred to the main studios as being #3 and the location as Waverley (an adjoining suburb of Bondi Junction).

Cinesound and Hall exploited On Our Selection’s popularity with a series of sequels, Grandad Rudd, Dad and Dave Come to Town and Dad Rudd, MP. Of these the ‘Dad and Dave’ entry especially proved a hit, matching the profitability of the original movie.

↗ Ken G Hall (centre) with American actress Helen Twelvetrees during filming of ‘Thoroughbred’ (photo: Mitchell Library)

Sydney’s ‘Little Hollywood’
While Ken G Hall’s cinematic canvas was unmistakably Australian (only one of the Cinesound movies was not set in Australia), his approach to film-making saw Hollywood clearly as the model. With the characteristic “spirit of a showman”✺, Hall wanted to shape Cinesound Studios in the Hollywood mould⊡…to create a “Little Hollywood” with a star system, hyped-up promotion of the studios’ movies, etc. [Waverley Lib, loc.cit.].

86E9EA2C-40D6-490B-AE60-0B42CEDDDFA9

↗ Twelvetrees outside Cinesound Studios

FT and Efftee Studios
Sydney-based Cinesound’s domestic rival in the film-making caper was Melbourne’s Efftee Studios, started by theatrical entrepreneur Frank W Thring (FT) in 1930. Thring produced the first commercially-viable sound feature-length film in Australia, Diggers (1931) in collaboration with Pat Hanna. Efftee, unlike Cinesound though, had to import the optical sound system for its movies from the USA. [‘Efftee Studios’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. Other notable Efftee films of the Thirties include an adaption of CJ Dennis’ The Sentimental Bloke to the screen, and several George Wallace vehicles, His Royal Highness, Harmony Row and A Ticket in Tatts. Thring’s premature death in 1935 put paid to Efftee Studios’ productions.

 

⬆️ Australian cinema’s long tradition of Bushranger flicks beginning with the original 1906 feature film

The outlawing of bushranger films  
A 1930s Cinesound project for a film based on the popular Australian novel, Robbery Under Arms was quashed as it would have transgressed the standing prohibition by the NSW government (in force since 1912), banning movies about bushrangers✪ [‘Bonuses for Films’, Sydney Morning Herald, 20-Oct-1934 (Trove); ‘Bushranger ban’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].

Shirley Ann Richards: Cinesound’s contract female star  
In accordance with Ken G Hall’s star-making approach, he fostered the career of actress Shirley Ann Richards, starring her in several of his films (It Isn’t Done, Tall Timbers, Lovers and Luggers and Dad and Dave Come to Town). Richards, Cinesound’s only star under long-term contract, later emigrated to America and had a reasonably high profile Hollywood career (under the name Ann Richards).

The Kellaway brothers and Cinesound  
Alec Kellaway and his more famous brother Cecil were feature players for Hall and Cinesound. Alec was a regular performer, appearing in a raft of the studio’s movies including The Broken Melody, Mr Chedworth Steps Out and several of the Dad Rudd series. South African-born Cecil Kellaway started his acting career on the Australian stage, establishing himself first as a top Australian theatre star before appearing in two Cinesound films where his performances opened studio doors in Hollywood for him…Kellaway subsequently carved out a career as a major character actor in numerous US films.

George Wallace, Aussie “king of comedy”  
In addition to being a prominent actor in Efftee Studios musical-comedies, George Wallace was Ken G Hall’s “go-to” favourite comic performer, starring in two late 1930s Cinesound films directed by Hall – Let George Do It and Gone to the Dogs.With the outbreak of world war Cinesound called a halt on feature film production. During the war years the studios directed all energies into making newsreels, initially covering the war against Japan and beyond that on all aspects of Australiana.

Newsreel rivalry: Cinesound Vs Movietone: the focus on newsreels by Cinesound was not a novel innovation. From its outset Cinesound produced newsreels – short documentary films containing news stories and items of topical interest – in competition with the rival Fox Movietone company. The two newsreels differed in content, Cinesound concentrated on Australian only topics while Movietone covered a mix of international and national news✤.
Newsreels in Australia prior to 1956 occupied a unique place in media and communications. Before the introduction of television, cinema-goers’ exposure to newsreels (part of the “warm-up” for the main feature) were the only images Australians saw of their land – the footage of elections, natural disasters and other such events [Waverley Lib, loc.cit.]. Thus, newsreels like the Cinesound Review, with its distinctive red kangaroo symbol, were an important source of news and current affairs, and were an integral part of the cinema program [‘Cinesound Movietone Australian Newsreels’, (ASO) (Poppy De Souza), www.aso.gov.au]✙. According to Anthony Buckley, the newsreels reflected Ken G Hall’s “pride and spirited nationalism” [Buckley, A, ‘Obituary: Ken G. Hall’, The Independent (London), 17-Feb-1994].

The studios site post-Cinesound
In 1951 Cinesound sold off the Ebley Street building which became a factory manufacturing American soft drink. However, between 1956 and 1973 the building reverted to the world of visual communications, housing various film and television production companies including Ajax Films. Following that, it housed a furniture retailer. Today it is the home of a Spotlight store (fabrics and home interiors) [Waverley Lib, loc.cit.].

Ken G Hall in his autobiography contended that Cinesound Productions never lost money on any feature films. Some did very well – crime drama The Silence of Dean Maitland, for instance, for an outlay of £10,000 returned takings of more than £70,000 in Australia and the UK [Graham Shirley & Brian Adams, Australian Cinema: The First Eighty Years, (1989)]. One Cinesound movie however, strictly-speaking, probably did lose money…Roy Rene’s single venture into celluloid, Strike Me Lucky, in which ‘Mo’s’ humour, robbed of it’s spontaneity in live performance didn’t translate well to the big screen and was reflected in negative critical reviews and at the box office [Film Review: ‘Strike Me Lucky’, Sydney Morning Herald, 19-Nov-1934 (Trove)]. Despite Hall’s faith in the studios’ films, from 1937 there was a decline in box office returns (prompting GUT head Doyle to resign). Another (external) factor affecting Cinesound profitability occurred in 1938 with the passing of the Cinematograph Films Act in the UK…under this legislation Australian films no longer counted as local, their removal from the British quota meant a loss of market for Cinesound and other Australian movie producers [Waverley Lib, loc.cit.].

The war resulted in a temporary halt to Cinesound feature films, however the studios made only one more (postwar) feature film, Smithy, a biopic about pioneering aviator Charles Kingsford Smith in 1946. Another blow to Cinesound’s future prospects at this time was a move by Rank Organisation – the British film giant purchased a controlling interest in Greater Union, preferring to use it to exhibit its own UK films in Australia [‘The first wave of Australian feature film production FROM EARLY PROMISE TO FADING HOPES’, http://afcarchive.screenaustralia.gov.au].

⬆️ ‘Smithy’ star Ron Randell later pursued a career in Hollywood

Stuart Doyle’s contribution  
WWII took all the impetus out of the Australian industry, there was a shortage of performers and crew due to recruitment and conscription. Stock available for film was also in short supply, what there was directed first and foremost to making propaganda and news films in support of the allies’ side. More particular to Cinesound’s challenges, the loss of MD Stuart Doyle before the war was especially telling. Film production is high cost (especially sound which proved massively more expensive) and high risk…Hall’s ability to pursue a good number of projects in the Thirties, depended on Doyle’s willingness to take a risk with Cinesound. When he departed, he was replaced by a “risk-adverse accountant who favoured real estate over film production” [ibid.].

Footnote: Cinesound Talent School  
The Cinesound people eventually established its own talent school for young actors. Run by George Cross and Alec Kellaway (a regular player in Cinesound movies)…offering training in “deportment, enunciation, miming, microphone technique and limbering”✥. By 1940 the school had had over 200 students including Grant Taylor, later a prominent actor in Australian movies and TV dramas [‘Cinesound Talent School, SMH, 02-Feb-1939, (Trove); Cinesound Productions’, Wiki, op.cit.].

┅┉╍┅┉╍┅┉╍┅┉╍┅┉╍┅┉╍┅┉╍┅┉╍┅┉╍

※ In 2002 GUT merged with Village Roadshow, these days Greater Union picture theatres go under the name ‘Event Cinemas’

✺ a trait shared by Greater Union boss Doyle
⊡ the company even closed down production at Bondi for several months in 1935 to let Hall go off to Hollywood to study American film techniques

✪ the state authorities felt that the popularity of the bushranger film genre would exert an ‘unhealthy’ influence on Australians, especially on the young, and make them more resistant to authority

✤ the two newsreel providers merged in 1970, forming the Australian Movie Magazine which folded in 1975

✙ the 1978 film drama Newsfront is a fictionalised account of newsreel makers in Australia between the late Forties and mid Fifties which includes actual newsreel footage from the period

✥ school director Kellaway’s brief was teaching dramatics and mic technique

Aden End-Game: The Union Jack’s Imperial Curtain Call

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Travel

A couple of years ago the BBC screened a television drama about the final chapter of British colonial rule called The Last Post. Set in 1965 in the southern Arabian Peninsula, the opening sequence of the show begins with some archive black-and-white footage and the current queen Elizabeth II extolling the virtues of the British protectorate of Aden as the finest exemplar of British colonial administration. The TV series’ storyline focused on the relationship dramas of a group of British Royal Military Policemen and their wives stuck in an unforgiving hell-hole of a desert outpost surrounded by largely nondescript bands of armed and hostile Arab insurgents. The Brits are shown behaving alternately badly and heroically in an alien and challenging environment (the Hadhramaut region in modern-day eastern Yemen, but actually filmed in South Africa!)

‘The Last Post’ ⇣

Brits on a very “sticky wicket”

Although the inter-personal conflicts of the main protagonists are at the forefront, The Last Post does convey a plausible sense of just how dicey a predicament the British on the ground found themselves in that political and military hotspot. It would be interesting to recount some background history of how Britain got involved in Aden and how things reached such a disastrous crescendo for the declining colonial power in the 1960s crisis.

(Source: Nafida Mohamed)

A base on the Red Sea

Britain’s decision to capture the town and port of Aden in 1839 via the agency of the British East India Co was a strategic move, all about securing up the lines of communication with Britain’s “jewel in the Empire”, India✲. Holding Aden, together with British Somaliland on the Horn of Africa, gave Britain control of the entrance to the Red Sea, this became even more critically advantageous following the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 [‘A Short History of the Aden Emergency’, (Simon Innes-Robbins), IWU, (22-Jun-2018), www.iwu.org.uk]. The retention of Aden as a bunkering port facilitated the British navy’s task of ensuring a safe passage for merchant shipping from the threat of pirates between the Indian colony and the motherland [Charles Schaefer; “Selling at a Wash:” Competition and the Indian Merchant Community in Aden Crown Colony. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 1 August 1999; 19 (2): 16–23. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201X-19-2-16].Aden Settlement ⇡

The securing of a stronghold in Aden also allowed the British to check rival great power expansion into the Indian Ocean (eg, from the French and the Russians). The link with British India was cemented by making the Aden Settlement a province of the Bombay presidency.

‘Adan albaldat alqadima (old town) ⇣

Crown colony to federation 

In 1937 the area of Aden and its immediate environs (just 192km in size) was hived off and made a colony directly ruled from Westminster. In an attempt to make the British Arabian possessions more manageable, two separate jurisdictions were established – a West Aden Protectorate and an East Aden Protectorate…from this time on Britain encountered a heightening of dissent and disruption to its rule from within the various sultanates and emirates in southern Arabia (especially from the trade union sectors of society). The British army was reinstated in Aden in 1955 and the outbreak of a general strike three years later was mishandled by Westminster.

Britain’s overriding strategy was to try to hold out against these challenges and demands as long as it could…Aden and the Red Sea was still as vital as ever to the UK’s geo-political objectives, but it was also crucial to the Empire’s commercial interests, ie, the profitability of the trade route from South Asia, maintenance of access to Middle Eastern oil reserves (including a BP refinery located at Little Aden).

FSA Flag ⇡

By the late Fifties concessions were needed to quell the cries for full independence…in 1959 Britain sponsored the creation of the Federation of Arabian Emirates of the South, comprising six of the sheikhdom states. A further nine joined in 1962 and the expanded federation renamed the Federation of South Arabia (FSA). The following January (1963) Aden joined the association as the State of Aden (Arabic: Wilāyat ‘Adan) within the FSA – in all 16 states federated under UK protection⌖. The British government’s aim was to defuse the impetus of the southern peninsula Arabs while allowing Britain to continue running the states’ foreign affairs and retain it’s petroleum holdings in Aden [‘State of Aden’, Wikipedia, https://en.m.wikipedia.org].

In 1963 Harold McMillan’s Tory government announced the decision to pull out of Aden and it’s hinterland by 1968. This was a fillip for the local nationalist opposition groups. Two preeminent rival nationalist groups emerged: the National Liberation Front (NLF) and the Front for the Liberation of Occupied South Yemen (FLOSY), both based in Aden. What began as opposition to UK colonialism evolved into a war for independence, partly inspired by Colonel Nasser’s Pan-Arabist movement. The NLF and FLOSY from 1963 fought each other for ascendency as well as fighting the British occupying forces.

Aden Emergency

As tensions rose in Aden, a grenade attack in December 1963 by insurgents intended for the British High Commissioner, triggered open conflict. A state of emergency was declared with the Arab militants engaging primarily in guerrilla activities against the British forces with part of the fighting centred around the mountainous Radfan region where local dissenting tribesmen (aided by NLF) launched raids on the British line of communications between Aden and Dhala – for this reason the Aden Emergency is sometimes also called the Radfan Uprising [Aden Emergency’, (National Army Museum), www.webcitation.org]. In 1964 the British government sent reinforcements to try to quell the insurgency…the short-lived FSA was suspended and an attempt made to reimpose colonial rule.

⇣ British patrol on Radfan Mtns

(source: UK Mail Online)

In a change of tack, NLF in late 1964 switched the point of attack, concentrating the war on Aden itself. The insurgents sought to hit home where the garrisoned British troops were…the soldiers and their families became the targets of NLF terrorist attacks – with a resultant effect on morale [ibid.].

Meshing of the Yemen Civil War

The imbroglio in the State of Aden was exacerbated with fighting spilling over into the region from the nearby civil war raging in North Yemen. Meanwhile, the British Labour government led by Harold Wilson signalled its intent to grant independence to the territory under the leadership of FLOSY, however this was vetoed by US president Lyndon Johnson who wanted to avoid an escalation of the Yemen conflict whilst the Vietnam War was raging.

Aden street riots 1967 ⇡

By the beginning of 1967 the focus of the Emergency fixed on the Crater district in Aden after NLF had orchestrated street riots. When units of the indigenous South Arabian Army mutinied, the British military lost control of this key district… eventually the British under a hard-line commander Lt-Col “Mad Mitch” Mitchell regained control of the perimeter. By now the Wilson government had had enough of the whole disastrous mess, announcing an earlier than planned pull-out from Aden (November 1967) – despite the fact that no clarification of the Arab leadership situation had been realised [‘Aden Emergency’, Wikipedia, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/]

By late 1967 this issue was resolved however…NLF had become the dominant group, triumphing over FLOSY with the help of the (North) Yemen federal army. As British forces were withdrawn in November, the result of NLF negotiations with the British government was that the Marxist-oriented NLF immediately took over the former protectorates of Aden and Hadhramaut, establishing the People’s Democratic Republic of South Yemen [‘Federation of South Arabia’, www.unostamps.nl].NLF (South Yemen) flag ⇡

It was left to a diplomat to put the best face-saving spin on it for the retreating Brits (last High Commissioner of Aden Humphrey Trevelyan): “So we left without glory but without disaster”✥. Whichever way you view it the British colonials were gone for good, more than anything else at this time the Aden episode symbolised the eclipse of Britain as an imperial power… conflict in the Yemen, however as time would show, was far, far, from being at an end.

Post Scriptum: Failure of FSA to unite the tribal potentates

Many historians of the Aden crisis view the British construct, the Federation of South Arabia’s failure to take root as inevitable, “a hopeless misadventure almost predestined for failure” [Harrington, Craig A.”The Colonial Office and the Retreat from Aden: Great Britain in South Arabia, 1957–1967.” Mediterranean Quarterly, vol. 25 no. 3, 2014, pp. 5-26. Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/article/553185]. Many reasons have been advanced…elements within the southern tribes put loyalty to the Aden nationalist groups ahead of loyalty to the Federation, and the ingrained regional rivalries of the parts (the sultanates) did not make for a cohesive federated whole; what was imposed by London was a “Whitehall Federation” which failed to address the issues facing the southern Arabian protectorates; the creation of a modern unified state was an illusion, given it was being carved from such unpromising material (remote, traditional fiefdoms and sheikhdoms with no experience of democracy and beset by a culture of ongoing internecine conflict). For some scholars FSA’s demise can be sheeted home to a deficit of both political resolve and financial investment on the part of the colonial power – with the catastrophic outcome of Britain cutting and running, leaving the regional entity without any viable succession plan and without any prospect foreseeable for a peaceful solution – a blatant abdication of its responsibility as a protectorate [Clive Jones (2017) Aden, South Arabia and the United Arab Emirates: a retrospective study in state failure and state creation, Middle Eastern Studies, 53:1, 2-5, DOI: 10.1080/00263206.2016.1200031].

PPS: Condemnation by association

Moreover, as one observer put it, as the FSA remained “remained dependent on British backing, and in consequence became ineffably associated with British imperialism in an era of anti-colonial Arab nationalism” [Simon C. Smith (2017) Failure and success in state formation: British policy towards the Federation of South Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Middle Eastern Studies, 53:1, 84-97, DOI: 10.1080/00263206.2016.1196667].

▃▁▁▂▃▂▃▁▂▃▁▂▃▁▂▃▁▁▂▂▃▁▃

✲ for instance, Sir Robert Grant, the governor of Bombay, (1834-1838), argued that India could only be protected by pre-emptively seizing “places of strength” to protect GB’s Indian Ocean possessions [Britain: Gaining and Losing an Empire, 1763-1914, (Nikki Christie), (2016)]

⌖ they were Fadhi, Audhali, Beihan, Dhala, Lower Yafa, Upper Aulaqi Sheikhdom (the original six) …

Alawi, Aqrabi, Dathina, Haushabi, Lahej, Lower Aulaqi, Maflahi, Shaib, Wahidi …

and the State of Aden

 ✥ although Trevelyan did concede that Britain achieved “little permanent good for the country”

 

 

The Tusitala of ‘Villa Vailima’: RLS in Samoa

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
Biographical, Heritage & Conservation, Inter-ethnic relations, Regional History, Travel

3F835B56-9E95-40A0-BA47-64C4F66E27F4⌂ 1890s map of the Samoan Islands

Barely four kilometres south of Apia Town, just off the Cross Island Road, is Samoa’s finest residential building, Villa Vailima (1891), the home away from the (Northern) cold built by Scottish novelist and poet Robert Louis Stevenson (see FN below).

275293C0-31F4-4723-9236-317B75C514AC

⌂ RLS ‘Treasure Island’ Samoan stamp

Anyone with a passing acquaintance of mainstream Western literature will have some familiarity with Stevenson’s work. Author of a host of illustrious juvenile adventure classics like Treasure Island, Kidnapped, The Master of Ballantrae✲, and one Gothic novella, Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde, offering deep psychological insights into the human mind.

Stevenson’s voluntary exile from Britain in search of a climate less injurious to his fragile health led him to the Pacific. After sailing around the islands on an extended ‘odyssey’ (Hawaii, Gilbert and Ellice Islands, New Caledonia, Marshall Islands, etc), Stevenson (accompanied by his American wife) settled on Samoa as a hoped-for antidote to his chronic bronchial condition✥.

73BF5460-2E19-4C8E-89B9-0C0930BDFC6C

RLS in local politics
When Stevenson set anchor in Samoa the islands were in the midst of a civil war over succession to the Samoan throne. Behind the stand-off between rival chieftains was a three-way struggle for control between the colonial powers, Germany, the US and Britain, each of which had despatched warships to the Samoan islands to protect it’s commercial interests. While building the Vailima home RLS embroiled himself in the political conflict, taking the islanders’ side against the colonialists…so much so that he became a sort of political advisor to the indigenous factions [‘History of Samoa’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].

By the conclusion of a second civil war in 1899, the colonial powers under a Tripartite Convention divided up the islands between them – Germany retained the western islands of Upolu and Savai’i, and the US got American Samoa (Britain did a trade for the Northern Solomons) [ibid.]

The Stevenson family at the Vailima homestead ⥥

.0798B7BA-948A-4CB4-8B11-972344FA30E3

Tusitala’s kudos 
Stevenson’s whole-hearted embrace of the Samoan people was reciprocated…though a palagi (white-skinned person) they afforded him a special status in Samoan society. The Samoans attributed the quality of mana (“heaven-sent” supernatural powers) to the writer. And the craft of his story-telling which he had mastered so expertly in his novels led Samoans to bestow on him the title of Tusitala, the “teller of tales” [‘Samoans Honor Adopted Son, The Teller of Tales’, (Lawrence Van Gelder], New York Times, 08-Dec-1994, www.nytimes.com]. Samoans however were nonplussed as to how RLS earned his living (being at a loss to comprehend how the activity of story-telling could amount to paid work!).

Centennary British banknote with images of RLS & Vailima ⥥

3B09F032-614D-41C4-B896-B78E9244CF95After RLS’s death of a stroke in December 1894 after decades of ill-health, his widow sold up and returned to California. Since then, Villa Vailima initially housed the German colonial administrators followed by the New Zealand ones. After decolonisation it became the residence of the Western Samoan head of state. Finally, restored to its impecable state, it was transformed into its present incarnation as the Robert Louis Stevenson Museum on the anniversary of the novelist’s death.

AEB413CA-9CCC-4B9B-9B4A-824A13A4A05D

Recreating RLS’ treasured island haven
A visit to Villa Vailima today will discover a slendid, elegant mansion of a building. A tour will reveal the scope of the interior which includes five bedrooms, a large living room, a smoking room, a library/ study and a ballroom big enough to accommodate 100 dancers. In his time there Stevenson made several additions and extensions…I was informed by our guide that the east wing of the building was added later as separate living quarters for RLS’s mother-in-law who had come to live with them◙.

The walls of some of the Villa’s rooms were adorned with incongruous items, like the bow-and-arrow set in this bedroom ⥥

RSL’s study and the smoking room are probably the highlights of the tour for several reasons…on display in the former is a bookcase full of original translations of RL Stevenson works. Even more impressive, it contains the novelist ’s original, solid wood writing desk (on which he wrote his last four novels). The pièce de résistance for me though was in the downstairs smoking room – a double fireplace had been installed (and never used!) It seems that the Scot wanted the “feel-good” reassurance of having a quintessential feature of his former Northern hemisphere life – irrespective of how incongruously impractical it seemed (and how puzzling to Stevenson’s Samoan attendants!), located in the steamy tropical climes of the South Pacific. RL’s wife Fanny had her own familiar reminder of home at the Vailima house, she had the walls of her bedroom lined with polished Californian redwood [Lonely Planet Samoan Islands, (M Bennett et al) (2003)].

⥥ The smoking room 2EADE340-ECC9-4CB0-A1CE-369F4AD9B811

I was also intrigued by the contents of the spacious living room…what caught my eye immediately was this massive mega-safe in the middle of the room (too big I thought even for the XXL-proportioned Samoans to move!). The very large portrait of RLS (by Sargent?) next to it looked broodingly dark and foreboding. The guide recounted to us how Stevenson was brought into this room by his servants after he was fatally stricken out on the front lawns of the property.

Ascending Mt Vaea
It is very fitting once you’ve toured the RLS residence and learnt some of his Samoan story to take in the final chapter by making the 472m trek up Mt Vaea to glimpse the “teller of tales’” final resting place. It’s a short but a very steep climb and can get very hazardous after heavy rain (I have first-hand experience of how slippery it can get having slid right off the quagmire of a track on the return descent!). When you reach the beautiful high plateau where Stevenson’s tomb is located you will appreciate just how irenic and tranquil the setting is. The great views of the island from the top are also well worth the effort of getting there.

D12AFF7F-1D81-4700-A31E-C6EE130B52A1

Footnote on ‘Vailima’: There are two interpretations of the name’s etymology – in Samoan ‘vai’ means ‘water’ so Vailima is commonly rendered as “Five Waters”, however the suffix ‘lima’ can mean ‘hand’ or ‘arm’  (as well as the number ‘five), so an alternate (literal) explanation for Vailima is “water in the hand” [Theroux, J. (1981). ‘Some Misconceptions about RLS’. The Journal of Pacific History, 16(3), 164-166. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/25168472]

PostScript: RLS in Sydney
From his Samoa base Stevenson made several trips to Sydney, staying mainly at the city’s Union Club (Bent Street) and at the Oxford Club (Darlinghurst). On one visit he stopped over in Auckland where he met the former governor and premier of NZ, Sir George Grey. Stevenson occupied his time in Sydney by mainly working on various manuscripts of novels and stories (including The Wrecker, Ebb-Tide and In The South Seas)✪ [‘RLS Website’, (2018), www.robert-louis-stevenson.org].

29C88547-55CD-4031-9D29-7AC8500F8361

⇜⇝⇜⇝⇜⇝⇜⇝⇜⇝⇜⇝⇜⇝⇜⇝⇜⇝⇜⇝⇜⇝⇜⇝

✲ not to neglect the personal favourite “Boys Own” RLS book of my 11-year-old self, The Black Arrow ➳

✥ the choice of Samoa as home was desirable on pragmatic terms because it had a regular mail service (allowing RLS the professional author to connect with agents, editors and publishers). He was also attracted to the place because it was not too ‘civilised’ [Prof Richard Dury, ‘RLS Website’]

◙ the anecdote goes that Stevenson sent her off to Sydney for a few months and upon her return had the new wing built so he could put some (much sought-after) distance between them!

✪ these last two books plus The Wrong Box (1889) were co-written with his American stepson (S) Lloyd Osbourne

 

The ‘Aggie’, Apia’s Landmark Hotel and One Legendary Samoan Entrepreneurial Hotelier

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
Memorabilia, Popular Culture, Regional History, Social History, Travel

An essential part of a tour of Independent Samoa’s main island, Upolu, is a trip to Aggie Grey’s…Samoa’s historic hotel in Beach Road on the western bank of the Vaisigano River. The place is a South Pacific institution, as was its legendary eponymous founder.

Aggie Grey’s Hotel (#77) ⍗

96002492-5F6A-4A82-B47C-08CCB7E50815The ‘Aggie’ of Aggie Grey’s was born Agnes Genevieve Swann✲, the offspring of an English pharmacist from Lincolnshire and his Samoan wife, a local taupou (a ceremonial maiden). Business seemed to be in Miss Swann’s DNA – in her early twenties she opened her first club in Apia, the Cosmopolitan Club, and in 1933 started a Samoan private tourism company, Grey Investments (later called the Grey Investments Group).864D0B42-1B18-4F68-9DD0-62BDB0E91AB7

No luck with ‘Kiwi’ spouses

The early death of Aggie’s first New Zealand husband left her without support and with four children to care for…the addictive gambling of her second husband squandered what money they had. In addition Aggie now had three more children and desperately needed to find a way to revive and consolidate her precarious financial situation.

With the advent of the Pacific War and American involvement, the resourceful and inventive Aggie eventually found the solution in 1942. She had earlier borrowed US$180 to purchase a colonial home which previously had been the “British Club”. As New Zealand’s prohibition laws were in force in Western Samoa⊡, Aggie started ‘Aggie Grey’s’ as a snack bar selling hamburgers and coffee to US servicemen on their tours of duty [Lonely Planet Samoan Islands, (M Bennett, D Talbot & D Swaney) (4th Ed 2003)].

The Hotel, 2006 ⍐

The American GIs in the South Pacific had plenty of money to splash around on their R & R activities, but the prohibition on liquor was a hand-brake on Aggie’s capacity to grow her business. Aggie found a inventive method of circumventing the ban…although serving alcohol was illegal, Aggie got round it by dispensing “medical permit doses” of booze to the American servicemen [‘Aggie Grey: West Point Hotelier, Legend – Apia, Upolu, Samoa’, in The Samoans: A Global Family, Frederic Koehler Sutter, (1989)].

⍗ Aggie Grey: on the maiden Pan Am flight from Pago Pago (American Samoa) to Sydney International Airport, 1962   (photo: John Mulligan)F8AD4C1A-48B6-4D10-9A75-A6D9E3936E97

From a backwater-town bar to a tourist hub

Beyond the war, over the following years, Mrs Grey turned the Apia hotel from a modest “drinking club” to a 200-room international hotel (arguably vying with Suva’s Grand Pacific Hotel for the mantle of the South Pacific’s premier international hotel) [‘Memories of the incomparable Aggie Grey’, Samoa Observer, (Terry Dunleavy), 26-Apr-2016, www.samoaobserver.com].

An ‘aiga welcome

The key to this success can be found largely in Aggie’s management style – her warm interpersonal skills, authentic, convivial personality, and her innate “understanding of the human condition”.  Through her personal example of showing hospitality she imbued “Aggie Grey’s” with an atmosphere of “laid back Samoan friendly fa’aaloalo” (‘respect), conveying to each guest a sense that they were ‘aiga (‘family’) [Dunleavy].

In the formative days the hotel thrived as a result of Aggie’s ability to network… forging business links with the world outside Samoa – with the management and crews of TEAL (forerunner of Air New Zealand), and in encouraging celebrity A-listers (especially from the US) to make Samoa and Abbie Grey’s a regular stopover on route to film assignments in French Polynesia [ibid.]. Accordingly, the likes of Hollywood stars Marlon Brando, Dorothy Lamour, William Holden and Gary Cooper✥ et al would be regular AG guests. Aggie sought to capitalise on the celebrity aura by naming each of the hotel’s fales (rooms) and bungalows after visiting movie celebs.

The Marlon Brando fale (№ 93) at AGs ⍗2524870C-9E00-4B23-B52E-2902F0576EAC

The hotel’s postwar success rested on a number of contributing factors. The arrival of trans-Pacific airlines (TEAL/Air NZ, Pan Am, QANTAS, then later Virgin’s Polynesian Blue) brought increasing numbers of tourists to replace the WWII servicemen. Aggie also had the right people behind her…a son with a good head for business, and a irreplaceable and devoted handiman, a “Mr Fixit” by the name of Fred Fairman, who Aggie could always rely on to keep the ‘wheels’ of the hotel running smoothly [ibid.; Sutter, loc.cit.].

Aggie Grey’s made it’s owner very wealthy…Aggie, a stalwart of the Samoan hospitality industry, continued at the hotel’s helm into her old age. In 1988 she died age 91, having long been one of the most respected members of the Apia business community.A4D39039-C9AF-4652-950C-20E6EC898B91

Footnote: In December 2012 Cyclone Evan severely damaged Aggie Grey’s, closing it down for over three years. In August of the following year, management of the hotel complex, still under repairs, passed to the Sheraton’s hotel chain. Aggie Grey’s reopened in 2016, now operating under the name Sheraton Samoa Aggie Grey’s Hotel & Bungalows. A second Aggie Grey’s complex in Upolu, Aggie Grey’s Lagoon Resort, was opened in 2005 off a coral reef in the west of the island (a joint venture between the Grey family, the governments of Samoa and New Zealand and Virgin Samoa). 🇼🇸 

 

PostScript: Prototype for Bloody Mary?

One of the US servicemen who frequented Aggie Grey’s during the War was travel adventure author James A Michener. Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific was later adapted into the hit Broadway musical South Pacific. One of it’s main characters, the loud and formidably forceful “Bloody Mary”, was widely thought to have been modelled on Aggie Grey, a comparison that didn’t endear itself to the Apia hotelier! [‘Lonely Planet’, op.cit.].

436C8E22-4671-4397-B5A2-11C996D3C0DE

⍐ ‘Return to Paradise’ – Samoan film set & resources of ‘Aggie Grey’s’  🇼🇸 (see below)

– — – — – — – — – — – — – — – — – — –

✲ ‘Grey’ was the surname of Aggie’s second husband from New Zealand

⊡ New Zealand administered Western Samoa as it was called at this time, under a League of Nations mandate

✥ Cooper in fact made a movie in Samoa, Return to Paradise in 1953 (pretty stock standard South Seas adventure stuff), and of course Aggie came on board to contribute to the production …Aggie Grey’s hotel providing logistical support and a base for the project’s accommodation, and the indefatigable hotelier personally supervised the catering unit for the film [Dunleavy]