Luscombe Searelle

William Luscombe Searelle (1853 – 18 December 1907) was a musical composer and impresario. He was born in Devon, England, and brought up in New Zealand, where he attended Christ's College, Christchurch.

Searelle began working as a pianist in Christchurch and graduated as a conductor. He sang, wrote, directed, composed alongside conducting. At the age of 22, his comic opera, The Wreck of the Pinafore, was produced at the Gaiety Theatre in London. He wrote the comedic opera, Estrella, with Walter Parke, and it became a smash hit in Australia in 1884. In December of that year, Estrella, went on at New York's Standard Theatre where it enjoyed just three performances before the theatre burnt down.

Of his comic opera Bobadil, one Melbourne critic wrote: “Mr. Searelle is a sworn foe of dullness and a warm friend of variety”. By 1886, in spite of favourable critics, Searelle was bankrupt and turned his sights to South Africa's newly discovered gold field.

His first visit to South Africa was in 1887 with an Australian Opera Company where several operas were staged in Cape Town including three of Searelle’s own compositions; Bobadil, Estrella and Isadora. In his time here, he bought a 1600-hectare coal mine that yielded no coal, and he prospected for tin in Swaziland, with little success. He fought with the Boers and was finally hounded out of Johannesburg.

In 1889, an ox-wagon arrived at Johannesburg, bringing a small party of opera singers from their hotel rooms to welcome Searelle, tired from his long trek from the port at Durban. Among those to greet him were the talented Fenton sisters, Blanche, Searelle’s wife, and Amy. They had first taken the train to the railhead in Ladysmith and then transferred to stagecoach for the rest of the journey. En route, the Fentons spent a night with a Boer family where Amy, the nineteen-year-old prima donna, was given the bed President Paul Kruger used when he passed that way; an enormous four-poster that had a ladder at its side for climbing up into.

In the days that followed, the contents of the ox-wagon filled the intersection with Eloff and Commissioner Street, where Luscombe Searelle’s corrugated iron “Theatre Royal” had been unloaded and was being hammered together. “The material blocked the road for days,” Headley A. Chilvers tells in his book Out of the Crucible, “but the blockade mattered little, for traffic passed easily by taking detours over the veld”.

The wagon had a stage, stalls, comfortable boxes, a bar, as well as costumes, scenery, and dressing rooms for the opera stars. Following their arrival, the mining town received opera as its first serious form of entertainment. Searelle opened his first season with Maritana and The Bohemian Girl.

As an agent and producer, Searelle was responsible for theater celebrities coming from London; the most famous of which was the ex-opera star turned actress, Genevieve Ward. She arrived in 1891 describing Johannesburg as having "no pavements of any kind, yet the streets lighted by electricity, and the place but five years old".

In eleven weeks, she played in sixteen plays, including six by Shakespeare: Macbeth, Othello, Hamlet, The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Merchant of Venice, and Much Ado About Nothing.

In 1892, Searelle brought the partnership of Cora Urquhart Brown-Potter and the romantic lead Kyrle Bellew out from Australia. They toured South Africa with Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet; however, their run was cut short when the Exhibition Theatre in Cape Town burned to the ground. Despite his genius and sporadic successes, Searelle was to be dogged throughout his life with litigation and debt, leaving in his wake a story of misfortune.

Periodically, Searelle went on tour and took his company throughout South Africa, Rhodesia and Mozambique.

In 1905, he staged Bobadil in America, but his principals took off with his money, leaving him destitute. He survived selling dusters from door to door and occasionally received a pittance from The New York Journal for poems he submitted. Nights were frequently spent on benches.

Eventually Ella Wheeler Wilcox read his poetry, and together they wrote the opera Mizpah, based on the biblical story of Esther (1904-5). It was put on in San Francisco but by then Searelle was too ill; dying of cancer, he could only view its success from a wheel-chair. After its premiere, he was wheeled before the audience to receive his ovation. Inspired he rushed to England to stage it there, but by now he was too ill and died on the 18th of December 1907, aged 54, before he could begin negotiations.