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 to conductor. He sang, wrote, directed, composed and conducted: at the age of twenty-two his comic opera The Wreck of the Pinafore was produced at the Gaiety Theatre in London. The comic opera Estrella, written with Walter Parke, became a smash hit in Australia in 1884. In December 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 crits, Searelle was bankrupt and turned his sights to South Africa's newly discovered gold field.

In 1889 a heavily weighted ox-wagon rumbled down the dusty streets of 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 of 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”.

Complete, it had a stage, stalls, comfortable boxes, a bar; as well as costumes and scenery and dressing rooms for the opera stars. And so, oddly, this raw, rough and dusty mining town that boasted a bar to every five men and as many prostitutes, received opera among its first serious form of entertainment. Searelle opened his first season with Maritana and The Bohemian Girl.

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