In the 1970s, when I was writing my first Big Book, The British Musical Theatre, I haunted the little junk-ephemera shops of Seven Dials and other unlikely areas in search of anything relevant to my cause. As you doubtless know, the result was two vast volumes of text and four rooms of programmes, playbills, scores, photographs, vital certificates (now largely enshrined in the Harvard Theatre Collection).
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| The shelves and drawers filled, and spilled out into the hall ... |
The very first letter I bought was this one, written by child musician Max DAREWSKI (aged 11). I think it was 10p. No-one knew who Max was, nor even his more well-known brother, Hermann who actually wrote an autobiography ...
Here's a piece I wrote before:
DAREWSKI, Herman [Edouard] (b Minsk, Russia, 17 April 1883; d Kennington, London, 2 June 1947). Songwriter and music publisher whose song successes were contrasted with some flamboyant business failures.
Born in Russia, brought up in England, Darewski studied music in Vienna and then returned to Britain where he became a conductor at the spa town of Bridlington, then at Blackpool, a member of the staff of Francis, Day & Hunter music publishers, and an adept writer of popular songs and interpolated numbers for musical comedy. His first song success came with `My Little Hyacinth', interpolated into The Beauty of Bath (1906) by Ellaline Terriss, and he had further success with ‘In the Twi-twi-twilight’ (w Charles Wilmot) sung in the American edition of The Dairymaids (1907) and `I Used to Sigh for the Silvery Moon' as interpolated into Charles Dillingham's Broadway production of The Candy Shop (1909). He also provided the tune to Elsie Janis's lyrics for `For I Love Only You' (The Slim Princess, 1911). He subsequently established his own Herman Darewski Music Publishing Company Ltd which, apart from publishing his own works, also put out such popular numbers as `Any Old Iron', `Sussex by the Sea', `Arizona', `I Know Where the Flies Go in Wintertime', `Ours is a Nice House Ours Is' and ensured the British distribution of many American hits.
His first musical theatre scores, mostly put together in collaboration with other writers, were written for revue, beginning with such shows as Mind Your Backs (Hackney Empire, 1913), and Austen Hurgon's 1914 Coliseum piece Happy Days (1914) and including de Courville's Hippodrome shows Business As Usual (`When We've Wound Up the Watch on the Rhine'), Push and Go (1915, w Jean Schwartz et al) and Joyland (1915), and the Comedy Theatre Shell Out (1915). Alongside the revue songs, and such singles as Jack Norworth’s ‘Sister Susie’s Sewing Shirts for Soldiers’ (1915), he found time to contribute more or less music to a number of musical plays, of which the first was J M Barrie's vehicle for Gaby Deslys, Rosy Rapture (1915), a revusical affair in which his songs (including `Which Switch is the Switch, Miss, for Ipswich?') supplemented half a score by Jerome Kern.
Darewski contributed numbers to such pieces as Émile Lassailly's Carminettaand revivals of Bluebell in Fairyland and The Catch of the Season, but he scored his biggest success when he supplied the bulk of the songs for the enormously successful C B Cochran wartime musical The Better 'Ole (1917). The unfortunate Gertie Millar vehicle Flora (1918) gave him only a brief exposure, but his re-musicked version of the Rip revue Plus ça change for Cochran and Alice Delysia as As You Were (`If You Could Care For Me') was another hit, whilst his `The Shimmy Shake' and `Le Petit Nid' (`In That Little Home That's Built For Two') gave him a wider audience when they were heard in the Parisian version of Ivan Caryll's The Earl and the Girl, Hello!! Charley(1919).
At this time, often three or four West End revues and/or musicals at one time bore Darewski's name, in a larger or smaller capacity, on their bill. However, with the exception of a Gaiety Theatre revival of The Shop Girl (1920) for which the original Ivan Caryll score was topped up with eight new Darewski songs (`The Guards' Brigade'), none of the musical comedies for which he provided the major part of the score (Jolly Jack Tar, The Eclipse, Oh! Julie) proved particularly successful and, by the early 1920s, his name was much less frequently seen.
In 1920 Darewski (who had bought up the old music publishers Charles Sheard in 1918) purchased the famous publishing house of Metzler, but in 1922 he encountered financial problems and was obliged to sell his publishing interests in bankruptcy. From the 1920s he operated once more as a musical director at various seaside resorts and at the head of his own band, whilst still providing the odd song to such musicals as The Blue Mazurka and Up with the Lark, but without ever regaining the profile he had had in the 1910s.
1908 Teashop Girls (The Tea-Shop Strike) (w Charles Willmott/H Maurice Vernon) sketch Empire, Nottingham 27 April, Hackney Empire 1 June
1914 The Chorus Girl (Harry Grattan) 1 act London Palladium 20 July
1914 Going, Going, Gone 1 act Chelsea Palace ****
1915 Rosy Rapture, the Pride of the Beauty Chorus (w Jerome Kern/F W Mark/J M Barrie) Duke of York's Theatre 22 March
1917 The Better 'Ole (James Hurd/Bruce Bairnsfather, Arthur Eliot) Oxford Theatre 4 August
1918 Flora (w Melville Gideon/Harry Grattan, Heard) Prince of Wales Theatre 12 March
1918 Jolly Jack Tar (Heard, Davy Burnaby, J P Harrington/Seymour Hicks, Arthur Shirley) Prince's Theatre 29 November
1919 A Good-Looking Lass (Leon Pollack, Lauri Wylie) 1 act Chelsea Palace 11 August
1919 The Eclipse (w Gideon, Cole Porter/Adrian Ross/Fred Thompson, E Phillips Oppenheim) Garrick Theatre 12 November
1920 Oh! Julie (w H Sullivan Brooke/Harold Simpson/Firth Shephard, Lee Banson) Shaftesbury Theatre 22 June
1922 Listening In (Worton David, Will Hay) Apollo Theatre 31 July
Autobiography: Musical Memories (Jarrold, London, 1937)
Darewski's brother, Julius Darewski, was a very prominent London theatrical and musical agent and occasional producer, whilst another (disowned) brother, operating under the name Ernest C ROLLS [Josef Adolf DAREWSKI] (b 6 June ?1890; d London, 20 January 1964), produced musical comedy and revue in both Britain and in Australia with more side than skill. He was sued for theatrical dishonesty before he was 21, bankrupted in 1921 after losing £16,000 on the musical Oh! Julie and £12,000 on the revue Laughing Eyes, and his mismanagement of Australia's J C Williamson Ltd almost led that famous firm to disaster. After directing some extravagant productions of a series of mostly American musicals on the Australian stage (Sunny, Good News etc) he went into management there on his own behalf, mounting Australia's Whoopee(1929) and the flop local Funny Face (1931), and, in the wake of Frank Thring's promotion of home-written Australian musical productions, even producing an original piece, Flame of Desire (Apollo Theatre, Melbourne 19 October 1935), for which he took a half book-credit with J L Gray (mus: Jack O'Hagan) and imported Ethelind Terry to star. He sacked her, and the show went down the drain anyway. It was then, through engineering a financial takeover of the firm by New Zealand department store magnate John McKenzie who then put him in charge, that he won the job at Williamson's,. His production of I Married an Angel was Williamson's all-time top money-loser and he was quickly given the boot when his second year's contract expired. Rolls' family did not disown him for his failures, nor for his flash manners and flashy productions (all well-established family failings). They disowned him first, in print (well, father and two brothers did, mother stuck by him a little longer) over his arrests for dishonesty, and then all over again when he was convicted of exposing himself in a rather different kind of `flash'.
A further brother, Max DAREWSKI [Marks Maximilian A DAREWSKI] (b Manchester, 3 November 1894; d London, 25 September 1929), also composed for the musical theatre. In his earliest years, Max was celebrated as an infant prodigy at the piano, touring through Europe (under the not always appreciated `management' of brother Herman) and appearing before crowned heads in the best prodigy fashion. He also conducted his own and other music, in novelty circumstances, before the age of ten (Albert Hall, 1904 etc). Amongst a proliferation of piano compositions, he composed music for a number of revues, including Oh! Molly (1912) and the Venus Limited produced by brother Rolls, at the Pavilion and the Finsbury Park Empire respectively, but without being connected with anything very successful. He also got a tiny Broadway showing when he shared a credit on the title song for the 1916 musical Go to It.
He provided the score for Alfred Butt's musical comedy vehicle for Gaby Deslys, Suzette (1917), which, with a London run of 255 performances -- not really due to its songs -- proved his longest-lived piece. His only other full score was for the touring musical Mam’zelle Kiki (1924), but he shared credit for the composition of the Gaiety musical His Girl (1922) and the Jack Buchanan musical Boodle (1925) and had songs interpolated into various other musicals including the London versions of Der Orlow (Hearts and Diamonds), for which he was also musical director, Lehár's Cloclo, and revivals of Tonight's the Night and The Maid of the Mountains. He also provided a handful of songs for Broadway’s Hammerstein’s 9 o’Clock Revue (1923). Maurice Chevalier made a success of his `One Hour of Flirt with You' (1917) under the less curious title of `J'aime les fleurs' in the Casino de Paris revue Pa-ri-ki-ri. In what seemed to be the family tradition, he was glaringly bankrupted in 1924.
Max Darewski was married to showgirl Ruby Miller, who recounted their lives in the book Believe Me or Not (1933)
1917 Seeing Life (Arthurs) 1 act Oxford Music Hall 15 January
1917 Suzette (Austen Hurgon, George Arthurs) Globe Theatre 29 March
1922 His Girl (w Ernest Longstaffe/Austen Hurgon, F W Thomas, Claude E Burton, Arthur Anderson) Gaiety Theatre 1 April
1924 Mam’zelle Kiki (Douglas Hoare, Graham John, Sydney Blow) Portsmouth 25 August
1924 Boodle (w Phil Braham/Hoare, Blow, Douglas Furber) Prince of Wales Theatre, Birmingham 26 December; Empire Theatre 10 March 1925
And here is today's photo ...
The Darewski story is told, with multiple photographs, in the late Frank van Straten's book Hanky Panky (Australian Scholarly Publishers, 2020) which is principally focused on the career of 'Ernest C Rolls'.
Anyway, now I have the letter and the photos together, in the same article. Which is as it should be!
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