All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
Posted this last year….but it’s worth a second outing….
Many thanks to an old time Shanghailander, Bill Savadove, who sent me this card originally sent in 1945 from Shanghai by the United States Navy wishing the folks back home a “melly klisimas”…..
An interesting picture of Tientsin (Tianjin) Settlement Railway Station – look closely (or click to enlarge) and you can see the “Settlement” signage – probably early 1900s I think…
In 1920 and 1921, “Shanghai Securities & Commodities Exchange” and “Shanghai Chinese Merchant Exchange” started operations. Radio was also beginning to become a force of communication in China. The state of the Stock Market Index was announced hourly on the radio by someone called “Little Miss Shanghai”. Apparently this was Miss Ai-Lien Wu and she stayed on the air reading the stock prices throughout the 1920s broadcasting to a loyal base of money merchants and many who just loved her voice.
But who was she? Well, it seems she was an Australian-Chinese called Alice Lim Kee and her career was far more varied than just reading the stock prices. She left Australia at 21 and travelled to Peking, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Chungking. She seems to have worked in the Teachers College in Peking for a while before finding a job in radio. She claimed to be the first female radio announcer in China, but also wrote for the North China Daily News, was a private secretary to Soong Ai-ling (one of the Soong sisters and wife of H.H. Kung) and appeared in some Shanghai movies – being famous enough to be introduced to Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford (below) when they visited Shanghai (see my post on that here).
Later she worked in the Chungking government and married Fabian Chow (a well known Chinese journalist at the time) and had a couple of kids. So she pops up under a bunch of names – Mrs Fabian Chow, Alice Lim Kee and her Cantonese name Wu Ai-lien. She’s also referred to in the Shanghai newspapers as “Miss Alice Wu, elder daughter of Mr. Charles Lim-kee Wu, of Melbourne, Australia.” She visited Australia in 1938 as Mrs Fabian Chow and gave Chinese cookery demonstrations to raise money for China’s Civilian Relief Fund during the war.
Basically there are literally hundreds of stories of Alice…first Australian-Chinese woman elected a member of the KMT, visited Calcutta during the war and in 1943 arrived back in Oz with a personal message to the Australian people from Madame Chiang etc etc but I don’t have the room for them all. But back in 1921 she was the darling of Shanghai radio as Little Miss Shanghai reading those stock prices out on the hour, every hour.
A few ideas for the reader or old Shanghai/China fan in your life this Christmas….and, with apologies, all include me!
Truly Criminal is the UK Crime Writers’ Association 2015 anthology of true crime writing – including a piece by me on the 1907 murder of Eliza Shapera in Hongkew…
It’s 100 years since Sax Rohmer wrote and published the first Fu Manchu book – this year a bunch of writers, academics and historians (including me) looked back on varios aspects of Rohmer, Fu Manchu and the Yellow Peril in Lord of Strange Deaths….
This winter I took a stroll over the rooftops of old Shanghai in the latest issue of the Asia Literary Review – pianos on the rooftop, cocktails, jugglers and working girls, luxury pads and Maoist spy hunters…it’s all Up on the Roof….
I’ve been spotting opium references in popular culture with interest for a few years now (2014, 2013 & 2012) – just how opium keeps fascinating us…However, 2015 was not a vintage year, but wasn’t a total loss either (or maybe I just read the wrong books and watched the wrong TV and films?)….
Ray Celestin’s The Axeman’s Jazz had a very nice opium den scene circa 1919 in New Orleans while the latest Ross Duncan novel from Christopher Bartley, To Catch is Not to Hold, had some laudanum in 1930s Chicago. Dennis Lehane’s World Gone By had a few opium hooked gangsters and doctors down in 1940s Tampa. Alan Massie’s third book in the Inspector Lannes series set in wartime France, Cold Winter in Bordeaux, featured some laudanum under the Vichy regime. Of course we could rely on Amitav Ghosh who published the third in his Ibis trilogy, Flood of Fire, which took us right up to the brink of the opium wars with every paragraph having a crib from Hobson-Jobson. Meanwhile Lawrence Osborne’s Hunters in the Dark had opium fuelled ex-pats in modern day Cambodia.
On the tele season 3 of Ripper Street saw a young girl dosed up with laudanum in Victorian Whitechapel – Ripper Street has been a good source of opium related mentions since it started and long may it continue. Copper has ended now so we won’t get to see the lovely Elizabeth Haverford (below) topping up her sherry with a little opium powder anymore. Meanwhile, over at the Union-Pacific Railway, Doc Durant found solace in a tincture of opium in series 2 and got himself mightily hooked in Hell on Wheels. Being in the UK I’m a bit behind with Hell of Wheels, but hear series 5 has a Chinese opium den out on the railroad!!
Elizabeth Haverford just can’t resist a tincture in New York….
Meanwhile, out West, the Doc needs a little pick-me-up too…
Sometimes when researching old Shanghai and the foreign community in China in the first half of the twentieth century a name crops up that makes you sit up and pay attention and say “I wonder if…?” Writing about Florence Broadhurst and her Broadhurst Academy in 1920s Shanghai yesterday threw up one such name – Daniel Melsa. I knew I knew the name – apparently a violin teacher at the Broadhurst Academy in 1926, but surely from somewhere else. I admit I am not exactly au fait with many virtuoso violinists but this one had warranted a mention elsewhere. I’m a fan of the writing of Israel Zangwill, the London Jewish author and Zionist, largely forgotten now, but who wrote compellingly of the Jewish ghettos in London and New York in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He mentions a Daniel Melsa, a Polish-born child prodigy on the violin who took London, Berlin and New York by storm before the First World War – could this Daniel Melsa have spent time in Shanghai teaching violin at the Broadhurst Academy. I very much think so…but if anyone knows different please let me know?
And I could be wrong…references to Melsa in Shanghai are scant, but it seems to be the same man.
Here’s Daniel Melsa’s story, the early part of which is given in an appendix to Zangwill’s 1908 play The Melting Pot (which popularised the term) about a Jewish family fleeing pogrom and settling in the USA :
Melsa (originally I believe Isek David) was born in Warsaw of Russo-Jewish parents in 1892. He began the violin young, being taught in Lodz by a well known professor. At the age of 9 he was admitted to the Lodz Conservatorium of Music under Professor Grudzinski. he studied there for two years until disaster struck – his father and younger sister were murdered in the 1905 pogroms by Cossacks. His sister’s body was later discovered in a Christian graveyard “riddled with bullets” while his father’s body was never found. With his mother he went to Berlin where friends arranged for him to attend, free-of-charge, the famous Klindworth-Scharwenka Conservatory. He won the Conservatory’s top prize for violin in 1909 and came to the attention of the American Ambassador who bought him a Carlo Bergzoni violin (see postscript at end for more on this). He made his debut as a soloist in 1912 in Berlin, took the audience by storm and then played to sell out venues across Britain and the United States.
Melsa in 1913 with his beloved Bergzoni
Successful now Melsa married an English pianist and actress Joan Carr, who’s stage name was “Miss Joan Carr”. She performed with him regularly and also went on extended tours with him. As an actress I believe she appeared in 1929 at the New Theatre in London in a play The Circle of Chalk. It ran for 48 performances, was well reviewed and also starred a young newcomer from America to Europe, Anna May Wong, the Australian-Chinese actress Rose Quong and a very young Laurence Olivier (Anna May and Olivier in the production below). The play, which is still regularly performed, is a popular adaptation of a Yuan Dynasty play by Li Qianfu and later inspired Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle. More on that here.
Rose Quong in Chinese costume
Olivier at 22 with Anna May Wong, just 23 here
By the time of World War One Melsa was a sensation and in high demand. In 1913 the London Jewish Chronicle wrote:
“Melsa is not yet 20 years of age, but he looks somewhat older. He is of slight build and has a sad expression…He seems singularly devoid of any affectation, while modesty is obviously the keynote of his nature.”
Daniel Melsa in 1917
Melsa’s spent most of the war years in London and New York but in the 1920s began travelling further afield. Australia was keen to hear him and the circuit there profitable and, of course, between Europe and Australia was the Far East. He visited Australia and New Zealand in 1921 after performances in Colombo and other Far East cities. Such is the life of the travelling virtuoso – he seems to drop off the radar in Europe and America between about 1923 and 1934. This seems to be the time he was travelling mostly in Asia…
Advert for Melsa’s concert at the Sydney Town Hall in August 1921
Certainly he played concerts in Singapore and seems to have come to China around 1926 (the same time as Florence Broadhurst). Perhaps he knew her from the circuit – she was travelling around Asia with the Globetrotters revue at around the same time – or from Australia? He did appear in Peking in 1926 – Sidney David Gamble, then in Peking amassing his treasure trove of pictures of China during that period, saw him perform in the city. So it is highly possible that the Daniel Melsa recorded as a violin tutor at Bobby Broadhurst’s Academy on Kiangse Road, Shanghai is the same man – merely taking a break in a pleasant city for a while. But little else to my knowledge is recorded of his time in Shanghai. This includes when he left and returned to Europe?
Melsa, with his wife Joan Carr, did return to London and settled there around 1934 – at least he then regularly begins appearing on the BBC Home Service radio and at the Proms. He published a book called The Art of Violin Playing (below). Melsa died in 1952 at home his home in Hendon, North London at just 59.
Postscript – and that Bergzoni, bought for the young prodigy in Berlin by the American Ambassador (who I think was David Jayne Hill), stayed with Melsa all his working life. However, in 1940 Cyril John Curtis, a “showman” appeared at Bow Street Police Court in London charged with having stolen Melsa’s Bergzoni, valued at 1,200 pounds, from the violinists car while he had popped into the Globe Theatre. Curtis claimed he had found it in the doorway of a nightclub on Gerrard Street (today’s London Chinatown) and had telephoned and handed it back to Melsa after hearing an appeal for its return on the radio. The judge believed Curtis, who had a number of good character references in court, and dismissed the charge. Melsa got his beloved Carlo Bergzoni violin back. Melsa was reported in the Times as being “in tears” when the instrument was returned to him.
David Jayne Hill – diplomat and music lover
I came across a reference the other day to Florence Broadhurst and the Broadhurst Academy in 1920s Shanghai which obviously intrigued me.
Florence Broadhurst, an Australian from rural Queensland, spent just a year in Shanghai in 1926. She came as a dancer/singer and worked with the Carlton Follies at Louis Ladow’s Carlton Cafe on the Ningpo Road (Ningbo Road today) and also with a group called the Frothblowers, who appear to be an amateur song and dance revue outfit. However, she found time to establish the Broadhurst Academy (Incorporated School of Arts), basically a finishing school, offered classes in in violin, pianoforte, voice production, banjolele (taught by Broadhurst herself and claiming to make you proficient in just six lessons which probably wasn’t very difficult – there’s one below!), modern ballroom dancing, classical dancing, musical culture and journalism. Jean Armstrong, another Australian from New South Wales and a journalist in China, taught journalism and story writing at the Academy.
Most of the music and dancing classes were taught by Broadhurst (herself an exponent of both the Charleston and the Tango) or one or another classically trained White Russian. Professor Kaurnitz Bulueva taught piano and his wife, Madame Bulueva, taught classical dance. I know nothing about these two I’m afraid and the spelling of the surname may be incorrect). Daniel Melsa taught violin and he is somewhat more well known and I’ll blog on his remarkable story tomorrow.
You can see a wonderful picture of Florence Broadhurst here. While in Shanghai she joined the British Women’s Association (by virtue of being an Australian) and was a regular in the society pages of the North-China Daily News, China Press and other Shanghai newspapers.
Florence (Bobby) Broadhurst around the time of her arrival in China…
She ran the Academy from premises at 38 Kiangse Road, on the corner of Nanking Road (Jiangxi Road and Nanjing Road), on the 2nd floor over Admiral Lane (that lane is still there, but I can’t remember what it’s called). That corner was a busy one . Weeks & Co, Ltd – outfitters, milliners, carpet and furnishing warehousemen, fancy goods dealers – occupied the ground floor close by Brewer & Company’s Shanghai offices (who I think sold canned milk for mothers).
Florence Broadhurst launched her career after winning a singing competition in Australia in 1915. That somehow led to a tour with the Globetrotters troupe to India around 1922 and the Far East (Bali, Japan, Thailand and Singapore as well as Manchuria and elsewhere before finally reaching Shanghai) and her sojourn and Academy in Shanghai, at just 28 years of age. There is a lot more on The Globetrotters here). She was reportedly a great contralto. I think she eventually decided to leave Shanghai after the bloody events of 1927.
After Shanghai Broadhurst moved to London and reinvented herself as Madame Pellier (she’d been known as Bobby in her hoofing days), running a dress salon at 65 New Bond Street in 1933 (now a Geneu skincare store – below). After a decade in London she returned to Oz and launched her wallpaper business, which is still going today (though Florence was murdered sadly in 1977 in Paddington, Sydney). There is a documentary on her life.
In 1918 Carl Crow, already an experienced China Hand having pitched up in Shanghai in 1911, decided to head back to Shanghai after a few years away in Japan and California….Having, as expats did and do, acquired rather a lot of Chinese nick-nacks and furniture he decided to sell it off before departing and starting again. Not a bad haul for three and a bit years in Shanghai – 250 pieces of brocades, robes, embroideries, porcelain, lacquers, bronzes, carvings, tapestries, rugs, linens, mirrors, lamps, screens, pillows etc…
