VIOLENT ATTACK?

Auckland Star, Volume LXXI, Issue 234, 2 October 1940, Page 5

VIOLENT ATTACK?

FAMOUS CONDUCTOR.

SIR T. BEECHAM AGAIN.

(By Air.) SYDNEY, September 26.

Sir Thomas Beecham, famous English conductor, whose stay in Australia while conducting for the Australian Broadcasting Commission has been marked by many stormy controversies, is leaving the country in the same manner. Yesterday Press messages from Adelaide reported him as having made a violent attack on Australians in an interview. He was said to have stated that in Australia he had nothing but insults and vile treatment and that in every capital city he had received wicked anonymous letters from vile, ignorant people.

Sir Thomas was reported to have said that when he got back to England he was going to publish these anonymousletters, even if he had to print a booklet himself, to let the world know what vile, ignorant people Australians were. He said that in Perth, while he was at a concert, "drunken hooligans" had broken into his sitting room and smashed up his furniture, and that when he was invited to address a meeting at 'the university student hoodlums caused such an uproar that he had to leave the meeting. He added: "Never have I been I treated so abominably as I was in Perth. As long as I live I will never go back there."

i In Sydney yesterday Sir Thomas! jdenied that he had given any such interview. He said a reporter had been among half a dozen A.B.C. officials with whom he had dined. Such a statement as he had been reported to have made could come from only one quarter in the world —"the egregious Dr. Goebbels." Sir Thomas said that reports about him in Australian newspapers had been "an elaborate and synthetic farrago of distortion and perversion," and added: "The newspapers have torn my verbiage violently from its context and altered it in such a manner as to represent me as a comparatively illiterate, uneducated person. It is now quite clear to me that Australia considers it can make its luivn musical future without co-operation of persons like myself."