MAKING OF A TEAM

Evening Post, Volume CXXIV, Issue 14, 16 July 1937, Page 13

MAKING OF A TEAM

GILBERT AND SULLIVAN

SOME EARLIER HISTORY

"W.S.'S" VARIED CAREER 0

It is a good thing that the father of Sir William S. Gilbert was a retired naval surgeon who had a fearful temper and literary tastes, and had also an interest in fairy tales, eccentricity, and the writing of long novels, biographies, and the like. Otherwise, the world might never have had | the joy of that incomparable combination, Gilbert and Sullivan, writes Janet Maybie in the "Christiyi Science Monitor." - Certainly there was tery little in the early life of Gilbert to indicate the eminence he would come ty later. He had a mother and four sisters, bu^ it was Father Gilbert who made most of the noise in the household, and the neighbours predicted that, with a father like that, young Gilbert, who had a temper of his own, would never lead a dull life, though it would probably never be a prosperous one, either. When he was thirteen, they sent young Gilbert to a school at Great Ealing. He could not get along there. He was probably suffering from what a pretentious later age was to. dub an inferiority complex, because all he did was fight and fail completely to adjust himself to the community doings of the school. There was one thing that could distract him from himself; that was writing plays and acting in them. Presumably his masters were glad enough to see him occupied with this activity, extracurricular as it was, but he man* aged always to fight with the casts selected for the productions and at last he decided to chuck it all and run away. He could be an actor somewhere else. He was wheedled into keeping or! with school for a while. PREPARED FOR. WAR. King's College followed the school at Great Ealing. He didn't like to study, but he thought he'd like to join up with the Artillery in the Crimean War, and set about preparing himself to do so. Unfortunatly for that ambition, the war ended before he could take the examinations. But he joined up with the Militia, anyhow. He looked splendid in a uniform. But when his detachment went to Scotland for manoeuvres and he was assigned training duties, his independence asserted itself again. He and his men simply did not appear in their appointed place one day, and when another detachment was detailed to find out why, it was found that Gilbert decided the weather was too poor for any such peacocking antics, and he and his men were all dry and cosy, indoors. ■ ■ ■ ■ " That seemed to cause a rift between Gilbert and the Army. He'got a job in the Department of Education, but they made-^him sit on a stool and write things he considered nonsense, and when someone left him a little legacy he was orr the stool like a shot and away to try to pre-. pare himself for the law. He did qualify, but he had difficulty getting clients. He got a few, but they

were strange people. One pounced on him and kissed him in court. Another took off his shoe and flung it in Ivs face when the outcome of the case displeased him. TURNED XO LETTERS. So it was that Gilbert turned his back on the fantastic world of the; law. And it was just then that his attention was caught, by the idea of writing about, and drawing, some of the sights around him—which he did. and which attracted a tremendous atI tention to him when they developed into the famous Bab Ballads.- ---• He was still tarred with the brush of his father's gift of cynical, barbed wit, and it came to him that he was rolling up enemies in the theatre world; and since he wanted eventually to be connected with the stage, he could see that he must stop this. So he stopped writing or drawing anything connected with the stage. He fell in with one Tom Robertson, who j was the leading figure in modern stage direction; they established a club which was to become very important to the English stage; Gilbert learned liberally and conscientiously from Robertson and by the late sixties his own plays were being produced with that care which was later to become known as the special excellence of the Savoy. They weren't very good plays, though, and are lost now in the merciful dust of the forgiving years. THE COMBINATION. It was "in 1870 that he met Sir Arthur Sullivan. Sullivan was as important a composer as Gilbert was a writer. But by late 1871 they had

done an operetta together. , It wasn't a very good operetta, but Bichard DOyly Carte thought that the two who had done it might be capable of better things; and four years later he had persuaded them to get together cm "Trial By Jury"

They were two totally dissimilar men. Sullivan made friends easily and had a certain talent for friendliness. Gilbert annoyed the life put of people and was always in hot water. Gilbert, on the other hand, was a highly-respectable man, whereas SulUvau loved -gambling on horses.

While they were in New York, Gilbert and Sullivan lived at a hotel called the Gramercy Park Place. That was in 1879, and there they wrote "The Pirates of Penzance." It made, such a hit that DOyly Carte decided that he could not possibly do better than take t over the whole business of Gilbert and " Sullivan productions, which he did, building the new Savoy Theatre while their next opera, "Patience," was being presented. '• ..

The public, which had held aloof from the two before their American triumph, now flocked after them, and "lolanthe" came close on the heels ol "Patience." But the subsequent "Princess Ida" was so far from what they hoped that the composer threw up his hands, wailed that his day as a composer was run out, and he would never write anything more. Gilbert flew into a fury, but as usual they managed to compose their differences of opinions and the grim fiasco of "Princes* Ida" was, swallowed up in the really marvellous clamour over the "Mikado," which came along in 1885.