On the night of September 27, 1926, the rafters of the Causeway Hall (still standing at Kingston) were rattled by a kind of music never before heard in the young and still culturally impoverished Canberra. It was opera and one of the celebrity rafter-rattlers brought in for the great occasion (staged by the Canberra Philharmonic Society) was the once famous but now almost forgotten Andre Navarre (1898-1940).
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But he's not forgotten by the National Film and Sound Archive and yesterday his daughter Andree Navarre was at the archive to enable that institution to do oral history interviews with her, for posterity. She too has had several distinguished careers (they'll be the subject of another column) and is such enormous fun that she and this columnist concluded our interview in the archive's library by ringing the rafters with a medley of the greatest hits of Sir Harry Lauder. The medley included that famous hymn to drunkenness I Belong To Glasgow and Stop Yer Ticklin Jock!, the latter, a saga of coy courtship, inexplicably overlooked when newly independent Scotland came to choose its national anthem.
Andre Navarre (sometimes shortened to just Navarre) wasn't her father's real name. He was Alex Wright. As an Australian youngster he wanted desperately to be an opera singer, but the cultural cringe was such that entrepreneurs didn't believe Australian men could do it. To be Caruso-like, one surely had to be Italian.
''Theatre managers had always the same answer,'' he was to reminisce. '' 'A local boy being able to sing in opera? Too ridiculous for words!' For months I walked the streets of Melbourne dying for a square meal, seedily dressed and with battered shoes on my feet, looking for any kind of theatrical work … I learned my lesson and it was as 'Navarre the great Italian opera singer' that I applied for my next job, in a theatre in Perth. I was an instant success. Big offers poured in from all over the country.''
Things looked up in Australasia and he toured with Elsa Stralia and with ultra-Scottish singer-comic Sir Harry Lauder at a time when the latter was one of the biggest international stars in Christendom.
Navarre, handsome and suave and engaging, left for Italy in about 1928. He was never to become a megastar but eventually he did carve out a substantial radio and theatre singing career in Britain, perhaps most famously as ''The Prince of Mimics'', in which role he impersonated great popular stars of opera, music hall and film.
In about 1933 he moved to England.
He made his radio debut on the BBC in 1934 and for the remainder of his career was always popping up on the radio and in British theatres, everywhere from Southsea to Glasgow. As the war developed he was in demand for fundraising concerts. There was a flurry of them in 1940. On October 13, 1940, he performed in a charity concert at the Odeon Theatre, Leeds, in aid of the Leeds Spitfire Fund, and two days later was killed during an enemy bombing raid.
Andree Navarre was only nine when her father died. His death caused her mother such grief that her father's recordings were never played around the house. Here your columnist has to explain, for reasons that will emerge in a moment, that Andree Navarre, blessed with a very cultured English voice, is one of those fluent talkers, an interviewer's dream. Her conversation flows like the Danube bustling through Vienna. But yesterday's flow was suddenly dammed by emotions for a while yesterday as she explained how, last Friday, she was played a recording of her father talking and singing.
''I wasn't prepared for it at all. I hadn't heard his voice for 72 years. And when they played that record, well, I can't tell you … the tumultuous feelings. I had to hang on to myself. It was overwhelming to hear it … I was in such a state at hearing it.''
Seventy-two years! There are moments in life when a gentleman wishes he had with him, as he always would have had in more genteel times, a clean handkerchief to hand to a lady in a time of distress. Yesterday was one of those times.
What did she remember of life with her father, in their home just outside London?
''It was a house filled with laughter and music. Especially music. Daddy, being a singer, he was for ever trying out new songs, or when he came to imitate Larry Adler the great harmonica player, learning to play the harmonica. I still have five of his harmonicas at home. I remember vignettes of days in the garden. The day he presented to mother the first sprouts he'd ever grown, but sadly the slugs had got into them first.''
Andree said yesterday that she'd been reminded by the shock of hearing her father sing of how his had been ''a magnificent voice, a huge voice''. Yesterday and because of the Andre Navarre connection, this columnist went to visit the Causeway Hall and to marvel at what the impact of Navarre's huge voice must have been in so compact a venue. On that night in 1926 there was a chorus and an orchestra and three soloists, one of them Navarre, as well as an audience, and all of them in a venue the size of a modest shearing shed.
