Haddon Chambers and the long arm of neglect.

WHO WOULD BE your nomination as Australia's most successful playwright? Ray Lawler? Patrick White? David Williamson? Alex Buzo?

How about an Australian who had some thirty plays produced over three decades with the finest actors and directors of the day? The great majority were staged in the West End of London at a time when Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, J.M. Barrie, Arthur Pinero and Harley Granville Barker were in their prime. Many were admired hits on Broadway. Six were made into silent movies in Hollywood. And several were staged in his home country.

Would that be someone whose work might be performed on Australian stages, taught in Australian universities and schools, known to and discussed by educated Australians? Well, apparently not.

Haddon Chambers is best known now not for his plays, but for his relationship with Nellie Melba. Even weighty tomes like The Oxford Literary History of Australia and Penguin's New Literary History of Australia entirely fail to mention him.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon Chambers was born in the Sydney suburb of Petersham on April 22, 1860. Named after the Baptist "Prince of Preachers", C.H. Spurgeon, he was educated at Marrickville and then at Fort Street School, alma mater of so many distinguished Sydney-siders. His Ulster-born father (Chambers referred to him as a "Scotchman"), John Ritchie Chambers, worked in the New South Wales public service, and his mother, Fanny Kellett, was from Waterford in Munster. Leaving school at thirteen, he worked as an insurance clerk, then in the Department of Mines, then as a boundary rider near Camden.

In 1880 he visited cousins in Ulster, going on to London for the first time, then returning to Australia on a ship which was carrying the Montague-Turner Opera Company. He worked with them in Sydney in the management of the company. This was one of the earliest touring troupes in Australia, run by two Americans, soprano Annis Montague and her tenor husband, Charles Turner. In July 1883, the company was in Mackay, Queensland, where a young and lonely Mrs Charles Armstrong (later to become Nellie Melba) befriended them.

By then Chambers was already back in London, determined to make a career as a writer. To make ends meet, he took odd jobs and wrote stories and sketches, mostly about Australian life, for Australian and British publications. He wrote "London Letters" for the Bulletin in Sydney and helped its proprietor, W.H. Traill, to recruit the young English cartoonist Phil May. In May 1886, a Chambers article, "Franz Liszt", appeared in the Argosy. The elderly pianist-composer had just come on his last visit to England.