Singing Kiwi’s life pivoted on critical points
A Dunedin tailor, Ernie McKinlay, could look back on a couple of incidents that changed his life. One was just before World War 1, the other during it. Ron Palenski takes up the story.
ERNIE McKinlay’s two lifechanging incidents earned him a reputation and measure of fame.
McKinlay was a keen and talented singer and was rehearsing in Dunedin one day in 1914 when a welldressed woman walked in and asked if she could sit and listen to the rest of the rehearsal. McKinlay and his companions knew instantly who she was and were flattered by such attention. The casual visitor was the celebrated English actress and singer, Ellen Terry, in Dunedin for ‘‘illustrative acting’’ and to ‘‘discourse on the triumphal heroines of Shakespeare,’’ as newspaper advertisements described it.
When McKinlay finished, Terry handed out tickets for her shows and told McKinlay, whose confidence soared, he should go to study singing in Munich where ‘‘one really breathed the atmosphere of music’’.
McKinlay’s singing got him to Germany all right, but not in the manner intended.
A few months later, he enlisted and found himself a member of No 3 Field Ambulance, which was under the command of a Dunedinborn and trained doctor, James Hardie Neil, who saw the value in his men providing their own entertainment rather than perhaps getting into trouble while seeking diversions from William Ernest McKinlay, known as Ernie. Right: Ellen Terry.
soldiering. McKinlay and others staged concerts while in camp, on board ship and in Egypt before going with the New Zealand Division to France.
This led to his other lifechanging moment, not long after the New Zealanders’ 23day involvement in the Somme and what McKinlay called ‘‘this continual racket of whistling, screeching, whining, moaning, and rattling of shells, with the almost incessant flashes of our gunbursts on either side’’.
McKinlay’s singing again attracted attention. He was in the Bell tent of the unit’s quartermaster, Captain Ernest Finlayson, and singing a romantic ballad made popular by the renowned Irish tenor, John
McCormack,
I Hear You Calling Me. By chance, Sir Andrew Russell, the general commanding the New Zealand Division, heard the singing as he rode by. He stopped and asked Finlayson who it was. On being told, Russell said anyone with a voice like that ‘‘had no right to be so far up’’ [the line].
Soon after that, Russell issued orders that entertainers within the division were not to be put into the front line and a little later, he was in the audience for a performance by the English 56th Divisional Concert Party. He determined that New Zealand would have its own concert party and that those selected for it would be kept out of all ‘‘stunts’’ because their greater value would be to the welfare and morale of the soldiers.
Russell saw to it that a call went to all units for entertainers or musicians to make themselves known and available and it fell to McKinlay and a colleague, Dave Kenny, based initially in the small town of Estaires near the Belgian border, to choose and plan. McKinlay later wrote a book about the experiences of the New Zealand Divisional Entertainers, as they were formally known, and recalled: ‘‘We rehearsed all day and every day at concerted numbers and sketches mainly, having much to learn as to the proper uses of entrances and exits. If our performances did not at first attain the success ultimately achieved, it was probably mainly due to our lack of stage training and also to our being set the altogether too difficult task of putting on a double change of programme weekly, with our alltoolimited repertoires.’’
Nuns at Bailleul, not far from Estaires, made their costumes, which were of white calico, with a white fern in a black circle on the left breast. They wore high Pierrot hats with pompoms and became known as the Digger Pierrots (a Pierrot being a stock figure in French pantomime).
For the rest of the war, the concert party with orchestra was there ready to perform when the division was pulled out of the front line, there to make soldiers laugh, lift morale and wipe away memories if only for a short time of the fighting, and especially Passchendaele in October 1917.
One of the female impersonators, Stuart Nelson, evidently did such a good job that some of the soldiers thought he was indeed a woman and one Maori officer was so taken with ‘‘her’’ he insisted on going backstage for a meeting. Peter Buck (later Sir Peter, the noted anthropologist) was among the officers and when Nelson removed his wig, Buck told the smitten officer to make a speech in praise of ‘‘the vanishing lady’’. This he did in Maori, with Buck translating with a great deal of licence, his audience guessing correctly that Buck was making it up as he went along.
Kenny died after an appendectomy in 1918 and Captain Eric Anderson, who reviewed the wartime shows, recalled he unwittingly provided another of the great laughs in the early days of the concerts. Kenny, who was about 1.80 metres tall and weighed close to 80kg, played the Queen of the Fairies and flitted on to the stage, proclaiming, ‘‘I’ll Fly! I’ll fly!" A quickwitted soldier in the audience, who saw such a prospect as unlikely, shouted out: ‘‘Like hell you will, Dave!’’ Anderson drily noted that no civilian theatre could produce such unscripted comedy.
McKinlay made it to Germany, but to Cologne, not Munich, when the orchestra and concert party joined most of the rest of the division as an occupation force in late 1918 and early 1919. In McKinlay’s words, ‘‘We were given the services of a threeton lorry and performed mostly in YMCAs and in halls attached to hotels in some dozen little towns around Cologne.’’
Many of McKinlay’s fellow entertainers continued on the stage after the war as members of the Diggers Concert Party, which toured New Zealand and Australia under the direction of multitalented Pat Hanna. McKinlay went to Britain and studied under the Irish baritone, Plunket Greene, who was close to Edward Elgar. He was reported to have performed seven times at Buckingham Palace and made two world tours with a varied choral group, the Westminster Glee Singers. He moved to Australia and performed in shows as well as becoming a recognised authority on Maori songs, of which he recorded many. He also wrote and sang Kia Ora Katoa, published in Sydney two years before he died in 1945. The Sydney Morning Herald described him as ‘‘the silver tenor’’.
Back home, his old commanding officer, James Hardie Neil, by then ear, nose and throat surgeon at Auckland Hospital, said McKinlay was ‘‘one of the finest personalities that the entertainment stage had produced in the last war.’’