Clara Butt's 1907/8 tour, and what it teaches us about the development of artist management

I write on the first anniversary of the first lockdown on March 23rd 2020. An aeon of experience and revelation ago. At that time I had just returned from holidaying/lecturing in Western Australia. The journey back on an 18-hour direct flight from Perth seemed fraught with danger —cooped up in a claustrophobic cabin, emerging into the threatening environment of the Heathrow rabbit warren, then trapped in the confined space of a taxi for 40 minutes.

No wonder I feared the worst — although not yet informed by an awareness of the kind of intensive care nightmare which was to become all too familiar. Guarding against the possibility of being out of action for a while, I wrote a column that would if necessary tide me over for a month. I decided to revisit a period in musical and artist management history that formed the backdrop to the very first piece I wrote for CM back in 1985, about the great contralto Clara Butt’s first Australian tour in 1907/08. Looking at it now, this year-old unpublished column resonates with a kind of innocence, given all that’s happened over the last year. More than that, the subject matter — rooted in history though it is — points up the stranglehold which Covid-19 has had on the free flow of musicians and managers internationally.

So, a year late, here’s the piece plucked off the shelf as I defer for once my tracking of the latest twists and turns with which Covid and Brexit are tormenting artist managers — little news there is certainly not good news. Let me transport you to what historians are wont to call ‘the first great age of globalisation’, spanning the 40 years or so up to the Great War. Trade of all kinds was now dazzlingly ‘global’ thanks to the rise of international capitalism, underpinned by steamship, railway and electric telegraph. The ever more intrusive barrage of advertising and promotion (stunningly highlighted in H G Wells’s 1908 novel, Tono-Bungay) enhanced demand for everything under the sun.

All this was reflected in the work of the new breed of artist manager (aka ‘concert agent’) and promoter, each possessing expertise immediately familiar to us today. I’ve been looking at how artists from Europe and North America were signed up for Australian engagements. No artist managers as we’d understand them in the vast continent at this time, just sharp-elbowed promoters raking in the takings from as many concerts as the workhorses they engaged could manage across far-flung tours. Two great rivals were the Tait brothers (J & N) and J C Williamson.

Both these outfits understood the huge benefit to be gained in the modern competitive environment from face-to-face meetings with artists and their agents in Europe and North America. So they travelled — trapped on board ship, commercially unproductive, for weeks each way. In 1906, Nevin Tait visited London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Prague ‘and other continental cities’. How do we know this? Because Tait gave media interviews on his return about latest signings, as the first salvos in what would became a blaze of publicity surrounding the consequent concert tours. Williamson likewise crowed about his captures. After one trip to Europe in 1903/04 he told the Sydney Herald: ‘I don’t think I was ever so successful in making important contracts in such a brief space of time.’ Yes, these guys had profile of a kind the typical artist manager of today would shun.

In an age before wireless, television and the internet, national and local newspapers were hugely influential in whipping up interest in a forthcoming or continuing tour. Promotional opportunities for agents and promoters in the press were boundless, taken up with an alacrity which loses nothing by present-day comparison. Archive newspapers easily reveal the machinations of pushy press agents — the continual drip-drip of stories appearing in multiple titles. From the time Nevin Tait announced that in Clara Butt’s 1907/08 tour she would ‘cause the greatest furore ever created in Australian musical circles’, the ‘pars’ kept coming — for example, news of a UK society wedding Clara had graced before her departure, her farewell concerts in the UK, a dispatch (by cable) noting her ship’s departure (with the tit-bit that P&O had placed electric fans in her cabin so the sweat-shy diva could withstand the Red Sea heat), all building up to massive coverage of the regal arrival in Australia, whisked coast-to-coast by telegraph.

Yes, those farewell UK concerts. The Australian press reported on how they’d extended from Dundee to Brighton. How many goodbyes did Clara need? But ‘Goodbye!’ was a potent marketing ploy, just as ‘Hello again!’ concerts would be in the spring of 1908. We get a sense of that from the letters of Butt’s travelling manager, R Leigh Ibbs, partner in the fledgling Ibbs & Tillett concert agency in London — yes, accompanying Colossal Clara to the other side of the world by boat was deemed financially worthwhile. Never mind that he was representing one of the most desirable musical properties in the universe, Ibbs constantly relayed news of Butt’s Australian triumphs to a PR man in London. The aim, to ensure she didn’t lose an iota of appeal back home— relaying everything from hyperbolic accounts of concerts (‘People … stood on the seats, waved and cheered for about 20 minutes’) to details of receipts (‘Exaggerate as much as you like').

Ibbs had another strikingly familiar managerial role — negotiating commercial endorsements for Butt and her baritone husband, Kennerley Rumford, syndicated across Australia and in themselves fanning the flames of adulation. For example, the bold ads for Peps Pastilles, and Kallos skin cream. Ibbs even appeared in the latter: ’Madame Clara Butt ... has tried your preparation and considers it most excellent SKIN FOOD. Yours faithfully, R Leigh Ibbs’. One indication, then, that Ibbs enjoyed quite a media profile during the tour, his presence (not least at society events) constantly noted in print. Indeed, a keyword search for ‘R Leigh Ibbs’  in 1907/08 Australian online newspapers brings up dozens of hits. Eat your heart out, thoroughly modern managers.