Prelude.

I first met Mrs Bessey when I was just 10 years old.  My Father’s brother, Claude Muller, had learnt piano from her at an earlier time and it was decided that I should meet her with a view to becoming her pupil. She wasn’t just a music teacher; she was a concert pianist!  Wearing my Sunday best, my mother took me to her home, at 206b Herries Street, Toowoomba.  It was a very grand house, a pink art deco with a rounded portico with the name ‘Los Angeles’ painted in large flowing letters above. It was in a central part of town, not where normal people lived in the late 60’s.  Rose bushes lined the scarlet cement pathway to the entrance.  Without a second thought I walked through the small yellow gate, straight up that pathway to the stained glass front door and into her life. 

For the meeting we sat in her lounge room, which although stuffy because the house was always closed up, was decorated in a style that displayed wealth and formality.  Dark wooded furniture, wallpaper and rose patterned carpet set the backdrop for photos of famous composers and marble statues.  Above the fireplace was a portrait of her in a flowing pink gown.  On each side of the lounge were the grand pianos.  The Neufeld, which I later used for my lessons and the Steinway that was saved for special occasions.  I only ever got to play it when my exams were coming up and I needed to experience the touch of different key actions.  A huge silver bowl of roses sat upon a draped cloth on the piano and underneath each were large enamel dishes of water to keep the moisture in the air. Lace curtains draped the windows and the afternoon sun created a golden glow in the otherwise muted dusty pink room.  I later discovered that they had planned to install a pipe organ but the ceiling was too low.

During my lessons, apart from learning music theory and pieces by Mozart, Bach, Chopin, Brahms, Greig and Liszt, I also learnt about life.  She would tell me stories about her own life, though always again veiled in secrecy to prevent me from discovering her age.  She was a proud woman. She told me that she had been a brilliant student and at age 13 had sat for the Royal Academy Gold Medal and passed.  You had to be at least aged 14 years to be eligible so she lied about her age.  She also told me that she had made recordings and had been a concert pianist.  Although fleetingly, she only ever referred to her husband Bon as her beloved.  He had died some years before, but I don’t think she ever recovered from the grief.  She had met him at a train station, where he offered to carry her bags or so she said. 

Mrs Bessey had given me a gift.  She gave me music, passion, an opportunity to learn about a different world of glamour, guilt, discipline, and travel.  I wish I had had the knowledge to know at the time what she had given me and to acknowledge the gift. I never forgot the time I spent with her, but yet I only knew her as an elderly and eccentric lady.  Who was she?  Who was her beloved?  I wanted to know more.

 Fugue.

Honey, as she was known due to her golden locks, was born Ethel May Matthews in Ravenswood, North Queensland on the 17th April 1892.  She was the youngest of eight children and the apple of her father’s eye.  Her father had remarried after his first wife had died, and Honey was born.  Her father became wealthy later in life when with ten others he reopened the Donnybrook goldmine. Honey benefited from his newly found wealth and received a private education at Geelong Ladies College.  It was here that her musical talent blossomed and she received her licentiate from the Royal College.  She returned to North Queensland after finishing school and worked as a piano teacher whilst her family had the Metropolitan hotel.

In her late teens and early twenties she travelled by ship to Dunedin with two nieces and her sisters.  It is also rumoured that she had travelled to London, the Continent and America, during this time.  But little more is known?

On the 17th June 1920 in North Queensland, she married Wilfred Gregory Bessey, her beloved ‘Bon’. He was her first and only love.  

Bon was a teacher of voice production and singing, elocution and dramatic art, pianoforte and theory. He was born in Sydney on 2nd January 1889 but had travelled abroad studying at notable places including the Leipzig Conservatorium, in London, on the Continent and in the USA under the guidance of the world’s greatest masters – Dr Lennox Browne, Emil Bhenke, C.J. Plumptre, Professor Warman and professor Melville Bell.  Honey and Bon most probably met at this time, maybe in Los Angeles?  She spoke with immense admiration for him and seemed swept away with the romance. He was an older ‘artistic’ man and she was beautiful and talented.

Bon was very well educated and had friends in the theatre. One, Bland Holt, was a well- known producer at the time and Bon possibly travelled with his productions.   Maybe Honey also performed?  A postcard collection shows a tour from Victoria through country New South Wales and Queensland, to the United States via the Pacific islands and Hawaii and to the Continent. 

Honey and Bon found fame in their youth, so why did they settle for life in Toowoomba? In the early 1920’s Toowoomba was a wealthy provisional city with culture and educational opportunities and they were a newly married couple, with culture to spare. They were Mr and Mrs W. Gregory Bessey. They built their first house in Clifford Street during the War and then moved to ‘Los Angeles’.  Honey, known on her business card as Mrs W. Gregory Bessey, taught at Beale Studio’s in Toowoomba.  She played bridge with the neighbours but was affronted if she was referred to by any name other than her formal married name.  She was a proud woman and some would have said, ‘a snob’.  She imported soap from America, as she considered it was the only soap that suited her delicate pale skin. Her late nephew, the artist Nevil Matthews, questioned their ‘beloved’ romance – was it too an embellishment?

Upon reflection, their golden days appeared so short.  Was she happy? Was he happy? Or did she choose to remember another time, a recapitulation of their halcyon days. Studio photos show them at middle age, elegantly dressed, each seated at their pianos on opposite sides of the room.  The same room that I had entered, complete with the marble statues, the grand pianos, and the painted portrait above the golden faux fireplace.  Nothing had changed. There was grandeur but their faces tell a different story.  Austerity and strain show on Bon’s face and his gaze is distant.   Were they truly beloved?

On the 23rd of July 1960 Bon died of a heart attack at home while listening to the races.  Honey’s world fell apart.  She was no longer Mrs W. Gregory Bessey, the wife of a well- to- do man, a mason and an ‘artiste’.  She was too distressed to attend the funeral.  For a further sixteen years she lived as though time had stopped, just waiting for a second chance.

Honey died on the 12th July 1976 in their home.  She lies in an unmarked grave in the Toowoomba Cemetery next to her beloved Bon. 

I embarked on this journey of discovery, wanting to know all: the story of her life, the love and grandeur that so captured me in my youth.  But, I realise it is also my story, where memories become as embellished as the gold paint on her furniture. Do I really want to know the facts or is better to remember the time when music, romance, and the world held my imagination.