Person Page - 18

SMITH, LOUIS LAWRENCE (1830-1910), medical practitioner and politician, was born on 15 May 1830 in London, son of Edward Tyrell Smith, theatrical entrepreneur, and his wife Magdelana Nannette, née Gengoult. He attended St Saviour's Grammar School, Southwark, in 1841-46 and then was apprenticed for five years to the surgeon Sir Thomas Longmore. In 1848 he studied at the Ecole de Médecine, Paris; next year he attended lectures of the London Society of Apothecaries, and in 1850 began his training at Westminster Hospital (L.S.A., 1852). For a while he practised with Dr R. J. Culverwell, proprietor of a pathological museum. In 1852 he migrated as ship's surgeon in the Oriental, arriving in Melbourne on 11 December.
Briefly on the goldfields, Smith opened a surgery in Bourke Street in July 1853 and by 1862 had expanded it to include a museum of anatomy and the Polytechnic Hall. He regarded his practice as a speculative venture and by 1863 was spending £3000 a year on newspaper advertisements. He began consultations by post, at a fee of £1 per prescription, and in 1860 he first published his annual Medical Almanac which emphasized home treatment. He also developed his popular approach through articles in the Australian Journal from 1865 and in cheap pamphlets produced in the 1860s.
Smith argued that advertising showed the worth of his qualifications and thus exposed quacks. He also claimed that his practice gave him an unusually wide range of experience; but his methods were opposed by many doctors and some laymen. His museum was closed in 1869 because it offended 'taste'. Notorious for his treatment of venereal disease, in 1858 he was acquitted of a charge of procuring an abortion; the reputation stuck. Undaunted he ignored the Victorian Branch of the British Medical Association when it was formed in 1879, continued advertising and was said to be making £10,000 a year by 1880.
Smith entered politics perhaps rather for prestige and influence than on principle. As 'the people's candidate' for South Bourke, from 1859 to 1865 he seems to have won Legislative Assembly elections by force of personality. His early career was marred by his assault on J. D. Wood in the House on 15 May 1863. He won Richmond in 1871, but lost popularity and was defeated in 1874 when he opposed Francis's reform proposals. In 1872 a select committee had found that he acted imprudently but without corrupt intentions in soliciting government advertisements for the Times and Mines in which he had had an interest; in 1873 he was accused of approaching the commissioner of railways to gain advantage.
As a supporter of Berry Smith again won Richmond in 1877, but in 1881 he helped O'Loghlen to defeat the government and in July was rewarded with a ministerial post without portfolio. But the ministry was weak and lost office in 1883; Smith was defeated. Returned for Mornington in 1886, he opposed the Gillies-Deakin coalition, but supported Munro and Shiels until January 1893, when he crossed the floor to support the scheming Patterson. He lost at the election in September 1894, but stood again in 1895 and 1901, and polled last of the twenty-nine candidates for the 1897 Federal Convention. In the House Smith had spoken often, especially on manufacturing and agriculture. He chaired three select committees and was a member of several others; he served on the royal commission on coal in 1889-91, and was a member of the Phylloxera Board until 1893. He was a promoter of coal exploration and in 1876 had been involved in a proposed tramway from Cloncurry to the Gulf in Queensland.
Until 1881 Smith made the Polytechnic Hall available for theatricals, especially in the 1860s, and he associated with visiting actors such as G. V. Brooke, T. B. Sullivan and the Keans. In November 1867 he organized a free public open-air dinner during the Duke of Edinburgh's tour; the viands were rushed when the royal visitor did not appear. He was also associated with the Australian Journal, the Ballarat Sun in 1864, the Times and Mines and the Melbourne Journal in 1894. Most of his time and at least £20,000 were devoted to his model farms at Dandenong, Narre Warren, Nunawading and Beaconsfield on which he raised pigs and sheep. From 1863 he had racehorse stables at Emerald Hill and later at Kensington; he liked acting as steward at suburban meetings and rode in his young days. He was a patron of the Richmond Football Club, was prominent in the Yarra Yarra Rowing Club, and bred bloodhounds.
Smith joined the Chamber of Manufactures in 1881, was several times vice-president and was a leading spokesman for many years. He concentrated on wines, growing the grapes on L. L. Vale at Nunawading; he won success at overseas exhibitions. President in 1883 of the Victorian Winegrowers' Association, he wanted protection against imports. In 1898 he retired as chairman of the Exhibition Trustees, but continued his medical practice and developed his extensive art collection.
By the late 1890s Smith suffered from gout. He died of pneumonia at East Melbourne on 8 July 1910. Charming and 'a thorough Bohemian at home among all classes', he was small and dressed fashionably, often sporting a diamond ring. As a conversationalist he was sparkling and witty, and noted for his gaiety and boisterous mirth. Although his success might have been won unscrupulously (the Bulletin dubbed him ££ Smith) it was often the result of enthusiasm and self-confidence, combined with an inherited flair for promotion. His championing of local industry, especially wines, showed an awareness of genuine colonial interests.
Smith was twice married: first about 1860 to Sarah Ann Taylor (d.1882), by whom he had ten children; and second on 15 May 1883 to Marion Jane Higgins, who survived him and by whom he had four children. Of these Louise (1884-1962), a pianist, settled in Paris and in 1932 founded the Lyre-bird Press; Tom Roberts's portrait of her as a child is in the National Gallery of Victoria. Sir Harold Gengoult (b.1890) was lord mayor of Melbourne in 1931-34.⁹³

DYER, LOUISE BERTA MOSSON HANSON (1888-1962), patron of the arts and music publisher, was born on 19 July 1884 in Melbourne, daughter of Louis Lawrence Smith and his second wife Marion Jane, née Higgins. In 1891 she began attending Presbyterian Ladies' College, East Melbourne, where her musical aptitude soon emerged. A talented pianist, she won the gold medal of the Royal College of Music, London, and afterwards went to Edinburgh to continue her musical studies.
Three years after returning, Louise married, on 27 December 1911, 54-year-old James Dyer, who as a young man had sung in the Liedertafel. He was now Australasian manager of Messrs Michael Nairn & Co. of Kirkcaldy, Scotland: contemporary gossip columnists referred to him as 'Jimmy Dyer, the linoleum king'. Louise's immediate sphere of social activity became the P.L.C. Old Girls' Association, which she served first as secretary and then as president in two double terms, 1919-21 and 1924-26.
After moving in 1922 from Hawthorn to Kinnoul, Toorak, Louise Dyer held regular divertissements. The prime mover in the foundation of the British Music Society of Victoria in 1921, she was in touch with the best performers offering, and paid them handsomely. Programmes were designed by leading artists, the hostess rising to the occasion with gorgeous dressing; flamboyance united the imperious and Bohemian aspects of her personality. She was also serious: before long she was mounting a production of Gustav Holst's Savitri and the Lully-Molière Le Mariage Forcé. Active in the Alliance Française, she extended her interest in literature to works being written around her: she underwrote the publication in book form of Shaw Neilson's Ballad and Lyrical Poems (1923) and, with characteristic energy, organized a deputation to the prime minister which sought an increase in the funding of literary pensions.
The Dyers were bound eventually to move to Europe: on a previous departure Louise told the press of the necessity to go to England to procure music unavailable in Australia. Shortly after donating £10,000 to encourage the establishment of a permanent orchestra, they left Melbourne for England in April 1927 and a year later settled in Paris. There, after an initial period taking in galleries and concerts, she decided to complement the Lully edition then in progress by publishing a similar one of the music of Couperin le Grand, whose bicentenary was approaching. Thus was born the 'Editions de l'Oiseau-Lyre', the homage to her homeland spelt out in a photograph of tail feathers from a lyre-bird that adorned the front endpapers.
When the twelve volumes of the Couperin edition appeared in 1933, they created a sensation: material which had existed hitherto only in manuscript form, or in inaccurate nineteenth century editions, suddenly became available as the finest printed music most people had ever seen, impeccably edited. The edition was intended to be as permanent as possible, 'traversing time and space', as Louise wrote in her introduction; and to this end the best engravers and printers in Paris were set to work with the finest hand-made papers. By 1940, some forty volumes had been printed, including collections of sonatas by Purcell and Blow and the Polyphonic Music of the XIIIth Century (bound in Australian blackwood). Gramophone recordings were undertaken initially as Mrs Dyer's response to the earnest theorizing of a young musicologist, who was suddenly provided with the facilities to demonstrate his arguments about performance; but as the catalogue grew, the recordings became the means by which the Editions de l'Oiseau-Lyre became best known.
In the early long-playing era Lyre-Bird was the first to record the Monteverdi Vespers, Handel operas, the larger stage works of Purcell, and the complete ordres of Couperin; also works by Schönberg, Milhaud and Stravinsky. Such discs were often notable for the vivacity and freshness of the performance, often a direct result of Louise Dyer contacting the artists involved immediately after a particularly impressive radio broadcast. The publishing programme continued, though now overshadowed; as before, it catered for the needs of institutions and accredited scholars rather than the tastes of collectors.
Louise Dyer, along with the musicians Nadia Boulanger and Wanda Landowska, was a key figure in the revival of the serious performance of Baroque music in recent times: in consequence the French government appointed her a chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur in 1934, with promotion to officier of that order in 1957. Yet although she moved effortlessly in Parisian musical and social circles, Louise Dyer's attachment to Australia, while attenuated, was unassailable. The Editions de l'Oiseau-Lyre published works by Peggy Glanville-Hicks and Margaret Sutherland; Louise tried to interest Gallimard in publishing a translation of Furphy; and, at the moment of her greatest triumph, the appearance of the Couperin edition, she wrote of the presentation copy to the Public Library of Victoria, 'Number One went to the President of the French Republic; Number Two goes to my own homeland library'. She returned to Melbourne frequently, most notably to be lady mayoress to her brother (Sir) Harold Gengoult Smith in 1932.
James Dyer died in January 1938. On 6 April 1939 at Amersham, Buckinghamshire, England, Louise married 30-year-old Joseph Birch Hanson, an Englishman who had studied at the universities of Melbourne and Paris. They left Paris on the outbreak of war; Hanson attended Balliol College, Oxford, until August 1945. Finding post-war conditions in Paris untenable, they moved to Monaco, where they carried on their music publishing business. Louise Hanson-Dyer died in hospital at Monaco on 9 November 1962; her ashes were brought back to Melbourne general cemetery. The greater part of her Australian estate, valued in Victoria for probate at £241,380, was bequeathed to the University of Melbourne. The principal beneficiary of her estate in Europe was her husband, who carried on the work of l'Oiseau-Lyre; his second wife Margarita continues it still.
Portraits of Louise by Tom Roberts and W. B. McInnes, are in the National Gallery of Victoria and at P.L.C.²²

Sir Harold Gengoult Smith (1890-1983), lord mayor and medical practitioner, was born on 25 July 1890 in East Melbourne, third of four children of English-born parents Louis Lawrence Smith, medical practitioner and politician, and his wife Marion Jane, née Higgins. Harold enjoyed an outdoor life on his father’s model farms at Beaconsfield, and was educated at Melbourne Church of England Grammar School. He studied medicine in Scotland, but his course was interrupted by the outbreak of World War I in 1914. Serving in France with the 2nd Dragoon Guards, he was twice wounded, but not seriously. From July 1915 to April 1916 he held a commission in the cavalry. Returning to Scotland, he served in Red Cross hospitals while completing his studies. In 1917 he qualified as a licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons, Edinburgh, and the Royal Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons, Glasgow.
Back in Australia Smith practised at his late father’s Collins Street medical rooms from 1919, and in 1921 he was elected to the Melbourne City Council. A keen adventurer, in 1929 he explored the Tanami Desert, 400 miles (644 km) north-west of Alice Springs, with Michael Terry.
In 1931 (Sir) Harold Luxton retired as lord mayor of Melbourne and there was a closely fought contest between Smith and another councillor, John James Liston, to replace him. Liston was regarded as inimical to business interests, and Smith won the position by one vote. Had the votes been equal it was speculated that the presiding officer would have chosen Liston.
Melbourne’s first bachelor mayor, Smith vigorously took up the mayoral role. His sister, Louise Dyer, returned from France to be lady mayoress, taking leave from her music publishing business, Editions de l’Oiseau Lyre. On 6 December 1933 Smith married Cynthia Mary Emmerton Brookes, the daughter of Sir Norman and Mabel Brookes. She was 21 and he was 43, and their marriage at St Paul’s Church of England Cathedral, Melbourne, was the wedding of the year, attracting thousands of onlookers. By then plans were afoot for the Victorian centenary celebrations (1934), and Smith chaired several organising committees. He conceived the England to Australia air race and persuaded the confectionery magnate Sir Macpherson Robertson to provide £15,000 in prize money. The celebrations were honoured by a Royal visitor, the Duke of Gloucester, who was later godfather to Smith’s first child; (Sir) Robert Menzies was godfather to his second child. In addition, the celebrations were marked by the erection of new city landmarks, including Captain Cook’s cottage (now known as Cook’s cottage) and the Shrine of Remembrance.
Smith was knighted in 1934. He retired as mayor at the end of that year, but was to remain a member of the city council—representing Albert (later Latrobe) Ward—until 1965, making him the city’s longest-serving councillor. His only other attempt at political office was to stand unsuccessfully as a United Australia Party candidate in a State election in 1940. Following his retirement as mayor, he undertook postgraduate medical studies, becoming a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, Edinburgh, in 1935. Returning to Melbourne, he resumed his medical practice.
Having been active for much of the period 1908-33 in the Citizen Military Forces, Smith volunteered for full-time duty in World War II. Mobilised as a lieutenant colonel, Australian Army Medical Corps, in April 1941, he served in Australia and commanded the 5th Casualty Clearing Station (1941-42), the 50th Camp Hospital (1942-44), the 111th Australian General Hospital (1944-45) and the 107th Convalescent Depot (1945-46). He transferred to the Reserve of Officers on 2 March 1946 and thence, as an honorary colonel, to the Retired List in 1948.
Known for his courtesy and old-world charm, the veteran councillor was seldom given to long speeches—when he spoke it was usually to the point and in a soft, gentlemanly voice. A defender of British tradition, Smith decried new architecture, modern art and long-haired pop singers (including the Beatles), and applauded Melbourne’s trees and parklands. He was conservative by inclination and tended to be frugal both in his private life and in his municipal role. As an influential member of the council’s finance committee, he dismayed the management by successfully advocating the purchase of only half of a site proposed for new administrative offices. The land was not built on for forty years. Predeceased by his wife (d.1962) and survived by their daughter and son, Sir Harold died on 14 April 1983 at Armadale, Melbourne, and was cremated.¹⁷