When young Richard Smith accidentally banged a cricket ball through the Payneham Primary School bass drum back in the ’20s, it had some unforeseen consequences.
For instance, when he became the school drummer he had to learn to avoid the ruptures and holes in the drum and to beat where the skin was tight. It taught him to strike the drum accurately. It also put a beat in his blood.
So began a career of a notable timpanist and one which would embrace the pits of movie houses in the silent picture days and the white-tie-and-tails atmosphere of orchestral concerts.
Richard Smith is a gentle and approachable man for one who has wielded such striking power and whose tempo as a timpanist was often used at rehearsals by famous conductors for the benefit of less experienced colleagues.
His experience with theatre orchestras has included Gilbert and Sullivan performances with such greats as Ivan Menzies; in Army entertainment units accompanying Gracie Fields in Brisbane; and playing the drums for Noel Coward at Woodside Army camp.
An original member of the first ABC orchestra under William Cade, his conductors have ranged from Schneevoigt to Sargent and from Klemperer to Krips.
He has remained a dedicated -professional, but a bloke who has enjoyed himself always and hoped that the customers out front have done the same.
He told me he liked the moment when, coming from an Adelaide Town Hall concert, he could mingle with the patrons and find how the performances went.
He has adjusted his life to the tempo of the times although the beat quickened a bit when he met a young ABC pianist called Beryl Chinner, whom he later married
But, he says, the Payneham school band was the start of his musical career. Then there was Harold Hender, licensee of the Tavistock Hotel, who taught him how to hold the. drumsticks and to roll the drum, the “drum” being the surface of the bar counter.
When the Depression came Richard’s father, a marshal at the Hackney tram depot, and his mother made sacrifices to enable him to get his percussion instruments.
Bill Cox, of the Payneham Brass Band, taught him how to read music.
He was 14 when he got his first professional job at the Alberton Ozone. He was in several movie orchestras in the silent film days but the Regent was the most memorable.
He played on its opening night. He remembers the chandeliers, the nightly parade of usherettes and the 100 pieces the orchestra might play in a single evening.
He said: “It certainly improved my reading of music.”
Richard Smith was then 16. When talkies ousted the silent movies, there were few theatre jobs.
Cyril Ritchard, who was appearing with his wife, Madge Elliott, in Roberta and High Jinks at the Theatre Royal, praised young Smith’s percussion accompaniment to a spectacular dance.
Then Richard Smith joined the ABC orchestra (which later formed the nucleus of the South Australian Symphony Orchestra) in 1936 and stayed there for 43 years.
There were some friendly, and fiery, conductors during that long musical association.
When young Smith, sleepy after a Smith. trip with some interstate friends to Victor Harbor, missed a cue in a rehearsal for Elijah, Sir Thomas Beecham remarked: “When my young timpanist is with us we will continue.”
“But he smiled. He was always one for a joke,” said Richard as we talked at his Wattle Park home.
Another great British conductor, Sir Malcolm Sargent, loved showmanship.
One night before playing an Elgar overture, Sargent said to Richard, “What we’ll do is ease up until near the end and then I’ll come over to you and we’ll let them have it.”
Richard Smith said: “So we let them have it. The members of the audience nearly fell out of their seats with delight.”
He recalled that conductor Georg Schneevoigt, the fiery Finn, wasn’t so pleased about a transgressing player.
Stormed Schneevoigt: “There may be only one cannon in Finland but if you play another wrong note I will bring it out and I will shoot you dead.”
At one studio rehearsal, Schneevoigt demanded that Sibelius’s Finlandia should be played at full volume.
Said Richard Smith: “We played it with such power that announcer Jack Norris rushed in from the next studio and said that the needle kept jumping off the gramophone records and could we soften it a bit?”
German conductor Otto Klemper er, who would beat time with a finger and expect an orchestral response, became so irritated at rehearsal with a continual mistake in Brahms’s Fourth Symphony that he stormed off, shouting “sabotage!”.
The ever-watchful concert manager, Athol Lykke, brought him back.
“After that we always called it the Sabotage Symphony,” said Richard Smith.
Richard Smith enjoyed meeting country people but when, in its early years, the orchestra went to Broken Hill everyone dreaded the dusty road and, even more, the cold pasties.
The thoughtful Athol Lykke carried a little stove on the bus to heat the pasties.
“When we’d arrive at Yunta, Athol would prepare to heat the pasties. But the stove was so slow we usually ate them cold,” said Richard.
Richard Smith has always relaxed with tennis. He was an A Grade district player and took a heavy toll of other musicians.
He once knocked out conductor Joseph Post with a forehand drive and smashed conductor Tibor Paul’s glasses on a court at Renmark. This meant a frantic hunt to find an optician before the evening’s concert.
Richard Smith also gave US Davis Cup players Donald Budge and Gene Mako lessons on the drums. In return Budge gave Richard the racquet with which he won the Australian singles title.
Richard Smith still teaches at the Elder Conservatorium and plays in local orchestras. He has travelled to South-East Asia for youth music camps. The camp director, in a letter, thanked him and wished him a happy journey.
Indeed a happy journey might describe the life of Richard Smith, both as man and musician. And whether it’s the tinkle of his xylophone or the beat of his timpani, he still has a thumping good time, this drummer boy from Payneham Primary.
Max Fatchen