"I'LL GO RIGHT ON SINGING"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 258, 2 June 1944, Page 18

"I'LL GO RIGHT ON SINGING"

Dockside Diva Builds Morale

By

JOHN

BARKHAM

(by special arrangement with "Life" 5

Perla Siedle is South Africa’s No. 1 dockside moralebuilder. Yanks call her " Kate Smith" and "Ma"; Poles have named her "South African Nightingale"; and to Britishers she is the ingale"; and to Britishers she is the "Soldiers" Sweetheart" and the "Lady in White." The Lady in White has sung in and out of Durban Harbour more than 5000 troopships carrying an estimated quarter of a million servicemen of all the Allied nations. Standing on the quay in Durban, South Africa’s busiest wartime port, always wearing an immaculate white dress and a red hat, this one-time Wagnerian dramatic soprano sings request songs by the dozen through a ship’s megaphone in a powerful, vibrant voice which carries far across the waters of Durban Harbour. Her megaphone comes from a torpedoed liner and is a gift from grateful Tommies who salvaged it for her. The fame of Perla Siedle has spread across the world in soldier talk. When H IFTY TWO-YEAR OLD

troops spy her stocky figure, calls pour in from the crowded rails for favourites like Home, Sweet Home, When the Lights Go On Again, The White Clifts of Dover, Annie Laurie, and Gounod’s Ave Maria. Captains usually stand on the bridge and salute her as the ship glides by. Czechs and Poles aboard ship click their heels and stand at rigid attention. Perla kicks off with a few mellifluous coo-ees, to which the soldiers reply with thunderous echoes. Then comes the first song and it is inevitably the sameLand of Hope and Glory. Perla welcomes the Yanks with God Bless America, The Star-Spangled Banner, Negro spirituals and new song hits,. Sometimes their requests stump her; for

example, she didn’t know The Marines’ Hymn, "From the Halls of Montezuma . .’ But Perla makes a point of learning any soOng new to her before it is requested again. / The Yanks never ask for hymns, although the British sometimes do. Australians always want Waltzing Matilda, South Africans like their own Afrikaans folk songs like Sarie Marais. Czechs, Poles, Greeks and other continentals prefer opera, so for them she does arias from Wagner, Verdi, Puccini. For hospital ships, Perla gives extra long performances. ; The No. 1 ritish favourite is There'll Always Be An England. Says Perla Siedle: "I adore British Tommies. They make you sing and sing and never let you stop. I once sang six hours at a stretch for them." She never sings God Save the King because it is too formal and the men would have to stand at attention. Likes Laughing and Singing A wealthy, benevolent socialite, Perla Siedle is energetic, bright-eyed, bigbosomed and good-natured, and has a pudgy, plump figure. She likes laughing and singing, and looks like a streamlined Kate Smith. Because of her matronly appearance, sentimental British troops invariably ask her to sing Mother o’ Mine. She is married to Air Sergeant Jack Gibson, last stationed at Foggia, Italy, and has two sons and one daughter in the South African Army. All four have (continued on next page)

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heard her sing them good-bye. Durbanborn, Berlin-trained, the daughter of a rich South African ship-owner, Perla Siedle in her youth sang in London for Granville Bantock and Henry Wood, and once gave a recital in New York, What she calls her "wharfside work" began on April 16, 1940, when she was bidding farewell to a young Irish seaman her family had entertained the day before. Across the water he yelled, "Please sing something Irish," and through cupped hands she obliged with When Irish Eyes Are Smiling. That started her on her dockside career and she has sung to every troopship that has come in or out of Durban Harbour since. In London, New York, Bombay, Sydney and Cairo servicemen talk about her, write her fan letters and send her souvenirs. The first U.S. troops to arrive in Durban threw to the quay packets of precious chewing gum, which Perla promptly sent to her sons in the Middle East. For security reasons the British Navy won’t tell her of ship movements, but from the broad porch of her tiny Dutchgabled villa on Berea Hill ("my crow’s nest") Perla can see when convoys are in or readying to go. When that happens, she speeds to the docks in her sedan with a special entertainment pass issued her by the Navy, who rate her morale-building value high. Usually it is near dawn or dusk, and the men are either glad to come or sad to go. She sings till the ships are docked or beyond the range of her voice, and never turns her back on a departing vessel. At first, when the ship is untied, the men join in so heartily that when an onshore breeze is blowing the song-feast can be heard in central Durban a mile away. But by the time the ship is out over the bar, Perla is singing.alone. Farewells are always charged with heavy misty-eyed emotion on both sides, One particularly * touching Durban "farewell was thus described by a magazine published on board a British troopship en route to India: "A deeper feeling gripped all of us soldiers, a strange contracting of the throat. A chorus started, wavered, fell away into poignant silence. Gradually the troopship drew away and at the end of the jetty that white-clad figure started Auld Lang Syne. As the gap grew, just snatches of the words came to us, and finally, just a picture of that solitary figure in white waving to us, and we swear she was still singing. We may forget many things of this war, but never the songs of Durban’s Lady in White." Says the Lady in White: "I'll go right on singing as long as ships keep sailing, and when our boys come back after victory I'll be here to sing them welcome home again."