The reason I had trouble finding anything much on this lady is that she performed under the name of Gwendo Paul. Like her mother, she was an accomplished pianist and, like her mother, travelled to London to study. In late 1927, in Kensington, she married Harold Ching, a baritone with the Bristol Opera Company. In 1929, they travelled to Australia, gave concerts, and Harold took up a post teaching at the Melbourne Conservatorium. A son was also born, in Queensland, sometime before October 1929. In 1933, they returned to England and Harold began to study medicine while still performing from time to time. They planned to travel to Australia to visit family in about 1938 after Harold had completed his studies, but her father's death in 1937 intervened.
From the rather poor photos in the scanned newspapers, "Gwendo" was quite a stunner, and Harold wasn't too bad himself.
The most likely birth registration I can find for Harold is Harold Thomas CHING, September quarter 1906, Croydon registration district.
I am now trying to dig up information on their life after 1937.
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Dear Geoff, great to see that you continue chipping at the old block.
ReplyDeleteI found a new job in Copenhagen and have been quite busy in the move.
For whatever it is worth, I have Gwendo's husband as Herold Kyng born Kilburn, London without any source notes.
Best wishes,
Thomas.
Hi Geoff
ReplyDeleteI have a lot of information about EGE (Gwendo) Paul and Harold Ching (later Kyng) as they were my grandparents. I'm currently building a Kyng family tree on ancestry.com which may be visible to people who sign up there (I'm not entirely familiar with their system). I'd be interested to know how you came to be researching the family. Let me know what you'd like to know.
Best regards, Jenny Kyng
Jenny! Wonderful to "meet" the granddaughter of Gwendo. All I had in the way of descendants was a newspaper reference to a son born here.
ReplyDeleteWhat would I like to know? Just an outline - did they have more children besides the son? Did they settle UK or return here, or travel back and forth?
I started out on this just by checking the files on William Townsend in our local historical society and finding that some of what had been collected didn't make sense. He was a Sandgate "notable resident".
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DeleteI can't find your tree on ancestry.com. Found a few, but very short on info and some of them not particularly correct.
ReplyDeleteGeoff
! I know we met in person but I have just realised I didn’t answer these questions when you asked them on this forum. Sorry about that! As I probably told you in person Peter was their only child.They didn’t return together to Australia. Harold and Gwendo separated sometime after he completed his medical degree. He had come under the influence of the ideas of Aleister Crowley and Freud by that time and consequently become impossible to live with. A perhaps formerly disguised mental illness began to assert itself. He was diagnosed schizophrenic in the years preceding his death and after a long hospital stay ended up committing suicide at the age of 34. Gwendo lived on and eventually died in Australia at the age of about 90. I’m surprised you couldn’t get into the Kyng family in Ancestry but perhaps you should have been looking under the name Ching. This was the real surname of Harold. All the best. Jenny
DeleteAhhh! I found a report in The Age of January 1975 that tells me that she was widowed in 1940, that her son was in the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, and that she returned to Australia in 1951, and played with Mr McCallum, presumably at the "Cremorne" theatre.
ReplyDeleteI hadn't searched on her name for a while, so this must be a new entry.
http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=C9FaAAAAIBAJ&sjid=NpIDAAAAIBAJ&pg=6324%2C3660073
Interesting, That all sounds correct. Peter remained in the orchestra till the late 70s or early 80s as far as I remember.
DeleteUmmm ... are you Jenny Kyng the artist? (Thought the name was familiar.)
ReplyDeleteYes I am though I didn’t think I had any kind of public profile of note!
DeleteI now have found her Electoral Roll entries from 1954 (Darlinghurst, NSW) to 1980 (Wiliamstown, VIC).
ReplyDeleteGwendo was my grandfather's sister.
ReplyDeleteYou must be Noel’s granddaughter then? It seems he wasn’t treated all that well by his father...while Gwendo was the apple of his eye. Must have been very hard for Noel.
DeleteGwendo Paul performed at Tikki and John's in the 1970s.
ReplyDeleteTrue—she played with them for many years—“musical theatre” it was then known as. It would probably be called Burlesque now. She seemed to enjoy it, though quite possibly there was some regret about her once promising career as a pianist never really going anywhere. The war got in the way and her life was severely disrupted by the no doubt traumatic collapse of her marriage to Harold (who by the way changed his name to Herald), leaving her a single mother struggling to make a living.
ReplyDelete