Author:
Charles Haddon Chambers [Charles Haddon Spurgeon Chambers] (1860-1921), Australian dramatist who settled in England, where he had an affair with Dame Nellie Melba [Allhusen family, Stoke Court, Bucks]
Publication details:
17 May 1911; on letterhead of 14 Waverton Street, Berkeley Square, W. [London.]
Chambers is not mentioned in Dame Nellie Melba’s entry in the Oxford DNB. She met him in London in 1895, and their affair ended for unknown reasons in 1904. It is clearly the ‘notorious’ affair in whose fame Chambers ‘rejoiced to the last’, according to Somerset Maugham’s devastating assessment of the man in ‘A Writer’s Notebook’ (1946). Harry de Windt gives a markedly kinder account of Chambers in his ‘My Note-Book at Home and Abroad’ (1923).
