Songwriter/pianist/singer.
A prolific songwriter and talented pianist, Alf. J. Lawrance wrote a cantata called 'The Mandarin' at 16, and after it was produced by a local amateur dramatic society he began turning his attention to the theatre. That same year he also published his first song, 'Goodnight My Little Daffodil.' It reportedly sold in excess of 40,000 copies in Britain alone. By the mid-1949s Lawrance had published upwards of a thousand more (some in collaboration), mostly for vaudeville, pantomime, revusical, revue and follies, radio and film.
In his early theatre career Lawrance ran his own Saturday concerts at Kingston-on-Thames before turning to fulltime songwriting. By his own count he had by 1915 composed more than a thousand songs (not all were published), with some of the biggest names to perform them being Ada Reeve, Marie Lloyd and Wilkie Bard.
Lawrance and his wife, singer Violet Carmen, first came to Australia as a piano/vocal duo. Billed as Carmen and Lawrance, the pair found engagements in this country and New Zealand through until 1921 with James Brennan, Ted Holland, Dix-Baker, Birch and Carroll, Fullers Theatres and George Willoughby among others. For Willoughby he wrote the book and music for Babes in the Woods (1914) and in 1915 contributed most of the music for Villiars Arnold's Step This Way company. Around 1922/23 Lawrence partnered singer Nell Crane before going solo. He also appeared with a number of revusical and revue companies - notably Claude Dampier's Trump Cards Company.
In the 1930s Lawrance was employed by Ernest C. Rolls as a pianist/songwriter for revues like League of Happiness, while also contributing music for radio and scores for the films The Hayseeds (1933), Splendid Fellows (1934), The Flying Doctor (1936, with Willy Redstone) and Rangle River (1936). His radio career began in the late-1920s with the privately-owned Australian Broadcasting Company (as music director/ conductor). He joined the government-run Australian Broadcasting Commission in 1937. Through the early 1930s, he wrote the music for a number of radio revues by Edmund Barclay.
In late 1946 Lawrance teamed up with 19-year-old songwriter Robyn Teakle. The pair went on to write and published a number of popular songs.
[Source: Australian Variety Theatre Archive]
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