Acting role at the Barr Smiths' Torrens Park home theatre a part of William Bragg's entree to Adelaide society

Scotch College in Mitcham was formerly the Torrens Park home of Robert and Joanna Barr Smith. It includes a 200-seat theatre where William Bragg took a lead role in a play.
Image by Samuel White Sweet, courtesy State Library of South Australia

In October of his first year (1886) in Adelaide, William Bragg took the male lead in a comic drama in two acts entitled The Jacobite. It was presented in the Torrens Park Theatre, an elaborately decorated auditorium built by Robert and Joanna Barr Smith at their large home at Mitcham in the Adelaide foothills.

With much of its interior decoration arranged by correspondence with a London architect, the theatre had a fully equipped stage, gas lighting, antique mirrors, oval windows and a glass-roofed conservatory. It seated 200. (The theatre has been restored by Scotch College that now occupies the property.)

Robert Barr Smith emigrated to South Australia from Scotland in 1855, and he soon developed extensive and varied business interests, including his own pastoral holdings and the pioneering pastoral developments of Elder Smith and Co. His philanthropy became legendary but he shrank from any publicity. The University of Adelaide was one of his major beneficiaries with general funds. specific projects such as Elder Hall and the Elder Conservatorium, and particularly the library.

Robert and Joanna Barr Smith were lavish hosts, and the theatre, built partly to indulge the family’s own interest in theatricals, became the venue for many entertainments.

William Bragg's participation in at least one of those entertainments recalls his boyhood love of theatricals at King William College in England and it indicates his immediate acceptance into the wealthiest level of Adelaide social strata.

It was also significant in Bragg's rise to scientific eminence. Seventeen years later, Robert Barr Smith provided the money for Bragg to buy his first sample of radium bromide and begin his extraordinary research. Later, in 1906, Barr Smith gave more funds for Bragg to buy a machine to liquefy gases.