The Ascent of Miss Ann Watt
My beloved mother Miss Ann Watt was born Angela Jean Watt to British-born parents in the city of Brandon, Manitoba. Her father an Irish builder from Castlederg in County Tyrone had been born into a Presbyterian family of probable Scottish extraction, while her mother was from Glasgow, having been born there to an English father from Liverpool or Manchester, and a Scottish mother, which means my mother is of mixed Lowland Scottish, Scots-Irish and English ancestry, whatever that might signify.
My paternal grandfather was probably a descendant of the planters sent by the English to Ulster, many of them originally inhabitants of the Anglo-Scottish border country and the Lowland region of Scotland. Lowlanders are traditionally distinct from their Highland counterparts, being Anglo-Saxon rather than Gaelic, although sense dictates that in their bloodline a variety of strains would be found including as well as Anglo-Saxon, Pictish, Gaelic, Norman, and so on.
Many of these Ulster Scots emigrated to the United States in the 1600s, and their descendants are to be found all throughout the US, but most famously perhaps in the South, where the greatest proportion of those identifying as just American are believed to be the descendants of the original Colonials and therefore mainly of British (English and Scots-Irish) ancestry.
Angela Watt was the youngest of six children – with only five surviving – born to James and Elizabeth Watt and the only one not to be born in either Scotland or Ireland. While still an infant, the family moved to the Grandview area of East Vancouver where James found work as a carpenter. By this time, James had abandoned the extreme Presbyterian Calvinism of his Ulster boyhood and youth for the sake of the Wesleyan theology of the Salvation Army, and my mother was raised in the Army at a time their approach to Scripture was what would be called Fundamentalist today.
His swing from the extreme (Calvinist) Protestantism of his youth in Ulster to the Wesleyan Arminianism of the Salvation Army could not have been more radical.
To explain, Calvinists are those Christians who’ve traditionally subscribed to what is known as the Doctrines of Grace – or Five Points of Calvinism – which stem from the Protestant Reformation. According to these doctrines, God predestined a limited Elect of men and women to be saved and that this election is unconditional, given Man’s total inability to respond to the Gospel without Grace, which is irresistible, and that salvation is irrevocable.
Calvin was himself powerfully influenced by Augustine of Hippo (345-430), the great North African Church Father who was an early proponent of a type of Christian determinism known as Predestination. This is based on the belief that God has foreordained every minute detail of history from the foundation of the world, including who would come to salvation in Christ, and who would be passed over. Double predestination, which was emphasized by John Calvin involves God’s active reprobation – or rejection – of the non-Elect. Up until Augustine, the majority of Church Fathers were advocates of the doctrine of Free Will, later revived by Jacobus Arminius and John Wesley.
Some Calvinists are what is known as supralapsarian, from the Latin lapsus meaning fall. They believe that God’s Elective Decree occurred prior to the Creation and Fall, and that it was accompanied by the reprobation of the non-elect. Calvin himself was a supralapsarian. Others, known as infralapsarian, maintain that Election followed the Fall. Most have been supporters of double predestination, thereby allegedly forming part of the largest group within Reformed theology.
Calvinist Churches became known as Reformed in Germany, France, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, and Presbyterian In Britain and the nations colonised by British Presbyterians such as the United States, Canada and Australia. Their faith was early expressed in written confessions, or creeds, such as the Heidelberg Catechism, the Belgic Confession of Faith, and the Canons of Dordt, as well as the Westminster Confession of Faith and the Westminster Catechisms. All are in essential agreement, together with the Baptist Confession of Faith of 1689, which has been upheld by Calvinist Baptist churches to this day.
After having been employed to defend Predestination from the attacks of fellow Dutchman Dirck Volckertszoon Coornhert, The Reformed theologian Jacobus Arminius began to have doubts about the doctrine himself and so the seeds of Arminianism was born, although this was never formulated in Arminius’ lifetime, and Arminius himself never saw himself as anything other than Reformed. According to Arminianism, Election doesn’t involve reprobation and is in accordance to God’s foreknowledge of who will and who won’t come to saving faith under the influence of God’s universal or prevenient Grace.
After Arminius’ death, his followers became known as the Remonstrants. They maintained Election came through, rather than being as a result of unconditional predestination (followed by spiritual regeneration), that atonement was universal and Grace resistible, and that salvation can be lost. The only one of the five points of Calvinism which they upheld was Total Depravity, although for them, this didn’t involve a total inability to respond to the Gospel. They expressed their beliefs through the Five Articles of Remonstrance known as the
However, the Synod of Dordrecht of 1618-’19, which had been organised for the express purpose of condemning Arminius’ theology, declared both it and its followers anathemas, before drawing up the Five Points of Calvinism, and expelling all Arminian pastors from the Netherlands.
Were it not for one man, Arminianism might have been in danger of vanishing into the shadows of history. That man was Anglican Minister John Wesley. Wesley effectively revived the reviled doctrine of Arminianism, handing it down to succeedent generations of Arminians, including members of the Methodist, Nazarene and Holiness churches, as well as most Pentecostals and Charismatics, and of course the Salvation Army, possibly the most famous manifestation of Wesley’s emphasis of God’s love for Man, and specifically the poor, the unfortunate and the maltreated.
At the same time, like Arminius, John Wesley never saw himself as anything other than Reformed, a word now almost completely associated with Calvinism. What’s more he remained a faithful Anglican for the entirety of his life. Yet, while a passionate opponent of slavery and other violations of human rights, he was a conservative Biblicist who upheld God’s fierce hatred of sin. He passed this fiery Arminianism on to the Methodist and Holiness churches, including the Salvation Army and the Church of the Nazarene, and it’s still in existence today, not just within Pentecostalism, which contains Christians devoted to a return Biblical or Classical Pentecostalism, but Fundamental Wesleyanism. The Salvation Army was once a haven of Fundamental Wesleyanism, and one of its zealots was my paternal grandfather James Watt, who was opposed to worldly pleasures such as dancing and the theatre, and in his day, even the drinking of tea or coffee was frowned upon.
At the age of 14, Angela joined her friend Marie and Marie’s mother on a car trip just beyond the US-Canadian border into the state of Washington, where she saw her very first movie, a romantic civil war picture entitled “Only the Brave” starring Gary Cooper and Mary Brian. Its effect on her was little short of seismic, as by her own admission it introduced worldly ideas into her psyche for the very first time.
After leaving school, Angela trained as a secretary before working as such, until she was able to make her living exclusively as a soprano singer. Many of her greatest triumphs took place at the Theatre Under the Stars, one of Vancouver’s most famous musical theatres, which officially opened on August the 6th 1940. At the TUTS, Miss Ann Watt as she became known played the lead in such classic operettas – which were the musical comedies of their day – as Oscar Straus’ “The Chocolate Soldier” (1908 ), based on George Bernard Shaw’s “Arms and the Man”, “Naughty Marietta” (1910) by Victor Herbert, with libretto by Rida Johnson Young, and “The Student Prince” (1924 ) by Sigmund Romberg, with libretto by Dorothy Donnelly.
For the CBC with full orchestra, she broadcast many popular classics. With the accompaniment of Percy Harvey and the Golden Strings she sang Noel Coward’s “I’ll See You Again” from “Bittersweet” as well as two songs by Victor Herbert, “A Kiss in the Dark” from “Orange Blossoms”, and with “Sweetheart” with the baritone singer Greg Miller. She also sang another lovely song by Herbert, “’Neath the Southern Moon” from “Naughty Marietta”, “Strange Music” from “The Song of Norway” (1942), adapted by Wright and Forrest from Grieg’s “Wedding in Troldhaugen” and “Can’t Help Singing” by Kern and Yarburg from the 1944 movie of the same name. She also broadcast Classical songs such as “les Filles de Cadiz” by Delibes and “Depuis le Jour” by Edouard Charpentier, and German liede sung in English – due to wartime restrictions on the German language – to the piano accompaniment of Phyllis Dylworth, among these Schubert’s “To be Sung on the Water”, and Richard Strauss’s exquisite “Night” (“Die Nacht”).
After the war, she hoped to expand her career either in the US or the UK, but despite a successful audition for the San Francisco Light Opera Company, she ultimately opted for England, once a ticket to sail had become available to her.
She set sail for Britain laden with letters of recommendation from her singing teacher Avis Phillips, as well as – presumably – numerous press cuttings from her brilliant Canadian career. She’d been led to believe that once in London, she’d effectively take the singing world by storm, at Drury Lane and elsewhere. Sadly though, soon after arriving, she failed an audition for the internationally famous Glyndebourne Opera House, home of the annual festival of the same name.
However, she did land a small role in the Ivor Novello musical, “King’s Rhapsody” which opened at the Palace Theatre on the 15th of September 1949, with its author one-time matinee idol Novello in the title role. It ran for 841 performances, surviving Novello who died in 1951. She also broadcast for the BBC, and among the songs she performed were Debussy’s “Des Fleurs”, and the popular Harry Ralton standard “I Remember the Cornfields” with lyrics by Martin Mayne, and appeared in an early television show called “Picture Post”. Sadly though, it wasn’t long after her arrival in London that she realized her voice was deteriorating – this being especially true of her top notes – possibly as a result of sleeping difficulties, although mention must be made of her former lifestyle in Vancouver, where in the city’s many night clubs she loved to dance, drink and smoke until the small hours.
She went from one singing teacher after the other in the hope that her once near-perfect voice might be restored to her but little came of her efforts, although one of her tutors, who just happened to be the great German soprano Elisabeth Schumann did offer some hope. Schumann suggested to my mother that once her time in England was over – she recorded her last liede 78s in London with the British pianist Gerald Moore – she accompany her back to New York City where she’d been resident since 1918.
My mother, however, turned the great Schumann down, feeling she’d already spent enough money on lessons, and besides she was seriously involved with a London-based musician my father Patrick Halling, whom she married in June 1949, and so uprooting would not have been easy, and they were far from rich. They spent the next seven years living the vie de bohème in a peaceful post-war London and on the continent, travelling by car or motorcycle, just happy being young and in love in that relatively innocent period between the end of the Second World War and the birth of the Youth-Rock culture, after which things would never be quite the same again…
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