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CHAPTER NINE
I BECOME MY OWN IMPRESARIO
Almost simultaneous with the improvement in my repertoire which the songs I have just spoken of represented I began to get more work than I could tackle and found myself actually compelled on several occasions to refuse engagements. There were forty or fifty letters waiting me when I came home after that first Moss and Thornton tour and practically each one contained the offer of an engagement. So I determined to raise my fees. I would accept nothing less than a guinea and a half and my rail fare! To my great delight many of the concert promoters gladly agreed to my terms with the result that my income was sometimes as high as five and six pounds a week.
Naturally some of the people I had been glad to sing for a year or two earlier for five shillings and ten shillings a night were in high dudgeon about Harry Lauder's "swollen heid" and didn't make any mistake about telling me off for my greed and rapacity. The secretary of a football club in Cambuslang with whom I had formerly been on friendly terms wrote me a very snappy letter in which he demanded to know if I considered myself an Adelina Patti, finishing his epistle by saying I would live to regret not coming to Cam'slang and that he would tell everybody the dirty trick I had played his club and its annual concert !
In the autumn of 1896 I got an engagement for six weeks with Mr. Donald Munro's North Concert Party and this started a friendship which has been one of the great joys of my life. Donald is a big man in Aberdeenshire today and is the Provost of Banchory, the lovely Deeside town which he has always envied. At the time of which I write
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