William Arthur Dunn was initiated into the Order of the Golden Dawn at its Isis-Urania temple in London in December 1892, taking the Latin motto ‘Vi superum’. At that time he was living at 46 Wandle Road Croydon. He did the study necessary to progress further, and was initiated into the 2^nd, inner Order on 17 March 1894, but resigned from the GD a year later, in June 1895.

It’s been hard to find out much about William Arthur Dunn, because he spent relatively little of his life in Britain. I found an obituary, which is the basis of this biography, but the obituary knows more about the last two decades of his life than the three.

William Arthur Dunn was born in 1866 in Hackney, then a suburb north of the City of London. His family emigrated to Canada while he was a child: they are not on the census of 1871, so they must have been in Canada by then. It means that I have no idea who his parents were, I don’t even know their names, or whether he had any siblings.

Perhaps William Arthur Dunn came from a musical family, because he showed early promise as a musician and in 1879 (he was only 13) was appointed organist at Christ Church cathedral, Hamilton Ontario. At some point before 1885 he returned to England to take his music studies further. In February 1885 he became a student at the Royal Academy of Music, being recommended to the RAM by Joseph Percy Baker, also an organist and secretary of the Royal Musical Association. During the time he was a student, he was living in Hackney again - perhaps with relatives, or as a lodger in a district his family knew.

In 1887, he married Alice Dixon. On the 1891 census she is described as having been born in the Dalston district of Hackney, so perhaps their two families had known each other for a long time. Aged 21 when they married, both William Arthur and Alice were very young - Victorian couples usually married later in their twenties, so they could set themselves up financially. They then had two sons in quick succession: Hubert Arthur in 1887 and William Reginald - known as Rex - in 1888. This probably explains why, on the day of the 1891 census, William Arthur Dunn’s main source of income was a job as a book-keeper. As far as I can see, he didn’t work as a full-time musician while he was living in London.

William Arthur and Alice had begun their married life in Harringay, north London, but had moved to Wandle Road Croydon by 1891. There, William Arthur was offered work as a musician and he may actually have been paid for it, which must have pleased him: from 1892 to 1902 he was working as organist and choir master at the Unitarian Free Christian Church of Croydon, where the vicar was the Rev John Page Hopps, known at the time for his attempts to bring together Unitarianism and Spiritualism. Once they had established themselves in Croydon, firstly William Arthur and later Alice got involved in the Theosophical Society (TS).

In my biographies of Herbert and Sidney Coryn (both TS members who went on to join the GD) I’ve talked quite a bit about how active they were in recruiting new members to the TS. William Arthur Dunn was one of those new members. He applied to join in July 1891 and Sidney Coryn and his sister Frances (also active in the TS but never a GD member) were his sponsors. Sidney Coryn was just setting up a new TS lodge in Croydon, and William Arthur became one of its members, serving as its correspondence secretary in 1892-93, with Sidney as its president. Croydon Lodge was very active. There was a programme of fortnightly talks - one in September 1892 was on Medieval and Modern Sorcery, which may have been the trigger which led William Arthur to want to join the GD. There were also regular study evenings during which the members considered theosophical works like Helena Petrovna Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine and Annie Besant’s Seven Principles of Man. In 1893, William Arthur moved over to join Brixton Lodge instead, and served 1893-94 as correspondence secretary there at the same time as he was studying to be a magician of the GD. As well as being active in his local lodges, William Arthur also volunteered at several of London’s Lotus Groups - the TS’s equivalent to the Christian Sunday school - conducting their children’s choirs.

It’s likely that William Arthur was kept fully informed about the dispute that arose in 1894-95 in the TS, between William Quan Judge on the one side, and founder-member Colonel Olcott and Annie Besant on the other; because both Herbert Coryn and Sidney Coryn played big roles in it. I’ve dealt with the intricacies of the dispute in their biographies. In this biography I’ll just say that although it was fought out on other issues, the argument was about the direction of the TS after Blavatsky’s death (she had died in 1892) and who would be its leader. William Arthur Dunn did not take an active role in it. But when William Quan Judge lost the dispute, in 1895, and was censured by senior figures in the TS including the GD’s William Wynn Westcott, William Arthur Dunn was one of the many people who resigned from the TS and had no further involvement in it. His resignation from the GD - coming at the same time - may have had the same cause. However, there may have been more personal reasons for cutting back on his involvement away from the family.

Alice Dunn had not been involved with the TS during the years in which her husband was very committed to it; but she joined it in January 1895 even as the Judge dispute was hotting up. I can’t help wondering if her interest in theosophical issues had grown because she - and he - knew she was ill; because Alice died in the spring of 1896, aged only 30.

As well as his grief, William Arthur will have had to deal with the practical problems of being a working widower with two small boys. If he had been a wealthier man, he could have employed servants to take care of the house and children; or sent the boys away to school. The usual solution for a less well-off man would be for a female relative to move in to run the household and look after the children - but William Arthur may not have had many relations living in England. Perhaps someone was despatched from Canada to come to his rescue, but I don’t actually know how William Arthur managed over the next five years.

One thing that he does seem to have done in late 1890s is get more involved with one particular local church: in 1897 a theosophical magazine mentioned that his having something to do with the English Labour Church movement - though unfortunately my source didn’t say exactly what he was doing there. The Labour Church movement was a loose group of essentially independent local congregations, mostly led by people brought up as Nonconformists but who now felt that the leaders of Nonconformism were a bit too close to the Establishment and not worried enough about social issues. The nearest Labour Church to where William Arthur Dunn was living was Croydon’s Brotherhood Church, founded by Rev William Jupp, who had been raised as a Calvinist and then spent time as a Congregationalist minister before coming under the influence of the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. It seems to be a moot point exactly how Christian the beliefs of an average Labour Church congregation were. Though most people who attended Labour Churches believed in immanentism (see the Sources section at the end of this biography) that wasn’t just a Christian doctrine, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine was based on it too (so William Arthur Dunn would have been very familiar with the concept). Labour Churches tended not to have a minister, just a chairman for their meetings. And many of them had close ties with the Independent Labour Party and the Social Democratic Federation. So this was pretty radical stuff that William Arthur was getting himself involved with. However, in the end it didn’t satisfy him and he returned to theosophy, committing himself to a revitalised idea of it coming out of the United States - universal brotherhood.

Universal brotherhood was the clarion call of Katherine Tingley, who began to rise to eminence after William Quan Judge died in 1896. As early as the summer of 1896 she and a group of companions - they called themselves ‘Crusaders’ - visited England as part of a world tour in which they gave talks explaining their vision and raised money for a theosophical community Mrs Tingley was setting up on land at Point Loma, just outside San Diego in southern California. William Arthur Dunn doesn’t seem to have taken any part in the social events organised in 1896 for the Crusaders - it was too soon after Alice’s death - but Herbert Coryn was involved in them and between 1896 and 1898 was one of universal brotherhood’s most vocal champion in England. In 1898, Katherine Tingley became leader-for-life of the TS in the USA; its name and its constitution were changed to make universal brotherhood their central feature; and Herbert Coryn emigrated to America to work for the Universal Brotherhood and Theosophical Society in New York. In 1900, Coryn went the whole hog and moved to Point Loma.

So William Arthur Dunn would have known a great deal about what was going on at Point Loma, and what Mrs Tingley and her supporters were trying to achieve there. By 1900 he had made up his mind: in that year, he travelled to California and installed Hubert at least, if not Rex as well, at Point Loma to continue their education there. He had not returned to England by the day of the 1901 census but he did come back for a time, to tidy up his affairs, before moving to Point Loma himself in 1902. He may have travelled out with Sidney Coryn, who also emigrated to the USA in 1902 (though Sidney never lived at Point Loma, he and his family settled in San Francisco).

What was Point Loma like? It seems to have had elements of university, of religious retreat and of township. People lived there full-time, but they were not tied to it, people came and went. Mrs Tingley never supposed that it would be self-sufficient, but it had a farm, orchards, a bakery and kept bees and residents were expected to contribute labour to all of these, whatever else they were qualified to do. There was a school for the children of the residents. The centrepiece of Mrs Tingley’s vision for Point Loma was the Raja-Yoga College, which taught residents how they could live a life based on theosophical principles. However, later there was also a College of Antiquity, which trained people to teach theosophy; and a lecture-extension scheme explaining theosophy to people who knew nothing about it; and a publishing business producing journals and booklets. To pay for all this, residents did pottery and work with cloth - Point Loma’s batik work became very well-known and it also had a business making school uniforms. There was a hospital and sanatorium, where Herbert Coryn worked in addition to being one of Point Loma’s GP’s.

For William Arthur Dunn, one of the main attractions of Mrs Tingley’s ideas must have been the emphasis she placed on music and music-making as a part of everyday life: by 1913 Point Loma had an orchestra, a chorus, a string quartet and presumably lots of informal groups, and was also training up composers, one of whom was William Arthur’s son Rex. The Isis Conservatory was the centre of Point Loma’s musical life. Moving to Point Loma enabled William Arthur done to give to music all the time he’d had to give to being a book-keeper when he was living in London.

Immediately on settling at Point Loma for good, he joined the Conservatory’s teaching staff. In 1904 he took charge of all the community’s choral work and in the same year Mrs Tingley appointed him head of the Isis Conservatory and conductor of the orchestra.

It’s a pity, but I haven’t found any musical compositions by William Arthur Dunn, either in the British Library or mentioned on a website anywhere. I’ve found more by his son Rex.

In January 1906, William Arthur Dunn married again. His second wife was another resident of Point Loma, Ethelind Wood. Ethelind had come to Point Loma with her father, Lorin Francis Wood, who had founded Point Loma’s hospital and worked there with Herbert Coryn. In 1900 she had been the first person to graduate from the Raja-Yoga College. Point Loma’s junior school was founded the same year with Ethelind as its only teacher; in 1906 she was its headmistress. She could sing, and was sufficiently confident to sing solo at concerts: in 1905 she gave the first performance of a song written for her by Rex Dunn, the earliest composition by him that I could find any reference to. William Arthur and Ethelind did not have any children, but they adopted one child, possibly more - Point Loma had always taken in orphans.

I haven’t found a specific reference to William Arthur Dunn going with Mrs Tingley, the orchestra and chorus, to a theosophical peace conference in Sweden in 1913; but if he was the orchestra’s conductor he must have done so. After the peace conference, the whole group went to Holland where Mrs Tingley gave some lectures and the musicians some concerts. One of the pieces they played when they visited Arnhem was an Ode to Peace, with music by Rex Dunn and words by Katherine Tingley and another Point Loma resident, the Welsh poet and fantasy writer Kenneth Morris (whose brother Ronald had been in the Golden Dawn). Hubert was studying to be a theosophy teacher, at the Raja-Yoga College. In 1917 Hubert married yet another Point Loma resident, but he and his wife Emily left Point Loma in 1919.

William Arthur Dunn fell ill early in 1921 and died on 10 August, at Point Loma.

Ethelind Dunn stayed at Point Loma at least until 1929. She got married a second time, to Edwin Lambert.

HUBERT DUNN

I couldn’t find any mention of him on the web so I don’t know where he and Emily went, or what happened to them after they left Point Loma.

REX DUNN

Rex became a composer. He was rather feted at Point Loma. He was given the commission to compose the Ode to Peace; and had several of his works played during a recital by Dame Nellie Melba in 1917, at her special request. He stayed on at Point Loma for several years after his father died - but then sound came to the movies.

By 1929, Rex had moved to Hollywood and was composing music for Warner Brothers. Imdb has got a comprehensive list of his film scores. The list covers 1929 to 1948; however, Rex didn’t get his name on any film credits until the late 1940s. As well as composing, Rex did some conducting, and also some adaptation of scores already in existence for Warner Brothers’ purposes. The most notable of Rex’s adaptations was the score of the 1929 version of The Desert Song, from original music by Sigmund Romberg The film had very high production values - not only sound, but also several sequences in technicolour, and Myrna Loy at the outset of her long career.

Rex Dunn died in 1959.

--

BASIC SOURCES I USED for all Golden Dawn members.

Membership of the Golden Dawn: The Golden Dawn Companion by R A Gilbert. Northampton: The Aquarian Press 1986. Between pages 125 and 175, Gilbert lists the names, initiation dates and addresses of all those people who became members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn or its many daughter Orders between 1888 and 1914. The list is based on the Golden Dawn’s administrative records and its Members’ Roll - the large piece of parchment on which all new members signed their name at their initiation. All this information had been inherited by Gilbert but it’s now in the Freemasons’ Library at the United Grand Lodge of England building on Great Queen Street Covent Garden. Please note, though, that the records of the Amen-Ra Temple in Edinburgh were destroyed in 1900/01. As far as I know, the records of the Horus Temple at Bradford have not survived either.

Family history: freebmd; ancestry.co.uk (census and probate); findmypast.co.uk; familysearch; Burke’s Peerage and Baronetage; Burke’s Landed Gentry; Armorial Families; thepeerage.com; and a wide variety of family trees on the web.

Famous-people sources: mostly about men, of course, but very useful even for the female members of GD. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Who Was Who. Times Digital Archive.

Catalogues: British Library; Freemasons’ Library.

Wikipedia; Google; Google Books - my three best resources. I also used other web pages, but with some caution, as - from the historian’s point of view - they vary in quality a great deal.

SOURCES FOR WILLIAM ARTHUR DUNN

The main one is his obituary, published in Point Loma’s journal The Theosophical Path volume 21 number 4, issue of October 1921 p407. The Theosophical Path was edited by Katherine Tingley.

ONTARIO

Wikipedia on Christ Church Hamilton: the church is on James Street North. The diocese of Hamilton was created in 1875. Its first bishop was Canadian-born Thomas Brock Fuller (1810-84).

WILLIAM ARTHUR DUNN’S MUSICAL TRAINING

By email 16 April 2012 from the Choral Library, Royal Academy of Music, quoting the RAM’s Student Register. William Arthur Dunn started at the RAM in February 1885 aged 19; he was living in Hackney at that time. He had been recommended as a potential student by Mr Percy Baker.

PERCY BAKER:

Macmillan Encyclopedia of Music and Musicians by Albert Ernest Wier. Published Macmillans 1938. On p104: J Percy Baker “English organist and writer on music” 1859-1930.

International Music Journals by Linda M Fidler and Richard S James. Greenwood Press 1990. Via google to p384 which is quoting the Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association volume 100 1973-74. On p7 there is an article by J Percy Baker FRAM on the RMA’s first 50 years; at the time the article was written, Baker was the RMA’s Secretary.

In British Library catalogue a few musical compositions by him: hymn settings, songs, piano pieces. And some books including: A Compend of Musical Knowledge for...Degree Candidates 1914.

MEMBER OF THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY

Theosophical Society Membership Register January 1889-September 1891 p238 entry for William Dunn. Application dated 3 July 1891, sponsors Sidney Coryn and (Sidney’s sister) Frances Coryn. Subscription paid 1893-95; handwritten note across his record - “W G Judge”. Address during membership: 46 Wandle Road Croydon.

Theosophical Society Membership Register June 1893 to March 1895 p241 membership application of Alice Dunn of 46 Wandle Road Croydon dated January 1895. Sidney Coryn is one of her sponsors.

William Arthur Dunn’s obituary said that he was a personal student of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky; the date of his joining the TS suggests differently, and the assertion is also contradicted by this:

At www.theos-world.com, journal Theosophy World issue of February 1999. Contains an article: 40 Years at Headquarters: the Theosophical Society (the American one, that is), Point Loma California. By Iverson L Harris. It was originally a talk by Harris, given at Blavatsky Lodge in London on 10 May 1973. Harris had lived at Point Loma until 1946. During the talk Harris gave a list of 13 people originally from Britain, who’d played a large part in the development of the community at Point Loma. He divided the list into two: those who had known Blavatsky - which included Herbert Coryn; and those who hadn’t - which included WA Dunn. Hubert Dunn was also on the list.

WILLIAM ARTHUR DUNN AS A THEOSOPHY ACTIVIST: APPEARANCE IN LUCIFER

Lucifer: A Theosophical Magazine was published by the TS in London and was the most important British theosophical magazine during the early 1890s.

Volume XI September 1892-February 1893, editor Annie Besant. Published London: Theosophical Publishing Society 7 Duke Street Adelphi London WC. Volume XI number 62 issued 15 October 1892: p169 news section. Report on Croydon Lodge which now had 35 members and assocs. It had been formed in July 1891. Thus far it had confined itself to lectures each fortnight but now it was going to have a series of study evenings: a group had been formed 27 September [1892] to study Besant’s Seven Principles of Man and Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine. On 6 September [1892] Jessie Horne had given “an interesting lecture on Yoga”; and p170 W R Old had lectured on Medl and Modern Sorcery, on 20 Sep [1892]. Report prepared and sent to Lucifer by William A Dunn as Croydon Lodge’s correspondence secretary.

7 April 2013: Jessie Horne was the sister-in-law of Sidney and Herbert Coryn. She was secretary of Brixton TS Lodge.

WILLIAM ARTHUR DUNN’S ONLY PUBLISHED WRITINGS ON THEOSOPHY; all in Point Loma’s The Theosophical Path, which Katherine Tingley edited and which is on the web at www.scribd.com and via googlebooks:

* Volume 21 1921 an article which may be by him (the snippet wasn’t clear on that): Thought-Power of Ancient Egypt.

* Unnumbered volume covering July to October 1932 p228: Executive Thought.

* Volume 54 number 4 April 1933 p538: Constructive Tendencies of Thought, which may be a Part II of the article published 1932

LABOUR CHURCH MOVEMENT

At www.scribd.com there’s full text of Theosophy the US-based magazine: volume XII number 1 April 1897 p30 says that “Brother Dunn” of Croydon had come to the notice of the Labour Church movement. There was no more information on what about him had caught the Labour Church’s eye.

My modern source for the Labour Church movement is via

www.escholarship.org/uc/item/8v38w3wj, a site run by University of California. There’s an article by Mark Bevir of the University of California at Berkeley, published originally in the Journal of Britishh Studies volume 38 number 2 April 1999: the Labour Church Movement 1891-1902. Besides giving the details I’ve used in the biography, Bevir makes two points that I think are important:

1) p7: the Labour Church was one of many attempts to reconcile Darwin (I’d say Lyell as well) with belief in Christianity. Those who attended Labour Churches (I don’t think you can call them followers) emphasised the importance of immanentism: that God is in the world, not above/out of /beyond it; and that Evolution of species could be taken as evidence of this (not a denial of it).

2) p13-29: the Labour Church flourished only briefly - by as early as 1902 it was running out of impetus, for a number of reasons that Bevir details.

Via google I found a larger work by Mark Bevir: The Making of British Socialism published 2011; on p254 says Rev William Jupp founded “a free religious movement in Croydon” around 1890 which merged with the Brotherhood Church in the district around 1892.

CROYDON’S UNITARIAN CHURCH

For John Page Hopps see:

www.le.ac.uk/litandphil/presidents the website of the Leicester Literary and Philosophical Society.

And www.croydonunitarians.org.uk/history/html

He appears in Lucifer but after Dunn had left the TS:

Lucifer: A Theosophical Magazine Volume XXI September 1897 to February 1898, edited by Annie Besant and G R S Mead. Publishing details as above. In Volume XXI number 124 issued 15 December 1897 there’s advance notice p292 of the International Spiritualist Congress which would be held in London 19-24 June 1898. On the first evening J Page Hopps would lead a religious service.

A bit more on Hopps from The Great Secret and its Unfoldment in Occultism by a CofE Clergyman. London: George Redway 1895. Anonymous author is widely thought to be Rev Charles Maurice Davies, whose wife Jane Anna was in the Golden Dawn. On p307 in a Postscript to the book, author says that he attended a spiritualist conference held in London either in 1894 or 1895 after many years spent out of spiritualist circles. P309 Rev John Page Hopps was the preacher at the opening session of the conference. Author describes Hopps on p312 as had being more successful in his efforts to link spiritualism and Unitarianism than the author had been trying to put spiritualism and Anglicanism together.

Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research volume XI 1895 p613 shows that John Page Hopps was an associate member, at Oak Tree House, South Norwood Hill. W A Dunn was not a member of the Society during the period I checked this out, between 1882 and 1900.

THEOSOPHICAL COMMUNITY AT POINT LOMA

Via googlebooks to an advert for a replacement for W A Dunn at Croydon’s Unitarian Church: Musical Times volume 43 1902 p687 in the jobs’ column, there was one for an organist/choirmaster at the Free Christian Church in Croydon. Salary £30, apply to the vicar.

My best source for Point Loma:

The Point Loma Community in California 1897-1942: A Theosophical Experiment. By Emmett A Greenwalt 1955: Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Greenwalt used Point Loma’s own archives, local government records from San Diego, local papers, and accounts of Point Loma by people who had lived there.

Another modern source is:

The Dawn of a New Cycle: Point Loma Theosophists and American Culture by W Michael Ashcraft. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press 2002.

For Kenneth Morris:

Lloyd Alexander, Evangeline Walton Ensley and Kenneth Morris: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography by Kenneth J Zahorski, Robert H Boyer. In the Masters of Science Fiction and Fantasy series. Boston Mass: G K Hall and Co 1981.

ETHELIND WOOD DUNN

The History of Woodstock Connecticut volume 3 by Clarence Winthrop Bowen. Published American Antiquarian Society 1930; p100 in list of noted people born in the town; Susan Ethelind Wood b 1881 daughter of Lorin Francis Wood MD. She married 1 January 1906 William Arthur Dunn. No biological children but adopted Gertrude Wood Dunn who was born 25 December 1906. William Arthur Dunn’s DOB is given as 12 February 1866; there’s no source for the information but it might have come from Ethelind herself.

Via google to The Theosophical Path couldn’t see a volume number but it covers 1929 p89 Ethelind is Mrs Lambert now and has become director of the Raja-Yoga College.

The Dawn of a New Cycle: Point Loma Theosophists and American Culture by W Michael Ashcraft. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press 2002. P99 is the basis for my account of Ethelind Wood; her second husband was Edwin Lambert of Boston.

Familysearch did not have records of the marriage of William Arthur Dunn to Ethelind Wood; nor of William Arthur Dunn’s death. I’ve noticed it’s not very good on California information.

HUBERT ARTHUR DUNN

Via web to Tingley’s Plea to Abolish Capital Punishment addressed to the Governor of California at Sacramento and dated 2 April 1914. Hubert Dunn is first on list of signatories.

Via googlebooks to The Theosophical Path volume covering January 1917-February 1918. On p214 there’s a short report on a ceremony on 11 December 1917 at Point Loma in which twelve residents married including Hubert Dunn and Emily Young.

Hubert = son of W A Dunn of the Isis Conservatory of Music. Hubert was a student of divinity at Point Loma’s School of Antiquity, training to be a teacher

Emily = daughter of H B Young and his wife. Emily had been a student at the Raja-Yoga School for several years.

The Dawn of a New Cycle: Point Loma Theosophists and American Culture by W Michael Ashcraft. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press 2002. P100 about Hubert and Emily leaving Point Loma 1919.

WILLIAM REGINALD DUNN called REX

At www.worldcat.org: the Ode to Peace was published by the Aryan Theosophical Press at Point Loma in 1914. Music by Rex Dunn, words by Kenneth Morris and Katherine Tingley.

Via googlebooks to The Theosophical Path January-June 1922 p197-98: a translation of an article originally in Dutch and originally published on 27 August 1913 in Niewe Arnhemsche Courant.

The Point Loma Community in California 1897-1942: A Theosophical Experiment. By Emmett A Greenwalt 1955: Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. On p106: Nellie Melba’s visits to Point Loma. Greenwalt’s sources for them are the San Diego Union 8 March 1917; and The Theosophical Path volume XII April 1917: p429.

REX COMPOSES FILM MUSIC

See www.imdb.com for what looks like a pretty complete list of the films which have his music in. Imdb gives full DOB as 28 October 1888 in Croydon; DOD is 25 May 1959 Los Angeles.

Film Composers in America: A Filmography 1911-70 by Clifford McCarty 2000. On p14 a reference Rex Dunn and others as “staff composers” at Warners at the time of the transition to sound ie 1928-31. Warners’ music archives are now at the University of Southern California, which is on the site once occupied by the Point Loma community.

Sigmund Romberg by William A Everett and Geoffrey Holden Block 2007. On p262 in the chapter Romberg in Hollywood, Rex Dunn named as the adaptor of music by Romberg for a film of the play The Desert Song.

Dunn did some music for one early film by Howard Hawks: Award-Winning Films of the 1930s by John Reid 2004; pp58-59: film is The Dawn Patrol, 1930 by First National Pictures of New York. I can’t understand why it’s listed in this book as author says it wasn’t a good film and didn’t win any awards!

Copyright SALLY DAVIS

7 April 2013

***