Harry Haddy
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HARRY HADDY
In April and on 6 May 1933 Haddy played Joe Philpot in The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists at Ingersoll Hall. During the same period he acted in Nellie Rickie’s three one-act plays at the Workers Art Club (WAC), followed by the part of Tom in The Sundowner at Ingersoll Hall, then A Night in Spain with the WAC. The last included a burlesque of Carmen. Playing a toreador, Haddy wanted something more realistic than parsnips for bull’s horns, so he got hold of a bullock’s head from an abattoir and boiled it in an improvised copper on the roof of 36A Pitt Street. After a week, its smell attracting every cat in the neighbourhood, the head was finally doused in disinfectant and thrown into the harbour.
In October 1933 Haddy played the title role in The Spy by the RTP Theatre Group at the Friends Of The Soviet Union Hall. The next month he appeared as a comedian, female impersonator and in the role of Baptiste in The Taming of the Shrewd with the Workers’ Dramatic Club at North Sydney.
In June 1912 Harry Haddinott “Specialist in Dry and Pungent Humor” was touring with Ben Fuller’s vaudeville show; in 1917 he was singing at Queenstown Tasmania to accompany silent film screenings. In October 1922 Harry Haddy’s Apache dance was an item in a Russian and English concert in Sydney’s Communist Hall. In December 1924 Harry Haddy took part in a benefit concert for the unemployed at the Hippodrome Theatre Haymarket (later the Capitol Theatre) by performers from the Tivoli and Fuller vaudeville circuits.
In 1941 a CIB agent reported that Harry Haddy had written from London to the New Theatre League with news that Russia had been represented in an Allies’ Day Demonstration there.
