Born in Sydney, he had a career in England and his native country, performing in opera, oratorio and concerts and giving radio broadcasts.

He sang with the Waverley Methodist Church choir as a boy soprano and later an amateur baritone; but he found that 'football and cricket were the most absorbing affairs of my life'.

He played for Waverley Cricket Club (1906–15) and Rugby Union as a wing-three-quarter with the Eastern Suburbs team, representing New South Wales against New Zealand in August 1914.

The war ended in November 1918, and he began to study singing in London with Charles Phillips and strove to overcome his lack of basic musical knowledge.

Five years earlier, he had sung in the stage première of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's The Song of Hiawatha in London under the baton of Eugene Goossens.

[1] In 1938, he was one of 16 singers invited to take part in the first performance of the Serenade to Music, written by Vaughan Williams to mark Sir Henry Wood's Silver Jubilee as a conductor.

Although the concert hall was his natural milieu, he also performed such roles as Iago (Otello), Wolfram (Tannhäuser) and Tonio (Pagliacci) with the British National Opera Company until its demise in 1929.

[1] His 1933 English-language recording, with his countryman the acclaimed bass Malcolm McEachern, of "The Gendarmes' Duet" from Offenbach's opera Geneviève de Brabant is an enduring classic of the gramophone.

He proceeded to become a touring soloist throughout the duration of World War II and also taught at the New South Wales State Conservatorium of Music in Sydney.

Although he had some notable pupils, he was not a strikingly successful teacher of voice production; further, he knew almost nothing of the lieder repertoire and had little strength in non-English languages.