In 1889, an ox-wagon arrived at Johannesburg, bringing a small party of opera singers from their hotel rooms to welcome Searelle, tired from his long trek from the port at Durban.
In the days that followed, the contents of the ox-wagon filled the intersection with Eloff and Commissioner Street, where Luscombe Searelle’s corrugated iron “Theatre Royal” had been unloaded and was being hammered together.
“The material blocked the road for days,” Headley A. Chilvers tells in his book Out of the Crucible, “but the blockade mattered little, for traffic passed easily by taking detours over the veld."
They toured South Africa with Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet; however, their run was cut short when the Exhibition Theatre in Cape Town burned to the ground.
The partition which is the work of Messrs. Hart & Co., General Contractors, Eloff Street, is half glass and forms a handsome construction with swing doors, the noise of talking at the bar, always so annoying to those who wish to enjoy the entertainment, being considerably reduced.
They are totally unnecessary and serve but to fill the pockets of the management with a few pounds, whilst the artists themselves reap no material benefit by having to give up their Day of Rest.
"[3] "It was indeed a pathetic scene enacted on Monday night when Miss Jenny Hill was induced by Mr. Luscombe Searelle to brave the cold winds that were sweeping the town and speak a piece to the audience assembled at the Theatre of Varieties.
Surely it was anything but decent to let her be almost carried on to the stage and, in a feeble voice, utter some platitudes about the climate of South Africa, the experience of her early career and the kindness shown to her by Mr. and Mrs. Searelle.
Has it come to this that a lady, who is as near to her death bed as any human being can dread be, has to be the medium of advertising him on a bleak autumn night to an audience to which the sight appeared as painfully gruesome?
If more people took the law into their own hands and horse-whipped unscrupulous tricksters , who refused to discharge their obligations, neither Mr. Searelle nor his Compagnon de Voyage would have a whole shin today.
Although ‘The Critic’s time and space was too precious to waste on Mr. Searlle they continued a fervent reportage on him months after he departed South African shores.