Albury-born singer Ella Caspers, 21, fell for a serial bigamist in London while a student at the Royal Academy of Music.

Ella married Charles Bradley at a Catholic church in Marylebone on January 6, 1911, with a reception at Claridge’s.

Charles was really a German named Felix Ogilvie and he may have hypnotised the promising young contralto.

Somehow Ella’s brother William got wind there was something wrong about the marriage.

Police arrested Bradley at the Australian High Commission in March, when he and Ella had returned from their honeymoon.

He was jailed for 10 years as the court was outraged that he had entered into two marriages previously, one with a woman he drugged at a hotel, robbed and then abandoned.

An Australian socialite living in London said she had always suspected Bradley had hypnotised his bride.

“The more I saw of Bradley the less I liked of him -- I thought of Svengali,” she wrote back home.

“He seemed to have some magnetic power in his dark, cunning, penetrating eyes.”

Bradley never paid Claridge’s, and nor did he pay for their car from the reception and many other bills.

Ella must have recovered enough to continue her singing career and was a regular at the Royal Albert Hall and other big London venues where she sang with baritone Peter Dawson and Albury-born bass Malcolm McEachern, among others.

She was among such early Australian recording artists who became stars in Australia and Britain in the 1910s and 1920s.

They were the predecessors of modern artists from Joan Sutherland to the Little River Band, INXS and Kylie Minogue.

Ella returned to Australia just before World War I and sang at the inaugural concert of the NSW Conservatorium in 1915.

In 1921 she married Alban Albury Maloney, a dentist and later mayor of Taree, who died in 1936, aged 47.

Her husband had been born in Albury, the son of John Francis Maloney, draper, of David Street.

He was the same age as Ella and they probably worshipped at St Patrick’s Church as children.

Deafness problems led to Ella abandoning the stage but in 1940 she sang in a charity fund-raiser for Father Dunlea’s Boys Town, sharing the stage with her brother William, a noted Sydney organist, and sister Agnes.

After that, she faded from public view until “found” again by The Border Mail in 1986.

However, by then she had dementia and died in a Mosman, Sydney, nursing home in April, 1987, aged 98.

Ella was a daughter of Henry and Eleanor Caspers, of Albury, and a grandfather was William “Coffin” Jones, an undertaker and furniture dealer.

The family had an Irish Catholic background and Ella received early singing lessons from the Sisters of Mercy.

Musical friends in Albury and Goulburn paid to send her to the Royal Academy in London.

The National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra has a collection of Ella Caspers recordings, photographs and documents.

Early gramophone records were recorded at around 78 revolutions per minute but there were slight variations in the speed.

As a result, no one is quite sure how fast her recordings should be played and it cannot therefore be determined exactly how her voice sounded.

But in her day, even Dame Nellie Melba called Ella’s voice exquisite and Dame Clara Butt said: “I have heard many beautiful voices during my tour of Australia but Ella Caspers has a place all by herself”.