Australian pianist and spy Nancy Weir was taught to read and write music by the Presentation Sisters. Photo: Presentation Sisters and the University of South Carolina Library.
Wagga’s Mt Erin Heritage Museum contains a wealth of history and some amazing stories from the earliest days of education in Wagga.
The school was founded by the Presentation Sisters who arrived in Australia from Ireland in 1874 to bring education to the children of the wild frontier town of Wagga Wagga.
Sister Alexis is the current historian for the museum and loves to share the stories of some of the school’s most notable students, including the ‘Musical Spy’, Nancy Weir.
Portrait of the ‘Musical Spy’ Nancy Weir. Photo: Athol Shmith, National Portrait Gallery.
Nancy Weir was born in 1915 in Victoria and moved to Lockhart as a child when her father took up a position as a local publican.
From the start, it was clear that Nancy loved music and by four, she was playing the piano by ear and would entertain customers in her father’s pub.
Always eager to learn and improve, young Nancy followed the sounds of music she heard emanating from the local convent.
After finding her way inside through the kitchen she fronted up to Sister Benjamin who agreed to teach her to read and write music and expand her gift for piano.
As it was around the time of the Great Depression, the nuns tutored her for free.
Later, Nancy was ‘discovered’ at the 1926 Australia Day Exhibition in Melbourne when her father left her at a piano booth with a bag of sweets while he went to the pub.
The precocious 10-year-old proceeded to play her entire repertoire to the delight of a gathering crowd.
Years later she recalled the scene.
“I was knocking out my tunes, poppa was having a marvellous time in the boozer with his friends, and mother looked over the balcony and saw this crowd gathered around the piano and she said her heart sank because she had a feeling that we were in some way tied up with it,” she said.
“I played anything they asked for.”
The attention landed her at the Presentation Convent at Windsor in Melbourne under the tutelage of a renowned piano teacher.
By the age of 13, she had performed with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and the mayor was so impressed that he set up a public subscription scheme to send her to Berlin to study.
Nancy Weir from a film produced in 1929 to raise funds to send her to study in Germany. Photo: University of South Carolina Library/Fox Movietone.
She learned under the greats in Germany before leaving for London in 1933 when Adolf Hitler came to power.
She gained renown as a student at the Royal Academy of Music where she was said to have had “the best musical ear since Mozart”.
When WWII broke out Nancy enlisted in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) and was later transferred to the Royal Air Force thanks to her fluent German.
As an intelligence officer, she was placed along the coast near Dover and equipped with a radio.
Each night she would tune in to listen to the chatter of the young German pilots as they crossed the English Channel to learn where they were going and inform the defenders of her findings.
As well as her intelligence work, she was also deployed to the Middle East to entertain allied troops and at the end of the war was sent to Rome to attend the interrogations of German POWs.
Due to the damaged Italian airfields, she was forced to make a dramatic entrance to the city and later joked, “I think I am the only classical pianist in history who ever parachuted into Rome!”
She went on to become one of the most celebrated Australian performers of the 1950s and 60s and received a Medal of the Order of Australia and was awarded the Beethoven Commemorative Medal by the German Government.
Nancy passed away at 93 in 2008.
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