Australian Dictionary of Biography

Sir Alexis and Elsa Albert, 1954

Sir Alexis Francois Albert (1904–1996), music publisher and media proprietor, was born on 15 October 1904 in Sydney, younger son of Ukrainian-born Michel François (Frank) Albert, music publisher, and his New South Wales-born wife Minnie Eliza, née Buttel. Otto, Alexis’s elder brother, died from meningitis aged fourteen in 1914. Alexis attended Knox College, St Leonards, although his schooling was disrupted as Frank regularly took him on international business trips, having become over-protective after Otto’s death. It took him three attempts to matriculate before undertaking study at the University of Sydney (BEc, 1930), where he lived on campus at St Paul’s College.

In 1931 Albert was appointed managing director of the family music business, J. Albert & Son (known as Alberts), which had been co-founded by his paternal grandfather, Jacques, and his father in 1894. It was a profitable business that comprised music publishing, sheet music, and instrument sales, alongside an emerging radio network begun in 1929. In 1933 Alberts was incorporated, and ceased selling musical instruments. The same year, the family’s radio business, the Australian Broadcasting Co. Pty Ltd, purchased the licence for the commercial Sydney station 2UW; it would acquire several further stations, which would later be named the Australian Radio Network. On 17 March 1934 at St James’s Church of England, Sydney, he married Swedish-born Elsie (Elsa) Karin Rigmor Lundgren.

Albert joined the board of the Australasian Performing Right Association (APRA, of which his father had been a founding director in 1926) in 1946, continuing in the role until 1976. In 1954 Alberts expanded into television, when Albert became a founding director, and the company a shareholder, of Amalgamated Television Services Pty Ltd, which owned Channel 7, Sydney; he would remain on the board until 1987. He took over as chairman of Albert Investments Pty Ltd, the family’s parent company, and of the Australian Broadcasting Co., when his father died in 1962. In both business and in personal life, Albert was measured, unfailingly polite, modest, and reserved. He was known for recruiting smart people and giving them the freedom to do their job. In 1964 he steadfastly supported the vision of his son Edward Frank (Ted) for a new business, Albert Productions, that would nurture Australian pop and rock music through recording and producing. The national stable of radio stations, including 4BC, 2CC, and 3DB, ran until 1995, when Albert’s beloved network was sold to Australian Provincial Newspaper Holdings Ltd.

Like his father, Albert had an enduring passion for the sea. He was a member from 1925 and commodore (1971–75) of the Royal Sydney Yacht Squadron, and a competitive sailor for much of his life. One of the relatively few boys who had completed his compulsory military training as a cadet in the Citizen Naval Forces (1918–21), he was appointed as a midshipman, Royal Australian Naval Reserve, in 1922, and promoted through the junior officer ranks to lieutenant in 1926 and lieutenant-commander in 1934. In World War II he was mobilised for full-time duty, serving ashore in staff posts in Sydney (1939–44) and commanding the auxiliary minesweeper HMAS Paterson in operations off the New South Wales coast from October 1944 to November 1945. Albert was demobilised on 12 December and transferred to the Retired List in 1949. From December 1936 he had been an honorary aide-de-camp to successive governors of New South Wales and he would continue in that role until February 1958. A private person, he did not welcome the media attention he attracted in February 1954, when he and Elsa hosted a private afternoon tea at their Vaucluse home for Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh.

A quiet but committed philanthropist, Albert was a councillor of the Royal Blind Society of New South Wales from 1948, including seventeen years as president; a founding member of the council of the National Heart Foundation’s New South Wales division; and a generous donor to the Sydney Maritime Museum. In 1967 he was appointed CMG and in 1972 he was knighted. Sir Alexis was of medium height, slim, always impeccably dressed, and with bright blue eyes. He died on 10 October 1996 at home at Vaucluse and was cremated; a memorial service was held at St James’s Anglican Church. Predeceased by his wife, he was survived by two of their three sons, Robert Otto and Anthony Alexis (Tony), both of whom had entered the family business; their son Ted had died in 1990.