The Hero Maker

by Stephen Dando-Collins

  Paul and Peter Finch became inseparable. On one occasion, they decided to adventurously paddle a leaky canoe from Mosman’s Bradleys Head across Sydney Harbour to the eastern suburbs. When they were well away from land the canoe sank beneath them, and the pair had to be rescued by a passing boat. Probably as a result of this near drowning, Paul found himself banned from Peter’s company.

  ‘I’m not allowed to see you anymore,’ Peter glumly advised when Paul came knocking at his door.

  Paul, stunned, wanted to know why.

  ‘You’re a very bad influence on me,’ Peter replied.34

  Both must have burst out laughing at this. Neither of them took any notice of Aunt Kate’s decree. They simply met up away from Peter’s house. The firm friendship continued unabated.

  4.

  Wiped Out

  IN 1931, BOTH Paul and Peter left high school. Paul passed the Intermediate Certificate examination with Bs in all his subjects. Peter didn’t even bother sitting the exam. He was initially sent to work at a bank, but when this didn’t work out a kindly Greenwich Point neighbour came to the rescue.

  Norman Johnson was news editor with the Sydney Sun, an afternoon tabloid and member of the Associated Newspapers stable like the Evening News, where Paul’s father worked. Johnson, who lived near the Finches, was a thirty-nine-year-old theatre and opera lover. Seeing something special in theatrical young Finch, Johnson offered him a place at the Sun, then Sydney’s biggest-selling newspaper. Peter started deep in the print room as a ‘printer’s devil’, a dirty manual job, before moving upstairs to become a copyboy, the first step on the ladder to becoming a journalist. At least as a copyboy he had a window to look out when he daydreamed about an acting career.

  Meanwhile, for the Brickhills, 1931 was a bitter year. On 21 March, the owner of the Evening News, Sir Hugh Denison, closed the paper down, and George Brickhill lost his job. The Great Depression was biting, and newspaper circulations had plummeted. Through mergers and acquisitions, by the start of 1931 Denison had owned two morning newspapers, two afternoon papers and four Sunday papers in Sydney. By the end of the year, he had reduced this to one of each, leaving the city awash with unemployed newspapermen. More grief beset the Brickhills shortly after. In June, after a long illness, Grandma Bradshaw died under their roof.

  George had been determined that his sons receive the education he had not. Eldest boy Russell graduated from the University of Sydney with a degree in civil engineering. Working with the Main Roads Board, Russell studied part-time, gaining further qualifications including an economics degree. With their father now unemployed, Paul, seen as the least academic of the Brickhill boys, was despatched to join Russell in the workforce while Geoff completed high school and Lloyd and Clive also continued their studies. By way of compensation, Paul’s father arranged for him to attend night classes at the University of Sydney in 1932.

  Paul’s working career began rockily as he went through several jobs in short order. The stutter was his undoing. His first job was at an accountancy firm. Paul was doing fine until the boss heard him stumbling over his words. Paul was sacked. The same thing happened in his next job, at an advertising agency. When the boss heard him stammer, he terminated the fifteen-year-old’s employ.

  The Sydney Harbour Bridge opened in March 1932, with much fanfare and a little controversy as a political activist rode up and cut the opening ribbon with his sword. Several weeks later, the unemployed Paul was wandering around the harbour’s northern edge when he noticed that the Adelaide Steamship Company was reconditioning an old ship moored nearby. Reasoning that, if the company had money for that, they could afford to employ a new office boy, he boldly fronted up at the company’s downtown offices in Bridge Street and offered his services. Impressed by his initiative, the office manager took him on. Paul started work in May.

  Two weeks later, Edward Wareham, head of the company’s Sydney branch, arrived back in the office after taking his wife and daughter on a month’s holiday to his native Queensland. And when he heard the stuttering voice of this young man who had been hired in his absence, the boss was furious. Wareham, a stern-faced man with a walrus moustache, had been with the company thirty-eight years. A lawyer, justice of the peace and president of the Interstate Steamship Owners Association, he was well-to-do, living in a mansion called the Ritz at Cremorne. He was also a perfectionist, and couldn’t abide young Paul’s affliction.

  Wareham was about to dispense with the stuttering teenager’s services when other staff members ganged up in Brickhill’s support. Relenting, the boss gave Paul a new job – lift boy, riding the lift up and down the floors of the company’s offices, pressing buttons. Young Paul was happy to be contributing to the family coffers, but unhappy about his boring dead-end job. Peter Finch, full of sympathy for his mate, and having only recently been promoted to the copyboy ranks at the Sun, took up Paul’s case with his own champion, Norman Johnson, hounding him to also take on Paul as a copyboy.

  Even though Johnson, a native of Port Pirie, knew George Brickhill well, he refused Finch’s requests at first. But Finch kept on at Johnson until he agreed to see his friend. As a result, Paul was summoned for an interview at the Sun’s grand offices in Elizabeth Street. Built just three years before in the Skyscraper Gothic style, this tall, impressive building would have been at home in Manhattan. Undaunted by the surroundings, Paul impressed Johnson, despite his stutter, and was offered a position as a copyboy. Paul was able to return to the Adelaide Steamship Company and politely tell Mr Wareham to stick his lift boy’s job up his funnel. That winter of 1932, Paul Brickhill joined the staff of the Sun, becoming, via the agency of Peter Finch, the only one of George Brickhill’s five sons to follow their father’s and grandfather’s footsteps into journalism.

  ‘If it hadn’t been for Peter making Johnson hire me,’ Brickhill would later say, ‘I would never have become a newspaperman or a writer. I owe Peter a lot.’35

  So, now Paul and Peter crossed the harbour together by ferry each day on their way to work at the Sun. In modern day terminology, copyboys were ‘gophers’, at the beck and call of senior journalists, carrying freshly typed copy to and from subeditors and editors, and doing any errand required. In the process, they learned the journalistic ropes, and how a big city newspaper ticked. Paul embraced it. Peter was not so enamoured with his job. ‘I was an indolent lead-swinger of a copyboy,’ Finch would say years later, ‘cheeky and untidy.’36

  As they steamed from Greenwich Point to Circular Quay and back, Paul and Peter would share their dreams for the future. Peter had no plans to become a newspaper hack in the long term. And neither did Paul; his ambition was to be a pilot. Peter was single-minded in his ambition to go into acting. But the Depression had closed down Sydney’s professional theatre companies, and local film companies had suspended production while they waited to see what impact the new-fangled overseas talking pictures had on the film business. Peter was convinced that talking pictures weren’t going to last, while Paul felt they were the future. Peter’s only outlets for his acting ambitions were then the amateur theatre groups and social clubs which ran theatrical productions on Sunday nights.

  On the ferry one morning, Peter and Paul, daydreaming as usual, shared a fantasy. Peter unexpectedly received a cable from a theatre company in London’s West End. There was an emergency. The actor playing the lead role in a play about to open had been struck down. Only one person in the world was capable of taking his place – Peter Finch! But, wait. How would Peter get to London?

  ‘I’ll fly you there in my plane!’ Paul chimed in.37

  Brickhill’s parents were progressively wiped out by the Depression. By the end of 1932, George could no longer afford to pay for Paul’s university night classes. Paul quit after just a year. He didn’t mind. He was fed up with university, finding it dour. By 1933, George Brickhill’s worsening financial situation had him seeking a cheaper place for his family to live. He was still calling himself a journalist when the census-taker f
or 1933 called, but no man in his position with any pride would volunteer to be listed as ‘unemployed’. The Brickhills’ new residence was not far from Mitchell Street. At 30 George Street, it was rented from Mrs Josephine Harrison.

  At the Sun, Paul was impressing his superiors with his conscientiousness. Within a year of starting as a copyboy, he was made a cadet journalist. His first assignment, compiling the shipping list, was wearisome, but he knew that if he applied himself he would be moved on to more interesting work. Quickly mastering touch-typing and shorthand, he found he could remember large slabs of detail without having to write everything down. As his abilities were appreciated and rewarded, his confidence grew, and his stutter faded, only to reappear at times of emotional stress.

  Peter Finch, meanwhile, still a copyboy, was frequently in trouble with his superiors. He fell asleep on the job at the annual wool sales. On a visit to the Supreme Court with court reporter George ‘Doggie’ Marks, he was called to the bench by Justice Frank Boyce. Finch had kept his cigarette burning in court, hiding it under his hat. And the judge had spied the trail of smoke emanating from beneath the hat.

  ‘In future,’ growled Justice Boyce, glaring down at Finch, ‘when you gentlemen of the press come to court, would you mind putting your hats out!’38

  Finch did manage to impress his workmates with an ability to mimic anyone and everyone with great skill and wit. One Friday afternoon, chairman of the board Sir Hugh Denison walked in on sixteen-year-old Finch standing on a table and doing an impression of him, to the great amusement of gathered colleagues. Peter had even borrowed Denison’s own hat and cane for the performance.

  ‘Boy, do you work here?’ boomed Denison.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Finch replied.

  ‘Well, you don’t anymore!’39

  Norman Johnson managed to get Peter his job back, but the young man’s days at the Sun were numbered. Peter was repeatedly running away from Aunt Kate’s house and sleeping rough at sleazy Kings Cross, which he adored. The Finches would bring him back, but when he ran away yet again in 1933 and refused to return, Norman Johnson gave him an ultimatum – return home, or lose his job at the paper.

  ‘Sack me!’ Peter challenged, calling the editor’s bluff.

  When Johnson declared that young Finch was making things very difficult for him, Peter decided to make it easier. Taking up a full water pitcher, Peter emptied the contents over the benevolent Johnson’s head. On his way out the paper’s door, Peter stopped to tell Paul Brickhill what he’d done.

  ‘That took guts!’ Paul declared, impressed by his friend’s bravado. ‘Now what are you going to do?’

  ‘I’m going to the Cross!’ Peter happily announced, before marching out of the newspaper for good.40

  After that, Paul would regularly catch up with Peter at the Arabian House coffee lounge in Kings Cross, a popular meeting place for members of Sydney’s arts scene. Peter was sleeping wherever anyone would give him the space to lie down. Over coffee paid for by Paul, Peter said that an amusing ‘older man’ of twenty-five had invited him to move in with him.

  Two weeks later, back at the Arabian House, Peter confessed that the arrangement with the twenty-five-year-old wasn’t working, and he was moving out. He’d found a room to rent in Woolloomooloo for five shillings a week. The only problem was that he didn’t have five shillings. Generous to a fault, Paul offered to help. For several months, Paul would pay Peter’s rent from his weekly pay packet of twenty shillings. There is no indication that Finch ever repaid him. Paul didn’t seem to mind. But the pair would grow apart over the coming years. Finch’s arty friends like gay artist Donald Friend, with whom Finch would live for some time, were not young Brickhill’s kind of people.

  As Peter embarked on a career as a sometime actor and full-time scrounger, Paul’s career at the Sun went ahead in leaps and bounds. He regularly won two-shilling prizes for the best stories in competitions the Sun ran for young members of staff. Over the next few years he graduated to fully fledged reporter on the crime beat, doing the coroner’s court and police rounds, then the starting point for all journalistic careers on big city papers. It didn’t go unnoticed at home or in the office that he’d achieved promotion much more quickly than his peers.

  Hearing of a bank robbery on one occasion, Paul rushed to the scene to find he’d even beaten the police to the bank. This allowed him to interview the teller involved without interference. But Brickhill felt there was more to the story. So, to capture what he called ‘the living moment’, he interviewed every witness he could find, building a bigger picture of the event. His report went down well with the paper, and this encouraged him to take the same detailed approach to future reports.41

  He came unstuck when his quest for detail and drama led him to miss a deadline. At the scene of a safe-blowing at Botany, he found everything very routine, with no witnesses and little to write about. Walking around the corner, he located several people who lived above a shop and had received a rude awakening when the safe was blown. They had subsequently seen the safe-blowers making their escape. These witnesses were afraid to talk at first, but the affable young reporter with a ready smile eventually got them to open up. Feeling pleased with himself, Brickhill sought the nearest public telephone armed with his dramatic story.

  ‘I telephoned it through to the office,’ he would recall several decades later, ‘and got my pants kicked off for having missed the first edition with the colourless report that the safe had been blown.’ 42 The Sun’s competitors ran reports of the safe-blowing in their first edition, beating Brickhill’s paper to the punch. No editor likes missing a news story, no matter how bland the copy might be. The person kicking Brickhill’s pants was news editor Norman Johnson, Peter Finch’s one-time mentor, who remained at the Sun until 1938, when he left to become secretary to the board of the David Jones department stores.

  Here was a salutary lesson for Brickhill on how to think like a newspaperman – get the story in, and worry about the colour later. The problem was, this wasn’t an approach Brickhill the writer appreciated. ‘That was really the first division between newspapers and me,’ he was to say. ‘I liked to take my time with a story, uncover the drama in it, bring the drama out.’ He delivered on time in future, but that didn’t stop him looking for the inherent drama in a news event, or, as he put it, ‘the guts of a story’.43

  Paul was still living at home with his parents and brothers, when, in 1936, the Brickhills moved house yet again, this time renting at 2 Greendale Street, still in Greenwich Point, from the estate of Esther Quaife. In 1937, Paul’s elder brother Russell, who was a member of the Australian Militia, the country’s part-time army, encouraged him to join the Militia. Paul joined the 7th Brigade’s field artillery, and his after-hours military training provided good background for feature articles he was soon writing as a military reporter for the Sun. By 1938, the family moved house again, this time to 132 Greenwich Road, a property rented from Mrs Louisa Martin. The move coincided with the departure of Russell Brickhill in late 1938 to work in England as an engineer.

  Mary Callanan featured in Brickhill’s life during these pre-war years. She may not have been his first girlfriend, but he would later rate her as the love of his life. Little did young Brickhill know that the Callanans, Irish Catholics, would never permit him to marry their precious daughter. But, for the sake of harmony, the Callanans always made young Paul welcome. By 1939, it had become clear to Paul that there was no future in pursuing the relationship, and, broken-hearted, he began looking elsewhere for love.

  Come late 1939, with World War Two several months old, Paul had been one of the Sydney Sun’s two military reporters for over a year. The other was Lionel ‘Bill’ Hudson, under whom Brickhill had trained. Paul even carried a military pass complete with his photograph, giving him access to military offices and bases. At this time he was leading an active social life as a member of his swimming club, of a squash club and a golf club – all of which, as it happened, involved primar
ily individual sports rather than team sports. Into his busy life came a new female individual who took his fancy.

  Del Fox was a slim, long-faced brunette with the good humour of her Irish forebears. A secretary with a Sydney company, Del came from a good Bellevue Hill family in the posh eastern suburbs. Through his swimming connections, Brickhill secured two tickets to the annual Speedo Ball, and resplendent in dinner suit and bowtie he escorted an equally spruced-up Del to the ball. Brickhill paid for several photographs to be taken of the couple on the night, and sent copies to Del a few weeks later, apologising for the delay and blaming what he called his ‘congenital procrastination’. He thought one picture of her an absolute ‘clinker’, saying she looked ‘very willowy and graceful’. Brickhill was still living at home with his parents, and before he sent the photos to Del he showed them to his mother. ‘Mother is quite impressed,’ he told Del.44

  The main topic of conversation at the ball had of course been the war in Europe. In the letter to Del that accompanied the photographs, Brickhill made it clear he had no interest in fighting the Hun for king and country, unlike many young men he knew. ‘Chaps seem to lose their minds and think there is honour and glory in it still. They can have it on their own. I have no intention of going 12,000-odd miles to stick a bayonet in the insides of a man to whom I have never even been formally introduced – or more to the point, have a total stranger stick a bayonet into my insides. The only way to get me into uniform is for the defence of Australia – which is an unlikely necessity.’ The war was, he declared, ‘a damn silly show’.45

  On 3 January 1940, Paul’s paternal grandmother, Rebecca Brickhill, passed away in her Launceston home. She was ninety-six. By this time Brickhill’s father and mother had relocated to Newcastle, where George was working with the Newcastle Sun. On their departure, Paul moved into a flat in another ‘Elsmere’, in Lawrence Street, Manly, still in sight of Sydney Harbour.