The Hero Maker

by Stephen Dando-Collins

  There was soon further movement on the movie front. David Higham contacted Brickhill with the news that film producer Robert Clark liked his treatment. As it happened, the viability of the Dam Busters film had just been enhanced by the Air Ministry informing Clark he could borrow several Lancasters for filming for next to nothing. Through November, Clark and Higham haggled over a film-rights deal.

  That deal was announced in early December. Clark was promising to commit more money to this project than Associated British had spent on any previous film. Although some newspapers would speculate that Brickhill would receive as much as £15,000 from the deal, Clark’s total budget for both screen rights to the book and the writing of the screenplay was £7500.202 Of this, £5000 was likely allocated to Brickhill, with the remaining £2500 going to the film’s screenwriter.

  Escape Or Die and Bader research kept Brickhill busy until January 1952, when he went back to London for ten hectic days of meetings, once again leaving Margot in Provence. In London, he put the final touches to Escape Or Die in close collaboration with Pudney, caught up with the Baders, met with producer Robert Clark and lunched with prominent novelist H. E. Bates.

  The meeting with Bates had been set up by Pudney, who had interested the author in writing the Escape Or Die preface. Herbert Ernest Bates, who, like Brickhill, started out as a journalist, had gained a measure of success with rural novels and short stories before the war. His wartime novels had made him famous. Like Pudney, Bates had been employed by the Air Ministry’s Creative Writers Unit expressly to write patriotic works for public consumption. Using the pseudonym Flying Officer X, he’d produced The Greatest People in the World in 1942, and How Sleep the Brave the following year. In 1944, using his own name, he’d written Fair Stood the Wind for France, the story of a British bomber crew forced down in occupied France. In later years, his successes would include the Darling Buds of May books, which would become a TV series that launched the screen career of Catherine Zeta-Jones.

  Now, as Bates lunched with Brickhill to discuss how he might approach an Escape Or Die preface, he posed the Australian a question that had puzzled him for years. ‘Why did not flying men, especially bomber pilots, go over Germany wearing fully prepared civilian disguise under their flying suits, so that they could begin organised escape immediately on hitting German soil, instead of afterwards toiling in tunnels?’

  After giving the question thought, Brickhill responded, ‘I suppose no RAF man ever had a final and absolute belief that he would be shot down, and that, if by some unfortunate accident, he were, he would never be captured anyway.’203

  Bates would write a thoughtful preface, and, although one of the least known of Brickhill’s books today, Escape Or Die would prove a great success, going into its seventh reprint within a year of publication. The downside for Brickhill would be that, after seeing what he’d done for RAFES, and reading of his high literary earnings, charities and individuals would plague him, begging his time and money. At first, he would give something to everyone. ‘I tried to do all I could,’ he would later say. But the more he gave, the more was asked of him. ‘I found I was on the sucker list.’ Over time, he would become increasingly selective about which charities he supported.204

  Brickhill’s latest meeting with Robert Clark proved productive. At his Elstree Studios at Borehamwood on London’s northwest fringe, Clark informed Brickhill that he had made his choice of screenwriter for the Dam Busters movie. After initially considering novelist C. S. Forester, noted playwright Terence Rattigan and other leading screenwriters of the day Emlyn Williams and Leslie Arliss, Clark had settled on R. C. Sherriff. A successful playwright who’d first found success in the West End with Journey’s End in 1928, Bob Sherriff had more recently built a career as a screenwriter on hit films such as The Invisible Man, Goodbye, Mr Chips and Odd Man Out. Clark passed Brickhill’s book and treatment to Sherriff, who agreed with Brickhill – for maximum dramatic impact, a Dam Busters movie must focus on the dams raid, and on Barnes Wallis and Guy Gibson. An August delivery date was agreed for Sherriff’s screenplay.

  On Brickhill’s February return to the French villa at St-Paul-de-Vence, his maid took him aside and confided that, while he’d been in London, his twenty-three-year-old wife had blatantly conducted an affair with a visitor, a Douglas Gordon, in Brickhill’s marital bed.

  Though shocked to the core by his wife’s infidelity, Brickhill said nothing. But unable to live in the house where Margot had betrayed him, he announced that they were returning to London at once. Leaving her to pack everything, on 22 February he set off to drive the Alfa Romeo back to England. Unaware of the reason for the sudden relocation, Margot angrily followed by train, bringing all their trunks and suitcases. She joined him at the Cumberland Hotel in London, where they stayed until a Chelsea flat became available.

  Leaving Margot in the flat, trying to put St-Paul-de-Vence behind him and to contain his anger, Brickhill told his unfaithful wife to go back to modelling and to hire a maid, then spent eleven days in a quiet hotel in Kent correcting Escape Or Die proofs. On his return, Margot had hired the maid, but was still at home, under his feet.

  Across the Elstree Studios meeting table from Brickhill on 7 March sat screenwriter Sherriff, producer Clark and several of Clark’s production executives. Sherriff had by this time read both Brickhill’s book and treatment and had formed an idea of how he would approach the Dam Busters script.

  ‘The story should be told simply and naturally,’ Sherriff told the meeting, ‘with no recourse to tricks of any sort.’

  Brickhill was in full accord. As was Clark – his goal was always authenticity and realism.

  ‘And there should be no effort to introduce a feminine influence,’ Sherriff added.205

  Again, agreement was voiced around the table, although Clark would reserve his judgement on that issue.

  With Barnes Wallis at the core of the story, six days later Sherriff went down to White Hills House to meet with him alone. He came away convinced that the film should open with Wallis experimenting at his farmhouse with the home-made catapult and a bucket of water with which, a decade earlier, he had established that a bouncing bomb could, in theory, work. It was agreed that Brickhill, Sherriff and the production executives should visit Wallis to see the experiment in action.

  With his customary soft smile, Barnes Wallis greeted his guests, then conducted them to his workshop. It was 22 March, and Brickhill had led a small expedition to Wallis’ Surrey farmhouse. With him and Sherriff went two Associated British production chiefs, Walter Mycroft and production supervisor W. A. ‘Bill’ Whittaker. In preparation for the visit, Wallis had set up his original ‘scientific’ apparatus.

  ‘It’s just as it was at the time,’ Wallis assured Brickhill and his companions. ‘Now I’ll show you how it works.’206

  He didn’t. And couldn’t. To the scientist’s acute embarrassment, no matter how many times he tried, Wallis was unable to successfully replicate the original experiment for his visitors. Still, Brickhill agreed with Sherriff that this charmingly innocuous home experiment, which had led to a breakthrough in arms development, and to so much death and destruction, should form the opening scene of the film. Of course, through the magic of cinema, the experiment would succeed on celluloid. And a ‘female influence’ would be snuck into the opening scene and several later scenes, in the person of an actress playing Wallis’ supportive wife.

  With his opening in place, Sherriff set off to talk with Micky Martin and others intimately involved with the dams raid.

  Between February and August 1952, while the Dam Busters script was being developed, Brickhill focused on Douglas Bader book research. Regularly, he would take an after-dinner stroll around to the Baders’ Kensington flat from his own in Chelsea, toting a recording device. This being before the era of the portable tape recorder, Brickhill’s device was a dictating machine. Then state of the art, it looked like a portable record player, which it was, in reverse. A blank 78 rpm record w
as placed on the turntable, and a stylus recorded whatever the microphone picked up, onto the disc, creating a series of grooves. It took exactly an hour for the stylus to fill the disc. So, exactly an hour after Brickhill pressed the ‘Start’ button, his recorded chat sessions with Bader ended. The following day, Brickhill would mail the record to a secretarial service. Twenty-four hours later, he received a typed transcript. By the time Brickhill concluded his interviews with Bader, he’d filled 123 discs.

  The routine for their after-dinner chats was the same. Brickhill sat in an armchair in the Bader flat, microphone in one hand, glass of beer in the other. Across from him sat Bader, puffing on a cigar. Bader had always been a pipe smoker, even in Spitfire cockpits. He added cigars to his smoking armoury after meeting Luftwaffe fighter ace Adolf Galland, who ended the war a general with 120 kills. Galland had been a lieutenant-colonel commanding JG26 at Wissant in France in 1941 when Bader was brought there to meet him after being shot down. Galland was famous in German ranks for his cigar smoking, even puffing away on the operating table after being shot down.

  Once Brickhill made Bader famous via his biography, Bader would be approached by Galland to write a foreword to the 1955 English version of his autobiography, The First and the Last. Bader would provide the foreword, finishing with ‘Galland is a brave man, and I personally shall look forward to meeting him again anytime, anywhere, and in any company.’ They did meet again, with the former enemies becoming friends. While Bader was at Wissant airfield, Galland had permitted him to sit in the cockpit of an Me 109. After the war, Galland sent him a photograph which showed Bader in the Messerschmitt cockpit, with Galland and his subordinates crowded around. Only then did Bader notice that one Luftwaffe officer held a pistol – in case Bader attempted to take off in the German fighter.

  As Brickhill and Bader talked during their interview sessions, Thelma Bader sat unobtrusively sewing, taking everything in. She rarely spoke. When she did, it was invariably to act as an impartial referee as the discussion between the men became heated. ‘Now, now, you two!’ she would say, immediately taking the sting out of the contretemps, with both men retreating under her maternal gaze.207

  Early on during their chats, Brickhill felt that Bader was not being honest with him. Having learned that Bader had been up for selection in the England rugby team before he lost his legs, Brickhill was, in his own words, callously fascinated with how he would describe the feelings of an athlete who wakes up in hospital to find both legs missing. As delicately as he could, he asked Bader what he’d felt at that time.

  ‘My dear chap,’ Bader replied, ‘I didn’t mind a bit.’

  Knowing how he would have felt in that position, Brickhill couldn’t believe this, and said so. When Bader persisted with that line, Brickhill, shaking his head, urged his subject to come clean.

  Bader scowled at him. ‘My dear chap, would you kindly get into your unbelievably thick skull that I know what happened and you didn’t. And I’m telling you what happened. I do not happen to be a liar.’208

  While still disbelieving, Brickhill changed the subject, for the time being. He found that patience was required with Bader – something he was having to develop in all his relationships. The following evening, the author decided to again probe his subject on the same question. This time Bader was even more vehement in his denials. It was some time before Brickhill absorbed the fact – Bader had genuinely not been upset at losing his legs.

  ‘I know that sounds unbelievable,’ Brickhill would say, ‘but it is true, and the reason is that he is a rare freak with enough guts to recognise tragedy that cannot be altered, to accept it without tears or wishful thinking, and carry on from there to endure it or overcome it.’209

  In another session a little later, Bader said, ‘You know, the months in hospital after I lost my legs were among the happiest in my life.’210

  This wouldn’t make sense to Brickhill until, in the course of interviewing Dorothy Brace, a nursing sister who’d looked after Bader at Royal Berkshire Hospital in 1931, it became clear to him that, perhaps for the first time in his life, in hospital Bader had been surrounded by people who really cared about him.

  As the year unfolded, Bader relaxed totally in Brickhill’s company. In his flat, he would remove his trousers and stomp around the room with his shirttails hanging down over his prosthetics. Made of yellow-painted metal, heavy and unbending, by today’s standards those prosthetics were primitive. Brickhill was to marvel at how Bader got around on them, appreciating for the first time how he took his own flexible ankles for granted. To walk, Bader would heave a leg in front of him, then lean forward until he overbalanced, then move the other leg; and so it went. Bader had only taken up golf after losing his legs, and now he had a handicap of just four, which put him in the same class as professional champions.

  For a while, Brickhill thought the man totally insensitive, until Bader one evening began to passionately recite the verse of A. C. Swinburne. The poet’s work tended to be dark, and the lines quoted by Bader had a cynical edge to them. But at least, Brickhill concluded, the man had a poetic side.

  Brickhill also found that Bader held views towards women that were typical of many men of the day. To Bader, a pinch on the backside should be considered a compliment by the female recipient. He also held the view that it was in order for a man to put his wife over his knee and give her a spanking if she became difficult to handle. Yet Bader would never pinch Thelma on the bottom, or even think of putting her over his knee. For Brickhill, ‘The jigsaw of a very complex character was fitting together.’211

  Interspersed with the interviews of Bader and many who knew him, Brickhill enjoyed getting away for golf breaks. His fairway partner in March was actor Anthony Bushell, a founding member of the Laurence Olivier Players, of which Peter Finch was a member. Over dinner with Brickhill that night, Bushell expressed the view that Finch didn’t have what it took to be a West End star.212 It would be another twenty-four years before Finch crowned his acting career with Golden Globe and Academy Award success.

  In the spring of 1952, while research for the Bader book was ongoing, Brickhill teamed up with Ian Bevan to form the Australian Artists Association in London, an organisation for Aussie expats in the arts. This new group attracted a number of playwrights, authors and actors, among them Hugh Hastings, Alan Stranks, Charmian Clift and Robert Helpmann. With the support of Australia’s High Commissioner to the UK, Sir Thomas White, himself a published author, they launched the association with a function in the basement at Australia House. Peter Finch turned up for the launch, looking his usual dishevelled self – Russell Braddon described him as ‘the worst-dressed man in Dolphin Square’.213 Also among the artistic throng was a young bearded Australian entertainer with a stuffed kangaroo under his arm, Rolf Harris.

  Feeling there was also a need for an organisation that supported Aussie authors in the UK, Brickhill was instrumental in the creation that October of the Society of Australian Writers (SAW), becoming one of the society’s vice-presidents. Bevan and playwright Hastings again took leading roles, bringing in writers such as Chester Wilmot and Alan Moorehead to form an Australian literary mafia in London. Former Cambridge University professor Gilbert Murray was an early leader of the band, while Russell Braddon became SAW’s chairman, a position he would hold for twenty-five years. Braddon was looking for a new book subject, and with an introduction and encouragement from Brickhill he would soon begin researching and writing the biography of 617 Squadron’s Leonard Cheshire, a book which would be well received when published in 1954.

  Although Elizabeth II had been queen since the death of her father, King George VI, in 1952, her official coronation would not take place until June 1953. She and Prince Philip would make a royal tour Down Under in early 1954. With the impending regal visit in mind, Ian Bevan convinced William Collins to publish a collection of patriotic essays about the many facets of Australia, under the title The Sunburnt Country, which would be presented to Her Majesty in he
r coronation year as a lead-up to the royal tour. Bevan, who would edit the book, invited fifteen noted Australian writers to contribute, SAW members Brickhill, Braddon and Wilmot among them. All the authors assigned their royalties to a charity to be nominated by Prince Philip.

  With so much else on his plate, Brickhill rattled off an earnest though lacklustre piece for The Sunburnt Country, about the contributions of science to farming in Australia. He particularly applauded the work of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), for whom his father-in-law, Edric Slater, was now working as a nature photographer. In part, Brickhill described the history of the war on the rabbit plague in Australia ever since British rabbits landed with the First Fleet in 1788, culminating in the CSIRO’s use of the mixomatosis virus, or ‘myxo’ as it became known to Australians, to destroy rabbits wholesale.

  In June, Douglas Bader informed Brickhill that he and Thelma were spending three weeks’ annual holiday in Cornwall in August. Brickhill still had plenty of questions for his subject, so the Baders invited him to join them on holiday to continue the interviews. Bader said that the men could play golf together during the day and resume their after-dinner recording sessions each evening. Brickhill readily agreed, and, with a meeting at Elstree Studios set down for 12 August to review Bob Sherriff’s draft Dam Busters screenplay, booked a room at the same hotel as the Baders to share the first ten days of their holiday with them.