The Hero Maker

by Stephen Dando-Collins

  ‘Oh, God, no!’ Brickhill exclaimed.258 Conception had apparently occurred shortly after they’d reunited aboard the Orontes. A child was the last thing Brickhill wanted. Now, they would have an explosive marriage plus a baby.

  For the sake of the child, both Brickhill and Margot that day vowed to make the marriage work. Going back to George Street, they informed Dot and George that they were going to be grandparents. Margot gave up smoking, and Brickhill booked a room for the third week of April at St Margaret’s Maternity Hospital in Darlinghurst.

  Now, too, Brickhill took a lease on ‘Kambah’, a pricey furnished house on the Northern Beaches. On Cabarita Road at Avalon’s Stokes Point, it overlooked the calm waters of Pittwater, a short hop from Palm Beach. The couple moved in, and in mid-December, while Margot went Christmas shopping, Brickhill opened a package from London containing Reach for the Sky proofs. In accompanying letters, Bonham Carter and Billy Collins urged Brickhill to remove all the ‘by Christs’, ‘by Gods’ and ‘bloodies’ colouring the text.

  While these suggested deletions were partly at Bader’s request, the chairman observed that the recurrent swearing, while true to life, would limit the Collins sales team’s hopes of getting the book into every school library in the land. He recalled that one phrase in The Wooden Horse had significantly limited its sales to school libraries. At the same time, the publisher had good news for Brickhill: Collins’ initial print run would be a massive 100,000 hardback copies. Buoyed by this, Brickhill began the task of expunging Bader’s expletives.

  Meanwhile, Bader was causing Brickhill headaches of a different kind. Bader had been surprised by the amount of money that Reach for the Sky now seemed likely to generate. And scared. At this rate, he said, after tax, he would end up netting only fifteen per cent of his fifty per cent share of the book’s royalties. To relieve him of a heavy tax burden, he asked Brickhill to scrap their fifty-fifty arrangement and renegotiate their deal. Agreeing, Brickhill sent him Collins’ and Norton’s sales projections. Based on these, there was some difficult haggling, with Bader’s officious accountants demanding to know why Brickhill’s agent David Higham was involved in the negotiations.

  Finally, both sides agreed that Brickhill Publications Limited would pay Bader £10,500 as ‘expenses’, with Brickhill relieving Bader of tax liability on that amount, plus £2625 for ‘services’, on which Bader would pay tax. There, the deal was capped. Bader would receive £13,125 in total. If royalties failed to meet projections, Brickhill would be out of pocket. If they exceeded them, he would make more than Bader. This time, their deal went into a written agreement, which both Brickhill and Bader signed.

  That same month of November, The Sunburnt Country was released in Britain, to a warm reception. UK sales would be healthy, generating new editions in 1954 and 1955. The book wouldn’t reach Australian bookshelves until January, but an advance review in the Australian press in November about this mostly expat view of Oz from afar was not complimentary. The review particularly focused on a female contributor who’d declared that Australian women were ‘lousy cooks’.

  Angered on behalf of his co-authors, Brickhill complained to the local press about the lack of a comprehensive review of this well-intentioned book whose royalties were all going to a good cause. In response, Eric Baume, a Sydney writer and broadcaster, blasted him in the Sydney Morning Herald: ‘You have a very high reputation, and are a world best seller, which few writers can say. Leave it at that. Give the critics the same right as your own to say what they want.’259 Brickhill did not respond.

  For the first time in five years, now as a married man with a baby on the way, Brickhill spent Christmas with his parents and brothers. This same month, Russell Brickhill ran for Lane Cove Council; he would serve as an alderman for many years and as mayor of Lane Cove in 1963 and 1964. Brickhill was also able to catch up with literary friends from London who were spending Christmas in Australia, Russell Braddon, Alan Moorehead and Chester Wilmot among them. Surrounded by friends and family, he enjoyed his best Christmas in years.

  It was the calm before the storm; 1954 would prove one of the most difficult years of Brickhill’s life.

  20.

  The Dam Busters Crisis

  THE YEAR BEGAN well enough. In the first week of January, David Higham announced from London that a deal had been signed with independent British film producer Major Danny Angel for the film rights to Reach for the Sky, for ‘a record amount’, rumoured to be £25,000. To make the film, Angel would partner with the Rank Organisation, then Associated British’s only competitor in Britain’s restricted film-distribution market. Higham also announced that shooting of Associated British’s production of The Dam Busters was expected to finally begin that month.260

  The cameras would not in fact start rolling on The Dam Busters until April. After considering Laurence Olivier and Jack Hawkins to play Barnes Wallis, producer Robert Clark signed Michael Redgrave for the role. Australian actor Bill Kerr would play Micky Martin, and two future stars would have minor roles: Patrick McGoohan and Robert Shaw – whose career would surge decades later after he co-starred in Jaws. To play Guy Gibson, Clark cast Richard Todd. Like Gibson, Todd was short but handsome. ‘No other role has appealed to me so much in all my acting career,’ Todd told the press.261

  But, very quickly, Brickhill’s year took a downhill trajectory. On 10 January, Chester Wilmot was flying back to England when his BOAC De Havilland Comet jet crashed into the Mediterranean near Elba, killing all thirty-five aboard and snuffing out a lauded writing career. The disaster only heightened Brickhill’s dread of flying. This same month, Brickhill’s Sydney accountant delivered even more disastrous news. Between British and Australian taxation and what he’d promised to pay Douglas Bader, Brickhill would soon be up for a staggering £65,000.

  As Brickhill panicked, his accountant offered a solution; if he moved to New Zealand, where the top marginal tax rate was then sixty per cent, he would be able to limit his liabilities. But he must do it at once, and not set foot back in Australia, or Britain, for several years. Brickhill gave two options to Margot, by this time six months pregnant. She could accompany him to New Zealand, or remain behind in Sydney. He conceded that, apart from a few Air Force chums of his, they knew no one in New Zealand. But if he didn’t go there, he said, they could end up penniless. Shattered by the thought of having the baby alone, Margot found herself between the devil and the deep blue sea.

  ‘I have no alternative,’ she glumly responded.262

  On 11 February, Brickhill and his wife sailed for New Zealand. After staying at Auckland’s Trans-Tasman Hotel for a fortnight, they rented a flat for another six weeks at pretty Mission Bay, on Auckland Harbour. Setting up his typewriter, Brickhill again attempted to begin a novel. But work quickly stalled as sickness levelled him – the severe bronchitis he’d suffered in Stalag Luft 3 returned. Margot was sympathetic, bringing meals to his bed. Then, as he was recovering in March, a letter arrived from Billy Collins. A letter which rocked Brickhill, and his world.

  For the first time, Billy dispensed with ‘Dear Brickhill’, beginning this letter with the more solicitous ‘Dear Paul’. Sales of Reach for the Sky looked like exceeding all expectations, and Billy was seeking Brickhill’s agreement to reduce the author’s royalty set out in his publishing contract to make it a flat ten per cent for all sales, instead of lifting to fifteen per cent for sales above 20,000 copies. Collins’ argument, which made no sense to Brickhill, was that the more copies they sold, the less the publishers made, until they ended up losing money. To Brickhill’s mind, it would surely be the other way around. Collins even split hairs on whether ‘Australasian’ sales included New Zealand. He claimed that no one in New Zealand felt the term ‘Australasian’ encompassed their country as well as Australia. Author George Greenfield, who fell afoul of Collins around this time, would declare that Billy frequently resorted to money-grubbing ‘venal tricks’.263

  It was not the first time that Brickhill had been
the victim of such behaviour from publishers. Faber & Faber and Evans Brothers had both attempted to renegotiate his royalties down, similarly because his books had been much more successful than expected. Brickhill was already disappointed with William Collins for what he saw as their failure to provide him with a detailed editor’s report. This grab for his money sapped all confidence he had in his publishers. For a week he fretted over what to do, before it all became too much. Totally disillusioned with the whole business of writing books, he spiralled into depression, and was soon overcome with exhaustion so total he could barely find the strength to get out of bed. When he did arise, he wrote to David Higham, asking him to sort out everything with Collins.

  In April, at Kohimarama, just around the point from Mission Bay, Brickhill found a house to rent. On the crest of a ridge in Allum Street, the house was spacious, although far from luxurious. Its best features were dramatic views east over playing fields below and south across the harbour. Local shops were a five-minute walk down the hill, with a sandy, tree-lined beach reminiscent of Manly Beach another few minutes away. Hiring a housekeeper, Brickhill and his wife moved in.

  Work still proved impossible. A hundred Reach for the Sky press reviews flooded in from London and New York. His breath bated, Brickhill read every one. With rare exceptions, such as fellow Stalag Luft 3 kriegie Robert Kee, who, in the Observer, damned Brickhill’s writing as nothing more than competent journalism, press critics had woven their reviews with the gold cloth of praise. Brickhill had to drag himself away from the adulation to rush Margot to Auckland’s Wakefield Private Hospital. On 14 April, a week earlier than expected, she gave birth to a son, 7lb 3oz Timothy Paul.

  Knowing that AAP in London would disseminate the news to newspapers of the world, Brickhill sent a revealing cable to the news agency, announcing the new arrival:

  He seems pretty good for a first edition. Very bold type-face, requiring extra end papers. Well received by the critics. No cereal rights yet. I won’t be reprinting for some time – the first impression is regarded as adequate.264

  An unfinished letter sat in his typewriter. Immediately following his son’s birth, Brickhill returned to his desk to complete this missive, to John Pudney in London. He would add a handwritten postscript about the birth of Timothy, but was writing in reply to a December letter from Pudney that had found its way to him via Greenwich Point. Pudney, who had just changed publishers, joining Putnam’s, had written a Reach for the Sky review for a London magazine. Brickhill thanked him for penning what he considered one of the best, most constructive critiques he’d received, complaining that so few reviews helped him improve his writing.

  The catalyst for Pudney’s letter had been a comment from a SAW member in London that Brickhill thought Pudney was ‘hipped’, or unhappy, with him for some reason. Brickhill wrote back that it was he who was hipped, with himself, for failing to include Pudney among the people he’d acknowledged in The Dam Busters. It pricked his conscience that he’d forgotten Pudney, the father of his fortune in many ways. Brickhill told Pudney that he planned to present him with a handsome present the next time he saw him in London, and nothing the editor did or said would prevent him from delivering on that intent.

  ‘You are a pawn between me and my conscience,’ he told Pudney. Appropriately, he would pay for this gift, he said, from the proceeds from the Pan paperback edition of The Dam Busters, published that year.265 Brickhill always kept his word. And this edition of The Dam Busters would soon fill his gift-buying coffers to overflowing – within two years, it became the first Pan paperback to sell a million copies. It has been suggested, but not substantiated, that Brickhill subsequently gave Pudney an expensive gold watch.

  As Margot remained in Wakefield Hospital for ten days, Brickhill initially visited mother and child twice daily. Feeling trapped in a volatile relationship, he was once more overwhelmed with depression. As his spirits dropped, so too did the frequency of his hospital visits. On one occasion, he gloomily lapsed into silence as he sat at his wife’s bedside.

  ‘Come on now,’ said Margot impatiently, ‘entertain me.’

  He made no reply.266

  The next day, in a doctor’s surgery, Brickhill collapsed from nervous exhaustion. Days later, hiring a full-time nurse for the baby, he took mother and son home to Allum Street. Brickhill already slept poorly. A new baby crying at all hours meant he got no sleep at all. Moving out, he slept at an Auckland gentleman’s club for two weeks, visiting his wife and child during the afternoons. Margot demanded to know why.

  ‘I’m ill!’ he replied in exasperation. ‘Can’t you see?’

  ‘You are suffering from no illness whatsoever!’ he would remember her retorting.267

  Throughout May, William Collins’ New Zealand manager drove Brickhill to signings at bookstores throughout the North Island. As a result, New Zealand sales of Reach for the Sky would approach those in Australia. With travel and public appearances exhausting him, and desperate for a rest, when Brickhill heard about a cancellation on a cruise ship departing Auckland in June, he booked a cabin; for himself, alone. For twenty days, he sailed around the Pacific.

  When the cruise ship docked in Fiji, he caught up with aviation pioneer Harold Gatty, who by this time had founded Fiji Airways. Gatty told him about a philosophical book he was writing about nature and survival, and Brickhill would strongly recommend it to Billy Collins. The book, Nature Is Our Guide, would be published in 1958, a year after Gatty’s death.

  Prior to sailing away, Brickhill had given his wife a generous housekeeping allowance and money to pay the nurse’s wages. Margot, who was exercising and dieting to regain her slim pre-pregnancy figure, which she would succeed in doing by the time her husband returned, was before long short of cash and asking her father in Australia to send money to pay the nurse’s wages. Margot wouldn’t tell Brickhill about this until a decade later. Brickhill, arriving back in Auckland to find his wife desperately lonely, flew Margot’s mother over from Sydney to stay for many weeks. While Olive took care of the baby, Margot went looking for modelling work in Auckland, securing one week-long assignment.

  In Brickhill’s absence, letters from Billy Collins had piled up. Collins had clearly not approved of the author’s lone Pacific jaunt, saying that he expected Brickhill’s wife and son would be very pleased to see him again. He also said that recently, at a lunch, he’d seen Douglas Bader, who was far from happy with the success of Reach for the Sky. With the hardback print run now up to 300,000 and the film contract finalised, Bader had told Collins he very much regretted the deal he’d renegotiated with Brickhill, and questioned the sales projections provided at the time.

  No one could have predicted the book’s phenomenal success in advance – within several years, Reach for the Sky would become the biggest-selling hardback book in Britain since Homer’s Iliad in the 1930s. Yet Billy Collins was siding with Bader, telling Brickhill he hoped he would sort the matter out with him. As far as Brickhill was concerned, the matter was already sorted. He hadn’t heard a peep out of Bader about their revised agreement since they’d signed it. And he never would. As Collins continued to prod him about Bader’s share, Brickhill, now commencing his letters with ‘Dear Billy’, spelled out in detail the lengths he’d gone to in accommodating Bader’s requested revision of their deal. But the chairman never seemed to grasp the intricacies of it all, and Brickhill would always feel that everyone at William Collins felt he’d defrauded Bader of his fair dues.

  Not that Bader came out of it a poor man. He would use money from his share of the book royalties to purchase and totally renovate a house in Kensington’s Petersham Mews. It became his and Thelma’s much-cherished home. Thelma would die from throat cancer in 1971, five years before Bader was knighted for services to the public and the disabled. Sir Douglas would retain the mews house as something of a shrine to Thelma. Although by then living in the country, Bader and second wife Joan would use Petersham Mews as their London pad after they married in 1973. In
2009, Sir Richard Branson would unveil a British Heritage plaque dedicated to Bader on the mews house’s exterior. Branson’s Aunt Clare had been a friend of the Baders, and at the age of seven, at his aunt’s Norfolk house, Branson had stolen the famous tin legs and run off with them while Bader was swimming, only to discover that he was just as nimble on his hands as he was on prosthetics.

  Bader would not complain publicly about his share of Reach for the Sky spoils, but his dissatisfaction with the way he and Brickhill split the money, at Bader’s own instigation, led to the pair falling out. Bader no longer answered letters from the author, and their firm friendship dissolved the way family relationships dissolve over contested inheritances. ‘I am sickened by the whole business,’ Brickhill would lament.268

  As Brickhill read the backlog of letters from Collins, he found the chairman returning to the subject of reduced royalties. Brickhill had thought that matter dealt with. He sent a negative response, and through July and August long, politely couched but combative letters flowed back and forth between the two. Still, Collins harped on royalty revisions. Seething, Brickhill asked for detailed sales figures for all territories, and withheld permission for a book club edition. Their disagreement on financial matters was, he told Collins, ‘an awful business’, and he deeply regretted it.

  As he fought this continuing war of words, his drinking increased, and all inspiration for a novel deserted him. The only thing he took pleasure in now was his new son. ‘He is pink and a ball of muscle,’ he proudly told Collins, adding that tiny Tim had just let out his first full-bodied laugh.269