At the end of three carefree years at university she found herself behind a school desk again, with a group of girls younger than she. Typing she picked up very easily and she had no trouble with the lines, pothooks and squiggles of Pitman’s phonetic shorthand. After only three weeks she asked to be promoted to the speed class, but this was a little too fast for Miss Hale, who refused. Beatrice decided she didn’t need to stay at the college: office skills could be practised at home. She left and continued to study alone, taking down and transcribing the words of announcers on the family crystal set.2
Perhaps through university contacts – Beatrice kept in touch with the University of Sydney all her life – she heard of a vacancy for a stenographer at the French Trade Commission. The salary was a very low two pounds a week, but at least it was an income. Beatrice put on her best suit and hat, brushed up her French and, no doubt charmingly equivocal about her experience as a shorthand typist, talked her way into the job. It meant taking down and transcribing letters in French – more of a challenge than she had expected. With ingenuity and the help of an excellent memory, she worked out a way of adapting the stolidly British Pitman’s to the liquid French vowel sounds.
Despite the low salary, Beatrice quite enjoyed the job. The Trade Commission was a hotbed of intrigue and she quickly made her name as the most discreet person on the staff, able to be relied on to keep other people’s secrets. This involved handling delicate situations – that is, keeping spouses and lovers ignorant of each other’s existence. By now Beatrice probably had a few secrets of her own to keep as well.
She was still playing the piano. In the late 1920s and early 1930s amateur music making was very popular, and most Sydney suburbs had music clubs. There were several in Neutral Bay, and Beatrice belonged to one in Bannerman Street. There she met Mervyn Archdall, an ebullient doctor in his late forties who was the assistant editor of the Medical Journal of Australia. He had a fine tenor voice and they often teamed in duets. Dr Archdall was very taken with the pretty and talented Miss Davis, aged twenty-one, and was pleased to discover that they took the same ferry to work.
One morning in 1930, after Beatrice had been working at the French Trade Commission for about a year, Dr Archdall told her that his secretary was leaving. Beatrice asked, ‘What do you pay her?’ When he said £3 10s a week – half as much again as her salary at the Trade Commission – Beatrice swiftly said, ‘I’ll take the job.’ It was one of the most important decisions she ever made.
The Medical Journal of Australia was produced and printed in a solid, rather forbidding brick building in Arundel Street, Glebe, on the high side of Parramatta Road opposite the university. Established in 1914, the magazine was an Anglo-Australian hybrid, another example of Britannia ruling Australia’s waves. Though all the material in it was Australian, its publisher was the British Medical Association; the Australian Medical Association did not yet exist. The journal went to the 2000 Australian members of the BMA.
Beatrice got the job – she later said Archdall praised her appearance, saying she was ‘very neat about the stockings’. Shortly after she started as his secretary, the journal’s editor, Dr Henry Armit, died and Archdall took his place. Beatrice was now not only Archdall’s secretary but his editorial assistant. She stayed in the job for the next seven years.
It was a very busy office. With only a manual typewriter, Beatrice and Archdall were responsible for bringing out a weekly magazine of never fewer than thirty pages. The copy, much of it handwritten, consisted of reports of medical and scientific meetings, analyses of medical politics, abstracts, case commentaries, summaries of medical literature, original scientific articles – three or four per issue – obituaries, book reviews and letters to the editor. Whatever was not supplied Archdall or Beatrice had to write. They selected and edited the material, chose the layouts, read and checked proofs: they did almost everything.
Beatrice quickly discovered that her boss was brilliant at his job. Though married, Archdall had no children and always joked that the MJA was his baby. Punctilious about grammar and punctuation, he taught his editorial assistant how to write abstracts and short book reviews – very useful when she came to assess manuscripts later. He was also an exact proofreader. Beatrice, whose education in science had taught her the importance of precision, could hardly have had a better teacher of the skills on which her career would depend.
However, she found that Mervyn Archdall could be very demanding. A short man with reddish-brown hair and prominent ears, he was part Irish, part German and explosively emotional. He suffered from various nervous complaints, particularly asthma, and stammered so badly that when he was agitated his jaw jammed up and he could hardly speak. He would flare into an instant rage and then, like a furious child, he was difficult to pacify. Beatrice soon learned to read his moods. If all was well, he was likely to greet her as she approached the building by waving an exuberant leg out the window; if he was depressed his gloom would envelop her as soon as she stepped into the office. Beatrice’s way of handling him was to remain very calm and keep out of his way until he recovered his equilibrium.
Archdall was also a man with firm views about etiquette, some of which dated from the nineteenth century. He considered it an intolerable impertinence to be on first-name terms with anyone he had known for less than ten years – Beatrice was always Miss Davis – and he corrected anyone who addressed him simply as Doctor instead of Dr Archdall, as Doctor was a title, not his name. He also firmly believed that men who wore suede shoes were cads. When a colleague came to visit him with these offending objects on his feet, Archdall announced to Beatrice that the man must never, never come into the office again. Beatrice accepted all this calmly. Archdall’s insistence on rules of proper behaviour might even have reminded her of Granny Deloitte.
Beatrice and Archdall formed one of those quasi-family alliances that people often do when they work closely together. Both being keen on music, they frequently discussed concerts they had heard on the wireless, and Archdall lent Beatrice gramophone records. Though he generally represented the teacher/father and Beatrice the student/ daughter, the roles could be reversed; Beatrice knew more about books and literature than he did. Archdall supplied them both with boxes of Craven A cigarettes during the day – Beatrice had started smoking as soon as she could afford it – and after work they occasionally went to the Hotel Sydney near Central railway station for a sherry. They slipped into a private language of their own: ‘Shall we be excessive this morning?’ meant ‘Shall we have cake or biscuits for morning tea?’ If Archdall vehemently assured Beatrice, as he often did, that he was a blighted being and that woe was him, she was likely to reply, ‘You’re a poor sad thing, docky-docky.’
Now that Beatrice had a stimulating, relatively well-paid job and was learning new skills, as well as maintaining a strenuous social life, she began to feel restless. The time had come, she decided, to leave home. But where could she go? The Sydney of the 1930s offered little accommodation for single women of good family. There were boarding houses, usually tenanted by single men and women middle-aged or older, but they had a rather threadbare reputation and lacked privacy. Beatrice could, however, rent her own place. Down by Circular Quay among the sailors’ pubs, crouching at the foot of the almost completed Harbour Bridge, were many old buildings, some warehouses, others former offices of shipping companies dating from the days of sail. These had been cheaply fitted up as rental accommodation, warrens of variously sized rooms with tenants ranging from ships’ chandlers to artists and writers. The rent was low, the area close to the city and only a tram ride away from the office. But for Beatrice the real attraction was its air of bohemia. It might be only ten minutes across the harbour by ferry, but George Street was a long way from Neutral Bay.
Shortly after starting work, Beatrice moved to 213B Lower George Street, in a row of three-storeyed terraces belonging to the Harbour Trust.3 Her room was a large, ground-floor studio at the end of a long corridor, with a grimy window. Sh
e furnished it in best post-student style, with a cushion-covered divan bed, some books in a bookcase, a gramophone and a stack of records, and her piano. Cooking was done on a gas ring in an odd little corner cupboard. The bathroom, which she shared with two or three other tenants, was halfway along the corridor.
Now, for the first time, Beatrice had her own living space. She could come home from work or from a piano lesson at the conservatorium up the hill, kick her shoes off and just be alone to play music or to study German (for a while she took lessons one night a week). Her neighbours, the painters Rah Fizelle and Grace Crowley, often dropped in and introduced her to other artists in the area. She met the young short-story writer Dal Stivens and gave a pre-wedding party in her room for him and his first wife Mary, and she and Dal remained warm friends. She kept in touch with friends from university, and fellow musical students from the conservatorium. Her brothers came to see her; John visited from Narrabri, where he had now settled with his new wife. Another addition to her circle, one who became a life-long friend, was Vincentia Boddam-Whetham, a former kindergarten teacher who came to work in the MJA office in 1936.
Some evenings after work Beatrice would make dinner for six or seven people. She had developed a great flair for cooking and cut recipes out of the Sunday papers (not from the Womens Weekly, which she didn’t read). Everyone drank sherry: spirits were expensive and Australian wine was considered rotgut, usually known as ‘fourpenny dark’. There was a great deal of talk, laughter and music, and after the ferries and trains had stopped running Beatrice would make up beds on the floor for those who stayed over.
Through her work at the MJA, which often included attending medical conferences and taking notes for a report in the journal, Beatrice made many medical contacts. After a few years she became friendly with a young doctor and agreed to marry him. She later said that neither of them was particularly serious, but this might have been her rationale for what happened one day late in 1933 when her fiance took her to visit a friend of his in hospital, a fellow doctor who was suffering from tuberculosis.
In his mid-forties and therefore twenty years older than Beatrice, Frederick Bridges had been medical superintendent of Prince Alfred Hospital, though more recently he had been working as a GP in the northern suburb of Chatswood. However, he seems to have considered his medical career as something of a sideline. In his youth he had wanted to be an actor, but his businessman father had hated the idea. Frederick dutifully studied medicine and did well, but he never much enjoyed medical practice. His friends were not anaesthetists or pathologists but writers, artists, musicians. He knocked around with some of the Bulletin people, such as Norman and Percy Lindsay and Hugh McCrae. One of his oldest friends, Dick Jeune, was rumoured to have been a gun-runner or a pirate.
Though Frederick was generally well liked, his reputation in Sydney’s conservative medical circles was equivocal. He was too fond of artistic types for his medical colleagues’ liking, and he was also divorced. He had married young, but after several years his wife had left him for another doctor, taking their two sons with her. Frederick had not seen them for ten or twelve years, not since Peter, the elder, was seven or eight years old.
Frederick Bridges was of middle height, rather stocky with a bull-like neck, thinning light-brown hair and brown eyes; the young Vincentia Boddam-Whetham, who had definite views about male attractiveness, considered him ugly. But Beatrice was attracted to him from the moment they met. They had a great deal in common: tastes in books, an interest in French, which Frederick read and spoke fluently, and a love of music – every Christmas Day he presented a program of light classics on radio station 2UW. He knew how to make Beatrice laugh and he was someone she could talk to, the kind of companion she had not found before. Beatrice had had many beaux but her heart had not been engaged. This, she knew, was different.
Her current fiance, who knew nothing about this, was quite happy for Frederick to squire Beatrice around when he was busy, so he was disconcerted when she decided to break their engagement.4 By 1934 Beatrice and Frederick were spending a great deal of time together.
Mervyn Archdall was aware that his friend Frederick Bridges knew Beatrice, but he was far too busy with the journal to concern himself with her private life. Archdall was also moonlighting, editing technical, medical and scientific manuscripts for an old friend, Walter Cousins, the publishing manager of Angus and Robertson. After a while this extra editing became too much even for the ferociously energetic Archdall, who began passing some of the work over to his editorial assistant.
And so Beatrice began her career as a book editor. She really enjoyed the detailed work of manuscript editing – it was so much more satisfying to work on books than short journal articles, abstracts and book reviews. She was also coming to the conclusion that she did not want to spend the rest of her life at the Medical Journal of Australia. Six years of being the indispensable Miss Davis had become repetitive and stressful, and she felt that she had learned all the MJA had to teach her.
She wondered whether there were any opportunities at Angus and Robertson. She knew and liked Walter Cousins, who had also taken a shine to her, and she was quickly acquiring a reputation as a painstaking, efficient and dependable editor. One day she decided to ask Cousins for a job but he told her that the company did not need a full-time editor on staff.
Beatrice bided her time. Early in 1937 Cousins went on an extended holiday and Bill Kirwan, the manager of Halstead Press (the printing company that Angus and Robertson also owned) temporarily took over. Beatrice asked Kirwan the same question she had asked Cousins. ‘When can you start?’ asked Kirwan.
But he was only offering her work as a proofreader and manuscript checker at Halstead Press. Beatrice would work for Halstead until four-thirty every afternoon and would then spend an hour working in A&R’s bookshop. Bill Kirwan assured her that if Walter Cousins could find nothing for her at A&R when he returned, there was plenty of work at Halstead.
Beatrice now had a new job and the chance of a new career. ‘I’m never going to make my own clothes again!’ she told Vincentia with glee.
Nor was this the only major change in her life at the time. Early in 1937 she agreed to marry Frederick Bridges. To many of her friends it seemed a quixotic decision. Frederick Bridges was much older, regarded as déclassé and by no means rich. He didn’t want more children, having two already. Most alarming of all, he suffered from open tuberculosis – a cavity in the lung – which was not only incurable but could be infectious. Why would Beatrice, intelligent, accomplished, beautiful Beatrice, who could surely have any man she wanted, throw away the possibility of a comfortable life and a family of her own?
But for Beatrice it was a logical decision. For her, marriage meant neither children nor respectability. For the first time she had found a companion who shared her interests, who possessed her quickness of mind, who made her laugh. Being witty and ironical rather than jovial herself, she enjoyed Frederick’s sense of the ridiculous. He was daring and unconventional in ways she was not: once, very early in the morning after a boozy party, he collected all the empty bottles and stacked them outside the house of the Anglican Archbishop of Sydney. Frederick Bridges was buoyant and light of spirit, fun to be with; he knew interesting people and he encouraged Beatrice to break away and find a new career for herself. And – possibly this was what made him irresistible – despite all his sophistication, he needed her to look after him. Vincentia Boddam-Whetham was in no doubt that theirs was a love match.
The biggest problem was Mervyn Archdall. Knowing what an autocrat he was, Beatrice could guess what he would say when she told him that not only was she marrying one of his old friends, but – even worse – she had taken another job. She put off telling him until she was about to start at A&R. Archdall’s reaction was even worse than she had anticipated: he flew into a passionate rage. She was ungrateful and treacherous, he shouted, she had betrayed him. How could she do this to him? She must leave immediately! The depth of his f
ury does suggest that his relationship with Beatrice went beyond their work together.
Beatrice, shaken, left the MJA as soon as she could. But Mervyn Archdall continued to behave like a jealous lover. When a few years later Vincentia married Dr Douglas Anderson, she knew she could invite either Archdall or Beatrice to her wedding but not both. Archdall never forgave Beatrice and never spoke to her again.5
PART 2
1937–1945
Our Miss Davis
Counter, Desk and Bench: The Story of Angus and Robertson
When Beatrice joined Angus and Robertson in 1937 the company consisted of three parts: the bookshop, the publishing company and the printery, Halstead Press. Of these, the most profitable was the bookshop; sprawling across a city block at 89–95 Castlereagh Street, opposite David Jones, it was a landmark for book lovers throughout Australia. With its varied departments – fiction and general, theology, military, children’s, history, hobbies, biography – wooden counters piled with new books in their crisp jackets, and the seductive and pervasive scents of fresh paper and printer’s ink, the bookshop was a magical place. Angus and Robertson sold second-hand as well as new books, and also boasted a small and select rare-book department and the Sydney Book Club, a large circulating library that provided an essential resource in the days before free municipal libraries (not gazetted in New South Wales until 1944). At one time the bookshop had also held a small art gallery, run by Captain de Groot of the New Guard, the horseman who had prematurely sabre-slashed the ribbon at the 1932 opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The basement was a warehouse where spare copies were stored, and it was also the headquarters of the mail-order department, where books were wrapped and dispatched to all parts of Australia.
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