Daddy, We Hardly Knew You

by Germaine Greer

  Wally would go with Reg and sit in the bleachers at the Amateur Sports Club in North Terrace. ‘Reg would always get something going with someone two rows in front. “What do you know about it?” he’d say to someone who was expressing his opinion of the play somewhat forcefully. And when the row started he’d say, “I’ve got a boy here that’ll take you on any time you like.”’ Reg Greer once played that joke with Jack Tosh, who did not get the point, possibly because in this case it ended in a punch-up of which Jack got rather the worst.

  Wally remembered Reg on the beach at Glenelg, skinny in his woollen trunks. A bosomy dark girl walked past and all the lads hubba-hubba-ed like mad (Hubba-hubba, digga digga, woo-woo, what a figure!) till Reg said, ‘I think I know her…’ When Wally got to the Victoria Hotel that night, he caught sight of Reg just disappearing round the corner of the passage to his room, and blow Wally if he didn’t have that gorgeous dame in there with him…. ‘Never knew how he did it.’

  ‘Harry Miles who worked for W.J. Bush the cosmetics people also lived in the Victoria Hotel. He was English, not unlike Reg actually. But Reg was a cheeky charlie, full of cracks, full of nonsense. Always having you on. We used to play table tennis in the hotel cellar, although there wasn’t much room. Reg would arrange tournaments with the Lee boys.

  ‘But he wasn’t always ready to be in it. There was one night they all went to a nightclub, and Reg cried off. Didn’t go. But Laurence Tibbett or John Charles Thomas, “You should have been there,” he’d say. He loved that sort of thing.’

  The Victoria Hotel belonged to Jack and Arthur (‘Murt’) Lee, who were very fond of their star boarder. Murt (now Sir Murt) remembered that he could always see the other fellow’s point of view. ‘He really put people at their ease. A new show’d come into town and the bar’d be full of strangers. Reg’d come in and soon they’d all be nattering away as if they’d known each other for years.’

  From what Arthur Searcy and Wally Worboys both said, it seemed that Reg Greer had been in Adelaide for some time before either of them met him. He was secretary of the committee of the Adelaide Advertising Club Ball that year, and evidently did a very good job, for no fewer than twelve hundred people paid to dance the night away at the Adelaide Palais, and applaud the glamorous floor show which featured beautiful models stepping out of the unfolding pages of a huge magazine. Reg Greer probably took along his girlfriend, some say his fiancée, Iris Powell, the trim, dark daughter of the licensee of the Kalgoorlie Hotel, which was a little way down Hindley Street, on the other side from the Victoria.

  Try as I might. I could not track Reg Greer further back than this point. He seemed to have evolved as the space-seller’s job itself evolved, out of nowhere. It was the space-seller’s job to persuade local merchants and manufacturers that they could not conduct their business in a satisfactory manner unless they kept their names and their products in the public eye by having their names printed, preferably in very large format, in the newspaper for which he worked. When Reg Greer was a boy the job of putting the newspaper together was seen as one only, whether it dealt with advertising copy or editorial. Juniors spent less time on collecting news than in reading, correcting, and shortening copy. Reg Greer’s account of his career, going from ‘reader to reporter to advertising representative’, is possible, but not probable.

  According to one story that he told my brother, who was not really interested, Daddy had a Chevrolet that he drove around the country shows, doing business for his newspaper or chain of newspapers. The point of the story was to impress my brother that he had had a car before any of the other employees of the paper, including the top brass. My brother did not ask which newspaper, or where or even when. Reg Greer may have begun as the kind of travelling adman who carried a selection of stereos in his suitcase to which the name of a local merchant had only to be added before it would be a made-up advertisement for the local paper. If he had been a newspaper proprietor’s son with no particular gift for the literary side, he might well have been given the safe sinecure of a job in the advertising department, but if he was not, he must have worked his way into the glamour job by sheer flair and hard work.

  In the case of the larger circulation newspapers, the old job of canvasser, which combined the functions of soliciting subscriptions, selling space and filling the space with advertising copy, gradually resolved into three separate avocations, circulation, space-selling and the designing of advertising campaigns. The last was eventually taken over by separate organisations, the advertising agencies. Many of the early agencies were set up by men who had originally worked for newspapers. The whole field was one in which personal contacts and patronage were of the greatest importance; as the industry expanded the old school network quickly became the principal source of personnel.

  In the mid-thirties a concerted attempt was made to take the hucksterism out of advertising, and put it on a ‘scientific’ footing, with proper market research and assessment of effectiveness of campaigns as the basis for the setting of fees and tariffs. ‘Scientific advertising,’ its proponents argued, ‘is the only force which can control the crowd and direct its spending.’ As advertising became geared to exploitation of mass media and less to local visibility, the selling of advertising space became a more inert business, for advertisers had no choice but to take space in the mass circulation newspapers. Before a space-seller could take over a job in a mass circulation paper, he had to prove himself elsewhere—or be related to the proprietor.

  Reg Greer was a space-seller of the old school who depended upon his personality, his capacity to make and hold business friendships, and his knowledge of advertising, which was always available to the client with whom he came into direct contact. There was no audit report of circulation to authenticate his statements. ‘Were not his proprietors men of honour whose word could be relied on? Was not he a sincere and trustworthy man?’

  The answer to the rhetorical questions is of course, no. The article appeared in Newspaper News as part of the polemic that preceded the setting up of an audit bureau of circulation in 1936. The purpose of this body, to which all newspapers were meant to be subscribers, was to give clients hard facts about the degree of penetration into the body politic of any given organ.

  By 1933 Reg Greer was an established and respected member of his profession. Somehow he had found a job and hung on to it while all around were losing theirs. In 1928 newspaper proprietors were demanding not only that staff work longer hours for less money, but also the return of lineage, the iniquitous system by which reporters were paid per line of print they supplied. (Keith Murdoch, Rupert’s father, began as a penny-a-liner.) In 1928 or thereabouts (for his own statements vary) Reg Greer collapsed in the street in Melbourne and was taken to St Vincent’s Hospital, suffering from pleurisy. He stayed there for six or seven weeks by one account and by another he was ill for five months. His lungs were aspirated six times and at one point he came out of a coma to find the priest anointing his feet with Extreme Unction. His indignation at this may have saved his life, for he was determined not to allow any such liberty to be taken again. I have always imagined that this episode represented the lowest point in his fortunes, for the seriousness of his illness seems to indicate that he was weakened by privation. Perhaps he decided then and there to go to Adelaide, where the dry air and longer hours of sunlight would heal his lungs.

  At first he probably had to work hard, persuading old-fashioned businessmen that it paid to advertise. ‘The space-sellers go about singly or in swarms, irrespective of weather conditions, and enter, forcibly or otherwise, any door whereon they see printed the words “manager” or “managing director”. Once inside these space-sellers are almost impossible to get rid of….’ By the time Arthur Searcy and Wally Worboys knew him, Reg Greer had built up a clientele and needed to do very little actual work to keep up his selling record, but in mid-1934 his career received a check.

  Perce Messenger was to be moved sideways, and sent to represent The News in Syd
ney. As the senior (and star) space-seller, Reg Greer expected to replace him as advertising manager. Instead he was passed over, and his junior. Arthur Searcy, was promised the job. If the management thought that their idle cheeky charlie would not be bitterly disappointed by the snub they were wrong. Reg Greer demanded a move, and was sent to Perth, where he stayed for a year. When Arthur Searcy saw him again he was shocked to see that his shirt-cuffs were frayed. (My own suspicion is that Reg Greer eked out his salary by hustling in the billiard saloons, which was a very much tougher proposition in Perth than in the ‘city of churches’.) Reg Greer told Arthur Searcy that he was on his way to Melbourne to take up a job selling advertising space for a new newspaper, the Star.

  The Star came into being in Melbourne in October 1933, as a rival to Keith Murdoch’s evening paper, the Herald. It was published by the Argus, the rival morning paper to Murdoch’s Sun. Many of Murdoch’s senior staff had defected to the new paper; Murdoch said to one, ‘What will you do when I close the paper down?’ and he replied, ‘My boy’ll be selling the Herald on street corners and I’ll live off him.’ Tradition holds that Murdoch put pressure on the newsagents, threatening to remove their franchise to sell his papers if they undertook to sell the new paper. It was also thought by some that Murdoch moles within the Star organisation were paid to sabotage it. In the first edition the weather map was printed upside down. On another memorable occasion the letter r inexplicably dropped out of the fourth word of a headline that should have read, ‘General O’Duffy’s Blue Shirts striking again.’ The fourth word was left out altogether in the caption to a picture that showed one man carrying another piggyback up a ship’s companionway after a fire; the caption should have read ‘The ship’s cook helping up the unconscious ship’s carpenter….’

  The Star is remembered nowadays, by those who remember it at all, as the green newspaper. Unwisely the paper promised never to call any edition final that was not the last of the day, and to make the final edition unmistakeable it was printed on green paper. What that meant in practice is that the earlier editions remained unsold. The management insisted on absurd restrictions: reporters were not allowed to smoke, were limited to one pencil a week, had to bring their own typewriters and had to queue up for copy paper. Circulation dropped to a low of 45,000 copies.

  When Reg Greer met Peggy Lafrank he was working for the Star. He was too canny not to see that Murdoch was winning, by dint of such shifts as offering newsboys bicycles as bonuses for selling the Herald. He left the Star and took a one-off job organising the advertising campaign for a special book offer being marketed by the Mail. On New Year’s Day 1936, Newspaper News announced, under a photograph of Reg Greer with his own teeth, that he was to be appointed Melbourne Representative of the Daily News Perth, a job which he apparently did not take up, for the name of the rep was given in May as R.J. McCartney. Instead he took another one-off job, selling space in the centenary edition of the Advertiser, for which he returned to the scene of his greatest successes, to Adelaide.

  The centenary edition of the Advertiser was to be ‘a hundred pages, printed on 36lb newsprint, nip finished with a specially designed cover in gravure’; eighty of those hundred pages were advertising. When every inch of that space was sold more than a month before the date of issue, a record was set that was not equalled for many years. A hundred thousand copies of the paper were sold, and 15,000 extra had to be printed. The total population of Adelaide at the time was only 330,000. Reg Greer came back to Melbourne and took Peggy Lafrank to Nathan’s and bought her a large solitaire diamond.

  There was no vacancy for an extra rep on the Advertiser once the centenary bonanza was over, but Advertiser Newspapers had a better plum to offer Reg Greer. W.E. Davey, the Melbourne representative of the Advertiser, had decided after many years in Australia and New Zealand to return to England. In November 1936, Reg Greer’s appointment to the job was announced; this was the pinnacle of his career. The Advertiser was read in 85 per cent of households in metropolitan Adelaide. Advertising in a paper with this kind of penetration sold itself. The job was well paid, glamorous, easy and stable. On the strength of it, Reg Greer and Peggy Lafrank decided to marry as soon as Reg should have received religious instruction. Peggy left her job and never took paid work again.

  In January 1939, twenty-two months after they were married, ‘when fishes flew and forests walked’, I was born.

  Hush-Hush

  Each false thing ends. The bouquet of summer

  Turns blue and on its empty table

  It is stale and the water is discoloured.

  True autumn stands then in the doorway.

  After the hero, the familiar

  Man makes the hero artificial.

  But was the summer false? The hero?

  WALLACE STEVENS, ‘EXAMINATION OF THE HERO IN A TIME OF WAR’

  Reg Greer did not volunteer until the war was two years old. His active service began on 17 January, 1942, and I was nearly three. I know that now; I tell myself over and over, but it means nothing. I tell myself, ‘You knew him for three years, before he went away,’ but as I can’t remember anything about those three years, the information is useless to me. Why did I tell myself such a silly tale, that he was already in barracks when I was born? He wasn’t. He was sitting in a flat in Docker Street, having a few beers and many cigarettes with a couple of friends while they waited for the call from the hospital.

  Reg Greer was just an ordinary bloke. He didn’t want to fight a war, didn’t rush into it early but stayed out of it as long as he could. That wasn’t good enough for me. I had to tart up his image, had to turn him into a committed warrior against fascism; I needed my father to be a hero, exposing himself to all that death and danger dare. I don’t approve of heroism, and yet I demanded heroism of my father, imposed it on him. Across the dark gulf of years a sharp thought leaps like a spark; perhaps I was Reg Greer’s problem. The very idea makes my touchy tummy boil up under my ribs until I feel nauseated, my father’s nausea in my stomach. (Oh, Papa, forgive me.)

  Australians were not quick to enlist in the European war; Australian men with families were more reluctant than most. Two years into the war they found they had no choice, especially if they sold advertising space. There were no ships free to carry newsprint to print the advertisements on and the clothing merchants had only the barest essentials to sell. Rationing was inevitable. The newspaper proprietors were only too happy to release men who wanted to volunteer. The men were happy to go, on the understanding that their jobs would be waiting for them at the war’s end. The men who did not volunteer stood a pretty good chance of being given the sack.

  The need for trained men, especially in the Air Force, grew faster than it could be supplied. In the closing months of 1941, a concerted attempt was made to recruit 50,000 men, most for the Empire Air Training Scheme. On 30 October, 1941 the Royal Australian Air Force announced that in addition an Officer Entry Interview Board would be held at No. 1 Recruiting Centre in Melbourne, otherwise the premises of an electrical company, on the corner of Queen Street and Little Collins Street. They asked ‘what you knew, what you did’. Some time in November Reg Greer, advertising salesman, went along and satisfied the board that he was who he said he was, no older than he said he was, had done his cadet training and knew how to ‘put on a bullshit parade’ as Australians called the rituals of militarism.

  He gave them the account of his life and education on which all my fruitless researches were based, secondary senior public school until the age of fifteen and a half, reader, reporter and representative on a newspaper or newspapers, sports cricket, rowing, football. The men interviewing him had the same background and they fell for it, hook, line and sinker. If I had only known it, this was Reg Greer’s finest performance.

  He was thirty-seven, too old for a combat pilot, but there were other jobs to do and a shortage of officer material to do them.

  At his first medical examination, on 13 November. Reg Greer was found to be five f
eet ten and a half inches in height, and to weigh 147 pounds. His chest circumference was a mere 34½ inches. His mentality was alert. He had a firm appendical scar, a scar on the second, third and fourth fingers of the left hand which I don’t remember seeing, and a scar under his chin, which I do. It was not the white crescent that results from a child tripping with a glass raised to its lips, but a flat bubble of shiny scar tissue where no beard would grow. The little toe on his left foot was a hammer toe. He also displayed a ‘slight scoliosis’, a lateral curvature of the spine. I never noticed that either. He had had a tonsillectomy in 1927, if his memory was accurate. The ear-wax in his left ear was excessive, and his Eustachian tubes were blocked. Both problems were treated on 24 November. The Eustachian tubes were politzerised until they were clear; a second ear, nose and throat examination revealed a healed perforation of the right ear. Daddy’s age, his chronic rhinitis and catarrh, and the state of his ears, all meant that he would not be passed fit enough for a pilot.

  There was no way that Daddy could influence the medicos’ dispassionate assessment of his physical condition. Once his fine clothes were off they saw a thin, narrow-chested, taller than average man, with a fairly representative collection of past traumas. It is too easy to suspect hardship during childhood as a cause of his skinniness, to wonder if his perforated eardrum was caused by a vicious box on the ear, or his curved spine by being made regularly to carry something too heavy for a growing boy. After all we children were all made to wear our schoolbags on our backs, because mother was so anxious about curvature of the spine, having suffered excruciatingly herself. My brother is as thin as my father was, despite my mother’s Oslo lunches and drinking hectolitres of milk, and may even have as narrow a chest. Still, as he stood there before D.B.F., MO and J.S.E., MO, Reg Greer cannot have been an impressive sight. Wing-Commander W.M. Lemmon passed him A4B.