Phillip Schuler

by Mark Baker

  Murdoch’s part in the conspiratorial duumvirate appears to have been driven more by his obsession with playing kingmaker than by racism. Monash was less likely than the gentlemanly White to indulge his political intrigues. Murdoch played on Billy Hughes’s ignorance of Monash’s strengths. In the same way that he had falsely maligned Birdwood in his Gallipoli letter to try to stop ‘Birdie’ being appointed as Sir Ian Hamilton’s replacement, Murdoch set out to discredit Monash’s fighting capabilities in defiance of all the evidence to the contrary. In the perversely inverted character references that Murdoch sent Hughes, White was ‘the true AIF genius of frontline daring and dash’ while Monash’s ‘genius is for organisation and administration’.16

  Murdoch also had the temerity to write to Monash professing friendship before offering a bribe: if Monash gave up the corps command and settled for a desk job in London as AIF commander, he’d be promoted to full general rank and would enjoy favourable handling in the 250 newspapers that published Murdoch’s cables. Monash, who wanted nothing more than to lead Australian soldiers in battle at a critical turning point in the war, took the letter for the insult that it was. ‘It is a poor compliment,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘both for him to imagine that to dangle before me a prospect of promotion would induce me to change my declared views, and for him to disclose that he thinks I would be a suitable appointee to serve his ulterior ends.’17

  The journalists’ scheming unravelled after Hughes arrived in France in early July and was told by every general he met that Monash was unquestionably the best man for the job of corps commander. Within days the matter was resolved emphatically when in 93 minutes Monash engineered one of the quickest and most decisive victories of the war at the Battle of Hamel.

  Charles Bean would later show some remorse for the vehemence of his attacks on Monash in 1918. Long after the war he recanted the allegation that Monash had worked ‘by all sorts of clever well hidden subterranean channels’ to replace Birdwood as corps commander. ‘I do not now believe this to be true,’ he wrote in the margin of his diary.18 There was no such recanting from Keith Murdoch, who never took a backward glance in his march to fame and fortune.

  By the time he left London in 1921 to return home to Melbourne and the editorship of The Herald, Murdoch had become the most influential Australian in Britain. At a farewell dinner in his honour at the British Empire Club, a message was read from the Prince of Wales wishing him a safe journey and a successful future. The day before Murdoch departed, Lord Northcliffe and the directors of The Times hosted a lunch attended by Billy Hughes and 30 of the most powerful politicians and journalists in London. In the group photograph Murdoch, clutching his farewell gift—a set of golf clubs—is seated beside Northcliffe, who is clutching a Stetson and a cigar. Australia’s celebrated pioneer aviators, brothers Sir Keith and Sir Ross Smith, are standing behind them. The picture would hang proudly above Murdoch’s desk in Melbourne as he built a newspaper empire to rival that of Northcliffe, his cocky patron. Before long, some of his minions would be dubbing him Lord Southcliffe—well out of earshot.

  The battle between Sir Ian Hamilton and his journalistic nemesis would flare again after Hamilton published two volumes of his diaries in 1920. The diaries’ details and Hamilton’s renewed public criticisms of Keith Murdoch’s conduct in 1915 drew a vitriolic response from the budding media magnate:

  I have a perfectly clear conscience as to what I did. I went to London. I hit Sir Ian Hamilton as hard as I could. I thought the vital thing was to get a fresh mind on the spot [at Gallipoli]. The British Cabinet confirmed my view by recalling him within a week of my report being discussed by it. He was not again employed . . . Sir Ian says I hit him below the belt. The violence of his language after four years is evidence of the hardness of the blow That makes me glad. But it was a fair and square blow.19

  Murdoch’s response was published in the Melbourne Herald and a number of other papers in Australia and New Zealand—but denied any oxygen in Frederick Schuler’s Age. Murdoch insisted, yet again, that he ‘broke no censorship pledge’ in his Gallipoli letter. He drew a laboured distinction between his commitment as a correspondent not to write outside the censorship rules, and his commission as ‘representative of the Commonwealth Government’ to report frankly to officials on his visit to the Dardanelles. It was a distinction that was nowhere to be seen when Murdoch had first written begging permission from Hamilton to visit Gallipoli.

  Frederick Schuler was incensed by the Murdoch article and wrote to Hamilton, enclosing a copy of it from The Herald. He told Hamilton that the general opinion in Australia now was that the Gallipoli ‘conception’ was of supreme value but the lack of adequate support had made failure inevitable. Then he vented his undiminished antipathy towards Murdoch, leaving no doubt where The Age would stand in the renewed debate:

  This intrusive note is to let you have a cutting of what that precious cad and jackass Keith Murdoch has had to say, by way of reply, to your delightful touches upon the hide of this curious creature . . . The insignificance of Murdoch is perhaps the best point to tackle of him. I have, however, an account to settle with him on my late son’s account and I will not neglect to give you the result.20

  On the same day that Frederick Schuler wrote to Hamilton, Andrew Fisher sent a hand-written note from the Australian High Commission in London, thanking the general for sending him copies of the published diaries. Fisher, who had supported Murdoch so energetically during the hearings of the Dardanelles Commission, was not offering any endorsements to the author but conceded: ‘It will be a subject of controversy but in my opinion it is better so than had it never been published.’21

  20

  After Phillip

  Max Howard was born in October 1916, just days after Polly Howard had turned 37. He was the last of her four children and fourteen years younger than his sister Noel, the eldest. From the outset, Max was the odd boy out in ways other than his late arrival in the Howard family. In both physique and temperament he was quite different to his brothers and sister. He had dark curly hair and olive skin, unlike his fair-skinned and fair-haired siblings, and he would grow to tower over Noel and brothers Tom and Tony. His personality also set him apart. He loved books and history, archaeology and science, interests that they mostly found peculiar. As he got older he would become more independent of them and often aloof.

  Polly doted on her youngest child, who would be known as ‘Mac’. She was very protective of him and he was devoted to her. Max’s relationship with his father, however, was often difficult. Later in life he would say that he thought Charles did not love him. While his brothers followed their father into jobs in business, Max chose to become a mining engineer and metallurgist. It was a decision his father mocked as an inferior career choice. But Charles, a gentle if conservative man, provided well for all of the children and cared for Max when he spent a year in hospital after contracting polio in his early twenties.

  Max died on 1 July 1995. He had fathered three children of his own and led a successful working life as a mine manager and paper mill superintendent in Tasmania. Three years later his widow, Meg, was told a story that would change her life and that of her children. ‘You know, Max is not a Howard,’ her sister-in law, Joyce, remarked one day with an inflection that implied Max had been unqualified to share the proud lineage of her own husband and children. She then revealed the details of a secret she had held for more than 40 years.

  In the final years of her life, Polly Howard was cared for by Joyce, who had been a nurse before marrying Polly’s eldest son, Tom. On the mantlepiece in Polly’s bedroom was a portrait of a handsome young man in a solid silver frame. After having home surgery for a minor condition in the 1950s, Polly had come out of the anaesthetic and, staring at the portrait, cried out, ‘Oh Phillip, why did you leave me!’1 Shortly before her death in 1958—four years after Charles had died—Polly had told Joyce the full details of the weekend in January 1915 she had shared at Merriyula near Yarra Junction
with Phillip Schuler. She confessed to having been madly in love with the young journalist and to having become pregnant that weekend. Polly explained that she had then constructed an elaborate hoax to persuade her husband that the child was his—despite them not sleeping together at that time:

  Apparently she was really beautiful and a shocking flirt . . . She flirted so much with the husbands that the wives used to get hansom cabs and go home leaving her to it. Next day Polly would get Uncle Jack to send choice wines to the wives and her apologies. She also told Joyce that she plied Chas [Charles] with whiskey until he was dead drunk. When she told him she was pregnant, he said ‘How could you possibly be pregnant?’—I presume they were not sleeping together—and she reminded him of the night he became so drunk and she said he forced himself on her. He swallowed it and was a good father to Mac.2

  When Joyce retold the story to Meg in December 1998, Max’s widow recorded all of the details in her diary. The next day she took a walk in the garden with her son Richard and told him everything. ‘He was amused but a little sceptical,’ she wrote that night. Richard Howard questioned the reliability of his 85-year-old aunt but was intrigued by the prospect that his real paternal grandfather was an Australian soldier of German descent named ‘Philip Schula’, as Meg had written in her diary, who had died in World War I. It would be another seven years before Richard discovered—through an article in The Age—that Phillip Schuler was much more than that.

  After the startling revelation of Joyce, Meg Howard remembered conversations she’d had with Polly more than 40 years earlier. A wonderful cook and a skilled dress-maker, Polly had told her she made her own dresses before going to dances and parties: ‘One was of black lace that was very greatly admired. She told me about the wonderful weekend parties they would have at Merriyula.’ And Meg vividly recalled a remark that now convinced her that her husband’s birth was no accident and that Polly had chosen to have a child with Phillip Schuler:

  Polly said she never got pregnant unless she wanted to get pregnant. She knew how to manage; how to have sex without getting pregnant . . . I feel quite sure that she did [want a child]. I don’t think it was any accident. She was madly in love with him. He actually had joined up by then and I think she felt, well, he’s going off to war and it may have been the only time they were together because he was a young man going off to war and she was a much older woman.3

  Whether Schuler wanted to have a child with Polly Howard—or even knew that she was four months pregnant with his child when he left Australia for the last time in June 1916—is and will always be unknown. Beyond the simple printed greeting card that Schuler sent to Polly from Larkhill Camp before his unit embarked for France in November 1916, there is no surviving correspondence between them from that period and no evidence that there was any other communication. The place Polly Howard held in Schuler’s heart in the final months of his life remains an eternal mystery. He was certainly very fond of Polly, an affection that had grown over many years, but they both knew there could be no future between a much younger man and a married woman with several children—certainly not in the world of Australia in 1916.

  There is no doubt, however, that Schuler was very much in love with Nelly Rabinovitch and saw a joyous future with her. While back in Melbourne he had talked a lot about Nelly with his close friend, Roy Bridges. ‘Abroad he was to meet and love a beautiful and gifted woman, the fitting partner of his tragedy,’ Bridges later wrote.4 And in the finals days before his death, Schuler was telling Charles Bean of his plans to marry Nelly once the war was over.

  The news of Phillip’s death affected Polly as profoundly as it did Nelly. Grief drew Polly even closer to their child. Max was pampered and indulged, becoming an obvious and precocious favourite of his mother while he would never be close to Charles Howard. After learning the truth, Meg Howard became convinced Charles must have ‘realised at an early stage that he was looking after a cuckoo’.5 But she said Charles worshipped his wife, whose framed portrait he kept on his office desk to show off to visitors. His love for Polly meant he was prepared to turn a blind eye to her flirting with the doctors and surgeons during the weekend parties at McCrae on the Mornington Peninsula. It meant he might even accept her infidelity and take another man’s child into his family. ‘Mac used to get sick a lot. If there was a wind change he’d go down with pneumonia,’ said Meg. ‘But Charles took on all the responsibility of his illnesses and when he had polio in 1939.’

  Polly must have anguished over her youngest son’s ignorance of who his real father was, but telling him would have risked destroying their relationship. ‘His mother sent him out into the world as a young Parsifal,’ said Meg Howard. Like the naive young man in the Arthurian legend, whose mother keeps from him the secret of his noble descent, Max Howard could not be told the truth about his birth. But unlike Parsifal, whose long journey leads him to discover his claim to greatness, Phillip Schuler’s son would never reach that destination. ‘Polly didn’t ever tell him, because she had brought him up to be so respectful of women,’ said Meg. ‘He adored his mother and I think he would have been quite heartbroken if he knew that she had not lived that perfect life that she urged him to live.’

  Frederick Schuler would never recover from the loss of his only son. Always a shy and reclusive man beyond the world centred on the Age editor’s office, he became more so in the final decade of his life. He would spend more time on his solitary walks through the Dandenongs, or alone in his garden, with his books and painting watercolours in the attic above the stables at 10 Lisson Grove. It was there on the afternoon of 11 December 1926 that ‘death stole mercifully upon him’, as his friend Hugh Adam would write two days later in The Herald.

  Frederick had been editor of The Age for 26 years, a tenure unmatched since. His ambition had been to achieve 50 years service on the paper but he fell short by two years. His marathon editorship had straddled the federation of the Australian colonies, the last decade of the life of the great David Syme, the social and political upheavals of the Great War, and the final days of Melbourne as the capital of Australia. Yet despite the undoubted power and influence he wielded as editor of what still was the most influential newspaper in the country, Frederick Schuler remained an enigmatic figure to the end. ‘The man . . . was hardly known by sight, or even by name on the streets of Melbourne,’ wrote Adam, who had been an editorial writer and theatre critic at The Age before joining The Herald. ‘Only the small circle of his colleagues who came in direct touch with him in his work, really knew the man, and loved him for his quality. This anonymity was of Mr Schuler’s deliberate seeking.’6

  One man Frederick Schuler did remain close to in his final years was Roy Bridges. The reporter and novelist had fallen out with Geoffrey Syme and resigned from The Age in 1919. He rejoined the paper in early 1922 and was welcomed back by Frederick Schuler ‘as cheerfully as though I had just returned from annual leave’.7 Bridges would meet with the editor every Sunday evening for an hour or more ‘by the fire in his room, listening to his talk of life and memories’. Bridges had been one of Phillip Schuler’s closest friends and through him, perhaps, the old man grasped a tender link with his lost son.

  Frederick was survived by Deborah and their daughters, Dorothy and Minna. Deborah Schuler’s blindness was fully advanced but she stayed on at Lisson Grove with the assistance of her housekeeper, Mrs Bacon, until her death in July 1939. She learned Braille, friends would read to her and she would pass the time knitting clothes for children. In the late 1920s Deborah negotiated the transfer of all of her son’s photographs to the Australian War Memorial. Dorothy, who married a Presbyterian minister, was a stable supporter during Deborah’s final years, but Minna proved as spirited, flamboyant and rebellious as Phillip had been before the war.

  Unlike her more conventional and reserved sister, whom she once ridiculed as a ‘puritan’, Minna Schuler shared Phillip’s dislike for her father’s authoritarianism and challenged her mother’s moral and religious cons
ervatism. Like her brother, she was a gifted writer, musician and artist—with a withering wit. She would scandalise the family by having two very public affairs with famous married men. After studying at the Melbourne Gallery Art School, where one of her teachers was Fred McCubbin, Minna became a familiar and popular figure in Melbourne’s bohemian circle of artists and writers. Her friends in the early 1920s included Penleigh Boyd, one of Australia’s finest impressionist painters. Soon they were lovers and Boyd, whose wife, Edith, was living briefly in London with their son, made no attempt to hide the liaison. The gossips described Minna as a ‘femme fatale’ who had beguiled the celebrated artist with her beauty and charm. But it was more than a casual encounter for Boyd. In 1923 he painted one of only three portraits that survive amid his catalogue of landscapes. It shows a handsome young woman in a delicate mauve dress and fleecy white cloak gazing reflectively out of the canvas. The woman is Minna Schuler and the portrait, which Boyd exhibited in 1923, was painted in the loft at Lisson Grove.

  Minna’s affair with Penleigh Boyd would end dramatically after his wife returned from London in November 1923. Penleigh and Edith quarrelled immediately after the ship had docked at Port Melbourne. Perhaps the news of his infidelity had reached London. Four days later, Boyd took his new luxury Hudson touring car and headed for Sydney. He lost control on a sharp bend near the town of Warragul in Gippsland and the car overturned. Boyd suffered severe injuries and died within minutes. His biographers could not explain the reason for his sudden trip to Sydney but the Schuler family believed he was rushing to meet Minna, who had moved there for a time. Dorothy Schuler’s son Robin Denholm would later recall as a small child ‘riding at breakneck speed with my mother and Minna in Penleigh Boyd’s tourer car, on a road that was so rough that I bounced off the lap on which I was sitting and hit my head on the fabric roof’.8 Penleigh Boyd, Robin noted, had a reputation for reckless driving.