From Changi to the Tower of London
Proud Australian Boy: A Biography of Russell Braddon
by Nigel Starck
Australian Scholarly Publishing, $34.95 pb, 284 pp, 9781921875403
(Published in Australian Book Review, February 2012, No.338)
by John Ellison Davies
Russell Braddon was part of the first wave of postwar Australian ‘expatriates’ who embedded themselves in British cultural life. He published memoirs, novels, and biographies. He wrote for newspapers. He was a regular guest on BBC radio, a presenter on television, always in demand on the lunch and dinner speaking circuit. He enjoyed the life of a popular and successful author for over forty years. He was a showman with sound instincts and good intentions. Nigel Starck has written his biography with respect and justified affection.
Braddon’s journey began when he enlisted in the army and was promptly captured by the Japanese on his twenty-first birthday in 1942. He endured, despite malaria, dysentery, meningitis, beri beri, starvation, and frequent beatings. Cheeky and cheerful, he survived the war but collapsed after its end. He failed his law exams and attempted suicide. After five months in a psychiatric hospital, Braddon was discharged with the advice not to attempt any ‘brain work’ for twelve months. He told his mother that he did not want to do any ‘honest’ work either. He practised his tennis serve and decided to become a writer. He used all his savings to book a first-class starboard cabin on a ship to England. What happened next was pure show business fairytale. Starck tells it with relish.
In Changi, Braddon and Syd Piddington had worked up a ‘telepathy’ act to entertain fellow prisoners. After the war, Syd developed the act to a professional level and toured with his wife, Lesley. Now they needed a scriptwriter and manager to advance their career. Russell jumped at it. He devised a stunt with Lesley, in the Tower of London, apparently receiving telepathic messages from Syd in a BBC studio. Ten million people listened to the broadcast. Braddon was put on a contract for £2500 a year.
George Greenfield, the enterprising managing director of Werner Laurie, wanted to cash in on the Piddingtons’ notoriety with a ‘quickie’ theatrical biography. Syd and Lesley insisted that Braddon should write it. He did, instantly establishing himself as a reliable jobbing author. The publisher noticed an unusual power in the sections dealing with the war. He commissioned Braddon to write a book about his war. The Naked Island has sold over two million copies since it was published in 1952. Braddon spoke for a generation, not least with his claim that sixty per cent of officers in the prison camps were more concerned with their own comfort, playing chess and bridge, than they were with the welfare of their men.
Braddon began to write a regular column for the Daily Express, which then had a circulation of ten million. He wrote a series of profiles of war heroes, which led to his being commissioned to write biographies of Leonard Cheshire (1954) and Nancy Wake (1956). Sales were high. Fleet Street press baron Roy Thomson invited Braddon to write his biography. Braddon was not interested initially but met him out of politeness. He was charmed when Thomson found himself short of ready cash and brazenly asked to borrow a fiver. Roy Thomson of Fleet Street appeared in 1965.
Braddon’s novels were of uneven quality. His name and unfailing descriptive powers carried him over the line with readers. The Proud American Boy (1960) dealt with racial prejudice in the southern states of the United States. Unfortunately, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird was published at the same time.
He returned to what he did best with a biography of Joan Sutherland. Following her sensational performance in Lucia di Lammermoor in February 1959, Braddon approached her, Sutherland told him that there could be no biography until she had also made her mark in Paris, New York, and Milan. In 1962, all opera centres duly conquered, the biography appeared. Braddon’s biographical technique was not scholarly. He painted vivid scenes and freely reconstructed dialogue that nobody could have remembered. In his narrative, Sutherland was a heroic fat girl who slimmed down to become merely a big girl and a great singer. Describing a sinus operation which she underwent to preserve her voice, risking it at the same time, Braddon did not spare the delicate reader any details: ‘He [the surgeon] cut the full width of the mouth, severing the upper lips from the gums …’ He wrote about the blood and brutal crunching of bone. Critics were unimpressed, but sales were huge and Braddon and the Bonynges remained lifelong friends.
After 1973 Braddon turned increasingly to involvement in television documentaries for the BBC and ABC, including Images of Australia (1988) and When the War Came to Australia (1992). Life was leading him gently home. At the National Press Club in 1988, he tackled the expatriate tag head on. He pointed out to journalists that they never used the word about Greg Norman, or Peter Weir. A female journalist used her question to turn to more important matters. How, she asked, had he managed to keep his figure so trim and look so handsome at sixty-seven? In 1991 doctors found a cancer in his neck. He declined treatment. He was a brave man. A considerate man, he asked his sister, niece, and nephews not to visit him in his last weeks. His partner of many years, David Healy, was with him at the end.
Nigel Starck has written an engaging biography of a remarkable and immensely likeable Australian.