Back in the 1950s, we read an awful lot
I had the flu recently and retired to bed in no fit state to do more than sleep and read lightweight stuff so I gathered up a small pile of old war books inherited from the Pickwick Lending Library – which in my youth was run by my Aunt Dolly out of her home at 38 Burnie Street in Clovelly – and sweated it out.
I read many of those World War II accounts when I was a kid, hot off the press: true stories of escape and evasion by downed aircrew; feats of commando derring-do; heroic tales of bomber raids, fighter sweeps and sturdy British seamen battling U-boat wolf packs. Cracking good reads – real boy’s own stuff. Righto chaps, synchronise watches … remember, it’s the Hun in the sun, that’ll get you. FW190s at Angels 15. Tally-ho!
Dolly must have moved into the terrace house which looks like it dates from just before or after World War I, sometime after World War II during which she’d been in the UK as a governess employed at a large estate in Scotland. The library was located in the front room, just off the street. I remember the rows of shelves packed with hardbacks, the cover of each meticulously encased in clear plastic. Back in the ‘50s there was only the cinema, radio and reading and people read an awful lot, so there were small private ventures like Dolly’s dotted through the suburbs.
On family visits to Aunt Dolly (Miss Elizabeth Gatenby), I was allowed to climb the stairs to the balcony above the street. It was a special experience because we didn’t do two storeys in Strathfield and I thought stairs and two storeys were very glamorous.
The war books filled quite a large section of the library. I imagine one paid sixpence to borrow them because a modest hardback retailed for 15 shillings in those days. From the late 1940s through to the early ‘60s, publishers churned out hundreds of these titles. Many were autobiographical but lots were written by reporters who’d experienced combat during the war. One of the most prolific and successful was the Sydney journalist Paul Brickhill, who my father met during training at RAAF Bradfield Park (now Lindfield) in December 1940.
Brickhill went on to become a Spitfire pilot. He was shot down in 1943 over Tunisia and spent the rest of the war as a POW in Germany. He took part in the preparations for the famous 1944 mass escape attempt from Stalag Luft III, although he wasn’t involved in the building of the long escape tunnel, nor could he be one of the escapers, because he suffered from claustrophobia. Just as well for him, because of the 76 who escaped, 73 were recaptured and of those, 50 were shot on Hitler’s orders.
Brickhill’s account, The Great Escape, published in 1950, was the basis for the 1963 film starring Steve McQueen, James Garner and Richard Attenborough. Video games followed in 1986 and 2003.
By 1954, Brickhill had also penned Escape – Or Die: Authentic Stories of the RAF Escaping Society, Reach for the Sky, the story of the legless RAF ace (and serial pest) Douglas Bader, and The Dam Busters, an account of the RAF’s famous May 1943 attack on three dams in the Ruhr Valley. My father actually flew a decoy mission on the night of the raid. In 1954, Brickhill’s book was serialised by Australasian Radio in 26 half hour parts. The film followed in 1955.
Brickhill’s books sold five million copies in 17 languages but sadly he never managed the transition to fiction writing. He died a recluse in his Balmoral flat in 1991, his ambition to write ‘The Great Australian Novel’ never fulfilled.
The Wooden Horse by Eric Williams – was another of the military escape classics, again about an escape from Stalag Luft III. I was awarded my copy as a school prize. Escape books were probably considered good for the character, dramatising as they did, British pluck and resourcefulness in adversity. The escapers used a wooden vaulting horse to begin their escape tunnel from the middle of an open area of the POW camp right under the eyes of their guards.
The whole genre was brilliantly satirised in Escape from Stalag Luft 112B – an episode of Michael Palin and Terry Jones Ripping Yarns series for TV – although they prudently set it in the far off days of World War I, so as not to give offence to the living.
In 1950, they made the wooden horse escape into a movie too. The actor Peter Butterworth, who appeared in many of the Carry On films, was one of the horse vaulters in the real-life escape. He applied for a role in the movie but didn’t get a part because they said he didn’t look convincingly heroic and athletic – an early example of the Hollywood – or in this case Pinewood Studios – version triumphing over reality.
