Part 2: March 1990-May 2002

13/3/90 ditto:  L made the decision to go to Sydney, it now seems [I had spent some weeks analysing his letters, ship movements, etc] immediately on his arrival in Perth.  It was almost certainly the result of seeing, the day he arrived, a letter from Hum, sent to Mrs Jenkins (for Hum cd not have replied to a letter sent by L from Ceylon before L left Ceylon for Perth).  So it was someone on the boat!  Both Whiting & the novel were correct (remember, Callcott says to Somers that Cooley heard about him “from a chap on the Naldera, that’s the boat you came on, isn’t it?”). 

 

3/4/90 ditto:  What did L mean by [Somers’ description of the novel as a] “thought-adventure”?  Is it an adventure only in thought?  This is the interpretation many have given the novel (eg Sagar 1965).  But perhaps L meant something else by it.  Perhaps to him it was a compound expression, a combination of thought (his musings) & adventure (outside action).  I think that is what it might be – a mixture of real (and imagined) events – autobiography, in fact – together with his musings & comments.  So what did he mean by “a romance”? [he told Mountsier he was going to try to write “a romance” while in NSW]  It must refer to the thought-adventure in some way.  Later he says of the term “thought-adventurer”  that it is a “discoverer of himself and the outer world”.  He contrasts a thought-adventure with an emotion-adventure, which he describes as “a floundering of feelings”.  Certainly the words “romance” & “adventure” are akin. Perhaps by “romance” he meant an action novel – a novel in which things happen.  A little earlier he had told his American publisher Seltzer that he hd began “a proper story novel – in the Venetian lagoons: not pretty, pretty – but no sex…”.  This was his last attempt at a novel before K, & it failed.  So is K a “proper story novel”?  I think it might have been thus intended.  Then there is “this gramophone of a novel”, as he describes it later in the book.  Surely this is the diary element he extolled to Mollie Skinner & Mary Cannan.  Maybe the diary mechanism was adopted to get round the problem he encountered with the aborted Venetian novel.  He also describes the novel in his letters as “weird” & “queer”. He seems to equate this “queerness” with unreality, strangeness.  Yet he described AR [Aarons Rod] as “such a queer mad affair”, & it is full of autobiographical material.  Not much help there.

 

17/4/90 ditto:  What touched off The Nightmare?  Ostensibly it is caused by Cooley’s rejection & threats to Somers after he tells Cooley about his contact with the Labor leader Struthers.  But, as I noted elsewhere [the separate “Extra Notes” notebook], Scott would have been very, very angry when he learned that L was breaking the sacred bond of mateship, & might even betray the secret army secret.  That reaction, I noted, wd have touched off a humdinger of a nightmare.  And I added:  maybe it did.  Maybe that confrontation had occurred earlier, and the Cooley-Somers exchange (where Cooley says “I could have you killed” [on the original MS] ) might have in fact been between Scott & Lawrence, then reworked later, as so much else is, in the “Jack Slaps Back” chapter. 

[Yet I still think there were two confrontations, the first between Rosenthal and Lawrence in Sydney, the second between Scott and Lawrence at Wyewurk.]

 

30/4/90 ditto:  I was shopping for lattice for the house at Collaroy on Saturday & went to the Mitre 10 store/yard at Manly.  The account, however, was made out in the name of the previous proprietors – Hayman & Ellis.  Yes, the same Horrie Hayman I interviewed at Hinemoa in 1979.  It’s a small world.

[in Sydney]

 

1/5/90 ditto:  Daniel Schneider (DHL: The Artist as Psychoanalyst, 1984) has a very good point.  He says the plot of K is flawed in that L should have Somers join the secret army, then discover its evil, & reject it.  That would make dramatic sense.  But he doesn’t.  Somers recoils before it is explained what he is recoiling from.  I know why, of course, but it is nice to see someone, lacking my inside knowledge, seeing this very obvious fault in the plot (& clue, too).

 

22/5/90 ditto:  It is strange how small points can be important.  For several days now I have been thinking about L’s use of names in K – Callcott, Wooloona, etc.  Names he just plucked out of his environment (like 51 Murdoch Street).  Then it slowly dawned on me what he was doing.  He was writing a novel whose backbone, as it were, consisted of his & F’s doings in Sydney & Thirroul (hence the diary).  But that’s not what he was really doing.  He believed the novel should mainly be his thoughts, comments & ideas, woven round this backbone.  So it’s those speculative, discursive passages (so many of them, too) that are the real content of the novel, as far as L was concerned.  A[ustralia] & the diary elements were just departure points.  So Kangaroo is a sort of antipodean commonplace book (hence Bits, etc).  (How the literary academics will be pleased with this – safely back to their Lawrentian musings and meanderings.)

24/5/90 ditto:  Re Perth-Sydney movements similarity – in Ceylon l[etter] to Mrs J[enkins] L mentioned he fancied going to the apple-growing areas south of Perth.

 [Apparently the point I was making here was that he also went south when he got to Sydney – little did I realise then that the regions south of Perth were to lead to the uncovering the true identity of Victoria Callcott, or at least part thereof – see below for Sandra’s great discovery.]

 

18/6/90 Collaroy (we had moved our primary residence from Bondi to our Collaroy beach house, and I was reassembling my books, files and other research materials):  Going over Ruffel’s letters it is clear that from some time back he began to entertain doubts about this whole hypothesis.  He mentions quite early on that he is nt happy with the Hinemoa scenario.  I just glossed over this, when I shld have spelt out [to him] why this aspect seemed firm.  Now, in retrospect, I can see I assumed too much with Ruffels.  It was so clear to me, & his goodwill so patent, that I did not inquire into the exact underpinnings of his support.  God knows, others have had their doubts, so he may be excused his.  And one can see where his interest might have been lured away by other, more supportive sirens.  So, to redress, I shld try to lay down some more firm foundations to this part of the hypothesis, which, to be honest, is solid perhaps in my mind alone.  So, why Hinemoa?  Well, I still could be wrong here.  One first latches on to possibilities, then probabilities, with the hope of the safe harbour of assurity on the horizon.  Yet Hinemoa is a good bet.  L&F did go to Many that first Sunday.  They did catch the tram to Narrabeen.  They did walk to the beach and look at houses to let.  They did have afternoon tea and were driven back to somewhere by car.  Anyone who doubts this [and Joe Davis had developed in his book a scenario that denied this, hence this refutation] is going against probability.  But where did they have tea?  Somewhere nearby.  Who invited them?  Hum, almost certainly.  And Hinemoa at Collaroy  is a good bet – the description fits…sideways aspect, “at the end of the street”, the connection with Scott, Hum holidaying nearby, etc.  No, I am right.

 

8/8/90 Bondi (still going there at weekends):  I was not going to note this in the main notebook, but now it seems it deserves an entry.  Going through my file of letters I came across one I had entirely forgotten but which contains another reference to boats and L.  The letter was from John Carr-Gregg to my old editor, King Watson, & was dated 1975.  This is very early, & was actually before I returned to Australia to begin the research proper.  I must have spoken to KW in London & told him of my intentions, & he must have written to C-G.  Anyway, the reply mentions that “there is evidence that Lawrence based the character Callcott on someone he met on the boat between Ceylon & Fremantle”.   I spoke to C-G in Victoria & he cd not remember where he got the reference, but he thought it was from a book.  He is still trying to track it down, & he might, tho I cannot recall reading it anywhere, & I have read almost everything on the subject.  It may have come from the l[etter] from Frieda to RA [Richard Aldington, an acquaintance and early biographer of Lawrence] dated 20/11/48.  Frieda, obviously in reply to a query from RA, said:  “…I think Cooley was a mixture of Dr Eder and Kot – No Lorenzo never went to political meetings – Jack & Victoria something like them on the boat – No the spy story did not happen.  About the only paper Lawrence read was the Sydney Bulletin.”  Also, this is interesting from several points of view.  First, RA was clearly trying to find out if K did have a factual basis.  And F clearly denies this & specifically denies the reality of the “spy” story.  So RA had some grounds for his remarks [denying any possibility of political reality in the novel] in his Introduction [to the Heinemann edition of Kangaroo].  But what about F’s reference to “something like them were on the boat”?  Is there something significant here?  Who cd F have meant?  A couple?  And which boat?  It certainly warrants more consideration, which it will get.

[for more about the Aldington “spy” reference, see Rananim 3/2 and below]

 

3/2/91 Collaroy:  I am getting a feel for the sort of place Collaroy was in 1922.  At the recent Basin Xmas Party one old resident [Dick Swift] mentioned that it hd bn a beach resort, not only for people from the country, but also from St Ives and Wahroonga [upper-North Shore leafy middle-class enclaves].  It was a well-off area, though the houses were nt pretentious.  It hd, however, a distinct military tone, with street names like Anzac and Birdwood [a WW1 general] & memorial stands of trees.  So an invitation to tea hereabouts cd involve people like Scott. 

 

4/2/91 ditto:  I have tried nt to burden this diary with comments on what others say about the “Darroch Thesis”, so I did nt remark on [Ray] Southall’s Introduction to Tom Thompson’s new “corrected” [ie, the Seltzer text] edition of Kangaroo (Imprint ’89), nor Joe Davis’s DHL at Thirroul [also put out by Thompson’s Imprint imprint].   But as I am about to break out into print myself on the subject [I did not, my article was rejected], it deserves to be recorded here (esp as it will probably explain the “split” with Ruffels).  As I mentioned earlier, Davis’s book questioned a great deal of the Darroch Thesis, indeed sought to cripple it.  Mostly it was rubbish, though it was, at least, a detailed commentary on what I have said (& he picked up one or two mistakes I hd made – the “steelworks”, etc).  As, however, no one asked my opinion on what he said, I was left writing slightly plaintive letters to the DHL Review, warning them nt to take Davis’s work as accurate.  AM [andrew Moore] did pen a riposte (he being v. angry, his anger somewhat unfortunately vented earlier on JR [at a lunch at our place at Bondi], which, unfortunately [but understandably], caused him to take umbrage), and this was published in Overland [a left-wing journal, issue 120, 1990].  Then Davis responded, also in Overland, repeating his ridiculous “reconstruction” of L’s time in Sydney & his absurd claim that L went to Thirroul on the Sunday, nt the Monday.  This has allowed me to pen my own rebuttal of his “thesis” which I think will leave him without a feather to clothe the bareness of his arguments.  Not only can I show that Davis is wrong (backed up by AM’s ferroequinologist J[ohn] L[acey]’s train timetable expertise  [there was no train Lawrence could have caught to Thirroul that Sunday] ), but I can expose the faults in Davis’s methodology.  It will be interesting to see if this has any more running in it.

 

22/2/91 Bondi:  I sent off [my] riposte to Overland this week, & a day or so later R[uffels] finally replied [I had sent him a copy].  His position re Davis is difficult to discern, but his concession that Davis cd be wrong seems less vehement than his insistence that I should nt deride people who put up other theories.  He remarked on my “sensitivity”.  That is worrying, for, as I have pointed out in my reply to him, I welcome – indeed, relish – criticism.  But I wrote as mollifying a reply as I cd muster.  But R did drop several interesting things.  It seems that Steele has actually visited 112 [Wycombe Road, where I had placed Scott in 1922], looking, no doubt, for evidence to confirm the Darroch Thesis [I have bn asked to point out that this is sarcasm on my part].  More seriously, R mentioned that 112 had a name.  It was once called, apparently, Frome.  This cd be important, for Frome is in Somerset [I know this, because I interviewed Anthony Powell there when he finished his Dance to the Music of Time - he told me a true Somerset man would pronounce it “Vroom”] and in K Victoria’s family came from Somerset.  Could someone at 112 be Victoria?  I must do some urgent research on this.

 [alas, yet another red herring]

 

25/3/91 Cumberland Street (our new office):  R[uffels] also mentioned in a letter that I was wrong about the South Head lighthouse being visible from the bathroom of 112.  And, of course, he is correct.

[that was a slip of the pen, for I knew it was the Macquarie light – see 6/2/79 above]

 

28/3/91 ditto:  Went to the Land Titles office to look up owners of 112.  Some Craigs owned the land until 1917 when they sold it [and 114] to three Miss Tinsons, who retained it until the 1950s.  A Mr Summers owned a place at the rear.  Interestingly, a “W.P. Friend” witnessed the 1923 transfer document.  Am investigating further.

 

4/3/91 Bondi:  Interesting day at the State Library.  In 1920 State [electoral] roll WJR and JM Scott are in Lane Cove Road, Wahroonga, apparently staying with Scott’s parents.  1921, ditto.  1922 JM disappears, but WJR still there.  1923 WJR at 112 Wycombe Rd and JM in Wylde Street [Potts Point].  So it seems that WJR and JM split in 1921 or early 1922 (if the rolls reflect a year before [as they usually do] – however, the 1922 roll was “made up to Oct 6 1922” and the 1923 roll “ditto 26 June 1923”).  So Scott cd have been at 112 in May 1923, assuming a delay in registering. 

[these dates of making up the rolls was to assume some importance –see 6/8/93 below] 

 

5/3/91 Cumberland Street:  Overland replied:  not keen to print my Davis article.  Reader interest cited.  TT [Tom Thompson] sent JD’s [Joe Davis’s] thesis [PhD] references [apparently to show me the depth of Davis’s research!].  Steele is reviewing the CUP The Boy in the Bush [edited by Paul Eggert].  Well, slightly better than Eggert’s mother.  Now they shld get Eggert to review Steele’s K[angaroo] & make a good job of it. 

[He did!]

 

20/3/91 ditto:  Have tracked down everyone [I can find via the electoral rolls] at 112.  It seems that 3-4 people moved out between rolls, & 4 moved in, incl Scott.  112 clearly a guest-house, so it wd seem that, for the Ls to stay there, there would have hd to be a spare room, which is possible, given the comings & goings.  R supplies the extra info that Tinson snr was a cordial manufacturer at Quirindi (this from a surviving relative).  Bertha Pearshouse, a 112 resident, signed the KEA petition [complaining about some Labor iniquity].  R thinks WP Friend worked for AA Hemsley [a leading Sydney law firm].  Nothing obvious here to follow up, but am still poking around.  Read Ellis piece on “The Darroch Controversy” in the DHLR at weekend and got v. annoyed.  [English academic and anointed CUP biographer of L’s period in Australia David Ellis had done a nice hatchet job on me]  But silence is best until Steele bursts forth [with his CUP edition of Kangaroo]. 

 

12/5/91 Collaroy:  Rang the archivist of Burns Philp (she had a letter in the SMH) and asked about Whiting’s Mr McEwan.  Alas, no Mr Mac in any position of note in the company in the 1930s.  So where does that leave this vital piece of evidence?  Will check with CSR [Colonial Sugar Refining Company] (more probable anyway), then back to Deep Throat, if he’s still alive.

 

13/5/91 ditto:  Yesty to lunch at Paul’s [Delprat] where his uncle Dick [Rosalind’s brother] was visiting.  Mentioned Hum, whom he remembered quite well (and his wife, “Lilly”).  Rather vague, & no Friend or Collaroy memory.  However, he said Julian’s [Ashton] brother hd two sons who went to work in Ceylon.  Then Wenda [Dick’s wife] sd she thought Hum hd some sort of Ceylon connection.  Dick confirmed Hum’s “stuggy” appearance, but cd nt recall any Cornish connection.

 

14/5/91 ditto:  Overland finally rejected my Davis refutation.  Hd dinner with AM Sat[urday] & he sd they were going to use 3 pars of his “ferroequinology” riposte (J Lacey was wrong, there were trains to Thirroul that Sunday, however none that L could have caught).  Overland suggested we transfer our spat to the DHLR.  A British author rang .  He’s doing a book on L’s various [fictional] sites, and came here to see Wyewurk.  But he didn’t bother to contact me till a few hours before his departure, only to pay his respects.  Apparently he was under the wing of JR, & no doubt Davis as well.  So I am really on the outer now.  I suppose the opposition is wooing Ruffels to help destroy the DT [Darroch Thesis].  Set a thief, etc. 

 

8/6/91 ditto:  R[uffels] has written a pc mentioning that Steele is apparently writing a piece [for Meridian] on Rosenthal [this was the Duntroon paper mentioned above].  Fancy that.  Wonder what he’ll say.

 

10/6/91 Hilltop Hotel, Kandy (I was travelling to England and had taken the opportunity to go via Sri Lanka to do some preliminary research into Lawrence’s time in Ceylon):  A nice dateline.  Am here in Celyon mainly to dig up material [for a planned book or article on Lawrence in Ceylon].  Drove up here yesty from the G[alle] F[ace] H[otel].  Saw the lake, the temple, etc.  Heard the little machines going all the live-long night (not too [intrusive], but in 1922 the jungle was probably a lot livelier – however, the hotel did warn me to close the [verandah] door at night against the monkeys).  I asked around a bit for the Lake View Estate [where Lawrence stayed with the Brewsters in 1922], but no luck.  Yet the hills overlooking the lake were dotted with bungalows, so a return visit might be in order [after Sandra joined me in London  we were planning to return to Sydney via Sri Lanka].  No much colonial atmosphere – no sign of expats, all gone after 1948 independence.  But hope to see Nuwara Elyia (pron: Nu-raeelia) on the way back.  Useful.  Later at airport:  On the way here I noticed something that caught my eye.  A sign apparently advertising a guest-house called Torestin [the name of Somers’ first Sydney house in Kangaroo], just off the road to the airport.  That’s odd.  There was no airport when L was here, and it isn’t on the road to Kandy [he went by train anyway].  I know there’s a house [in England] on the Mansfield Road called Torestin.  Is this a coincidence (another one)?  Is it a common name?  Or a DHL fan?  [Ada, Lawrence’s sister, liked the name so much she named several of her UK homes, “Torestin”]. Or is Torestin a Ceylon source?

[yes]

 

11/6/91 Colombo Airport (after midnight):  Having four hours (so far) to wait for my London plane, I will indulge myself in a little speculation.  Last night in Kandy I woke up at 3am and, having nothing else to do, started re-reading parts of K.  What tripped an idea was the passage in “Battle of the Tongues” [chapter] when Somers returns [to the Callcotts’ place in Sydney] after his argument with Cooley to find them all waiting for him.  He “found a little party”.  [Trewhella] was there, and Victoria had made, “by coincidence”, a Welsh rarebit.  Why “by coincidence”?  The coincidence seems to be focused on WJ [Trewhella].  But he is Cornish, not Welsh.  (So if comestible coincidence were involved, she should be making Cornish pasties.)  The words might mean nothing, but, on the other hand, there cd be a more significant explanation, & this is where speculation comes in.  Let’s consider what sort of disguise L might have adopted if he were using real people in K.  For them to be of any use to him, he wd have to retain some of their characteristics.  So what wd he change?  Gross matters, probably – marital status, job, address  - but nt, apparently, physical appearance.  Scott might be the guide to what L changed & what he left in.  Scott & Callcott are very similar (thank God) – appearance, character traits, probably behaviour.  So what does L do to make [the borrowing] less obvious?  He changes his name, marital status, Army rank [incorrect – it was Rosenthal’s rank he changed], job – but that’s about it (he cd hardly change his sex).  Not much real disguise, but any more & it wd vitiate the utility of the exercise.  So, let’s now turn to Victoria.  Her name is not that, and she may nt be married.  But what else?  Age, perhaps.  What incidental [ie, not important for characterisation purposes] detail might be changed?  In the novel she comes from Somerset.  That cd be changed.  Could she be, rather, from Wales?  Cd that be the coincidence?  Rank speculation, except for two things.  First, there is the famous “slip of the pen” when L uses the name “Tanny” or “Fanny” in the MS, then crosses it out and replaces it with “Victoria” [incorrect – see below].  Second is the fact that Fanny, or Miwfanny, is a name used in the (originally Welsh?) Friend family.  OK, nothing very solid, but the Friends’ Fanny bears closer inspection.

 

6/8/91 Collindale Library (London):  Nice to be back at the [British Museum] Newspaper Library.  But the microfilm hasn’t the same feel as my old friends, the 1922 newspapers intacto.  Here to read the Ceylon newspapers.  Quite a bit of interest (see my 20 pages of [extra] notes.)  However, my speculation that L&F went to Government House is incorrect.  [One cutting I had read in Colombo said that a Mrs & Mrs E.H. Lawrence had attended a levee or dinner at Government House]  There was an E.H. Lawrence, [but] he was apparently a local bank manager.  One point, however.  I came across a “Andree”  in the papers.  Cd this be significant? 

[no] 

 

1/11/91 Colombo:  Here on the DHL in Celyon trail.  But I shld update a few small points.  I may have been wrong about the Welsh rarebit business.  The dish had been referred to before in K, where there is a jocular exchange between Somers & Trewhella:  “Ha-ha!  Oh yes, I like a bit of toasted cheese myself – or a Welsh rabbit, as well as any man.”  This may have been the coincidence.  But it still may be significant. 

 

2/11/91 Kandy:  Driving up here this morning I had the idea that one reason why L did nt write his intended Ceylon novel was the fear of having to rely for its real-life models on his kind hosts, the Brewsters.  But the idea, or technique, wd have only bn shelved, to be reactivated when he did find some casual acquaintances, in Australia. 

 

3/11/91 Kandy:  It’s been one of those magical, miraculous days when everything goes right, and you uncover something important.  A day when the journalist’s skills come into play, for it was a nice bit of investigative reporting.  It’s worth recording in full.  We returned to Kandy to try to find Ardnaree [the Brewsters’ bungalow where L&F stayed].  Our first stop was the local tourist bureau, by the lake, but it was closed, it being Saturday.  However, the arts and craft center next door was open, and there I found a helpful lady to whom I told my tale of Lawrence & the Lake View Estate.  She herself cd nt help, but she suggested we go to a hotel up in the hills above the lake, The Chalet, where I might find a Mr de Silva, who was a former Sri Lankan ambassador, who might know something.  So we drove up [we had been provided with a car and driver by the Sri Lankan Tourist Board]  & found the place, a large black-and-white stucco two-storey ediface, about 1930, with the appearance of a sanitarium.  There I encountered a lady, probably in her 60s, who may have been around long enough to remember pre-independence Ceylon.  She was most attentive to my tale of research.  But she had been here only 10 years or so.  However, her husband, the ex-ambassador, who had been in Kandy much longer, might be of some assistance.  So she went upstairs to inquire.  She returned a short time later – while we watched the monkeys skylarking on the lawn overlooking the lake – to say he did nt recall the Lake View Estate, nor Ardnaree, nor Lawrence.  We were about to depart, and were asking a few casual questions (did she know of a Torestin, etc), while I or Sandra happened to mention that we had a Sri Lankan friend who now lived in Singapore, Michael De Cretser.  It turned out she was his aunt!   [yet another fortuitous coincidence]  At this, she apparently got a second wind, and went back upstairs, where, from a window, a few minutes later, she summoned us to come up & join her.  We found our way upstairs & to the door of a handsome sitting-room where her husband, an invalid, beckoned us in.  He hd rung his sister, who, he now recalled, did know something about Lawrence & Kandy.  Combined with what she hd told him & what he knew, he could now deduce the whereabouts of Ardnaree.  It was across the lake on an opposite hill.  It was in the grounds of a local college [school] & it was the residence of the principal.  He gave us the names of several people who might know more, including a local doctor.  Mr [Freddie] de Silva – and he turned out to be a most distinguished gentleman, a former Chancellor of the local university – called up our driver & gave him instructions how to get to the school grounds opposite.  And to make doubly sure we got there, he summoned one of the servants (his term) & told him to accompany us to ensure we found the place.  We drove off & across to the opposite hill & eventually found the correct entrance, just below the summit of a hill that was, apparently, the highest point around Kandy.  We drove in the gate & on the left was a dusty cricket ground & on the right a much-altered bungalow.  We parked at the side, and I was prepared to be disappointed, but the now-closed-in verandahs recalled L’s description of the Brewsters’ bungalow, so my hopes rose.  No name-plate, however.  As we mounted the side steps – the entrance proper - a youth of about 18 appeared.  Our guide explained our quest in Singhalese (since independence the study of English has been discouraged), but the boy replied in perfect English, saying that his father, the occupier, was asleep.  However, he confirmed that the house was indeed [or had once been] called Ardnaree.  We asked to be shown around, and he happily complied.  There was little doubt, from my memory of the Brewsters’ & Lawrence’s descriptions, that this was indeed Ardnaree.  There was a large sitting-room, rectangular, with a lovely vaulted wooden ceiling.  The floors were cement & the verandahs covered in, but from the front a view over the lake was afforded.  The father now appeared from his slumbers.  He told us that monkeys still plagued the place.  There were servants’ rooms at the back, behind the kitchen, and a variety of bed and other rooms.  It was a colonial architectural masterpiece, sadly neglected now, but as important (& as neglected) as Wyewurk.  We got permission to send a photographer back, and made to leave, but as we reversed, the boy came out again to say, no doubt on his father’s prompting, that a doctor in town knew all about the Lawrence connection, & was writing a book on the subject.  It was, apparently, the same doctor Freddie de Silva had told us about.  The boy gave us his name and address, and we dove back down towards town, intending to look him up.  Dr Nihal Karunaratne’s clinic was in Trincomalee Street, a short distance behind the Queen’s Hotel, adjacent to the lake, and we were fortunate to find him in his busy surgery.  He was a co-operative, articulate gentleman sitting at a desk with a photo of Clare College, Cambridge, on the wall behind him.  He looked puzzled at our apparition, but invited us to be seated, ahead of a corridorful of more worthy clients.  “You don’t know why we are here,” I opened, and he nodded agreement.  Then I mentioned our quest for Lawrence, and his face lit up like a Halloween pumpkin.  “You have come to the right place,” he said, with a slight Singhalese accent.  He went on to explain that he was writing a history of Kandy, and one chapter was to be devoted to Lawrence’s time in Kandy & the Pera Hera he hd observed here & which he celebrated in his poem, “Elephant”.  He offered a lot of useful detail before I could stop him & explain why we were here, what we had done, and what we needed to know.  He was entranced that someone else shared his enthusiasm & interest.  “A lady from the DH Lawrence Society was here a couple of years ago looking for Ardnaree,” he sd, and as he uttered the words my heart dropped – like Captain Scott, I had been beaten to the Pole.  But no, she was desperately unlucky.  She hd turned up, unannounced, from the UK, as we hd, in June 1989, wanting to trace Lawrence’s footsteps in Kandy.  (She hd sought him, the local historian, out via a mutual medical acquaintance.)  He cd nt help her, but she did awaken his interest.  About four months later he went up to Dharamaratah College [the school] to pay a professional visit to the wife of the principal.  As he mounted the side steps he looked up, & there, over the entrance to the verandah, was a wooden rectangular sign bearing the word “Ardnaree”.   He was probably the only person in Sri Lanka who knew what that battered, weather-worn name signified.  The purpose of his visit was forgotten, and he asked to see the view from a room at the front.  He was shown into the principal’s study & there, from the window, he could see a view that he had searched most of Kandy for – the prospect of a river flowing into the Sacred Lake identical to that described by Lawrence in his letters from Kandy.  Alas, apparently the incumbents, a la Mr Morath, thought so little of their treasure that they subsequently allowed the Ardnaree sign to fall off, and it has now been lost.  As recompense for our disappointment at nt being able to photograph the crucial name-plate, Dr Karunaratne invited us to tea the next day at his own lovely bungalow next to the grounds of the local botanic garden, where he regaled us with stories of Old Kandy.  We promised to return.

 

6/11/91 The Triton Beach Hotel, Ahungalla:  Our visit to Nuwara Elyia [or Eliya] didn’t provide us with anything substantial, though we absorbed quite a bit of local colour (we cd envisage what it must have bn like when Lawrence visited it in 1922).  Rather Scottish, with heather and gorse around the Hill Club, itself next to the Vice-Regal lodge.  April, by the way, was the hottest month in Ceylon, & the height of the social season at this hill station.  (The colonials later called it “Blackberry Time” or “Black Week” because of the rising position of the more permanently tanned indigenous population [we were told this by a local we befriended on the picturesque golf course, said to be the highest – over 8000ft – in the world].  Little wonder we lost the Empire.)  Also, it is almost certain that L picked up the name Torestin in Ceylon.  Even today, there are many “Rest Inns” or “Rest Ins” in Sri Lanka, and the phrase Rest House is almost ubiquitous.  [They are low-grade guest-houses.]  Several people we spoke to hd heard the name “Torestin”.

 

9/11/91 UL678 Colombo-Sydney: I may not yet know what K is about, but I think I might now know what its main theme is.

[Before I left London to start this quest in 1975, I attended, as consort to my more famous literary wife, an authors’ function in Chelsea where I was asked by a Lady Bracknell figure, “And what do…you…do, Mr Darroch?”  I piped up brightly that I was about to return to Sydney to begin research into Lawrence’s Kangaroo.  “And…what…is…Kangaroo…about?” she intoned, with the emphasis on the final word.  I confessed I did not know, and the group peered down their noses at me, as in the cartoon of the man who asked for a whisky in the Pump Room at Bath.  Since that put-down, I had been constantly on the lookout for clues as to what Kangaroo is about.]  

I think the main theme may be that, under the apparently placid surface of Australian life, something sinister lurks.  This in K is reflected in such incidents as the walk in the bush in WA, the silvery freedom suddenly turning at the end of the book, the spirit of the continent waiting to pounce, and so on.  Then there is the volcano passage.  And The Nightmare.  The “another gulf” that opened in ”Jack Slaps Back”.  There is the dream of the thief in the night.  There are the unexpected reactions of Cooley & Callcott.  And, ultimately, there is the figure of the Dark God, knocking at the door.  But above all, there is the secret army itself, present but unknown.  It may be that K can be interpreted (& I realise I am taking a gingerly step into the territory of the foe) on a two-fold level:  the naive, almost pastoral story of S&H’s daily life in A, & the dark, turbulent forces just under the thin crust beneath their feet.  (Then again, it may not be about that at all.)  By the way, as we left I saw another Rest Inn phenomenon:  a Tourist Inn [geddit?] on the Galle Road.

 

17/12/91 Collaroy:  There is no doubt that the environs of Collaroy were stiff with officer material.  Geoffrey King’s research on the 1922 home-owners proved that, what with house names like Smoke-oh, etc.  (I hope I’m not repeating myself here – a danger!)  Also, L must have met someone at Collaroy on that first Sunday who knew Wyewurk was vacant.  L wd nt have taken the late train down unless he was certain that secure accommodation was at the end of the trip.  Also:  Vicky must be a Friend.  On another track, LD Clark (in The Minoan Distance) makes an interesting point, citing Rebecca West.  She remarked that, on a visit to Florence, L was already committing his impressions of the place to paper, even though he hd just arrived.  Yet RW also remarked that it was nt Florence he was seeing, but himself.  However, I don’t think that is true of Australia.

 

12/1/92 ditto:  Another year begins – the 20^th since we first got the idea in Austin, Texas, at the HRC to look into L’s time in A.  If we had but known.  And who wd have imagined that, 20 years on, there wd still be so much to do.  I’ve spent most of December and January finishing my article for Meridian in reply to Steele’s attack on me, or rather on the now notorious “Darroch Thesis”.  I wrote the first version in London earlier last year, but was not happy with it, for it went down to his level of argument – the itsy-bitsy detail.  The final version, which I sent off last week, is less polemical, even disdainful.  It makes a good point, I think.  The nub of the matter can be reduced to three questions: 1, was there a secret army in NSW in 1922?; 2, is this the secret army L describes in K?; 3,  how did L find out about it?  The answers to the first two questions are yes, yes.  The third question remains unanswered. 

 

13/1/92 ditto:  In the course of thinking about my Meridian article, it occurred to me that the physical descriptions of Scott, Rosenthal & Hum are connected in an interesting & indicative way.  I have always been slightly concerned that L did nt make a greater attempt to disguise the first two, esp physically.  Well, I suppose there are several answers here.  He did nt know when he started the exercise where it wd lead.  And when he did know, he did nt, or cd nt, change things, perhaps because that was his working method (ie, he kept the physical traits, & changed other things).  Also, consider Hum & Trewhella.  There is, we know, little physical change here (& we know L met Hum).  The same probably applies to Scott & Rosenthal.  That was the way L worked, at least in this novel. 

 

12/2/92 ditto:  Paul Delprat said the other day that his mother hd mentioned my letter to her [seeking further info about Hum] & asked him what I wanted her to say!  Dear, dear.  I hope her memory of Howard calling Hum “a typical Cornishman” is nt suspect.

 

13/2/92 ditto:  It will be 70 years this May that L came to A and Sydney.  I wonder if we should do something?  [at this stage the DHL Society was but a gleam in our eye]  Starting today at the State Library on perhaps the last piece of undone research, the Sun newspaper files.  I wonder if there is some last clue in them.  (Of course, the Sun – which was nt available at Collindale due to microfilming – was the newspaper in Sydney that we know L read, for he quotes from it in K.)  Sally & John Rothwell to lunch last weekend.  She seems to know more about Fisherman’s Beach – Collaroy – than she’s letting on.  Will send her my [Friend] MS & see if she can add anything.

 

14/2/92 ditto:  Some friends of Chris (S[andra]’s] surgeon-sister), the Moultons, have taken a house in Surfers Pde, Thirroul, & we are bidden thence Saturday week.  They are keen to do something about Wyewurk (which is just around the corner from them).  Might lead to something.  Did nt have much of a chance to do any newspaper research yesty, S’s machine broke.  But saw some Sydney Mails [a weekly supplement to the SMH] while we were waiting.  Apparently Collaroy was regarded as a v. healthy place in the early 1920s – children’s [convalescent] home, etc.  Also, Scott must have been close to the Friends, for OE Friend was on the board of both [his father’s] CBC & [his own] United Insurance (& also connected with the KEA & the Anglican church).  If he [OEF] hd an eligible female relative, Scott cd have bn buzzing around.  And she cd be…

 

1/3/92 ditto:  Nothing much from our Thirroul visit, though Barry [Conyngham, composer/academic husband of Sandra’s cousin who lived at the next beach north of Thirroul] has bn approached to do an opera based on K.  What a little cultural icon K is becoming!  Gave a US 1^st [Seltzer] edition to Lani Moulton.  Hope that fosters an interest.  Nice it wd be to have some locals on my side!  Also AM’s student Jenny [Commons] has taken up my suggestion re the Friends [ie, to do some research into them].  Meeting her at the State Library on Wed.  So am preparing a paper for her on “the Friend connection”.  Having a “oldies” do re Hum [the Ashtonarama] at Collaroy on the Ides.  So it progresses.

 

4/3/92 ditto:  Met today Jenny Commons, AM’s MA student who is interested in doing some research into K.  Gave her my paper, which sums up the remaining problems.  It will be interesting to see if she picks up the bait and runs with it.  Talking about coincidences, etc, who shld be at lunch at B[ill] and T[oni]’s [a cheap Sydney eatery] today, as I was briefing JC on the Friend connection, but Ray McGuinness – FF’s [Fiona Friend’s] husband!  God, Sydney’s a small world – and how much smaller it wd have bn in 1922!   Also got a friendly reply from Mrs Delprat.  Hum liked fish, not Welsh rarebit.  Oh, well.

 

6/3/92 ditto:  Sandra spoke to Mrs Delprat, who can’t come to our Ides oldies lunch.  She now remembers many Sunday “teas” involving her father & Hum at which Welsh rarebit was the main dish.  (I hope this is a genuine memory.)  But she can’t recall Hum going overboard about it.

 

17/3/92 ditto:  Lunch on Sunday with Dick & Wenda Ashton.  Dick recalled Hum, but nt in much detail.  Hum’s big American car impressed him (he was in his teens) most.  He remarked on Hum’s crazy city driving (also mentioned, I think, by his son to R[uffels]).  But he’d slow down once open country was reached.  Hum was a regular Sunday guest with Howard, and he often brought fish – snapper.  V. conservative.

 

18/3/92 ditto:  Letter yesty from Ruffels responding to my Friend paper.  He enclosed a recent letter to the SMH from Pedder Friend, of Mosman.  Of course, Pedder is a Scrivener name (the only S[crivener] name WSF [WS Friend] of Col[laroy] recalled to R was a Pedder S[crivener], bank manager, of Manly).  I had speculated in my Friend paper that if only we cd find a S[crivener] lady who had married a F[riend], it wd explain a lot.  The quicker we get into the Friends, the better.

 [This is an interesting entry, for it means that Ruffels also interviewed Walter Friend in Beach Road Collaroy.  I recall I spoke to Ruffels about this, and he said Walter Friend had been very unco-operative.  “Oh, no, not this again!” I think was his reaction when Ruffels raised the secret army matter.  This will have resonances as we get deeper into “the Friend connection”.]

 

23/3/92 ditto:  Paul’s [Delprat] 50^th birthday yesty & he hosted a party for 40-50 at [his studio in] Balmoral [Mosman], one of whom was Sonja Ashton, wife of Cedric [Paul’s uncle and his mother’s elder brother].  Sandra mentioned Hum to her, and it rang a bell.  Then S explained why she was asking, and S[onja] A[shton] came up with the news (confirmed under my close questioning) that she knew a lady, since deceased, with whom she was walking one day at Collaroy Basin & who told her, as they passed one of the cottages, “That’s the house where L[awrence] stayed.”  Further questioning revealed nothing more, except that [the woman’s] brother was still alive.  Naturally, I’m probing further.  Could be something, could be nothing (for it cd be “retrospective” knowledge derived from something I wrote).  The incident apparently took place about eight years ago [ie, three years after my book was published].

 

30/3/92 ditto:  Yesty visited Cedric Ashton (aged 81) & his wife Sonja, at Newport.  Sonja expanded on the “house where L stayed” incident.  She was walking up the Basin beach (from the rock pool towards the golf course) with a local resident, a Mrs Worsted.  As they passed an old house facing the water [unquestionably Hinemoa*] she said:  “That’s where L stayed.”  Mrs W lived nearby (in Beach Road, abutting the Basin beach) & was “very literary”.  So it cd be something, or just the result of reading my book.  Cedric remembered Hum quite well.  He was short (5ft 2”), stocky, & wore a Panama hat.  Dressed well & spoke with a “clipped” voice.  Visited Howard regularly.  They wd sit in silence together.  Hum smoked a pipe.  Cedric vaguely recalled he hd some link with Collaroy & some Cornish background.  (He did nt realise Hum was a cousin.)  Will try to remember more.  One useful extra thing.  Hum’s wife Lillian was quite pretty & rather fluttery.  So she cd be the model for Victoria (if the Friends fail).  One oddity – Sonja jumped when I mentioned the name Scrivener.  She, & her father, knew the Mt Irvine Scriveners well. 

[Yet another indication of how inter-connected families and acquaintanceships were - and are - in Sydne.y]

[*well, perhaps – there is some doubt about that now, see 23/5/02 below]

 

3/4/92 ditto:  It’s strange, almost eerie, how things germane still keep cropping up.  Late today I was driving from Collaroy to the golf driving range at Narrabeen – Lawrence “territory” I suppose [“Tres Bon”, a house which Lawrence mentions in K, was to my left] – when, among the detritus of the Australian Surf Titles being held at Narrabeen Beach this weekend, I spotted something that stopped me in my tracks.  On the side of one of the parked surfboats was painted the words:  “Bulli/Lovatt Transport/Simply the Best”.  Of course, it’s the double T that is so interesting, that & the Bulli name [Bulli is just south of Thirroul].  For that is the (most unusual) spelling L gives Somers [Richard Lovatt Somers] in K.  Was there a Lovatt transport in or near Thirroul in 1922?  Even a garage?

 

8/4/92 ditto:  AM rang.  Had spoken with Jenny C & the plan is, subject to uni approval, that she will do a Friend probe as part of her MA course.  Excellent.

 

9/4/92 ditto:  Last week S[andra] went to see an ear specialist, Barry Scrivener, a friend of her father’s.  Of course, she asked about a possible Scrivener connection with L and K.  None came to his mind.  No South Coast or Collaroy connection either.  But the Friends did ring a bell.  He remembered their large [hardware] warehouse in George or Clarence Street.  But the big plus was his assertion that his father, Percy Pedder Scrivener – a Mt Irvine Scrivener – was “best mates” with “Steve” Friend (Brigadier S.G. Friend [Walter’s – WS Friend - brother]).  They had parallel WW1 Army careers (both in artillery [as was Rosenthal]) & kept in close touch after the war, exchanging frequent visits.  His mother was also friendly with the Streets [Scott was a Street].  Are the Scriveners making a comeback? 

[no]

 

28/4/92 ditto:  (Reorganising my files & research scraps.)  On going through my Willie Struthers file I came across the l[etter] from Frank Hardy [a left-wing author] to JR[uffels] dated 16/1/83 in which FH says he recalls speaking to Jock Garden in about 1948-48 re DHL.  FH sd:  “In the course of the conversation, the q[uestion] of L[awrence]’s K[angaroo] came up somehow and G[arden] told me L[awrence] had visited the [Sydney] Trades Hall while in Sydney asking q[uestions] about the political situation…”.  FH said the memory of what Garden told him was now very vague, but he seemed to recall that L was interested in the political position of the returned soldiers.  This tends to confirm what Garden’s biographer Arthur Hoyle told R in a letter (28/3/83) that he was “reasonably certain” that Lawrence’s character Willie Struthers was based on Jock Garden.  This is reinforced, of course, by the content of Struthers’ speech in the “Row in Town” chapter, where he talks about being friendly with “Brother Brown & Brother Yellow”, a line no ALP-affiliated unionist wd dare espouse in the White Australia of 1920-22, but which Jock Garden would say, being both a Communist (founding secretary of the Australian Communist Party) & a prominent “Wobbly” [IWW] supporter [both of which advocated an international brotherhood of all workers].

 

29/4/92 ditto:  Joe Davis writes some appalling stuff.  I hd to re-read his book re Mrs Wynne (see separate note) & came across this passage (p 58, my emphases and exclamations):   “…I believe there is a chance that [“possible” conversations between Lawrence and Dr Crossle] might provide the basis for the discussion in Kangaroo about the English writer RLS being offered the chance to write for both the diggers and the socialists…it is not so difficult to believe that the offers Somers receives to write for the diggers and the socialists in the novel are based on a single offer put to Lawrence, perhaps by Crossle, in Thirroul.”  Apparently the basis of this outré speculation is that  “…Crossle appears to have been privy to Norman’s and Jack Lindsay’s discussions concerning the establishment of the magazine Vision…It seems likely that, if he found himself talking to an internationally famous writer in his Thirroul surgery (or perhaps at Wyewurk or even playing tennis [!!!!] at Bulli), he would have made mention of these discussions and might even have suggested to Lawrence….that he should consider contributing to their literary venture.”    And the supposed result of this conjecture?  Lawrence makes Struthers offer Somers the editorship of a Labor newspaper.  And Davis accuses me of unwarranted speculation! 

[OK, OK, I know.  That’s hitting a sitting duck – and I made a few wild stabs in my own 1981 book - but the image Joe conjures up of Lawrence playing tennis at Bulli deserved to be registered.]

 

30/4/92 ditto:  No, I’ll not let him off that easily.  Let’s revisit that tennis afternoon at Bulli.  L plays a forehand into the vacant court.  15-love.  “I say,” says Dr Crossle, as he crosses to the backhand side, “would you care to write for a journal two friends of mine are putting together?”  “No thanks,” says a rather breathless DHL.  (Thinks:  “Hey, that’s not a bad idea for my novel.  I’ll have RLS being asked to write for the Diggers…and why not the socialists, too?  What fun.”)  And if you think I’ve picked out an isolated flight of fancy in D.H. Lawrence at Thirroul, consider this Icarus-like gem:  “Did an Italian, or someone with recent experience of Italy, on board the Malwa or Orsova, provide Lawrence with details of the political situation in Italy which made him change his mind about writing a novel just a few days after getting off in Sydney and settling in Thirroul?”  Well, anything’s possible.  (Sandra has begun a short book [Collaroy Basin – Sydney’s Best-kept Secret] on the history of the Basin.  This cd yield some DHL material.  Hope so.)

 

4/5/92 ditto:  Had to lunch yesty Rosalind Delprat, Cedric Ashton (Howard’s children) & Sonja Ashton.  Not much, except Mrs Delprat was even more sure that her father called Hum “a typical Cornishman”, not once, but on several occasions.  Sonja cd nt add to her “Lawrence’s house” story, but thought the incident took place about 1981, which wd make it even more likely that my book was the probable source.  It was actually Paul who supplied something new.  He recalled Howard saying that he hd “friends in security” who “leant on foreigners” (Germans, etc.)  Scott? 

[Incidentally, one of our Basin neighbours, the Beinssens, were German, and were interned at the outbreak of WW2.  Scott, we know, went round gathering up Germans in 1939.  It is quite possible – OK, I know, I know - it was he who picked up Mr Beinssen.  At least he would have known the area, and its inhabitants.]

 

6/5/92 ditto:  Well into research on the Basin, helped by our neighbour Peter Hall, who was a local estate agent (& went to Sydney High).  Going through his [Richardson & Wrench] office’s records for 1921-23, I came across the sale of lot 2 No 3 section 12 of the Collaroy Park Estate [the original subdivision] by a Mrs Kaeppel of St Kilda Private Hospital [Birtley Place, Elizabeth Bay].  Hall recalled that when his family came to live in the Basin in the early 1920s they were only the 4^th permanent residents in the street (Cliff Street), the rest – about 20 or so – being holiday houses let out by their owners when they were not using them themselves – mainly in the school holidays & at Xmas.  So the whole of the Basin, to all intents, was a holiday place, with lots of places to let [probably “at winter rates”, too].

 [Also, and in case I forget to mention it elsewhere, Birtley Place Elizabeth Bay was the home of the Streets, and was where Scott grew up, so presumably he would have known the Kaeppels there – indeed, his first wife, JM, the Canadian nurse, later worked at the St Kilda Private Hospital - see below.]

 

15/5/92 ditto:  Dick Swift, over 80 & a long-time resident (he lived in a house next to Florence Avenue), remembered Peter & John Oatley living at Hinemoa, where he himself stayed as a boy.  It was split into two flats, one occupied by old Mrs Hayman, the other (no doubt the better one, overlooking the Basin beach) let out.  Recalled that John Oatley had polio (but I thought that was Peter Oatley), hence the family’s taking up residence in this renowned convalescent spot (safe swimming in the Basin, etc).  Could not recall Hum.  In 1922 the houses wd have bn few & scattered.  Also, from WA, a reply to my letter to Walter Murdoch’s daughter who, alas, is ga-ga (say her relatives).  So no luck there. 

[This is interesting.  The letter referred to asked the daughter of Walter Murdoch, a writer and academic of some renown, if she had been told or learned that Lawrence had made contact with an actual secret army in Sydney though someone he had encountered on a boat.  I believe it was, of all people, Bruce Steele who passed this information to me.  (It is a pity I did not diarise it.)   Of course, we have heard this story before, and we now think it was true, and that Hum was the contact.  However, the fact that Murdoch’s daughter also knew is most interesting, for she may have got this information from her father, and he was in a position to know, for he was Brookes’s nomination for the head in WA in 1919-20 of what became the Old Guard, and would almost certainly have had continuing contact with Brookes and his co-conspirators afterwards.]

 

19/5/92 ditto:  In going over my notes, I came across the research I did into 112 Wycombe Road a year or so ago, when I ran across the name, obviously of a solicitor, “W.P. Friend”.  Something clicked in my mind.  It concerned the address of one of the Tinsons who either part-owned or was related to the Tinson sisters who ran 112 as, apparently, a guest-house, or private hotel.  The thing that clicked was the address of this Tinson, which was “Wallace Road, Burwood” [a Sydney inner-west, and once affluent, suburb].  I had seen this address more recently, & looked it up.  It was the address of none other than Lucy May Friend, who was not only a prominent Friend (aunt of WS & SG Friend), but she actually hd owned a house & extensive land in Craig Street. Thirroul.  In fact she hd sold “Wyuna”, the house opposite Wyewurk, a few months [maybe a little longer] before Lawrence arrived there.  This cd be co-incidence, but it might point the way to why Scott, resident at 112, was familiar with Craig Street & Wyewurk (and the Friends).

 

20/5/92 ditto:  (The day we paid off our mortgage on Bondi - hooray!)  It is quite amazing that, after all these years, & countless re-readings of K, that I can come across something vital & previously missed.  I was preparing a new article on the DT [Darroch Thesis] & was thinking of including a new (old) snapshot of Hinemoa, given to us by the lady at 7 Florence avenue [Mrs Dight, I think].  The photo was useful, for, unlike the other photos we had of Hinemoa, it showed the house as viewed from the beach, making it look very much as St Columb is described in K, “standing on a bluff of sand, sideways above the lagoon”.  But  “the lagoon” hd always been a problem, as I (and many others) hd assumed that this referred to Narrabeen Lagoon, where S&H go to bask in the warm sand & peel their pears.  But as I wrote the caption for the snap, & sought the right quote, I re-read the words L uses on the following page:  “The bungalow was pleasant, a large room facing the sea…”.  The sea!  Not the lagoon.  Again, L let’s the disguise slip & tells the truth.  So the new Collaroy research has led to something.

 

21/5/92 ditto:  To ML [Mitchell Library] to look up 1922 Sands for Wallace St, Burwood, the Tinsons & W.P. Friend. At first, disappointment.  No WPF anywhere in Sydney.  No H.A. Tinson in Wallace Street, though there was a H.A. Tilson.  I looked at a later Sands and, sure enough, Tilson had become Tinson.  Lucy May F was at 9 W[allace] St, & Tinson at 22.  But the street was short, & they cd have known each other.  H.A. was a JP & a solid citizen, so if he was related to the 112 Tinsons, he cd have moved in Friend circles.  Too early to tell if this is important, but the Tinsons look promising. 

[no luck, another red herring]

 

5/6/92 ditto:  Today came across a real oddity.  In one of Peter Hall’s real estate books I found a list of every house in the Basin, with their names [names were given houses before street numbering became established]  (Ours, at 5 Anzac Avenue, was “Golf View Lodge”.)  None of any real note, except “Wywurrie” at 14 Beach Road, cr Ocean Grove. Owned by a Dr Burton.  Of all the names I wanted to find [in particular, I was looking for some of the names Somers cites in Kangaroo, such as “Stella Maris”] this was the least-expected [it being the name of the house next door to Wyewurk in Craig Street, Thirroul].  What is its possible relevance?

 [I later found a “Stella Maris” in Pittwater Road, between Narrabeen and Collaroy.]

 

6/6/92 ditto:  Got Ruffel’s response to my new article.  Rather negative, but that’s what I asked him for, to see the best the “anti” case can muster.  But some of his phrases hit home, eg “a necklace of improbabilities”.  Gee, that’s a bit stiff.  Could he really think that?  I did a long, 16-page riposte, but decided against sending it.  He won’t be convinced by anything I say.  Why is he so opposed to – blind to – the Scott/Hinemoa scenario?  How can he dismiss the parallels, nt to mention the summer house lookout & Mrs Jeffery? 

[Mrs Jeffery was the left-wing lady, the daughter of the doctor in Killara, who told AM that her father held regular card get-togethers at which Scott was teased about his portrayal in Kangaroo – see 14/5/86 above.]

 

26/6/92 ditto:  Something odd & interesting.  Jenny Commons rang yesty & faxed an early fruit of her research (which she began this week).  She looked at the will of Thomas Irons, the former owner of Wyewurk [his architect son built the bungalow], who died in 1918 (in the lavatory, Ruffels informs me).  Now, what is of interest is that his will reveals that he owned a half-share in a firm of Sydney motor engineers, P.J. Taylor & Co, of Clarence Street, City (north).  The will gives a list of “work in progress” at 31/3/18, and this included work on two Austins for WS Friend & Co (which owed Irons 26 pounds 13 shillings & five pence).  As L makes Callcott a partner in a motor-works place, this bears some investigation.  Also:  got a fax from “Wien” from a Johann Schmidt who hd stayed at Torestin guest house in Welisara, Sri Lanka.  He hd bn handed my letter of 2/12/91 in the belief that Austria was the same place as Australia.  Anyway, he now informs me that the acting manager of the guest house told him that the name Torestin was Singhalese.  However, “it had no special meaning”.  Not much use.

 

23/7/92 ditto:  H. Hayman’s daughter to afternoon tea today.  She confirmed that Hinemoa was built around 1910-13 by Horrie for his parents (his father was a S[alvation] A[rmy] captain who came over from NZ to take over a SA “industrial farm” at Dee Why).  But they did nt much live at H, so it was mostly vacant.  Later split into two flats.  It was also a hospital for a time (probably during the [WW1] war).  Hinemoa is a Maori name, she was a Maori Princess, the subject of a legend.  Her [the daughter] mother named it.  Olga Bray, her friend who came with her, and a long-time resident, sd the Basin was deserted outside of the school holidays.  So it was the place someone wd recommend to someone wanting brief & cheap accommodation.  

 

24/7/92 ditto:  Ruffels rang last night.  He believes Wyewurk is up for sale.  So much for Mr Morath’s much-vaunted desire [stated at the inquiry] to preserve this piece of literary & architectural history.  [we had discovered that Wyewurk was not only of literary significance, but it was also the oldest Californian bungalow in Australia, and therefore of probably even greater architectural importance]  Waiting for confirmation before doing something, however. 

 

25/7/92 ditto:  Ruffels sent a copy of July’s The Sydney Review [a local blat] with an article headed “Life and Death in Thirroul”, a reference to B[rett] W[hiteley]’s death there.  [Brett Whiteley, Australia’s greatest living artist, who had painted a Wyewurk diptych with fellow artist Garry Shead, had recently committed suicide (or overdosed) in a shabby Thirroul motel room, which he frequented on his drug-enhanced escapes from fame and Sydney.]  Inside is a nice little piece by G[avin] S[outer] [a journalist/historian] marking BW’s death & the Thirroul connection.  However, GS quoted an excerpt from Davis’s book along with a blurb from TT’s [Tom Thompson] Imprint:  “This highly regarded work…”.  Pass the sick-bag, Alice.

 

30/7/92 ditto:  Cd nt find PJ Taylor & Co in company registers at State Archives.  But a Percival John Taylor was a director of a Pitt Street garage called Rees.  PJ Taylor listed in 1924 Sands at 143 Princes Street (probably destroyed in the [Sydney Harbour] bridge works).  Later (1949) PJT at Liverpool & Riley. 

 

6/8/92 ditto:  J[enny] C[ommons] faxed some info re PJT.  His works were in Clarence St, nr Grosvenor Hotel (but nt a garage, a workshop apparently).  Irons owned half, PJT the other half.  S[andra] interviewed two Basin identities, Mrs Dight & Mrs McQueen (mother of Wallaby coach) for her book. Latter had CSR connections [the Colonial Sugar Refining company was behind the Old Guard in the 1920-30s].  She sd there was a little enclave of CSR people who owned or rented places in Florence avenue & on the corner of Beach Road (“the CSR houses”).  She recalled Walter Friend as a family acquaintance (Mrs McQ’s father worked for CSR, I think).  Also:  F[iona] Friend rang.  Pedder Friend no relation.  But her father [the one Professor Riemer consulted re Friend involvement in secret armies – see above] has the WS Friend & Co records. She glanced at them.  Details of guns & bullet supplies.  Useful people to know if you’re organising a secret army.

 

4/9/92 ditto:  I wasn’t going to note the W’gong [Wollongong, the administrative center of the South Coast, which takes in Thirroul] excursion, but something has come out of it worth recording.  Shead’s pictures were surprisingly good [Garry Shead, now one of Australia’s leading artists, had done a series of pictures depicting Lawrence and Frieda in Thirroul].  I hd hoped to build bridges with the Thirroul mafia (Davis, Southall & the mephistophelean Tom Thompson).  And they, in cabal by the entrance, greeted me amicably enough.  TT was master of ceremonies & paid a graceful tribute to the “Sydney guests” – Ruffels, AM, Margaret Jones [ex-Literary Editor of the SMH], Sandra, and “the elegant” Robert Darroch.  Met Wendy Jollife, local Thirroul libarian & curator of the “DHL collection” at the library (she brought some good photos along, incl one of Wyewurk pre-1914).  So optimistic did I feel, that in the way back in the car I raised the possibility of turning our Save Wyewurk Committee [of which I was the convenor] into the D.H. Lawrence Society of Australia.  Ruffels & M Jones have warmed to this idea, so I later wrote off to various people canvassing the initiative, including the South Coast mafia.  But no response yet from Davis et al.  However, Wendy Jollife responded enthusiastically, so I think we’ll go ahead.  None of this wd really warrant a substantive diary entry were it nt that at the post-exhibition dinner, TT pulled JR aside & sd, conspiratorially, that he hd an important new lead on K.  This, I later discovered from R, was that Forrester [on the Malwa with Lawrence] hd two aunts already in Sydney & “in a significant place”.   The place turned out  to be Murdoch Street, Mosman, which certainly wd have bn significant.  Alas, on investigation, they proved no kin of our [AD] Forrester, & so joined our swelling shoal of red herrings.  But I wonder how TT found this out?  Is Davis still poking around?  What are they up to?

[I do not, however, want to leave the impression that Joe Davis has not contributed substantially to knowledge about Lawrence’s time in Australia.  Though his speculations about what Lawrence did in Sydney are suspect to the point of nonsense, what he says about Thirroul, fanciful tennis afternoons apart, is solid and useful.  Indeed, his research into the Thirroul of Lawrence’s visit in 1922 is invaluable.  He is perhaps unlucky that bigger and more predatory fish, such as Steele and Ellis, saw in his work the opportunity to find disparagement for the Darroch Thesis, for without Davis and his DH Lawrence at Thirroul, their counterblast would not have carried much puff (which is no doubt why Steele later accorded Davis’s book a cue-title in his CUP edition of Kangaroo).]

 

5/9/92 ditto:  Went to the ML last Fri to read the letter from Aldington to Adrian Lawlor. 

[Andrew Moore had discovered that a cache of papers belonging to Adrian Lawlor were in the La Trobe (University) Library (Victoria), and that they included this particular letter.  This was quite important, because in his so-influential Introduction to the Heinemann edition of Kangaroo – since the 1940s the standard British and American text of the novel – Aldington had stated, categorically, that there was no secret army of the sort Lawrence had described in the novel in Australia at the time, citing as the authority for this statement information he had received from an Australian contact, Adrian Lawlor (who was a literary figure in Australia in the 1930-60 era).  How and where Lawlor himself got this (totally misleading) information was a matter of some significance, as it was partly, even principally, responsible for the incorrect interpretation of Kangaroo. The La Trobe library had refused to send me a copy of the vital letter, but had arranged for it to be sent up to the Mitchell in order that I could read it there, which I had now done.]   

Something of a revelation.  I hd always blamed RA’s Introduction for being largely responsible for the no-factual-basis interpretation of K.  But this letter now undermines that view.  It is dated 30/10/48 & in it RA tells Lawlor that, “If that ‘spy’ scene between Somers & Jack is invented I should be surprised.  There is real rage in it, which I don’t think Lorenzo could have worked up over an imaginary episode.”  [Aldington had known Lawrence personally;  the “spy” scene probably refers to the “Jack Slaps Back” episode]  RA earnestly sought Lawlor’s opinion of “DHL’s insight & even prophetic vision”, going on the refer disparagingly to other discussions of Kangaroo (such as Hugh Kingsmill’s) as “invented twaddle”.  Yet, despite these very valid doubts & insightful questions, RA went on eventually to set in literary concrete an altogether different impression in his Introduction, plugging for, if not for such twaddle, then at least invention.  One supposes that RA’s initial insight was altered by Lawlor’s negative reply.  I am writing to Alister Kershaw, who was RA’s secretary, re this, for AK is also mentioned in the letter as having sent RA Lawlor’s “very interesting” notes on DHL.  Will follow this up.

 

24/9/92 ditto:  A[lister] Kershaw has replied from France.  It turns out that he is RA’s literary executor, so I now have all the permission I need to access Aldington material, world-wide.  He enclosed a copy of the vital letter from Lawlor to RA [sent in response to RA’s letter cited above].  In essence, AL denied to RA any possible “fascist background” to K.  Indeed, he had taken the trouble to consult a local historian on the matter.  The expert was Brian Fitzpatrick, the Labor historian.  (So the literary folk aren’t to blame after all.)  [for the full, and very interesting story, about this, see Rananim 3/2]  Also:  We are having a meeting at Thirroul on Nov 14 to see if we can set up a DHL Society.  Only thing we can do now to help Wyewurk.  Wendy Jollife [Thirroul librarian] commendably keen.  No response from Steele or Eggert, however. Sagar wrote supportively, as did UK DHL Society. 

 

26/10/92 ditto:  In the post came the first reviews of the new [Miranda Seymour] biography of Ottoline [Morrell].  Now, here is a subject I know second only to DHL in Australia.  I spent about a year, 1972-73, editing Sandra’s text [of her excellent, and much-acclaimed, 1975 biography Ottoline – The Life of Lady Ottoline Morrell], & I got to know all the source materials intimately, some of which I myself researched in Texas [at the HRC in 1992].  And now comes a new work going over the same ground.  And from the reviews it seems we missed a great deal.

 [Miss Seymour having access to Ott’s “journals” which not only were denied to us, but whose very existence was categorically denied by Mrs Vinagradoff, Ott’s fractious and perfidious daughter, who said they had been destroyed during the war, thus “doing a Friend” and lying through her teeth]

There was, apparently, an affair with a stonemason at Garsington in 1917.  Not only that, there was another family liaison with a rustic called – and you won’t believe this, but it’s true apparently – Mellors!!!!!!!!  So Ott may well have been, for DHL, Lady Chatterley!!!!!!!  All this unsuspected by Sandra & me. 

[the point I was trying to make here was that I should be careful not to rely too definitively on my current research into DHL and Kangaroo, for my (now shown to be faulty) knowledge of Ottoline’s life was immeasurably greater than the grasp I had on Lawrence’s time in Australia]

I mention all this because I got a call from my new ferret, Jenny Commons, on Fri.  She was in a state close to despair.  She hd reached the end of her tether, Friend-wise.  Help!  she pleaded.  So I faxed her some new Friend stuff, including the will of one of the Friends [AGF, supplied by Ruffels, I think].  Then she came back with what she (and I) thought might be an important discovery, which was a new possible model for Victoria Callcott.  This, JC suggested, might be Annie Turnbull, who was left a bequest in the [AGF] Friend will, & who lived next to the Friends in Thirroul.  It seems that Jenny’s father hd some contact with the present Turnbulls, so he rang them on Jenny’s behalf, asking if they knew of any connection between them, the Friends, & Lawrence.  And they did!  Their response was:  “Of course, you know Lawrence fathered a bastard in Thirroul?”   God, what a possibility - and for half a minute my mind started to whirl like the barrels on a fruit machine.  But, of course, that’s the plot of Steel Beach, that silly novel by the woman who conjures up the image of driving down to Thirroul & coming across a young, thin, red-breaded surfer (I seem to recall that Joe Davis pictured himself similarly at one point).  I don’t think we need to follow up that lead

[however, see my speculation about Frieda and “The Barber of Thirroul” in Rananim  2/1] .

 

2/11/92 ditto:  [I noted that this date was exactly one year since our discovery in Sri Lanka of Ardnaree.  Apropitious date, I remarked, and adding…”but please, not another year”.  However, what I should have written was “decade”, not “year”.]  JC rang first thing this morning in a state of hardly suppressed excitement.  She thinks that she has, finally, come across the real model & inspiration for Victoria Callcott.  And I think there is a high probability that she is right.  She is a Friend, at least by marriage, & her name is Myfawny (yes – Fanny) Beatrice  Owen.  In 1918 she was married to Ernest Adrian Friend, one of the 7 sons of the Friend doyen, A.G. Friend, principal of WS Friend & Co.  She’s the right age (born 1897, so 25 in 1922).  Recently married to EAF, he 28 in 1922.  Father a retired clergyman (Edward Owen) & mother a Phillips, a well-known South Coast family.  Father at Nowra (definitely on the SC) in 1922, JC thinks.  Some dairy farm connection.  [we had been looking for a female, about 22-26, recently married, connected to the Friends, father and grandfather surveyors, father now retired and running a dairy farm on the South Coast, easy distance from Thirroul, younger brother aged about 16-17, mother from Somerset, father a keen fisherman, she the eldest, etc, etc - as per the description of VC in K]   Strong [Anglican church] connection (father once rector at Hunters Hill).  Connected with the [Banjo] Pattersons [cf above re Ernest Whiting’s family].  Not proof positive, but…

 

6/11/92 ditto:  The fog thickens.  JC just rang.  The Rev. Edward Owen (C of E) not at Nowra but rector of All Saints in Hunters Hill in 1922.  He died in 1925, but window lived on till about 1935 in a home with a Welsh name in Boundary Rd, Roseville [another leafy, affluent North Shore suburb, and where Sandra grew up].  This implies that L met on the Malwa someone (Cpt Bertie Scrivener) whose father lived in the Parish next door to the Scriveners, the mother of which family was a stalwart, indeed a leading female light, of the Sydney Anglican dioceses.   What can we make of that?  We know [from information supplied by Ruffels about the Harbour Lights Guild] that when Bertie arrived back in Sydney on the Malwa, he was feted by his mother’s Anglican circle.  Could the daughter of the adjacent Anglican clergyman have bn present at one of these functions?  Hmmmm…  Also from JC, Owen Edward Friend, yet another luminary in the fecund Friend family – probably cousin of AGF & Lucy May F – had a sister called Fanny, too.  (Her mother was also a Fanny – now we have an embarrassment of Fannys.)  And according to Carl Oatley [Sally Rothwell’s brother or step-brother], the Kaeppel-Oatleys knew some Friends in the north-west [Moree? Armidale?].   Some mention of Hebert F & Phillipa F.

 [My late father’s doctor at Milson’s Point had contact with these Friends, for he once asked my father, on their behalf, if he, Ian Darroch, knew a Robert Darroch who had written something about Lawrence in Australia.  Naturally I tried to chase these Friends up, but to no avail.  The Friend portcullis descended.]

 

10/11/92 ditto:  Ruffels to lunch last Sunday.  He brought details of a Colonel Percy Thomas Owens who lived at Nowra [on the SC], was a keen angler (in K, Victoria’s father in a keen angler), and went to Grammar [where Scott, etc, went].  Son of another Colonel Percy Owen.  Worked in Canberra.  The Owens are coming thick & fast.

 

11/11/92 ditto:  To Cobbitty [outside of Sydney] to Tim & Renate Yates [Tim’s family, of Yates Seeds renown, regularly holidayed at the Basin, with servants].  The other guests were Red Harrison & his wife Pamela.  Tim hd invited them because journalist Red, now with the BBC, knew about my antipathy to [left-wing journalist John] Pilger, & thought we wd hit it off.  We did.  I read them my Pilger piece, which everyone loved.  Lots of gossip about old times on the [Sydney] Daily Telegraph [where Red & I hd worked, though in different eras].  But it was Pamela who provided the icing on the cake.  Her mother was an Owen!  Came from the South Coast, probably around Bellambi, which is an easy buggy-ride from Thirroul.  And even better, she is a Macarthur-Onslow on her father’s side!!!  [General George Macarthur-Onslow was almost certainly the military head of the Old Guard (“the Maggies”) – see various references above]  Things are looking up.

 

16/11/92 ditto:  On Saturday we all trooped down to Thirroul to form the DH Lawrence Society of Australia.  I took Sandra, M[argaret] J[ones] and JR.  Others came separately, and we rendezvoused with W[endy] J[ollife] at her library in the main street.  Turned up:  us, AM and Beverley Burgmann, Steve O’Connor (a lawyer interested in L), Ray Southall & Joe Davis plus wife & bairns.  TT sent apologies.  No one else from W’gong Uni turned up, despite invitations.  WJ declined to be secretary & Beverley volunteered.  We co-opted a reluctant Ray Southall as President, I became VP and Steve O’Connor agreed to be treasurer.  An even more reluctant Joe Davis, after some badgering, agreed to be editor of our proposed newsletter, but with a total absence of enthusiasm [he had to be replaced very quickly with AM’s friend, ferroequinologist John Lacey].  Then we adjourned to WJ’s place for celebratory eats & drinks.  So we are in situ.  Now we’ll see what role our poor babe will play.  (WJ has a nice collection of DHL photos, etc, in her Library, into whose precincts the dreaded Mr Morath was recently seen to slope.  Also, a local estate agent is now promoting property in Thirroul with the come-on line, “the place Lawrence stayed in”.  Some evidence of local interest, I suppose.)  Meanwhile I have sooled MJ on to the Burradoo connection, as she recently convalesced with some people she knew down there who just happened to live next to Laural Park, the local Friend mansion (and address of Mrs MK Friend, who boarded the Osterley in Colombo as Lawence disembarked).  Small world.  MJ’s friends will investigate their Friend neighbours.

 [Burradoo is to NSW what the Hamptons are to New York, but more Scottish]

 

29/12/92 ditto:  M Jones rang with a jewel, or at least something semi-precious.  She was down again at Burradoo with her friends, the Simons, for Xmas.  They had very little to add about the Friends & Laurel Park.  Their Friends apparently took up residence there about 1914 & were connected to the Galong (a NSW country area) Friends.  Anyway, M and the Simons were driving past the gates of Laurel Park, and DHL was mentioned, when one of the other guests sd, out of the blue:  “Oh, I have a postcard from Frieda.”  A postcard from Frieda!!!!!  Well, as you can imagine, much excitement.  (The lucky/naive guest was Evonne Maley, nee Wright, from Manly.)  Was the Burradoo connection, so derided – to the point that I was busy hosing down rumours, flying round the Southern Highlands, that L had spent some time at Burradoo – to prove of importance?  [As it turned out, no.  But it did serve to show me how much could be out there, still undiscovered.]  The pc, we were to find out, was addressed to Miss Ilka [? – Frieda’s scrawl was almost illegible] Foster, “Glanugre” [?], 11 Addison Road, Manly, NSW, Australia.  It apparently dropped out of a copy of a 1948 edition of Aaron’s Rod.  What is its significance?  How did Miss Foster, whoever she was, know Frieda?  Did the link date back to 1922?  Ferrets, bright-eyed & bushy-tailed, are dispatched in every direction.  [meanwhile, we were waiting for Mrs Maley to dig out the pc and reveal  what it said]

 

30/12/92 ditto:  Jenny Commons to lunch (with MJ, AM, Beverley [Burgmann], etc), & she brought her Friends [MA] thesis.  Quite impressive, & not a little flattering to the DT [Darroch Thesis], to which, of course, she cleaves.  She hasn’t come up with anything dramatic, but she does - & this is where her work is useful – flesh out the web, or rather webs, of social, political, class, business, family & other connections into which L was injected on arrival in Sydney.  It is now quite clear that it isn’t a matter of a string of unlikely events & coincidences [or “necklace of improbabilities”] that explains how Kangaroo came to be written, but rather which of a number of possible paths led L to Scott, etc.  But I must record, or sum up, JC’s Friend, etc, research [for it will make subsequent references to the Friends more explicable].  The origins of the [Australian] Friend dynasty lie in Devon, where Walter Smale F, son of Walter F[riend] & Mary S[male], was born c. 26/7/1812 at or near Holdsworthy, a small village near the Cornwall border (so there cd a Cornish connection in the F family).  By 1839 WSF was a tinmaker in Totnes with James Bunker, whose dau Ann married WSF in 1835.  They emigrated to Sydney in 1839.  By 1854 WSF was an iron merchant in York Street.  In 1870 he moved to Five Dock & built the family mansion, Moreton (set in 15 acres).  Died in 1896.  Firm of WS Friend & Co went to five grandsons, one of whom, Arthur Gilbert Friend, gained control (he was born in 1864 at Cintra, in Wallace Street, Burwood, and his sister was Lucy May F, owner of ” Wyuna” in Craig Street).  There was, apparently, a tradition in the by now proliferating Friend family of investing in the family firm, WS Friend & Co, so AGF became trustee of the family wealth, and godfather of the clan.  AGF had 11 children, 8 of whom survived, including Walter Smale, Stephen Gilbert, Robert Moreton and Ernest Adrian, who married Myfawny Beatrice Owen [see above] in 1918.  She was 25 in 1922.  Myfawny (Fanny) eldest of six children.  Mrs MK Friend (of Laurel Park and Osterley fame) was married to Herbert Walter Friend, younger brother of AGF, and he was indeed of the country NSW side of the clan, coming from Galong.  The only other point of interest in JC thesis is that she uncovered someone called Moses who was connected to the Friends (distant cousins) who owned a house in Collaroy (but not the Basin), and this house was called Cooee (!!!!).  [one of Somers’s houses in Kangaroo]   The Friends also seem to have had a link with Ceylon, an Esmond Friend going to Ceylon in 1921 (which makes Mrs MKF’s visit there in 1922 perhaps a family trip).  So JC has pushed the research forward, and in Fanny Beatrice Friend found a possible model for V[ictoria] C[allcott].  She, hopefully, will keep digging.  But fingers crossed for FBO, nee Friend. 

[as we shall see, the answer was there, but it was not FBO, or at least we don’t think so now]

 

1/1/93 ditto:  Will this be the last year of this long journey?  [no]  Is FBO the final clue?  (I have listed 19 possible connections between FBO and VC – see extra note).  Meanwhile, JC has confirmed that the private schools were indeed on vacation when L arrived in Sydney that May weekend, so the Basin wd have bn filled up by the various Collaroy house owners-and-renters, & their North Shore & country families.  Which, of course, means Hum was probably up there with his family that weekend, & that Sunday afternoon teas – the main social occasion of the week – wd have bn in full swing in Beach, Florence, Cliff, Anzac, Birdwood, Ocean, & Seaview [the streets of the Basin] around 3-4 pm, when invited visitors from overseas might have knocked at the door.

[though, being the Basin, the front door wd have bn already open]

 

7/1/93 ditto:  Ruffels is hot on the Forster postcard scent.  He has bn going over the electoral rolls, Sands directories, etc, & has found that Rosenthal’s partner (Day or Lovatt Rutledge?) lived in the proximity of Addison Rd, Manly.  Of course, this cd just be, as so much has proved to have been, mere coincidence.  [besides, it was wrong]  But if it did come to something, what a wonderful denoument.  A chance meeting in Burradoo, a postcard falling out of a copy of AR, the trail leading to Addison Rd Manly, then…what?  

[the pc (dated 11/1/37) turned out to be Frieda replying politely to a fan letter from Sydney, viz:  “THANKS VERY MUCH FOR THE LETTER AND I WAS GLAD TO HEAR FROM AUSTRALIA AND GET A BULLETIN.  BEST GREETINGS.  FRIEDA LAWRENCE – see Rananim 1/1]

 

9/1/93 ditto:  In the course of writing my piece, “Letters of Introduction”, for the first issue of our DHLA Journal, Rananim, [1/1] I have bn re-reading [Witter] Bynner’s Journey with Genius to check up on what L’s habits might have been pre-Mexico [see next note*].  However, it is interesting also what B says about L’s writing regime or system.  He observed that L seemed to make up in his mind – ie, compose - vast sections of text, then just copy them down, as if by dictation [my emphasis].

 [This observation is one of the most important ever made about Lawrence, and will be pursued below (independent of Bynner’s acute observation) – see July 1994 et seq below.  It is, I now believe, one of the key aspects of a proper interpretation of Kangaroo, and how it came to be written. It is interesting to note, however, that it is very similar to the observation made by Aldous Huxley in the Introduction to his Letters – see 14/10/79 above. ]

[*In this article I speculated that Lawrence, as he did pre-Mexico and elsewhere, might have, in Ceylon and on board ships, sought letters of introduction to people in Sydney, people perhaps connected with the Friends.  I also mentioned the address that Lawrence copied into one of the notebooks he used in NSW, the postal address of the Kuo Min Tang (Chinese Nationalist Party) in Sydney (which had always been a puzzle).  I speculated further that he might have got this exotic address from D.G. Hum, who had strong Chinese connections.]     

 

14/1/93 ditto:  A few items of passing interest.  JC got a high distinction for her Friend thesis.  Hope it encourages her to go on. [alas, she didn’t]   R rang last night, bless him, for he had tracked down the lady on the Frieda postcard.  He’s coming on Sunday to reveal all.  Meanwhile S[andra] is getting on well with her Basin research & has tracked down the window of Walter Friend (the slippery fellow I, and later Ruffels, interviewed in Beach Road).  She is in a nursing home in Kirribilli (this from Marge McQueen, who keeps in touch with her).  Also saw Margaret Carnegie at the weekend, up from Melbourne.  She will see if Ernest Whiting is still on his twig.  She has bn helpful in the past.

[Margaret, a pillar of the Victorian Establishment, and an historian in her own right, had arranged contact for me with the Streets and Whites in Melbourne - see above, various]

 

20/1/93 ditto:  R to lunch.  He has tracked down the pc lady’s real name, which was Ilka Maria Forster (nt Foster – for, as in most things, F got it wrong).  More interestingly, nearby 11 Addison Rd (at 21 in fact) resided a man called Wright, who, says R, worked in Rosenthal’s office.  (Odd – Mrs Maley’s father was a Wright.  Maybe some confusion here.)  Later:  no link.

 

31/1/93 ditto:  [an entry, too long and repetitious to be fully repeated here, related to the “Letters of Introduction” article mentioned above and in which I remarked on the fact that the idea that such letters might be important was first raised in a note I had made, but filed separately, dated 20/1/90.  I also remarked on the fact that, in his letter to M[abel] D[odge] L[ulan] of 9/6/22, Lawrence uses the plural form (“I don’t present any letters of introduction…”), implying, perhaps, more than the one such letter we know about, the one from Mrs Jenkins that he didn’t present to the Bulletin’s Bert Toy (see above).]

 

9/2/93 ditto:  S[andra] today went to see Mrs (W.S.) Friend [Edna], widow of the Beach Road Friend who was so unFriendly (as JR put it) when we (separately) interviewed him all those years ago.  She is now 90ish and in a nursing home in Kirribilli.  She was a Wright, from Mosman, who married the none-too-dashing (according to her) Walter on his return from WW1 [see below about the Wrights’ role in all this].  She did not remember much of note.  She confirmed that they lived in Collaroy, near the beach [on Pittwater Road], for a long time, and also rented a house in Turramurra [yet another leafy, affluent North Shore suburb].  No memory of Scott, Hum or anyone else.  (She was very vague.)  Remembered EAF, who was deaf, but who, along with others of the Friend clan, came down from Galong to holiday at the Basin during school holidays & at Xmas.  No special memory of FBO.  (Maybe FBO isn’t the right Friend?  She doesn’t seem to have had much of a Thirroul existence.)

 

9/7/93 ditto:  The long delay since the last entry (February) does nt indicate a lack of activity – very much the contrary.  Our DHLA Society has been bumping along, & the first issue of our journal, Rananim, edited by John Lacey, is almost ready.  I, however, have my doubts about all this, even though I initiated it.  The Thirroul element, for which the whole thing was arranged, shows a distinct lack of enthusiasm.  (Ray Southall, our President, apart.)  And the first issue of the journal is almost all my stuff, leaving the impression that it is only a vehicle to promote my theories & interests.  My attitude is to now stand back, having given birth, and see if the thing has a momentum of its own.  If it has, it will go forward, if not, better it be still-born than succumb a few months after birth.  For much of the rest of the time I have bn having a fairly strong exchange with Ruffels.  It started with the “Letters of Introduction” article.  JR responded on 8/5/93 evincing some disagreement with my views.  This, on my part at least, led to further insights (see our various letters), which has now led me to begin composing an article for Rananim on “The Curious Incident of the Estate Agent in the Day”.  [see “The Barber of Thirroul” in Rananim 2/1*]  So the exchange has taken the research forward, considerably. 

[*This article in our second issue of Rananim made a number of points about Lawrence’s trip down to Thirroul and his time there.  The principal one was that whoever took Lawrence down to Thirroul must have known that Wyewurk had been recently vacated and was available for letting, and so was very familiar with Thirroul, and also must have known the estate agent, Mrs Callcott, very well for her to waive the usual preliminaries and allow the Lawrences to take possession of Wyewurk, immediately, uncleaned and unprepared.  It also made the point that there was something most unusual and curious about the fact, recorded in Tom Fitzgerald’s 1958 Nation piece (see above), that Frieda had allegedly sent a copy of her autobiographical Not I But the Wind to George Laughlin, the local barber who cut Lawrence’s beard in Thirroul.  I speculated that it was not to Laughlin that the book was sent, but rather to whoever in Thirroul had been so helpful to Lawrence and Frieda when they were there - almost certainly a Friend – whom Frieda might also have wanted to reassure that some secret that they shared had not been divulged by her.  I made it clear, however, that this surmise was rank speculation.]

 

c. 9/7/93 ditto:  To what extent has any work bn done on L’s use of reality &, more importantly, his methods for disguising or transforming real-life events & people into fiction?  I am beginning to suspect that disguise or camouflage isn’t really the right way to look at it.  What L does in K (from what we know of reality) is nt disguise, at least in the sense of changing things to make them, for example, less sensitive.  Rather he seems to be using some sort of automatic transformation technique.

 

 [Of all the things I have written, I believe this to be the most important – see entry 29/8/94, et seq, below.]

 

10/7/93 ditto:  The DHLR has written, out of the blue, asking if I have anything more re L in A[ustralia].  Well, yes, I have, actually.  So I have written back offering something on the DT.  I await their response. 

 

6/8/93 ditto:  The exchange with JR has continued.  His last letter, in response to mine about the similarity between Hinemoa and St Columb, fell on what at first seemed to be very stoney ground indeed, but which has subsequently borne some surprising fruit.  In essence, R[uffels] sd (see his l[etter] of 25/7/93) he did nt believe me about Hinemoa for three reasons:  1) Hum’s son knew nothing about Lawrence, Scott, etc.  2) Mrs Oatley was shown in the electoral rolls as being at Gordon until 1924.  3) Scott’s presence at 112 Wycombe Road was not definite for May 1922, as he was shown in the 1922 State roll as still living at Lane Cove Rd, Wahroonga.  He also sd that he did nt believe Hum met L at the wharf.  So I went to the State Library to re-check the electoral rolls myself.  Mrs Oatley was shown as living at Gordon in 1922, disappeared in the 1923 roll, and turned up at Hinemoa in 1924.  Scott  was listed at Wahroonga in ’21 and ’22 but at 112 Wycombe Rd in ’23.  On the face of things, that made it unlikely he was at 112 in May 1922, as JR had sd.  Yet I knew I was right, for I had Norm Dunn and the tub-top summer house.  The evidence of K had to be better than the electoral roll (as Lady Bracknell sd, “I have known some strange errors in that publication.”).  Then a thought struck me.  Where was Bert Toy in the 1923 roll?  Sure enough, he was at “Canberra”, 51 Murdoch St, while in the 1921 and ’22 rolls he was at Shell Cove Rd, Neutral Bay (ie, similar to Scott).  The significance here, of course, was that we know L carried to Sydney an envelope addressed to Toy at 51 Murdoch St.  So the 1923 roll that listed Scott as having moved from Wahroonga to 112 also had Toy moved from Shell Cove Rd to Murdoch St.  So Scott had to be at 112 when L arrived in Sydney, carrying that envelope addressed to Toy in Murdoch St.  [see Rananim 2/2 “The Evidence of the Rolls” for a full explication of this]  Also got a call from Paul Eggert wanting to be involved with our DHLA activities.  V. good.

 

31/8/93 ditto:  Got a card from Ruffels. V. friendly.  But no mention of my last l[etter] re Scott’s 1922 movements.  His silence on this probably means the end to the exchange, but that he still wants to keep in touch.  Fair enough.  Can’t have expected anything else, really.

 

1/9/93 ditto:  Yesty Fiona (F) rang.  No family memory of any Ceylon connection.  But she did volunteer a candidate for “the lady you’re looking for” [ie, Victoria Callcott].  This is a Friend aunt who died about 1970.  She lived at Bundanoon, but spent “lots of time” in Thirroul.  FF knew her as “Aunty Dawd” [for Dorothy].  She was unmarried and rather “fast” (“fast” in Friend parlance means “intellectual”).  She was the last survivor of “the brothers”, ie the seven-son family of AG Friend.  So she was probably the sister of our [Basin-based] Walter Friend.  (Friend family tree shows Dorothy May F, born 1888 – eldest of AGF’s brood.)

 

10/9/93 ditto:  Sent off today my DHLR article “Lawrence in Australia. The Case for the Darroch Thesis”, of which I am quite proud.  [this, essentially my response to Steele’s Meridian article, was “assessed” by Professor L.D. Clark (CUP editor of The Plumed Serpent), who wrote back, some time later, approvingly, but suggesting some minor changes;  we decided, however, to hold fire until I had the opportunity to read Steele’s much-delayed CUP edition of Kangaroo and saw what he had to say in this more “authoritative” format;  when I did, however, a more imperative article suggested itself, and which the DHLR later  published – see Rananim 9/1 for a slightly revised version of this DHLR 26 1.3 article, “Not the End of the Story” (and which will have to be slightly revised still further to take account of the unpublished Seltzer letters in volume 8 of the CUP Complete Letters – see below and separate section in this site, THE END);  as mentioned above, the “DHLR” article was eventually published as “Nothing to Sniff At” in Rananim 7-8/1]  It came out very well, and if I were to keel over tomorrow, at least I wd have left something useful behind. 

 

11/9/93 ditto:  Beverley [Burgmann] says she can’t be secretary of our DHLA society.  Andrew says Jenny Commons has also declined.  [Margaret Jones, happily, took up the burden]  AM is bringing some more student ferrets on Oct 14.

 

20/9/93 ditto:  DMF [“Dawdie” Friend] looks increasingly like VC.  Sent off long l[etter] to FF, seeking more info.  S[andra] will also see if Mrs [Walter] Friend can remember anything about DMF.  Have started a study of the methods L uses to disguise reality. 

 

21/9/93 ditto:  As I suspect I am poised to get confirmation that DMF is VC, I will put down the reasons that point in this direction.  She is a Friend, and I have long suspected that VC is a Friend.  She is recorded as a Harbour] L[ights] G[uild] “scattered” member [ie, not attached to any particular parish].  She is the eldest of a large family.  She has a 17-ish younger brother.  Her father has a house a short buggy-ride from Wyewurk.  He is a keen fisherman (his will specifically mentions his fishing rods).  Somewhat Bohemian (and thus probably interested in visiting authors).  Lives in the country.  Almost certainly a member of the local Anglican community in Thirroul, and thus in a position to know personally Mrs AF Callcott, who let Wyewurk & was the local church organist.  And we can place her at Collaroy.  Most importantly, FF says (perhaps reflecting family information or comment) she is “the lady you are looking for”.  So, I need only one more major correlation to convert probability into certainty.  (Even the negatives – her age [34] and her unmarried status might be accounted for via L’s reversal disguise technique.)

 

22/9/93 ditto:  Something quite amazing happened yesty.  I was lunching at the Union Club with [fellow member] Robert Douglass.  He hd written to me saying his father had heckled Jock Garden in the Domain.  It turns out that his father was actually heckling his uncle, for his father was Jock Garden’s brother!  Rob has promised to do a piece for Rananim on Jock and the Garden family.  [see “Was Willie Struthers My Uncle Jock?”, Rananim 2/1]  Yet another example of the inspired serendipity that has favoured my long quest.

 [and, one might add, further confirmation of what a small place Sydney can still be]

 

26/9/93 ditto:  Sally Rothwell rang on Friday with some interesting information.  When we were having lunch (with AM, etc) about two months ago [see above], I mentioned FF’s tip re DMF & asked Sally if she cd check with her aunt Rachel [sister of the Oatley brothers – ie, AAK was her mother and Scott her step-father – and who now lives at Moree] if she had any memory of DMF.  Sally rang with the results of her inquiries.  Only Friends she remembered were ones nearby (probably my father’s doctor’s “Armidale” Friends).  But she was most forthcoming about Scott, whom she hated.  (“He deprived us of our [Oatley] inheritance.”)   The Oatley family [ie, that of AAK’s first husband]  “owned Warwick Farm” [an area south-east of Sydney].  Sd her mother [AAK] “saved Scott from the clinky” over some bankruptcy threat.  But she did supply the information [mentioned above] that Scott’s first wife, JM, had worked at the Kaeppel-Edwards St Kilda hospital in Birtley Place [Elizabeth Bay].  The next piece of Sally’s info came from her own probing (bless her little ferrety heart).  Her mother’s sister [her mother, by the way, is a Lawrence, having married a second husband of that ilk] has a friend, Mrs Dorothy Farquahar, nee Gennel-Smith, who went to Abbotsleigh & later knew Jack Scott & who also holidayed at Thirroul.  But the real gold came with news of another family friend, Miss Marky (for Margaret) Vernon.  Her father knew Scott quite well [hence the Vernon papers in the ML with their file on the Old Guard and its North Shore nominal roll and dispositions].  Even more interestingly, however, Miss Vernon not only knew Enid Hum, but was “the girl-friend” [Sally’s description, not mine] of Sir Phillip Goldfinch [the executive head of the Old Guard and general manager of CSR]!!!  Obviously a lady whose closer acquaintance I will be endeavouring to make.

 

27/9/93 ditto:  DHLA meeting tonite at Balmain attended, hopefully, by Paul Eggert.  (It was, and he was very positive.  Some move afoot to link up all the DHL societies internationally, hence probably his interest.  But he will bring in the rest of academia, so this is good, & gives me the confidence to push ahead.)  1^st issue of Rananim almost finished.

 

5/10/93 ditto:  This morning I went to see Miss Markie Vernon at Warrawee [still another leafy, affluent North Shore suburb].  A most intriguing interview.  She v. bright, & wits intact.  She knew Enid Hum [daughter of DG Hum, who met L on the boat to Ceylon], but only by sight, unfortunately (“a small, round-faced girl, very plain”).  No other knowledge of the Hum family [which was the main reason I had come to see her].  Thought Enid, who was a year behind her at Abbotsleigh, mixed with two “other” German girls, Lottie Catts, nee Rueberg, and Gerda (or Ursula) Hotterhoff.  Will try to recall more.  No memories of Friends, the Basin or Thirroul.  Knew all about the Old Guard, however, mainly from her brother Phillip Vernon (who gave the Vernon papers to the Mitchell [she actually urged me to read the Vernon Papers, which, of course, I already had]).  Father involved, too.  [he was the Vernon who amassed the Vernon papers and retained them, against Old Guard instructions and practice]  She knew that what we call the Old Guard (ie, the Gillespie-Goldfinch organisation) had a predecessor, and that this was actually the Old Guard.  Sd General Macarthur-Onslow wrote to Goldfinch [around 1929-30] to ask him to be involved [and to, in fact, become its executive head].  She sd she had not read either Kangaroo or AM’s book [on the Old Guard].  Knew Scott, but not very well (or so she sd).  Knew of much plotting in 1930-32 and thereabouts.  Her brother kept a loaded gun under his pillow.  Cars were always coming and going outside their [North Shore] home.  Her brother, father and grandfather were all in the Light Horse or its city equivalent (NSW Lancers?)  Rosenthal was quite close to her father (they were both architects).  But here’s the really important thing – I felt she was keeping something back.  Her answers were guarded, and seemed to come from a deeper level of knowledge than the one she was exposing.  At one stage I was rabbiting on about Hum, Scott, Collaroy, Hinemoa, and how I now thought it had all come about, when she said, as I paused for breath, and quite softly:  “Are you sure?”  [Of all the verbiage that such a long line of contacts had uttered to me down through the years, these three little words were the most salutary.  They stopped me dead in my tracks.]  “Well, not really,” I replied, and, after a moment, went on.  But she knew something, something that she was not prepared to reveal.  Again, I was on the threshold of the truth, but the door was still closed to me, though I had been given a tiny glimpse of what I now knew was the light inside.  I promised to send her Kangaroo to read.

 [which I later did, but got nothing back but a polite thank-you note]

 

12/10/93 ditto:  Alas, no result from Miss Vernon, nor her friend, Mrs Mannix [Goldfinch’s sister, whose name and  address Miss Vernon had supplied me with].   However, she again conceded [during this second visit] that there was a pre-1930 Old Guard.  So, back to the drawing board.  Also:  got permission from the Botanic Gardens Trust to hold our inaugural DHLA meeting in the [pavilion in] the Palace Gardens [where Lawrence and Frieda strolled in May 1922].  1^st issue of Rananim also goes out today.  One of AM’s prospective new ferrets rang.  “I’m still skeptical,” she told me.  Thanks a lot, dear.

 [Not a particularly elevating day…however, the door of the vault was about to creak open a fraction.]

 

13/10/93 ditto:  Often have I wondered how all this wd end – with a bang, perhaps, or just trailing off, with all leads exhausted, & no final answer found.  The main hope has always been some sort of dramatic discovery – a lost file on Scott, mentioning Lawrence & Kangaroo, or some aged relation suddenly fessing up.  Well, just such an event seems to have occurred.  Andrew [Moore] rang yesty with the news that he had received a letter from the archivist at The Kings School, Parramatta.

 [To appreciate & understand what follows, it is necessary to know the The Kings School (TKS) is the oldest private school in NSW, and that many prominent families sent their sons there.  It became, especially in the earlier part of the 20^th century, the place where country families in particular dispatched their male children to be educated, not so much academically, but to acquire the social skills and contacts seen as necessary in children of the prevailing establishment.  In that regard, it might be seen to the Eton of Australia, or at least of NSW.  In particular, it was the custom of TKS fathers to send their sons there, to get the same socialising “experience” they themselves had been subjected to.]  

This gentleman [the archivist] had written, apparently, after Andrew’s book [The Secret Army and the Premier] had been remaindered, and he had acquired a copy.  In his letter to Andrew, the archivist said that one of the Friends, who went to TKS, had told him that Lawrence “had been given the key [to Wyewurk] by a Friend” (or words to that effect).  Now, this might be the key that unlocks the final door.  For reasons that I won’t go into here, I have concluded that someone who met L at Collaroy that first Sunday accompanied him down to Thirroul the next day (the Monday) and installed him & F in Wyewurk.  Who is this particular Friend, identified by the TKS archivist?   Walter?  Dawdie?  Andrew is sending me the [archivist’s] letter.  After the comparative disappointment of yesty’s entry re Markie Vernon, this breakthrough, if it is one, comes at a propitious moment.  We might just have some interesting news to announce at our Palace Garden’s meeting. 

 

13/10/93 ditto:  Well, events cd nt be more dramatic. Came home about 2pm to find a message on the answer-phone from a very excited AM.  He had spoken to the TKS archivist (whose name is Peter Yeend).  He [Yeend] hd gone back & checked his file, & hd now come up with this – & words to find the adequate adjective fail me – squillentious piece of information.  In May 1974 – note the date!  [ie, 18 months before we returned to start our Lawrence/Kangaroo research*] – Yeend went down to Bowral [of which Burradoo is a satellite] to interview an [TKS] old boy, N.H. Wright [Yeend was systematically interviewing TKS old boys for the school records].  In the course of a conversation about the Old Guard [and, remember, it was Yeend’s acquition of Andrew’s book on the Old Guard that had sparked all this] Mr Wright said words to the effect that, “This [the Old Guard] was the organisation that D.H. Lawrence portrays in Kangaroo.”  Moreover, Wright sd he had bn told this by none other than his brother-in-law, Walter Friend [the now deceased husband of Sandra’s Kirribilli confidant Edna Friend].  Well, well, well – so that dirty old dog Walter Friend knew all along!  This must be the key that now unlocks it all.  Ferrets scattering in all directions.  Exciting days – exciting hours!

[*which meant it could not have been contaminated by anything I, or anyone else for that matter, had written or said.  This was genuine stuff – the truth, in fact - that had somehow slipped out from behind the wall of silence.]

 

13/10/93 ditto:  A third entry for this day!  I rang F[iona] F[riend] & told her about the TKS information.  She was riveted & will bring it up tonite with her father, who is taking her to dinner for her birthday.  “So he did know after all,” was her comment [the “he” being her Uncle Walter].  I asked her who had told her that DMF might be “the person I’m looking for”.  She sd her father hd implied it.  They were discussing K & who Victoria Callcott might be and DMF’s name was mentioned (probably by FF), at which her mother sd:  “But it couldn’t have been Dawdie,” to which, says FF, her father replied, with what she described as “a twinkle in his eye”, “Oh yes it could have.”  Hmmm…

 

20/10/93 ditto:  Ruffels reports that the F[riend] wills indicate that DMF was left “Yugara”, the Friend “Bundanoon holiday house” in about 1940 by her mother, Lucy Edna Friend, nee Buckland.  NH Wright was Newcombe Henry Wright, a wool-broker, who in the 1930s lived in “Lightcliffe” in Edgecliff, Sydney.  Later he moved to “The Hut” in Boolwey [?] St, Bowral.  Mother was Vida  Louise W.  NHW went to TKS & was an artillery officer in WW1.  FWD Oatley (AAK’s late hunband) also went to TKS, as did Rosenthal’s son [sons?].  WSF at TKS 1898 and SGF also at TKS, but 2 years younger.  WSF [Walter Friend] enlisted in 1914.

 

20/10/93 ditto:  [normally, in this edited version of the research diaries, I combine entries made on the same day, but events were moving so quickly that it is better here to make them, as they were, separate entries]  Dispatched over 100 copies of [our first issue of] Rananim to the four corners of the globe.  Ruffels & several others rang up with warm approval.  Started writing my next Rananim piece, “The Curious Incident of the Estate Agent in the Day” (or, “The Barber of Thirroul”).  Quite pleased with it.  No news back from FF yet, but sent her a Rananim & a note asking her to a lunch here on 6/11.  Told her to look through the Friend bookshelves for a copy of Not I But the Wind *.

[* ie, for the copy sent by Frieda supposedly to the barber Laughlin but, as I speculated in the “Curious Incident” article, sent perhaps instead  to the Friends in Thirroul].

 

20/10/93 ditto:  Ferrets still investigating.  Yesty got [a copy of] the crucial Yeend letter from AM, plus notes of his conversations with same.  Confirmed what he told me by phone [see note 13/10/93 above], but provided some additional info.  One piece now [cf my “Curious Incident” research] appears v. significant.  I will quote the exact wording from AM’s letter to me:  [Yeend told AM]  “Also you will be aware that D.H. Lawrence stayed in a cottage provided by the Friend family who publicly denied they told Lawrence about the rural army…”.*  In one of AM’s follow-up calls, Yeend told him that somewhere in his file on the Friend family there was a reference saying that WSF [Walter Friend] gave L the key to Wyewurk.  Yeend also mentioned that Bill Friend (Walter’s son) still has in his possession “the Friend letter-books”.  AM is following up.

[*I am not sure what this refers to (but I think it is significant).  I certainly have not found, nor have AM or Ruffels (both of whose research skills are considerable and exhaustive) uncovered, any such public denial by the Friends.  My suspicion is that the denials were not public ones, but made rather to the people behind the Old Guard, possibly along the lines of  “well, it wasn’t us to told him”.  The other point of interest is the use of the term “the rural army”.  Again, I suspect that whoever gave Yeend this information (and it may have been NH Wright) was more familiar with the country element of the Old Guard, which as we have seen – see 12/5/76 above – had a problem with what to call itself.]

 

21/10/93 ditto:  V[ictoria] C[allcott] in the novel has a brother (Alfred John Wilmot, at one point in Lawrence’s confused dramatis personae) who goes down to [Thirroul] on mining business.   Could this be Walter Friend?  Did he have some sort of business connection with the South Coast?  Must get Sandra to ask Edna [Friend]. 

 

1/11/93 ditto:  Response to DHLA mailout fairly poor to date:  only 10 replies so far. Did a segment on the DHLA for SBS [a Sydney TV channel].  Went OK.  Good publicity for the society, assuming it goes to air.

 

7/11/93 ditto:  Our DHLA lunch yesty (Ruffels, M Jones, Steve O’Connor, Lacey, etc).  FF came, but not with the info I wanted.  However, I read her (& the other attendees) the Yeend l[etter to AM], & she was suitably impressed.  Couldn’t understand why Uncle Walter hd lied.  Her father, she sd, was reading K (for the first time, apparently).  Then she sd she hd “dreamt up” the Dawdie story [see 13/10/93 above] & that she wasn’t told by anyone in the family [ie, her father & mother]*  AM goes to TKS tomorrow to quiz Yeend.  Fingers crossed.  Had a DHL/Thirroul piece in the SMH on Saturday.  The pot is bubbling along.

[*Though I did not realise it at the time, this was the first indication that the Friends were beginning to get concerned about what was coming out.  FF could not have made that “twinkle-in-his-eye” story up.  She was, I now believe, acting under instructions, or warnings, to withdraw it.   In any case, from now on I did not get a single piece of extra information from any Friend source, except 93-year-old Edna at Kirribilli, who was probably past being lent on.]

 

10/11/93 ditto:  Driving (coincidentally) past the King’s School yesty I saw, about half-a-mile further on, a sign on the right.  It read:  WALLY FRIEND/LANDSCAPE GARDENING, and under this was the direction END OF LOYALTY ROAD.  Is this an omen?  No news from AM re his TKS visit last Monday.  Oh, well…  Ian Hicks [literary editor of the SMH] says he’s coming to our launch.  Good.

 

12/11/93 ditto:  AM reports nothing of note from TKS visit.  Walter F was a good footballer, & even played Rugby for A[ustralia], apparently.  AM will probe on, but I think the time has come to start injecting some L material into Peter Yeend, to fuel his interest.  Will invite him to our DHLA launch in the Botanic Gdns on the 21^st, to which Bob Carr [NSW Minister for Planning, and a former Bulletin colleague] says he hopes to come.  Still poor response to mailout [of membership forms].

 

19/11/93 ditto:  Got about 30 DHLA members.  So-so.  Bob [Carr] rang to cancel, but at least he rang personally.  I sd we wd make him an honorary member, & he purred.  But the big(ish) news is that S[andra] rang [Basin neighbour] Phyl Cope, who goes next week to see Edna F (93 now) at her new nursing home in Clifton Gdns [Mosman], & primed her with some questions to ask (she having the best chance of getting something).  As it is, she (PC) came up with some useful background info re the Friends.  She sd Edna had told her that she & Walter used to travel down to Thirroul regularly by motor-bike.  (Motor-bike!!!!! – cf K ch 1:  “…the neighbour [“Jack Callcott”]…must come backing out of the shed and shoving a motor-cycle down the path…”.)  Enda was born in January 1901, so she was 21 in 1922.  She sd “Grandma” Friend (probably widow of the original WSF) moved from Five Dock to Thirroul after [WSF?] died.  She sd the Friends often played poker at a house opposite Hinemoa [ie, on the other side of Florence St] owned by their friend, Trixie Oatley.  “Edna often speaks of Trixie,”  Phyl Cope said.  She sd she believed that “the Friend papers” had bn taken away by one of the Friends (Alan F) to Walgett [a NSW country town].  But mice hd got at them & most of them hd bn destroyed.  (Don’t tell me mice stand between me and immortality!)  Phyl sd the Friends were “a funny family…they don’t like to talk.”  Edna had bn “very forward & daring”.  Hmmm…

[I should pose a conundrum (or at least conjure up a mystery) here, just to liven things up, and retain reader interest.  The clue (well-hidden I warn you) to the truth of  what happened when L arrived in Sydney lies in the above entry.  So - what is the most significant item in the above list of information?  To help matters, I will repeat the items:

1.       She sd Edna had told her that she & Walter used to travel down to Thirroul regularly by motor-bike.

2.       Enda was born in January 1901, so she was 21 in 1922. 

3.       She sd “Grandma” Friend (probably widow of the original WSF) moved from Five Dock to Thirroul after [WSF?] died. 

4.       She sd the Friends often played poker at a house opposite Hinemoa [ie, on the other side of Florence St] owned by their friend, Trixie Oatley. 

5.       “Edna often speaks of Trixie,”  Phyl Cope said. 

6.       She sd she believed that “the Friend papers” had bn taken away by one of the Friends (Alan F) to Walgett [a NSW country town]. 

7.       But mice hd got at them & most of them hd bn destroyed. 

8.       Phyl sd the Friends were “a funny family…they don’t like to talk.” 

9.       Edna had bn “very forward & daring”. 

You will have to wait, however, another nine years, as I did, to find the correct answer.]

 

20/11/93 ditto:  Rang [Dr.] Jim Friend, FF’s father. [see entry 2/1/90 – it was this gentleman whom Professor Reimer contacted about validity of the DT]  He was quite co-operative, but evinced scepticism about any link between the Friend family & L, etc.  He hd nothing helpful to contribute to my quest.  However, he did say that the Friends quit Thirroul before 1956 (so Clarice Farrahar’s [Mrs Callcott’s daughter, I think] statement to Nehls that “the people who knew Lawrence have left the district” cd still hold true [indeed, it would give added significance to that item of information – see “The Barber of Thirroul” in Rananim 2/1 - and point even more strongly to the Friends].  JF gave me the address of Bill Friend [Walter’s son] at Neutral Bay.  Sd Alan Friend was ”very wealthy” & lived at Walgett [with the mice, presumably].  He sd he hd read K but cd see nothing in it to “implicate” the Friends.  But he was not at all hostile.  Did nt know much about Edna.  He seemed interested, but puzzled.  I sd I wd keep him informed of progress.  He sd that if DHL had bn involved with the Friends, then surely someone wd remember.  I cited the “Armidale Friends” as knowing something.  He did nt comment.

 

21/11/93 ditto:  Had our DHLA launch yesty in the Palace Gdns.  Went off very well, I thought.  No “celebrity” guests, but Ian Hicks from the SMH came with the rather surprising news that someone called White was “doing a book of DHL & secret armies”.  Well, well, I wish them luck.  (AM had never heard of him or her.)

 

16/12/93 ditto:  R[ob] Douglass has written his “Was Willie Struthers My Uncle Jock?” piece.  Hasn’t come up with any new info, but his article does support such an identification.  He has also come up with family snapshots, one of which, he says, has JG looking a bit like Abraham Lincoln (as L describes WS in K).

 

17/12/93 ditto:  Doing my “Curious Incident” piece for Rananim #2 [2/1] & remarked on the inconsistencies in K.  [I made an error here, about the Callcott-Trewhella family interconnections, which I later corrected in Rananim.  However, after making the mistake, I went on to say:]   L seems to be disguising some possibly identifying [ie, real] family relationships here.  Maybe it’s not [error].  What relationship then?  Maybe brother and sister (cf Walter and Dorothy F)?  But there seem other relationships involved.  Were the Friends related to someone else present?  Scott?  An Edwards or a Kaeppel?

 

21/12/93 ditto:  To the NSW Art Gallery for the Shead book launch [a book of Shead’s DH Lawrence paintings] & exhibition [of some of his works].  V. impressive.  Met Tom Thompson, Ruffels & the Davises, the last rather icy.  Well, bugger Joe D.  Garry [Shead] was very nice & signed a copy of his book for me, saying I was “his inspiration”.  Most satisfactory.  Later the ABC [TV] news had a segment on it.  Excellent publicity.  Is L having a renaissance?  Also: wrote to Douglass suggesting some stiffening of the identification [of his Uncle Jock as Willie Struthers], esp G[arden] being on a union committee charged with looking into starting a Labor newspaper.  Makes WS’s “I’m in a position to…” reference more meaningful.  Hope he agrees.

 

22/12/93 ditto:  Carl Oatley replied [to my letter asking about Trixie Oatley – see 19/11/93 above].  Had spoken to his aunt Rachel & she recalled that Trixie was a second cousin by marriage & lived in a house in Beach Road, two doors north of Florence Avenue.   That wd make it the place on the beach, I think, virtually opposite Hinemoa.  Anyway, the interesting point is that Trixie wd have bn very close to Mrs Oatley [AAK], for their situations were almost identical, both widows.  Trixie (Beatrice) even offered to adopt Rachel.  Rachel also recalls they [moved to] the Basin [from Gordon] in 1920, 18 months after F[rederick] D[udley] W[eedon]  [Oatley]’s death [from “a chill” caught, apparently, while swimming in the Basin].  Peter [Oatley] was at a prep[atory] school in Manly in 1926.  Trixie looks interesting.  Looks as if we can place Walter – and maybe DMF – at or near Hinemoa perhaps in 1922!  The trail warms by the day.

 

24/12/93 ditto:  A thought occurred to me yesty.  Maybe T[rixie] O[atley] was living at 31 or 33 (or whatever) [Beach Road] before AAK & family moved into Hinemoa.  Maybe it was her presence there that induced AAK to move to “the house next door”.  The two families wd have bn very close, both having lost a Oatley husband.

 

25/12/93 ditto:  Spoke to Dick Swift (80+) at the Basin Xmas party again last night.  He recalled TO quite well.  Thinks she lived at 31 Beach [Road], “Bustle Cottage”, but previously “Tero” (but she cd have bn at 33, “Reef View”*).  She was a widow with no children, & lived alone.  Very vivacious & “lots of fun”.  Entertained a lot.  Probably there in the early 1920s, because Dick recalls going through her place as a kid on the way to do some fishing.  He wd have bn about 10 at the time.  He recalled that when he first came down to the Basin there were only about 5 houses there, incl Hinemoa, the rest was unmade dirt tracks with bottle-brush and she-oaks.  Recalled Walter Friend knowing Trixie.  Walter was “rather forbidding & stern”, and came to Collaroy “from Parramatta”.

[Warwick Farm, actually]

 

25/12/93 ditto:  R[obert] D[ouglass] rang, agreeing to my suggestions re his Garden article.  (Incidentally, he’s discovered that Jock spent time at Harcourt, near Ballarat – cf:  Struthers “knocked about the goldfields”.)  [Ballarat was the center of the Victorian goldfields]  RD mentioned the ref[erence] in K to W[illie] S[truthers] having read Somers’ book on democracy (perhaps demonstrating Garden’s own wide reading).  But this reminded me of that fact that Siebenhaar (WS!) probably had [read Lawrence’s “Democracy” essay in the Hague publication mentioned above – see 9/4/86], so Struthers is probably an amalgam* of both Siebenhaar & Garden.  Indeed, the connection cd be closer, for both were IWW members or sympathisers, & must have known each other.  Maybe Siebenhaar even provided L with a letter of introduction to Garden.

[* this concept of an amalgam of character models or sources was to assume a far greater significance in a year or so]

 

29/12/93 ditto:  Have drafted a letter to Tim Curnow [of Curtis Brown, the authors’ agents] suggesting two books:  “The Silvery Freedom and the Horrible Paws/DH Lawrence in Australia” & “The Quest for Kangaroo”, the latter being the companion volume, the story of the research.  [ie, these notes.  In the event Tim recommended against the project, citing lack of general – and publisher - interest.]  I think I have to put this in motion now, even though the research isn’t finished.  For I think the answers are all but here, & in any case I can’t delay much beyond Steele’s Kangaroo, which (Tim tells me) is due in July.  I’ll have to wait of course, to see what he comes up with, but by then I should have most of it written.  Have just revised both Introductions & will start ch 2 – Perth – in the new year.  1994! – 20 years since Sandra & I returned [from the UK] on the Ocean Monarch & began the main research.  Long enough.

 

29/12/93 ditto:  Sandra is doing her Café Royal article for Rananim & found an interesting quote in a letter to C[atherine] Carswell (21/11/16) re W[oman] [in] L[ove].  In it L says that in WL “Halliday is Heseltine & the Pussum is a model called Puma, & they are taken from life.  Nobody else at all life-like.”  Of course, that’s rubbish.  There are a lot of other real-life models in the novel:  Ottoline, Katherine [Mansfield], Murry, etc.  But note the similarity of the names:  Pussum for Puma and Halliday for Heseltine.  L clearly can’t avoid using real-life departure points, leaving behind “the clue”. 
Also, note that he confesses to Puma and Heseltine, but not to the others.  Maybe that’s because they are “straight” steals, while the others are part-borrowings.  Perhaps this applies to K.  Maybe Callcott isn’t pure Scott, but an amalgam.  Ditto Trewhella.  Ditto Cooley.  Maybe Callcott mark 1 is WSF, the rest Scott.  Food for thought.  Also:  According to Sagar (DHL Handbook, citing Lawrence’s extensive reading) L had access earlier to knowledge about A.  He read Lawson [Henry, Australian poet] in 1912 and [Rolf] Bolderwood [eg, Robbery Under Arms] by 1916, plus all the other references [to Australia] in literature (Wilde, Dickens, etc).

[This note marked the end of one of the most productive years of the Lawrence research, second only perhaps to 1976, when I found out about Scott and the secret army, a slightly ahead of 1979, when I discovered the geographic link between Scott and Lawrence (at 112 Wycombe Road).  Yet a lot was still unknown.  Most particularly, the precise nature of the link between Lawrence and the Friends was still a mystery.  This question was to dominate the next few years of research, that and the matter of the endings of Kangaroo.]

 

5/1/94 ditto:  Phyl Cope put my questions to Enda F over Xmas.   Her replies:  She married Walter in December 1923 – 18 months after L was in Sydney.  (So her ignorance about what W was doing in 1922 may be explicable.)  They built a house on Collaroy Beach [ie, on Pittwater Road, facing Collaroy Beach] in 1924.  Dawdie [DMF] did not come to Collaroy (but neither did Walter’s mother – some hint of a family rift).  Trixie was at Warwick Farm when they got to know her, around 1924.  Walter’s father [AGF] had a warehouse in York St [city] & W started off working there with his many brothers.  Did accountancy.  Bought a factory (Marnes?) at Roseberry [a south Sydney semi-industrial precinct] (nuts & bolts).  He joined the war late [but see 20/10/93 above] – as a private.  Served in France.  His father paid his return via the U.S.  DMF spoke well, good education, did charitable work with her three maiden aunts, the “Misses Friends” [ie, Lucy May F and her two sisters].   Hmmm…  Will probe further.

 

6/1/94 ditto:  S[andra]’s [excellent] piece on the Café Royal incident [see Rananim 2/1] demonstrates how L used a real-life event & turned it into fiction.  Indeed, her main purpose is to make nonsense of L’s claim that only Halliday & Pussum “are taken from reality”.  Gudren is obviously Katherine Mansfield, & the whole scene is very close to the actuality we know from the other sources S cites (eg, Aldous Huxley’s letter to Ottoline).  But the piece also shows the techniques L uses to change & disguise reality.  It is as if L can’t avoid this compulsive echoing back to the original source of his borrowing.  It’s a phenomenon that’s almost the equivalent of a literary “pun”.  My point now is that the same techniques & compulsion no doubt apply to K.  But because people don’t know the original sources (Scott, Hum, etc) they don’t recognise the parallels.  We know from Huxley, etc, the truth about what happened at the Café Royal.  We have no equivalent “truth” source for K.  For example, Fred Wilmot cd be Walter Friend (the reversal technique – FW/WF), and so on.  It will be interesting to see if further research comes up with any more of these “echoes”.

 

8/1/94 ditto:  It is clear that I must go through L’s post-Australia works & see if there are any, hopefully revealing, borrowings from his time in Australia & Sydney – the use of names like Dorothy or Walter, etc.  Also must read Sea & Sardinia more closely to see earlier evidence of this diary technique.  (Yesty Tim Curnow rang.  Sending TSFAHP [“The Silvery Freedom and the Horrible Paws”] to Macmilllan.)

 

15/1/94 ditto:  Phyl Cope rang yesty.  Had put my list of further q[uestions] to Enda F.  Not much response (v. old & vague now).  No memory of Scott.  No memory of Walter at Neutral Bay or Mosman.  Met Walter at [the Friend mansion] Moreton, Five Dock, at a dance (post-1922).  Walter “never spoke of family matters”.  But a few crumbs of interest.  Dawdie was “the mother of the family” (ie, of the children of AGF).  (cf. VC in K.)  But DMF and WSF were “a different generation, almost”.  DMF very active in the Anglican church & worked with the Mission to the Seaman [whose ladies’ auxiliary was the Harbour Lights Guild].

 

15/1/94 ditto:  I’m almost afraid to write this, but as I think this should be a true record, I’ll go on.  Something is wrong with my picture of what happened.  Callcott is mostly Scott, ditto Cooley Rosenthal, and it now seems that Struthers is largely Garden.  DMF is not all of VC, but surely some.  The rest of her might be Lillian Hum or someone else:  a neighbour in Thirroul even.  But Hum cannot be the full explanation for Jaz [Trewhella].  Nor can Hum provide the link with Scott.  I am beginning to think  that someone else is involved.  The Jaz exchanges imply someone connected with secret armies, & Hum is simply not that sort of person.  And another thing, Sandra’s Café Royal research implies that Hum, who resembles Trewhella so clearly, should be more heavily disguised.  The fact that he is so obviously Jaz means that his involvement with secret armies, Scott, etc. must be providing a cover for someone else – the “real” Jaz, if you like.  The same applies, perhaps, to Scott. [and that’s the real point here]  Callcott is so obviously, at least once the book gets going, the physical shell (& more – his interests & characteristics) of Scott, that he too must be a cover for someone else.  There is something awry or missing.  And there is Markie Vernon’s worrying remark:  “Are you sure?”  No, I’m not, & I’m getting less certain by the day.  W[alter] F[riend] doesn’t fit either.  I must go back & retrace my steps.  I’ve taken a wrong turning somewhere.  But I’ll get to the bottom of this, or perish in the process.  Also:  Re disguise techniques & “echoes” – Reggie Turner became Algy Constable in W[omen] [in] L[ove]!

 

23/1/94 ditto:  Checking back through my notebooks to see why I had not recorded my visit to Walter Friend, just before I left for London in 1979.  In doing so, I came across a note dated 9/8/79 (KPR) in which I speculated that the Mosman Bay meeting [between Somers, Callcott and Jaz] cd nt, as I had assumed, be Scott taking L to meet [ostensibly] Jaz [but perhaps Rosenthal], but someone taking L to meet Scott (hence Mosman Bay, just down the hill from 112 Wycombe).  And, of course, this must be correct.  It is all but confirmed by the references to “Jaz” as “living by himself”  & of women liking him.  It is made all but certain by the following reference:  “But do the women like him?” [Somers asks] “Rose does,” [replies “Callcott], “I believe he’d make any woman like him…[he’s got] a sly sort of touch-the-harp-gently [technique], that’s what they like on the quiet.”  Which, of course, also implies – strongly – that Rose Trewhella [the owner of the house at the end of the sandy street in what is certainly Collaroy Basin] is Andree Adelaide Oatley [nee Kaeppel, and soon to be Mrs WJR Scott, Rachel’s womanising step-father].

[And, remember, Lawrence is talking about “Jaz” here, not “Callcott”.]

 

23/1/94 ditto:  It was in March 1980, not February 1979 [see note c.8/2/79 above], that, on a trip back to Sydney from London, I went up to Collaroy to see the [Walter] Friends [in Beach Road].  And I had left my main current notebook back in the UK, & thus did not record what at the time seemed an abortive meeting.  But see my l[etter] to “Mr Friend” dated 8/4/80:  “…while I was in Sydney recently I sought out your brother…”.  Why did I do this?  Which brother?  Did WF give me his address?  He must have.  Why?  (This particular Friend was in the country – northern NSW - I seem to remember.) 

 

25/1/94 ditto:  One way of finding or identifying the “missing” people in K is to go through K & list the components of each character & try to work out from whom they were borrowed.  If we have a lot “left over”, then we have evidence of that missing person or persons.

[I did this, and the character elements are listed at the back of this second notebook.  However, they revealed nothing of much import.]

 

26/1/94 ditto:  The image, propagated by many (incl [Joe] Davis), of L sitting passively at Wyewurk dreaming up the contents & characters of K is nonsensical.  There is far too much Sydney, etc, reality, fact, etc, in the novel for that to be the case.  The more accurate image is of L darting hither & yon, garnering ingredients for his novel.  He went to the library, to Dymocks, to the KMT [Kuo Min Tang], to Trades Hall, etc, etc.  He was a busy little bee, buzzing all over Sydney & Thirroul in search of material to supplement his daily doings & introspective musings.  Also:  While analysing ch 1 (I plan to do a chapter a day), I came across L’s reference to Sussex Street (“he wandered disconsolately around Sydney…”) which he likened to Covent Garden in London, implying the Haymarket end [where Sydney’s markets were].  Why did L go to that particular and not-very-salubrious part of Sydney on his first day in NSW?  Maybe because that was precisely where the Trades Hall was, where Jock Garden reigned.  Did he have a letter from Siebenhaar, introducing him – and wanted to find out where it was, so that he cd go there later?  Could be.

 

1/2/94 ditto:  I am beginning to realise that the roots of what happened to L in A lie further back, in 1920-21, when he fled England for Italy.  During this period L’s art was developing, & going in a new direction (the previous era ending with Women in Love).  He seems to have been working out a new technique.  But here’s the crucial q[uestion].  There are two possibilities.  Either: 1, he was using what incidentally happened to him as material for his fiction, or, 2, he was deliberately looking for & seeking out new experiences (eg, Sea and Sardinia).  There is always some of the first, but how much is there of the second?  Much of his “fiction” (eg A[arons R[od]) is already turning autobiographical, & the difference between the two, fact & fiction, is beginning to blur (eg Sea and Sardinia).  His introduction to The Memoirs of the Foreign Legion [by Maurice Magnus] has the same authorial tone as K.  And there is something very odd about that M[aurice] M[agnus] business, as Anthony Burgess also picked up.  L wrote to MM inviting himself to Monte Casino.  Why?  And why did he pursue the little fellow?  Was it to gain material for a possible work of fiction?  I am beginning to think so.

[In March 1994 I went over to Perth to take up a job as publisher of some mining magazines, and Sandra joined me soon afterwards.  Professionally, the period in Western Australia was less than an unmitigated triumph.  Western Australians do not like “people from the east”, or, as one Westralian put it, “t’othersiders”, coming over to take up jobs that locals could fill just as easily, and I was soon out of work.  However, having leased a (lovely) cottage in Cottesloe, one of Perth’s nicest beachside suburbs, we remained there till October, during which time, naturally, we did a lot of research on Lawrence’s period in Western Australia.  So fruitful was this research – and how pleasant was the stay sans job – that we now regard that interlude as one of our most pleasant memories. Its productiveness cannot be over-estimated, and included the first Yeend letters, the correspondence with LD Clark over the endings of Kangaroo, the solving of the mystery of the Old Dairy, the development of “the Darroch shift”, finding out about Rosenthal’s WA background, and, most significantly, the uncovering of the true identity of Victoria Callcott.  All this in a scant three months.]

 

4/5/94 Perth:  According to Ruffels, there is a house in Ocean St, Narrabeen, called Wyewurk!  [This shows you how careful you have to be with such research, and be wary of “jumping to conclusions”.  Ruffels, bless his little ferrety heart, investigated this.  It turned out that  the owner of the house hd read K & borrowed the name.]  Meanwhile some praise is beginning to come my way, or recognition at least.  On Monday came a letter from Dennis Jackson of the DHLR accepting the piece I sent last year, “The Case for the Darroch Thesis”.  Enclosed with it was a letter from the “reader” to whom the article hd bn sent for appraisal.  This turned out to be LD Clark, the eminent Lawrence scholar (The Minoan Distance, The Dark Body of Night, and the CUP editor of The Plumed Serpent).  His assessment  was an enthusiastic recommendation to publish my piece (“unreservedly”).  He even praised my writing!  Then, next mail,  came the “Simon Leys” article from the New York Review of Books, “Lawrence of Australia”.  This pretty much pedalled my line, with attribution.  A good 24 hours, & I cd nt have asked for more, with Steele’s K about to hit the bookshops.

 [I can’t recall know who sent me the Leys article.  Simon Leys is the nom de plume of the prominent Australian scholar, Pierre Ryckmans.  This piece sparked a response from my old friend Humphrey McQueen (see 21/8/76 & below).  In the event, the DHLR did not publish my “Case for the DT” piece.  Within weeks, Bruce Steele’s CUP edition of Kangaroo was published, and the Lawrence world began to turn against me.]

 

26/5/94 ditto:  Quite a bit of L work.  Was going through my files [I had brought most of my Lawrence research materials over from Sydney, intending to stay some time]  & came across the [1919 Brisbane] Red Flag & [1921 Sydney] riots file.  They were in a bit of a mess, so I started to tidy them up.  Reading them, I decided to try to write a piece on the Row in Town & use it for our first DHL seminar, “In the Footsteps of Lawrence”, which will be held at [our house in] Collaroy on our brief return to Sydney in a few weeks.  In doing so I realised that Struthers’ speech before the riot is pure IWW rhetoric.  I checked in Ian Turner’s Is Sydney Burning? [the standard work in the IWW in Australia] & this was pretty much confirmed.  Then I read my notes & cuttings on the background to the 1921 May Day incident & the disturbances this led to.  The start of it all was a meeting held in the Sydney Town Hall on May 1 to mark the death of Percy Brookfield, the Labor MP who was shot on Rivirton [near Broken Hill in western NSW] railway station some weeks earlier [by a deranged Turk].  That May 1 Town Hall meeting, at which Garden spoke, has according to the cuttings, the precedent of Willie Struthers’ speech in the Row In Town.  And the riot that occurred in the Domain a week later had all the ingredients of the subsequent fictional fracas in K.  Here are all the elements that go to make up “The Row in Town” chapter, including the shooting & death of Cooley (Brookfield was shot in the stomach – his “marsupial pouch” - and succumbed some time later.)

 

26/5/94 Perth:  The Weekend Australian republished Ryckman’s “Lawrence of Australia” article.   A nasty riposte by Humphrey McQueen.  So I wrote to H reminding him of our “collaboration” back in 1976-77, and enclosed a copy of my DHLR “Case for the DT” article, hoping – assuming – it wd revise his anti-position.  He replied very smugly, questioning my Scott deductions & criticising my writing (!) style.  H[umphery]!  Dear, dear, dear.

 

26/5/94 Perth:  I turn the page [of my notebook] & write the following with conflicting emotions.  H[umphrey] sd in his letter [to me, see above] that I had cried “proof” so often in the past.  Yet that is nt true – only once, really, & that was when I discovered 112 Wycombe Road, & Norm Dunn (& by that I hd only meant proof or confirmation of the DT).  And I have nt “discovered proof” yet.  But now I do have something, something (I dare to say) as significant as anything I have written in these pages before.  Not a smoking gun, but a whiff of gun-powder.  I wrote some time back to Peter Yeend, the King’s School archivist (see entry 13/10/93 and also 23/1/94).  He hd told AM that NH Wright, Walter Friend’s bro-in-law, hd told him that W[alter] hd confessed [to Wright] that he hd bn a member of the Old Guard & sd that L had written a novel about the predecessor of the OG.  AM hd also sd that PY had intimated that W[alter] hd bn involved in “giving the keys of Wyewurk to L”.  So I wrote to PY asking him if he wd put all this down, as it wd come best from him personally.  Yesty he replied, & I opened his letter at about 6pm, when I returned from work.  At first the letter was a disappointment.  He denied having told AM that WF hd given the keys of Wyewurk to Lawrence.  “I know nothing of Lawrence & the rental until Dr Moore told me.”  Even worse, he sd “the Friend family” hd deposited more material at the school, but that this was on the understanding that the material cd nt be used for any research  “outside research on TKS matters done with the authority of the Headmaster”.  This “blanket arrangement” also applied to previous material deposited, Yeend sd.  So hd the Friend family become aware of what Andrew had written in Rananim 2/1?  [Andrew Moore had written a short piece on “What Walter Knew”, mentioning his contact with Peter Yeend]  In any case it was nt good news.  Then came some gentle hints (see his letter) that I might be on the wrong track in my “Footsteps” article [in Rananim 2/2 – I must have sent him a copy of the text, in which I tried to reconstruct Lawrence’s movements in Sydney in May 1922]  (cf. also what Markie Vernon sd, see 5/10/93).  Did it have to be Walter Friend? he asked, almost rhetorically, adding:  “His father and several brothers have equal claim.”  Then came these words:  “Now my predicament is that as Archivist I cannot allow access to the Friend material any more, yet I do hold a strong piece of evidence which your thesis needs.”  He went on to imply that I was wrong about Florence Avenue – or at least that I shld nt be limiting my search to it.  “I’d be more interested in Beach Road,” he sd.  “A check on the owners of cottages there might be very productive.”  Well, that’s a pretty interesting letter.  Clearly I’ll follow it up. But it does, even in this form, confirm that I am on the right track at Collaroy.  Thank God for that.

 

31/5/94 Perth:  Our “In the Footsteps of Lawrence” seminar went off reasonably well on Sunday – 20 attendees, & no obvious flagging.  (AM did a good paper on Wyewurk [see Rananim 3/1].)  My TKS revelation [of Yeend’s letter, cited above] hd the desired effect, which was to hit back at the “sceptics”, via Eggert (who attended).  He sd Steele in his [CUP] edition of K hd taken the “not proven” line.  Sandra went to see Dick Swift again & asked, as Yeend hd enjoined us, who lived in Beach Road in 1922 (Dick, who must be in his 90s, has bn here since 1917).  A list has bn duly made, & only two of interest emerge.  One is W.J. Treloar (cf. WJ Trewhella) and the other a Bob Friend, who Dick recalls “coming down from the country” to the Basin in the early 1920s.  This is, of course, Robert Moreton Friend, Walter’s next younger brother.  I have written a pleading letter to Fiona F[riend] & await a reply.

 

12/6/94 ditto:  Letters to Peter Yeend & FF [see 29/8/94 below] went off last week.  The hooks are in the water.   We shld soon get some bites.  In the meantime, I have gone back over my Collaroy research, focusing (naturally) on Beach Road.  But going over it has, alas, revealed nothing fresh, nothing apparently overlooked.  The houses & their inhabitants stand there, like ghosts, waiting to come to life.  I peer at & around them, but can see nothing.  Yet, I know, lurking in the half-light is someone, something, somewhere.  What a fascinating prospect.  Within perhaps days, I will know more, revealing a new insight, or illuminating an old, discarded one.  I am now constructing a detailed map of the “suspicious parts” of the street, mainly the houses on either side of Florence Avenue.

 

17/6/94 ditto:  A really curious day to be writing such an entry.  Today, this afternoon, I will probably be sacked, or otherwise got rid of, from what is almost certainly (at 54) my last job in journalism:  as publisher of my little group of mining newsletters.  A sad enough occasion in anyone’s life.  Yet also today I received a letter – from Peter Yeend – that almost certainly spells the end to all this, the answer to my long, 20-year quest.  In it (see full text) Yeend reveals some crucial clues.  The Friend involved is Robert Moreton Friend.  The Beach Road house was rented, not bought.  It was occupied (presumably) in May 1922 by RMF.  But here’s the crucial piece of information.  NH Wright, bro-in-law of Walter Friend, was married in 1920 to a lady whose name was Victoria (nee Saclier)!!!!  And, of course, the Wrights lived at Cremorne, just above Mosman Bay.  That’s it!!!!  (PY is trying to convince the Friend family to release the precious documentation.)

[unfortunately it was not “it”]

 

27/6/94 ditto:  Yeend replied re Mrs Wright.  Alas, not Victoria Saclier, but Vida.  Pity.  Father was LF Saclier, a public servant (the only Saclier in Sydney, according to Ruffels).  He says they lived in Redan Street, Mosman (so right area).  Married “Wilbur” Wright, woolbroker, in March 1920 & they lived in Wallaroy Rd, Double Bay [inner eastern suburb, next to Edgecliff].  The name Saclier rang a bell with R.  A Saclier is in charge of the CSR [Colonial Sugar Refining company] archives.  AM confirmed this.  He’s also archivist at ANU [Australian National University in Canberra].  Both are hot on the scent, & Yeend says he’ll do his best to help.  Meanwhile H[umphry] McQ[ueen] wrote a stinging article in [ABC magazine] 24 Hours (“Kangaroo Revisited”).  He was nt too complimentary about me, but worse about Ryckmans & the procrastinating Steele.  I’m drafting a riposte.

 

30/6/94 ditto:  Nothing v. new.  Wrights lived at 17 Shell Cove Rd (ie, on Cremorne peninsular, overlooking Shell Cove).  Saclier parents Fanny & Louis.

 

2/7/94 ditto:  Reading an MA thesis by one of Steele’s students.  [I do not recall who sent it to me]  Mostly tosh.  Main theme:  K is about “fire & cold”, & the key chapter is “Volcanic Evidence”.  [well, he could have been warm here – see note 9/11/91 above]  But he did have a good point about R[obert] L[ouis] S[tevenson] & Lloyd Osborne, co-authors of RLS’s The Wreckers.  Lloyd Osborne was probably on Capri in 1921, & so cd have met L.   [RLS’s novel has some parallels with Kangaroo, having a South Coast setting and actually opening, as K does, in Macquarie Street]   However, he also focused on the Mosman Bay meeting, & this caused me to do likewise.  Clearly L went there to meet Scott.  The conversation with “Jaz” is obviously with Scott.  And he is clearly sounding L out about his politics, etc:  “What do you think of this Irish business?”  “And what about the British Empire?”  “What about socialism then?”  All prime KEA concerns.  The holograph MS text – the original or first version L wrote in Thirroul - then goes on:  “And supposing the bulk of the people won’t have capital kept alive any more?”  [and Somers replies:]  “Then, as in war-time, as in cases since the world began, you’ve got to substitute an absolute one-man rule, quick, a sort of military rule and martial law…you’ve got to have [military rule] at the back of you.  Then you can carry through change.”  No wonder Scott went straight to Rosenthal & sd, no doubt, “I’ve just seen a chap you must meet.”

 

8/7/94 ditto:  Michael Saclier (ANU/CSR archivist) has replied to AM re Vida Wright, nee Saclier.   Nothing.  A Mosman connection, & that is all. 

 

8/7/94 ditto:  Have done for Rananim a piece [“The Evidence of the Letters”, 2/3] about L’s repeated “I want to be alone” & “No one knows me” statements, showing that what L actually meant by this was that he did not want anyone to know he was an author & perhaps writing something about them.  Also gave me a chance to answer Ellis’s DHLR piece.  Sent Hump[hrey McQueen] piece to 24 Hours.  Ryckmans wrote a friendly letter.  Played cicerone to visiting Japanese professor [Yoshi Niwa] (he’s translated K into Japanese).  New editor of DHLR (Chuck Rossman?) also wrote appreciatively.

 

28/7/94 ditto:  A great deal has happened since my last entry, though nothing individually significant enough to warrant a substantive entry by itself (still waiting for word from Yeend & FF).  Did an article for Rananim on “The Evidence of the Letters” [see above].  But the major development has been a burst of research by Sandra & myself on L in WA.  I won’t go into it all now, for Sandra is planning to write a book on the subject.  However, one point is worth noting here.  L definitely arrived intending to stay for some time (for he told a reporter who boarded the boat before it docked that that was his intention).  Yet within hours of his disembarking he had changed his mind & instead decided to catch the first available boat to Sydney.  Almost certainly this was because he opened a letter from Sydney that had bn waiting for him & whose content made him change his plans.  Looking at Mollie Skinner’s MS for Eve in the Land of Nod, which was edited by Lawrence.  Deserves to be published, for it shows how L corrected someone else’s work.  Also found an “undiscovered” TS, miscatalogued, in the otherwise excellent Battye Library here.  However, I begged them to take more care of their cache of Lawrence letters to Mollie Skinner.  They are just available to anyone, the originals!  I advised them to put them under lock & key & only let bona fide scholars touch them.  I hope they take my advice.

 

8/8/94 ditto:  Two very interesting things have come out of this current spate of research.  I have bn going through the cancelled [crossed out] parts in the holograph, and something quite odd is emerging.  There is, I have observed, a subtle & totally unexpected pattern in them.  Surprisingly, the more he re-writes, the closer (as a rule) he reverts to the original reality (when one wd expect the exact opposite).  I glanced at the several versions of Lady Chatterley, & there’s a similar pattern there, I think.  This cd be a general rule.   By a happy coincidence, I have also been reading back through my (complete) run of DHLRs, & came across a 1968 article in which a Professor Elsie Adams remarked on the similarity between G[eorge] B[enard] S[haws] Cashel Byron’s Profession and Lady Chatterley.  She cited a similar quote from both books where the houses of both heroines are described.  Both Shaw and L use the phrase [that the house] was on an eminence in the park.  However, L used this “steal” only in the 3^rd version.  In the 1^st version, no such eminence is mentioned.  In the second, it is called an “elevation”.  Only in the third does it become, as in the original, an “eminence”.  This appears to be confirmation of my proposed new rule.  But it is the second find, which comes from reading the three versions of Lady C, that is of real significance.  In the second LCL a character called Jack Strangeways appears.  It looks as if he is based on Jack Scott (as I had suspected might happen).  The detail (on p 54 of my edition of John Thomas and Lady Jane) is outlined separately in my extra notes. 

[I go into greater detail re this and associated matters in Rananim 5/3, “A Ruse by any Other Name”, the third part of my “Mining Lawrence’s Nomenclature” series.]

 

8/8/94 ditto:  I shld record that we drove the other day up to Darlington* & tracked down the cottage occupied by Mollie Skinner’s mother & brother.  We can now show that L [when he went for his scary walk in the bush] went up the hill behind Leithdale [Mollie’s house, where the Lawrences stayed], then down to the brook, a track that is still partly there.

 [*Lawrence used the name Darlington in the second version of LCL.]

 

15/8/94 ditto:  (Definitely a right-hand-page entry.)  Something interesting has happened.  It looks as if I may have discovered a major clue.  (Though I shld have thought of it earlier.)  As my 8/8 previous entry indicated, I have bn pursuing a line of research that started with my decision – pending news of the Friend front – to go through the entire run of DHLRs & extract anything about K, etc (partly for information, partly as a reflection of knowledge on the matter over a period now spanning over 25 years).  This line led me to Prof Adams’ article on LCL & CBP.  This in turn led to the discovery of Jack Strangeways in LCL #2.  Yesty I read Derek Britton’s 1988 book on The Making of [LCL], which actually has a chapter on Jack Strangeways.  Britton identified JS as JMM [John Middleton Murry].  But, of course, he knew nothing of Jack Scott.  (And JMM doesn’t really fit, for he was not noteably a fascist, & I don’t think he wd have machine-gunned the proletariat [as Jack Strangeways urges in LCL #2].)  But Britton also mentioned The Virgin & The Gipsy, which preceded LCL & largely pre-figured it.  It features a military figure, too.  He is Major Charles Eastwood.  We know where the name Eastwood comes from.  But where did L get Major Charles?  Well, in the novelette (unpublished in Lawrence’s time) he is described as “surely Danish”.  Does this ring a bell?  Cooley in K is described as “surely Jewish”.  Moreover, [Major-General Charles] Rosenthal was Danish (though he looked Jewish).  But leaving that aspect aside for the moment, this led me on to think what L might be doing, generally, when he needs the names of characters (& places, for that matter). I think he has some mental equivalent of a rag-bag, filled with names & other ingredients he needs for his fiction.  This bag is stuffed with names he has come across, from his childhood in Eastwood, down to his present day.  If I am right (and I think I am), then that bag wd contain names like Scott, Rosenthal, Hum, Friend, etc, and, more importantly, their characteristics, both appearance-wise & behaviour-wise.   And in subsequent works these patchwork “bits & pieces” wd be pulled out, when necessary, to do their fictional duty.  (I must catch up on my L reading, for a Robert Moreton Friend, or parts of him, might be lying there, out in the oeuvre somewhere.)

 

23/8/94 ditto:  (Our day in court!)  Good things are emerging from my analysis of how & where L obtained his character names & fictional places.  (See later exposition on this.)  Already some interesting patterns are coming forward.  I have identified 8 different “shift” mechanisms, so far.  [for a full “exposition” on what I have immodestly labeled, temporarily, “the Darroch shift”, see the “Mining Lawrence’s Nomenclature” series in Rananims 5/1, 5/2, 5/3]  Nevertheless, the main object of all this is to find evidence in his later works of his Australian period & experience.  Already we have Jack Strangeways & probably Major Charles Eastwood.  Now, from the other end, as it were, another “clue” emerges.  I discovered yesty (reading Holderness’s list of characters in L’s works) that L had used the name “Struthers” before – in A[arons] R[od].  So I looked it up & found he is an artist-Bohemian in London (no first name) supposedly based on Augustus John.  So what is the connection with K?  Well, it’s a complicated chain of association, but it fits in with what is emerging as typical L “shifts”.  The basic question is:  what is the link between the Struthers in AR and the Struthers in K?  In AR Struthers meets Lilly etc at the opera…at Covent Garden…[Jock Garden]…Trades Hall…St Martin’s Lane…[later they go to the Adelphi…there Jim Cunningham talks about]…[Scottish miners’ leader] Robert Smillie & Bolshivism.  Now, I wd not place any firm credence is this “chain of association”.  But it’s possible, & I am becoming convinced that something like this went on in L’s creative processes.

 

29/8/94 ditto:  DHL research progressing & expanding.  I have bn reading AR (again).  In AR Aaron visits Sir William Franks in “late September”.  Actually it was L visiting Sir W Becker in late November – a “shift” or two months.  Then, a few paragraphs later, L makes the visit indeed November.  Now, this is very similar to “reversions to reality” found in K.  First it’s Murdoch Street, then Road (for the reality is Wycombe Road).  First St Columb is opposite a lagoon, then a few paragraphs later it is the correct sea.   This fits in with the LCL “shifts”, mentioned above (elevation-eminence).   Yet the shift phenomenon cd have an greater significance, for it might be used to “translate” L’s fiction, esp K.  When you see L making such “errors”, then there is a very good chance the second manifestation is the truth, or closer to it, at least. 

[Hence why I did not find copious alterations or “backward revisions” when I examined the holograph MS in the British Museum library back in 1977.  Or, rather, this points to part of the reason, for it is more complex than that, as we shall see when we start to get an inkling of how Lawrence actually composed his novels – see Rananim 6/2, “Down in the Forest, Something Stirred”.]

 

29/8/94 ditto:  I was in the middle of writing the [here much truncated] note [above], when the phone rang.  It was FF, calling from Sydney.  She sd she hd some news for me.  You might imagine how my heart leapt.  [In my last letter to her I hd proposed a “deal” with the Friend family, whereby in exchange for access to the material they had proscribed, I wd undertake to treat their involvement with Lawrence, secret armies, etc, with “sensitivity”, and to ensure their point of view was properly advanced.]  I even thought of alerting Sandra, who was sunning herself on the verandah with Tribly, our cat, so that they might be present to witness the moment of ultimate revelation.  As FF spoke, my expectations rose even higher.  She sd she had some good news for me.  (What other good news cd she have than the word of co-operation I wanted to hear from the Friend family bunker?)  But it was nothing of the sort!  She sd her parents hd just sold the family house (somewhere in Pymble, I think [yes, another leafy, affluent NS suburb] - it must have been almost a palace, for the buyer was Ken Cowley, of News Ltd).  In cleaning it out, they had found, in what they called “the cat’s cupboard”, a file of papers.  (This is bizarre!)  And amongst them was a single sheet of paper with some form of comment, by Walter Friend, that – wait for it – his brother Ernest Adrian Friend had been a member of a secret army!  Surprise, surprise!  (Apparently his role was to help protect Harden, a NSW country town.)  It came as a severe shock to FF’s parents.  Uncle Ernest, a secret soldier.  Fancy that.  Well, they never.

 

29/8/94 ditto:  (Clearly a big day in Lawrence research – this being the third entry for the day, and the most important one.)  Today, this afternoon, we, or rather Sandra, solved perhaps the last outstanding mystery (except the exact nature of the Friend connection, of course).  Yet, & this is very peculiar, the solution – the identity of Victoria Callcott – does not lie in the Friend family, at least not on the surface.  For it turns out that VC is, in large part, none other than Maudie Cohen, wife of Eustace Cohen, the couple that befriended fellow guests L&F at Mollie Skinner’s guest-house-cum-covalescent-home, Leithdale, when L was in WA in early May, 1922.  [for a full account of this matter, see Sandra’s “Take Me to your Liedertafel” in Rananim 6/2]   (And it is a sobering thought that we wd not have had any chance of uncovering this had we not, by accident almost, come to this Godforsaken place [WA].)  So why Maudie?  Well, she’s recently married (like VC) [in fact the young couple were on their honeymoon];  her mother (a Brazier) came from Somerset (like VC);  her father was a surveyor who had given up surveying and taken up dairy farming on the South Coast (of WA, not NSW, as everyone had assumed);  and she was the eldest of a large family.  (And her father came from Victoria [like VC]!)  There is no question now where L got the family & other details he invests VC with.  Nor is there much doubt they are grafted on to someone in NSW & who is the real VC, and who we now have to track down.  However, we can at last conjure up a mind’s-eye picture of Lawrence, sitting or standing on the wide verandah of Leithdale with Maudie Cohen, chatting about her family, while she waits anxiously for hubby Eustace return from Perth, perhaps on his motor-cycle.  A very good day’s work, all in all.

 [Sandra had got most of  this from Mary Brazier, via a librarian at the Battye, Perth being an even smaller place than Sydney.]

 

29/8/94 ditto:  So how does this discovery fit in with the Darroch shift?  Here we will have a golden opportunity, when we discover whom Maudie is the cover for, to test it out.  Perhaps it will be Maudie-Dawdie.  (And Cohen-Callcott?)  We shall see. 

 

2/9/94 ditto:  This is really a right-hand page entry, for it is, I believe, as an important an entry as I have ever made.  A major “discovery” has come out of the WA research.  It began with my decision to use the time I hd left in WA to do something sunstantial.  [this period – July-October 1994 - was the first time I had devoted all my attention entirely to Lawrence research]  I began going through my DHLRs, partly to find references to K, partly to augment my general knowledge about L & his works & the research thereon.  (It is important to note that, when I started this research effort back in the early 1970s, I deliberately avoided reading widely on Lawrence, only – and later - on & re K, so that my mind wd be uncontaminated by what other people had written.  I hd adopted this approach after Ottoline, where we found that written sources were unreliable & misleading.  I wanted to be as naïve & open-minded as possible.)  Now it seemed sensible that, as the primary research was nearing an end,  I shld “break out” of that self-imposed strait-jacket & begin to “bring in” that wider Lawrence world.  This soon led via the DHLR to the Elsie Adams piece on BCP/LCL [see above] & to Jack Strangways & Major Charles Eastwood.  This struck a chord.  For in analysing the changes L hd made in K (see, eg, 8/8/94) I hd begun to discern a pattern in L’s changes in K.  This picked up on earlier observations about L’s use of names, etc [cf note 6/1/94 et seq], & led to the “Darroch shift” hypothesis. This led to the next step, which was to begin looking for such “shift changes” in L’s works in general (eg, in AR, Algy Constable (fiction)/Reggie Turner (reality): an associated name shift).  This led to me reading CUP AR, which I finished yesty.  AR is very similar to K.  The authorial tone is similar, though K is more markedly L.  Indeed, there are 2 Ls in AR, as he is both Aaron & Lilly, though more the former, the latter being most a physical “shift”.  The pace is identical.  The span of time covered is similar.  The “narrative” (rather than introspective) passages are similar (L goes here, does this, observes that, meets so-and-so, etc).  AR, in fact, reads very much like a prelude to K (which it was), esp in the last chapter, where the “power urge” is specifically introduced, & even the Dark Gods make a shadowy entrance.  But the parallels go beyond that.  There is a nightmare, & evidence of L being “stuck”.  There are riots (2 at least), a bomb outrage, mentions of secret army activity (proto-), socialism, Bolshevism, workers uprisings, etc.  The political stuff is quite overt, & presages K.  There is even an Australian connection, a barrister from Sydney.  Contrary to what I have hitherto believed, K is linked to AR, but not via the “standard” Leadership Novel interpretation.  Rather, L is using, even developing, his new writing, or rather composing, technique, & particularly his various “shift” or transposition techniques.  So “shift analysis” cd be applied more widely than K.

 

12/9/94 ditto:  The Darroch shift is growing more sturdy by the day. (“Darroch shift” seems too grandiose, or grandstandy, but I don’t know what else to call it at the moment.)  I have a new example of it.  But to save labour I shall simply record, in good sub-editorial fashion (my fading profession!):  take in “A copy” (entry 12/9/94 re RLS from notebook 3).

 

12/9/94 ditto:  Peter Yeend has written.  He says (see his letter) he will soon approach key members of the Friend family to plead my case, “for the greater good”*.  Let us hope they cleave to his earnest entreaties.  Meanwhile I’m ploughing through L’s works, making various side excursions into asscociated books, memoirs, critiques, etc.  Lots of minor insights, but hardly worth recording in this now Spartan chronicle.  But one item might be worthy of mention here.  In TLG [The Lost Girl] L pillories leading Eastwood identity George Henry Cullen, master draper, & his family too.  And he satarises or parodies much of the populace of Eastwood, into the bargain.  This was in 1920, two years before K.  And with not the slightest hint or fear or remorse.  His home town.  Had Jack Scott had any inkling of this, he wd have kept his mouth shut.

[*ie, that their interests lay – their “greater good” – in allowing the information out via a “sympathetic” source, rather than run the risk of less sensitive handling]

 

13/9/94 ditto:  The “O’Reilly speculation” [that Lawrence’s key contact on the Malwa was the Rev. Maurice O’Reilly, a prominent Catholic cleric in Sydney who was returning from a conference in Europe – the “speculation” being advanced by author Richard Hall as a counter to the Darroch Thesis] bites the dust.  Looked at newspapers in the Battye yesty.  The Malwa’s shipping list showed the Rev. M. O’Reilly in first class!  So it is little wonder L showed no sign of having encountered that turbulent priest [Lawrence travelled second class].   Also Scrivener in first, too, so it is very unlikely he was “the young Army captain” referred to by L&F.

[this pretty well put paid to the Scrivener conjecture (or red herring), though it re-opened the question of who that “young Army captain” (who told Lawrence about the sound of the rain on the tin rooftops) actually was]

 

13/9/94 ditto:  A further perusal of the shipping lists & movements has given added weight to my growing suspicion that Hum’s role may have bn less than I have previously thought (or guessed at), & that the Friend connection might be stronger, & date back further, than I have hitherto suspected.  The lists show that Mrs MK Friend did leave Perth sans children.  This means they must have been left behind in Ceylon.  [Mrs MK Friend was shown in the ex-Sydney shipping lists (this by courtesy of Ruffels) as being accompanied with, I think, two children, & (from the Colombo lists [examined in Colombo and at the BM]) arriving in Ceylon thus emcumbered.]  Which surely implies they had been left behind with people who knew the NSW Friends very well indeed.  (You do not leave your children with casual strangers.)  We already know L moved in the sort of circles that the Friends would have mixed with in Ceylon.  So it is not beyond belief (& I put it no higher than that) that L cd have been “introduced” to the Friend’s milieu in Ceylon.  This wd explain things much better. They cd have provided the vital letter of introduction.  The Collaroy excursion cd have bn a Friend-only operation.  Which makes Whiting look even more right.  At the very least, it shld make a Friend pre-Sydney contact as likely as a Hum one.  (Though L’s address book wd still argue Hum.)  Also:  a slight curiosity.  TLG has Alvina [Houghton] becoming engaged to a Dr Alexander Graham, who is from “Sidney” in the holograph, though L later corrects it to “Sydney”.  Did he first hear rather than read that name?  Maybe the Graham figure was a locum in Eastwood, or else someone L met at one of the Woods musical evenings in London.  In any case, it wd seem that L indeed had some knowledge of A[ustralia] c. 1920.

 

14/9/94 ditto:  On the Malwa, the name “Marchbanks” wd certainly have caught his attention.  [on the Malwa L&F met two English migrant couples, the Forresters and the Marchbanks]  For when they were young, L & his sister Ada used to play games in which L was “Mr Marchbanks” & Ada was “Mrs Lawson” (see l[etter] to A. Lowell 18/12/14).

 

16/9/94 ditto:  A nice example of L’s “reversion” shift is in TLG where James Houghton opens his cinema enterprise.  L is borrowing from reality here.  The real-life model of Houghton was George Cullen, the local Eastwood draper, who did open a cinema.  It was called “Cullen’s Picture Palace”.  To disguise (or shift) the original, L wants to change this to “Houghton’s Pleasure Palace”, which he does at first, but is drawn back, magnet-like, to the original.  Several times he writes “Houghton Picture Palace”, and crosses out the [“shifted”] word, “Picture”.  Then he gives up the fight, & leaves it in unchanged, & it is printed confusingly thus.  Here is the Darroch shift in full flight, & a perfect example of L reverting to reality.

[Shortly after this note was written we packed up & returned to Sydney and Collaroy.]

 

23/9/94 Collaroy:  A letter from Yeend was waiting for me.  Much excitement, as it enclosed a page of unfamiliar handwriting.  I expected the best.  But the accompanying news was not good.  He has approached one of the key Friends, with quite negative results.  His exact words are:  “I was given a strong hint last night by one of the Friend family that their problem is they want no publicity and that is where the problem lies.”  However, he was approaching another Friend, & wd press my case further.  However, the enclosed page of handwriting was quite interesting.  It was numbered [page] 3 & was clearly part of a longer document.  It detailed, as in a memoir, how, in 1917, a group of TKS boys went to Victoria Barracks in Paddington to enlist.  (They marched all the way from Parramatta in their school uniforms!)  Obviously Yeend was trying to be helpful, under his Friend constraints.  He did nt say whose memoir it was, nor what else its other pages might contain.  Yet is was probably a Friend memoir, & I will be much mistaken if that Friend is not Robert Moreton Friend.  I wrote back begging for more, & intimating again the danger they run if the truth were to get out via less sympathetic sources.  However, in the wings, other forces are now at work.  M Jones rang to say she hd learned from Ruffels that Steele’s K is out, & that it rubbishes me.  (So much for Eggert’s “not proven” line.)  Sandra & Margaret thought I wd be unhappy about this.  On the contrary, it’s exactly what I wanted, for I can now use this to prise info out of Yeend & the Friends.  Also, it “sets up” my discoveries all the better.

 

24/9/94 ditto:  Went today to Abbey’s bookshop to buy some CUP editions.  Asked re K.  No sign of it.  So Ruffels must have hd an early copy – probably via Steele, in gratitude for his assistance.  Hope Steele does pooh-pooh my theories, for the stronger his attack on them, the more pressure I can put on the Friends, etc.  It’s an ill wind…

 

27/9/94 ditto:  CUP Kangaroo arrived yesty.  At first glance, no unexpected [ie, nasty] surprises.  A lot of things of interest, but some boo-boos, too [as one wd expect in such a complex work]…Charles McLaurin, etc.  The argument he advances about his chosen ending (the Seltzer) looks, also at first glance, to be shonky.  But I will have to check this against my own analysis.*  Nevertheless, he has some important information re this.  He utterly rejects – contemptuously - the Darroch Thesis (which, according to him, “has now been found to be without foundation”).  I don’t even warrant a cue-title, though Davis does!  Well, he has gratifyingly gone out all the way on his limb.  Fortunate it is that I have at hand my saw, or axe, to cut or hack him into little pieces.  But I will play this game carefully, & extract maximum benefit & satisfaction.  Death to Professor Steele by a thousand cuts!  (But his book is v. useful & praiseworthy, the DT apart.)  He does bring out one point, & that concerns the reference in Fantasia [of the Unconscious] to a mythical “League of Comrades” [and written just before Kangaroo, in which extract Lawrence extols a Whitmanesque concept involving organising bands of young men, specifically in groups of 10, similar numerically to the Maggie squads in Kangaroo].  This might go some way to explaining L’s confusion about the make up of the Maggies structure (eg, squads choosing their leaders, etc).  Obviously [perhaps] L grafted this on to Scott’s descriptions of his secret army, the proto-Old Guard.  (It might also have played a role in convincing Scott that L was his sort of chap.)

[*As mentioned above, I had done some deep analysis on this vexed matter during my preparation for my abortive submission to be appointed CUP editor of Kangaroo, and had drafted an article on it, see 31/5/79 above.]

 

28/9/94 ditto:  In an as-yet unpublished l[etter] to Seltz[er] dated 18/10/22, L says K is “the deepest of my novels” (his emphasis).  What on earth cd he mean by that?  Am planning a “council of war” re our response to the CUP K at Collaroy next Sunday – M Jones, Moore, Lacey.  Ruffels rang last night.  Steele did send him an advance copy of K.  Clearly not because of his championing of the DT.

 

6/10/94 ditto:  I have now analysed Steele’s argument for the Seltzer ending [to the CUP Kangaroo] and, though I myself originally cleaved to this ending (see my [unpublished] 1979 article on “The Endings of Kangaroo”), I now suspect that he is wrong, mainly because of his interpretation of how Lawrence’s “last page” (sent to Secker on 10/2/23) came about, & what it consisted of.  Even Steele concedes it must have consisted of Berg lll (TS2) pp 475, 475a & 476*.  But it is inconceivable that this Secker “last page” is not the same last page he sent Seltzer on 4/1/23, yet Steele alleges just that.  However, his arguments carry some weight, & I must look into this more closely.         

(*Steele also seems to allege that this “last page” must also have included 474a, saying that L originally wanted to end K on 474, which, I think, is nonsense.)

 

8/10/94 ditto:  Two, somewhat enigmatic, letters from P. Yeend.  He has spoken to Brian Friend, son of Robert Moreton Friend.  Answer still no.  BF told Yeend that “the young men” (ie, his father & elder brother Walter) shld nt be blamed for “what they did” (presumably joining Jack Scott’s secret army in 1920-22).  No sign of any softening of attitude, tho Yeend says “there is still fuel on the fire”, whatever he means by that.  However, in his two letters he did let drop some useful tidbits of information.  First, one of Rosenthal’s sons was in that group that marched to Victoria Barracks to join the colours (there were 12-14 in the detachment).  He sd the Rosenthals & Friends were very close, exchanging family visits.  Also he revealed that Walter’s TKS nichname was “Jimmy” [all TKS boys had nicknames, hence “Wilbur” Wright].  Yeend added that Brian Friend believed that his father had owned Wyewurk.*  This is where the belief that the Friends installed Lawrence in Wyewurk came from [and they probably did]. 

[*As far as we know, no Friend ever owned Wyewurk.  However, it is obvious that the house was associated in Friend lore with the Friend family.]

 

 8/10/94 ditto:  I have bn analysing Steele’s argument for the Seltzer ending.  I am convinced now that he has blundered.  Moreover, as a result of the analysis I think I now know what happened:  how the different endings did come about.  I may do an article on this.

 

19/10/94 ditto:  Finished first draft of my Kangaroo endings article (“Not the End of the Story”).  Pretty devastating re Steele.  Also proposed to Yeend that he set up a meeting with the Friends (Brian & Bill), perhaps at the U[nion] C[lub].  Coincidentally, I’m playing golf on Friday at RSGC [Royal Sydney Golf Club] in the annual Union Club vs Australian Club match, and in the four behind me is none other than Brian Friend!  (He’s a member of the AC.)  It’s a small world. 

 

16/11/94 ditto:  Finished second revise of my “Not the End” article & sent it off to LD Clark for unofficial appraisal & advice.  Spent most of the last four weeks polishing what is now a powerful & convincing piece.  Steele will not be left with much credibility after this.  He actually had the gall to write to Lacey & say that he thought Rananim was “concentrating too much on L’s Australian period”, which was only “a brief interlude”.  The cheek of him.  Wait till he reads “Not the End”!  He went on to deign to offer (in reponse to an invitation from Lacey) to provide a few thoughts, when he cd spare the time, on “some of the editorial decisions” he made with his CUP Kangaroo edition.  Jolly D of him.  Whatever sympathy I might have hd for him (which wasn’t much, I admit) has now evaporated entirely.  He brought to the Kangaroo endings the same lack of intellectual rigour he applied to the question of how the novel was written.  It’s strange how Lawrence attracts second-class minds. (Oops!  That’s me, too!)  I am fortunate that he has given me such good evidence to expose his duplicity*.  We decided to ask Eggert to do a “straight” review of the CUP Kangaroo, & he, innocent soul, has agreed.  After that, we can open up the question for comment & discussion.  Meanwhile, Yeend has written again repeating his detemination “to allow the truth to come out”.  My next move will be to write again to FF, apprising her of our intended move back to Bondi, & trying to elicit some idea of the state of play with the Friend family.

[*In his flawed explanation of how the variant endings came about, Steele deliberately failed to mention perhaps the most germane point – that the Seltzer ending, and now his chosen CUP ending, ended in mid-sentence.]

 

25/3/95 Bondi:  Sent off the endings article to the NYRB [New York Review of Books], at their invitation [courtesy of a recommendation by Pierre Ryckmans].   It is rock-solid now, & shld so undermine Steele’s editing credibility as to neutralise, if nt destroy, his anti-DT activities.  But the main news is another Yeend letter.  He wrote, after reading my article in the latest Rananim (“Darroch Thesis Put to Flight?”) [3/1], reassuring me that, despite such setbacks, I was correct (he cited Rosenthal/Monash, etc – see letter).  So, sensing an opportunity, I replied, waxing sorrowful, & asking if a way round the dilemma was to tell me something – give me a hint, as it were – chosen from his knowledge of what did actually happen, that might put me on the right track, independent of the proscribed Friend material, & wd lead me to the truth.  There was subtlety here.  I was trying to get him to commit to paper some written confirmation that the material he hd access to did, independent of his assertions, truly did confirm that I was correct.  (I was hoping for something definitive about Scott.)  Alas, his response was quite unhelpful, even negative.  No extra confirmation (except a new name – “Walter’s good friend George Sutherland”), and, worse, an intimation that he hd given up hope of breaking down the Friends’ determination to keep their secret intact.  His final words, however, reiterated his belief that I wd be vindicated in the end.  Not much of a consolation.  So I now have a problem.  If the Yeend avenue is really closed, I may have to break through to the Friends myself.  I may have to play my threat card – to tell them they have two choices:  co-operate, or face the consequences.  Tricky times ahead.

 

30/5/95 ditto:  Last week I went to the [Sydney] Trades Hall [in Goulburn Street, opposite what used to be the Sydney Markets, and where Jock Garden reigned in 1922].  I went there because I had noticed, recently passing by, that its full name (given on a plaque by the door) was, or hd bn, not “the Trades Hall”, but “The Trades & Labor Association Hall & Literary Institute”.  The latter obviously called for further investigation.  [L favoured such literary institutes, mentioning, for example, that he had found a copy of his banned Women in Love in “the Mechanics Institute” in Perth]  I rang the Secretary & she invited me along, saying that D.H. Lawrence had visited the Trades Hall, & that this was “recorded in the Minutes”.  You can picture me, tripping down Goulburn Street, like, as Lytton Stratchey described his gait in a letter to Ottoline in the dark days of WW1, “a gazelle, or a special constable”.  Alas, it was not D.H. Lawrence who hd paid a visit to the Trades Hall, and whose visit hd bn recorded “in the Minutes”, but his fellow scribe Ryder Haggard, of King Solomon’s Mines notoriety.  [More recently – see Rananim 10/1 – a student wrote to me saying that he was “doing a thesis” on Kangaroo putting the argument that it was in the same genre as King Solomon’s Mines.  Had I been still in touch with him, I could have directed him to the Trades Hall Minute Book, for which, no doubt, I would have forever been in his debt, or at least earned a footnote.]  However, my visit, this disappointment aside, was not without interest.  In 1922, I learned from the ever-helpful Secretary, it wd have hd two reading rooms, one for contemporary newspapers, the other a reading-and-lending library, the former by the front door, the latter on the first floor (& which was still there).  The newspaper room hd bn well-stocked, & even hd hd journals from South Africa (eg, the Natal Mercury) & from elsewhere in Australia (eg, the Newcastle Herald).   They were kept, I learned, in large folders, & thus wd have bn preserved for some period [I saw the extant folders for the two above publications].  So L had access, hd he visited the Trades Hall (as it seems he did), to back copies of newspapers that cd have, for example, reported the 1921 May Day incident & subsequent disturbances.  I perused the now dusty, & obviously now ill-patronised, shelves of the first-floor library, looking for a title that might have interested L, but came across only Towards Democracy by Edward Carpenter (1911).  [Lawrence hd bn something of a disciple of Carpenter]  Still, L’s sort of stuff.  The Hall’s ambiance conformed with L’s descriptions of “the Canberra Hall” (it seemed its dingy corridors hd hardly bn swept in the intervening 70-odd years).  On a more downbeat note, the NYRB has rejected my endings article, but, on a positive note, Warren Roberts [see above] wrote asking if I wd like to send it to the DHLR (Clark must have told him about it).  Win some, lose some.  Eggert has agreed to be President [of the DHLA, Southall having resigned].

 

22/10/95 ditto:  Almost a five-month gap.  My main activity has been re-polishing my endings article for the DHLR.  Warren Roberts, bless his big Texas heart, has taken it under his wing, & himself sent it to the DHLR, with his blessings.  As he’s the general editor of the CUP project, & an ex-head of the HRC [Humanities Research Centre at the University of Texas, publisher of the DHLR], I think it’s in with a chance.  Re-read the Vernon papers (to find Friend names in Vernon’s nominal rolls for the North Shore) & sent the guilty page [containing Walter Friend’s name] to Yeend, along with something of an ultimatum, saying that if the Friends still refuse to co-operate, I wd be obliged to consider using other means to achieve my end (but promising sensitivity if they agree to co-operate).  [the “Walter Friend” page was meant to show them that his identification as a secret army member was already in the “public domain”, and thus this fear need not hold them back any longer]  It will be interesting to see their response.  Meanwhile I’m planning to go to Nottingham for a DHL International Conference [the main DH Lawrence gathering, held every two years] in July, where I will detonate my endings bombshell.  Also meanwhile, the “sceptics” grow in brazen self-assurance.  Our new DHLA president, Eggert, has apparently hitched his caboose to the Steele bandwaggon [in his review for Rananim of Steele’s Kangaroo – see Rananim 3/1].  Even though he knows about the Yeend letters saying that I am right & Steele is wrong!  Elsewhere, embarrassed silence (JR, MJ, etc). If only there’s a letter from Lawrence in the Friends’ family vaults.  Too much to hope for, I suppose.

 

14/3/96 ditto:  Another five months since my last entry, & I can see on the next page of this notebook Sandra’s handwriting, dating back to June 1974, when we bought it, prior to going on our Greek cruise, to record late Ottoline research notes.  So the end of this notebook is in sight [though I had quite a number of right-hand pages yet to exhaust].  I must husband these last few pages carefully, for a third notebook is well-nigh unthinkable.  Yet today deserves an entry, partly to report an odd encounter, partly to update the diary on recent & upcoming happenings.  The odd encounter was with Phillip Simpson, husband of Caroline, nee Fairfax [until recently owners of the SMH], whose (excellent) book on Eveleigh was launched in the Rocks last night [Eveleigh was the historic site of the main railway workshops in NSW, and now the site of the Australian Technology Park, where we had an office].  His grandfather was EP Simpson of Minter Simpson, the “establishment” firm of Sydney solicitors who were linked with the Old Guard (they were, among other things, solicitors to CSR & the King’s School).  (He told me that he went to Kings with a boy called Robert Darroch!  [No kin – for I was a New Zealand-fathered Darroch - but one might suspect here, if it were anyone else than the charming, naïve Phillip Simpson, a Kim Philby ploy*.])   He says EP hd bn a member of the Union Club who was kicked out because he was living in sin (his phrase!) with a lady called Mollie Earle.  Rings a bell.  Didn’t Sandra’s father mention some shady lady re secret armies?  [alas, he cannot remember any such mention]  Meanwhile, no news from the DHLR & the Lawrence mafia.  Still scheduled to go to Nottingham [for the DHL conference] to give my hopefully explosive paper on “The Curious Incident of the Missing Full Stop”. [which later became the basis of the “Not the End of the Story”  DHLR & Rananim articles – see above]

[*Kim Philby, the English traitor, had a nice ploy which he used to win over & cement relations with casual acquaintances whom he thought might be useful to him later.  He would ask the date of their birthday.  Then he would say, “What a coincidence!  That’s my birthday, too.”  And thereafter the two would exchange cards on the day, and otherwise enjoy the relationship afforded by natalistic propinquity.  Of course, the turncoat of Acol Road altered his supposed birthday to suit the contact and occasion.  (This, otherwise extraneous, diversion is, nevertheless, justified because it allows an explanation to be advanced for the Friends’ deep reluctance to admit that their forebears had been involved in secret army plotting.  For such plotting was, to put it bluntly, treason – a realisation reflected in Kangaroo, when Jack Callcott – and in this guise it may well have been Robert Moreton Friend – said, when asked by his “wife”, Victoria, what he and Somers had been talking about down on the beach at Thirroul, replied:  “Politics, and red-hot treason.”).] 

 

20/3/96 ditto:  Wrote to Yeend re Phillip Simpson & Minter Simpson.  He confirmed the Minter Simpson connection.  FDW Oatley (deceased husband of AAK) did nt go to Kings.  Yeend added, bleakly:  “No change in the Friends’ position,” then adding, “I still have the matter in my daily work file, for you are right, but we are prevented from proving it.”  Nice to know.

 

22/3/96 ditto:  A little flurry of unexpected activity.  I had been re-reading my (still unpublished) Darroch Thesis article [languishing with the DHLR]  when I came across the reference in it to Kangaroo’s “Colonel Ennis” being General Macarthur-Onslow.  A sudden thought struck me.  My theory now is that L did not invent things, but took them from reality (his “rag-bag”), then changed them, as per the Darroch shift.  I know, of course, where he got the name Ennis from (Ceylon).  But why did he choose that particular name?  What was it in Macarthur-Onslow that connected to Ennis?  (For he did not rummage aimlessly around & pluck things out at random.  There always had to be a connecting link.)  Then a vague memory tinkled in the back of my mind.  What was Ennis’s first name?  Of course, it was George, as in George Macarthur-Onslow.  And even better, Ennis’s middle name was McDaniel.  So there it is.  [General] George Macarthur-Onslow became Colonel [George McDaniel] Ennis.  (Note that habitually L demotes officers, General Rosenthal becoming Major Eastwood (and a mere lieutenant in Kangaroo), & General Macarthur-Onslow becomes Colonel Ennis.  That’s working-class democracy for you.)

 

23/3/96 ditto:  So, following on from yesty’s insight, are there any indications that the truth is hidden in the place & person names in K?  Does reality lie behind them?  Can we use the Darroch shift to get at the truth through these shifted [ie, transposed or altered] names?  For example, does the [house] name St Columb tells us anything?  Perhaps the actual place L met the Friends at Collaroy had such a Cornish name?  Is this the place that Yeend (& others) have been hinting at?  (Even Sonja’s acquaintance – I can’t use “friend” any more, for obvious reasons – telling her “There is the place Lawrence stayed in”, or whatever?)  Is St Columb Trixie’s place?  This deserves closer examination, which it will get.

 

24/3/96 ditto:  I was reading though Steele’s endnotes when I came to his reference to the name Trewhella.  I hd speculated (before I came across Hum) that the name hd come, perhaps, from L reading an ad in the “to let” colums of the papers, for a Trewhella advertised a boarding house in Coogee the weekend the Lawrences arrived in Sydney - or, more likely, it was from a Cornish source, recalled from L’s time in Cornwall during the war.  But Steele suggested for the source an item on “May 26” in the SMH about the death of JTS Trewhellar, “manager of Cameron, Sutherland p/l, of Neutral Bay”, or, alternatively, Matthew Trewhella, a Zennor (near where L stayed in Cornwall) choirester.  It was, of course, possible that L had read that Sydney Trewhellar item (not in the SMH of 26/5, but 24/5, the Wedneaday before L’s Saturday arrival), but it was unlikely, partly because the spelling was wrong, and partly because of the Wednesday dateline.  Yet that item, when I checked it, did engage my attention.  For one thing, Yeend had just dangled the name Sutherland before me.  For another, there was this Trewhellar’s address, which was Claude Avenue, Neutral Bay, a short distance from 112 Wycombe Road, and Scott.   But there were two more things.  The obituary mentioned that JTS Trewhellar was a prominent Mason (and there is a strong Masonic elelemt in Kangaroo), and that he had been a member of the Sydney Liedertafel, a choral society (and singing also figures prominently in Kangaroo, Rosenthal in particular being a leading Sydney bass-baritone).  So I will high myself off to the ML next week & see what I can dig up about Sutherland, Trewhellar, etc.  But it certainly is odd:  a Trewhellar dies on 22/5, is buried on 24/5, L arrives on 27/5 & alights on the name Trewhella, injecting into his novel the man’s environs, a similar Masonic background, and a musical element.  Hmmm…  Steele might have something here.

 

28/3/96 ditto:  Went to the State Library yesty & perused the [news]papers.  Found obit for Joshua Thoman Samuel Trewheeler (nt Trewhellar).  However, the DT [Daily Telegraph] (29/5) ran an editorial par that gave the extra information that Cameron, Sutherland p/l were machinery merchants.  Rang JR who dug up a 1949 Sydney telepone book which had George Sutherland listed as a cousultant engineer at 14 Spring St [city] & 33 Telegraph Rd (Pymble?  St Ives?).  Still probing.

 

29/3/96 ditto:  Went through my old friend the Sands Directory for 1922.  No Sutherland in Telegraph Rd nor any George Sutherland listed anywhere.  But Cameron Sutherland p/l was not only listed, but had an ad.  And the type of machinery they specialised in?  Mining machinery – winding gear, etc.  [In Kangaroo Victoria’s brother is a mining engineer who travels down to “Mullumbimby”, as does, at one point, “Jaz” the North Side coal merchant]  So if George Sutherland was a mining engineer, he wd have hd every excuse to visit the Excellsior Colliery in Thirroul.  Will write to Yeend seeking more information about “his” Sutherland.  (And according to Dick Swift, the Basin was a particular haunt of people from St Ives, which is, of course, a Cornish name.)

 

5/4/96 ditto:  Letter from Yeend waiting for me at our Millers Point PO box.  But, despite his opening line, “Yes, you are hot on the trail…”, nothing especially helpful.  “Sutherland leads you straight to Friend,” he says, but he doesn’t show me the way to get there.  Anyway, I’m at Friend already.  It’s the way from Friend to Lawrence that I’m trying to uncover.  Still, he’s trying to be helpful, & there’s probably a big clue somewhere in what he says.  (He adds that George Sutherland hd two brothers at uni, but that’s getting further away, nt closer.)  I wish I still hd my team of ferrets so I cd sool them on to the problem.  But they’ve run off in their own directions.  Most frustrating. 

 

8/4/96 ditto:  I have, for the past few days, & while drafting my “What’s in a Name” article [see Rananim 5/1], bn racking my brains to work out the shifts involved in {Rosenthal} = {Major Charles Eastwood}.  [I have decided to use the equal sign to denote shifts and pointy brackets to enclose shift elements]  (see note 15/8/94)  {Major Charles}  = {Major-General Charles Rosenthal} is fine as far as it goes.  But how could Rosenthal become Eastwood?  Some have found in Major Charles Eastwood an echo of Major T.P. Barber, the “squire of Eastwood”.  Far stronger, of course, is the link with Rosenthal (Danish, etc).  So cd the line or chain of association be via Barber?  (ie, {Rosenthal} = {Barber} = {Eastwood})  It’s possible.  Barber & Rosenthal have a lot in common.  Barber was High Sheriff; Rosenthal GOC NSW.  Both were local conservative, even right-wing politicians.  Both went to WW1.  Both were figures of  local authority.  And so on.  There’s even a hint of a connection in Barber’s second name, Phillip, which L seemed to associate with Sidney/Sydney.  But that’s very tenuous, & I mention it only as a possible chain or shift set.

 

11/4/96 ditto:  I think I might have stumbled on where L might have got the name Benjamin Cooley.  It turns out that the father of George Cullen (of London House & Picture Palace fame) was Benjamin Cullen.  L knew the Cullen family well, for he portrayed them in TLG.  Might also make the possible shift {Rosenthal} = {Barber} stronger.  Also, according to one of my young helpers, Sacha Davis, whose family is German, the name Rosenthal means “valley of the roses”, and there is a village called Rosenthal in Germany!  Must visit it.

 

17/5/96 ditto:  Have written to Yeend to see if any of Sydney’s big store-owning families sent their offspring to TKS.  (L mentions almost in the first chapte of K that Sydney’s “aristocracy” seemed to be the owners of the big department stores.)  I seem to recall that wyewurrie in the Basin was once owned by the Horderns [owners of perhaps Sydney’s biggest department store in 1922].

 

21/5/96 ditto:  Why did L change (shift) Wyuna – the house opposite Wyewurk in Craig St – to Verdun?  Why change it at all?  He only changed things when he had to, when he wanted to “fictionalize” them.  What was the reason for disguising Wyuna?  It had been owned, until a few months previously, by Lucy May Friend.  Perhaps it was still available for visiting Friends?  (eg, Robert Moreton Friend)  Or Scott?

31/5/96 ditto:  Yeend replied implying I was getting cold with my Hordern, etc, speculation, despite his info that the Horderns, Nocks, Snows, Peapes, McCathies all hd nippers at TKS. 

 

1/7/96 ditto:  I’m off to Nottingham tomorrow for the DHL conference & to give my (brief) paper – aka bombshell - on the endings.  Chuck Rossman, who will be at the conference, now has the article.  Says he will publish later this year.  Will also go to Germany & try to visit Rosenthal.  Had a thought last night.  The car trip back from Collaroy that Sunday wasn’t in Hum’s car, but in Robert Moreton Friend’s car, garaged, as L says Jack Callcott’s was, in town, no doubt in the Taylor’s garage.

 

6/7/96 Frankenberg:  An exotic dateline, as exotic as any I have penned.  I arrived here at 8pm, so the Rathaus bell just told me.  It’s a hilltop, early medieval town, in Hessen.  I left Waterloo at 7am this morning, by the Eurostar express & the Channel tunnel.  Changed at Brussels & arrived Cologne at 2.20pm.  Then the troubles started.  Walked from station into town to Eurocar office.  Closed.  Hd to get cab to airport to hire a car there.  Then I cd not find my way.  Finally, more by luck than anything, I found the right road, & nosed my way towards my destination.  Am now 13 km from Rosenthal, according to the sign down the hill.  Passed Waldbrol, Numbrect & Dallenberg on the way (all places L mentions when he was in Germany in 1912).  Too far [for him] to walk or ride.  But a train line all the way.  And Frankenberg is a major tourist spot.  Just the place to bring a bored & frustrated nephew [Lawrence had been staying at Waldbrol with his German relatives].  Tomorrow to Rosenthal.   Shall report further.  Now, a stroll round town, dinner & bed.  A good day - & only a journalist cd probably have made it.

 

6/7/96 Frankenberg:  It is now 10.15pm, the same day as the above entry.  I hope whoever reads this journal might pause for a moment & imagine the state of mind I am in as I write this entry.  To recap – I have come all this way, from Sydney, to test a hypothesis:  that the “red wooden heart” L mentions in “Volcanic Evidence” came from Rosenthal, here in Hessen.  I am here to find some evidence for this rather remote – but worth exploring – possibility.  And as I drove the long miles from the environs of Waldbrol, my hypothesis has looked shakier & shakier.  Too far, too far.  Yet, and yet…hope (and expenditure) springs eternal.  So, after writing the previous entry, I went for a pre-prandial stroll.  As luck (fickle mistress!) wd have it, I came across a poster on the front of a [motor] garage advertising a “disco nite” at the nearby village of Rosenthal.  Nice souvenir, & some indication that Rosenthal performs some sort of festival function, at least vis-à-vis Frankenberg.  But back to the hotel.  And dinner.  I was placed in what seems to be the guests’ dining room.  I ordered.  As I waited, my eyes drifted around the room.  Suddenly they were arrested by the sight of a plate hanging on the wall, not more than 8ft away.  An ordinary plate, glazed brown, & somewhat garish.  But in the centre was something that riveted me:  a heart, and, far more significantly, a heart with dots around its perimeter [just as Lawrence describes in Kangaroo].  Well, that’s too much of a coincidence not to be meaningful.  And there was a second one, too.  I asked, but they knew nothing about them, except that they came from somewhere locally.  You might picture with what emotions I went up to bed…

 

13/7/96 Nottingham:  The first chance I’ve had of recording what happened the following day.  Nothing, or very little.  I drove to Rosenthal the next day (a day of accidents).  The road was through a forest of great firs.  It was foggy.  As I arrived, the outskirts were marked by a sign, on which a rose was carved & painted.  But it was a small hamlet, not really a tourist venue, though there was a hotel & a village green that sported a marquee, so some sort of festival was in progress, adding weight to impression the poster imparted.  Indeed, there was another medieval rathaus & attendant architecture.  Roses in abundance & carved wooden weather vanes.  But no wooden hearts.  After a chapter of accidents (car broke down, cdn’t find drop-off point in Cologne), I got to the station just in time to catch my train back to London.  Not a let-down, but needing further research.

 

13/7/96 ditto:  Am now in Nottingham, at the uni, for the DHL conference.  Not so much Daniel in the lion’s den, as a mouse in a den of mice, or rats.  No, no – that’s beneath me.  But it is an interesting experience, face-to-face at last with the enemy.  Pained politeness on their part – Worthen, Kinkead-Weekes, Ellis, etc.  (See separate diary of the occasion.)  It will be interesting to see what happens when I give my talk on Monday.

[It was received politely, and ignored (though [CUP general editor] Professor [Geoffrey] Boulton, who attended with Ellis in tow, came up afterwards and asked:  “Have you spoken to Bruce [Steele] about this?”, and when I replied that we had not spoken since the Wyewurk inquiry day, added, wistfully, “Pity.”]

 

6/10/96 Bondi:  (The morning of our second [Sydney] DHL conference, at which I am to deliver a paper on my recent trip to Rosenthal [also see “In the Valley of the Roses” in Rananim  4/2-3].)  It is disconcerting how things from the past, missed or glossed over, can re-emerge to become of the highest importance.  (Hum, for example.)  When we were in Perth & Sandra was doing her L in WA research, she came across the fact that Pussy Jenkins’ husband, George, a lawyer, had been in Coolgarie [a WA gold town to the east of Perth] at the same time (1897-98) Rosenthal was there, practising as an architect.  At the time she remarked that such a coincidence might have some significance.  But I was in full flight with the Darroch shift, & took no special notice of this fact.  But yesty, as S[andra] was keying in her talk for today’s conference [later published as “Pussy Jenkins & Her Circle”, Rananim 4/2-3] she read out - no, I read her print-out – which said Pussy was a good amateur pianist (indeed, a student of Percy Grainger).  Suddenly the penny dropped.  I recalled that in Perry’s monograph on Rosenthal it was mentioned that Rosenthal, while in Coolgardie, was “the resident basso” in the local musical society, the Coolgardie Liedertafel.  In fact, the Liedertafel’s first concert [and Rosenthal’s arrival in town might well have led to the society’s formation] was given in the local Tivoli theatre on September 23, 1898.  Had Pussy bn in Coolgardie, which she almost certainly was (George Jenkins was Mayor of Coolgardie in 1897), then she, too, wd probably have been at that premier concert, & may even have played accompanist for “the resident basso”.  (The cutting of the occasion sd Rosenthal sang “The Nightwatchman’s Chorus”, otherwise known as “Lardbord Watch Ahoy”.)  So, 20 or so years later, when Pussy was pressing on Lawrence letters of introduction to people she knew in Sydney, she may have recalled that resident basso, and included one to him.  And we can take this speculation further.  Had L & Rosenthal met in such a context, one of them cd have referred to those Coolgardie and Liedertafel days, & Rosenthal might have mentioned that Sydney, too, had a similar musical body, the Sydney Liedertafel, whose name had now bn changed to the Sydney Appolo Society, & which hd, only the previous week, lost one of its most active members, Joshua Trewheelar, of Cameron Sutherland & Co, mining engineers.

[rank, journalistic, even Davisesque, speculation of the worst type – but see note 29/5/02 below]

 

10/2/97 ditto:  Out of my extensive work on L’s “transformation techniques”  (a better phrase than “the Darroch shift”) have come three articles on the matter, which will be published shortly in Rananim [5/1, 5/2, & 5/3].  I am now working on something else, but which came out of this research, & is closely associated with the transformation phenomenon.  The question has always bn:  what was L doing, or trying to do, with K?  I had thought that he was experimenting with a new technique (the diary form), & that K was a “one-off”.  But the transformation techniques I have identified persist throughout his works, before & after K.  I am coming to believe, therefore, that they are part of some automatic process (ie, not separate & conscious or objective) that was at the heart of his creative process, dating back to 1908 or thereabouts.  But there is something else, too.  Around the time he finished K – indeed, immediately after - L began a series of essays about the form of the novel.  Immediately before K, he had been putting down, in Fantasia [of the Unconscious], his thoughts about the creative process.  I am beginning to think that K – or a proper understanding of it - is crucial to understanding how he wrote his fiction, how his creative processes worked.  It may well prove that this, really, is what K is “about”.

 

19/2/97 ditto:  I now think I have an insight into something of fundamental importance about K & L’s creative processes.  I will nt explain here how I came to this insight, except to say that it is the result of a process involving a long series of smaller insights, recorded separately in the Darroch shift extra notebook.  I will just state it baldly.  I now believe that there are two Lawrence “voices”.  There are almost two Lawrences.  There is the “authorial” voice – the “dear reader” voice of his letters, essays & parts of his fiction (but not, I think, most of his poetry).  Then there is the voice of what he called “his daemon” – the creative voice.  Time & time again, he refers to this latter “beast”, whom he can’t seem to control, & which (for it seems a “thing” rather than something animate) he has to conjure up, or else it makes unscheduled, uninvited manifestations of itself, & which is the “real author” of much of his fiction, & perhaps all his poetry.  This, if I’m right (& I’m investigating further), cd help explain some profound puzzles about, in particular, K, such as why L seemed incapable of changing some things, such as the repetitions.  Maybe, & I realise I’m drawing an enormously long bow here, maybe these bits were “written” by the daemon, & the “other” L cdn’t (or wdn’t) change them.

 

23/2/97 ditto:  An amusing thing has happened.  AM related it on our annual DHL Harbour Cruise [on the Lady Hopetoun].  A woman from Ermington [a Sydney western suburb] rang AM to tell him about her father, Jack Davies, who was high up in the Old Guard (the Country Movement) in 1930-32 around Scone [a country town/center north-west of Sydney].  His name is on the cigarette case.  [Andrew had found a cigarette case, presented I think to Colonel Hinton (see note c. 1/1/78 above), bearing the engraved initials of all the Old Guard “top brass”, including, of course, “JWRS”]  She told AM a lot about the OG around Scone & the Hunter [River].  As she reached the end of her recollection, Andrew, ever alert to possibilities, asked her if she was aware, by chance, of any link between her father’s organisation & DHL & Kangaroo.  Yes, she said, brightly.  She knew of a book that had been written locally to explain how the OG came into existence, & it included the story of how Lawrence came to be involved with the organisation.   She sd she would get the book & show it to Andrew, who made the earliest possible appointment to see the lady & her book.  Had our ship come in at long last?  She greeted him at her door with an apology.  She did indeed have the book, & it did give a history of the OG, at least in the Scone area, but it had nothing about Lawrence.  She had mixed it up with another book that had mentioned Lawrence & secret armies, a book by a chap called Andrew Moore.  However, that aside, she did have some important information.  The local book (by Sandy McTavish or some similar name) recalled that the local OG branch was run out of someone’s house, & that they used to meet in its garage.  The two chaps in charge of the local group were called “the two rats from the garage*”.  Interesting.

[*We now believe that one of the pseudonyms or euphemisms for the 1920s NSW predecessor of the Old Guard was “the garage”  - which makes Callcott’s profession in Kangaroo (“garage proprietor”) more than a little pertinent.]  

 

17/4/97 ditto:  A lot has happened since my last entry.  Concentrating mainly on my new “insight” into (dare I say it?) “the other Lawrence”, that “daemon” whose dark side is beginning to make the Picture of Dorian Gray look like The Laughing Cavalier.  Thus the secret army side has lain dormant, until last week, when I decide to take matters into my own hands.  Enough is enough, I said to myself, & sat down & drafted an ultimatum to the Friends, warning them that unless they agreed to remove their ban on the TKS material, or otherwise agreed to co-operate, then I would be left with no option than to reveal to the world their terrible family secret.  I also wrote to Yeend, telling him what I intended to do.  I waited a week, then, having received no reply, I saw Fiona Friend, showed her the Kings letters from Yeend, and enlisted her aid in getting the ultimatum into the hands of the relevant Friends (Bill, Brian & her father).  It will be interesting to see what happens, or doesn’t happen.  However, I will not let the 75^th anniversary of L’s visit pass without attempting to flush out the truth. 

 

30/4/97 ditto:  I received from Yeend a short note saying that he had referred the matter to the Headmaster [of Kings] – what authority & power does that title conjure up! – and who is now “reviewing”  the correspondence.  I don’t know what the result of this will be, but at least he should contact the relevant Friends & inform of the danger.  At any rate it adds to my cache of documentary evidence.  I am optimistic, & am beginning to compose what I’ll say when I am given access to (what I assume is) the confession of Robert Moreton Friend.  (Also I have bn having a rather dusty exchange of emails with John Worthen [Lawrence biographer and head of the DH Lawrence Centre at Nottingham], whom I have apprised of the existence of the TKS letters.  He says he prefers to remain one of the sceptics, however.)

 

1/5/97 ditto:  Of course, a Lawrence transposition cd explain Vida = Victoria [see note 27/6/94 above].  Also yesty I played the Minter Simpson card.  Wrote to Phillip Simpson [see note 14/3/96 above] asking if he had heard of any possible link between the law firm & DHL.

 

21/9/97 ditto:  On the ABC the other night, Mrs Ritchie (dau[ghter] or g-dau of Major Jack Davies of Scone OG notoriety), whom AM interviewed [see 23/2/97 above], sd she was told by her mother that Davies joined the predecessor of the OG in 1922 (precisely).  He was enlisted by Macarthur-Onslow & a Colonel Arnott.  They used to meet in the garage.  (Date is important.)

[To some, this fixation with garages might seem strange.  But garages performed a number of useful functions for secret army plotters.  First, they were, like the shed, a male preserve, for “the women” were not to be included in any plotting.  Second, the car was there, and the car was the main item of secret army ordinance, as it afforded both speed of molblisation, and could double as an offensive weapon in riot situations.  Third, meetings in them were unlikely to arouse much suspicion, for blokes, or rather chaps, naturally congregated around motor machinery, discussing camshafts, universals, big-ends, and the other arcane paraphernalia of automobiling.]

 

7/3/98 Bondi:  More than six months since my last entry.  Nothing very exciting to report.  FF never replied, despite various reminders.  No doubt “got at” by the Friends (inheritance concerns, etc).  Nothing, too, from Kings, so the Yeend opening is totally closed now.  The vault door has slammed shut, and I am back in stygian gloom again.  Ellis’s volume covering L’s time in Australia has bn published, but though I asked Peter Preston [of the Nottingham DHL Centre] for a photocopy of the Australian bits, I got no reply.  Have ordered a copy via The Spectator.  I hope it is dismissive [it was] as it helps keep up the pressure on the Friends, Kings, etc (but not with any hope of success).  Been corresponding with Taos [where the next DHL Conference was to be held, and to which Sandra and I planned to go] but silence since I revealed my non-academic background.  No reaction to either my endings piece in the DHLR or my nomenclature series in Rananim [5/1 etc].  Warren Roberts, my good & true friend, died, & I did a little item about him – having inspired me, etc – which I sent to the DHL list [ a short-lived website run by Chuck Rossman out of HRC].  Our DHLA society hangs on, but by a thread, with membership & enthusiasm ekeing away.  But to end on a positive note.  Last night at the ATP [Australian Technology Park, where our Internet company had its office] I met the financial controller, Charles Summers.  He is egregiously Scottish (so we got on well!) & revealed that his family came from Cruden Bay, near Aberdeen, & confirmed that Summers is a Scottish name.  (The Murdochs also come from Cruden Bay, & Charles’s father [or grandfather] knew Keith Murdoch, Rup’s pop.)  However, this [Scottish information] might help with a Darroch-shift transformation:  {Lawrence} = {RLS}  [Robert Louis Stevenson] = {Richard Lovatt Somers}.  Well, anything’s possible.

 

3/4/98 ditto:  Completed the draft of my proposed talk/paper for Taos in July.  It will be an update on the DT, with Yeend embellishments, with a substantial APL [American/Australian Protective League] historical piece tacked on to the front [eventually published in Rananim 7-8/1 as “Nothing to Sniff At”].  Reads OK, but may be too long, or too arcane, for the Taos organisers.  Also wrote to Lloyd Waddy, chairman of the TKS Council, with a final appeal, suggesting someone else (such as [my TKS friend and fellow journalist] Chris Ashton) read [the Robert Moreton Friend “confession”] & give me a clue that might lead me, independently as it were, to the truth, while preserving the Friend family honour, etc.  A desperate throw, but one worth trying, for everyone’s sake.  Sent off to NY the text of my talk for approval by the Taos organisers.  Read the Ellis bio.  As expected, he gives no credence to the DT, using as his main rebuttal the “time” argument.  [the argument, also put forward by Joe Davis, that Lawrence would not have had time to mix with secret army types in Thirroul and NSW]  He, surprisingly, relegates Steele’s “League of Comrades” revelation [see 27/9/94 above] to a footnote.  Goes on about “the unconvincing nature” of the DT & eventually plumps for invention.  Really?  However, he does concede some possibility of reality content, perhaps, he suggests, garnered from the local barber, Laughlin.  Yes, I can see it now.  Lawrence comes in on his weekly visit, perhaps after a strenuous game of tennis with Dr Crossle.  After leafing through a new magazines, a chair becomes vacant.  “A beard trim is it today, Mr Lawrence?”  asks the gossipy Laughlin.  “By the way, have you heard the latest about the secret army…?”  Already the local reviewers (SMH, etc) are cleaving to his views.  The DT is dead, caput, as far as the outside world is concerned.

 

4/4/98 ditto:  Ellis has, however, some useful stuff.  For example, he mentions that the Brewster daughter, Harwood, is still alive (or was) & she remembered going to the Pera-hera with Lawrence, accompanied by Mrs Ennis “and two other women”.  So L had met the Ennises before he went up the Nuwra Elyia.  That’s interesting.  It means that L was mixing in the highest social circles almost on arrival in Kandy.  Which gives him ample time to come across someone who knew Mrs MK & the other Friends.

 

9/4/98 ditto:  Ill winds continue to blow me some good.  Ellis made much of L’s contrained timetable for writing K.  He sd 3000-4000 words a day wd have precluded him going up to Sydney regularly & meeting people such as Scott & Rosenthal, as the DT insists he did. (Indeed, Davis wd hardly allow him to lift his head from his darg, permitting him only two trips up – one to collect his trunks, the other to book passage to Taos – ie, arriving at Thirroul, & departing therefrom.)  In considering this point, a sudden thought struck me.  L gave his mail address in Syd[ney] as the Thomas Cook office in Martin Place, not Wyewurk in Thirroul, for he did nt know he wd be staying in Thirroul before arriving in Sydney, & by the time he did tell someone his actual local address, he wd, in all probability, have left for America.  As he was expecting important letters, such a cheques, etc, almost weekly, he wd, of course, have hd to make regular trips up to Syd to collect his mail, at least.  Now, the point here is that we know that overseas mail came to Sydney by one means only:  by ship.  Also, we know the arrival dates of those ships, as we also know L did (he kept very good track of such things).  So we can, in fact, correlate the ship arrival dates with the trips he wd have had to make up to Cooks.  In other words, we know when he was likely to have made a trip up to Sydney.  Not only that, but this “excuse” cd also have disguised, from Frieda at least, the “other things” he might have bn doing while up in town.  And there’s another possibility here.  He had to send mail overseas by ship, so the departure times of the mail boats wd also have bn important to him, & he may have made even more visits to Sydney to ensure his letters caught those boats.

 

16/4/98 ditto:  In trying to work out, apropos of the above entry, L’s probable Sydney excursions (& thus his possible meetings with Scott, etc), I remembered something that I should have thought about more closely at the time.  (I now believe Lawrence made either four or five trips up to Sydney, before he was “cut off”  by Scott & Rosenthal, probably around 2/7/22.)   As I began to try to picture in my mind these Sydney excursions, I recalled that L says in K that Somers, when collecting his trunks, went up to Sydney “for two days”.  Two days?  Why two days?  That is odd.  It implied an overnight stay in Sydney.  Why wd he stay overnight in Sydney?  [one possibility was that the trunks weren’t available on the Thursday or Friday, so he had to stay overnight to arrange their forwarding the following day]  Clearly, I then calculated, this overnight stay was the visit during which L met Scott (& so spanning the day of the Friday ferry collision [which is mentioned in K & reported in Saturday’s Sydney papers] - ie, Thursday-Friday or Friday-Saturday, June 2-3-4).  Then I suddenly recalled Whiting’s letter [see 14/9/77 above*]  in which he said that he hd information, from obviously reliable sources, that “Scott fits the description I had of the man who met Lawrence at the wharf & look him to stay with him on the North Shore for two days.”  Two days!  That had to be the same two days mentioned in K.  Then it hit me.  I had hd the wrong wharf!  I had always assumed that the wharf Whiting had bn referring to was the P&O wharf at the bottom of Macquarie Street, where L was met on arrival in Sydney, presumably by Gerald Hum.  No reconstruction I cd envisage wd have Scott at that wharf on that day, so I dismissed this (otherwise very strong) piece of “evidence”.  Besides, the trip up to Narrabeen/Collaroy on the following day, the Sunday, cd hardly be described as “being taken to stay with him of the North Shore for two days”.  Now, however, I realised that the wharf Whiting hd, of course, bn referring to (or hd bn told about) was nt the P&O wharf, but the wharf at Mosman Bay!  Then it all slotted into place.  L hd come up to Sydney on the Thursday or Friday morning [we still don’t know which], caught a ferry (hence his description of the ferry collision in ch 2) to Mosman Bay, & there met Scott.  They then walked around to the little park opposite the wharf & there sat & talked, possibly in the company of Robert Moreton Friend.  Later that day, after L hd arranged for his trunks to be sent down to Thirroul by rail, he returned to Mosman, by inviation, to spend the night at Scott’s flat at 112 Wycombe Road (for, no doubt, he hd discerned in Scott – a la Maurice Magnus - the germs in him of a novel).  It was then he climbed up the slat ladder to the tub-top lookout in Scott’s backyard, & looked down to the Harbour in the fading light.  Then, the next day, he wd have returned to Thirroul, possibly – no, almost certainly - in the company of Scott.  And, of course, he could  easily have stayed that Friday (orm Thursday) night at 112, for Frieda was not with him, & he cd have bedded down on the sofa, or whatever, perhaps after a game of chess with Scott.  Next morning, he wd have walked to Mosman Wharf with Scott, as Somers does with Callcott, meeting “Ant’ny”, “Bill, old man”, etc, on the way down.  Yes, it all fits now.

[*Above I say “three days,” but my better recollection is that Whiting sd either two days or “several days”.]

 

17/4/98 ditto:  First, the bad news.  Most of L’s ex-NSW letters are postmarked “Thirroul”, so he posted from there, not from Sydney (though he mentions going to the GPO in Sydney).  But he still wd have hd to come up to Sydney to collect his mail (unless it was redirected, which is unlikely, particularly as, in all probability, he needed to come up to Sydney regularly).  We can now date those Sydney excursions, & they are:  June 2/3;  June 8/9;  June 15;  June 24 & July 4/5 (plus, probably, July 15).  [ie, once a week] These excursion dates correlate well with the [content of the] letters themselves, the weather, tides, sun/moon phases, the text of K, current events, issues of the Bulletin, & other associated information*.  We can almost (but not quite, yet) follow his day-to-day, even, sometimes, his hour-to-hour movements.  Most especially, they fit in with the information he was getting from Scott & Rosenthal (eg, when he tells correspondents he is “stuck” in his novel – for Frieda mentions this in a dated letter giving a precise page-number in the MS for this “stuck” event).

[I suppose I should explain how I know this.  Over many years I have reconstructed a detailed “diary” of Lawrence’s time in Sydney and Thirroul, correlating and cross-referencing such things as weather, newspaper reports, etc, etc.  For example,  in his letter dated June 6 to Mountsier, Lawrence said:  “I had your letter of May 9 yesterday – direct to Sydney - and yours of April 20 today.” – ie, on consecutive days.  The explanation was that the May 9 letter arrived via an ex-U.S. ship on June 8 and the UK letter, sent to Kandy and readdressed, via an ex-UK ship on June 9.] 

 

17/5/98 ditto:  My analysis of the holograph (to determine what he wrote when) is going well, & providing some useful new insights.  [I have, courtesy of the late Dr Warren Roberts, a photographic copy of the text he wrote in Thirroul, as well as photocopies of the extant typescripts, which he corrected in Taos]  I am beginning to develop a picture of his daily writing regime (I can now tell the breaks in the writing sessions from the changes in his handwriting).  He wrote 3000-4000 words a session, or between 10 and18 pages a sitting (the MS has 559 pages) - necessitating between 30 and 38 sittings [ie, he could not have done it in less than 30 sittings, and it seems unlikely he took more than 38].  He probably started on Wednesday or Thursday May 31/June1 & put down his pen on July 15 – a writing span of 46 or 47 days.  On average, he wrote about half a chapter a day (there are 18 chapters).  So on a number of days he did not write at all (ie, when he was up in Sydney staying with Scott, or at the Carlton Hotel, for example).* 

[*This pace of writing, which is phenomenal, and has been remarked on by a number of critics – eg, Aldington in his Phoenix edition Introduction – has flummoxed many people, Ellis, Steele & Davis in particular.  They cannot see how he cd have kept this up, and still have had time for the sort of extensive socialising (not to mention research) the DT says he must have had with Scott, Rosenthal and the Friends.  And this is a problem, especially if you also allow him time to think up the plot, etc.  For the DT to work, Lawrence must have been writing almost at dictation speed.]

 

17/5/98 ditto:  I have begun my attack on the Friends, or rather their intransigence.  I fired the first, warning, shot via a letter in The Australian, assisted by the good offices of an old ACP colleague, Shelley Gare (who is now features editor there).  The letter began with the words “While researching the links between anti-democratic movements in the 1920-30s, D.H. Lawrence, and a leading Sydney boys’ school, I came across….”  That should put the wind up them.

 

July-August 1998 Bondi:  [This is a retrospective entry, re-created to fill a gap.  It concerns my Taos trip, itself described, in somewhat tongue-in-cheek (with emphasis on the cheek) fashion, in Rananim 6.2, “Fear & Loathing in Las Taos”.  I am taking the liberty of reconstructing it in diary format so as the maintain the diary form of the narrative.  I justify this “fiction” by the fact that I should have made an entry describing the Taos trip, but that I was in no mood to do so, and so this entry is redressing that omission.]  The trip to Taos, from which I have just returned, was a mixture of farce & deep disappointment, or more accurately, disillusionment.   I went with fairly high hopes – indeed, we both did, for Sandra left Sydney with me, intending to also give a paper in Taos on her WA discoveries.  I was to deliver a paper on the present state of the DT, a copy of which I had sent to the conference organisers for their OK, which they gave, or at least that’s what I thought they did.   Sandra, however, fell ill in Singapore, & we thought it prudent to send her back to Sydney, as the risk of her condition worsening in London or America, out of reach of familiar care, was one we cd nt take.  So I went on alone, intending to read her paper for her, along with my own.  The trip to Taos was long & arduous, culminating on a long bus ride from Denver to Taos, where I arrived, after more than 12 hours in the bus, late in the afternoon of the day before the conference was to begin.  There was a glitch about my room, but it was sorted out, and I picked up my copy of the conference program, which, I was dismayed to discover, had me slotted in for a talk I had not prepared.  Instead of  “Nothing to Sniff At”, an update on my secret army research, I was expected to deliver a paper on “Lawrence’s Response to the New Worlds of Ceylon & Australia”.   What on earth could I say about that? – especially on the third day of the conference, after such papers as “Celtic Cycles Recycled in The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter” and “Lawrence, Silko and Southwestern Mulitculturism”.  As I later remarked in my “Fear & Loathing” piece, a bit hard to go back to Australia from there.  So, as I already had some concerns about how my anti-Lawrence-establishment DT paper wd go down (concerns exacerbated by the frosty reception I had got from other – for I consider myself one – Lawrence scholars), I decided instead to give a hastily-complied paper on my new obsession:  Lawrence and trees.

[For my transformation research had advanced apace in the past few years, and was now pushing into very new territory indeed.  Putting it baldly and briefly, I was developing a theory involving Lawrence needing the companionship, even the collaboration, of trees to compose his fiction.  This will sound utterly mad, but the DT had taught me that mad ideas about Lawrence may not turn out to be so crazy after all.  Lawrence was a very peculiar and complex person.  As luck would have it, there was another scholar giving a paper at the conference which touched on this idea.  Michele Potter of the University of New Mexico was giving a talk on the influence of various trees on Lawrence and some of his works.  She gave, for example, a list of the trees that had influenced various Lawrence works – and I kid you not – such as an apple tree (The Fox), various fir trees in Bavaria (Aaron’s Rod), a willow in Mexico (The Plumed Serpent), umbrella pines outside Florence (Lady Chatterley’s Lover), a  Swiss pear tree (The Man Who Died), and the famous pine tree at the Kiowa Ranch (St Mawr, The Woman Who Rode Away, and Pan in America).  And if anyone has doubts about this, and I don’t blame them if they do, then I would urge them, most earnestly, to read “Trees and Babies and Papas and Mammas”, which is chapter 4 in Lawrence’s Fantasia of the Unconscious. You will not laugh about Lawrence and trees after that. (In fact, read the whole of Fantasia, for it will alter you view of Lawrence most substantially.  It was written just before Kangaroo.)]

So that is what I did (for I had brought with me my “Darroch shift” notebook, in case I ran across anyone else at Taos with whom I might discuss this somewhat outré new theory of mine).  This necessitated some absences from the conference events, particularly the social ones, but as I had come to regard my presence there as as welcome as Adolf Eichmann’s at a bar mitzvah, this didn’t much worry me.  I finished the paper and delivered it [see “Down in the Forest, Something Stirred” in Rananim 6/2], and then gave Sandra’s paper at a session I had to chair.  Perhaps the saddest part of the experience was coming across LD Clark, who had been so enthusiastic and helpful over my DHLR pieces, and him turning away, as though I were a stranger.  Which, I suppose, in that company, I was.  I got out as soon as I could, and returned to Sydney as swiftly as possible.  For some time after that, the name Lawrence and the thought of research were as ashes in my mouth.  I did very little work on Lawrence in the next year or so, except for Rananim.

 

19/2/00 Bondi:  A new century, and a new millennium – and almost two years (!) since my last [actual] entry (made just prior to my trip to Taos and the 7^th DHL Conference [see above]).  I had foresworn DHL after Taos, apart from the subsequent Rananim, and indeed little has happened since, except my correspondence with Kings (see letters).  So what justifies this entry?  Nothing very substantive.  I opened my notebook at the entry re Markie Vernon, partly to include something from it in the next issue of Rananim (which we are now finalising), and partly because at the [Union] Club last week [fellow Member] Geoff Dobbyn revealed that he was – wait for it! – the nephew of Markie Vernon (his mother, apparently, is, or was, a Vernon).  He has agreed to approach her and beg, on my behalf, for her to reopen the door* just a crack.  It might even make a footnote to my “Nothing to Sniff At” DT article in Rananim 7-8/1.

[*This “door” reference might becoming confusing.  What I mean to convey here is a door between the outside, ignorant world, which I and others inhabit, and the light of knowledge behind the door of the truth about Lawrence, Kangaroo and the secret army.]

 

7/3/00 ditto:  Posted Rananim out yesty, with my “best case” for the DT in it (“Nothing to Sniff At’).  Sent it to Kings, Yeend, FF, SMH, Australian, Steele, etc, etc.  The die is now cast, as I told the new Head of Kings, Dr TF Hawkes.  It will be interesting to see what happens.  G Dobbyn is writing to Markie.  But she’s “reclusive”, he sd.  Not promising.

 

17/3/00 ditto:  Peter Yeend has sent in a personal (not TKS) renewal for Rananim.  He has added his fax & email address.  Is this the hint of a rapproachment?  I will send him a nice note & see what happens.  (No news from Markie Vernon.)

20/3/00 ditto:  Geoff Dobbyn rang last night.  Sd Markie asked him to apologise and decline a meeting with me.  Various medical grounds cited.  Slight chance GD might visit her and try to get something.  We’ll see.  Meanwhile I posted a groveling letter to PY, with my email address.  We shall see.  [no response]

 

10/9/01 ditto:  Again, over a year since my last entry.  A year in which our DHLA society has fragmented, due to Paul Eggert’s defection. 

[Well, not so much a defection as an expulsion.  Following publication of my “Fear & Loathing” article, Eggert made overtures to some academics at Wollongong University about taking over the running of the DHLA and “refocusing” its activities from Sydney to the South Coast.  This did not work out and led to an exchange of letters between myself and Eggert, published in Rananim 9.1.  At the next AGM, John Lacey became the DHLA President, and Eggert did not renew his membership.] 

John Lacey is our new President, and our main activity now, socialising apart, is building our DHLA website.  But that is not the reason for this entry.  Rather it is my realisation, when subbing my “Nothing to Sniff At” article, that Scott is probably Lawrence’s cover for Robert Moreton Friend (or have I mentioned that before?).

 

4/4/02 ditto:  Seven months since my last entry.  I had thought that there wasn’t, miracles apart, much scope for further advances that wd warrant new entries (esp as I have only one side to write on, so my entries must be fairly substantive).  But now something has cropped up, quite unexpectedly, from “left field”, as it were, which certainly deserves a substantive entry.  I won’t go into the whole thing here, for it is outlined in the article “The Man Who Wasn’t There” I am writing for Rananim [10.1].  The man in question is George Augustine Taylor – not a name that has impinged on these notebooks hitherto.  I hd never heard of him until AM sent his letter about him to me a couple of weeks ago.  Now he is the center of attention.  His use of the name Cooley (twice!) and his closeness to Rosenthal make for a fascinating mystery.  I have not solved the mystery yet – and I never might.  But I can say that it is highly unlikely that the use by L of the name Cooley to describe Rosenthal can scarcely be unrelated to Taylor’s use, twice, of the same name Cooley in his 1915 novel, The Sequel.  Exciting days again!

 

11/4/02 ditto:  I have just finished the Cooley/Taylor article, leaving the answer to the mystery quite open.  I ended it by posing the question:  Is it a coincidence that Taylor conjures up the same unlikely name Cooley that L uses in K to describe their mutual friend, Rosenthal?  Clearly not.  There must be an explanation.  Moreover, the clue to that explanation must lie in K, or elsewhere at hand.  What cd that answer be?  One possibility is that Taylor put some element of his hero Rosenthal into The Sequel.  That’s possible, given their mutual interests & close association.  (Ruffels is equally fascinated by the mystery, & is using his very considerable skills & resources to probe further.)  If L found Rosenthal charismatic & visionary, so wd Taylor.  Did he associate Rosenthal with the name Cooley via his contact with The Public & The Arena (ie, via Henry George)?  [see Rananim article]  But how, when & via whom was the information imparted to L, esp as Taylor wasn’t in Sydney at the time? 

 

23/5/02 ditto:  I have bn spending the past week or so keying in & editing my complete diary – both notebooks, from 1976 to the present day.  It is to be the main content of the “Darroch Thesis” section of our DHLA website, which itself is now the main focus & activity of our society (Lacey will be running it, with Sandra providing the technical & other assistance).  An interesting exercise,  for it both reminds me what has happened, & allows me to add a few flourishes that make it quite readable, even interesting (I think anyway).  I’m now up to Nov 1993, & up till now no new insights have materialised.  But now one has, I think.

[One good thing about “digitising” the diary is that I’ll be free from now on - for I will using the diary was my primary recording medium - to go back & remove deadwood & deadends.  Indeed, there are some interesting “technical” possibilities emerging (such as the use of hyperlinks) that cd convert these bland words into…well, I’ll leave that matter open for the moment, but something is beginning to stir in my mind about a new online form of - I suppose the best term now is - “literary content”.  But that’s down the track, to use an Australianism.] 

This new insight came from entry 19/11/93 (see above) where I put down what Phyl Cope hd told Sandra about the Friends.  She sd, inter alia, that the Friends “often played poker at a house opposite Hinemoa”.  Why I missed the possible sig[nificance] of this, I do nt know.  Of course, “the house opposite” must be that white stucco bungalow facing the beach, immediately to the north of Hinemoa.  When reading this, or keying it in, I suddenly remembered Yeend’s letter that advised me to divert my attention away from Hinemoa, Florence Avenue & Walter Friend, & instead focus on Beach Road & “one of Walter’s brothers”.  Then there was Markie Vernon’s haunting question, when I was rabbiting on about Hinemoa, Hum & Scott:  “Are you sure?”  So I sd to myself, cd L have met the Friends – specifically Robert Moreton Friend – in that white stucco bungalow?  The something really clicked.  Cd it have some Cornish connection?  (L called the place Somers has tea with Callcott - at what I now know was Collaroy Basin - “St Columb”, mentioning that the name came from St Columb Major in Cornwall.)  From the recesses of my fading memory of the Basin I seemed to recall that that place had an entrance in Beach Road, next to Fox Park, & that on its stone entrance gateposts was a name, Edgecumbe.  I sd to myself, I bet that’s a Cornish name.  And I consulted my new electronic ferret, Google, & sure enough, Edgecumbe is a place in Cornwall, near Torquay.  I will heigh myself up to the Basin tomorrow, & I will be most surprised if that white stucco place is not Edgecumbe. 

 

24/5/02 ditto:  Well, it isn’t.  The name on the gatepost is “The Reef”, & the driveway indeed leads to the white stucco cottage (now in very poor repair) on whose verandah is a fading nameplate that reads “Seaview Cottage”.  Puzzling.  Also, there is a closer house “opposite Hinemoa”, & it is 8 Florence Avenue, & cd date from about 1922.  But it’s nt in Beach Rd, so the “Yeend Razor” wd seem to rule it out, for he sd, or implied, that I shld be looking for Robert Moreton Friend, & the place he & L met, not in Florence, but in Beach Rd.  (I think there’s a house in Cliff St, parallel with Beach Rd, that has the name Edgecumbe on it.)

 

29/5/02 ditto (my first “electronic” – ie, non-written - entry):  A second “insight”, or, more accurately, a “second sight”, has emerged from the current keying-in exercise.  When typing in the entry about George Sutherland (see 5/4/96 above) it occurred to me that I didn’t really follow that Yeend “tip” up, properly, & when reading it again, especially alongside the later entry about “you’re on the right track…Sutherland leads straight to Walter Friend”, I realised that, probably, Yeend was doing his best to tell me something significant here.  What?  At the time (mid-1996) I did quite a bit of poking about, with Ruffels’ help, into Sutherland, but nothing seemed to gel.  However, I was about to go off to Nottingham & Hessen, so I got diverted.  I did not come back to it, & I shld have probed deeper.  The link between Yeend’s (independent) tip, the Trewheelar obit (published almost the day before L’s srrival in Sydney), the fact that that Trewheelar worked for mining engineers Cameron Sutherland, & that in K there is a shadowy figure, Victoria’s brother, who is a mining engineer who goes down to Mullumbibmy (Thirroul) regularly, shld have interested me more.  I’ll see what I can do now to rectify that.  Was Sutherland related to Robert Moreton Friend?  What was RMF’s wife’s maiden name?

[This entry marks a turning point, or watershed in the diary.  From now on the entries will be electronic, nt in hard copy.  (The notebooks have come to an end.)  In fact, as of this departure,  the diary now falls into three parts.  The first part covered the period from 1976, when it started, to around March 1990.  It was mainly factual, & reported the ongoing research “straight”.  The second stage – from early 1990 until now – comprised fewer “straight” entries (for discoveries were nt coming as quickly) & more “discursive” ones.  It contained more observations & comments than previously (& some of this content was, as I explained in an extra comment to entry 30/1/90, “upgraded” during the keying in process by the replacement & interpolation of preferable words and phrases).  Now the third stage starts.  It is, or begins, in an experimental mode.  Hopefully, it will lead to a better & more interesting (even more productive) format.  Meanwhile, I will also be going back & progressively inserting extra material, such as letters, etc, & hyperlinks to other germane material.  Most important of all, from now on the diary will be “live” & progressive.  When new items are written, they will be “put up” on the site shortly thereafter, for all to see &, hopefully, comment on.  This is an experiment – unique, as far as I know - that excites & intrigues me, & I hope it will engage the interest & involvement of others as well.]

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