I work in communications at the Brotherhood and this blog post is about a book, The Changing Drama, written by one Archibald Henderson and published in 1914, and Australia’s prime minister from 1941 to 1945, John Curtin.
You never know what gem you are going to uncover among donations to the Brotherhood of books, clothes and other goods, so Greg Simpson from our Brotherhood Books online bookshop was excited when he found this book.
It discusses contemporary theatre (in 1914) and bears this inscription on the flyleaf:
J Curtin.
Melb.
12/11/’43.
On a few blank pages at the back of the book are some handwritten notes that appear to be about the progress of the war against Japan in Asia and the Pacific. There are also annotations of the text handwritten throughout the book, as if by a student of drama.
So were the signature and notes written by the John Curtin or someone else? Greg and I went on a search to try to find out answer to this question for The Changing Drama.
My own online hunt took me on a fascinating trawl through the life and times of Curtin.
He was prime minister from October 1941, two months before Japan entered the war by bombing Pearl Harbour, until his death a few weeks before the war ended in August 1945. The inscription on his gravestone in Perth reads: “His country was his pride. His brother man his cause.”
Curtin was born in 1885 into a poor family in Creswick, a mining town near Ballarat. The family moved to different towns before settling in the Melbourne suburb of Brunswick. Curtin left school at just 14 years of age.
As a young man in 1917 he moved to Perth, which was his home for the rest of his life and where he raised a son and daughter with his wife, Elsie. Before he was elected to parliament in 1934 his main occupations were union organiser and journalist.
I certainly found some circumstantial evidence in favour of the book being linked to John Curtin.
My main sources of information, by the way, were the websites of the National Archives of Australia (www.naa.gov.au) and the John Curtin Prime Ministerial Library at Curtin University (http://john.curtin.edu.au/). And the electronic archives in John Curtin Prime Ministerial library.
Despite leaving school at 14 Curtin was well read, and deeply interested in theatre and other literary pursuits. In a 1912 letter to Elsie and her family, he discussed another book of dramatic criticism, Women of Shakespeare, by Frank Harris, and wrote: 'There is nothing that is not in a great book ... There is meat and drink and love'.
Despite leaving school at 14 Curtin was well read, and deeply interested in theatre and other literary pursuits. In a 1912 letter to Elsie and her family, he discussed another book of dramatic criticism, Women of Shakespeare, by Frank Harris, and wrote: 'There is nothing that is not in a great book ... There is meat and drink and love'.
According to his son, also John, in a 2004 interview that’s quoted in a section of the John Curtin Library website about the prime minister’s home life, his father was an omnivorous reader who 'read everything. Honestly he'd pick up the grocery list and read that! He had a wide range of books ... pretty deep stuff too a lot of it.'
And according to a journalist, Tom Fitzgerald, who exhaustively researched Curtin’s life for a biography he planned to write, his subject wrote under a pen name, “Vigilant”, about drama and poetry during his time as editor of the Westralian Worker from 1917 to 1928:
So at around the time of the publication of The Changing Drama, and later, Curtin was reading and writing about the theatre.
Regarding the 12-11-43 date next to the signature at the front of the book, Curtin was indeed in Melbourne from 10 to 14 November in 1943. This photo shows him at a War Cabinet meeting at the Victoria Barracks on 10 November that year.
However, despite this tantalising evidence, sadly the “J Curtin” signature at the front of the book isn’t a match with Curtin’s signature.
Intriguingly the book’s signature is much closer to a “John Curtin” signature that was actually written by his secretary, Eric Tonkin, on a photograph of the prime minister with his treasurer Ben Chifley, with a note that the photo was signed in his absence.
But it’s still not an exact match.
Turning to Curtin’s handwriting, the samples in these letters on the Curtin library website don’t reveal a match with the notes at the back of The Changing Drama, although they do reveal many touching communications between Curtin and his family:
For me, however, this wasn’t a fruitless search, because I enjoying discovering a little about the life of a prime minister I knew little about, beyond his name and the fact that he is generally viewed as a pretty admirable national leader in a time of great crisis.
Despite a tough early life and limited schooling he not only became an extremely capable national leader at a dark time in Australia’s history, but was also an erudite man with a keen intellect. His letters reveal an interesting, witty and compassionate soul, who writes with a deft turn of phrase. In one 1924 letter to Elsie from Geneva in Switzerland, where he was a delegate to a meeting of the International Labour Organization, he wrote of the pricey hotel he was booked into: “I told the manager ‘too bloody high’. He knew the meaning of the second word and said he would take me to another room ... It commands a magnificent view and is fit for a king. The other room was fit for five kings.”
So if it wasn’t the J. Curtin who signed the book, which J. Curtin was it? Greg Simpson and I would love to hear from anyone who can throw any light on this mystery. Leave a comment at the bottom of this post if you can help.
Jeannie Zakharov from the Brotherhood
