Letters From My Father, Robert Menzies – Book Launch – Heather Henderson

In 2011, Sir Robert Menzies’ daughter Heather Henderson published her father’s letters to her, written over the years she had been living overseas with her diplomat husband Peter Henderson. These letters reveal a very different Robert Menzies, Prime Minister of Australia from 1939-1941 and again from 1949-1966, from the imposing public figure most Australian came to recognise. To launch her book, Letters to My Daughter (Pier 9), Heather Henderson addressed The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 17 August 2011. The paper which follows has been taken from an edited transcript of the talk on the night

LETTERS FROM MY FATHER, ROBERT MENZIES – BOOK LAUNCH

HEATHER HENDERSON

I’m glad to hear from Gerard that I haven’t a time limit. I can remember that my father had a reputation in this regard. After he was well retired, he was being interviewed at home. His nurse told me later of how members of the press had said, “Well, now we’ll have a rehearsal.”  And he said, “I don’t have rehearsals.” But he was informed that he must have a rehearsal, otherwise they would not know how long he would speak. They could only give him precisely one and a half minutes.  He said, “Very well.”  So he started.  He spoke and he stopped precisely at the end of one and a half minutes.  The boys of the press had never seen a performance like that.  So, I tell you, my performance will be different.

I’m here to talk about the letters – the letters Dad wrote to me during the years when I was living overseas. Some time ago, I started writing about my parents. In the course of that, I got out the letters my father had written to me. I showed them to Peter. He looked at them and said, “Boy, this would make a good book.”  Peter was so fired with enthusiasm,  that he went out and bought a copying machine. He copied them all twice. Having first put them into proper date order, we then sent them to two friends who knew a lot about books. They both agreed they were worth publishing.  One of them had been a publisher and he knew a lot about books. He said, “If I was still in the publishing world, this would be a draft contract.”

That was very encouraging. What was less encouraging was that when we showed it to two publishers, both said no. The second (we were dealing with a friend of one of our daughters) said, “I like it, but the sales department said no and I can’t go against what they say.” And I said: “Okay, so where do we go from here?” And she said: “I think you go to a literary agent and let them do the dirty work.”  Well, I just hope her sales department lives to regret their decision because the literary agent found Murdoch Press who agreed to do it. Now we have what I like to think is a very good looking book.

Even so, I agonised about whether I should publish the letters or not. There’s a lot in them that’s not very kind about people. When my father retired, he wrote two books and he was very careful not to criticise people who would be hurt, or families who would be hurt.  Neither was a book of recriminations. But many years have passed and it is now interesting to know what he said about people. He didn’t criticise them in a particularly vindictive way. He did it in a rather clever and colourful way.  The families might not agree but we have cut out many rather juicy bits. You might not think so when you read the book because there’s still enough in it.

The letters, of course, were written for my eyes and ears. We saw Doug Anthony not long before the book appeared and we showed him a few bits we were not sure about publishing. For example, some of Dad’s comments about Jack McEwen. Doug told us, “Look, it’s history. Just put it all in, it doesn’t matter.”  So I am putting all the blame on Doug Anthony.

These letters reveal what people thought about Dad. And I particularly liked what Richard Nixon said about him which was:

If I were to rate one post war leader above the others, it would not be one of the legendary European or American figures. It would be Robert Menzies of Australia.

But the letters also reveal quite a lot about himself. When Peter and I lived in the Philippines, I met Mrs Marcos. When she heard who my father was, her first words were, “Oh, that sense of humour.”  That humour comes out in this book. Ii is worth it for that reason alone.  We’ve all heard about his meetings where people interjected and he gave crisp answers. But only the elderly amongst us will remember his wit. One man I met remembered that when he was quite a young man his father used to take him to my father’s meetings. They would get there at half past six and the meetings started at eight. They would take their sandwiches and sit in the front row. One night there was a woman yelling out and waving her hands. (Dad claimed that he could never hear what women were saying when they yelled like that, so his only defence was to think of something else.) So eventually he stopped and said: “Yes madam, of course, it’s through the door and down the corridor.”

Doing the book has been very gratifying. Somebody rang me the other day and said, “My husband is sitting at the table laughing because he’s enjoying the book so much.”  A young woman in the publishing house read the whole book and said, “Oh, but he’s got such a great sense of humour!”  So, good, that’s what I wanted people to realise – it’s important.

Another thing the letters reveal is his great affection and regard for his family. Me of course but also my mother, brothers, his brothers and sister. His own family was extremely united and they were great support for each other. And they never wavered. They were always there for him.  And I don’t think he could have coped without that support.

He talks about my mother in one bit – and again what a gorgeous way of putting it:

I’m back in Canberra from Brisbane where I went to explain the facts of political life to 800 businessmen at a dinner and then my reminiscences of legal life to 400 lawyers.  Your mother, who is I regret to say mentally afflicted, twenty speeches in a week, is having a succes  fou in Queensland and New South Wales and will not return until Saturday. … In the result, the Liberal Party gains votes in spite of me and my own eccentric life continues.

And then he worries about my mother doing too much. After retirement he wrote: “Your dear mother simply cannot delegate her responsibilities to others and is, therefore, always on the run.”  That made me laugh because I could just imagine my daughter saying, “You have some of your mother in you, haven’t you?”  (Because that’s me.)

But not all of the family comments are very flattering. About his nephew James, he wrote:

Young James has reached by careful inattention to his studies, the intermediate class at Trinity but is not expected to go further academically. This is a pity because he is a not unattractive lad and I believe plays the kettle-drum with remarkable talent.

I would like to add here that James has forgiven me and bought five copies of the book.

He took a great interest in his grandchildren and when our eldest daughter was five years old he wrote:

Edwina’s question “was God born?” has filled me with delight!  This, in my opinion, is the most profound theological question ever put.  It suggests to me that this girl should end up either as the first female president of the Rationalists Association or the first female Primate of Australia.

And then there was a bit about our youngest child. When my parents were in England at one time, and we were posted in London, we went down to Walmer Castle which was the seat of the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports. That of course was my father. And my parents had an apartment there. We stayed there for the school holidays during which time we went out on a hovercraft across the Channel to France where we were to have lunch. There was a great discussion about what people were going to have for lunch. What do the French eat? They eat eat snails and frog’s legs – what are we going to have, and so on. Finally Sibby, who was then about four or five, piped up and said, “I’m going to have snail legs!”  Dad loved that and never forgot it. A great success.

Another thing that comes out very clearly is the fact that my father was not a snob.  I shall quote a couple of passages where he talked about somebody who is a mutual acquaintance with, “His snobbery is so gratuitous and ill founded that I’m almost coming to enjoy it.”  But the best one is when some friends stayed at the Lodge. This is how my father described a confrontation between two ladies like this:

I wish you could have been with us. If I had time, I could write a piece about it which could rival De Quincy’s “Murder Considered as a Fine Art”. The two ladies sat devoid of all humour, looking at each other with the fierce eyes of rivalry, dredging up out of their memories all titled people they have ever met and wherever possible referring to them as “Tom” or “Mary”.  It was a magnificent encounter – never a laugh but never a dull moment.

In his letters, private conversations, making speeches, my father always seemed to quote something.  He had an amazing capacity for words. An English journalist who met him and spent some time with him wrote an article where he said, “[Menzies] can season the talk with a ready sprinkling of literary allusion and quotation.”

It’s true.  In these letters, we see a lot of examples of it. “As our late friend, the author of proverbs said, ‘Better a dinner of herbs with those you love than a stalled ox and hatred therewith.’” After a rather curious and uncomfortable gathering, my father claimed  old Shakespeare was right, not for the first time, when he said, “Time and the hour run through the roughest day”.  And when something had gone wrong in my life he said: “Comfort yourself with Browning’s  famous line: ‘But sudden, the worst turns the best in the end’.”

It seems extraordinary that Dad apologised for not writing enough. He used to write family letters – in the book as well – mainly to his brothers and sister, but also to everybody else in the family. And they were passed around. In one of these he said:

This will be my last family letter before my return. I seem to have averaged about one a month which is a rather poor performance, yet, and Frank can check this one. [Frank was the acknowledged biblical expert in the family.] my average may still be better than that of the apostle Paul, though the quality of the epistles should not be compared.

You wonder where this habit of quoting comes from, remembering all those lines. He always had an apt quotation wherever he was. It started, I think, with no words at all. When he was in Jeparit at the local state school, the inspector came round. The students were all told to be on their best behaviour and at the end Robert was to stand up and say thank you.   So, at the end, the head master Mr Livingstone said, “Well, now Robert will say a few words.”  Robert stepped forward and eventually looked up at this big man. He licked his lips, he wriggled, he looked down again, he swallowed and he looked up. And the teacher said, “Thank You, Robert.”   So that was the first speech, not a word.

My father went from there to school in Ballarat where he lived with his Scottish grandmother who, according to my father and my aunt, was a mean old woman. Whether she was or not, I do not know. But she was very strict. Any misdemeanour was punished by being made to learn a passage from the Bible or a psalm. And that’s where his knowledge of the Bible came from – it was what he had to learn when he was a small boy. He went from there, with scholarships, to secondary school and he loved poetry. He had a great feeling for poetry.  He wrote to his granddaughter Edwina when she was in her late teens:

When I had a big speech to make, I would begin by making brief notes, merely as a reminder to me as to what my line of argument was to be and relying upon the moment to produce the words in which I would clothe the ideas. The night before the speech, I read poetry because great poetry gives one a sense of the weight and quality of words, which perhaps no other reading can do.

Well, it worked for him, but it wouldn’t work for all of us. There he was, his brain was full of the Bible, poetry, Shakespeare, songs – it had to come out somewhere – and it did.  And we all know now those famous words in 1963: “I did but see her passing by.” But when he spoke at the reception in Kings Hall for the Queen, it was perfectly natural for him to quote something familiar.

My Uncle Frank used to sing at the piano. One of his songs went, “I know a lady sweet and kind/ I did but see her passing by/ yet I shall love her till I die.” We all knew that song. My father knew that song. And, at the time, it was quite appropriate. People had been standing and waiting hours in the streets to see the Queen. And they did but see her passing by. What the ABC does not tell us is that the Labor Opposition leader Arthur Calwell spoke at that same function. This is what Mr Calwell said, “Our speeches here are, of course, quite unnecessary to assure Her Majesty of the warmth of that welcome.  It will come much more directly, much more eloquently, from the millions of men, women and children who will see and will be seen by her in the course of this visit.”

I think if my father was here today, and he knew how the ABC had kept on with “Passing by”, he would not be surprised. But perhaps he would sympathise with Rachmaninoff.  Rachmaninoff composed the Prelude in C sharp minor and his friends loved it. They kept saying, “Play it again, play it for us, play it for us.” In the end, he said he wished he had never written it. I’m sure Dad would feel the same way about the words he used in 1963. On the other hand, I’m sure you will enjoy the little bit in the book about the ABC and what he thought about the ABC – on page 160.

My father made hundreds of speeches.  For me, one of the best speeches he made was at Churchill’s funeral. He was very het up about it, he was very worried about it and he wasn’t sure if it was good enough. When it was over, he asked our friend Charles Lloyd Jones to come and see him at his hotel.  “Charles, I know you will tell me the truth.  Was I any good?” The reply was, “Sir, I was proud to be Australian.  You have never made a better speech.” What is so extraordinary is that that little tongue-tied boy in Jeparit turned into the man who spoke to the world on that occasion.  What a transformation.

I do believe now that I have done the right thing. Readers can see the human side of Robert Menzies, which is the whole point about publishing these letters.  You can see what kind of person he was. The Canberra Times had a review of the book by Jack Waterford. He ended up saying, talking about me, “She has done him and us a favour.”  I like to think he was right.

Best of all, a friend of mine who knew my father from when we were about five, said, “Your father always had a way with words and it’s wonderful to hear him speaking again.”