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Australians at War Film Archive Australians at War Film Archive Griffith Spragg (Griff) - Transcript of interview Date of interview: 15th May 2003 http://australiansatwarfilmarchive.unsw.edu.au/archive/131 Some parts of this interview have been embargoed. The embargoed portions are noted in the transcript and video. Tape 1 00:36 Griffith, I was wondering if you could just start by telling us a bit about your parents, where they came from, what they did? Well, my father was born in New Zealand and my mother in Goulburn. They met in Fiji, when my father was a pharmacist. My mother was over with her sister running a boarding house, he boarded there. So the most unlikely romantic couple ever seen. Very shy, but 01:00 they must have got together because there are five kids and many attempts, at least attempts … well, let’s not go into that. He pursued mother back to Haberfield where she was living at the time and they married. He worked as a pharmacist in Sydney, first and then Waratah and then eventually Maitland where I was born. 01:30 He was a very good fellow, very highly principled but a little bit bigoted in many ways. He was … my sister describes it well, she said, “He’s tolerant, he rams tolerance down your throat.” But he was a very good father and my mother was a very sweet lady and very astute. 02:00 So I really had no problems growing up. Do you have any idea what took them to Fiji in the first place? Well, my father, when he … he worked for his uncle at one stage in Wellington. His uncle, Wesley, from whom he got his second name, which he didn’t like, that was his first name, Wesley Finnick, he always used the second name. 02:30 He didn’t like him at all, but Wesley was an interesting guy himself. He was reputed to have discovered the Kauri pine for making butter boxes in his factory. And Dad walked out on that job. I’m not sure whether he did pharmacy after that down in, I think that’s what happened, down in Dunedin. But in between time he just did roustabouting [general labouring] and cutting flax, 03:00 which is the hardest thing, he said. And then eventually he wandered over to Fiji. Was that a period, though, remembered with fondness, living in Fiji? Yes, mother was an anxious person, she picked up a little bit of Indian, the Indian language there and she tells the story of working down at the Quay in a bookstore, I think it was the New South 03:30 Wales Book Store, and some Indian seamen trooped in, none of them speaking English. And she felt very threatened by them for some reason or other so she took up the courage and said “Jau.” which meant “Go.” And they all trooped out again, just as they’d trooped in. What was it that you asked me in the first place? Oh, whether they had fond recollections of the time in Fiji? 04:00 Well, that’s hard to say really. They didn’t speak very much of it. Must have been all right, though, they were getting together. Did they have a strong sense of the Empire, then, was that an important concept to them? It was never verbalised but I think it would be … it just happened. We got it at school, we just accepted it. We saluted the flag, all British born. 04:30 Yes, so they certainly had that attitude. That was something that he didn’t ram down our throat, didn’t have to, I don’t suppose. Come to think of it, he was very angry with Churchill [Prime Minister of Great Britain in WW2] after World War II. When we were coming home from the Middle East, we sailed out of Aden one morning and turned up back in Aden the next morning. I believe it was Churchill and 05:00 Curtin [Australian Prime Minister during WW2] arguing, and the compromise … Churchill wanted to send us to Burma. Thank God we didn’t go there. And to be compromised by putting us on Ceylon. We had three glorious months, garrisoning in Ceylon. But Churchill was obviously prepared to sacrifice us for a time being, but it was expedient I guess. And I had a lot of time for the old boy, really. But Dad used 05:30 to get a bit heated about him, though. Can you tell me what it was like to grow up amidst the Depression? Well, we didn’t suffer really. My father was earning ten pounds a week. And that wasn’t princely, it sounds good, it was certainly comfortable, you didn’t want for anything. But we were on the middle strata of society there. My siblings were forever aspiring, particularly 06:00 my sister, to ascend to the social stratosphere. And there was a bit of a phobia about the unemployed and people of the socio economic group five. I can see in retrospect now, my mother used to get horrified if we played with them, etcetera. It was a funny attitude which at the time we didn’t like it, and we ignored it as much as we could. But we didn’t think anything 06:30 of it, it seemed to be the thing to do, they were common people. Where were you living? In Rutherford, out of West Maitland. So there was quite a mix of classes in amongst that area? No, they were mainly working people and just a few … there was a school teacher … these were our circle … and the manager of the South Maitland 07:00 Railways lived in that area. But mostly they were unemployed or battlers. And was it a nice area as a boy to …? Oh, yes it was a lovely area. It’s not anymore, it’s been urbanised or sub-urbanised. So what sort of activities did you enjoy? Roaming the bush, swimming the river, cricket, football all those things. A bit of shooting. Yes, so there are 07:30 about three or four houses in our street, well that was First Avenue, when I was growing up and the street was quite a short one. From there, there was a large paddock that went down to a dam at the bottom and rose the other side to a quarry, which now constitute the Maitland Bowling Club. And bush started around about that area and went all the way out to the river, and it was great. There’s a lot of bush around that area. 08:00 How old were you when you finished school? Sixteen, I was finished at the end of ’38. Sixteen and I turned seventeen in January, ’39. And what sort of career goals did you have or ambitions for the future? My father wanted me to be a journalist. So I caught that, and yes, I want to be a journalist. But 08:30 I … when I finished doing the Leaving Certificate, I went down to Sydney, stayed with relatives at Brighton Le Sands, lovely people, the Galstons, mother’s sister. And I started looking for a job then and I was trying journalism. My father had connections with Barry Bowman, or “Freddie” as they used to call him. 09:00 His father and Bowman’s grandfather were friends in New Zealand. And on the strength of that I went and interviewed him. He was an interesting guy, but he said I was overqualified … that was roughly what he was telling me. I had a Leaving Certificate, or I was about to get it and that was too advanced to be a copy boy. And that was it. So I eventually got into the Commonwealth Bank. 09:30 So during the early part of ’39, you were working for the Commonwealth Bank? Yes. And what were your duties there? Oh, I was a junior, checked sheets. The teller would do the transactions and pass the pass book through to me, the savings bank passbook, and I had to enter it onto these sheets where there was a strip down the side you tore off and they had to reconcile the balances. The boss once described my 10:00 check sheets as “Like a battlefield.” So I thought, “Well, if that’s how you feel about it, I’ll go to war.” in a sense. Can you tell me about the day in which you heard that war had broken out? Yes, I remember very clearly. When Robert Menzies [Australian Prime Minister at the outbreak of WW2] performed his “Melancholy Duty.” We were round at the home of friends in Brighton Le Sands, the name of Holmes, and 10:30 their father Mick, they called him “Red” Mick, he was a fellow traveller [a communist] I think, he was a good old guy, but he’d been wounded in World War I and he’d seen plenty of fighting. The tension was so great at that time that when Menzies announced that war had started, there were three of us there, my cousin, his youngest son and myself, we all gave into a cheer. And he was so angry, the father was so angry with us. He said “You bloody 11:00 young fools, you don’t know what you’re getting into.” And of course we didn’t, he was right. But it was a relief. It had been hovering over our head. And I think that was it.
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