Lindsay Hardy

Lindsay Hardy the man who wrote from Lindsay Street Victor Harbor —via Adelaide & Sydney— to the Middle East, North Africa, New Guinea, to Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, North America —Vancouver, Hollywood, Toronto, New York— to London, Sydney, to permanent expatriacy in London Peter Adamson To Angus ‘Gus’ Dodd of the 2/48th, who, typical of the vast majority of diggers, said so little of his war service that it was only when I researched Hardy’s life that I gained an inkling of what he endured. ©2014 Peter David Adamson 7 Horn Court, Walkerville. South Australia. 5081. <[email protected]> (08) 8344-3709 2 Lindsay Hardy was Australia’s finest writer of suspense thrillers for radio. Born in Victor Harbor, South Australia, he moved to Sydney, joined the army in December 1939, was wounded twice (once in North Africa and again in New Guinea), returned to Australia, and began writing radio serials. He and his serials soon became household names. He then sought fame in Hollywood and was successful, until McCarthyite hysteria saw him refused residential status. Disappointed, he moved to Cana- da and London; came back to Sydney, then finally, with very little work in Australian radio and television for writers of drama, returned to England and permanent expatriacy. 3 Lindsay Hardy the man who wrote Contents Preface 5 Acknowledgments 7 Introduction: Who was Lindsay Hardy? 9 1. Starting points: from Lindsay Street Victor Harbor to Sydney 12 September 1914-December 1939 2. To World War II: the Middle East and New Guinea 15 December 1939-November 1943 3. Back in Australia November 1943 -December 1944, then off to Britain 21 4. Back in Australia in 1946, Hardy begins writing for radio then or 1947 26 5. Hardy moves to Sydney in 1950 31 6. Writing in Hollywood and New York 1952-1953 39 7. To Canada, London, New York, London, Sydney, London, Sydney 1953-57 49 8. To London—never to return—1958-1994 58 9. The writer and the man: Who was Lindsay Hardy? 84 Appendices 1. More on Hardy’s trial for attempted rape 91 2. Hardy on the British Medical Establishment 95 3. Chronological bibliography of Lindsay Hardy’s known writing 98 4. Lindsay Hardy’s novels and television serials in translation 101 5. Lindsay Hardy’s ‘recycled’ plots 102 6. Cast and character lists of Major Gregory Keen radio serials 103 7. Robert Aldrich’s lies about the writing of World for Ransom 104 8. Serial production costs & profits, writers’ & actors’ remuneration 107 9. Photographs of Mr & Mrs Hardy in chronological order 110 Bibliography and other sources 117 Endnotes 118 4 Preface Although I have tried to write a chronologically accurate account of Lindsay Hardy’s life, and especially of his writing, there will be errors, because often I have had to rely on memories of events that occurred from 20 to over 90 years ago. My search for people who knew Hardy began with pleas in the letters-to-the- editors columns of Adelaide papers. Anthony Laube, who helped mount an exhibition on Victor Harbor’s history, read one and contacted me. A few years previously he had been sent some information from Sydney by Mark Day, Hardy’s nephew, about the Har- dy family. I rang Mark, who knew very little about his uncle’s life, but was able to tell me why: he had disgraced himself in the opinion of his family, and so Mark’s mother, Alfreda, maintained an unbreakable wall of silence about him.1 Mark told me how to contact Hardy’s surviving sister, Marjory, who said to me: ‘I know nothing about him … I was his younger sister and they told me nothing about him. I have no memories of him.’2 ‘They’ were her parents and older sister Alfreda. This raised several ques- tions. Did they tell her nothing, and if so why? Was it because he had disgraced himself? Or, did she know nothing? Being only three years younger than Lindsay, at least until he left home, she should have known a lot about him. Four years later Al- freda’s other son, Paul de Burgh-Day, recalled that ‘As a child, I remember hearing about … Uncle Lindsay. … he was my Uncle, but he was the family black sheep, he was not a good person.’3 Back to the mystery—what had Hardy done? Very little information from other sources is readily available about Hardy. His war record only gives an outline: it states where he was, what injuries and illnesses he had, when he went AWOL and the like. But, critically, it does not mention what bat- tles he fought in. The only other significant sources of information that I found, if one can call them that, were the blurbs on two of his books. That he was a private man is another reason for the shortage of material: for four years I was unable to learn anything about Hardy’s wife except her name and the year of their marriage; during four years I found only one line of his about himself, a comment in a British magazine. And that leads to the final reason for the shortage of information: he spent most of the last half of his life in England, about which I found little more than the line mentioned above and the synopses of scripts that he wrote for television. It seems that after returning to England in the late 50s he ceased nearly all contact with Australia, except for occasional meetings with the now deceased radio producer Donovan Joyce and the actor Guy Doleman. What information there was about Hardy was often hard to get. When I first rang the R.S.L. in Adelaide to see if any of his battalion mates were still alive I was told by a man that most were dead and that the memories of the remaining few had all been de- stroyed by dementia. I was bitterly disappointed. About a year and a half later I tried again, hoping to speak to a different person and have a better result. I spoke to a woman, and within 48 hours I had the phone numbers of three men who had served with him. I’ve never told those three helpful, knowledgeable men that they had been written off with advanced dementia. When I learnt that Hardy had attended Victor Harbor High School I rang the school. The receptionist told me that the school had no archives, and so nothing on Hardy. (She should have known that the school had archives because its 5 history had been published. But then she did not tell me of that either.) However, gentle probing revealed that they had boxes of records beginning in 1930. As that was the year Hardy spent there I asked her to look. She did and replied, ‘We have nothing on Anderson.’ She had looked under my misheard name. When I reminded her that I was researching Lindsay Hardy, not me, she found his report card with his grades on it. ‘Could you tell me what they are?’ She replied, ‘They mean nothing to me.’ Fortu- nately she agreed to send me a copy. I received a standard Education Department report (still used in the 1960s) with all marks expressed simply as percentages. History research should not have to be this hard. I was keen to find, what seemed to be the last possible source of information, the ‘niece’ who provided the details for Hardy’s death certificate. I wrote to her address at the time of his death in Southampton and received no reply. No one of that name was listed in the telephone directories, so I checked the British electoral roll and found only one possible. I wrote to her in Cheshire—no reply. Was she the woman that I want- ed? If only people would return mail addressed to the wrong person. All the time I thought that I was racing against time for Lindsay’s niece, if 20 years younger than Lindsay, would be about 75. Was she still alive? Finally, on Boxing Day 2009, I decided to make one last attempt to contact the niece, whom I thought was a niece of his deceased wife. If this attempt failed I would end the search and write up what I had. I rang Mark Day, who thought that her name was familiar. A few days later he emailed her address to me. She had been living in Australia since a few days after her uncle’s death in London, and was his grandniece— and no where near 75. I quickly contacted her. Not only had she provided the details for Hardy’s death certificate, she had visited her ‘Uncle Lindsay’ in London. Through her I contacted her mother and uncles. Then unexpectedly the information drought was significantly broken when her mother kindly lent me 100 pages of Hardy’s letters to his mother and sister Marjory. A year later Mark Day came across two packets of docu- ments (including passports, a seaman’s identity card and wage book), photographs and letters written to his mother. Before proceeding, some words on series and serials because Hardy wrote both. A series can include several serials but not the other way around, as in ‘Hardy became fa- mous for his series of serials about Gregory Keen.’ More commonly though in the writing world a series is a group or set of separate or stand-alone or self-contained sto- ries on similar themes or featuring the same leading characters.

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