December 2009

For JP, who wrote: People keep sending me obituaries… Do you still have your former wife's?

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Comrade, best call it a tribute: time and writing heal most wounds... although there is one loose thread hanging off this tale.


Not long after Madeleine's Sydney wake, I had a call from a cousin, a country doctor, Dr.John, whom I'd last seen at my mother Joan's funeral some thirty years before. Dr.John had been visited by another cousin with her husband, from the USA: they'd been talking family... and Dr.John in his gravel voice wanted to know

  "is it true that Harry committed suicide?"

Harry Vernon Dixon was our maternal grandfather. At the time of his death in 1930 he had recently retired as CEO of the sugar empire CSR.


I had to tell Dr.John I was unsure: my father— drunk and angry during his divorce (and, in retrospect, thinking I already knew the story)— had rambled how he'd been called to the scene by Edward, Harry's son: from which, I told Dr.John, I had inferred a family disagreement, misadventure, and, remotely possibly... but I hadn't asked.


[Something about a window: he'd been living at his club, there'd been an inquest, some distant family-tree-climbing relative discovered.]


We talked further and I recalled that Dr.John had gone to London to be a surgeon. He said he had been obliged to give it up. Depression. We agreed to sheet it home to Harry. "Take St.John's Wort" was Dr.John's advice, "half Germany's on it." I still do.

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So, comrade, there it stands: Joan and Madeleine, each has a parent suicide. I hadn't made the connection when I wrote my memories of Madeleine, hadn't understood the bond. And Joan had not ever mentioned her father's death, her stories were always of the paterfamilias and his happy brood in sylvan Hunter's Hill.

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And then there's the matter of Harry ending his days at his club... in a late draft of the biography of Madeleine, Harry has "gone to his club one night and killed himself". But neither the author nor I had done due diligence on that story, and in publication Harry's death emerged as "Joan's dark secret" about her father's life cut short.
I should be delving in the archives...

˜

September 2018

Edward's widow, Roma, is the thread by which the story hangs. At Edward's funeral in 1989, she tells the three of us-- her two daughters and myself:

"Edward told me once:
Harry committed suicide.
And he never spoke of it again"

— never, in all his years
of schoolmastering and headmastering.

She adds that when it happens

"Edward was at Paul's"

— by which she means St.Paul's
College, a university residence for professed Anglicans.

Which proves to be not true: in his first year, Edward is indeed bow in the victorious college Eight; next year, he's left. Gone. When Harry retires, he can no longer afford the fees.


When young Edward signs his father's death certificate, he gives as his address No. 32 Macleay Street in bohemian King's Cross, which (according to the plans lodged twenty years before) comprised two storeys with four apartments each. The plans admit only one apartment and one window from which a plunge is possible, from which I conclude this is the apartment from which, on a winter Sunday morning, Harry jumps—

fell from a window

as the certificate attests.

In hospital, Harry dies in the afternoon. If he's conscious following the fall, no-one alive now knows. There's a hasty inquest, no post-mortem. His funeral's on the Tuesday in sylvan Hunter's Hill and the empire sends its minions.

˜

Harry's undoing is not so much his depressive tendency: it's boardroom politics. The Chair has decided to retire, and in play is the Managing Director's seat on the Board of CSR.

At Harry's club, there's a murmuring of underlings

"HVD isn't the man for the job"

murmurings relayed to the Chair, who agrees:

"He relies too much on those whose advice
we would not regard as indispensable."

HVD does not take the news well. He refuses the Chair's handshake.

˜

Whatever Harry's shortcomings in a changing world— the Depression looms— one fact remains: the man who names his younger son
Edward Lincoln
for the President who
freed the slaves is deeply at odds with the culture of the empire in which he has spent his working life.

We also know that, in his retirement, the Chair concedes an admiration for President Lincoln, just as he admires his Queen... Victoria: but whether this is a bow to his General Manager Harry, today no-one can say.

˜

HVD was christened 'Harry': he was never 'Henry'.
Mr E. W. Knox’s notes on Mr H. V. Dixon’s retirement, 1928
his death   his funeral   his portrait   his Book of Common Prayer
Edward ~ headmaster
young Edward ~