Shute the Messenger

Shute the Messenger

By Graham Fricke

Book cover image: Nevil Shute

Text and cover design by Michael Hanrahan (www.mhps.com.au)

World map copyright Map Resources

Copyright Graham Fricke 2011

Smashwords Edition

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CONTENTS

1 On the bench

2 Antecedents and early influences

3 Scholar Engineer

4 Traveller

5 Sailor

6 Aviator-entrepreneur

7 Blimps and blunders

9 Author-raconteur

10 Some literary comparisons

11 Family man

12 Flight of fancy

13 Personal autonomy

14 Holding a mirror to life

15 Wartime reflections

16 Reflections down under

17 Twilight years in the antipodes

18 Armchair testator

19 A writer’s testament

20 Legacy

21 Suggested answers

1 | On the bench

When a festive occasion our spirit unbends

We should never forget the profession’s best friends.

So we’ll pass round the wine

And a light bumper fill

To the jolly testator who makes his own will.

-(Traditional toast in the Inns of Court, London)

‘SILENCE!…All stand please!’ Mr Justice Adam entered the crowded courtroom of the domed Melbourne law court complex that bore a resemblance to Dublin’s Four Courts. It was August 1964, four and a half years after the best-selling novelist Nevil Shute had died in the city he had adopted a decade earlier, but the lawyers were still struggling to interpret the meaning of a will which he, a master of clear prose, had composed.

Clustered around the bar table of the small Chambers were eleven barristers, including learned silks, and ten solicitors. Darkened eyes bore eloquent testimony to the tortured nocturnal industry of the assembled barristers, the burning of midnight oil over weighty tomes that now littered the bar table. The lawyers had gathered to debate which had troubled the trustee company managing the estate of Nevil Shute Norway. The equity advocates were very happy to argue these matters before the man who had been christened Alexander Duncan Grant Adam, but who was commonly known as Alistair, a name he was to adopt formally when he was knighted a few years later.

In Melbourne, The Age newspaper had been an enthusiastic chronicler of Shute’s move to its environs, his continuing literary success, his refusal to attend the film of his book, On the Beach, and his death a month later, in January 1960, which it recorded on the front page. It relegated the story of the legal debate to page three, under the heading 41 Legal Questions Arise from Nevil Shute’s Will. After setting out the nature of the legal proceedings, the reporter noted:

Early in the hearing yesterday, Mr Justice Adam looked down at the crowded Bar table cluttered with papers and books of reference. It would, he said, have been cheaper for Mr Shute to have had a solicitor prepare the will.

The mild laughter at the Bar table which followed the judicial bon mot was not just sycophantic. It was partly due to the genuine affection in which the judge was held amongst barristers. And it was partly attributable to the warm feelings which are generated at the Bar by the prospect of a handsome fee, as well as what was for them a stimulating and challenging intellectual exercise.

The will which gave rise to this litigious extravaganza was almost as long as some of its author’s literary chapters. Dated 24 April 1958, it occupied six pages of typed foolscap. But whereas Shute was an early exponent of plain English and wrote unvarnished prose in both his novels and his scholarly papers, the will was replete with legalisms, circumlocutions and archaic expressions. One suspects that the trustee company which he appointed as co-executor and trustee had a hand in the drafting of the will. Mr Justice Adam observed that the will, although it incorporated expressions ‘reminiscent of traditional legal precedents’, in its more important provisions bore ‘the unmistakable marks of lay authorship’. Details of its provisions are discussed in a later chapter. They were microscopically analysed by learned counsel and the judge during arid legal debate.

After two days of extensive – and expensive – argument, Mr Justice Adam upheld the more important provisions in the will. The language of the will (see chapter 19) raises the intriguing question, among others, of whether Nevil Shute fully understood his wife’s attitude towards Australia. He loved his adopted country, and it had been his decision to uproot the family and emigrate from England. But his wife, a former doctor, did not share his love of Australia. From the expressions in the will following the annuity, it appears that Nevil Shute expected that his widow would remain in the farmhouse at Langwarrin, Victoria. He contemplated that she might want to move, but only in terms of a preference for a ‘smaller and cheaper house’.

In the event, Frances Norway lost little time in returning to her native England. When she brought proceedings for ‘further provision’ from the estate, she swore an affidavit in support of her application, in which she gave the address ‘Ridgeway Place, Melbourne’. But she was already on her way back to England – following the traditional sea route – by the time she got around to swearing the affidavit, which she did in October 1962 when the ship berthed at Perth before a ‘Commissioner of the Supreme Court of Victoria for taking affidavits in Western Australia.’

Dr Norway’s affidavit highlights the amorphous nature of her husband’s estate and goes part of the way towards explaining why Shute had left her only a small annuity and a life interest in a farmhouse. His gross estate, for duty purposes, was valued at 190 281 pounds, five shillings and one penny. From this, a clutch of avaricious governments – England, the Australian federal government, the Australian states of Victoria and New South Wales and Australia’s Northern Territory – had extracted a total in excess of 100 000 pounds in estate duties. That left only 89 369 pounds, eleven shillings and eleven pence as the net estate. But the royalties received by the trustees for Shute’s books during the ten months after his death were more than double this net estate: a staggering 180 588 pounds had been received in royalties in just ten months.

Frances’ harrowing tale continued to be revealed in further affidavits which disclosed that the widow had assets worth slightly in excess of 2 000 pounds, that on returning to England she had lived at first in a hotel and then in a flat (which cost her 65 pounds a month for the first year, then 27 pounds 6 shillings a month for 10 months), and that she had then made arrangements with the trustees to purchase ‘Oak Barn’ at Walberswick in Suffolk for 10 000 pounds. (These arrangements were predicated on the two daughters executing a deed indemnifying the trustee company from any ensuing liability.)

Frances Norway moved into Oak Barn, a thatched cottage with an anthracite heater, situated on about three quarters of an acre, in August 1964. She was comfortable enough for the balance of the English summer, but then, as she deposed:

During the winter of 1964-5 it became clear that the winds from the north and west were extremely cold and the servicing and refuelling of the heater was a very heavy and dirty job, which I had to do myself. A certain amount of inquiry and my own observations made it clear that one remedy was to install an oil-fired central heating system and that it would also be desirable to plant trees as wind breaks to diminish the effect of the winds both on the house and garden....

Frances then wrote to the trustee company seeking reimbursement of expenses she had incurred, as well as funds to install an oil heater and to buy adjoining land on which to plant trees as a wind break. By autumn of 1965, the trustee had not acceded to these requests, so she obtained an increase in her overdraft and proceeded to install the oil heater.

Dr Norway explained in an affidavit in 1966 that she had been compelled to manage all of this without the benefit of an old age pension since she had been ‘resident in Australia during what would have been the qualifying period’. She added that she would have liked to make annual visits to her elder daughter who was then living in the United States, but that her financial position precluded such visits and she did not think it was right to ask her daughter to meet the cost of travel. She concluded by stating that although she was a qualified doctor, she was then aged 63 and had not practised for more than 25 years. The only use she had made of her medical training for many years had been to assist Nevil Shute ‘on aspects of his books which concerned medical matters’.

The wheels of the law ground slowly and it was not until 17 March 1967 that the court reconvened to deal with Frances Norway’s application for further provision. Once again a galaxy of legal talent appeared before Mr Justice Adam. The rustle of silks included R G De B Griffith QC (a later appointee to the Supreme Court of Victoria), N M Stephen QC (subsequently a justice of the Supreme Court of Victoria, the High Court of Australia and Governor-General), B J Shaw, who later became a Queen’s Counsel and R H Searby, a friend of Rupert Murdoch and an eminent counsel and company director. After hearing counsel, the judge made extensive provision supplementing the gifts contained in the will.

Mr Justice Adam ordered by way of further provision that Frances receive a legacy of $62 248, a further legacy of $14 800 from royalties received by the estate between 1962 and 1966 (less a proportion of income tax which might be levied on those royalties), an increase in the annuity from 1200 pounds to $5368 per annum and a fifteen per cent share of royalties received by the estate in the future. (1)

These events pose almost as many questions for the biographer and historian as the terms of the will generated for the court. Why did Nevil Shute Norway, who displayed generosity towards former employees, relatives, his daughters and his old school and college, behave in such a niggardly fashion towards his widow? Why did he not anticipate that she would want to return to England? But, most puzzling of all, why did he not engage a solicitor to draw his will?

It is possible at this stage to venture some superficial answers to two of these questions. Nevil Norway was a frugal man, who, like many testators, did not pay sufficient regard to the continuing ravages of inflation. He was in a more invidious position than most testators, for he could not accurately assess the value of his estate. Enormously popular as he was, he could not have foreseen that the royalties in less than a year after his death would almost equal the value of assets it had taken him a lifetime to accumulate, and would represent double the value of his net estate.

What of the third question? Why did Shute draft his own will? Authors tend to empathise with their protagonists, to fantasize that they are actually experiencing the events in their books, to inhabit and project themselves into roles in the manner of method actors. Somerset Maugham confesses to this tendency in his autobiography The Summing Up:

I have at times fallen victim to a snare to which the writer is peculiarly liable, the desire to carry out in my own life certain actions which I made the characters of my invention do.

(Penguin edition, 1938, p.36).

The temptation is even greater for an author who does not write in the third person, though even Graham Greene, who usually wrote in the third person, used to carry around and use business cards made out in the names of some of his characters such as Major Scobie and Mr Tench. And as a spy in the Second World War he had become accustomed to adopting different identities or ‘covers’.

The theme of testamentary dispositions features in the majority of Shute’s novels, and probate solicitors are depicted in a kindly light. Did he, having placed himself in the literary role of a family solicitor, imagine that he could do the job himself? It is possible Nevil Shute Norway believed he could do a better job drafting a comprehensible will than the average probate solicitor. In the end his will was held to be valid, although the expense involved in establishing its validity and meaning was much greater than the cost of retaining a solicitor to draw up a will. Frances’ proceedings for further provision under the Administration and Probate Act cost additional time and money, and it may be that if he had engaged a solicitor to draw up a will, he would have been encouraged to make more generous provision for his wife in order to forestall such proceedings.

These are tentative answers. To obtain a firmer understanding of the nature of the man who drafted the will,