When I began researching the life of Paul Brickhill for The Hero Maker, the first ever biography of the Australian World War II fighter pilot, POW, journalist and world-famous author of The Great Escape and The Dam Busters, I had no idea my quest for his roots would lead me to the city where I was born, Launceston.
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Brickhill was born in Melbourne 100 years ago this year, and died in Sydney 25 years ago. But his parents and grandparents were all born and raised in Launceston. Had they not pursued the careers they did, it’s unlikely Brickhill would ever have become a journalist and later an internationally bestselling author.
If you’re a Brickhill, and your Tasmanian roots go back a way, there’s a good chance you’re related to Paul Brickhill. His Tasmanian great-grandfather was John Brickhill, an East End silk dyer in London who, with a downturn in the silk trade, migrated to Van Diemen’s Land in the early 1840s and settled in Launceston.
John Brickhill would father ten children. His third son, James, went to work for The Examiner at the age of sixteen, starting out as an office boy. Working his way through the ranks, James would end up as the newspaper’s accountant.
When James was nineteen, he managed to get twenty-one-year-old local girl Rebecca Emms pregnant, and they hurriedly married. James and Rebecca would also have a large family, including five sons.
In December, 1881, after working for The Examiner for 19 years, thirty-five-year-old James Brickhill left to take over another newspaper, in competition with his old employer. The Telegraph had been set up by three Launceston businessmen in 1881 as a weekly paper, but had floundered.
Buying the paper and its printery in partnership with a printer named Bell, James quickly turned around its fortunes. He began by expanding The Telegraph.
By June, 1883, James was ready to take on The Examiner in a head-to head battle by going to daily publication. The 1881 census told him there were 33,500 people in the greater Launceston area, and he was determined to make as many of them as possible readers of his Daily Telegraph.
From premises at 56 Paterson Street, just down from The Examiner and around the corner from his parents’ St John Street home, James steered his newspaper to profit, at The Examiner’s expense.
As his Launceston-born boys grew up, James employed three of them. Second youngest boy George would become a cadet reporter with his father’s paper in 1894.
James was by that time a leading light in Launceston.
Then, at the end of 1894, James threw it all up, selling out of the Daily Telegraph and becoming a commission and mining agent. Driving his gig back from Beaconsfield one day, he was involved in a serious accident that laid him up for six months.
By the end of 1900 he was experiencing a midlife crisis. Taking wife Rebecca and unmarried daughter Daisy with him, he moved to Zeehan on the West Coast, where he became council clerk and a JP.
James’ sons spread to the four winds. Two went to Perth, Western Australia, and then South Africa to fight in the Boer War and later settle. Another went to Burnie, joining the post office there. Compositor Lewis went to The Examiner. And George went to Bendigo in Victoria, joining The Advertiser as a journalist.
In Zeehan, James again had itchy feet, in 1903 taking on colourful American politician King O’Malley to contest the North West Tasmanian seat of Darwin, later renamed Braddon, in the federal election. He almost beat O’Malley, too, losing by just 129 votes.
When James passed away in Zeehan in 1908, aged just sixty-one, Rebecca and Daisy would move back to Launceston, where Daisy would be her mother’s companion and carer for the next thirty-two years at their 45 Welman Street home.
Son and brother George had meanwhile succumbed to the wanderlust. In early 1905, George left Victoria to travel the world in search of exhibits for Wirths’ Circus. By April, he was driving four elephants to the Indian coast to board a ship for Sydney, along with several tapirs and a ten-metre python he had secured for the circus.
By March, 1906, George was back in Launceston to visit his mother and sister. The Examiner reported, “Mr Brickhill has lately been travelling the world in search of circus novelties, but has completed his mission and purposes resuming his association with the newspaper world in Melbourne.”
Sure enough, George joined The Age in Melbourne as a journalist, working alongside Keith Murdoch, future father of Rupert Murdoch. Back in Tasmania, George had fallen in love with Izitella ‘Dot’ Bradshaw.
By 1908, the Bradshaws had moved to Sydney. Following Dot to Kensington in inner Sydney, George Brickhill proposed. Marrying in February, 1909, the couple settled at Auburn in Melbourne, as George continued to work for The Age.
George and Dot had three sons in Melbourne. Son number three, Paul Chester Jerome Brickhill, was born at Camberwell on December 20, 1916. This was the future internationally renowned author.
Ahead lay a career as newspaper editor for George at several interstate newspapers, before the family moved to Sydney in 1927. There, young Paul Brickhill would befriend eleven-year-old future Academy Award-winning actor Peter Finch, who Paul would credit with getting him into journalism and launching his career as a world beating writer.
IN PART 2 (next Sunday): Paul Brickhill becomes a journalist in Sydney, joins the RAAF, becomes a Spitfire pilot with the RAF, is shot down, is made a prisoner of the Germans and helps organise the Great Escape.
After the war, he will write The Great Escape five different ways before it becomes an international bestseller, and within three years become the most successful author in Britain, also writing The Dam Busters and Reach for the Sky before post traumatic stress destroyed his life.