At Christmas 1933, the place to be in London was the palatial mansion owned
by American romantic novelist Baroness von Hutton zum Stolzenburg in highly
fashionable Clifton Court off St John’s Wood Road, a couple of straight drives
away from Lord’s Cricket Ground. Except ‘Betsey’ wasn’t at home – she was
“wintering” in Rome. Her vast abode was being rented by a free-spending New
Zealander, Stanley East, and it was “open house” for a stream of parties eagerly
patronised by, among many others, fellow Australian journalists and South
African footballers. The South Africans quickly wore out their welcome, however,
and after “bursting out into their war cry, some kind of Boer song” in the early
hours of one Yuletide morning, an incensed East, his eyes bulging, bellowed at
them, “I will not have German songs sung in my house. Out of the house, all of
you, before I throw you out with my bare hands.” The interlopers duly obliged,
unaided, but Australian cricket writers Arthur Mailey and Gilbert Mant stayed on
to enjoy a few more quieter ales.
Stanley East was born at Addington in Christchurch on April 4, 1886, the
son of the Church of St Mary the Virgin resident curate Herbert East, a one-time
compositor with the Lyttelton Times. Stan East started as a journalist with the
Lyttelton Times in 1909 and went on to work for the Christchurch Star until
1917, when he moved to the Evening Post in Wellington. He was also an
advertising agent in the capital before packing up his trusty portable
typewriter and decamping for Sydney in the early 1920s. Stan soon established a
wide reputation for his love of throwing parties, as a prominent member of
Sydney’s hell-raising Bohemian set in Bondi. To pay for this high life he worked for Daily
Telegraph and was later chief sub-editor of The Sun on comparatively meagre
wages. Yet, having discovered in 1915 P.G. Wodehouse’s immortal creation Jeeves,
and his “gentleman’s person gentleman” relationship with Bertram Wilberforce
“Bertie” Wooster, East had begun to harbour a surreal dream - of having his own,
real life, English butler.
In July 1933 East and his second wife Milba May won £25,000 in the
Queensland Exhibition No 2 Monster Casket, and Stan’s Jeeves dream suddenly
became a reality. Stan had a flutter on a few faltering Sydney nags, bought
beers for all his mates, handed over some of the cash to needy young lift
operators, messengers and printers, and then set off with Milba and their
13-year-old daughter, Raukura Margery De Villiers East, for London. Once there,
he immediately hired a valet called Watson (and Watson’s wife as a cook and
chief bottle washer). In his October 1965 Nation obituary for Stan, Mant recalled his first
encounter with Watson as a “baffling experience”. Watson, dressed in chauffeur’s
uniform, arrived at Mant’s West Kensington flat at the wheel of a magnificent
Bentley. After driving Mant and his wife to St John’s Wood, he quickly opened
the back doors of the limousine and, without saying a word, sprinted to the back
of the house. “In some bewilderment,” wrote Mant, “we walked to the front door
and rang the bell”. It was opened almost immediately by Watson, by now dressed
in immaculate striped trousers and a frock coat. “‘Please come inside, sir,’ he
murmured respectfully. ‘The master is expecting you.’ The master, also playing
his part to perfection, ushered me into his library (another fulfilled ambition)
and flung open the door of a cupboard containing every conceivable type of
alcoholic beverage.”
Having his own Jeeves wasn’t the only aspiration East achieved. He went
to the races at Longchamps and travelled to the Riviera, Monte Carlo and the
Alps. His big spend lasted a little more than six months, however, and Stan
eventually had to find work with the Australian wire news service operating from
The Times building. By August 1934 the Easts were back in Australia – having
held on to a sufficient amount of their winnings to fulfil another of Stan’s stated goals
- to buy a poultry farm. The Easts settled at Wiseman’s Ferry, Milba’s old home
town, 45 miles north of Sydney in the Hornsby Shire. The loyal Watson and his
wife came with them and moved in when the Easts in March 1935 settled in a
restored old stone house (renaming it “Rawhiti”, Māori for East) beside the
Hawkesbury River. But Watson didn’t last long. He was “out of his element
there,” wrote Mant, and soon returned to England. Stan East, meanwhile, kept his
hand in with his typewriter, writing articles about his European travels and the
cost of prime Canterbury lamb in Britain for newspapers across Australia,
including The Sun. Naturally, he was also president of the Wiseman’s Ferry
Cricket Club.
By 1939 Stan was back in Sydney, as manager of radio station 2UE, and
boldly predicting in The Sun that there would be no World War Two. He
volunteered when war did break out, and in 1943 a role was found for him in a
Federal Department of Information set up by Arthur Calwell, the minister in John
Curtin's Labor Government. East retired in 1947 and became librarian and
official historian for the Canberra Club, as well as helping produce a
short-lived Canberra-published political and literary fortnightly called the
Australian Observer. Mant said East “turned into a benign old gentleman, though
subject to sudden outbursts of histrionics when he would cry out passionately,
‘Thank God, sir, there are such men in England today’. It was the punch-line
from a play which East, in his younger days as an actor with Pollard’s Opera
Company in New Zealand, using the stage name Owen Hardy (‘I was always owin’,
and crackin’ hardy about it’), had been fond of reciting throughout his
colourful life in Australia.
The great humourist Lennie Lower, still considered by many to be the
comic genius of Australian journalism, is alleged to have based his 1929 novel
Here's Luck on Stan East, “distorting the real into the truly comic” by disguising East as Jack Gudgeon (who with his feckless son Stanley goes on
a wild rampage through Sydney's racecourses, gambling dens, pubs and cafes and
hosts never-ending parties in their increasingly derelict home). Lower’s editor
said the book “remains pre-eminently Australia's funniest book, as ageless as
Pickwick or Tom Sawyer, a work of 'weird genius' … written by a ‘Chaplin of
words’’’. Stan East died in Canberra on September 10, 1965, aged 79.
