The Playwright Who Invented Himself, on a Remington Typewriter

Teddy Barclay isn’t Australia’s most famous playwright, far from it. That title would most likely go to David Williamson, who used an Olivetti Lettera 22 portable. But Teddy Barclay was possibly our most prolific playwright, certainly so in the now long-lost speciality of radio drama. And he was definitely the playwright who consistently pounded a typewriter with the most unforgiving zeal. Each day in the six months from March to September 1933, Barclay sat at his Remington 10 standard typewriter from 8am to 1am the next morning, and wrote an astonishing 14 radio revues.

Or so Teddy said. The big problem with all this is that Teddy Barclay never existed. Unquestionably a highly inventive writer, Teddy’s most lasting invention was himself. In Leslie Rees’s 1982 book Hold Fast to Dreams: Fifty Years in Theatre, Radio, Television and Books, Rees described Barclay as “something of a minor genius”. His major genius was in creating a persona that Australians, to this day, believe to be true. Teddy Barclay was no mere writer's pseudonym, it was the complete fabrication of a life.

Teddy Barclay is still, today, vaunted in print – most notably in no less than the Australian Dictionary of Biography - as an outstanding novellist and playwright. His ADB entry has been slavishly copied by Wikipedia. Trouble is, all of the details about his early life are quite obviously false - to start with, no one in real life has ever had the surname Compston-Buckleigh. Yet until now nobody has bothered to find out the truth about Teddy. And that seemingly unpalatable truth is he that he is Australian literature’s greatest liar.

Australian Who's Who, 1944

Radio historian Richard Lane, in The Golden Age of Australian Radio Drama 1923-1960, wrote that Edmund Piers Barclay was "Australian radio's first great writer and, many would say, Australian radio's greatest playwright ever”. According to the ADB, Wikipedia and all other sources, Barclay was born on May 2, 1898, at Dinapore, India, the son of Major Edmund Compston-Buckleigh, from Hendon, Middlesex, that he was educated at Stonyhurst College, joined the Middlesex Regiment at the outbreak of World War I and won the Military Cross and Croix de Guerre while serving with the Royal Flying Corps. Apart from the date of birth, none of these things are even vaguely correct.

Brighter London was actually a 1923 stage play, not a weekly newspaper.

The editor named was Jimmy Heddle, not Headle.

The ADB and Wikipedia say Barclay arrived in Australia in August 1926, “determined to show ‘he was the world's greatest novelist’”. It must have been a very long voyage, because, under his real name, Barclay actually left London on the Australian Commonwealth Line's MV Largs Bay for Australia on November 11, 1924. The fact is that he would have reached this country by January 1925 at the latest.e wH

 

The unforunate wife of "Barclay" was London-born Helene Beatrice Barclay

 (nee Date, 1903-), left, also a noted playwright and author.

The 1993 (Volume 13) ADB entry on Barclay was written by Marion Consandine, who had had no more luck finding out who Barclay really was than, apparently, such well-known historians as Ken Inglis and Clement Semmler, the State Library of NSW or AusLit. Some relied on an entry in the 1944 Australian Who’s Who, which devoted 17 lines to “Barclay (formerly Compston-Buckleigh), Edmund Piers, MC (with Bar)”. The first nine lines are just a succession of blatant lies.

It didn’t take all that much effort to find the truth. All I needed to do was not copy what someone else (and especially Barclay) had written.

Mechanics were not all he devised.

Barclay was actually Edmund Charles Buckley, not born in India but in Southport, Lancashire (at least the birth date he gave was correct). His dad was no more a “Major” than I am – he was in fact a Swinton-born bike and car engineer, Samuel Compston Buckley (1871-1929). Edmund Buckley didn’t serve in World War I, and wasn’t awarded any war medals. When he left England under his real name, in 1924, he declared his occupation was journalism. He might have added, “and monumental bulldust artist”.

The sad part is that, in reinventing himself as a war hero and the son of a British Army officer, Teddy Barclay may have been inspired by the real life of Edmund Maurice Buckley, left, the son of Sir Edmund Buckley, the second Baronet of Mawddwy in Wales. Edmund Maurice Buckley (1886-1915) joined the Seventh Battalion of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers as a Second Lieutenant at the outbreak of the First World War. He served in the Gallipoli Campaign and died in the assault on Sulva Bay on  August 12, 1915.

Edmund Charles Buckley, who had become universally known as Edmund Piers Barclay, died of a coronary occlusion on August 26, 1961, at Gosford in New South Wales, aged 63. The truth about him was buried, along with the body.