The Aussie Bastard Who Could Fly – and the Grey Star Reporters Who Knew How to Cover His Crash

Guy Menzies phones home from Hokitika on the evening of January 7, 1931, while postmaster Ralph Cox listens in. Photo taken by David Stevenson.

Young journalists today, if denied the use of their iPhones and their laptops, wouldn’t have the slightest clue how to do it. But 85 years ago, in January 1931, reporters from the Greymouth Evening Star - armed with no more than their wits and their Remington portable typewriters - hurdled with impressive ease the massive challenges that confronted them. A rebellious young daredevil flyer called Guy Lambton Menzies had crashed-landed in a South Westland swamp at the end of a groundbreaking unscheduled flight from Sydney. It was one of the biggest international news story of the day, making a sizeable splash on The New York Times’ world page (under the headline “Youth Breaks Record on Tasman Sea Flight”). Even before The Gray Lady’s story was printed, those Grey Star reporters had got it on to the front page of such distant evening newspapers as the Corsicana Daily News in Texas and the Iola Register in Kansas - that very same day! (Well, in fairness, in the meantime it had crossed the international dateline, but still …) In startlingly quick time, US dailies such as the Morning News in Wilmington, Delaware (“Another Famous Southern Cross”) and the Terril Record in Iowa (“Inglorious Ending of a Glorious Flight”) printed Greymouth photographer Lawrence Andrew Inkster’s images of Menzies and his Avro 616 Sports Avian IVa – Charles Kingsford Smith castoff, the Southern Cross Junior – upside down beside Alf Wall’s cow paddocks at Herepo outside Harihari.

Photos at crash site by Lawrence Andrew Inkster

         Inkster’s photos, which clearly showed the registration letters G-ABCF underneath the Avian’s wings, had instantly given rise to some Kiwi wit – they stood for, one Harihari humorist promptly declared, “Gee – Aussie Bastards Can’t Fly!”

The 21-year-old Menzies had hit the La Fontaine ground at 3.15pm on January 7, 1931.  By the time he had fallen headfirst into mud out of his cockpit, waded across swampland to find help, had afternoon tea with May Berry and was put in Bert Kelly’s cream truck,  Grey Star and Grey River Argus reporters were well on the way south to meet him. One had somehow latched on to the story almost as soon as it happened, and had already spoken to Menzies by telephone from Harihari postmaster George Rowley’s store. It was a trying interview – after his 11-hour 45-minute flight from Mascot, Menzies was still pretty much deaf from the constant roar of the Avro’s engines.

Menzies with Hokitika hosts and Greymouth reporters on the evening of January 7, 1931.

 Photo by David Stevenson.

The Grey Star and Argus reporters were there at Ross, 29 miles of then hazardous road north of Harihari and 40 miles from Greymouth, when Menzies arrived in Kelly’s truck. His story was disseminated so far and so rapidly that it had reached Sydney by 3pm Eastern Australian time (5pm in New Zealand) and a Sydney Morning Herald journalist was able to ring Menzies’ mother, Ida, in Drummoyne, to give her the good news of Guy’s “safe” arrival. In those days, New Zealand’s cooperative news agency, involving dailies both metropolitan and provincial feeding copy into a national grid, was called the United Press Association. As affiliates, the Grey Star and Grey River Argus filed stories of major news value to Wellington, from where those of international appeal were sent on to Australia and beyond by “electric telegraph”. In 1931, UPA was under the management of former Christchurch Star news editor Alexander Buchan Lane.

The impression one gains from Max Wearne’s 2005  The Life of Guy Menzies: The Forgotten Flyer is that Australian newspapers were as much on top of this story as those in New Zealand. Yes, New Zealand journalists were supplied with some details about mystery man Menzies, but Australia’s eastern seaboard was two hours behind New Zealand, and yet New Zealand newspapers still “owned” this story the next morning. For ample evidence of this, one only has to compare The New Zealand Herald’s massive coverage (above) with the skimpy paragraphs in The Sydney Morning Herald, a newspaper in which the most prominent Menzies “news” item was a half-page Atlantic Motor Oil advertisement lauding “this daring aviator”.

Now in fairness, Harihari is about as a remote a hamlet as there is in a sparsely populated and rugged country. In that part of the New Zealand, in that era, telephone communications were only possible through party lines, directed onward through the post office in the town of Hokitika. When on the evening of the Menzies landing, postmaster Ralph Cox put Menzies through to Sydney, to speak to his mother and to Frederick William Tonkin (1884-1956), the much-travelled editor of the Daily Guardian, it was the first time such calls had been made between Westland’s capital and Sydney (two firsts in one day!).

Menzies relaxes in the Cox home, the postmasters' residence.

Photo by David Stevenson.

Menzies' log book shows that he estimated he would land "about Greymouth".

In the circumstances, the achievement of the Grey Star and Grey River Argus reporters, and the Greymouth correspondent of the Christchurch Press, was truly remarkable. Thousands of words were sent in extraordinarily short time across the world, followed the next day by the prints from the crash scene taken by Inkster and a photographer who had somehow managed to find his way to South Westland from Dunedin, Alexander William Bathgate (right, 1877-1961) (remember, there was no Haast Pass back then, nor would there be one for another 30 years).

While Inkster was still on his way south to capture Menzies at the crashed Avro, two of the more famous Menzies images, one of him on the telephone and the other at dinner with reporters and his hosts in Hokitika, were taken by a young Hokitika photographer named David Stevenson Jr (1907-1949).

 Inkster’s photos were prominently used in the Auckland Star and Wellington Evening Post on the 10^th and, with Stevenson’s and Bathgate’s, in the Auckland Weekly News on the 14^th, no mean feat given the capricious picturegram method of transmitting images by wire back then. Inkster’s images also appeared in Australian newspapers from the 13^th. For someone whose work in the La Fontaine swamp in 1931 is mostly uncredited today, Inkster’s legacy is that his photos of the upturned Avro are the ones by which the Menzies story is still most easily identified. However, one of his more telling images, illustrating just how boggy La Fontaine was back then (below, right), is no longer used, credited or otherwise. Stevenson and Bathgate have been given no lasting credit, either.

The talented Inkster, left, was born in Westport on April 2, 1897, the son of a Shetland Island migrant who died when Inkster was six months old. He was raised by his mother, who came from Araluen, outside Canberra. Inkster first worked on the railways but found his forte in photography and joined forces with James Ring in 1924. He took over Ring’s renowned agency when Ring retired in 1929. It was still called Inkster’s when Joe Quinn became owner after Inkster’s death on August 29, 1955. Quinn also photographed for the Grey Star.

For the Star and Argus reporters to have got hold of the story, to have made contact with Menzies, either by phone or in person, to have carried out their interviews, typed their long and detailed stories, and to have filed them from Hokitika on the night of the crashlanding, using party lines, in the time they had available to them ahead of deadlines, was quite astonishing. Don’t worry, I know what I’m talking about – I once had to file a story using a party line from a remote part of the West of Ireland, and it was a most exacting task - and that was in 1974! Remember, this flight in 1931 was unscheduled, made by an unknown pilot. And it ended a very long way from Menzies' intended destination outside Blenheim (or, as Australian authorities had been led to believe, Perth). So at first, at least, details were sketchy to say the least. What the Star and Argus men did took some doing.

Archibald Kibble

The Grey Star team was marshalled by the newspaper’s editor, Archibald Kibble. Kibble was born in Holborn in London on November 7, 1879, and first worked in New Zealand as a clerk in Napier in 1911. He started his career in journalism in Hobart in 1914 and enlisted for World War I when he returned to New Zealand in 1917 and settled in Christchurch. Kibble became editor of the Ashburton Guardian in 1919 and took over as editor of the Grey Star when John Robert Wallace died in April 1921. Kibble remained editor for 25 years. There was a break in 1939 when he went back to England, but he returned at the outbreak of World War II. After leaving the Grey Star in 1946, Kibble returned to Christchurch and was still in journalism at the age of 78. After two trips back to England in the 1950s, he eventually settled back there in 1959 and died on July 26, 1965, in Bournemouth.

"Our photographer", the "first man on the scene with a camera", was in fact Lawrence Inkster of Greymouth.

Sadly, the names of these intrepid Grey Star and Argus reporters who covered this historic event are unknown. The hundreds of newspapers around the world which published their stories only gave them the standard “Our Correspondent” byline, as if to establish they had someone on the scene.

Uncredited Inkster photo in an Australian newspaper.

"Gee – Aussie Bastards Can’t Fly!" can't be seen!

We do know, however, that one “ace” New Zealand journalist, James Ogden Hanlon, was back in harness in Christchurch, after stints with the Sydney Sun and as editor of The Fiji Times in the late 1920s. Born in Auckland on June 10, 1899, Jim Hanlon had worked for the Auckland Star, Wanganui Chronicle and the Grey River Argus before going to Australia and on to Suva. He spent most of the 1930s as a chief of staff and roving reporter based in Norfolk, England, before returning to Auckland. Hanlon died on June 21, 1986, aged 87, and is buried at Purewa Cemetery.

 Above, Menzies with young female admirers in Hokitika. Below, Menzies' plane is carted from Hokitika to Greymouth

 Below, in Greymouth.

Getting SHIRTY about QWERTY (Part I)

- With apologies to Jimmy Fallon and The Tonight Show crew

St Joseph Herald, Michigan, 1868, six years before the

Sholes & Glidden first appeared on the market.

The reference to its speed is in relationship to

penmanship (handwriting), not sending Morse.

To this day, the QWERTY keyboard configuration remains, to paraphrase Winston Churchill's October 1939 description of the Soviet Union, "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma". QWERTY will most likely remain so forever. The reason for this, perhaps, is that there seems to be every possibility the sequence of letters which comprises the "Universal" keyboard emerged almost completely at random, a juggling act of sorts. In turn, this might well explain why Christopher Latham Sholes and James Densmore didn't bother to leave behind a definitive explanation of the way in which they settled on QWERTY - maybe they simply couldn't. As desperate as we may be to finally figure QWERTY out, to decode it, there will always be obstacles - such as the absolute fact that we cannot possibly look into the minds of two dead men, from a distance of almost 145 years. These hurdles will remain insurmountable. Thus, every single theory concerning the configuration, no matter how well researched or documented, can be no more than that: a theory - and one based on pure speculation. What we are actually left with is a choice: Is one theory more plausible than another? That's really all there is to it: speculation upon speculation.

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Let's just say, for the sake of an argument, that this is what started out as the 40-character four-bank keyboard, in alphabetical order, which Matthew Schwalbach came up with in late 1871, and which Sholes and Densmore then played around with in order to overcome "technical difficulties" (Ernst Martin). FGH stay together, for example, as the only surviving trace of an original alphabetical sequence, albeit on a lower bank. Can such extensive character movements be related to anything other than the efforts of Sholes and Densmore to get their machine working more efficiently? Schwalbach had already achieved the objective of a small, compact four-bank keyboard, to reduce the amount of hand movement by the operator. What remained was to ensure the typebars connected to the keys could operate smoothly. One overall task, but a number of necessary solutions, and much fiddling - the diagram above is not intended to convey an accurate idea of Schwalbach's original layout, simply to indicate the amount of (key)chopping and changing that went on. Were Sholes and Densmore premeditated, or indeed guided, in their decision-making? Based upon the balance of what evidence we do have, that would seem to me to be most unlikely.

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A young journalist who worked with me at The Canberra Times and went on to "make it" elsewhere - in spite of little or no encouragement and guidance from his "superiors" - once trailed along on a lunchtime hunt to a large Fyshwick second-hand bookshop. I suspect he later came to place a little too much faith in a chance remark I happened to make as we walked the long aisles, that "If I was ever short of an idea for a column, I could pick up any of these books and find one". For me it still holds true, but good second-hand bookshops (in Canberra at least) seem to be disappearing at a rate far faster than New Zealand glaciers. Using the Internet is not the same thing, because, for one thing, an Internet search presupposes a subject, and risking a random selection is more likely than not to throw up something about which no column in a family newspaper can be written. What's more, old-stagers like me were brought up in a time when non-fiction works - references and textbooks - were almost entirely reliable (properly researched, checked, proofed, legalled, the works). Many of these are online, of course, if one knows how to find them. But today we're much more likely to be directed toward some half-baked thesis or an opinion piece masquerading as an article dealing in facts. Key in "QWERTY" on Google, for example, and see what nonsense comes up on the first page alone (oztypewriter notwithstanding). Give me a book anytime.

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In the days when I was a newspaper columnist, there were occasions when I was monetarily stumped for a topic. Happily, my brief was to write on anything I liked. Not even when the subject was sport did I concentrate a whole column on sport. I suspect it might be much more difficult for someone charged with writing each week on nothing but, say, technology. Such a columnist might often relish stumbling across a topic that had just the slightest whiff of technology about it. That thought came to me when I read a piece in The Atlantic from May 3, 2013, written by one Alexis C. Madigral and headed, "The Lies You've Been Told About the QWERTY Keyboard - The QWERTY configuration for typewriters can be traced, actually, to the telegraph." Suspiciously, on the very same day, another article, by Wesley Fenton at TESTED, appeared under the headline, "The QWERTY Keyboard Layout May Have Come from Morse Code. The story of QWERTY as we know? Probably wrong." Madigral and Fenton had, obviously without too much checking of their own, picked up on an article by a Jimmy Stamp, published online earlier on May 13, 2013, by The Smithsonian Magazine. This one was headed "Fact of Fiction? The Legend of the QWERTY Keyboard - What came first: the typist or the keyboard? The answer may surprise you." Both columnists had taken their leads from a paper published more than two years earlier, in March 2011, by Koichi and Motoko Yasuoka of Kyoto University and titled "On the Prehistory of QWERTY". Neither Stamp nor Madrigal offered much in the way of an original thought of their own, they simply followed what the Yasuokas had written, passing it on as gospel. The abstract for the Yasuoka document says, in part, "In this paper we reveal the prehistory of [the] QWERTY keyboard along [with] the history of telegraph apparatus: Morse, Hughes-Phelps and Teletype. The early keyboard of [the] Type-Writer was derived from [the] Hughes-Phelps Printing Telegraph, and it was developed for Morse receivers. The keyboard arrangement very often changed during the development, and accidentally grew into QWERTY among the different requirements. QWERTY was adopted by [the] Teletype in the 1910s, and [the] Teletype was widely used as a computer terminal later."

The Yasuokas go on: "Then we debunk several urban legends about QWERTY". Koichi Yasuoka is very good at debunking, especially any ideas that might run contrary to his own.

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One of the golden rules of old-style print journalism was, "Never risk publishing the word of anyone, without first checking out the facts for yourself." If Stamp, Madigral or Fenton had ever heard it, in this case they certainly didn't apply it. Stamp used the Kyoto theory to argue that the user (Morse operators) determined the structure of the QWERTY keyboard. There is simply no evidence to suggest that's true. Nonetheless, Stamp - and this is a guy representing the Smithsonian, remember - promptly adds to what he describes as the "myth and misinformation surrounding the development of QWERTY" by saying " ... right before their machine, dubbed the Sholes & Glidden, went into production, Sholes filed another patent, which included a new keyboard arrangement." Utter rubbish! Eventually Stamp gets to the point: "While it can’t be argued that deal with Remington helped popularize the QWERTY system, its development as a response to mechanical error has been questioned by Kyoto University researchers Koichi Yasuoka and Motoko Yasuoka ... They conclude that the mechanics of the typewriter did not influence the keyboard design ... The Kyoto paper suggests that the typewriter keyboard evolved over several years as a direct result of input provided by ... telegraph operators." Questions, conclusions, NOT facts.
As for Madrigal, he makes no attempt to hide the fact he is lifting whole paragraphs from good ol' "Jimmy Stamp over at Smithsonian". He boldly claims: "The QWERTY keyboard did not spring fully formed from Christopher [sic] Sholes, the first person to file a typewriter patent with the layout. Rather, it formed over time as telegraph operators used the machines to transcribe Morse code." "But the development of the design wasn't accidental or silly: it was complex, evolutionary and quite sensible for Morse operators." The rest is pretty much verbatim from Stamp. Did this guy get paid for copying and pasting Stamp's copy?
Fenton said first quotes that uber reliable source Wikipedia before himself dipping into Stamp's piece. "Smithsonian Mag turned up a lot more in their research." Duh? Their research??? Isn't this Yasuoka research? Oh, hang on, Fenton adds, again lifting Stamp quotes word-for-word, "Kyoto University Researchers Koichi Yasuoka and Motoko Yasuoka ... tracked the evolution of the typewriter keyboard alongside a record of its early professional users." Presumably Fenton held his hand out for some pay for this crap, too.
What happened here is far worse than mere plagiarism, however. Stamp, looking for something to hang some thoughts about the KALQ keyboard on, stumbles across the Kyoto paper and, without bothering to question its premise, runs with it. Madrigal and Fenton see Stamp's item and again, without looking too far into the Yasuoka theory, they simply repeat Stamp's unproven assertions. Suddenly, a paper which has been waiting around for two years for someone to pay any attention to it has developed legs. It's up and running. The QWERTY-Morse connection has got currency. A mere theory, pure speculation, enters the realm of accepted wisdom. It tops Google's QWERTY search page. All because of what passes for "journalism", but is actually very sloppy analysis, filled to the brim with unchecked assumptions.

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I was - quite fairly and reasonably - put on the spot when Richard Polt asked about this theory in a comment on my blog post on the mysterious QWERTY-advising son-in-law of Amos Densmore, James Densmore or Latham Sholes (take a pick). "I wonder whether you have an opinion on the theory that the S&G keyboard is designed to separate pairs of typebars that frequently follow each other?" Richard inquired.

"In ETCetera #6, Richard Dickerson [Ed: above, creator of the "Dickerson dodecamer"] published an analysis that supports this theory, with the notable exception that the R and E typebars are only two positions apart. Dickerson calls this a mistake. The Yasuokas take it as evidence that the whole theory is wrong, but I am not convinced by their argument about Morse code - partly because, I admit, I just haven't had the patience to follow its intricacies." "Put on the spot" in that, oh dear, was I being asked to question to word of the Yasuokas, to tackle Kyoto wisdom and risk incurring the wrath of Kiochi? I did manage to read right through the Yasuoka paper, and like Richard was not convinced. In my case, far from it. I am not an academic, never have been, never will be. Nevertheless I am very familiar with modern academic processes, which in my humble opinion too often begin with a preconception and then set about manipulating the solid evidence, using it selectively to come to the desired result. That's not proper research, that's simply pushing a chosen wheelbarrow in a predestined direction. 

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When its comes to working with what actually happened in the earliest days of the typewriter, I place a great deal of faith in Ernst Martin and Richard Nelson Current, one an out-and-out typewriter enthusiast, a one-time trade journalist and later publisher, the other an esteemed academic and writer. I doubt if anyone has studied typewriter history in more detail over a longer period than Martin. Michael Adler might challenge that, but then Adler allowed himself to reveal a distinct bias against Sholes - his agenda, a little like that of the Yasuokas, was to establish an extended QWERTY prehistory. But in Adler's case, much of it was irrelevant to the actual development of the typewriter we know and love today, thus rendering his work of merely "academic interest". As for getting inside the heads of Sholes and Densmore, nobody comes even vaguely close to Current.

Martin tell us this: "Among the first typewriter builders were some who believed that their keyboard [should] emulate a piano. They had overlooked the fact that typewriter keys must be individually hit in quick succession, and that it would be advantageous to keep the keyboard small, to accommodate the keys in a confined space to avoid the hands having to make large movements. Schwalbach recognised this need early on and persuaded Sholes to [employ] a four-row keyboard, which we have today.
"The world believes Sholes placed the characters in the same sequence as in the American printer's case - Sholes was a printer - [but this] is wrong. It is true that Sholes and Densmore worked out [QWERTY] together. Sholes' [earlier] experimental machines had a single-row keyboard with long and short intervening keys like the piano and the characters placed alphabetically, namely A-M long, N-Z short. Schwalbach distributed the keys over four rows, but the keyboard was originally in alphbetical order. The model shown in the first Remington catalogue [has in the second bank] ADFGHJKLM side by side. That the alphabetical order was not quite retained was due to technical difficulties, which had to overcome by Sholes."
NEXT: The views of Current, Schwalbach, Roby, Porter, Wheeler, Edison, Davidson and most tellingly, Louis Sholes. 

The Unbridled Joy of Typewriters

My grand-daughter Elly, eight months, with her mother's Remington Golightly-Riter.

Randy Raymond Chandler, his Italian 'Racing Car' Typewriter and his Racy Connections with Young Australian Women

The British-American novelist and screenwriter, creator of private detective Phillip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler and his Australian fiancée Jean Edith Precious Davis. After the death of her Italian-born American husband, US Medical Corps Captain John Fracasse, Jean returned to the name Jean Maria Vounder-Davis.

- Chandler wrote this limerick for Jean Davis

- Christmas card from Chandler to Davis, 1957

Deirdre Stuebe (née Gartrell), who died at Rock Forest outside Bathurst last December 14, was just 17, and a student the University of New England in Armidale, New South Wales, when Chandler started to write her steamy letters in 1956. The correspondence between them led to a 1995 book, The Australian Love Letters of Raymond Chandler, by Alan Close. Eighteen years his senior, or 50 years his junior, it didn't seem to matter to Chandler when his romantic interests were aroused.

- Chandler writing to his "darling", 'Dee' Gartrell, on July 25, 1957

Chandler, previously known to have used an Underwood Noiseless portable,  was enthusiastically typing with an Olivetti Studio 44 semi-portable when he wrote love letters to married Californian publicist Louise Loughner from London in the mid-1950s.

"I am apt to get up around 4am, take a mild drink of Scotch and water and start hammering at this lovely Olivetti 44, which is far superior to anything we turn out in America. It is a heavy portable and put together like an Italian racing car, and you mustn't judge it from my typing."

- Raymond Chandler, 21 May 1955

On May 21, 1955, an alcoholic and suicidal Raymond Chandler wrote these words in his second-floor flat in Eaton Square, London, in a letter to married publicist and would-be writer Louise Loughner (1900-) in California. At least he had one uplifting thing to write to her about - and with: His Olivetti Studio 44 semi-portable typewriter.
At a time when the Ferraris of Giuseppe Farina, José Froilán González and Maurice Trintignant were racing against Maseratis and Lancias in the Formula One world motor racing championship, Chandler likened the construction of his Olivetti to an Italian racing car. But he used a blue typewriter ribbon.

After a clumsy suicide attempt at his home in La Jolla on February 22, 1955, Chandler had been briefly held in the psychopathic ward of the Scripps Memorial Hospital and then taken by San Diego Tribune journalist friend Neil Morgan to the Chula Vista Valley View Sanitarium. He released himself in mid-March and on April 12 sailed from New York for England. After disembarking at Southampton on the 19th, Chandler checked into the Connaught Hotel in London. In the meantime, Loughner, the wife of accountant Sam Loughner (1891-1964), had read about the suicide attempt in her local newspaper, the Oxnard Press-Courier, and had written to Chandler. Her sympathetic letter eventually reached him in London.

Loughner, by the way, was the mother of Jack Loughner (1919-1975), managing editor of the San Francisco Daily Commercial News.

The correspondence between Chandler and Loughner continued into 1956. But whatever ambitions Loughner may have begun to harbour about forming a romantic attachment with Chandler were unaided by Chandler's admissions to her that he was planning an affair with Lady Natasha Spender (1919-2010), the English pianist and author and mother-in-law of Australian writer and actor Barry Humphries - even after Spender's operation for breast cancer. But Chandler biographer Tom Williams does write that Chandler's "romantic focus seems to have shifted ... from Spender to Loughner."

Lady Natasha Spender, right, with her husband, writer Sir Stephen Spender (1909-95) and son Matthew. In front is their daughter, Lizzie, wife of Barry Humphries.

On June 2, 1956, Chandler returned to US to finally meet Loughner. While staying at the Clift Hotel, he "courted Loughner assiduously", and made plans to propose to her and change his will in her favour. His engagement to Loughner, however, was broken off when Chandler persisted with telling her about his undying love for his deceased wife Cissy and for Spender.

Pearl Cecily Eugenia Hurlburt Pascal (Cissy) Chandler. Born in Perry, Ohio, on October 29, 1870, she was almost 18 years Chandler's senior. They married in 1924. She died, aged 84, in La Jolla on December 12, 1954, an event which led to Chandler's heavy drinking, depression and suicide attempts.  A little more than four years after Cissy passed, Chandler himself was dead, aged 70.

In January 1957 Chandler advertised in the San Diego Tribune for a secretary and employed the "striking and vivacious" blued-eyed blonde Australian Jean Fracasse. The "blithe and elegant" Jean had previously been in advertising but was working as an actress and newsreader on southern California TV, being one of the first three women ever employed by a network television company. She was born Jean Edith Precious Davis in Chatswood, Sydney, on July 8, 1917, the daughter of a Bathurst-born couple, Leslie Thomas Samuel Davis (1879-1928) and Ella Louisa (née Cornwell, 1878-1945). The Bathurst connection is interesting, because it will bring us back to Chandler's fixation with a much younger Australian woman.
Jean's father died in Manly when she was 11, leaving her mother to raise her alone. Ella Davis named their house on 39 Johnson Street, Chatswood, after St Austell, the town in Cornwall in England, from whence her ancestors came to Australia. One of these was Hannah Maria Vounder (1802-) and by the age of 13 Jean had adopted the stage and pen name of Jean Maria Vounder-Davis. At St Stephen's Cathedral in Brisbane on March 25, 1943,  she married an Italian-born US Medical Corps officer called John Fracasse (1907-1958), from Rhode Island.

Chandler with Jean Davis's daughter by John Fracasse, 

now known as Sybil Anne Davis.

The couple had two children, Vincent Andrew Fracasse (later Vincent Vounder-Davis, born in Brisbane on January 2, 1944) and Sybil Anne (now known as Davis, born December 5, 1945) and in 1944 first settled in the US in Muskogee, Oklahoma, where Dr Fracasse worked in the veterans hospital. The family moved to California in 1947.
By the mid-60s, following the deaths of both her husband and her would-be husband, Chandler, Jean Davis had resumed her career as a musician. Like Chandler's wife Cissy and another of his lovers,  Spender, she was an accomplished pianist and also played the harpsichord.  She had gained a doctorate in music before meeting Chandler and later became an historian and a music teacher at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In 1985 Davis wrote to the Los Angeles Times, "Australians get so tired of Americans who get practically everything about them incorrect. In this, they are usually joined by most of the races in the world. Americans then wonder why other peoples are exasperated with them!" This comment may well have been applied to Chandler's American biographers, who have invariably painted Davis in a poor light.
Davis died in Carlsbad, San Diego, on January 25, 1996, aged 78.  She had claimed to be the widow of "the late Dr Davis", but there was no such person. Sybil Anne Davis is now a retired attorney living in Pasadena.

1971

1959

As with Spender and Loughner, Davis became what Chandler referred to as one of his "girlfriends" - the difference being that she was practically "living in" and Chandler had taken her children, Vincent and Sybil, under his protective wing. Officially, Chandler was in the care of Davis, but there was much more to the relationship than employer-secretary, or patient-carer. In this environment, Davis was able to coax Chandler back to his typewriter to write fiction rather than love letters, and by Christmas 1957 he had completed the first draft of Playback. In gratitude, he dedicated the book to Davis and his new agent, Helga Mary Greene (1916-85), and in late 1958 deeded Davis the British and Commonwealth rights to the novel (Greene bought them back for $2000).

Helga Greene with Chandler. Greene successfully defended a court challenge from Jean Davis regarding Chandler's will. Chandler had changed his will, leaving almost everything to Greene, after previously favouring Davis.

Davis, now describing herself as a writer, followed Chandler to London with her children, arriving on March 7, 1958, with plans to travel with Chandler to Australia for three months. Chandler had decided to write about General Douglas MacArthur, who he intensely disliked, and the way wharf workers had stood up to him in Brisbane for "acting like royalty". It was no doubt a story Davis had told him, as it is alleged to have occurred at about the time she met her American husband John Fracasse in Australia.

Chandler shipped his Oldsmobile, in Davis's name, to Sydney. In May, Chandler showed Davis his will, which bequeathed his estate worth $60,000 to her - he had began telling friends in England of his intention to marry Davis as early as the previous year. But Davis, with Vincent and Sybil, went on to Australia alone in 1958. Chandler's London friends had come between the pair, suggesting Davis, 29 years his junior, was a gold-digger. During this time Chandler and Greene became much closer, and travelled to Naples together, but Chandler stayed in constant contact with Davis by telephone. On August 5, Davis's husband John Fracasse died and she returned to the US, where she was reunited with Chandler at La Jolla. Chandler wrote to his publisher's editor Roger Machell on October 14, speaking extremely ill of John Fracasse:

This time Greene sent a former Chandler secretary, Kay West, to spy on Chandler and Davis, after Davis had been named the main benefactor in Chandler's will. Chandler became engaged to West and changed his will in her favour, but West soon returned to England and in February 1959 Greene yet again interceded - on her own behalf. Chandler was on death's door and Greene was determined to get his money for herself, and to cut Davis out of his will. In his dying days, Greene elicited a marriage proposal from Chandler, and on February 20 he changed his will yet again.

Chandler and Davis's daughter, Sybil. In 1958 Chandler gave the original libretto of a comic opera, The Princess and the Pedlar, to her. It was written by him and Cissy's first husband, Julian Pascal.

Heading back to England with Greene, Chandler stopped off in New York to ask her father, Henry Seymour Howard Guinness, for Helga's hand in marriage, and was knocked back. So he returned to Davis in La Jolla. He died there on March 26. Davis and her daughter Sybil selected his gravestone and buried him at Mount Hope Cemetery, San Diego.

 In Februaty 2011, Sybil Anne Davis took part in the event at which Cissy's ashes were laid beside Chandler's grave. If you go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3x8RCGWTo78 and fast forward to 41 minutes, 56 seconds, you can see and hear Sybil reading an unpublished love poem by Chandler which was typewritten on his Olivetti Studio 44.

Four months later Jean Davis became a US citizen in San Diego. In November she filed a suit there contesting the will. The case went to court in May 1960 and Superior Court Judge Gerald C. Thomas found in Greene's favour. The greedy Greene then tried to get $4735 from Davis, money given to Davis by Chandler from March 1958. Davis did get to keep Cissy’s diamond wedding ring and Chandler’s monogrammed silver cigarette case and his ostrich-skin wallet, all of which Chandler gave to her. Sybil Davis wore the ring to a St Valentine's Day 2011 service at which Cissy's ashes were laid beside Chandler's grave, and had in her purse the cigarette case and wallet.

On December 12, 2011, Sybil Davis sold through a Sotheby's auction in New York books and papers from Chandler’s personal collection, which had belonged to her mother, including a first edition of The Big Sleep, inscribed to Cissy and reinscribed to Vincent Vounder-Davis, which fetched $254,500. The works came "from the library of Jean Vounder-Davis, who was the author’s fiancée, muse and private secretary until his death in 1959".  "Despite a 30-year age gap, Jean cared for the author, keeping him healthy, sober, and focused on his writing. In turn he helped to care for her children, becoming their legal guardian."

Deirdre 'Dee' Stuebe in later life

- Letter from Chandler to Deirdre Gartrell, April 23, 1957 

On January 22, 1956, the Sydney Sun-Herald published an article by Merrick Flynn based on an interview Flynn had had with Chandler 11 months earlier, following the writer's suicide attempt. Thus began, between February 15, 1956, and August 14, 1957, what University of Sydney professor of English Paul Giles was later to call a "bizarre epistolary romance" between Chandler and a 17-year-old student at the University of New England in Armidale, New South Wales. The student's name was Deirdre Gartrell (later Mrs Dee Stuebe of Bathurst), and she first wrote to Chandler to express her condolences "for his sadness". In return, he was soon addressing her as "Darling Deirdre". It was all very innocent at the Australian end, was it so at the La Jolla and London ends? Chandler thanked Gartrell "for your measurements, which 20 years ago would have made me rather excitable." In June 1956 he warned, "I suppose you realise, baby, that I am old enough to be your grandfather." 

Chandler's decision to stay in London and call off his planned Australia trip with Jean Davis and her children in mid-1957 meant Chandler and Gartrell never met, though Chandler fully intended to visit Gartrell, regardless of Davis's presence. It should be noted that it was almost a year before Chandler had appointed Davis his private secretary that he began this long-distance mail affair.

From Tom Hiney's Raymond Chandler: A Biography. The impression Gartrell was unhappy at this time seems to be something of a Hiney invention. Close's book doesn't suggest this. An interview with another Chandler biographer, Tom Williams, notes that Williams treats Jean Davis far more fairly.

Chandler destroyed all of Gartrell's letters to him shortly before he died, but Gartrell kept the letters she received from Chandler and one of these, typed in blue ribbon on Chandler's Olivetti Studio 44, and ending with an extremely ribald limerick, fetched $5000 when auctioned by Christie's in New York in December 2007, almost exactly eight years before Mrs Stuebe died:

Chander's letters, described as "intimate', formed the basis of Alan Close's 1995 book The Australian Love Letters of Raymond Chandler. As well, Giles says Chandler telephoned Gartrell on many occasions. Gartrell also corresponded with Helga Greene in 1960-61.

Deirdre Gartrell was born at Englewood, New South Wales, on June 6, 1938, the daughter of Harold Borrodell Gartrell (1892-1960) and his wife Dorothy (1903-93, née Weiley). From Chandler she received all sorts of sexual advice: "All our state-run institutions are co-educational and there is too damn much sex in them. On the other hand we don't breed sodomites like the English boarding schools" ... "I'd like to say this to you, though, from a man who knows a great deal about women, that no girl is as safe as she thinks she is" ... "I have a talent for women, and the basis of it is this: You never treat them except as something to be adored and respected and you never lay a hand on them until you know that they are ready and willing to get into bed with you" ... "Kisses may be many things. But if you ever feel yourself beginning to tremble, run like hell" ... "If you are a passionate and sensual type, you will find that he will be no good in bed" ... "If you should ever feel yourself slipping, hop on a plane and come and see me, of course as my guest in every possible sense." 

Gartrell had met her future husband, German-born builder Walter Stuebe (1929-2003), in December 1955, just before she started her correspondence with Chandler. 
The Stuebes lived in one of the Bathurst region’s special places, “Boonderoo”. Walter built the earth-covered home on Pine Ridge Road at Rock Forest and the totally self-sufficient premises on 100 acres was completed in 1997. It features solar power and water as well as a natural air conditioning system and unique engineering. Deirdre said "[Walter] could see what was happening with global warming and climate change and set about building a very natural home that wouldn’t be affected by interruptions to the power supply or water shortages. We purchased the block [in about 1975] and had a weekender shack out there, but we didn’t move into the earth-covered house until 1997.” “Boonderoo” is covered by two metres of earth with only the north-facing front of the house showing. 
Mrs Stuebe eventually did achieve her goal of becoming a writer - at least of poetry. In 2007 her poem "Joy" ("The source of joy is hidden in a well of pain") appeared in The Mozzie. She died at "Boonderoo" last December 14.