"Break Even Bill"

When I first worked with Bill Mordey, more than half a century ago, I wasn’t a smoker, I was an almost complete novice with alcohol, and I abhorred compulsive gambling. I also liked to get a decent eight hours sleep a night. Given Bill, in those days, smoked 70 a day and stayed out all night drinking and gambling, it might have seemed odd that we became such close friends. It helped that we covered the same sports, summer and winter, tennis in the former and rugby league in the latter and boxing year round. And we were part of the same stable, Bill with the Sydney evening the Daily Mirror and me with the morning national daily The Australian. That meant we were in each other’s company a lot, constantly at our typewriters in and out of the office. Yet I was surely the Jekyll to his Hyde, and I’m convinced Bill sometimes tired of the company of other Hydes. One ‘colleague’ set his measly heart firmly upon becoming a Mordey clone, and hung to Bill’s coat-tails day and night. It didn’t work. He was no more than a pale imitation. Those who worked with Bill and knew him as a Real McCoy journalist knew this self-proclaimed ‘protégé’ was no more than an imposter, a licking lackey who lacked all of Bill’s news gathering skills. For one thing, such was the flunkey's urge to be noticed, he was one of those despised newsroom pains - an office shouter. Bill Mordey never shouted, even in a bar. Others shouted him, for the benefit of his company.

Bill Mordey with Peter Muszkat, right.

Bill was the archetypical Australian sports journalist-raconteur. Being in his company was a guaranteed hour or four of enormous entertainment – and often enlightenment too. One of my favourites was his story about how Bill and the Australian Associated Press’s Peter Muszkat were the only two Sydney rugby league writers to fly to New Zealand with the Australian team in 1969, when I was rugby league writer for The New Zealand Herald. Bill was representing the evening newspaper, Murdoch’s Daily Mirror, which was then in intense competition with the Fairfax’s  Sun, but the Sun hadn’t sent anyone on the tour. Peter, like me, wasn’t capable of going drink for drink with Bill, and after checking into the Station Hotel in Auckland, Peter went to his room and flaked out. Bill, meanwhile, was checking through his list of story ideas – he’d placed them in order of what he deemed to be their news worthiness. After typing and filing four stories, Bill took pity on a comatose Peter and decided to file his fifth yarn to AAP on Peter’s behalf. The next morning Bill rang his sports editor, Peter Miller, to check that his stories had got through and were satisfactory. “Yes,” said Miller, “but I like the story the Sun has on its back page.” “The Sun?” said Bill in astonishment, “but they haven’t got anyone here. What’s the story about?” When told it was the one he’d filed to AAP, Bill felt like strangling the still sleeping Muszkat. “I must be the only silly bastard who ever managed to scoop himself,” Bill moaned.

Of Bill’s three deadly sins, tobacco was the only one that later got me in its grip, and held me there for 44 years. It was after I’d sailed out of Sydney and landed up one miserably cold and wet Sunday night in a place called Thurles in County Tipperary, when two of us in a freezing hotel room thought the only other living person in town was a church bell-ringer, that the cigarettes took hold of me. If there had been a phone in the room I’d have possibly called Bill and announced my seemingly inevitable lapse, it being early Monday morning Sydney time and me knowing what Bill’s routine would be, at his desk on Holt Street thumping away at his Remington International, pale green, the colour of Bill’s Monday morning gills. His Sundays would have started with a visit to support the Bloodstains team in the Anderson Cup rugby league competition at Neutral Bay. Then there’d be the famous Mordey bar trek, across the Eastern Suburbs and beyond, where he’d pick up his stories for the next day’s Daily Mirror. He’d have a pocketful by 6am on Monday, along with a mighty hangover. The man lived on fags, bourbon and Coke, coffee and occasionally melted cheese on toast.

Bill play pub pool with his son Craig.

William George Mordey was born in the Sydney suburb of Campsie in 1936. In 1943 his father, London-born George de Swynhoe Mordey, died, aged 41. Bill, a lone child of the marriage, was raised by his mother, Constance Maude (née Dell), who went by the name 'Maudie' Mordey. She worked as a seamstress, doing piecemeal work at home to keep Bill clothed and fed. “She used to sit for hours sewing those bloody pyjama sets together,” Bill recalled. “You used to have to turn the collar and you’d put the collar and a steel thing and put a needle in it to get the points. And I’d have to sit there for hours doing these bloody collars while she was putting it all together.”

In his early teenage years Bill made it known he was keen to escape the needlework and become a newspaper reporter. He left St Patrick's School, Strathfield, in 1950 and the next year scored a cadetship on the Sydney Sun under its brusque turf editor Jack Charles, who considered Bill a “bodgie”. Being paid to go to racetracks to cover races was, said Bill, “like handing a grenade to a baby”. The pick of the sports writing jobs in Sydney in those days was to cover rugby league, and at the Sun Bill realised Ernie Christensen was there for the long haul. So he soon moved from Broadway to Holt Street, Surry Hills, to join the Daily Mirror and cover rugby league. His love of horse racing, however, never left him. He would pawn News Ltd typewriters to cover bets at the racetrack. “You could always get a quid for the typewriter,” he said. “You’d come back from the races and get off the train at Central and go straight down the road, put it [the typewriter] in and get a pound. And then you’d have to get it out again before the next race day.” Along the way Bill acquired a few nicknames, not all of them complimentary. The milder ones included “Bluegum”, after the tall, slim tree, “Tex”, “Maverick” and, in later life, “Break Even Bill”, first given to him by Daily Telegraph sportswriter Ray Chesterton. It always had to be assumed, not known, that when Bill said he'd "broken even" on a gamble, he'd finished up at least marginally in front. There are hundreds of anecdotes about Bill’s wild lifestyle, many of them created by Bill himself and, as might be expected, many of them don’t stack up. For instance, that his first bet was at age 13, backing Flight to win the Melbourne Cup. Flight never raced in a Melbourne Cup.

I last saw Bill on November 3, 1973, a year after I’d left Australia. It was at Wembley Stadium in London. Bill was covering a Kangaroos rugby league tour for the Murdoch organisation and I was still biding my time in Cork in Ireland. By the time I took up smoking I was in Dublin, living the life of Riley. I would call Bill occasionally, especially when I got nostalgic for Sydney – at least for its blue skies and sunny days. By the time I caught up with my old Bloodstains teammates on a flying visit to Sydney in 1979, Bill had moved on from daily newspaper work. Eventually, in 1984, he found perhaps his truest calling: he became a boxing promoter. He set up Bill Mordey’s Classic Promotions on Buckingham Street, Surry Hills, not far from the News Ltd building. Bill was to become the reincarnation of the legendary Hugh D. (“Huge Deal”) McIntosh, the Australian most famous for staging the Jack Johnson-Tommy Burns world heavyweight championship fight at Rushcutter’s Bay in Sydney on Boxing Day 1908. The title bout, in which Johnson became the first African-American world champion, was covered by Jack London.

Unlike his uncle Jimmy Dundee, a welterweight who fought 171 pro bouts between 1933-46, Bill was a writer, not a fighter. His own boxing career had comprised one amateur bout. His mother had given him a spare thrupence to go to the Burwood Police Boys Club to learn to fight, and his only bout was declared a draw when both boys were too tired to hit each other in round three. But Bill came to know the game, inside out. He was an inveterate gambler and he understood the odds like few others. So much so that Bill, like no other sports writer I’ve ever known, ended up a millionaire. There were many, many times between his start as a budding Aussie Don King and his retirement in clover that Bill was on the bones of his backside. But he ended up way out in front, even if only financially.

Bill first gambled and won handsomely by bankrolling Jeff Fenech, who won world titles in three weight divisions and fought a running battle with Ghanaian Azumah Nelson. Bill then really tested the patience of the fight gods by trying to resurrect the career of Hungarian-born British heavyweight Joe Bugner, marketing him as an honest “Aussie Joe”. Though he’d lasted, in total, what Sports Illustrated called 39 “respectable” rounds with Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, Bugner had already been dismissed as the “Harmless Hercules”, the “Anxious Adonis” and the “Great White Dope”, and was described by British sports writer Hugh McIlvanney as being “built like a Greek statue but with fewer moves”. Bill took charge of couple of other Australian world champions, emerging as a puppet master in a rare golden era for boxing in this country. Bill’s most profitable investment was in Kostya Tszyu, a world amateur champion lured to Sydney from a town in the Ural Mountains, a Siberian of Koran, Mongol and Russian descent. Bill signed Tszyu for $100,000, a microwave and a goldfish, and turned him into a millionaire, with a dream for Tszyu to fight in Red Square. When the two split, Bill took Tszyu to court and won a $7 million settlement for breach of contract. Still, Bill and Tszyu, who held multiple light-welterweight world championships, remained on good terms. Bill staged 24 world title fights and was inducted into the Australian National Boxing Hall of Fame in 2007.

Bill’s heavy smoking, the drinking and the late nights took their inevitable toll. Bill gave up the stress of boxing promotion, moved to Singleton and then established a specialist high quality agistment farm and horse stud called Lurline Lodge on Dalswinton Road in Denman, appropriately just off the Golden Highway in the Upper Hunter Region of New South Wales, 150 miles north of Sydney. After a battle with cancer over several months, he suffered an adverse reaction to chemotherapy treatment and died at Newcastle's Mater Hospital at 9.45pm on Friday, April 23, 2004. He was just 67.

Blood On His Typewriter

There is, or at least was, a so-called “best-selling” author out there somewhere who called him or herself R.J. Avenira. He or she had a couple of books published, one of which was called Beautiful Mistakes. Avenira made a few beauties him or herself. Plugging another Avenina book, titled Blood On My Typewriter, this author quoted Ernest “Hemmingway” as saying, “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” Hemingway (that is, the Nobel Prize winner with just one “m” in his surname) never said any such thing. It was the American sports writer Red Smith who kept going on about opening a vein and letting it “bleed out drop by drop”. Another variation on the theme from Smith was, “I just sit at my typewriter until beads of blood form on my forehead.” Avenira’s version was, “I have sat down at my typewriter. Watch the words form from the blood that pours forth.”

My first and most memorable encounter with the phrase “There is blood on my typewriter” came on Saturday, May 27, 1972, when it appeared on page 25 of the London Daily Mirror under the byline of Peter Wilson, described by the Mirror as “World No 1 sports writer”. Indeed, I have a sneaking suspicion Wilson, a Harrow-educated classical scholar and the doyen of Fleet Street sports writers, may have used the line as the title of his memoirs.

Filing his copy from a world heavyweight boxing title fight in Omaha, Nebraska, Wilson, left, opened his story, “There is blood on my typewriter, blood on my notes, blood on my programme. And, however long I live, I shall never forget the face of Ron Stander. The face of courage in tears.” Ronald Neil Stander, a 27-year-old former switchman on the Chicago and North Western Railway, had just been punched to a pulp in four rounds by Joe Frazier. It was  Stander’s 26th bout, and only his second against anyone more than half decent. And the Philadelphia slaughterman sure tenderised the “Council Bluff’s Butcher”. Forget the idea Robert “Rocky” Balboa was based on Charles “Chuck” Wepner. He was based on a profusely bleeding Ronald Stander. Wepner came out of the Ali fight looking like a beauty queen compared to what Frazier did to Stander. Wepner had to have 23 stitches after 15 rounds, Stander 17 after four.

Wilson wrote of Stander’s “grotesque” appearance - “But it was the nose which drew your reluctant eyes like some crimson magnet. As a clown’s nose is a parody of a normal one, so was Slander’s a parody of a clown’s. But, merciful heavens, he would have to be a sadistic satyr who could laugh at this monstrous, pulsing red cherry which seemed as if it had been harpooned by a red-hot poker – and that the poker was still burning inside it.”

Dave Anderson wrote in The New York Times, “Now that the fight is over, everybody is willing to acknowledge that it never should have occurred. Unknown to Ron Stander, a hospital room had been reserved for him. ‘We were afraid he might get really hurt,’ one of his friends disclosed … in the hours after the fight. ‘We knew he was overmatched. He was just part of a TV promotion.’ He was just part of a slaughter, too. It belonged in the stockyards here. ‘The blood was in his eyes,’ Joe Frazier said with concern. ‘He couldn’t see.’ Had the blood prompted the heavyweight champion to soften his assault? ‘The man couldn’t see, but the blood didn’t bother me. I worked in blood all my life. I was a butcher in a slaughterhouse in Philadelphia for two years. Blood has been part of my life.’ It still is, except that the unbeaten champion never has bled. His victims do.” Anderson went on to point out that Stander needed his 17 stitches to close four wounds – two above the nose, one over his right eye, another under it. “His bulbous red nose was broken.”

This year “Blood On The Typewriter” has made a return to a book cover, on Robbie Brechin’s biography of 66-year-old Australian wine writer Philip White. Unfortunately, I’m unable to say whether the contents mention typewriters at all. Gippsland-born White was diagnosed with cancer in November 2018 and told he had six weeks to live. But he has battled on well beyond that timeframe, and used some of that time the tell his life story to Adelaide journalist Brechin. White, the son of an Old Testament manic street preacher, was in Paul Kelly's first band, The Debutantes, among many other adventures. Brechin is described as a failed banker-turned-journalist who has worked in mainstream media for four decades. He has written on rock music (pseudonym Thor Fingers), nightlife and politics.

FOOTNOTE: To my embarrassment, it was only after I'd included my 2010 article about Paul Kelly's book How To Make Gravy in yesterday's post that I realised a sub-editor had, all those years ago, changed Bob Dylan's typewriter to an "American steel Remington Safari". It was, of course, a Royal, and not even a Safari at that, but a Caravan. Maybe the sub-editor got confused with Pierce Brosnan's Remington Steele? He surely couldn't have imagined I'd made the mistake?!

How to Make Gravy Day

Paul Kelly: Carrying the baggage of a nation.

Until last week I didn’t know “How to Make Gravy” was a “thing”. It turns out it’s “our favourite national holiday”, “an intrinsic part of Australian Christmas”. Australia marks December 21 as “How to Make Gravy Day”, and has been doing so (or so it’s been claimed) for 25 years. The date is mentioned in the opening lines of Paul Kelly’s 1996 song How to Make Gravy, which was also the title of his 2010 book, a memoir in which Kelly takes the lyrics of 100 of his songs as starting points to tell the stories of his life. My friend Peter Crossing, now in Adelaide, brought all this to my attention when six days ago he opened his 11-year-old Christmas gift copy of the book and found inside a clipping of my review of it (originally typeritten), published in The Canberra Times on October 2, 2010.

The single How to Make Gravy is these days considered “The iconic Aussie Christmas song”, “the quintessential Australian Christmas anthem”. The songs we grew up with talked of a "White Christmas", and were tunes to go with cards emblazoned with snow - never very appropriate at the height of our summers, even with La Niña. How to Make Gravy tells of Joe, an imprisoned man, writing a letter to his brother Dan, lamenting that he will be missing the family's Christmas celebrations and not being there to make the gravy to go with the roast. During the pandemic, the song has taken on a new meaning for families and friends separated by border closures. This year’s music video of the song featured clips of people around the world telling their loved ones they miss them. The Sydney Morning Herald said, “For the uninitiated, the soundtrack to the silly season might mean Mariah Carey warbling that ‘all she wants for Christmas is you’ but for those in the know, for those who understand the true meaning of the holiday, there is only one song that matters.”

As much as I enjoy listening to Kelly’s songs, I feel an added affinity because his backing group from 1989-91 was called The Messengers. Kelly, who turns 67 next month, grew up in Adelaide, settled in Melbourne in 1976, moved to Sydney in 1985 and returned to Melbourne in 1991.

Perhaps unwittingly for the singer-songwriter, Kelly’s How to Make Gravy seems to have taken on a life of its own, almost separate from his hugely impressive overall body of work. In that it reminds me of The Pogues’ Fairytale of New York,  featuring Shane MacGowan and Kirsty MacColl on vocals. Although this single has never been the British Christmas No 1, it has reached the British Top 20 on 18 separate occasions since 1987, including every year at Christmas since 2005. It’s the most-played Christmas song of the 21st century and is frequently cited as the best Christmas song of all time in various television, radio and magazine-related polls in Britain. Helen Brown of the London Daily Telegraph wrote of it, “In careening wildly through a gamut of moods from maudlin to euphoric, sentimental to profane, mud-slinging to sincerely devoted in the space of four glorious minutes, it's seemed perfectly suited to Christmas, a time which highlights the disparity between the haves and have nots around the world. Those of us lucky enough to spend the day with friends and families by a cosy fire with a full stomach think of the lonely, the homeless and the hungry.” It has, in other words, echoes of How to Make Gravy.

From The Met to the Mettype: A Christmas Saga That Links the Mystery of a Grizzly Murder with the Joy of a Toy Typewriter

As some followers of this blog may have seen, in the past few weeks I’ve been trying to drastically downsize a very large collection of toy typewriters, accumulated many years ago. As I dug through boxes and chests packed with the toy machines, I came across the tattered remains of a carton containing a British-made Mettype, originally bought as a gift for Christmas 1961, sixty years ago today. The typewriter itself is in pristine condition, and the wrapping inside what was left of the carton probably accounts for its excellent state. On the basis of what I found, I’m imaging the little girl who was given the toy typewriter for Christmas was called Judy.

I had photographed Judy’s Mettype almost 10 years ago, for a post on Samuel Berger designs, but had never previously paid much attention to what was used to pack around it. I was in for a surprise. The most prominent item is a copy of the Southampton (England) Southern Evening Echo, from Thursday, October 12, 1961. And the lead article concerns the arrest of the man charged with what became infamous in Britain as the hugely controversial “A6 Murder”. There is a sort of link, as the typewriter is a METtype and the man racing to Blackpool to make the arrest, Detective-Superintendent Robert Acott, was from Scotland Yard in the London Metropolitan Police Service, known as the MET.

My interest in the “A6 Murder” was naturally aroused and it didn’t take me long to find out a bit about it. It was committed by one James Hanratty (1936-1962), one of the last eight people in Britain to be executed before capital punishment was effectively abolished. He was hanged at Bedford Jail on April 4, 1962, after being convicted of killing a 36-year-old scientist Michael Gregsten, shot dead in a car on the A6 motorway at Deadman's Hill, near Clophill, Bedfordshire, early in the morning of August 23, 1961. Gregsten's mistress, Valerie Storie (left, 1938-2016), was raped, shot five times, and left paralysed. The couple had been abducted at gunpoint in their car at Dorney Reach, Buckinghamshire. Hanratty's family fought for decades to have the verdict overturned. Eventually, in 2002, the Court of Appeal ruled that a DNA test conclusively proved Hanratty's guilt beyond any doubt.

Hanratty’s capital murder trial started at Bedfordshire Assizes on January 22, 1962, and lasted 21 days, the longest in English legal history up to that time. The jury entered a unanimous verdict of guilty. Hanratty's appeal was dismissed on March 13. An “A6 Defence Committee” was part-funded by John Lennon and Yoko Ono and it later tried to disprove Hanratty's conviction.

What struck me was that the horrid details of Hanratty’s crime are in such stark contrast to what else was placed with the Mettype in its crumbing carton. These are pieces of greaseproof baking parchment that Judy had used in her typewriter to write verses from well-known Christmas carols. She even illustrated Once in Royal David's City, which was written as a poem by Irishwoman Cecil Frances Humphreys Alexander and first published in 1848 in her hymnbook Hymns for Little Children. A year later, the English organist Henry John Gauntlett discovered the poem and set it to music. Once in Royal David's City tells the story of the Nativity of Jesus. Other hymns in the collection include All Things Bright and Beautiful (Maker of Heaven and Earth). Judy typed:

Judy also typed some of the words from O Little Town of Bethlehem, based on an 1868 text written by Philadelphia Episcopal priest Phillips Brooks and sung in Britain to Forest Green, a tune collected as an English folk ballad called The Ploughboy's Dream by Ralph Vaughan Williams and first published in the 1906 English Hymnal. 

Could be there be more of a contrast between what was printed on paper items found in one box?

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