Interview with Ivan Menzies (2)

Second interview with Ivan Menzies (the other one is by Malcolm Mackay). Interview conducted by unidentified Scotsman.

Q: Well Ivan, I believe your roots are in a very beautiful part of the world.

Ivan: Oh yes, the Lake District.

Q: And in particular from the Duddon Valley.

Ivan: That’s right, where Wordsworth wrote some of his finest poetry.

Q: And I have been told that your father was the doctor in the village.

Ivan: Yes, my dad was the village doctor. He had more or less retired but they had no doctor there so he took up practice. He was the doctor. I was the village organist.

Q: Oh, that was your introduction to music?

Ivan: I was also in the medical profession - I drove the car for him!

Q: And how did you first of all become interested in the stage?

Ivan: As I said, I was organist and very fond of music. Pianist. Played accompaniments. I was the bright comedian of the village concert of course. They put on an amateur show of Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore.  The producer saw me strolling off the station in my plus-fours and fishing flies in my hat from the Duddon and he said, ‘Who’s that? He’s just the man for Sir Joseph Porter. What fun!’ So, I played the part of Sir Joseph Porter. D’Oyly Carte’s cousin was in the front row and she said, ‘Oh you ought to go on and take Lytton’s place when he retires. Would you like me to write to my cousin?’

So, she wrote to him and D’Oyly Carte said he would be very pleased to hear me sing. I trotted off to Manchester where they were playing and sang him a song. He said, ‘My, you will have to get that army accent roughness off your voice and your Lancashire accent, but I will write to you.’  I said, ‘But first of all let me just sing you Sir Joseph Porter’s song’ and I rather impressed him with my diction. I said, ‘Surely that is the chief thing isn’t it, the diction?’  He said, ‘Oh yes, but we will write you.’ I thanked him and said goodbye and went back to my village.

The next morning the post boy came up with a telegram and said, ‘Oh, telegram from D’Oyly Carte’. He had read it before me!  Could I start at Manchester Opera House, and would I be prepared to go in the chorus at £4 a week?  That was better than the sum that I was getting then after being discharged from the army because of wounds sustained in the battle of the Somme. So, I trotted off to Manchester Opera House and started in the chorus there. The next day was a charity matinee at which the prima donna, Elsie Griffin, was selling photographs. I immediately fell in love with her the night before, when she was doing one act of Pinafore. I emptied my pockets of the 4 or 5 shillings they contained and said, ‘I only want a photograph of you’.  She said, ‘That’s very generous of you’. I said, ‘Oh not at all, as a matter of fact I joined your company yesterday’. ‘Oh, you’re the new baritone with the funny voice. You can’t afford this.’ I said, ‘Oh yes I can.’ Eventually she gave it back and just kept a shilling out, so I thought, ‘That’s the sort of woman one needs for a wife, you know.’

Q: You by nature were gifted, I think, with a sense of humour but not necessarily a voice to start with.

Ivan: Yes, well I had a sense of humour which I think was encouraged really. I would call it showing off, because when I was a kid I found my uncles and aunts and I made funny remarks as I handed round the cakes at my mother’s afternoon teas. ‘Do have some of this chocolate cake, it came from Fox’s the grocers and it only cost half a crown’. ‘Isn’t he lovely, isn’t he funny.’ I think that was where the gift of humour came into play. Also, my diction. My mother was deaf, and I was the only one she could hear. I didn’t talk much louder than anybody else but I just watched my words, my consonants and I think we could do with a lot of that on the stage today.

Q: But your voice had to be more worked on didn’t it?

Ivan: Yes, well the voice began to develop, singing in the chorus. The man singing next to me in the chorus used to recoil when I sang. They had all had trained singing lessons, a lot of money had been spent on them. I had never had a singing lesson or a dancing lesson in my life. I say I danced too - I would have liked to have been in the Russian ballet but, as I said, I finished up in D’Oyly Carte. I did dance one time, in the show we did for a season down on the pier at Clacton. I was the compere and one night the comedian was ill so I took his place. They only wanted me just to say the lines but I burst into the dance. The next night the comedian was back again, very quickly there.

Q: And then you fell in love with Elsie.

Ivan: Yes. She was the prima donna and I was just in the chorus.  Me going out with her was frowned on because she had belted earls and she was very popular even with the royal family who used to come. The Queen Mother told Lady Harding before she died that she was very fond of Elsie Griffin and her voice. The royal family enjoyed the Gilbert and Sullivan shows. So, I realised that we would have to be married secretly and she turned me down several times. I threatened everything, even suicide and she said, ‘Go on, that’s fine’. I didn’t really mean it of course. So, we were secretly married. We were playing in Leeds at the time. By this time I was understudy to the great Sir Henry Lytton and they began to see that they had a future successor.  JM Gordon - our wonderful producer who worked with Gilbert - spent a lot of time on me. I owe a great deal to Gordon. He taught me all the stuff that Gilbert wanted, the tradition of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas. We had arranged with the Registry Office in Sheffield, before we left that city. The day that Elsie was not playing and I was a walk-in understudy, so that I could be back in the evening, we tottered over to Sheffield. My parents didn’t come but Elsie’s mother and dad came, as they said ‘To see the last of her’. They were all a bit bored because, as I say, she had wealthy men and senior wranglers from Oxford and I don’t know what else. She had glorious fan mail and admirers. When we came out of the Registry Office her mother looked up to see the name of the road where we were, and the sign said Workhouse Lane, she very nearly fainted.  ‘Oh it’s a bad omen’.  I looked at the next road and I said, ‘This is worse. It says Change Alley’. I didn’t quite understand that. Then her father looked and he said, ‘Well this is better still - Paradise Square’, which was the next square.

It was anything but paradise after we had been married a year or two.

Q: I believe that fairly soon afterwards this ‘change’ promised by the alley began to come about.

Ivan: Yes, you see before this came about, I became principal comedian of the new D’Oyly Carte company. Then the repertory company with which Lytton was still playing was going to Canada and I didn’t want Elsie to go to Canada. She wasn’t too keen on going, so Carte very kindly let her come to my company there.  This meant we had even more marvellous tours round the coast and smaller towns than the repertory company did.  We had a great following and we happily went along together till that company finished, about 2 years later. It finished here in London at the Richmond Theatre which is a lovely old theatre.  Also - specially myself - wanted to have a child. I said to Elsie we must really propagate our great gifts and we must do that through a child.

We did a thing which is not always looked on with favour in the theatrical profession - the leading lady had a baby. However Mahala duly arrived. She was a gift of prayer. I should state here that I had always had a faith in God.  Whenever anything seemed impossible and needed a miracle, I prayed and I prayed very hard first to get into D’Oyly Carte.  I told God I would be a good boy and try and give something to lift up the stage and not in any way to pull it down - which for a time I did. But then the old human nature started to come back and we had our rows. I prayed very hard for our daughter called Mahala - it is her only name. It dates right back to Methuselah. It is a Bible name. I don’t know where it came from except that an aunt of Elsie’s had it. So that meant settling down in London for a time and getting the small flat while Elsie practiced, with the baby in one hand and a score for city dinners and city concerts in the other hand.  I managed to get into the BBC.  We had broadcasts together and songs and duets with myself at the piano.  I was also Uncle Mac - I don’t know if you remember Uncle Mac from the Children’s Hour. I would say ‘Hello twins’. It was great fun. I enjoyed that Children’s Hour very much.  

So life went along pretty well. Then I managed to get jobs. I was offered a part by Sir Barry Jackson in Tennyson’s Harold at the Court Theatre with no less a personage than Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson and a lot of stars.  I learnt quite a bit about Shakespeare before Nigel Playfair was reviving The Beggar’s Opera and things like that at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, which had just been gloriously built and opened by the Queen.  He asked if I would not rather come there, to a musical atmosphere. So, I joined him there. There was AP Herbert and Compton Mackenzie and a lot of people who were very interested in that theatre.  I had a great time until the offer came for another tour of Australia.

Q: But now I am going to go back a bit, because I introduced the point about ‘Change Alley’ too soon, so let’s go back there now. I think pretty soon after that, you had a shock in your life. You mentioned it to me once. It brought you face to face with what was promised in those three streets you saw after your marriage.

Ivan: Well this came after my first tour of Australia. I had always wanted to go to Australia and so I accepted the offer. In Australia they either like you or it is as well to go home before they count you out. I happened to be popular with the Australians. I love the country, I love the Australians. I like the gum trees and I liked everything about it especially the surfing beaches and not least of course the delightful ladies there. I had a very big fan mail there and was very popular.  I was offered the country more or less and I took it. As one of my songs in G & S goes, ‘They don’t blame you, so long as you’re funny’. I apparently was funny and amused them so I took everything. It wasn’t long before I say I hit some trouble and a little bit of a shock. Someone really got hurt, and I realised I couldn’t go on running my life my own way in that happy-go-lucky way. I had a belief in God.  I never went on the stage without saying a prayer,  ‘Please God be with me and help me, don’t let me forget my words’. Then when I got on and all was going well I was happy to take the call and the applause. You can’t go on that way with just a nominal belief and just praying to God when you are in trouble.  I realised that something would have to happen.

I came back on the ship and we decided at this point that Elsie and I should be divorced.  The company wanted to send us together to South Africa, where they had applied for us. So they rigged this up for a 6 month season in South Africa on my way home. So I thought, ‘This would be a good idea. We might get the divorce in South Africa if I get Elsie over as the prima donna.’ So I made it that part of my contract to go there, that Elsie would be included and they were quite pleased of course to have her. The tragic thing was that, at this point, Elsie had been sending all my letters to her solicitors and feeling divorce was the best thing. She felt that I was not the stable man she had thought I was, so we tried to get the divorce in South Africa. But the judge rather smiled and said, ‘Why do you suddenly want to be resident in South Africa?’ I said, ‘Well I love the country and the people and so on.’ ‘Are you sure it is not because you want to get a divorce here to avoid any scandal at home? I think, my boy, you ought to go back to England and think it over.’

So that was that. We sailed back to England together, on the Ceramic, the ship I had come on for my first trip.  We got back to England in the winter which felt rather cold, and it was there that I got rather a shock. I had hurt somebody in Australia rather badly and realised I could not run my life my own way. Something had got to happen.  I had bought an island. When I was playing in Queensland we went right up to the north, as far as Cairns - the most wonderful part of Australia, the Barrier Reef. Off the shore between Cairns and Townsville, inside the Barrier Reef about 3 miles off the shore, was a lovely little island. I thought I would just love to have that island, but was told that I probably wouldn’t be able to get it because the man who lived there had an unfortunate marriage. His wife liked the West End and Parisian lights, and liked the island for a time but then they began to separate and the marriage broke up. The man, who was a lawyer, gave up the island and went to the South of France somewhere but would not allow his name to be given. He didn’t want to sell the island or to live there.

To cut the story short, I was talking to a friend when I got back to Melbourne. He was a doctor and he knew my father. I told him about the island and that I couldn’t find out who owned it. He told me he knew and that, if I promised not to give him away he would tell me his name and address. So I wrote to this lawyer. At first he was rather annoyed and wanted to know how I had found him. Then he wanted an unheard of sum for it. I said ‘I have only got £500, but I don’t want to make a hotel there, I want to take one or two poor boys there and let them develop it.’ ‘In that case I’ll give it to you for whatever you can pay.’ He had been planning to leave the island to Dr Barnardo’s homes, but agreed to take my £500 for it.

So, I found myself now with a divorce pending on my hands, a tropical island, and an idea of taking one or two poor boys from the East End of London.  Well the papers gave full page to it, the Daily Mirror had ‘Actor’s tropical island for poor boys’ and crowds and crowds of people wanted to go to the island.  I saw some who looked likely. I wanted a secretary and one lady sounded likely.  She came and saw me and said she didn’t want to go to the island but said, ‘I thought you ought to have something that would help to train those boys’. She told me about the Oxford Group, which was beginning to flourish at that time in Britain and invited me to an Oxford Group house party. I was more interested in her than I was in the Oxford Group, but I went.  I met Frank Buchman - I thought ‘That’s a man of God. This is not some lost cause out of Oxford’ - which is what I had said it was. The people who spoke - the Metropolitan of India, Canon Streeter who was Provost of Queen’s College, Oxford, and men like that who don’t normally go for some frothy thing – it all hit me anyhow very hard, particularly when a couple got up and said their marriage was (had been?) on the verge of breakup. I had a talk with them afterwards and the man just shared about his own selfishness and materialism and about the flirtations which upset his wife .. all the silly things that seem to break up a marriage after it has begun to get going along steadily.  I thought, ‘Well the only thing is, how can I live this? If I connect myself with this I will be a liability to God and the Oxford Group and everybody else.’ And that little voice within which they had spoken about, that vital factor in the life of a man or a nation, I suppose the voice of God, that still, small voice, conscience, whatever you like to call it, said, ‘Yes, you will be a liability. But you will be a much bigger liability if you are not anchored to this.’

I got hold of a man I felt I could trust, one who seemed to be a man of God himself, in touch with the Holy Spirit, and I told him about my troubles. I didn’t see them as troubles. Everybody, all my friends, said ‘Oh so and so is divorced 2 or 3 times’. It wasn’t even at that time a feeling that it was different or wrong to be divorced if you didn’t get along, but I wasn’t happy. The result was I got down on my knees and gave my life to God and said I would be a liability but he would just have to show me what he wanted me to do.  That is how I came to be a man committed to this fight for building a new world and bringing this answer. It is so simple - those standards that I, who had never really read the Sermon on the Mount , didn’t really know what it was about.  But when they put the standards there, the salient points of absolute honesty purity, unselfishness and love. Whooo, you could really get a sort of picture of what you were like, not in your own little way but in God’s sight.  So, I started off on this path of restitution. Believe me, I had a lot of restitution to make, not least to the family to whom I had caused trouble and hurt.

So that is how that came about.

Q: And I believe you soon began to use your singing with these new ideas?  One of the simple basic ideas which you found then, you had a song about - ‘Somebody’s got to be different’.

Ivan: Well, it started new creative gifts coming to light and the great point about Buchman was - it was not only just a personal change but the change must go out. Change your wife. Change your mother. Change your friends. Bring this answer to a materialist civilisation. How could I be used? I got a bit ‘pi’ at first. I thought ‘That’s the end of the theatre!’. But Buchman said, ‘No, no, no, get into the theatre.’ I had had an offer to play Widow (Dame) Twankee, the leading comedian in the pantomime Aladdin at the Prince Edward Theatre in London. I had told the manager that I didn’t think I could be in it because I had joined the Oxford Group.  He said, ‘What does that mean?’ I said, ‘Well it means living standards of honesty and purity.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘we want a clean pantomime. That’s why we wanted you to be the comedian.’ So Buchman encouraged me to do it. ‘My goodness - the stage ,,, there are the people who have forgotten to listen to God. They will listen to their comedians, their artists, dancers and great actors. Why not use it, and give them a clean pantomime? But build a team.’ Which actually I did, before I went on my trip to Australia. That meant also writing songs.

The first song I wrote was a result of meeting a very big business tycoon.  His marriage was on the verge of breakup so I wrote this song about ‘Someone has got to be different’. ‘Oh, that’s a fine song. That’s just what my wife needs. Why don’t you go and sing it to her?’ So I sang this song.

Q: Did Frank Buchman himself ever sing?

Ivan:  I think that was a miracle. He had no voice at all and at this house party that I went to at Oxford we had meetings and meals in Lady Margaret Hall. I had sung this song for him, but his favourite song was ‘Tit Willow’ from the Mikado. He had some important guest there for lunch this day and he said, ‘Now, where’s Ivan? He’ll sing us a song now.’ It immediately came to me the thought of singing him ‘Tit Willow’, as it was his favourite song. I had been singing it at one or two meetings. I said to him, ‘I will sing it, Frank, if you will come and sing with me.’ So, Frank got up very valiantly.  Now he couldn’t sing a bar of music and I can’t say what he did really. But, when he got up beside me he said, ‘Now what do I do?’ So I said, ‘Well, I will sing “On a tree by a river a little tom tit sang ...” and you just come in and sing “Willow, tit willow, tit willow”. You just sing that.’ So Frank agreed.

I started off. ‘On a tree by a river a little tom tit sang ...’ and I looked at Frank.  I can’t give you how he did it, but it came out with a funny squeak.  He was not showing off or trying to be funny.  He probably thought if it would help me as well as the person he had in mind at the lunch, he would stand up there and do it. But the place was absolutely convulsed with laughter and I just couldn’t go on with the song. He was an amazing personality, Buchman. He would just go along with you and wouldn’t tell you what you should do. He just left the Holy Spirit to convict you.

It certainly convicted the man he was thinking about. There were two men - one was the Metropolitan of India, a most Christ-like personality. You wouldn’t think there would be any change needed in a man like that. But he said to me, ‘You know it is amazing how Buchman has brought the simple answer for what we call conversion’ - converting people, making them live differently. ‘Without any sermons and, not only that, now I am not conscious that I have done much wrong in my life, or sin, but I could never have known how to change a person like you who was probably going to hell and enjoying it!’ At the same time there was a union leader who had heard about these absolute standards. He was really fighting it all and he really got very tense. But at this point after the song, he just burst into uproars of laughter. He was as free as the breeze after that. It was extraordinary to think what happened as a result and I began to see that Buchman would go a long way with you if it was your way into the kingdom of heaven, as I would put it.

Q: And then you did go a long way soon after that, to Australia again.

Ivan: That was the thing. I went down to see my wife who was playing in a show at Brighton and I felt really sorry. I had real conviction about the way I had treated her. Just my happy-go-lucky way. She said, ‘Well I don’t want to be in this. I don’t believe you can change. I will believe it when I see it working.’ Which was not a bad thought, really. I had to go on my next trip, full of this new life and a new vision for what I had got.  I was anxious to share it now with my friends and to make what restitution I could make where I had run roughshod over many people because I wasn’t popular with everybody. Some people hated my guts and I didn’t blame them. I had some very painful restitution to make, including a very painful bit of restitution to the Income Tax people whom I had fiddled out of my expenses. In the Ruddigore Opera one of the characters, a Bishop of all people, I have to tell as the bad baronet that I have to commit a crime a day. I said one of the crimes I committed was to make a false income tax return. All the ghosts of my ancestors laugh and the Bishop says, ‘Ho, ho, everybody does that!’ Another character says, ‘It is expected of you!’  I am afraid I had treated it lightly like that.  The income tax people were very cross when I went to see them.  I said that I had fiddled my expenses and not got as much as I had put down for. It was chiefly on a big allowance for photographs because people want photographs of you when you are popular. They were very furious about this and they said, ‘You know, we can take you to court’. I said, ‘I know you can. I have got my eyes fully open but I am going to put things right as far as I possibly can.’

The upshot was that they didn’t take me to court, but they hit me up with a good bill of past expenses which I should have paid. As I went into the lift I thought, ‘Am I going a bit too far with this Oxford Group business?’ and a young lady ran out. She said, ‘Mr. Menzies, I am the typist that has been handling this correspondence and when your first letter came about this I said “Either Ivan Menzies (whom I like in your shows) has gone off his nut or this is something I should have. Because, between you and me, I have had an unfortunate love affair, I am very unhappy and I was going to commit suicide.  I came to hear you speak at one of your meetings and I have found something new, I just wanted to thank you.’ She dashed back into that office. I even feel a wobble in my throat now when I think of that. I thought, ‘My God, that life was worth hundreds of pounds more than I have paid back’.  I began to see how God could use a thing like that to save another life.

I went on merrily then, with all the restitution I had to make - including calling on the father and mother of the family that I had wronged.  I remember he came to the door and looked at me. There was such a look of hatred that came and then it changed. ‘Come in. If you had come in here a year ago, I would have shot you dead.’ So then he said, ‘Perhaps it is the way I brought up my daughter and we are much to blame.’ I replied, ‘I don’t know about that, but I only know that I betrayed a trust and I am deeply sorry. You will be glad to hear that as a result of it I am building a new marriage myself. I shall not have the divorce and I shall go on fighting for this spirit to come to this country.’ ‘Oh well, God bless you in what you are doing.’ And he showed me out.  I must say, I heaved a sigh of relief because I just saw myself in the headlines in a way that I didn’t want - ‘Actor killed’. I began to see something quite new there and I knew I had got the answer for every broken marriage, for every unhappy soul.

Believe me, there were other people who came to see me. In fact one lady came to see me who had been very happy and she said, ‘I did commit suicide.’ ‘Well how come you are alive?’ ‘Well I am the only person that has thrown myself off the Sydney Harbour Bridge and lived. I didn’t want to live.’ Another man came round one night after the show and he wanted to borrow ten bob. He said he knew me. I said, ‘Wait a minute’.  I had just got a book on the Oxford Group that I had been reading again, For Sinners Only and I said ‘Go and read this. Go and sit in the park and come and see me after the show. Come and have a cup of coffee and we can talk.’ So he came back after the show and he said, ‘Oh you can’t live that way. It’s beyond ...’ So I said, ‘Well I am living that way. Why don’t you start?’  Well, to cut the story short again, he started there. He had a lot of restitution he had to make, including walking out of hotels where he had not paid the bill but it went on.

Time and time again we would go into the little cafe next door and someone would come up to the stage door - I remember an aircraftsman. This was in the war, and this young man came to see me every Saturday night. He was interested, and made a decision to live this way and he gave me £1 of his wages towards expenses, because now I was building a team and we had a room there where I had a secretary who dealt with the letters that came in - some of course were just curious - wanting to know about the Oxford Group, some wanted photographs. But I was beginning to build a team now. And so I had a secretary too who was changed, who could deal with the ladies - and lots of very lovely ladies .. I was not insensitive to beauty any more than I was to the beauty of Wordsworth’s valley!  I say now, years after, it is extraordinary how so many humble people have come into great positions. This young aircraftsman is now an adviser of the Australian government. And I could give you many stories like that, of simple people.

Q: Well now I will just break off a moment, Ivan, because those are stories from a little later, and I think we ought to get over to Australia first. Your second visit to Australia. Now in 1938 when the nations of Europe were all rearming, FB launched a programme of MRA - isn’t that right?

Ivan: Oh yes, it is vividly in my memory still, in the East Ham Town Hall. Knowing this was coming up, I had got some of my friends together and people in the theatre were getting changed. There was a famous pantomime comedienne, a Shakespearean actor, his family are well-known now, and my leading man was to be Tod Sloan, who described himself as a ‘watchmaker by trade and an agitator by nature’. He used to have a go at ‘the flatties’ as he called the police there when they came to arrest him for breaching the peace and stealing the bishop’s collection money at a meeting in the Town Hall. And old Tod Sloan, I made him my leading man. I was going to make it into a revue. I had visions of our first stage production coming out, and putting a sketch in about the policeman, rather on the lines of the policemen’s chorus in The Pirates of Penzance, and about these ‘flatties’ - “they were getting changed, this has actually happened, and now the police instead of arresting them, they change them”. The song finished up like that each verse, ‘We change them, yes we change them, and send them off to change their bloomin’ pals!’ It was all very real.

Q: And Frank Buchman thought well of this?

Ivan: Oh yes, yes he did. We got this all rehearsed but certain people were a little afraid about it. Well, they thought - the councillors were getting changed and it might be a bit too frivolous for them, but Buchman was for it.  I think there was only one song survived that Will Reed had written, called ‘Farmer Jarge’. I’d like at some point to sing that song for you, because it was a very good song and it brought in all the ideas of change.

Q: So the show never went on in the end?

Ivan: No. Unfortunately, some of my friends were just a little doubtful whether we could treat it so humorously but realistically - because there was one about Councillors ‘Four jolly Councillors, as you can see, from East Ham and West Ham and Barking-on-Sea...’ So I am afraid the revue didn’t go on, although Buchman was very much in favour of it and it was a sparkling cast we had. We had a Lady X who played the leading lady in the final sketch and Tod Sloan (who used to have a playful little weapon of potatoes with razor blades stuck in them when the mounted police came up). The brilliant cast were all committed to MRA, which FB had launched to take the place of the old title of the Oxford Group, on his 60th birthday in East Ham Town Hall. I did sing some of the songs from it. One song, written by my friend George Fraser, called ‘Farmer Jarge’.

After this Buchman loved this song and he said, ‘I am going to America to launch MRA in the USA and I would like you to come with me’. Incidentally I had another song, for which the words had been written by Dorothy Prescott, based on a real character who had been working with me for a time in the East End of London, Annie Jaeger. I based the song on Annie, how she became a life-changer and went ‘on the knocker’ - knocking on doors and telling the wives of the labour people in the East End what she had found, and what the new world meant to her. A marvellous woman. She went with me, and with Buchman too, to America. I shall never forget that, in the beginning of 1939.

We landed there in New York and were into action straight away with meetings, a great meeting in the Madison Square Gardens and a magnificent team. I sang my songs. Farmer Jarge went down quite well, surprisingly enough, because I say the words are not what you might call sentimental, or like some of the silly songs that we get. In fact some of my songs have been published by Chappells because they said they wanted this type of song.  They were so fed up with so much sentimentality and things that were completely irrelevant to the world situation today and certainly were not faith-building songs.  That is what I always aimed to do, to get my philosophy of change, unite and fight to build a new world. Those were the streamers around Madison Square Gardens. Ruth St Dennis, the great dancer, was there and she repeated that phrase about people who have forgotten to listen to God will listen to their great artists. How much more important then, is it for artists and people who have influence on only one or two people, to know what they are living for.

We went on from there, on to the other side, to the San Francisco Exhibition. I remember one thing, there was a kookaburra in a cage from the Australian pavilion. They said, ‘He has never laughed, this kookaburra.’ I said I would go and see him. I went to see him and, believe it or not, when this kookaburra caught sight of me he started laughing. From there, we had a great gathering in the Monterey peninsula, and I thought, ‘This is one place where I don’t sing Farmer Jarge. It would be too much for them’  

To my horror, Frank Buchman was invited to a cabaret in the Monterey Hotel.  He asked me to come along with him to this supper, the cabaret and one of the most brilliant comedians I had ever seen, Hal Sherman. Frank Buchman thought I would enjoy it.  I went along with him and this cabaret came on about midnight. The manager came up and said, ‘I hope you are enjoying it, Dr Buchman’ and the reply was ‘Oh yes, but I have a comedian here from the D’Oyly Carte... he will give you a song.’ I wondered what on earth to sing him. Frank Buchman said ‘Sing them your farmer’s song’. I said, ‘What? That here?’  So, I got up and sang this Farmer Jarge song.  To my amazement I got a tremendous reception there and one fellow who had had a few drinks came up and ‘Thatsh a goo shong, me boy, I like it’. It was not long since that Frank had been responsible for AA, through some people who had been trying to change a certain person and had failed. So they said, ‘Let’s introduce him to Dr Buchman’. This man, who was an alcoholic, really changed and started this AA.

I had a repercussion of this sometime after when Buchman was coming to have lunch with me one day - this was back in England - and before he came he said, ‘Do you mind if I bring a drunk along?’ ‘Oh any friend of yours is a friend of mine’, I replied. This man came and we gave him fruit cup to drink but the conversation was sparkling and to cut the story short this man had made several decisions and hadn’t lived up to them. He said, ‘I am not going to see you again until I have really conquered this and I believe I have got the answer but I have not conquered it yet,.  I am not coming to see you again.’  I never saw him again till another trip in New Zealand. When we opened in Wellington this man came round to the stage door and he said, ‘I said I wouldn’t come and see you again - I have made it. I have founded AA in New Zealand and I have got a tremendous number of people who have found the answer.’

That’s by the way, because after this great gathering in Monterey we went on to Seattle. While we were in Seattle, war was declared. In spite of Frank saying that he didn’t think it would happen. His great cliche then was ‘guidance or guns’ - that men must listen to the voice of God or they would be condemned to listen to the sound of guns.  In spite of that, war broke out. Buchman said, ‘Well I didn’t think it would happen’. With us was Bishop Roots, late of Hankow, China, and he burst into tears. He was travelling with this team, with Buchman, in America. He burst into tears and he said a very significant thing. He said, ‘Had I made my bishops and clergy as revolutionary as Hitler has made his youth I don’t believe we would have had this war.’  He was tremendously upset.

After that came two cables. First of all when war was declared D’Oyly Carte had taken their company off the road.  Martin Green who had followed me in D’Oyly Carte joined Cochran’s Revue in London. There came a cable from Australia asking me to go and do another season there.  I wanted to be in Britain, for the war, and so I told Frank Buchman that my guidance was that we should return to Britain and play in D’Oyly Carte. I had visions that I could spread my new philosophy wherever I went at a time of great need in my country. I checked it with Buchman and he put us on the train to New York where we managed to get a Dutch ship on which were 60 ex-prisoners who had been let out and sent back to England when war was declared.

There was a good field for action of MRA, and it was quite an exciting voyage. We were anchored off Dover and the Downs while ships were being torpedoed and magnetic mines were going up. However, we made it in time for rehearsals and to open. I opened in Edinburgh on Christmas Eve in the blackout.  I realised I had got a very good weapon, in good joyous clean entertainment.  We played that Christmas season and into the New Year.

Meanwhile the Australian people, JC Williamson’s Australian theatres who had the rights from D’Oyly Carte of running G&S operas in Australia, were very anxious, backed up by government requests, for me to go out there now the war was on. This was because they felt it was suitable entertainment to give to the troops during the war.  I said I couldn’t go back there over those seas - I had just risked my life to get back to England to play and I wanted to stand by Britain. D’Oyly Carte said, ‘I have got someone that I could put in. He is a bit scared of your dream song - he didn’t know whether he could do that patter as you did it, but he has grand opera experience and I think he would be all right if you feel you should go. I don’t think we can run long.’ So in the end anyway I had guidance about it and I decided I would go.

Now, what about Elsie?  The authorities said ‘We can give you a passage, but we are not allowing any women or children to go at present, because ships are being torpedoed and it is very dangerous.’ So I went across France, just before France fell in the war, got an Italian ship at Naples and intrigued the captain on that ship by  singing for him. He was a grand opera fan and there was a grand opera prima donna.  My pianistic accomplishments came into full use, so I was very popular with the skipper. He said he would let me in on something - that if Italy came into the war before we got to Australia, he would sink the ship! ‘Anyway you have got a good faith, haven’t you.’ ‘Yes, I’ll go down singing, anyway.’ He wasn’t going to be captured!

We did get to Australia, but that is another story - I got off at Perth. He got as far as the east coast of Australia and war was declared and he did scuttle his ship. So I felt that was another miracle for me.

Q: I would like to know how Elsie got on.

Ivan: That is a very wonderful story, because Elsie and Mahala had to stay in England. She went up to live in my village, Kirby-in-Furness in the Lake District. They didn’t escape the bombs there, but Bristol was very heavily bombed so that is why they went up there and were given a cottage by the slate quarries, where my dad had been a doctor. So, that was that. Some months after that came a cable from Elsie saying that the government had offered her and Mahala berths on a ship coming under convoy with about 5,000 other wives and children who were being evacuated.  She cabled asking what I thought. I couldn’t get any of this guidance at all. I wanted to see her and I had been telling people that perhaps she was coming, but got responses like, ‘Well we’d love to see her but I wouldn’t ask her to come now’, sort of thing. So I said, ‘A warm welcome awaits you but go on your own guidance’. So she went down to Hays Mews, where MRA was now flourishing in the cellars of 45 Berkeley Square and got a team there. They asked what her guidance was and she said, ‘I have a strong feeling that I shouldn’t go’. They encouraged her to obey that, so she did. We never heard of the Ceramic - the boat that she was going to sail on - again until after the war and I was in Chicago. They said, ‘You ought to see this captured German submarine’. It was the only submarine captured by the British Navy in the war and there was quite an interesting story attached to it. So we went to see this submarine and they told me that the captain had torpedoed a ship called the Ceramic. He said he had thought it was a troop ship but they rescued one steward, just for identification, and when the steward told him what it was, 5,000 mothers and children being evacuated to Australia, and he had heard the cries of the drowning passengers in this cold winter’s sea, he committed suicide. The submarine - before it could be scuttled - was captured by the British Navy but for the grace of God there would be my wife and daughter.

So my wife had a firm conviction now that guidance worked. But she didn’t come till the next tour that I did of Australia.

Q: Between this second visit of yours to Australia and the first one, you had had a very great change in your life and your ideas. And did this make a difference to the way you thought about your tour in the war.

Ivan: The journey on the ship was the first thing. I just hoped no one would know me, and I would go quietly along. But everyone seemed to know me and call me over for a drink or something. I had a brother who both drank and smoked heavily.  He was furious when he saw me decide to stop both. He said, ‘You bloody hypocrite. God gives you that stuff for you to use.’ Mind you, he drank too much and he smoked very heavily.  I replied that I wasn’t telling him what he should do but I felt that I should pack up my lovely Dunhill pipes, though I liked my drink and my wine and all my indulgences.  The significant fact was that my brother died of cancer of the lung. My best friend had chivvied me about smoking up our lovely valley with my pipe when I went for a joyous day with him one day. The next time I went without it. ‘Where’s your pipe? You’ll be unhappy’. That day was one of the loveliest days of my life and I realised I was not dependent on these habits any more. It was just a matter of what God wanted me to do and he wanted me to be  free and happy and enjoy life.

On this ship people asked me to have a drink.  I said instead I would tell them a few stories - and got a lot of leg-pulling. But as we came out of the bar I was nearly bursting with lemonade and a young officer came along. ‘I was one of those pulling your leg but I was just wanting to see if you really meant it.’ He told me he had a problem in his own marriage which he was able to talk over and settle.  When we arrived, the directors were on the quay, calling ‘Hello Ivan’. The story had gone before me and the press were there. ‘Brought your bible with you?’ ‘Here you are Mr.Tate - the new book of the words. I don’t know if you have ever read it, but they are worth taking a glance at.’ So I got the laugh in over him but they were very worried there. They didn’t think they could have God and religion mixed up with the theatre. It was a precarious season at the end of the depression there, unemployment very high and, if the season had been a flop, it would have been the end of the theatre.  I said I didn’t know if God and the theatre were going to be detrimental, but why not wait and see.

From that moment we started our tour in Adelaide. In the old curtain speeches I used to say things along the lines of ‘You’re wonderful. How am I?’ I sometimes got a joke and would say ‘You are the finest audience I have ever played to’, and then they would applaud and then I would say, ‘Yes, I said that and it went very well in Sydney.’ I had the right kind of humour I suppose. But then I said, ‘I am not going to give you any old gags this time. I am going to tell you something that has happened to me, because I would be a very poor friend this time if I didn’t share something wonderful I have found.’ And I briefly told them about this. At the end of the play a lot of my old friends came round, looked around for the old scotch and soda that I used to have in my very nice dressing-room. Then at the back of the crowd I saw a young couple. I didn’t know them, but I spoke to them and they said ‘No you don’t know us but we were very interested in your speech. We have been praying for God to show us about this Oxford Group. We have heard about it and it sounds as if you are an answer to our prayers.’ So I got rid of the rest of my old friends, who didn’t want to stay long now there was no drink going, but I didn’t want to rush them out as they were old friends.

When they had departed and I got my makeup off, we sat down and I suggested we go to my hotel, a few doors from the theatre.   We talked into the small hours as they said they missed their last bus or last tram home. But we had all got on our knees and they had given their lives to God. They said they believed it was God’s plan and they wanted to commit themselves to it. As far as I was concerned, that was the start of the Oxford Group, although I know there had been a lot of people wanting to know about it and had started various groups in different ways. I cabled Buchman and said, ‘Oxford Group started today in Adelaide. Please pray for us.’ So that was the start as far as I was concerned.  When it became MRA  it had to start all over again with those who said they liked the Oxford Group better! I said MRA was the guidance of God and that I believed Buchman. He was walking in the woods of the Black Forest in Germany and this thought as clear as a bell came to him that the need today was for moral and spiritual re-armament. And moreover, I said, I believed my own thoughts which I felt may not always come from God.  It depends on what state I am in, whether I want the sort of guidance that I want, or whether I want the guidance of the Holy Spirit. But that’s it.

Q:  These people who came to see you - did they include people of influence as well?

Ivan: Well it was really amazing. There were all sorts and kinds, not only humble people. This couple were schoolteachers. When I got to Melbourne, our next port of call, the press came first - what was this, actor turns religious, all this kind of thing. They didn’t quite know how to evaluate it and a very good man who wrote in a paper equivalent to our Daily Mirror or Daily Sketch as we used to have, called Alan Moyle came. He said he had come for an article. He was doing a series of looking at life beyond the footlights. I saw him first and I gave him the story. He said he had come for the story but he thought I had better write it. ‘And I need to get the same experience myself’. I said to him that we would both write it so he wrote this splendid article which aroused a lot of comment and which gave me very good material to write my latest experiences. Great interest was aroused throughout the whole nation by my experiences - so much so that I had to get a secretary.  It had to be a ‘changed’ secretary, because naturally lots of young ladies came for autographs and I didn’t know whether they just wanted the autograph. They would say ‘What is this Oxford Group, Mr. Menzies?’ and they would want to know.  I needed some woman, a committed woman, who would know how to help them to start.  There God came in, he sent just the right sort of woman to help me, looking not necessarily for a secretary’s job but who felt that I ought to have a secretary and wanted to start on this idea herself.

I began to build a team, which was the great thing to do because one person couldn’t deal with all the requests that came in.  I got my friends over from Adelaide on their vacation to help me to start a team in Melbourne. We were ready for all who came. Then we had a journalist who was not slow in telling the office. He got a lot of leg-pulling about it but the thing began to build as a result of his article. I heard from the Chairman of the Legislative Council of Victoria, the Hon WH Edgar. He said ‘I have been most interested in your article, I think that this should start in the right place, right here in Parliament House and I would be very pleased to put my room at your disposal.’ So we started to have our first team meetings in that place. I felt it was a good place to start, the State Parliament of Victoria.  One or two MPs began to see this and began to start listening to God and getting changed so it began to spread. One night at the theatre the chaplain of the big prison, Pentridge Jail, came to see me. He said he wished I would come and talk to some of his fellows. ‘I don’t seem to get very far with them’. I said I would rather talk to him first, then we can probably find out why he didn’t get far. He said, ‘Oh I think they will listen to you.’

He suggested the next Sunday morning, at the service in the chapel at 7 am. I said it was a little early for an actor and would mean having my quiet-time about 5 in the morning, after doing 2 shows.  But by now I found I had what one religious leader called ‘great spiritual vitality’. My strength was going into something besides dancing most of the night and working off the headaches perhaps on the golf course the next morning. I was very keen on golf. So I landed out at the jail at 7 am and I could see the suspicious looks. I said to these fellows, ‘Look, I am not a do-gooder. I have not come to give you a pep talk. I will just tell you what I have found. The only difference between you and me is you got caught. I murdered as many people with my tongue as probably someone here has done (and the number one gunman was one of those listening very attentively - a typical, flat-nosed type).’ I was very taken by this fellow. The governor had told me that if I could do anything with him he would be grateful, because the prison officials couldn’t do anything with him except keep him in closed confinement. I started off and gave them the works of what I had found and afterwards one or two wanted to talk. One man had murdered a woman - more a death pact between them. He had finished her but not himself. He felt he had to suffer his long life sentence in that prison for what he had done. I said, ‘No you can work out your restitution here.’ He got the point. He was called Tom Bacon, and he had a passion for Shakespeare. They had made him the librarian.  It was amazing the change that came in that man. From being the most miserable man in the prison, he became the happiest man. Here is a line from a letter from him, where he shared some time after about what he had found: ‘The confession of sin I made to you on Sunday morning I made to the Inspector General. The Moffat Translation of the Bible you suggested to me seemed to help others beside myself. In your letter to me you state that God will prove himself to you if you will give him a real fair spin. How right you are. I have surrendered my will to God and I assure you that I shall play the game. I know I cannot cheat God and I should be 1001 fools if I cheat myself. Don’t you remember me telling you that things would happen in Pentridge Jail? They are happening all right, believe me. The group at the moment is 4. Wait until we get our feet and we will make it 14. A few days ago I was in prison, body, mind and soul. Today I am free.’

That man became a life-changer in the prison, as others did. One man who used to go on these sunshine cruises on ships had encouraged a man to drink too much and got him tiddly.  Then he helped him to his cabin and in to bed. He then took his wallet and took a few pounds out and the next morning came and sympathised with him for spending so much in the bar the night before.  Then another man who was a very good artist had done some lovely pictures on the chapel walls. He found he could make a very good imitation of a pound or a five pound note and confined his attention to that.  Like many, he got careless and got found out and got a long sentence. He said, ‘The change in my life is remarkable. I am amazed that everything is so easy. I was here for 10 months for burglary and I put in all that time in company with other so-called experts, planning ways and means to trick society out of some easy money without being caught by the law. I left here confident that I could carry out my trade as a thief. But when one has done little else for 20-odd years, one is apt to style oneself as ‘expert’ and beat the law. The jury didn’t believe the lies that I had told them.’ A real change came in that man. You had to prove that it was more satisfying painting honestly, than forging notes and stealing. That was the thing that caught their imaginations - the fuller life of change and listening to God. The Inspector of Jails told me ‘It is amazing. Breaches of the regulations have never been so low in that prison. It is valid change. We were watching it very carefully because we didn’t know what the answer was.’

We had something there.  It is significant too that there was a leading comedian an Australian called Gus Blewett, a very good comedian, who drank very heavily. My dresser in the theatre who also had seen a great change in me, as my stage manager had done, said to me one night, ‘Have you told Gus about this?’ I said ‘No’. He asked if I was afraid of him. Well in fact I was. I thought he might make fun of me because he was a real good old wisecracking comedian. However, I thought I would invite him to have a meal with me between the shows.  Old Gus came and I wondered if I should have a beer with him to make him feel comfortable, but the thought was ‘No, no, no. That’s his problem, and yet it isn’t his problem.’ I couldn’t understand this. He asked what I was drinking and I said I drank water. He said ‘That’s fine I’ll do the same. I’ll tell you something - I’ve got cancer. Nobody knows this but my mother and that is why I am drinking because what the hell? I haven’t got long to live. What you have given me tonight is the thing that I am looking for.’ And then, poor old Gus Blewett, the press got on to him and tried to shake him, but they investigated what was happening in Pentridge Jail after he had come up there with me. You got two comedians putting over the same thing and two popular ones, and the pressman said ‘When comedian Ivan Menzies called on the inmates of the grim grey pile and introduced the group idea, others had memories of G&S, and they laughed and they laughed. But they still were laughing when Gus Blewett came.’ He convinced them that there was a valid change in his life and it was tremendous the things that started happening.

We had a big team in the end of about 20 - big for a prison. The governor lent us his own sitting room where they could have walked out of the window into the street without any guard on the door. I think that impressed them. Robbie, the flat-nosed gunman, said to the governor that he was not going to take all the 4 absolutes, but that he would start on honesty. So the governor believed him, sent for him and Robbie said, ‘What have I done wrong now?’ The governor replied ‘Nothing. You were asking me some time ago for a job in the toolshed and I didn’t think I could give it to you then because of the hacksaws and things. But if you give me your word that you won’t let any of the tools go out of there.’ Robbie replied, ‘I’ll kill the bastard that takes them out.’ The governor said hastily that he didn’t want anyone threatened but that he would take his word for it.

Q: I would like now to ask you, were the church people interested in all that was happening?

Ivan: Yes. That was a great story of how the church were not slow to get on to this, and the Rev. Dr Irving Benson, later Sir Irving Benson, who was the superintendent of the Methodist Mission, asked me to come and speak in his church. So I did, at a thing called a PSA - a Pleasant Sunday Afternoon. The church was full - by now I was established not only as a comedian but a man with a great message to give to the nation. I spoke and told them my simple story The next day he rang me up and asked if he could have a personal talk with me.  He offered to call for me with his car and take me down to the shore. He later described his meeting with me and that, though I was a young man at the height of my powers as an exponent of G&S, I had found what men all over the world say they are looking for:- the way to God, the way to a changed life, a fuller and satisfying life and how to communicate that to others.

He formed a group, a Christian group of course, in his church, each member a vital witness. He said, ‘Ivan’s story was like the book of Acts in action. I opened my pulpit to Ivan and his talk was broadcast to the whole nation by the ABC. The response was an avalanche of appeals. Men and women in and out of the church crying out for the same experience.’ Sir Irving gathered the members of all churches together - three to four hundred for me to speak to them.  I saw the clergy in a new light. Instead of the critical one which I had had before. That afternoon we walked by the shore and, as he said, we talked our hearts out. The meaning of a changed life, and being a life-changer through the power and guidance of the Holy Spirit. The still small voice. The guideposts of the 4 standards. The folly of comparative standards, whether in making a parachute or servicing and inspecting a car or an airplane. Sir Irving wrote, ‘I saw it. I humbly and gratefully saw it all. Much more we told each other. I went back to Melbourne committed to the group. In it for all I was worth. Now I know how the spiritual inertia of the churches can be quickened. I know how the world can be changed, when individual lives are changed and brought together into groups.’ These teams are fellowships of reconciliation through which Christ can work.

I feel this is still valid and even more relevant today - whatever you like to call it.  The sequel of that was, he thanked me for my talk and said that the next Sunday he had Noel Coward coming. He asked me to come and sit in and give the prayer at the end of Noel Coward’s talk at the PSA on ‘The little ships of England’. So I agreed. Introducing Noel Coward the following Sunday Dr Benson said, ‘Mr. Coward is a gilded ornament of London society’. He had been impressed with his rocklike British strength and his sincerity and strength and conviction. In the whole of history, so far as I can remember, only one man successfully survived being lionised. That was Daniel. However Mr. Coward seemed to be doing very well so far.

Of course the talk was interestedly listened to, and Coward said he had been profoundly touched by the affection of Australia for England. It was leaving a flame that burned strongly and truly, goes far deeper than flag-waving and trumpet-blowing. Then I gave this prayer and the church magazine said, ‘Menzies led the prayers and the great audience was deeply moved by the simplicity and sincerity of his petition. He prayed ‘O God make us willing to be willing to listen to you. We know that you can speak to us even as you spoke to the prophets of old if we are willing to listen and obey. Spotlight in us anything that is preventing us from knowing your plan for us, for our nation and for the world. Inspire in us the true patriotism that surrenders personal selfishness, softness and self-indulgence for our nation, so that we may be governed by you and not by tyrants. Strengthen us to drive out from our land that insidious fifth column of fear, hatred, greed, dishonesty, impurity and disunity, so that we may build an impregnable morale through moral and spiritual re-armament. Fill us with that divine discontent that hates any sins enough to quit them, so that through new men and women we may build new nations and a new world in which our very defense is the respect and gratitude of our neighbouring nations. We pray, O God, for England. We thank you for her courage and steadfastness and ask that in this hour of her trial she may find Thee and so find her true destiny, to lead the world back to sanity, peace and our country’s resurrection. (and more - long prayer/speech, probably to be found in his biography, Song of  a Merryman)

Afterwards I could feel that Noel’s eyes were very closely on me and at the end of that he said, ‘My God I have never heard a prayer like that in my life before. What are you doing after this? Will you come back to my hotel and have a drink?’ I said, ‘Certainly I will. I have got the suite under yours in the Menzies Hotel.’ We had a very interesting talk, I must say.  He had asked me to compere his show - he was doing a charity matinee at Her Majesty’s Theatre. Why I am telling you about the church is that I was very anxious that the churches should not feel that I was in any way against them. That we were not a different denomination - as Buchman put it MRA was a new determination to live whatever we believed. I had many stories of all denominations - Buddhists, Jews, Catholics, of people who were roused to living their own faiths and finally coming to the one Almighty God.

Shortly after that the Moderator of the Presbyterian Church, who apparently influenced by my new kind of life had allowed his daughter to go into the chorus of the D’Oyly Carte, and at first was very snooty and wondered what I could tell her, the daughter of the Presbyterian Moderator about the Christian religion. However finally she began to see that I had got something that she needed and she formed part of the team now that I had in the company.  It consisted of herself, a Christian, a young lady who was Jewish with two daughters and who said she thought she couldn’t be in MRA because she didn’t believe in Christ. I said, ‘Never mind what you don’t believe in. Do you believe in your prophets?’ She said, ‘Oh I believe in God.’ So I suggested she listen to him each morning.  She started this quiet time in the early morning with her friend. Then one day she came to me and she said, ‘I had an extraordinary experience this morning. Now you may say it was influenced by me seeing that picture - the Holman Hunt picture of Christ standing at the door with the lantern and knocking - but I believe it was Jesus who came in and said “You know, I and my father are the same.”’ She said ‘I have no difficulty in believing now. I believe they are both the same.’

Moving on to Marjorie Davidson, whose father was the Moderator - he asked me to speak in his church. When I arrived, there were as many people out on the pavement as inside and I said, ‘Well there is no overflow. I hadn’t expected anything like this, but anybody who likes to wait, I will talk again afterwards.’ So I went into the church and I spoke. Before I started I said, ‘Hands up all the Christians. I had no idea there were so many Christians in this city.’ A lot of hands went up. ‘Hands up all the Christians who have read the 26th chapter of St Luke within the last 6 months’ and a lot more hands went up of course. Some were a little doubtful. I said, ‘Well anyway I appear to be talking in the right place because there ain’t no 26th chapter of St Luke!’ There was a dead silence of course and then roars of laughter, quite unheard of in a Presbyterian church as far as I know before and one letter certainly - a very hurt letter from an old lady who thought it was quite out of place. She said she hardly dared go out now because her friends teased her about it. I probably should not have done it, I replied to her, but once a comedian always a comedian and I couldn’t resist having a little bit of fun. I said to her ‘Why not just tell them, “No I haven’t read that but I have gone back and read the other 24 and I think this applies to you ...”.’  She quoted a song that I had put in a verse about when I point one finger at somebody else there are three more pointing back at me. I suggested she tell her friends about that.

So after that my team began to build up in the churches. In Sydney the Archbishop wasn’t quite sure whether the right people were getting changed that should be, but his wife was very much interested and also the head Deaconess who said she had long been wanting to hear about MRA.  She decided to be part of my team and would I come and speak to the women in the Cathedral?  I took my team along - and I took my friend Julie, the Jewish girl, and did not intend to ask her to speak - and yet to my amazement Julie said she wanted to speak in this Cathedral. She told the women the story of her vision of the picture. You can just imagine what that did in Sydney Cathedral to the dignified ladies of the Cathedral. It was an amazing experience.

Q: You spoke just now about having a message for the nation. Did what you were doing affect the leaders of the nation?

Ivan: That is the amazing thing. It captured the imagination of our leaders - for instance the Governor of NSW had become very interested and his wife too.  He had spoken to the Mayor of Newcastle about a revue that we had just got together and which had had its premiere in my hotel.  It happened there because the manager was very impressed with what had happened in his hotel since MRA had spread, especially to one man who had been convicted of stealing. The manager believed he had been put in that hotel to try and trace this but hadn’t succeeded.  This man came and confessed to it and had changed.  It had brought quite a new atmosphere in the hotel, although of course there were others concerns but the stealing had stopped.

The manager said, ‘I knew you were a bit religious, but I didn’t know that it was as practical as this. I would be very pleased to use this hotel and for you to have your meetings here. We have a very good ballroom’ - which I had my eye on too. He said, ‘I hear you are rehearsing a revue, so please use the ballroom any time it is not occupied, for your rehearsing.’ I was having the preview the next Sunday night and I had a line from the Prime Minister’s secretary saying the PM, John Curtin, had heard about this revue and is conscious of the work we were doing and would like to see it. I wrote to the secretary, Fred Macloughlin, a good Christian secretary, to whom Curtin said he owed a great deal and he would come to see the preview at Menzies Hotel the following Sunday. He duly arrived with his wife and saw the revue.  He said to me afterwards, ‘That is wonderful. You have really got something there. Where are you going after this? What are you going to do?’ It was very interesting. There was a journalist who had come, from a paper called ‘Truth’ which was very often negative and rather made fun of stories of comedians like dear old Gus Blewett and myself being changed. She sat through this revue and I said ‘Don’t think you are going to see a great G&S with professional people. These people are all in jobs but they are putting on this revue like a living picture which the Chinese did with their theatre. Living pictures of their faith.’ She jumped up at the end before Curtin spoke and said ‘Ivan Menzies had no need to apologise for this. This is the greatest thing he has ever given to Australia.’

In response to Curtin’s question about what we would do next I replied, almost facetiously, but certainly hopefully, ‘What about Canberra Mr. PM?’ He wagged his finger and said, ‘Yes. That’s it. That’s the place. I’ll be in touch with you. I’ll write to you.’ I thought ‘Oh well, well.’ and off he and his wife went.

Two or three days after that came this letter from Curtin, ‘If you can get your cast together I can offer you this week in Canberra to put this revue on. I have heard from the Governor of NSW and his wife and the Lord Mayor of Newcastle.  They have told me what they feel about it as a great strength to the nation. If you can get your cast together we will arrange for you to be put up.’ The long and the short of it was I had to be released. Mind you I did have it in my contract now that if I was wanting to be released for a few days for this play, I would be able to be. By now one of the directors had stood on the stage and expressed his apology for having criticized ‘Jimmy’ Menzies as he called me, for having felt that in any way my work was detrimental to the stage, ‘because he and this present company have saved us from bankruptcy. We have never had an empty seat. If this show had been a failure it would have been the end of our theatres.’ So I turned to him and I said, ‘So God is practical in the theatre?’ He replied, ‘I’ll say!’

It was not easy getting released because we were doing the Mikado and it is a very popular opera. At the same time, I had had a lot of letters because there was a lot of trouble with our soldiers being executed in Japan and the PM was getting letters asking why he didn’t do something about it. So the upshot was that I was released and all these people in the cast were released for a week, to go up to Canberra where he had built a stage for us in the Members’ Dining Room. He adjourned both Houses and we put on this revue. Afterwards Curtin got up and said, ‘Well, we can’t leave this here. I think we ought to try and make a film of this.’ There were ‘hear hears’ from the audience. ‘Mr. Menzies and his cast will come and meet my Cabinet in my room after this and we will discuss how this can be done. We don't have much equipment but we can vote him as much money as he needs because I feel this is what the nation should see.’

So there we talked to the Cabinet ministers. I have a photograph of a young friend of mine, called Malcolm Mackay. He was a young naval lieutenant. He had come all the way from his ship in Perth, WA. He had a week’s leave. He probably spent 4 or 5 days of it on the train, just to stand on that stage. I have a picture taken by the press of him talking to the then Minister for the Navy, the Hon Norman Machin.  Now, he has become Minister of the Navy for himself. It impressed the Minister at the time that he had come all this way just to stand on that stage and identify himself with the work that we were doing, because he felt that moral and spiritual values went together with the other kind of armaments.

We discussed how we could make films, but I came to the conclusion that it was beyond us to do that. The cast had to go back in their jobs. I had to go to my job. We had the leading producer offer his services, Chauvelle, who made a splendid film. We had plenty of cooperators who were very anxious to help, but it was not till years after that we were able to make films. Now our wonderful theatre, the Westminster Theatre, is putting on our plays and so we go on.

Q: Would you like to say something about General Macarthur?

Ivan: It wasn’t long of course before we went up to Brisbane with our operas and General Macarthur had heard of my work (he was in charge of the operations further north, as everybody knows). I had a very nice letter from his ADC, presenting the General's compliments. Now the leading hotel was occupied as his HQ but he would be very pleased for me to put up in that hotel as he had heard of the work that I was doing.  He felt it was an important contribution to the morale of the people in the war, and a strength to his forces as well. I had had an interview with the Australian commander, who was very impressed with the songs I had written for the revue, especially the one ‘Someone’s got to be different’ because he said he was getting a lot of negative letters to his soldiers from wives at home.  They were not always behaving as well as they should when absent. It was unsettling the boys.

I had very interesting talks with General Macarthur. We put a box at his disposal at the theatre and his officers used to come. Mrs. Macarthur and their young boy came - I felt so sorry for her. They just loved the operas and, whenever he came or there were officers in the box, I had a special verse or lines to the Major-General’s song in The Pirates of Penzance, which of course went down well there. I didn’t get any criticism for juggling with the script because I felt it was quite a legitimate occasion and it was good enough to have been written by Gilbert, even if he didn’t do it.

The General said something very significant too when I first spoke to him about my work in moral and spiritual re-armament. He said, ‘I am thoroughly and completely in agreement with what you are doing. I will help you all I can. I probably have been on more battlefields than any other soldier alive or any other leader and I have never yet seen a soldier die without God and his mother’s name on his lips.’

There was a sequel from my friend Robbie from Pentridge Jail, the man who shot the bank manager. His conduct was so good after we left that his sentence was reduced.  I had a letter after I was just on the point of leaving that area of that country from General Macarthur’s ADC, saying they had just had an application from a man called Robbie, giving my name for a reference. He wanted a job in Intelligence. the ADC asked what I knew of him. I said what I knew and about the man’s change. I said I would trust that man anywhere, with my life. I would go anywhere with him. I also added that if he got hold of some tough guy who tried to tell him what he should do rather roughly, he might knock him down - because that is what he did with warders in the prison until he had a change. I didn’t get any reply from that letter.  I didn’t find out what had happened to him because afterwards the war ended and I went to America and back to England. Then, when I went on a trip to America with Frank Buchman, the purser asked Buchman if he would take the Sunday service on the ship. Buchman said no he wouldn’t but he would ask his two ‘stars’ - Bunny Austin and me - to do it. I told Bunny about this and we took half each. I sang a song from ‘The Vanishing Island’ called ‘A man with a fire in his heart’. At the end I saw a man in uniform at the back of the lounge where the service was. He came up and he said, ‘You don’t remember me, do you?’ He gave me his name, and I did remember him, the Governor’s ADC. I asked what happened about Robbie. ‘Oh we took him on. He was the finest man we had ever had in Intelligence. But then he suddenly vanished.’

Ivan: Yes, I was certainly in the First World War and I was in that terrible battle of the Somme. I joined up in 1914 and shall never forget that terrible winter in the trenches of 1915, followed later on after the cold and the mud, with the heat and the flies and the stench of the wounded.  When that terrible bombardment started on July 1st for several days, the Battle of the Somme General Haig had said the artillery would level the trenches when we went over and we would only have to walk in. Well, we went up 1,000 strong at 4 o’clock. I was on the machine gun. An hour afterwards there were 18 of them standing up. I was wounded. A young soldier came dashing out to bandage me up. He asked where I was wounded. I said, ‘Keep down’ and he went to put my bandage on and there was a crack and he fell dead over me. I suppose his mother had been praying for him like my mother was praying for me, to bring me back. I thought, ‘I wonder why he has gone. Am I going to go too?’ However I managed to crawl back and finally got down to where a couple of stretcher-bearers were looking for anybody that was alive but wounded. They got me to the dressing station, and finally on the Somme on a barge, and so into an old barn where some nuns were bandaging up wounded. Then finally back to England and into hospital.

I shall never forget before we went up, we had one of Lena Ashwell’s concert parties, in which my wife used to sing. She was a very famous soprano, as I said, and had been picked to go with a concert party and especially to sing two songs that had been written for her by the late Fred Wetherly, Danny Boy an old Irish folk tune, with Fred’s words, and Roses of Picardy. Great favourites with the troops. I never forget Elsie’s concert party coming up. It meant a great deal to us there. I little thought that years afterwards I would marry her and sing duets with her even on the BBC. We used to do our songs for them and travel to the various provincial stations as well as Daventry. She was a great soprano, was Elsie. She was very much loved by the Australian troops on Salisbury Plain. That was a foretaste of her coming to Australia on my last tour. She came with one of the plays, The Forgotten Factor, and she designed the costumes for the Australian wardrobe. She got all the many different wild flowers of which there are a profusion in Australia and got a team together to embroider them on the girls’ frocks and made a great point of contact. She did a great job of course with women in her talks. She was in great demand to see what it was like. There was one article, ‘What is life like with a comedian?’ She gave me a much better build-up than I deserve but we were in process of working this new life out together.

Q: After the war I believe you took part in plays that Peter Howard had written.

Ivan: Yes I did - I was very keen on him as a playwright.  He told me he wanted me to be in his plays and that he had me in mind in many that he was writing and would write. I think the first one was The Real News. I had never met Beaverbrook, but I played the part of the editor in this play and a man who had worked with Beaverbrook said, ‘Did you know Beaverbrook intimately?’ ‘Extraordinary the way you are doing little habits that he had’. It was a marvellous play.

Q: Of course Peter Howard himself was one of Beaverbrook’s leading journalists.

Ivan: Peter was the man who was sent by Beaverbrook to get a negative story about us. He went back and said he was joining the crowd himself and wrote this play. We played it at the Westminster Theatre for a run. Then there was another play, Pickle Hill. To me the miracle was that it was not difficult to play in the G&S operas, but to see a play like Pickle Hill (Pickle was a great bootlegger who had been smuggling grog into the students at Penn State University and they were losing their football games as a result.) When Buchman arrived in the university they started changing and I really felt I was Bill Pickle who was really after Buchman’s blood because he was stopping my sale of grog to the students. I shall never forget the scene where I met ‘Frank’ and ‘Frank’ said he was really scared that I was going to hit him. Something hit Bill Pickle very hard and I used to feel it as I was playing him.

Another play, We Are Tomorrow, was about another university. I would have thought it would have been about Peter Howard’s own, Oxford. There again I seemed to have the villain’s part, the man who was spreading a different ideology to the MRA one. The change in this man, which came quite normally, was tremendously effective. You could just feel the Holy Spirit going right through the cast and into that audience. Tremendous experience to be in those plays.

The greatest one of all, my greatest experience in the theatre, was a musical written by Peter Howard.  It was helped, by contributions from others and with music by Dr Will Reed.  He travelled with us round the world with this play called The Vanishing Island. Tremendous play, it was. It was just the story of a country that had materialists and another country that had an ideology of hate.  These two ideologies were against one another till in the end the democratic island started to vanish. Vanish into the sea.  Then a voice came out of the clear, ‘What shall we do?’ I played the part of the king of that island. It was amazing, the part I had played before was in another play, where I played the part of a drunk.

Buchman always called you about the part you were playing. I said, ‘I’m the consumer’. Frank used to call me ‘the consumer’. Now I was elevated, I played the part of the king of this island, with the answer. I gave the answer in a magnificent song which I would like to sing later to you - ‘The Sound of a Million Voices’. You could just feel the hush in the audience. Not the hush that you would get in the usual sort of tense scene but the - well at times I could hear the wings of the Holy Spirit beating in that theatre. Whenever I got self-centred, I didn’t hear that hush or that silence. It seemed to go almost like the light. But when I was living absolutely to what I believed - my standards of rising early in the morning to listen to the still, small voice, as it said in the song, and thought about the Cross of Jesus Christ being in the centre of that stage and in that cast, you could really feel God working. It matched up with the experience that I told you earlier that I had, when I was surrounded by God. It was more than the limelight but the warmth of the limelight seemed to accentuate the power and the warmth of the Holy Spirit.  I used to pray for the cast and the country I was in. We went round the world with that play, not in 80 days but in 82 days, right up to the Arctic Circle and the most northern theatre in the world and back through Holland and Finland and Sweden. I lunched with commoners, with union leaders, with King Gustav of Sweden. I had lunch with him. In fact he lent us woollen sheepskin coats to go up to the Arctic Circle. There we played in Kiruna. We had Africans with us in the cast. I can see these people with their black skin - they were out getting snow in bottles. I said ‘What are you doing?’ They said ‘We have never seen snow at home. We are going to send some snow back to our relations, in the bottles.’

Then we went down through Africa. We played in Cairo first, in Egypt, and then a call came to go down to other parts of Africa. We played the opera house in Cairo the same day and the theatre in Salisbury, Rhodesia, 3,000 miles apart and then back again to Alexandria, the source of the Nile.  Then over into Europe again, through Switzerland and we played in the capital cities - Berlin, Paris.  Anyway, we played on 4 continents and in 28 countries, 78 cities and 461,000 people. How do I know that? Because I used to have one of these times of quiet on the stage, where I wrote down what thought came to me. They were real thoughts that did come, and amongst other things I wrote down the number of cities, the lives that were changed en route, from kings and commoners. One of the most vital experiences I think was in Tehran, where we played before the Shah in a special theatre he built for us. It seemed somehow to be very significant there, as we think now what happened to him as he watched that play.  He saw that king who was threatened to be killed if he didn’t get off the throne. Afterwards Peter Howard introduced me to him. He said, ‘Your Majesty this is the king from this play’. He said, ‘Oh yes, I know.’ Peter said, ‘You know, Your Majesty, you could do for the whole world what that king has done in that play.’ He nodded his head and the next day he gave many thousands of acres of his best land on the Soviet border to the peasants. In the light of events it is very significant. It was almost like writing on the wall.

And then of course we went to Iraq and there it was very different. They didn’t like the king coming off the throne in the play, because they were afraid of revolution. As you know they had revolution and many of the men we met were killed. But the man who invited the play there is still alive. All the way through it was just a series of miracles, of something more than a play that gripped the hearts and the imagination of the people. At one point in that play, our island was vanishing and the other forces of materialism and hatred and godlessness threatened the island. Then they became afraid. And a voice shouted out, ‘What shall we do?’ Then I sang this song, ‘The Sound of a Million Voices’, after having played to the heads of a thousand million people.

With special thanks to Ginny Wigan for her transcription, and Lyria Normington for her editing and correction.