Malcolm Mackay interviewing Ivan Menzies. A second interview is available here.
Ivan: My name is Ivan Menzies - that is Scots. In England it is generally pronounced differently and when I was in Australia it was the same because they had a Prime Minister of the same name, pronounced the English way and they didn’t understand any other way.
PM Bob Menzies stayed with my cousin up in Scotland and he took her to Menzies Castle. My cousin was a woollen manufacturer and used to make the tartans for the Royal Family. He said, ‘Well, we will find out how close you are to the Menzies clan. There is an old aunt, I think it was, living in the dungeon there. She will tell you. They went along to the castle and got about 20 yards from her. She came out and spit at him - then that settled it!
MM: Looking back to the two Menzies ... In Australia in my youth, when I was attending the university, I would think you were at least as famous as the very famous Sir Robert. What were you, Ivan? Were you a comedian, were you a singer, an actor?
Ivan: Well, I was a comedian. I was sort of a village boy, my father was a doctor, came from the Lake District and I was wounded in World War One on the Somme. A young Australian boy came to try and bandage me up. He was killed. After the war, what would I do? I was the bright-eyed boy at the village concert, so I could make them laugh like I did at school. My answers made the boys laugh. I thought, well if I could earn my living making people laugh I would probably get more than my dad - which I did ultimately and joined the D’Oyly Carte company. That is how I came to be - I started off first as a comedian and actor.
Then we did an amateur show of HMS Pinafore, one of the most famous, and I was Sir Joseph Porter there. One of D’Oyly Carte’s cousins was in front. He said, ‘You ought to do this? Old Henry Lytton. It is time he retired. I will write to my cousin.’ So D’Oyly Carte was coming up to Manchester and he said, ‘If you like to come over and have an audition there, we will look at you.’ So that is how I came to join the company.
I knew it needed a miracle because my voice was like a cracked fog-horn after shouting ‘form fours’ in the army - so D’Oyly Carte said we should have to get that provincial army accent out of me and perhaps I would join the chorus for a bit. So, I joined the chorus of the D’Oyly Carte. That is how I came to go on the stage. I immediately fell in love with my wife who was the leading soprano, Elsie Griffin. She turned me down several times before she had no option. I bundled her into a registry office and we were married.
She was the one person that everybody seemed to speak well of in the company. You could get a little bit of backbiting very often in a theatrical company - I don’t know if it is peculiar to that but everybody spoke well of her. She had the most glorious voice and in the first London season she didn’t play in the first Gilbert and Sullivan opera. There were criticisms in the press that the company hadn’t got ‘a singer’. Then they turned Elsie on to sing as the leading soprano in The Pirates of Penzance. There were headlines in the paper and billboards the next day ‘Marvellous singing at the Prince’s Theatre’ (top of Shaftesbury Avenue).. This was the voice I fell in love with but the sweet woman too. She always had a very good word for everybody. You never heard her criticise anyone
MM: Getting back to the comedian, I remember a drought period during the war in Sydney when water was extremely scarce. You were staying out in Cheltenham with Peggy Grainger’s family and it came on raining. You put on that wretched rubber cap that you took a shower in and raced around the house in your bathers putting pots and pans under every down-pipe, every drip. You were determined to have a fresh water bath. The comedian in you really came out there. Are you always like this in ordinary life?
Ivan: I saw the funny side and it kept the troops alive in France when I was in the army. I was a dispatch rider at first but then was to join the ranks. But that spirit, I felt the laughter. In fact, in Australia, they said ‘You do us more good than a medicine, you know’. Sometimes I got the laughs in the wrong place.
The sweet music of applause, the desire for success - I always excused myself and said, ‘Well especially in Australia, if I don’t get applause they would count me out and I would have to go home.’ After I had been there for a few days they asked me what I thought of Australia. I said, ‘It is not what I think of Australia, it is what Australia is going to think of me.’
If someone else on the stage got a lot of applause - as long as I got more applause than they did - I was willing for them to have their share. I suppose I was a selfish man. My stage manager said, ‘He may be very popular with the public but he is hell for me. I think I will go to heaven because I have had my hell on earth here managing Ivan Menzies!’
Mark you, I never went on the stage - like many actors - without saying a prayer. It was rather like, ‘Now please God help me to stop forgetting my words and to sing well’ Then when I got on, didn’t forget my words and the audience was applauding me I thanked him and said, ‘I think I can handle it now - I will take the bow’.
My first part in a D’Oyly Carte was at the beginning of The Gondoliers singing ‘The merriest fellows are we, tra-la, tra-la, tra-la, and jealousy yellow, unfortunate fellow, we drown in the shimmering blue...’ It is easier to sing about than to live. I have got a little fear in my heart about meeting Gilbert in the hereafter but I shall say to him, ‘Well you said, as long as the laughs came from the script .... ‘ I can imagine him then putting his arms round my shoulders and saying, ‘Well that is all right Ivan, but make sure that the laughs are coming from my characters as well.’
MM: How did you feel when you came to give up the stage altogether? When you finally bowed out and it was your last curtain and you realised your public life was over?
Ivan: Well of course I missed it, but when the professional life ... you see I met Frank Buchman and the Oxford Group. 1951 was my last tour but I had met the Oxford Group before in 1934.
My mother gave me a faith. I thank God for my mother. So that when I met these people in the Oxford Group in 1934, and Buchman, I thought ‘That’s a man of God. That’s fine for them but how is it going to work for me as an actor?’ I thought I would try anything once but I felt I would be a liability to God and the Oxford Group and everybody else the way I was. That little - what you call the still small voice, the voice within, conscience, whatever you want - said to me, ‘Yes you will but you will be a much bigger liability if you go on living your own way like this.’ So, I thought, ‘All right, I will try this.’
But then I got a bit ‘pie in the sky’. I thought that’s the end of the theatre then, in 1934. I immediately went down into the East End of London with an Oxford Blue boxer, and I said ‘I will go down there, but don’t ask me to go into the ring with Eric Boon’ who was the leading world lightweight champion then. Young Danahar was the British lightweight champion and I met Len Harvey, who was the British heavyweight and what he said he liked about the Oxford Group and this plan of moral and spiritual re-arming was that you had to give more than you got. That rather intrigued me.
Then the next thing came out of the blue, an offer to do Widow Twankee in Aladdin - the Dame, which is the principal comedian part. I said, ‘Oh no I can’t take on that part.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘I’ve joined the Oxford Group’. ‘What does that mean?’ ‘Living by standards of absolute honesty, purity, ...’ ‘Oh well we want a clean pantomime, that’s why we want you to do it.’ I said I would go and check this with Buchman. Buchman said, ‘Fine. Those are the people the world are listening to. Go and give them what you have found. Get in there.’ So, I did and it was terrific.
At the end of that I was trying to stay in London, but the offers were - I remember one play there, there was a lot of suggestive stuff. Then I started to check any offers I got by these standards. I was living by a different standard than I had before but finding that they were not only possible (these standards) but they were satisfying. I was enjoying my life as much, in fact more, than ever. I couldn’t take those offers on but then on the top of this came the offer for another season in Australia - the principal roles from the D’Oyly Carte company. In those days they only took one or two principals out who they felt would be popular.
Yes, the show was built around me, or us. It comes back to the first point about being the centre of the stage. You might ask me what difference that made in my playing. The first thing that it meant was being very careful that I didn’t detract. There are many ways you can do something without saying anything on the stage that detracts from somebody else, for example not doing anything when anybody else was to the fore, giving to them instead of seeing how I could get the attention.
MM: I remember the Duke of Plaza Toro once. You had a glove with a finger sticking through a hole in it, getting a lot of laughs because of the glove.
Ivan: Yes, that’s it. The gloves I think were traditional business, or it might have been Lytton’s. Where I did that business was a different thing after I changed. So, it was building on that and making quite sure that any other business - because I found the audience did respond to the funny business. You had to do, in other words, what I think Shakespeare would have said, ‘To see that the business did fit the character’. You could be too funny. At the same time, they liked it. In fact, one night I got a bit hurt by some criticism in the newspapers. A man had criticised something in The Gondoliers, so I thought, ‘Well you wait till you see my Mikado, I will give you something to criticise then ...’ I did everything but fall into the drum that night. The next day there was a long and very good report of all the principals and at the end it said, ‘Oh and Ko-Ko was played by Ivan Menzies, when he wasn’t getting in the way of those who were playing the Mikado’.
The next show was The Yeoman of the Guard. There was what I felt was a Shakespearian clown, Jack Point, and I played that absolutely as a Shakespearian clown. The drama comes at the end when he dies. I gave that every bit of work. I got not only a good notice, a wonderful notice in the paper but a letter saying, ‘I forgive all you did to Ko-Ko but do be kind to him. After seeing your Jack Point, that was one of the greatest Jack Points I have ever seen.’
MM: I seem to remember that there were other tensions in your relationship with the management, for instance when you insisted on talking about your Oxford Group experiences and so on at the close of a season, or something of this kind.
Ivan: They were very afraid at first. They felt that God and religion wouldn’t mix with the theatre. In the first speech I made, I said, ‘I am not going to give you a few old gags and tell you what a wonderful audience you are and how good I am, both of which we know, but I want to tell you about the Oxford Group and what I found, that I feel this is the thing.’ Each time there was a last night I put this in, but then the management got a bit afraid. The criticisms came in when they saw I was sincere. One man said, ‘If you make any more of those speeches I will walk off the stage.’ So, I said, ‘Well, you walk off. I am staying on anyway.’ The management came to me and said, ‘Please, please don’t. You have got plenty of work to do outside and we will give you the theatre any time you want it for your Oxford Group meetings.’ I had to do what I did every morning, that was to have a few minutes of silence and find out, not what Ivan Menzies wanted, but what I felt, as near as I could, what God wanted. The guidance was quite clear - do what they asked, because I needed to build a team. There were many people wanting to know about this.
MM: What was it that made you such a sought-after man in Australia at that time? I was with you in Canberra when we went in together to see John Curtin. You took me with you when he was Prime Minister. He was getting near the end of his life and there was his day bed in the PM’s office. He was lying down there a very sick man. I just sat very quietly on one side listening to two men talking from the depths of their souls together. Those sort of things - you were asked to preach in pulpits, you were on the radio, you opened flower shows and goodness knows what you didn’t - why were you so sought-after?
Ivan: I think - I felt personally here, if I am not sounding too religious, I felt I was wafted along by the breeze of the Holy Spirit like the experience I had of God fishing in the Lake District. I thought, if I could only believe that there was a God and I was suddenly surrounded by God. The hills seemed to dance alive and I fell on my knees in the heather. That night a knock came at the door. I had an old farmhouse. This woman had first seen a notice of an island that I had bought in Australia and which I was going to take some poor boys to. She called on me and said, ‘I think you ought to know about the Oxford Group before you start forming any colony of poor boys.’ It was this woman who said, ‘We want to invite you to come to this Oxford Group meeting’ - which I did ultimately.
We sat round my fire. In the middle of our talk a knock came at the door and there was a well-known author there. He asked if there was any possibility of getting a bed. ‘I don’t think so,’ I said, ‘this is my farmhouse for the time being but come in and have a coffee.’ He listened to these people talk and he asked what it was. I said, ‘These are some of the people in the Oxford Group’, and he said, ‘Oh that is a religious thing isn’t it?’ I said it probably was. He said, ‘Oh I brought this little New Testament with me up for my walk. I am doing a walk in the Lake District for Whitsuntide and I have come to the conclusion there is nothing in it. It is not relevant today and I am going to put it on the fire.’ ‘Just a minute!’ I said, ‘I think I would like to read that myself.’ I stole his thunder. He said, ‘Oh well, you probably need it.’ I said, ‘Well I am not in the Oxford Group!’ He said, ‘Why the hell aren’t you?’
I think Curtin sensed that what I had there was a genuine experience of God and of a guiding spirit because that early-morning time was - instead of lying, perhaps sleeping off a hangover. I wasn’t a great drinker by any means, but I liked my wines, my nightcap. I would go and dance. I would feel tired at the end of the show and I would go and dance till 2 or 3 in the morning and take the most smashing blonde I could pick up there, because by now my marriage vows were beginning to go. Not beginning to go, they had gone. We were talking about divorce. We decided when I came back from that particular tour that we would be divorced. We played South Africa on the way back. I got Elsie over to do her parts there. We lived in different hotels - just think of that. This was actually before I was really changed. The judge said to me, ‘I think you had better go home and think it over’. Then came all these experiences with meeting the Oxford Group and so on. That altered the whole situation.
But Elsie meanwhile said, ‘I will believe it when I see it working’. Something I had to prove. It was actually 4 years after that experience before we got together again. But I felt that all that - I decided now I had found the real meaning of love, that it was not a selfish thing. It is interesting how Gilbert talks about love and honesty in Patience. He says ‘Love, to be pure must be absolutely honest’ - or the other way around. ‘You are absolutely honest now so I presume you are absolutely pure. So, there can be nothing unselfish in loving so absolutely perfect a being ...’ Gilbert had this idea. I was beginning to see quite new things in Gilbert and Sullivan and in the theatre.
Coming back to Curtin, I think he saw that and he had a very good secretary there called Fred Macloughlin. Curtin got a lot from him. He was a man of faith too. I was always open to the Prime Minister. In the end when he heard about this revue we built in the war when everybody was beginning to get jittery, I think that was the time - and I feel those times are approaching again. What it is I don’t know, but this nation is going to have to wake up and so is every nation.
We had a concept of conveying a vision not just personally or nationally but for the whole world. Buchman’s vision was always for the world. One of his slogans was, ‘New men, new nations, new world’. starting with the personal change, then on to your family. Very simple things that even a stupid person like me could get. As I am, so is my nation.
MM: Back to Curtin - he was a sick man. He told us on that occasion about the tensions in his own party and even calling it being stabbed in the back.
Ivan: That’s right. The tensions in his party. He said, ‘Here am I. Look at this. Look at this bundle of letters from parents and mothers whose sons had been executed by the Japanese. What am I going to give them?’ I said, ‘Well Mr. Prime Minister, I don’t know exactly what you would give them. I know what I would give them. What I do know is that if you do what I do each morning and listen to that small inner voice, whatever you like to call it...’ He had been a man of faith and of religion but he said a certain statesman who had been ambassador to Japan had destroyed that faith. I said, ‘Well you can get it back, Mr. Prime Minister. God hasn’t changed one minute bit. He is there and I am quite sure that he can give you that answer.’ and Curtin sensed that. He not only sensed it but he broadcast the message to the nation.
MM: I can remember the shock I got when I was in your dressing-room, the first time I was there when you were preparing for the role of the Duke of Plaza Toro. I saw a great wound in your thigh and you were padding it. You padded it with bandages so that, in tights on the stage in ancient costume, you had two legs the same size. You skipped around like a 3-year old on the stage. How did you get it?
Ivan: Haig was saying, ‘We shall open with this tremendous bombardment for two or three days. The German trenches will all be levelled there. All you will have to do is walk in and take over the country.’ That was not true. When we got over there the Germans were in their deep dugouts. As soon as our barrage lifted up, out came the machine guns, we advanced in a body there, they shut us down. Do you know, at 4 o’clock before we went over we were 1,000 strong and two hours later there were only 38 standing up.
I was laid down, but not dead. I had half my thigh blown away on the Somme and as I said, this Australian soldier came and tried to bandage me up but he was killed and lay dead. When I got out of that it was quite a miracle. I don’t know whether an angel or God pushed that hand, but it did make me think ‘Now why does that boy get killed?’ In his pocket were letters from his mother saying, “We are praying for you and are sure God will bring you back alive”. He didn’t go back alive. The sequel to that was I met the parents of that boy and was able to tell them that he died giving his life to me. I don’t know why, but my life was saved and, as I feel that somehow my later experiences explain it somehow. Whether it was a guardian angel or what-have-you, but in any case as I was alive, what was I doing for those men that had been killed?
MM: I have heard of a lot of things that you have done that might be called peacemaking.
Ivan: One of those things I am doing now is that I am interested in the Westminster Theatre, which was bought by men and women who returned from the forces, as a memorial to the men and women of MRA who had been killed in the war It was there to help build a better world through our plays, music, songs and musicals, to save such a damnable thing ever happening again.
MM: Do you still have that sense that you are a special person, that God has laid his hand on?
Ivan: Not a special person, but one of the persons who just said ‘yes’ to God. That is all he wants. Just the one word ‘yes’, like D’Oyly Carte only wanted my signature. In fact, I remember a lawyer coming to see me once and saying, ‘Oh my problems are intellectual.’ I replied, ‘Well I often see a moral problem masquerading as an intellectual problem.’ In the end he realised it was a moral problem in his life. So, he said ‘You pray’, I said, ‘No you pray’. ‘I’ve never prayed before’ he said. ‘Well do it, like you make a deed out.’ So, he said, ‘Dear God, whereas unto the heretofore and so on ... I hereby bequeath and give my life to you God. Is that all right?’ I said ‘That’s fine. That’s just as binding as any other agreement.’
MM: Do you remember in a certain hotel in Melbourne the manager was partially interested in what you were doing and after many talks you decided to change your approach to him.
Ivan: Yes. It was more I suppose as a joke there, but every time I came back from the theatre I would spend an hour trying to convince him of what I had found. He put over all the arguments. In the end I got a little tired and I said, ‘Now look, I am tired of this. I have given you all I can. I want you to sign this.’ I had drawn up a receipt. “This is to certify if I get to the gates of heaven and they say, ‘where is your pass?’ - and if he said ‘what pass? MRA? No one has told me about that’ then I would get blamed, I would be kicked out. So, I want it to be certified that if you get there you won’t say that Ivan Menzies didn’t tell you ....’ He said, ‘Yes, yes I’ll sign that’ So, he signed this. Some 4 nights I came back from the theatre and straight up in the lift to my suite. Then on the 5th he said, ‘Oh Mr. Menzies...’ I said ‘No’. And he said, ‘Just one second. Can I have that receipt back?’
There was truth in my humour. I was thinking of one of the prophets - you are responsible for your friend and your neighbour and if you haven’t told him then you are responsible. If you have told him then the blood is on his own head. I was thinking of that, seriously, but I had to put it in a way like that.
MM: Today - here you are in this quite small house in Barnes. I have seen you in some of the largest and best suites of the best hotels of the land and your salary in those days in my eyes was absolutely enormous. How are you coping today?
Ivan: I am still more or less living on faith and prayer. I can only tell you we had no pension because I didn’t pay in. I was well off and I didn’t pay in. Also, I was not working professionally when the NHS came in and so on, for old people’s pensions, so that’s all we get now, Elsie and I, we get this over-80 pension. We are still dependent on God providing and I can only tell you we have never missed a meal. In fact, it has been very bounteous. In other words, my faith is still strong and now is the time, of all times. We are both 83 and I can still do things like I am doing now.
I thought this morning, if this talk that you and I are doing - and I have got a book written by the first couple that came to see me in Adelaide when the curtain came down, Cliff and Edna Magor. They said, ‘we have been wanting to know about this Oxford Group and prayed about it and here you are’. They stayed in my dressing room and afterwards in my hotel and missed their last bus or tram home. That is the way that it started. One is grateful for the way that God used me and I feel that still now - though I don’t have that .. People used to come to me, that was a very great blessing. I knew the people who came were looking for something, or they just wanted an autograph. I have letters from people who came for an autograph and I said, ‘You will want more than my autograph’ and I would tell them at the stage door about my new life.
One man, Allan Griffith, is now Special Adviser to the Prime Minister of Australia. At the time he was just a young aircraftsman. He used to come to the stage door every Saturday night and he stopped smoking, not because of any particular wrong that he felt in smoking, but because he felt it was a waste of money. He gave me £1 a week towards the expenses of buying Oxford Group books, because I gave a lot of Oxford Group books away - and by now we had a team who were working. From the Magors it went to some of their friends, one of their relations. One of these men that came to see me became Chief Commissioner of Police up in Papua and later in Brisbane. He said it was an Oxford Group book that gave him the thing that he was looking for to handle the situation up in Papua.
I am quite confident that God will provide and it doesn’t just mean doing nothing, as long as I follow what I believe in - that still small voice.
MM: Elsie, as you said, is 83 and she is now very frail. I guess you are no housewife yourself really, so Mahala, your daughter, is carrying quite a burden with you these days. How come you have such a devoted daughter who is giving her life really looking after you both in your old age?
Ivan: That is quite interesting - you mention in your book about a house up in the North of England where you went and you saw people living this life out in a home. Now I was in Australia and at this time Elsie was waiting to see how these Oxford Group ideas would work out in me. So, I wrote, I said, ‘For God’s sake take my daughter. I have an invitation for her and you to go there to this house in Cheshire where the MRA people are.’ Mahala said, ‘Well I don’t want to go but somehow I feel we ought.’ She went there and she saw people who were living this out as a community.
This house had been given over by a rich woman who was living on land which actually had been purchased from my grandfather in Cheshire. She went there and she was so impressed with what she saw. ‘The women there, she said, ‘They have got something. There is a light in their eyes, a brightness in their eyes.’ I heard an Australian girl the other day saying this in our Westminster Theatre. She said, ‘What impressed me was a spiritual power there, something satisfying and by God I want it.’ Mahala had said the same thing, ‘I want that’. She got it, and she has been a joy - she has been all over the world. She has been to South Africa and to Brazil and now I believe she is doing the greatest job of all - giving her life to looking after us. It is not easy.
Humanly she would tell me ‘Go to hell’. In fact, just the other day she did say to me, ‘It is about time you looked at that standard of unselfishness. You need to.’ At first I blustered a bit like a good father then I took it in my quiet-time and she is right. She is right. So, you can’t sit back, even at 83 you know.
I wonder if you remember that time when we put that revue on at Menzies Hotel, when Curtin asked us ‘Will you bring that to Canberra?’ You were a young officer in the navy then and you had a belief that I had got something. In response to my invitation, you came all the way. I think it was three days on the train, a cattle train from Perth. You stood on that stage. I have got a picture of you talking to the then Minister of the Navy, Norman Making. He was most impressed by that. With you coming over that day.
MM: We little thought in those days that I would be Minister of the Navy myself!
With special thanks to Ginny Wigan for her transcription, and Lyria Normington for her editing and correction.
English
