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Note: IN202
Note: MONTAGUE McGREGOR GROVER Ada Sara GOLDBERG Regina Roseville VARLEY
His christening names have been checked in the St. James Old Cathedral and have been confirmed by Jill and Hugh Smailes, however his birth certificate only shows Montague Grover. It would appear that he was registered Montague and christened Montague Macgregor Grover.
Most of the information re the ancestors of MMG has been extracted from the tree compiled by George Edward Grover of the Major Royal Engineers. Copies of Monty's Death Certificate are in the possession of MM Cannon, Jill Smailes and Peter Sayle.
(The following notes are excerps from "Hold Page One" - 'memoirs of Monty Grover editor', these were edited and introduced by Monty's grandson, Michael Cannon. Michael's mother was Dorothy Grover. I have Michael's written permission to use material from his book).
On his father's side, Monty Grover was descended from a very old-established English family which could trace marriage connections back to 1218 AD, when they owned "Boveney Court" in the Old Forest of Windsor. Late in the nineteenth century, Major George Grover compiled a detailed family tree for the previous four centuries, showing that Grovers had long been middle-ranking army officers, bankers, lawyers, surgeons, parsons and brewers. One was Vice-Provost of Eton College for many years. The tradition continued: Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Grover of Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, wounded and decorated in both the Boer War and World War 1, visited Australia to trace colonial descendants.
During the early 1880s Monty attended Melbourne Grammar School and Queen's College. After leaving school, Monty spent two years as an art student at Melbourne's National Gallery, but realised he would never be a great artist. The friendships he formed with other students, including Will Dyson and the elder Lindsay brothers, lasted all his life. In May 1891 he won the Australian Sporting Association's gold medal and 7 pounds and 10 shillings for his prize essay on "Sport".
He was articled for four years to Melbourne architect George Jobbins, completing his articles in 1893, aged twenty-three. Melbourne was then in the depths of the terrible depression and bank smash which followed the land boom of the 1880s. There was no work for architects, and Monty was dismissed with the rest of the staff. At the same time, his parents lost most of their assets. (See H.E.Grover's Notes for details)
He found temporary employment with the Board of Works, helping to survey some suburbs for the new sewerage scheme. Then he mastered Pitman's shorthand, and began writing freelance articles which were accepted by the Age. His mother, who knew David Syme, arranged an interview which won him regular assignments paid for on a lineage basis. As he grew in skill and confidence, Monty became impatient with the penny-pinching methods by which Syme survived the depression. In May 1896 he was offered a greatly increased salary to change over to the Argus Monty accepted eagerly, and for ten years remained one of the paper's chief police reporters and political roundsmen. When Young & Jackson's hotel caught fire one night, Monty was first on the scene. His exclusive story next morning revealed that the provocative nude painting "Chloe", usually hanging in the bar, had been found safe in St Paul's Cathedral across the street. Claude McKay suspected that Monty had himself carried the painting there to safety, and kept the story for the Argus.
There was another reason why Monty accepted the lucrative offer to leave the Age for the Argus. He had fallen in love with the beautiful Ada Sarah Goldberg, born in East Melbourne on 17 August 1877, daughter of Abraham Goldberg, clothier (born in Prussia 1848) and Isabella Levien (born in Corowa, NSW, 1858). Although his mother could barely accept the idea of a Jewess in the family, Monty married Ada at St Kilda in 1897. They produced several children: Violet (born 1897), Valentine (b. 1899), Harry (b. 1900), Dorothy ("Dolly", b. 1905), Moira ("Bee", b.1907), and Junee (b.1909).
At this stage of his life, Monty also wrote scores, possibly hundreds of verses, many printed in obscure outlets hard to track down. He was not ashamed to put his own name over an anti-war poem entitled "I killed a man at Graspan", published in the Coo-ee Reciter at the height of Boer War jingoism: In 1903 Monty was granted leave of absence from the Argus to travel to Europe as secretary to theatrical entrepreneur J. C. Williamson. Claude McKay pointed out that Williamson changed secretaries as often as W. M. Hughes. Monty lasted several months, describing his experiences in a series of signed articles commencing in the Argus on 16 January 1904 Then it was back to a Melbourne where he had to carry a revolver after exposing the activities of John Wren.
Early in 1907, at the age of thirty-seven, Monty received an offer to become sub-editor of Australia's oldest surviving newspaper, the Sydney Morning Herald. Thr sub-editor was second only to the editor, and was often left in sole charge of the day's issue. It was a remarkable offer for a man who scarcely knew Sydney, and Monty grabbed it. He was farewelled at a "smoke night" in the Press Bond (journalists' union) rooms of the Stock Exchange Club, and presented with a purse of sovereigns, with entertainment provided by J. C. Williamson's Pantomime Company.
It was the strangest procession which set off for Sydney. There was his father, the old trooper, now depressed by hard times but still with an eye for a pretty ankle. There was his mother and her older sister Kitty (Catherine McGuire), who in angry moments still referred to "Monty's Jew wife". There was poor Ada, with four children under nine years and a fifth baby at breast. They all settled into a new house in Bondi Road, which at that time was mostly rolling sandhills, making a pleasant walk down to a sparsely-patronised Bondi Beach.
Monty found that working for "Granny" Herald did not suit his ebullient instincts. He managed to persuade her to kick up her heels during the American fleet's visit in 1908 (and kept cuttings of his liveliest headlines -some even an unprecedented two columns wide But Monty himself was increasingly restless, especially when the Fairfax proprietary objected to the apparent sacrilege of his headline "The Sermon on the Mount" over an interview with a winning jockey. Later he described his SMH years as "intellectual catalepsy . . . enforced retirement from journalism".*
Monty went to Melbourne by ship between 28 February and 21 March 1910. His motive for doing this was that the Australian Star, published daily since 1887, and its associated Sunday Sun, published weekly since 1903, had almost succumbed to long-term financial difficulties and declining circulations. (Sir) Hugh Robert Denison (1865-1940), a wealthy tobacco manufacturer, held a lien over the Star's printing plant, and was about to foreclose. At his behest, Monty consulted in Melbourne with Theodore Fink and W. L. Baillieu, directors of the Herald & Weekly Times Ltd, asking them to share a joint endeavour to resuscitate the Star.
When this attempt failed, Denison decided to go ahead on his own resources. He, like Monty, had long been attracted by the Northcliffian revolution of the 1890s in London, when advertisements were thrown off the front page and bold displays of news and pictures substituted. This made events look hot, fresh and exciting, besides acting as a daily sales poster. Monty offered to transform the Star into such a paper, provided he controlled editorial contents and display. A letter from Denison to Grover dated 18 May 1910 confirmed the arrangement. On Sunday 29 May, says his father's diary, "MMG Sydney Morning Herald for the last time -contemptuous indifference of the Proprietors-unlike the Argus."
So on 1 July 1910 the Star disappeared, and a bold new broadsheet (bold for those times) called the Sun appeared. In his first editorial, Monty wrote that "The 'Sun' is unique in its freedom from party ties ... Its policy will be fearlessly democratic”.
Monty, having tasted the delights of Bondi's then-unpolluted surf, took full advantage of the growing interest in sea bathing to boost circulation of the Sun. Shark attacks and rescues by amateur lifesavers always made page one. Monty himself dragged a drowning woman ashore on 25 September1910. Ada Grover became a major force in forming the Bondi Ladies Surf Club, which built its own weatherboard changing shed on the foreshore. Her eldest daughter Violet was already a champion swimmer at the age of thirteen, and had to be handicapped in adult races at the new Bondi Baths. When Monty was prevented on grounds of public modesty from watching her and other young women compete, he began a campaign in the Sun which helped to abolish restrictions on mixed bathing and beach attire, incidentally assisting his news- paper's circulation no end.
Monty appointed a stammering but very hardworking young Age reporter named Keith Murdoch to the Sun.
With keen interest in Australia about news from London, circulations of both papers skyrocketed. Monty had already raised the Sun's daily audited circulation from 15000 in 1910 to 67,000 in 1913. On the outbreak of war in 1914, just on 700,000 copies were sold in four days; while the average daily circulation stabilised at about 12000. Although the papers were so successful, and a volume of Monty's one-act plays had been published, it was a desolate period for the Grover family.
Their second son Val, who suffered badly from asthma, often spent holidays on Hugh Denison's farm near Gulgong. One day when he was climbing through a wire fence, the trigger of his .22 rifle caught on a barb and he was shot dead. Then, as so often happens in journalism, Monty's marriage fell to pieces. The long-suffering Ada, tired of being left alone at Bondi to cope with her children and in-laws (for when pressure of work was really heavy Monty slept on a bed set up in his office) decided that she had had enough.
She found a man named James Mulcahy who would spend more time at home. Mulcahy was cited as co-respondent in the Divorce Court, where a patriarchal judge decided that Ada should not be granted access to her children. This cruel decision must have broken her heart: she had to hide outside their schools to catch even a glimpse of them as they grew up. Ada married Mulcahy, but they had no children: she died in Sydney in 1930 aged fifty-three, as she was on her way to board an interstate train to see her daughter Dorothy and her newly-born son Michael . (The editor of “Hold Page One”)
Monty was probably stunned by the turn of events. He sold the house at Bondi and moved to Gordon. The girls were put into Subiaco Convent, and his remaining son Harry set to work as a cadet on the Sun. Within a short time, however, Monty fell in love with a vivacious 24-Year-old secretary in J.C. William- son's office, Regina Varley, usually known as "Ina " or "Mamie". They were married at Hampton, Melbourne, on 14 September 1915, and had two children: Kevin (b. 1922 ); and Julie (b. 193 Meanwhile, Denison had become worried by Monty's sceptical attitude towards certain aspects of the war. In 1915 he promoted a new managing editor of both the "Sun" and the "Sunday Sun", with the power to over-rule any of Monty's radical ideas. Monty handed over daily editorship of the "Sun" and concentrated on the "Sunday Sun". The circulation zoomed from 127,000 in 1914 to 168,000 in 1921.
Early in 1920 Monty took his second wife, Ina, to Europe. From here he sent a series of articles to be published in the Sydney Sun between March 1920 and April 1921.
Back in Sydney Monty’s final contributions to the Sunday Sun was to develop the talents of Jimmy Banks ((1889 – 1952) and he was enticed to join the Sunday Sun in 1921. “Since we have these new colour presses” said Monty, “we might as well give the hero red hair”. So was born the famous Ginger Meggs.
Monty designed Australia’s first fully pictorial daily newspaper – but in tabloid format, not the traditional broadsheet. He figured this would be easier for commuters to handle. T hen came to him the name – the Sun News-Pictorial. This heavily illustrated paper was an instant success after its first appearance on 11 September 1922. The popular column “A Place in the Sun” provided entertaining paragraphs, and a “Fifty-Fifty” letter column gave readers their say in not more than fifty words. Saturday’s edition included the adventures of Ginger Meggs, as Jimmy Banks had followed Monty to Melbourne. Soon the Sun News-Pictorial had snatched more than 70,000 in regular circulation from the tired old broadsheets of Collins Street.
Monty tried started an evening paper, the Evening Sun, in opposition to the Herald, but after two years of heavy losses the paper was sold out to the Herald. About seventy of the staff gathered at the London Tavern on the evening of Anzac Day, 25 April 1925, to farewell the person whom J.A. Alexander called “our great captain and comrade”. The atmosphere, he wrote, was “unparalleled, indescribable”. Old John Sandes, another survivor of the 1890’s was there: his speech dwelt on the “love and admiration” which all of Monty’s staff bore for him. Tom Fitzgerald, chief sub-editor, said nobody could ever forget his great leadership. He read out a series of impromptu verses which finished: “One sun rose on Anzac morn, But two Suns set that day”. When Monty rose to his feet, deeply affected, “a mighty tumult burst forth….the most extraordinary manifestation of affection and admiration ever given their chief by any group of Australian journalists”, wrote Alexander.
Monty had lost his job as editor-in-chief of the two Suns and was appointed supervising editor of the Herald’s minor publications, but was never happy in that position.
He purchased a couple of acres of land near the Electrolux factory in South Yarra, where he designed and built several Spanish-style houses and maisonettes. The one in which he lived with his second wife and younger children became the scene of long-remembered Sunday-afternoon soirees, with Melbourne’s leading creative writers and artists gathering to discuss their work and occasionally mourn past events.
The Australian Workers Union started a journal called the World. As foundation editor they wanted the proven touch of Grover. To the 61-year-old Monty, it looked like the pinnacle of a lifetime ambition. His long-held belief in the death throes of capitalism seemed to be confirmed by the manifold tragedies of the depression era. Considering the depressed times, the World was extremely successful. From its first issue in October 1931 to early 1932 it achieved an audited circulation of 71,400. When the advisory editor insisted on interfering in daily production Monty, the news editor and chief sub-editor walked out in a body. The circulation fell rapidly and the paper was forced to close in November 1932.
When Monty’s journalist daughter Dolly, who with her husband Arthur Cannon had bought the Cobden Times in Victoria’s Western District, was having her second and third children, Monty visited the small town and wrote up the local news. “Cobden Wallops Warrnambool” was the kind of headline he liked to write over the report of a bush football match.
In common with many other progressive thinkers in the 1930’s, Monty believed that the centrally planned communist system adopted by Soviet Russia was working so well that it was only a matter of time before Australia took the peaceful socialist route to utopia. To prove it, he wrote a controversial book entitled “The time is now ripe”, published by Robertson & Mullins in 1937. The book won wide attention.
Today we know more about what happens when bureaucrats try to operate productive enterprises. But every generation has its illusions, and even a normally realistic and sceptical person like Monty Grover was not exempt from this rule.
Towards the end of his life he suffered severe strokes: when his grandchildren saw him for the last time he was paralysed down one side, and could not speak, but an impish twinkle still gleamed from his eye. He died on 7 March 1943, giving obituary writers a chance to resurrect their favourite “Monty” stories. Howard Ashton, one of his many protégés, wrote perhaps the best eulogy in “Newspaper News”: “He found the newspapers of the Commonwealth rather stodgy and complacent; he left them awakened and aggressive”. see website: http://adbonline.anu.edu.au/biogs/A090127b.htm
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