Margaret’s Impressions of Adelaide Writers’ Week 2017

When I was growing up in the fifties, the World War II books of Paul Brickhill on our bookshelves were The Dam Busters, Reach for the Sky and The Great Escape. The bare details on the books’ spines stood in contrast to the embossed books on the shelves, suggesting that the former belonged to my father who was a veteran.

At Adelaide Writers’ Week this year, I was curious to hear Paul Brickhill’s biographer, Stephen Dando-Collins, announce that Brickhill was not only Australian, but had been a prisoner of war (POW) in Germany as had my father and uncle. No wonder they made us kids sit up late for the TV re-run of Reach for the Sky. The film was based on my uncle’s friend Douglas Bader, a hero fighter pilot and real life POW.

As a prisoner of Stalag Luft 3 himself, the author Brickhill was fascinated by men who ‘struggling against impossible odds’. He determined that his first novel, The Great Escape, would be based on the events of the break-out from his own prison camp, wherein fifty escapees were shot dead. Brickhill knew that his novel needed a hero to focus the story. He chose real life escapee Roger Bushell, who became Big X for the movie. Steve McQueen played the lead role, somewhat sensationalising the actual escape, but cementing Brickhill’s career as an author.

Stephen Dando-Collins believes that Brickhill hit upon the need for heroes in a post-war Britain that was reeling from a broken economy, their cities in ruin. There was little evidence to the British in those days that they had actually won the war. Brickhill kept his Australian identity quiet so as not to jeopardise his authenticity as a storyteller. The objectivity of his ‘outsider’ status may have helped him shape Britain’s post-war self-image by creating its heroes.

The biographer says that Brickhill was drawn to other hard-drinking, chain-smoking, driven men like himself. These days he would be described as having Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). In those days he was just part of the norm. But that’s a subject for another time.

The Hero Maker: A Biography of Paul Brickhill
Stephen Dando-Collins (Vintage)