DEATHBED POEMS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 28 July 1938, Page 10

DEATHBED POEMS

CLARENCE JAMES DENNIS WRITES IN HOSPITAL.

END OF VARIED CAREER.

The creator of “The Sentimental Bloke,” “Ginger Mick” and “Ben Bowyang,” famous characters to all Australians, is dead. He was Clarence James Dennis, whose varied career had included work as journalist, carpenter, miner, railway labourer, photographer’s canvasser, insurance agent, and confidential secretary to a Federal Minister.

Mr Dennis, who was aged 61 years, had been in ill-health for several years, but he entered hospital at St Kilda, Melbourne, only recently. Although he was often in great pain, he continued to write verse. He even wrote poems while he was dying in hospital. For several years Mr Dennis had lived almost as a recluse at a country home at Toolangi. There he was visited by the Poet Laureate, Mr John Masefield, when he was in Victoriafor the centenary in 1934. Mr Dennis built his home at Toolangi with his own hands. It stood in the heart of the bush he loved so well. Since 1922 he had been engaged by the Melbourne “Herald,” and he delighted thousands of admirers with a constant stream of topical verse. There are few writers in the world who could have sustained as he did the quality of output in a daily verse commentary on men and women and their ways. Recently Mr Dennis had often written his daily verses lying propped up in bed, almost too ill to talk; and yet the genial humour was unclouded, the simple wisdom of his point of view undimmed by the almost daily task of writing and the oppression of illhealth.

The friend who described “The Sentimental Bloke” (published in 1915) as “the Bible of the trenches” revealed the essential quality of Mr Dennis’ work, which did, in an uncomplicated and simple fashion, touch the very essence of what is known as the Australian character.

Above all else, Mr Dennis was an Australian. He knew the country and loved it; he knew its people. And this love and understanding found a response in every section of the -community so that Mr Dennis, if not one of the most brilliant and gifted among the writers of this country, was understood and appreciated as perhaps only Henry Lawson was. •

In spite of his ■ ill-health, laughter seldom deserted him. His personality and interests were many-sided. It would have been ludicrous ever to have described him as “literary.” Posing of any kind infuriated him. He had the pride of the creative artist; but it was a pride in craftsmanship, not in self; . , . -

Mr Dennis had known hardship and brilliant success. “The Sentimental Bloke” made him the most affluent author in Australia. The book was adapted for the stage and . for the screen. Its popularity with the soldiers at the front was astonishing, and the fame of the author spread to England, where three editions of the book have been published. More than 200,000 copies have been printed. “Ginger Mick,”’ published in 1916, maintained the author’s popularity. Those two were his most popular works, but in “The Glugs of Gosh” he showed that he could write delicate satiric verse without the use of the slang which had been a feature of his earlier popular verse. Mr Dennis is survived by his wife, formerly Miss Olive Herron, who is an authoress. There are no children.