SOLDIER, BOXER AND CARTOONIST
Frankie Bruno Returns
NE of the first people to greet C) Private Q. F. St. Bruno when he arrived back from. the Middle East was an old friend in the person of Private Neville Mudgway, welter-weight boxing champion, and now in a medical unit, Private St. Bruno is better known to a lot of people in and out of the ring as Frankie Bruno, who held the New Zealand bantamweight and fly-weight titles, and was one of the hardest-hitting and at the same time one of the most cheerful and happy-go-lucky fighters to step into a ring. Bruno arrived back with a crushed foot, souvenir of a German trench mortar bomb which providentially failed to explode one morning during the thick of the fighting in Libya. It was an exhilarating reunion. The two boxers assaulted each vigorously to cries of "Hello, old Slap-Happy," and "Still as flat-footed as ever," drank to each other in cups of tea and posed happily for photographs. A picture of them appears on our cover this week.
His Share of Battle
From behind a machine-gun, Bruno has seen his fair share of battle. He has been in action in every show since the early one which New Zealand diggers refer to (Continued on next page)
(Continued from previous page) irreverently as "the Dago Push." He was in tigerish fighting up beyond Thermople, escaped from Crete by the skin of his teeth, and experienced some of the hardest fighting of the Libya campaign. His own account of how he received his wound is that he was "beating a strategic retreat’ when a mortar landed crump a few yards from him, The nosecap, or some superfluous piece of metal, landed on his foot, but the bomb didn’t explode. If it had exploded, says Bruno, it would have been a different story. In his spare time, Bruno has made a name for himself as a cartoonist. His work has been printed regularly in the N.Z.E.F. Times, which christened him the "Bruce _ Bairnsfather of the N.Z.E.F.," and a collection of his cartoons will be printed shortly under the title of Fritzfriegs.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19420313.2.22
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 142, 13 March 1942, Page 10
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356SOLDIER, BOXER AND CARTOONIST New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 142, 13 March 1942, Page 10
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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