The late James McNeish's final book is a collection of "three interrupted lives''.
BREAKING RANKS
James McNeish
HarperCollins
By JIM SULLIVAN
Some died early; a few by their own hand. Earlier books told of writer and soldier John Mulgan and athlete Jack Lovelock. Sheep stealer James Mackenzie and defector Ian Milner were non-conformist for different reasons.
McNeish’s last book is a collection of "three interrupted lives" telling of a legendary jurist, a soldier haunted by the possibility of a court-martial and a psychiatrist whose humane treatment of the mentally ill was before its time.
Only psychiatrist John Saxby was personally known to McNeish and probably this friendship gave Saxby his place in the trilogy as, outside his profession, he is probably the least known.
Yet this takes nothing from the poignancy of his story. Saxby was sent down from Oxford for some undisclosed rule-breaking and became a doctor with a special interest in mental health.
He came to New Zealand in 1966 as a psychiatrist at Tokanui Psychiatric Hospital, near Te Awamutu, which housed about a thousand patients; he became superintendent in 1984 and introduced group therapy, which would revolutionise treatment. This was only 15 years after Janet Frame narrowly missed being lobotomised and mental hospitals were still working to a regime quite different from that practised by Saxby.
A staff member compared Saxby’s rehabilitation with what she had seen at Seacliff where, "they never saw a visitor. Never. Tokanui, by contrast, was another world. People were active. It was already an approach towards a more perfect community."
A new Mental Health Act in 1987 and the subsequent Mason Report produced an environment in which Saxby found it impossible to work. He resigned as superintendent but returned to the medical staff a few years later.
McNeish fleshes out this chronology with some fine writing, discussing Saxby’s poetry about death and suicide. Saxby took his own life at the hospital in 1993.
Jurist Peter Mahon is the best-known of McNeish’s triumvirate, and, while he did not take his own life, his early death can be seen as a direct result of his refusal to toe the line as drawn by the legal fraternity.
Much has been written about Erebus and the shock to the legal minds of an "orchestrated litany of lies", a phrase which blew the studied blandness of legal reports out of the water.
McNeish had read all the reports and spoken to some of the main players. He emerges as a champion for Mahon, putting forward a case for his hero which is strengthened by the unique skills of a good historian/novelist.
Mahon is vindicated but, as McNeish suggests with undisguised dismay, by straying out of line by resigning, writing his version of events in Verdict on Erebus and taking a case to the Privy Council when he was too ill to be able to travel to London, he could well have hastened his death at the age of 62.
The third of McNeish’s protagonists fits the mould from which another of his biographies emerged. Author of Man Alone John Mulgan, after a stressful war and some heroics, committed suicide just when normality should have been about to return to his life. That scenario fits the story of Reginald Miles almost as neatly as a mess jacket from a top military tailor.
A top graduate of the first course at Duntroon, Reg Miles, from rural Canterbury, was a soldier through and through and has some claim to being called the "father" of New Zealand artillery. Unscathed at Gallipoli, wounded at the Ypres Salient (recommended for a VC but given a DSO) and then 10 years a peacetime soldier before becoming a brigadier and establishing the New Zealand divisional artillery in 1940. Not a step out of line, not a button out of place.
Then came Belhamed in North Africa and Rommel’s tanks crush the New Zealand artillery positions. Miles, the army would say, should have withdrawn rather than be captured himself. But he joins his men at the guns and is wounded. He makes an epic escape from an elite POW camp (only the New Zealanders Miles and Hargest get to Switzerland), is smuggled across France to northern Spain, yet with a home run to London within grasp Miles hangs himself.
Was it the fear of a court-martial for joining the troops when he should have been making himself scarce? Hargest suggested he cracked under the strain of being utterly alone for the first time in his military career.
McNeish’s subjects all broke ranks and their failure to conform saw their lives interrupted by early death. How much being out of step contributed to those deaths we are left room to ponder about. Surely, a mark of great story-telling?
Jim Sullivan is a Patearoa writer.
Win a copy
The ODT has three copies of Breaking Ranks, by James McNeish, to give away courtesy of Harper Collins NZ. For your chance to win a copy, email playtime@odt.co.nz with your name and postal address in the body of the email, and ‘‘Breaking Ranks’’ in the subject line, by 5pm on Tuesday, March 14.
LAST WEEK’S WINNERS
Winners of last week’s giveaway, The Yield, by Sue Wootton, courtesy of Otago University Press, were: Jane Whyte, of Dunedin, Gail Trochon, of Alexandra, and Judy Davies, of Wanaka.
