From ‘Big Shot’ to ‘Swindler’, racier newspapers gloated when Harry Hodgetts was convicted of fraud and false pretences in September 1945. But how did things go so wrong for Hodgetts?
In Harry Hodgetts: The flawed broker behind Don Bradman’s move to Adelaide, John Davis writes the complex story of this hard-working, gifted social climber, his fall into bankruptcy and a prison cell, and the scandal that haunted Bradman’s reputation.
In this special guest post, Dr David Faber of Flinders University provides his reflections on this riveting biography.
ADELAIDE CONFIDENTIAL:
Another Secret Broached?
Some years ago, a local journalistic identity and Murdoch press editor, offered me $5000 to research the grey zone surrounding Sir Donald Bradman’s emergence as a fully-fledged broker. I declined, saying ‘I have to live in this town’. Discretion, I thought, was the better part of valour, at least for one who had no ambition to be found floating in the Torrens. The sum, too, seemed underwhelming as the price of my literary skin.
Thus, I am particularly delighted to review John Davis’ seminal book on a saga of our fair provincial capital city of churches and hostelries. The adventures and misadventures of Harry Hodgetts, stockbroker, social climber and networker, make ravenous reading. Hodgetts’ profitable and philanthropic enterprises were intertwined with Adelaide educational and recreational institutions. It was Hodgetts who induced the athletic artiste Bradman to desert the big smoke and play in his heyday for South Australia in the Sheffield Shield competition, the administrative cricketing coup of the day.
John Davis has handsomely revealed one of the historical secrets of the city, not without shedding light on other aspects of the Adelaide story. This fulfills neatly a niche in our local history, that will hopefully be duly recognised by the State. It is a valid contribution to this bourgeoning literature, which Wakefield Press increasingly honours with its beautiful books. Davis has been a distinguished historiographer, historian of Pembroke and pedagogue there.
Hodgetts rose and was ruined in the shadow of the Adelaide Stock Exchange, whose handsome red brick edifice still stands as a museum in the heart of the CBD. This bourse saw some instances of insider trading, one famous episode involving the paramour of the delightfully caustic socialite and beauty, Thistle Anderson, author of the success de scandal, Arcadian Adelaide. Hodgetts’ faults were not unprecedented, nor was he the last to lose his way in the entangled undergrowth of business ethics, still today a work in progress. Thus, in September 1945 in the Criminal Court of South Australia, Hodgetts pleaded guilty to the white-collar offences of false pretences and fraudulent conversion, involving about £13,500. Justice Frederick Richards remarked that the offending ‘was a severe blow to public confidence generally in men of business’. Sentenced to several years gaol, the disgraced stockbroker stood exiled from his own ‘aspirational’ class, dying only a few years later.
Davis has charted the legitimate highways and dubious byways of Hodgetts’ biography for us. The course of his life and career attracted praise, but censure and little compassion in his fall. As my shopkeeping Socialist father said to me back in the day, ‘I hate to see anyone go through the hoop.’ Davis’ achievement is to conduct us like Virgil and Dante through the paradise, purgatory and hell of Hodgetts’ rise and fall in an appropriately uncensorious way, without failing the criteria of sober and measured historical objectivity. In so doing he has graced the annals of Adelaide’s bourgeois ‘gentry’. An historian’s function, after all, is to understand rather than praise or blame. Davis has discharged his evident vocation for scientific humanism well, and penned a good read into the bargain.
This book should grace the shelves of the Institute Building and the public and academic libraries of this State, not to mention the National Library, for the benefit of citizens of the Commonwealth and elsewhere striving to understand South Australians and the nation. Many will wish to read a copy and borrow or buy this volume.
It details a very significant story in the history of the Adelaide Establishment, founded by the pioneering free settlers, who took ship in hopes of freedom and riches. Hodgetts is, in his positive and negative attributes, part of our warts and all heritage, for better and for worse. Davis has enabled us to enter into our true group identity, for it is the true function of real and honest history to know ourselves as social individuals in community over time.
Harry Hodgetts: The flawed broker behind Don Bradman’s move to Adelaide by John Davis is now available from Wakefield Press.