Sing for the both of us: Sir Hubert, his lover and their suicide pact

According to a new book on Sir Hubert Wilkins, the adventures of the Adelaide man known as the last explorer almost never happened after he entered a suicide pact with his young lover.

SIR Hubert Wilkins entered into a suicide pact with his lover as a teenager and almost died, according to the author of a new book on the respected South Australian explorer.

Melbourne author Jeff Maynard uncovered the dramatic plot between the star-crossed lovers while researching Wilkins’ records and interviewing people connected to the adventurer.

According to Mr Maynard, Wilkins had fallen in love with an 18-year-old singer named Tilly who was, to use the parlance of the early 1900s, “in the family way”.

Tilly’s parents, deeply religious, forbid her from marrying Wilkins and instead wanted her to marry a man in his forties.

Wilkins also hailed from a religious and conservative family who were already disapproving of his lifestyle choices – which included working at a carnival and singing publicly himself – and the pair saw death as the only way they could stay
together.

A plan was hatched to commit suicide by taking potassium cyanide, a deadly chemical used in electroplating, but before they could go through with it Tilly sent Wilkins a letter imploring him to go on with his life before she drowned herself.

The grief-stricken Wilkins swallowed the cyanide but failed to kill himself and was nursed back to health by his family.

Four months later he stowed away on a ship to Sydney, found work in the newly bustling film industry and began his now-famous life of adventure.

Lady Suzanne Wilkins (nee Bennett), wife of SA born explorer Sir Hubert Wilkins.

For Maynard, who has produced a limited run of 1000 copies of his hardcover book The Illustrated Sir Hubert Wilkins to raise funds for further research of the explorer’s records, the incident points to a man who was far more complex than many have painted him over the years.

“I’ve been researching him for over 20 years,” Maynard said.

“I’ve tried to get past the Boys’ Own adventure version of Wilkins. That’s all good but I knew there had to be more to him than that.

“And when I went looking it was one of those cases of truth being stranger than fiction. I found a very complex man, a man with a lot of self-doubt.

“There are letters from the 1930s where you find yourself thinking, ‘This man is either close to a nervous breakdown or he has serious depression’.

“What I tried to do was shine a light on some of this without dragging the guy down in any way, because he was incredibly heroic.”

Wilkins, who was born in the Mid North town of Mt Bryan, was one of history’s great aviator-navigators, the first person to take a submarine under polar ice and the first person to shoot moving pictures of a war.

He was the only Australian war photographer to be decorated in battle, a pioneer in the fields of climate science and meteorology, and a man ahead of his time on issues of conservation and Indigenous relations.

And despite being a man of science, he also had a deep interest in ESP, telepathy and other paranormal phenomenon.

Wilkins conducted a long-running experiment in an attempt to prove ESP was possible, trading diaries with friend Harold Sherman in the 1930s to see if they could read each other’s minds over thousands of kilometres.

Wilkins also had rather unorthodox views on fidelity and marriage, perhaps best demonstrated by the fact a singer he employed to work as his assistant, a man named Winston Ross, ended up living on the Wilkins’ farm in Pennsylvania and having a long-running affair with Wilkins’ wife Suzanne.

“This fellow moves to the farm in with his wife and Wilkins keeps travelling, living in hotel rooms, and yet he was always loyal to her, supportive of her,” Maynard said.

“It was probably what we’d now call an open marriage. But Hubert was off doing his ESP studies and communicating with other planets and all that stuff. It’s very complex.

“That was another confliction – this strict Protestant upbringing and his interest in all these strange things.”

It was through Winston Ross’s adopted son Mike that Maynard learned more touching details about the suicide pact.

“Tilly wrote him this note before she killed herself, and I don’t know if that note still exists,” he said.

“But the story I got through Mike was that the note existed after Wilkins died. Mike said that his father told him that within that letter were the words, ‘sing for the both of us’.

“So just before she drowns herself she writes him this letter telling him to sing for the both of them, and he’s had that letter in his pocket as he runs out into no man’s land during World War I.

“He’s had that note in his pocket as he’s flown over the Arctic. It just makes you think, ‘wow!’. It puts a different complexion on the whole man and, for me, makes him incredibly interesting.”

Melbourne author Jeff Maynard in 2014 with the boxes containing George Hubert Willkins's diaries, papers and artefacts that had been stored for years in a barn in Michigan.

Maynard said finding the letter from Tilly would be “one of – but not the – Holy Grails of Hubert Wilkins memorabilia.

“There are boxes of material in America that I know about, and that note would certainly be very special,” he said.

“But his diary from the Western Front in World War I, where he would have been commenting about (Sir John) Monash and (Charles) Bean, that would be an incredible thing to find. The diary of the official photographer of the Western Front – that would be phenomenal.”

Wilkins (right) taking photographs during World War I.

Maynard said Wilkins was receiving some long overdue recognition thanks to a recent book by best-selling author Peter FitzSimons, but his main recognition in his home state remains a mural located in the men’s toilet at Adelaide Airport.

“It took me half an hour to photograph it because I had to wait for the toilets to be empty,” he laughs.

“But I didn’t want to be pulling my camera out in the urinals. I think the only thing now that could make him a household name would be a feature film. It’d be a great movie.”

The Illustrated Sir Hubert Wilkins is available online here.