Author and playwright Sumner Locke Elliott was born into tragedy

As an award-winning playwright at age 14 and an actor from 15, Sumner Locke Elliott’s merciless characterisations quickly established him as an enfant terrible of Australian literature.

Playwright Sumner Locke Elliott was beset by tragedy from his birth a century ago in Kogarah on October 17, 1917.

AS an award-winning playwright at age 14 and an actor from 15, Sumner Locke Elliott’s merciless characterisations quickly established him as an enfant terrible of Australian literature.

The reputation was secured when NSW acting premier Jack Baddeley banned his wartime play Rusty Bugles in 1948, almost a decade after another play had been produced in Hollywood.

Best known for his autobiographical novel Careful, He Might Hear You, the only son of accountant Henry Logan Elliott and his Queensland-born author wife Helena Sumner, nee Locke, was beset by tragedy from his birth a century ago at a private hospital in Kogarah on October 17, 1917. His father had been dispatched with the Australian Imperial Force in February, and his mother, 36, died of complications the day after his birth.

Her obituary noted that during rehearsals for her “rustic farcical comedy, ‘Mum Dawson, Boss,’ at the Criterion Theatre, she laughingly remarked that she had but two ambitions in life — to produce a play and to produce a son”. She had also written “a rustic American novel, ‘Samaritan Mary’, which was accepted and published in the US, enjoying remarkable success”.

Author and playwright Sumner Locke Elliott, as a young boy.

Helena was one of seven daughters and a son born to Anglican minister William Locke and his wife Annie, and was a granddaughter of English social reformer William Locke. Her funeral service was held at the Hurstville home of her sister Lilian, a trade unionist, political campaigner and suffragist married to Tasmanian Labor politician George Burns. Another sister, Annie was nursing at the front, and Jessie worked for the Red Cross in London.

Elliott’s father Logan, aunt Lilian, who was childless, and family friend Ernest Ewart were nominated as his custodians. But Jessie obtained a deed of guardianship from Logan to replace him, with Blanche acting as her Sydney stand-in. Blanche, an actress and singer, proved unsatisfactory and in 1921 Jessie returned to Sydney to take custody of Elliott, who had been homeschooled by Lilian as Jessie objected to local schools.

Elliott’s life in Lilian and George’s austere but loving home, with Blanche and another Locke aunt, Agnes, a Christian Science practitioner, ended when Jessie enrolled him at an eastern suburbs private school.

He rebelled in mid-1927, when Jessie began a custody case that had him enrolled as a boarder at Cranbrook School. Elliott completed primary school there as a day boy after Jessie died in 1929. Living back with Lilian at Cremorne from 1931, he completed his Intermediate certificate at Neutral Bay High in 1933.

Playwright Sumner Locke Elliott in New York in the 1950s.

Given a toy theatre, Elliott endured his family drama by creating plays. He had written a dozen for his puppet theatre and studied acting and elocution when he won a drama writing competition at age 14. After eight months in the principal role in ABC children’s serial, Midshipman Easy,
in 1934 Independent Theatre founder Doris Fitton cast him, along with Peter Finch, in Elmer Rice’s play Counsellor at Law.

Elliott praised Fitton, who in 1937 produced his first stage play, Cow Jumped Over the Moon, later produced in Hollywood, quickly followed by Interval, his study of the “disintegrating effect of success on a theatrical company”, as the champion of his career.

Drafted into the Army in 1942, Elliott was not posted overseas but worked as a clerk in remote Northern Australia. The “boring, demoralising life of an Australian army camp sweating in the backblocks of the Northern Territory” was recorded in Rusty Bugles, staged by Fitton in 1948, after Elliott had already flown out of Sydney to settle in New York.

Actors Wendy Hughes, Nicholas Gledhill and Robyn Nevin in the 1983 film Careful, He Might Hear You.

Critics praised the “consummate skill of the dialogue, although heavily loaded with cuss-words that will bring the pink to modest ears, and the affectionate observation of a batch of doggedly Australian Australians”. Elliott’s accurate recount of doggedly Australian cussing had the play censored after a few nights.

His first novel, Careful, He Might Hear You, published in 1963 won immediate acclaim, with suggestions Elizabeth Taylor could be cast as one of the sisters in a film version. The NSW Film Corporation helped finance a production in 1983, with Wendy Hughes and Robyn Nevin playing sisters locked in a custody battle over their nephew, PS, played by Nicholas Gledhill, to gross $2,431,126 at the Australian box office.

With a legacy of 30 plays and 13 novels, Elliott died in 1991 in New York, where he lived with American author Whitfield Cook. His final novel, Fairyland (1990) was the story of aspiring writer Seaton Daly, coming to terms with his homosexuality in the repressive atmosphere of inner-city Sydney during the 1930s and ’40s.

Originally published as Author and playwright Sumner Locke Elliott was born into tragedy