In these formative years, too, Whitehouse struck up an unusual friendship with the university’s great patron, James Mayne. Dr James Mayne was the son of butcher and businessman Patrick Mayne, who started in the new Brisbane colony in humble circumstances and soon after began a successful business that would be a catalyst to great wealth. On his deathbed in 1865, Patrick Mayne supposedly confessed to the murder of a man in 1848, and the theft of money that provided him with his empire’s initial capital.
James was born in 1861, and would qualify as a doctor before heading to London for six years of postgraduate work at the University College Hospital. A promising surgeon, he returned to Queensland in 1891 and accepted the humble position of resident medical officer at the Brisbane General Hospital. A dapper dresser, he wore a bowler hat and on occasion a diamond stick pin in his lapel.
In 1926 Mayne, along with his sister Mary, bequeathed 270 acres of land at St Lucia to the University of Queensland, and as its famous sandstone buildings began to rise in the late 1930s, Mayne died. In his final years, he had no closer male companion than young Freddy Whitehouse, academic and rower.
As Rosamond Siemon wrote in her classic book on the Mayne family, The Mayne Inheritance:
Just before the [first world] war a group of young men had reformed the Toowong Rowing Club, which had lapsed after losing its shed and equipment in the 1893 flood. In 1918 James became its President, an office he held for several years. At the age of fifty-nine it was through rowing that he met twenty-year-old university student, Frederick Whitehouse.
A close relationship developed between them which lasted until James died; for Fred, loyalty to James stretched beyond the grave. With his young friend, James rediscovered something of his youth.
Siemon described Whitehouse as a ‘short, stocky, personable but rather ordinary-looking student’ who possessed many admirable qualities. ‘An active oarsman, he was as enthusiastic a sport as he was a science student, and took a lead in student and community affairs. He is remembered as a self-contained, tough little man,’ she wrote. ‘His flair for debating and journalism was a spark to quicken James’ own sharp intelligence.’
Notwithstanding the 39-year age difference between the two friends, Siemon concluded that Whitehouse ‘would have brought a ray of sunshine to the colourless existence’ of Mayne’s life at the family mansion, Moorlands, in Toowong. When Whitehouse returned from Cambridge, he and his friend ‘resumed long riverside walks’.
Siemon published The Mayne Inheritance in 1997 and it was an instant success. It wasn’t until two years later that she also published a brief ‘postscript’ to the book, bringing to light information that had been triggered by readers of her history. In the postscript she wrote that ‘Isaac [one of the Mayne brothers] and James were homosexuals’.
Intrigued by Whitehouse’s passion for rowing, I rang the Toowong Rowing Club in Brisbane, their clubhouse a short distance from the former site of Whitehouse’s home in Austral Street, and they invited me over to inspect their old records. I was warmly greeted at the clubhouse – in a beautiful position on the river – and walked through the front door and down a corridor, the walls lined with important photographs and trophies.
There was one black and white photograph titled ‘WINNING CREW, Champion Eights of Brisbane River, 1940–41 season’.
The second rower from the bow was a small man with tight curly hair. His name was listed as L. Howard-Osborne. This was Leonard Howard-Osborne, Clarence’s brother. The coach for that year was Doc Whitehouse.
Waiting for me inside the club was a large, ancient ledger of minutes for the Toowong Rowing Club committee, and in it was a trove of fascinating information about young Freddy Whitehouse. There was, for example, minutes of a special committee meeting of the Toowong Rowing Club, held at the Regatta Hotel, Toowong, on Wednesday 21 October 1931. The meeting was called to consider ‘the resignation of Dr F.W. Whitehouse (Hon. Secretary)’.
The minutes stated: ‘Dr Whitehouse, in tendering his resignation, gave as his reasons an unfortunate set of circumstances arising from the selection and training of the Junior Eight, that made it impossible, as matters stood, for him to continue in office.’ No finality was reached in the discussion that followed, and the meeting was postponed to the following night.
In the minutes of the next meeting a ‘Mr Dowd moved that
Dr Whitehouse be asked to reconsider his decision.’ The resignation was withdrawn. There was no hint at what the ‘unfortunate set of circumstances arising from the selection and training of the Junior Eight’ might have been.
Several years later, having left the club and then returned, the minutes recorded the success of the Toowong Rowing Club annual picnic, held on Sunday 12 November 1939. Freddy Whitehouse seemed to have put on show the skills he had picked up from his famous caterer father.
Dr Whitehouse was in charge and ran a very good programme which everyone enjoyed thoroughly … most of the morning was spent in swimming, after which all enjoyed an excellent cold lunch, which was prepared by Dr Whitehouse and supplied by the club. (Sack races. Wheel barrow race. Another swim. Collecting firewood for the camp fire.) … The night programme was held round a camp fire, individual songs were rendered, a new type of community singing with action was conducted by Dr Whitehouse, then we had mouth organ solos and Banjo solos all making the evening a big success.
By 1940, Whitehouse was a successful university rowing coach, and Leonard Howard-Osborne one of his most consistent rowers. By the end of that year another rower emerged under the wing of Whitehouse. It was Clarence Howard-Osborne, a man who, nearly 40 years later, would kill himself and be exposed as one of the world’s worst serial paedophiles.
Nigel Powell picks me up outside the News Queensland building at 8.30 a.m. in his silver Holden Barina and we head into police headquarters. This is the event Lewis has briefed me for. I know Lewis has five associates who are attending – as per his typed list to me – but anybody could turn up. It’s also a public meeting.
We park at the back of headquarters, on the site of the old Egg Board building and former headquarters from which Frank Bischof ruled, and make our way around to the front entrance. We’re met by Cheryl Petroeschevsky, Manager, Library Services, who has organised the event. She signs us in and tells me that this is the first book event of its kind at police headquarters. She takes us to a large conference room on the ground floor.
There I meet Assistant Commissioner Paul Wilson, Education and Training Command. He has an over-compensating handshake. I tell him I know his name from an investigation I did many years ago into the disappearance of Ayr policeman, Mick Isles.
‘A terrible tragedy,’ he says, ‘a sad situation.’ I ask him if he was in command of the Gold Coast recently. He says, ‘Yes. Now I’m in Education and Training, with just a few years left to go.’
I see some elderly men wander into the room and congregate in the front row. One of them makes a beeline for me and proceeds to tell me the errors of fact and spelling in Three Crooked Kings. I can only assume these are Lewis’s retired colleagues.
Cheryl makes a brief welcome and then Wilson delivers an introduction. He offers the apologies of Police Commissioner Stewart who is busy ‘on many fronts’ and then tells some war stories from his days as a detective in Brisbane in the 1970s and 80s. He then proceeds with some comments about the book, its intentions, and me as the author, most if not all of it taken from the internet.
Wilson finishes by saying the lives of many good police officers and their families were deeply affected by that thing they called the Fitzgerald Inquiry and its revelations. For years, Queensland police were demonised as being corrupt.
I finally go to the lectern and tell the audience I will do something unprecedented because it has been requested of me by Terence Lewis. I read the note he has typed for me, regarding his total innocence, and disparaging the Licensing Branch. I then read out the names
of the men Lewis says will be in attendance, and ask them to identify themselves. Four out of five are there. I welcome them.
I then talk about how the book came about, the major themes. I also tell Wilson and the audience that the lives of many good police officers and their families were ruined for decades leading up to the Fitzgerald Inquiry, courtesy of corrupt police, and that that should not be forgotten either.
Then it’s question time.
The Lewis supporters start bombarding me with questions and soon dominate proceedings. ‘Who are the Three Crooked Kings?’ ‘What proof do you have of these kings?’ ‘Where is the evidence?’ It is loud and aggressive. Some of the elderly men are red-faced with anger. Have they been asked by their old Commissioner to come and do a good old-fashioned job on me?
Former Police Union chief John ‘Bluey’ O’Gorman then cuts through the tension with his customary humour. He praises the book as the fairest depiction of the era thus fair. He offers his admiration of Terry Lewis as Commissioner.
An elderly man stands up. ‘I just want to say that Terry Lewis was the best Commissioner we ever had.’ I have heard this exact phrase repeated time and time again.
I thank some of the retired officers for their questions. ‘It might not have been what you wanted to hear,’ one says. I reply that it might not, but it was what I was expecting. A book like this encourages debate. Another shakes my hand and says he is looking forward to the next book.
Three young police officers – one man and two women – come up to me as morning tea is served to tell me they thought the performance of the retired police this morning was ‘disgraceful’. They feel embarrassed to be Queensland police officers in the presence of the Old Guard.
I feel exhausted leaving headquarters around midday. Two hours later I ring Lewis, as promised, to tell him how things went.
He seems to know everything about it already.
‘So, Paul Wilson was there,’ he says. ‘He was a terrific young policeman …’
For a moment he is happily trilling like a bird. Clearly, reports have gotten back to him that his boys roughed me up a little and that nothing too disparaging was said about him. Indeed, he was praised in some quarters and that message got through to the audience.
I ask Lewis if he deliberately sabotaged the event.
He says a bit of roughing up will do me some good.
Who Hath Smelt Wood Smoke at Twilight?
By 1941 Freddy ‘Doc’ Whitehouse must have felt that with his skills as a geologist, as a leader of men in the world of rowing, and as a high-ranked official in the Boy Scouts, that his talents might be utilised for the benefit of the war effort. He enlisted on 7 July, Army number QX22008, and was attached to HQ First Australian Army. (His young protégé, Clarence Howard-Osborne, had already joined up on 15 March.)
Whitehouse went in as a private but moved quickly up the ranks. In less than a year he rose to Lieutenant, and as a geologist was utilised by the Royal Australian Engineers. In January 1942 he applied his geological knowledge to road-building projects in Queensland and New Guinea. He travelled widely through the south-west Pacific, taking extensive field notes and preparing lengthy reports in relation to amphibious assaults across coral reefs and the anchorage suitability of various ports and harbours. He was demobilised in 1945 and attached to the Department of the Coordinator-General of Public Works, resuming his full-time lecturing and settling back into the house on the river in Austral Street.
On occasion, he got a call from his old friend, Harry Roberts, who was then headmaster up on the range at Toowoomba Grammar (Roberts had also taught at Fred Whitehouse’s alma mater, Ipswich Grammar) to come and give some lectures to the boys. Roberts called these visiting speaker sojourns ‘little vacations’. Often the speaker would arrive on the weekend, then lecture for a couple of days early in the week, all expenses paid. Roberts had Whitehouse vacationing on the range a number of times.
One former student I happened to meet remembered well the Whitehouse lectures, between 1944 and 1947. ‘Freddy Whitehouse was promoted as the man who knew more about Queensland than anybody else because of his knowledge of geology,’ the student told me. ‘He was a bloody good lecturer, and it got us out of our regular maths or English lessons.’
With regards to his work as a geologist and palaeontologist, he was considered in those quarters as something close to a genius. In the book Fabulous Fossils: 300 Years of Worldwide Research on Trilobites, published in 2007 by the New York State Museum, Whitehouse’s early work is amply recognised:
His Cretaceous work drew him further west in Queensland until he reached the eastern edges of the Georgina Basin. It was in these flat-lying Cambrian sequences that he would become world renowned.
Whitehouse’s (1936–1945) five-part work on the Cambrian faunas of north-eastern Australia was the first attempt in Australia to use trilobites to establish a modern biostratigraphy. It was a remarkable achievement and should be considered the high point of pioneering trilobite work in this country … He did all his own photography with very inadequate equipment, and no research grants existed at that time. Whitehouse used his own vehicle, and on several occasions was forced to abandon it in the vast black soil plains between the Georgina Basin and coastal Queensland. He is known on more than one occasion to have walked to the nearest cattle or sheep station and offered to give his vehicle to the farmer if he would pull it from the bog and send all the specimens to the university.
In 1947, Whitehouse’s old friend, Harry Roberts, began the new school year as headmaster of Brisbane’s Church of England Grammar School, known as ‘Churchie’. He soon brought on board Whitehouse as school rowing coach. In the June edition of Churchie’s college magazine – The Viking – it stated in the Rowing Notes section that the rowing season had begun on 2 February. Training for the traditional Head of the River inter-college race commenced in earnest on 9 March. ‘We are very grateful to Dr Whitehouse, who gave up a great deal of his time in the afternoons in order to coach the first crew, which, by the time of the Head of the River, had managed to carry out most of his instructions.’ Whitehouse was pictured in the magazine as coach.
In the edition of June 1949, Whitehouse is again pictured as coach of the First IV, and was mentioned in dispatches. The Viking reported: ‘Dr Whitehouse again came forward to give invaluable coaching services to the Firsts and Seconds. His enthusiastic and unselfish work is something for which all rowers are more grateful than can be adequately expressed here.’
Whitehouse was an inveterate committee man, and managed to juggle myriad commitments in his peripatetic life. He was at one time governor of Cromwell College at University of Queensland, he was active in the university’s dramatic society, he was once editor of Galmahra magazine, the university’s journal (Roberts at one point had been on the magazine staff, as had Inky Stephensen), was president of the Queensland Naturalists’ Club and Nature-Lovers’ League (1929) and the Royal Society of Queensland (1940–41). He came to the Boy Scouts Association late in life, going from rover leader in 1932 to deputy chief commissioner in 1954–55.
I would find a tattered copy of Whitehouse’s official Note Book for Recognised Scouters Training Camps. On its stained cover it quoted the Kipling poem ‘The Feet of the Young Men’.
Who hath smelt wood smoke at twilight? Who hath heard the birch-log burning?
Who is quick to read the noises of the night?
Let him follow with the others, for young men’s feet are turning
To the camps of proved desire and known delight!
Whitehouse’s first notebook entry read:
Six months ago I did not even know that such a movement as rovering existed. Furthermore, I’d never been a scout. Then, in a sudden emergency and with only a week to spare, I needed
30 men to take part in a large pageant … I was recommended to apply to the Boy Scouts Association. By doing so I met Rover
s from the several Brisbane crews. They helped me in such an efficient way that my curiosity was aroused.
Elsewhere, Whitehouse was having other successes. In early 1950 his University of Queensland rowing squad won the state championships. By January 1951 he had climbed the ladder of the scouting movement and was in charge of 775 scouts from across the country on a New Year camp on Fraser Island. When news of a poliomyelitis outbreak reached the mainland, it was decided the scouts, effectively quarantined on the island, would have to stay for an extra week. While many of the boys suffered under difficult conditions, despite help from the state government during the crisis, Whitehouse later hailed the camp as an unforgettable test of manhood for the scouts. He even wrote a story about it, published in the Maryborough Chronicle on 15 January 1951.
The article stated:
Fraser Island is quiet again. The 800 scouts have gone. In the all-too-brief fortnight of their stay they have had such experiences, from which tales and legends will spread all over the Commonwealth, that the Fraser Island Adventure, as we had named it, will be one of the guiding lights for scouting in the future.
By 1953, Whitehouse gave a series of talks to schools throughout Queensland, then returned to Austral Street and his academic career. One university student at the time, who was making some money working as a postman for the St Lucia area, remembers wandering down Austral Street on his mail run and seeing Whitehouse sitting on his verandah.
‘He’d come down to the fence and want to talk,’ he said. ‘I knew Whitehouse used to hang around the university rowing sheds all the time. Some of the students would shout out, “Careful, he’s a homosexual.” Stuff like that.’
Then, on a Friday evening in April 1955, there was a knock on the door at Whitehouse’s house. It was a night that changed his life.
A Remarkable Confession
On the often unpleasant trail of historic paedophiles, it took years of talking to friends, colleagues, neighbours, family members and police to begin to get a three-dimensional picture of them, these men who were, by nature, masters of charm and subterfuge, and of incalculable cunning.
Little Fish Are Sweet Page 17
