Reilly 202.


Lindsay, John [Jack] (1900–1990), writer, was born on 20 October 1900 in Melbourne, Australia, the son of the artist and author Norman Lindsay (1879–1969) and his wife, Catharine, née Parkinson (1879–1949). Norman Lindsay's work spanned several fields and was filled with ‘lush imagery of ribald satyrs and fleshly nymphs … generally in a Rococo style, executed with great technical skill’ (Dictionary of Art, 19.143), although he is best remembered as the author of a children's classic The Magic Pudding (1918).

When Germany invaded Russia in 1941, Lindsay was drafted to the signals corps, but, tone-deaf, was recalled to the barracks at Trowbridge, Wiltshire, where he illegally joined the Communist Party. In that same year the schizophrenic Elza, who had been placed in medical care, died of cancer. Distraught, Lindsay nevertheless became absorbed in work, writing the epic poem Into Action: the Battle of Dieppe (1942) and the novels We Shall Return (1942), which viewed Dunkirk through the eyes of a communist would-be hero, and Beyond Terror (1943), which described British resistance to the airborne invasion of Crete. In 1943 he was reassigned to the War Office in London as a scriptwriter for the Army Bureau of Current Affairs theatre. Here he met Ann Lorraine Davies (1914–1954), who became his common-law wife. He went on to produce Second Front (1944), which propagandized for the relief of Russia, and Hullo Stranger (1945), about women in the aircraft industry. Overall, he felt that the war years marked a ‘cultural upsurge’, a thesis developed in his British Achievement in Art and Music (1945).

Was involved in the anti-war movement.

He died on 8 March 1990, partly as a result of excessive fasting.

James M. Borg