The Peach

Last night I had a curious dream about Uncle John, which took in the ghost of a recollection he once shared with me in Adelaide. Uncle John was an inveterate window-shopper. Some time in the mid-1970s, at the height of the oil crisis and in the pit of England’s cold-war malaise, he was immensely tickled by a summer display mounted behind one of the windows of Fortnum and Mason, presumably on the Piccadilly side. The window was exquisitely framed with brocade draperies held in place by silk rope, and bordered with a fringe of tassles. The commodious compartment within was lined, carpeted, and enclosed with panels of biscuit-colored suède. In the center, from an elaborate base rose a marbled half-column supporting, at eye level, a large, plump cushion of red velvet, on which someone had placed… a peach. To some extent this crazy contrivance says all that need be said about Fortnum’s, but, as I now remember remarking to Uncle John at the time, wasn’t there also a glimmer of wit and interpretative sunshine in evidence on that far-off, inevitably dull summer’s day in Piccadilly, at least in the mind of at least one, probably more of Fortnum’s apparently wistful London window-dressers? For, among all the fruits of the world, is there anything lovelier or more seductive than a perfectly ripe peach? Some may argue for the simplicity of the orange, the intensity of the cherry, or the fragrance of the strawberry, but for the sheer magnitude of sensual experience, heightened by the long period between seasons, what competes with the peach? Really? Leaving aside the invidious choices to be made between hesperidia, cucurbitaceae, and drupes—I am a drupe man—and, thence, between apricots, nectarines, mangoes, plums, and peaches, I find there is simply no adequate counter-argument. To me the peach is the queen, the Koh-i-noor, the Cotopaxi, the Angkor Wat, the Bach unaccompanied cello suites of fruit. In the dream, my brother Nick gave me a peach, and, led by Uncle John, the assembled staff of the Alice Springs Regional Base Hospital broke into loud and hearty applause.

Jim Lawson

Wing Commander James Franklin Lawson, O.B.E. (1913–2003) was born at Warracknabeal in Victoria on February 8, 1913.

His father was commissioned in the Army in 1912, and fought in World War I in the 4th Light Horse Regiment of the A.I.F. Major Lawson led the famous cavalry charge at Beersheba in October 1918, was mentioned in despatches and awarded the D.S.O., although he was in fact recommended for the Victoria Cross.

Jim went to Ballarat Grammar School, where he did very well and was primed to metriculate and study law at university. However, the onset of the Great Depression made it necessary for him to abandon that plan and leave school early.

Instead, with characteristic determination he studied accountancy by correspondence and, not surprisingly, came top of the state. Jim then worked as an accountant for various local councils in country Victoria, and for the City of Hawthorn in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne.

In 1935, the Royal Australian Air Force advertised for officer recruits. Jim was one of only five successful applicants, something that must have made his mother and father very proud. He rose rapidly in the R.A.A.F., in due course attaining the rank of Group Captain.

During World War II, Jim was involved in the Empire Air Training Scheme, which made such a crucial contribution to allied victory, and in 1943 served on the staff of the R.A.A.F. Allied Air Liaison Office in Ottawa, where he played tennis with Princess Juliana of the Netherlands, among other distinguished V.I.P.s temporarily sheltering at Rideau Hall.

The journey by ship to Canada was dangerous, and the risk of encountering enemy ships and submarines in the Pacific Ocean was high. In June 1944, with the rank of Wing Commander (N.W. area H.Q.), he was made an officer in the military division of the Order of the British Empire.

In November 1958, Jim left the Department of Air and the R.A.A.F., and joined Hawker Siddeley, the large British firm of aeronautical engineersand defence contractors. He worked for Hawker in Australia, and in England.

Earlier in the same year, Jim met John Borthwick in Melbourne. In about 1963, Jim and John travelled extensively in England, Ireland, France, and Greece.

Settling in England in the 1960s and 1970s, towards the end of which time John was working for the Wend End antique dealer Roy Barling, Jim and John lived variously in a sixteenth-century thatched cottage at Welford-on-Avon, at a partly restored fortified castle in Hunsdon, a flat in Porchester Place, Mayfair, a cottage near Cirencester in the Cotswolds, and, later on, above another antique business (called Grace and Favour) which John ran for Lady Joseph in Bute Street, South Kensington. At times, Jim assisted Barling with his considerable accounting skills.

In the 1980s, when semi-retired, they spent the northern winter months in Cannes, in the south of France, where after several years Jim’s appalling French showed no signs of improvement.

They returned to Australia in 1969, purchased and ran a motel and restaurant in Coffs harbor, aiming to bring French Provencal cookery to the northern coast of New South Wales.

When in England or France, Jim and John entertained many visiting Australians with supreme generosity, including many members of both their families. We remember those visits, which were frequently hilarious, with immense gratitude.

John’s nephew, my brother Simon, recalls Jim enthusiastically suggesting to him and Mary Ann, on the occasion of their first visit to London in 1984, that they attend a soccer friendly between Tottenham Hotspur and Liverpool at White Hart Lane. John was somewhat less enthusiastic.

In any event, during the game a riot took place, and Simon and Mary Ann barely escaped with their lives. Jim was unapologetic, observing cheerfully that this would for them be an unforgettable experience of daily life in the capital.

Jim was naturally gregarious and, at other times, to the mortification of young or merely shy companions, he did not hesitate to strike up conversations with complete strangers at the next table, wave his handkerchief to people in the theater, stop London traffic by holding out his walking stick, and sing songs.

Jim and John finally returned to Australia in 1988, and lived for some years in Sydney and Melbourne.

In 1996, Jim entered the War Veterans’ Home at Myrtle Bank (in Adelaide) as a patient and, though frail, remained mentally alert. No-one who knew them in happier times can easily forget the great care and devotion with which John looked after Jim in those last years, and with which Jim’s niece, Ann Pietsch, looked after both of them in Adelaide.

Jim Lawson died peacefully on Saturday morning, March 29, 2003. John died in Melbourne three years later.

William and Helen Borthwick at Raeshaw

William and Helen Borthwick, my grandparents, at Raeshaw, Fulham, near Sale, East Gippsland, c. 1924.

William Arthur Borthwick (1894–1953) was the fourth son and sixth child of William Borthwick and Ada Maud Mary, the eldest of the eight daughters of Edward Connor Bell and Katherine Anne Wallen.

William senior, my great-grandfather, migrated from Scotland in 1869, aged 19, after his father, Alexander Hay Borthwick, refused to buy him a commission in the Indian Army, in which two of his uncles had served with some distinction.

He may have been prompted to go to Australia by the fact that his father’s brother, Uncle John James Malcolm Borthwick, preceded him, and created in about 1850 the Tarong station atop the Blackbutt Range in the South Burnett region of southern Queensland, approximately sixty miles due west of Caloundra, and was one of the first men to ship wool from Brisbane.

On reaching Melbourne he joined the National Bank of Australasia Limited, and became the youngest man ever appointed manager of a branch, in this case at Maffra. Thence he was eventually transferred to Sale, where the family settled permanently.

My grandfather’s eldest brother, the namesake of their grandfather, Alexander Hay Borthwick, or Uncle Lex, as he was known, served in the A. I.F., lost an arm in Palestine, married Eva Sage of Mildura (a nurse whom he met whilst recuperating), and settled on the land not far from Cowarr in East Gippsland.

The second brother, 1st Lieutenant Keith Borthwick of the 8th (Victorian) Regiment of the 3rd Light Horse Brigade, fell on August 7, 1915, in the first wave in the famous Battle of the Nek at Gallipoli, one of the most famous but costly moments in Australian history. Because he was an officer, the name of Lt. Keith Borthwick, and his occupation (grazier), appear in one of the most haunting footnotes of Bean’s official history. The hundreds of ordinary diggers who died were, of course, not listed.

The third brother, John Malcolm, had much earlier chosen to pursue a career as a professional officer in the British Army, but evidently committed suicide at Aden in 1908, aged 20.

He had two younger sisters, Aunt Jean and Aunt Kath (Kathleen), a talented viola player in what Uncle John used to describe mischievously as “Ziggy Zelman’s Follies,” but which was, in fact, the budding Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, whose first concert took place on December 11, 1906, under the baton of Maestro Alberto Zelman.

Neither Aunt Kath nor Aunt Jean (q.v.) ever married. As a dedicated volunteer, Aunt Jean transcribed by hand entire books in Braille. She and Aunt Kath lived together, first with their mother, known affectionately as “Da,” in Adelaide Street, Armadale, and then in a modest ground floor flat in Myamyn Street, a few doors down from Granny.

My grandfather, William, came after Aunt Kath, and, finally, the baby brother, Ronald Murray Borthwick, who also served in the A. I.F., and eventually married Aunt Meryl, the daughter of Dr. Hagenauer of Sale.

On November 10, 1953, at the Veterinary School grounds at Parkville, Uncle Ron demonstrated a revolutionary stock cradle, which was thought to have considerable influence in the treatment and control of foot rot.

According to an engaging memoir she wrote in the early 1970s, Granny knew the Borthwick family when they were all growing up together in and around Sale. She recalled Aunt Kath coming as Red Riding Hood to a big fancy-dress dance in the drawing room at Kilmany, and, later, in 1912, Granny’s coming out year, going to dances in Melbourne and golfing tournaments in Traralgon with Lex and Keith Borthwick.

The war was as costly for the Borthwick family as it was for scores of others. My grandfather volunteered for active duty, but was prevented from serving due to a heart condition brought on by having contracted rheumatic fever as a child.

In the end he lost two brothers, who, if they had survived might conceivably have been more suitable husbands for my grandmother, such is the vague sense one gets from a close reading of the relevant portion of Granny’s memoir, which was written long after William died of a heart attack at Berwick in 1953.

Granny

Helen Pearson, my grandmother, in London, c. 1913.

Helen (Granny) was the daughter of the Hon. William Pearson, M.L.C. (1864–1919), and his wife Sophie Emily (née Gooch).

Granny was born on November 27, 1893, at Bonegilla Park, Wodonga, and grew up with her brother Roy, her sister Emily (Aunt Mim), and their younger cousin Mollie (Mungie) at Kilmany Park, near Sale in East Gippsland.

She was the head girl at The Hermitage in Geelong in about 1911–12.

Bafflingly, the family spent the years of the First World War living in Europe. At first they were stranded. When war broke out the family was touring Wales in a motor, and had great difficulty finding anyone who could speak English. Uncle Roy immediately joined the British Army, and served in the 13th Hussars in France and Mesopotamia. Although the Pearsons sailed back to Australia at the end of 1914, after a few months they turned around and came straight back again, presumably at some risk of enemy attack, to be nearer Roy, and possibly to resume a style of life in England that clearly suited their daughters. They settled in a large house called The Orchard on Chorleywood Common near Rickmansworth, on the northeast edge of London.

At the Hermitage, Granny recalled seeing her first aeroplane, a black speck that appeared over the You Yangs, but in early 1914, on a visit to Menton in the south of France, she actually flew in one.

William Pearson died prematurely in 1919, and Kilmany Park was sold not long afterwards. The station was subdivided, and the house was turned into a glum Presbyterian Boys’ Home.

In 1918, Aunt Mim, who was by then the widow of a British army officer, Pat Jackson, contracted Spanish influenza. Granny caught it too. They were both lucky to survive, as were their parents. The family returned to Australia at the end of 1918.

Soon after the end of the war, Helen married my grandfather, William Arthur Borthwick, a grazier, at Sale on October 27, 1920. Before the war she had known his older brothers, Lex and Keith, who was killed in the first wave at the Battle of the Nek at Gallipoli.

The Borthwicks were neighbors. Their property, which was creatively named Bald Hills, shared a boundary with part of Kilmany, and the Pearson and Borthwick children grew up together. Reading between the very discreet lines of Granny’s handwritten memoir – the name of Keith Borthwick crops up from time to time in connection with dances in Sale and Melbourne, golfing tournaments at Kilmany and Traralgon – one wonders whether there was more than a hint of affection between Granny and him. Keith Borthwick survives in one of the most haunting footnotes to Bean’s official history, but fell in perhaps the most disgracefully futile action at Gallipoli.

Helen and William Borthwick settled on a farm called Raeshaw, at Fulham, quite close to Bald Hills and Kilmany Park. My mother Helen (b. July 20, 1926), her brother David (1921–2000), their sister Anne (1923–1986) and brother John (1929–2006) were all born at Raeshaw. Anne and Helen followed their mother to The Hermitage.

The family moved to Geelong in 1936, and eventually settled first in a large house called Raith in Newtown, then at 188, Noble Street, where they remained throughout the final years of World War II.

As a child my grandfather had contracted rheumatic fever, which permanently weakened his heart, so although he volunteered for active service in World War I, unlike his two brothers, he was not allowed to go. In the late 1940s, Granny and Grandad moved from Geelong to Berwick, where he died far too young of a heart attack in 1953 – obviously I never knew him.

Granny retired to a big, rambling Edwardian house with a pretty garden at 5, Myamyn Street in Armadale. She died at Lynn Private Hospital in Melbourne on February 12, 1975, after a brief diabetic illness.

Uncle John

I was lucky that both my parents had three siblings, and that growing up we were surrounded by aunts and uncles, all of them thrilling.

Aunt Anne, my mother’s sister, was a veteran of the W.R.A.N., a tall physiotherapist, and eventually a slightly grudging farmer’s wife, with sharp wit, and a gift for origami. When the Victorian State Opera put on a production of Saint-Saens’s Samson et Delilah, notorious for its full-frontal nudity, she took me, aged twelve, and brought along a pair of powerful agricultural binoculars.

During World War II Uncle David had been shot down in the North African desert, survived for some days by eating locusts and drinking dew before being rescued by Bedouin. He was inclined to do on his knees at Metung a surprisingly good impersonation of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. He, my father, and their friend Kenneth Aitken twice sailed across Bass Strait aboard Uncle David’s alarmingly small yacht the Chindrina.

Uncle Alec, meanwhile, had glamorous girlfriends, and was rumored to have invented an ingenious, highly profitable component for German machinery.

Uncle Colin drove fast cars, and represented through Mallesons the legal affairs of Rémy Martin, as well as those of the City of Melbourne. And for years my father’s other brother Uncle Tony lived on a windswept island off the southern coast of Tasmania.

However, I was especially fortunate to have been able to spend a lot of time towards the end of his life with John Borthwick, my mother’s brother, Uncle John.

Like me, John was the youngest of four. He was born on the family property called Raeshaw at Fulham near Sale in East Gippsland, on February 5, 1929, well ahead of the Wall Street Crash.

For reasons that are not easy to fathom in 1936 the family moved to a lovely old rambling Edwardian house in Newtown, where John began school at Geelong College.

John was evidently a happy child, and spent all his holidays at Balmadies, the family’s idyllic house on the shore of Bancroft Bay at Metung on the Gippsland Lakes, where my brothers and I also did a lot of growing up each summer.

Before the war, the trek from Geelong to Metung involved a whole day’s travel, first by train from Geelong to Melbourne, then from Spencer Street to Flinders Street, another train to Bairnsdale, and a trap from Bairnsdale to Johnsonville where a punt took Granny, Grandad, their four children, luggage and provisions to last three months across the Tambo River, and on to Metung. Later, when the holidays lasted longer, and the family had acquired a car, they brought the cow on a trailer (for milk), as well as chickens and, at times, maybe even a pony – everything you needed for an Australian summer holiday.

To some extent by the time my own parents were repeating this process forty years later, the only material difference was that there were now bridges over the Nicholson and Tambo Rivers, and the road was paved.

At school John was as talented a musician as he was a brilliant athlete – specifically a champion sprinter and high jumper. He played the euphonium, and, as a boy soprano, starred in successive productions of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, most notably in the role of Pitti-sing in The Mikado, and in the title role of Princess Ida. When he left school, John had risen to the rank of lance corporal in the cadets, as my brother Hamish did thirty years later.

After leaving school at the end of 1947, John’s first job was working in Melbourne for the firm of Barraclough, Fitts and Co., Chartered Accountants, inserting innumerable upside-down ticks in ledgers, a job he recalled his mother helped him to get through an ancient, ascetic clerk who looked after her affairs on behalf of the Trustees Executors Company.

This grey and dessicated presence insured that throughout the Great Depression, and in fact long afterwards, my grandmother’s modest inheritance earned at times a quarter of one percent in rock solid government bonds, and with that exciting income she managed to finance my grandfather’s increasingly eccentric farming projects, and to educate all four of her children at private schools in Geelong.

Later, John toiled in the Melbourne offices of John Sanderson (Shipping) Pty., Ltd., agents for the Blue Funnel Line, and trained as a potentially deployable administrator of remote provinces in Papua New Guinea. One of the perks of working for Sandersons was free passage on a Blue Funnel liner. So John sailed to Perth and came back again. He stayed with his cousins Lex and Ruth Pearson – who years earlier prompted the Borthwick children to concoct the mantra: “’Struth, Ruth. Have a Bex, Lex.”

Afterwards John travelled to the Northern Territory by way of Alice Springs (aboard the Ghan), where he got a job with a geologist searching for copper in the outback. Every four yards they dug a hole, and took a sample. They slept under the wheeling stars, while later he recalled pools of oil oozing out of the earth and burning sootily on the horizon. The fact that there is no oil in that particular stretch of country did not prevent him from retaining that especially vivid memory, of which he spoke with an inexplicable degree of wistfulness.

He stuck it out for a while, then hitched a ride to Darwin and, through Vestey’s, became a jackaroo at Nutwood Downs, near Katherine, and later at Ord River in the remote northeast of Western Australia.

While finding his feet in Darwin, John was arrested in a Casablanca-like raid on the local betting shop, but was cheerfully bailed out by Vestey’s, for whom this exercise – evidently quite profitable to the territory government – was no more than a tiresome but manageable and frequently recurring business expense.

At Ord River, John masqueraded as an accountant and store-keeper, dishing out backie, taties, onions, cakes of soap, and decks of cards to the local Aborigines. Somehow, through Connellan Airways (based in Alice Springs), John spent a few months as an orderly at the hospital at Wyndham in the Kimberley, where he claimed the doctor was unfrocked, and the matron addled. He reset the broken leg of an Aboriginal child.

Back in Melbourne, where he lodged in Bully Taylor’s boarding house in South Yarra, John’s perfect diction was honed during a brief stint training at the Vincent School of Broadcasting, where he learned among other things how to write, read, and produce live radio commercials.

John worked briefly for the Myer Emporium, ingeniously selling many Texfoam® pillows, the new polyurethane wonder product, by encouraging customers to remove a glove and feel their feather-light softness. He also participated in various productions of the Hawthorn Dramatic Society, performing at one point alongside the operatic soprano and future star of Covent Garden Marie Collier, and as the ship’s carpenter in H.M.S. Pinafore.

Afterwards, John took the lease on a milk bar in North Balwyn for a while, but England beckoned, as it did for so many resourceful young Australians in the 1950s (the stifling era, still, of six o’clock closing, and niceness). With £400 in savings he sailed aboard the old Arcadia, her return maiden voyage, and arrived in London on New Year’s Eve 1957.

John loved London. At first, he knocked about doing odd jobs. He worked for 10s a night (no tips) as a waiter at the unlicensed Le Pavillon in Chelsea, and when his money ran low a friend, John Barnes, offered him a stall in the market on the Portobello Road. His working week involved traveling on the tube to West Ham with an empty suitcase and walking back home, stopping at junk shops along the way, purchasing things for a penny that he sold on his stall for a pound. He went to auction sales at Coe’s, where he recalled old dealers sitting in the front row knitting, in the manner of Mme. Lafarge. He was soon buying stock by the tea chest.

It was this process of inexpensive trial and virtually cost-free error which honed John’s remarkable gift, his eye, which was to form the basis of his successful career as a dealer in antique furniture and objets d’art.

Soon John began to make his mark among colleagues in the London trade. By the mid-1950s post-war taxation had flushed hundreds of great estates into liquidation, and John’s market was awash with great pieces of furniture. It was a dealer’s market, and on one occasion the third Duke of Westminster, the richest man in England – the successor and cousin of the more famous Bendor, sometime lover of Coco Chanel – tried on three successive weekends to beat John down on the price of (of all things) a humdrum piece of Wedgwood china. Eventually His Grace forked out.

In 1958, back in Melbourne, John met Wing Commander James Franklin Lawson, O.B.E., and struck up a firm friendship which lasted until Jim’s death. At first John had his own shop in Little Collins Street, on the site of the ghastly Naval and Military Club. He then worked for Archie Meare, in Toorak Road, South Yarra. Archie sent John on a number of highly successful buying trips to Europe and America. In about 1963, edging towards retirement, Archie entrusted to John the task of opening a branch of his business back in London, while Barbara Gilder managed the Toorak headquarters.

John and Jim settled in England for most of the following seventeen years. From 1971 to 1980 John was a director of Barling of Mount Street, the prestigious Mayfair dealer, just off Berkeley Square. Roy Barling, who had been photographed in the 1930s by Angus McBean, specialized in medieval furniture and works of art (upstairs), and Chinese antiquities (downstairs in the basement) mostly on consignment from Robert Ellsworth in New York.

John exhibited regularly at Grosvenor House, and was the first Australian ever appointed to the vetting committee of the Chelsea Antique Fair.

John’s clientele in Melbourne had at one time included Vivien Leigh, Nelson Eddy, and Grahame Kennedy, however it was not long before, safely ensconced in Mayfair, he added Princess Margaret, Alec Guinness, Claudette Colbert, Paul Scofield, Lauren Bacall (“call me Betty”), James Stewart, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, and H.H. The Aga Khan to his discreet list. Each year the then Begum Aga Khan asked John to select her husband’s birthday present, usually a discreet but rare object of supreme quality destined for their house on the Île de la cité, where presumably it remains.

The London sculpture dealer Danny Katz still has in his gallery in Bond Street a rare Lombard cassone he bought from John, and in the mid-1980s on a visit to the Palazzo Davanzati (the museum of the Florentine house) John was almost as astonished as he was proud to see a large sixteenth-century bed that he had once bought and sold twice for Roy Barling, to two different furniture collectors.

During this period, John and Jim lived variously in a sixteenth-century thatched cottage at Welford-on-Avon, at a partly restored fortified castle in Hunsdon, a flat in Porchester Place, Mayfair, a cottage near Cirencester in the Cotswolds, and, later on, above another antique business (unfortunately called Grace and Favour) which John ran for a former client, Lady Joseph, in Bute Street, South Kensington. At times, Jim assisted Roy Barling with his considerable accounting skills.

John and Jim traveled widely, touring the English countryside in a van, and making regular visits to Ireland, France, and Greece. In about 1980, when semi-retired, they went to Cannes, in the south of France, to advise Lady Joseph on the redecoration of her villa. They fell in love with the town, and returned there regularly to spend the winter months. After several years, Jim’s appalling French showed no sign of improving.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s John and Jim never failed to provide often hilarious hospitality to their siblings, and much-needed support to nephews and nieces who from time to time lived nearby. John went in loco parentis to Hamish’s graduation from Jesus College, Cambridge, in the summer of 1977, and I stayed with them twice in Cannes.

Jim had the unnerving habit of enthusiastically waving a white handkerchief from a prominent spot on the Croisette to those few members of the jet set who in December and January chose to recline semi-naked on the beach concessions of the Carlton, the Méditerranée, and on occasion the Negresco in Nice. John was careful to explain to me that the cupola of the Negresco had been modeled on the breast of some long-forgotten professional beauty, but that recent striations were too emphatic, the paint job too ruddy, or else that the relevant Edwardian horizontale was plainly not as young as she used to be.

Shortly before returning to Australia in 1969, John took a thirteen-week cordon bleu cookery course, intending to purchase a motel and restaurant in Coffs Harbor. Their aim was to bring Provençal cooking to the northern coast of New South Wales.

As Jim’s work for Hawker Siddeley, the British firm of aeronautical engineers and defense contractors, involved highly classified contracts for the Royal Navy, he sought and was granted special clearance to sail aboard an aging Soviet cruise ship, the Shota Rustaveli. While alert to the possibility that he might be of some interest to the K.G.B., Jim naturally accepted an invitation to the captain’s cocktail party, at which John remembered a lot of good caviar was served. In his cheerful way, John chose to recall that the party continued below decks.

Once settled in Coffs Harbor, they changed the name of their motel from “Kookaburra” to “Normandie” Lodge. John’s sister, my resourceful Aunt Anne, ran up gingham curtains and tablecloths. John handled the kitchen, which offered a constantly updated menu based on a close reading of Elizabeth David, while Jim looked after the front of house, a role that allowed him to draw extensively on his experiences in logistical command. No doubt Jim’s niece, Ann Pietsch (who went up to work for them as a waitress during the summer holidays), will tell you what it was actually like.

Jim and John returned to Australia again in the early 1980s, initially to stage a successful exhibition at the old Georges in Melbourne of textiles and ceramics designed by Sonia Delaunay for Artcurial (Paris), from which my mother purchased a splendid carpet which despite my best efforts to dissuade her Mum still uses for under the kitchen table.

John and Jim lived for some years in a comfortable flat in Macleay Regis, an old, yet-to-be-glamorized Art Deco building in what was then still a relatively quiet part of Potts Point. And in 1988 John began consulting for Sotheby’s Australia, a happy association that continued until he died, and in the course of which he made many firm friends.

In 1996, within two weeks of my arrival in Adelaide, Jim entered the War Veterans’ Home at Myrtle Bank as a patient and, though frail, remained mentally alert. John and I decided to share a flat while we each of us found our feet in Adelaide.

It was an ideal arrangement. John continued to represent Sotheby’s, and while every morning he took the bus out to Myrtle Bank, he was careful to fit in his calls for Sotheby’s around his daily ritual of caring for Jim.

At the same time John extended his own prolific artistic œuvre in the direction of surréalisme, Neo-Dada, and minimalist art pauvre. Out of modesty and discretion John usually preferred not to exhibit his own work in public, and while he was a trenchant, not to say hostile critic of Modernism, curiously his wardrobe, and his eye, leaned heavily toward natural fabrics, textures, and colors that were forthrightly modern in their restraint and spareness. He described his taste as “monkish.”

He loathed any and everything to do with the full extent of the nineteenth century.

While in Adelaide, John derived considerable enjoyment from sniffing out many objects that might have been of interest to the Art Gallery of South Australia. Scrupulously avoiding even the appearance of a conflict of interest, and with total impartiality, John insured that those objects were instead destined for Sotheby’s sales, and the neutral sphere of the international art market. They included an enormous hand-stitched Hammersmith carpet by Morris & Co. with impeccable Barr-Smith family provenance, and an early Harley Davidson motorcycle together with a box of pristine spare parts that, in due course, earned for its astonished Hahndorf octogenarian owner–rider an exceedingly large sum of money in Los Angeles, Calif.

No doubt there were many other discoveries that John made in his quietly persisent, patient, and philosophical way. 

John taught me how to extract every ounce of enjoyment from the simplest of pleasures, a ripe orange, a sunny day, The Times crossword puzzle, and a close reading of the current Broadway box-office figures as reported in the weekly edition of Variety, which he read in various public libraries for upwards of fifty years. He lived on the smell of an oily rag. His sense of the ridiculous was finely honed, his capacity for friendship humbling, and his ability through charm alone to extract free drinks and, at times, a potentially infinite succession of free meals from the friendly proprietors of ordinary restaurants and cafes was simply uncanny.

John derived exquisite pleasure from the adventures and achievements of his and Jim’s many nieces and nephews, and their progeny.

John Borthwick died as a consequence of a long diabetic illness on August 16, 2006, his normally high spirits and good humor somewhat dampened towards the end, but by no means extinguished. At the time of his death he was working on a novel, and planning to launch a fragrance.